Free The Perfect Girl by Gilly Macmillan Page B

like me. The only difference was that she won her scholarship because she was good at sport. We bonded over it. It meant we could be Social Pond Life together.
    I wanted to spend more time at Gull’s grave, but it was important that we mustn’t be seen, because people would have been angry. I had to wear a beanie hat to cover up my ice-maiden hair. I had to wrap a scarf high up around my neck.
    Mum is holding a large knife and she’s sawing at a baguette with it now with precise, quick diagonal cuts. I’m looking for an opening in her activity so I can say something but I don’t think I’m going to get one so I just say, ‘Mum.’
    ‘This is yesterday’s,’ she says, ‘so it’s a bit stale, but that’s fine.’
    ‘Mum.’
    ‘It’s probably better actually. For bruschetta.’ She says it the Italian way:
brusketta
. Chris would like that. He took her to Italy for two weeks before Grace was born and when they came back Mum pronounced everything the correct Italian way. She had lots of time to read the phrase book, she said, and improve her Italian, which was the silver lining of twisting her ankle on her fourth day there. My mum puts a lot of store in silver linings. Go figure.
    I estimate that there will be three more noisy crumb-scratchy slices to cut until she’s finished. Then she’ll have to acknowledge me. The sawing sound is relentless but finally the knife goes down on to the granite with a clatter and the serrated edge catches the light as it falls. There are crumbs everywhere and a neat, stacked pile of bread, cut on the diagonal like in the magazines.
    ‘Mummy,’ I say again. I know I’m too old to call her mummy, I know that, but she’s not listening to me. ‘Mummy. What will we tell them?’
    She swallows, and does multiple blinks, which is a sign of tension for her, and begins to brush the crumbs off the granite, cupping one hand at the edge and sweeping the crumbs into it with the other. Her movements are fast, but not as efficient as usual. She’s being hasty, and crumbs are falling on the floor. I notice she’s drunk two-thirds of her glass of wine already; she must have had a good slug when I was in the pantry. The glass is sweating so much it looks thirsty itself.
    ‘We’re going to tell them it was a mistake,’ she says brightly. ‘That we don’t know the man and that he made a mistake!’ I can see small patches of damp under each armpit and a single lock of hair that’s fallen on to her forehead, and looks greasy, from the heat. She’d hate that, if she could see it.
    ‘But you said his name.’
    ‘Don’t argue with me, Zoe. Just! Don’t! I need to
think
!’ Her voice is shockingly shrill and it makes my spine snap straight.
    She blows at the greasy bit of hair, she can feel it, and it rises, and then falls back on to her forehead, right where it was before.
    ‘God, it’s hot!’ she says, and she gets a fresh tea towel out of the drawer where they all sit perfectly clean and pressed and folded, and she dabs her forehead with it. Her hands are definitely shaking, and I’m suddenly suffused with the loneliness that’s been my real punishment since the accident. I’m riddled with it. It eats me up like a cancer; it spreads into my brain and makes me feel as though I’m going mad. I’m lonely because I’m never allowed to talk about it in the Second Chance Family, even though it happened, and it’s a part of me, and I can’t change that. I’m so freaking lonely, it’s even worse than it was before it happened. But on the subject of loneliness it’s best to be absolutely silent.
    So I sit on a stool on the other side of the kitchen island from my mum, and watch while she starts on the tomatoes, chopping them into tiny, tiny little pieces, minuscule pieces that she heaps up into a moist fleshy mountain on the edge of the cutting board, and then she grabs handfuls of basil from the plants she has in pots in the middle of the island, and she starts to rip them up,