The Perfect Girl by Kelly Golden

Author:Kelly Golden [Golden, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

42

SATURDAY 16TH JULY 2022

The banging is so loud it fills my head and blocks out everything else. I try to see – to focus. It’s these bars – the bars I’m shaking with my hands because my mother is curled on the floor on the other side. I have to get her out. I scream for her to get up, but when she does a wave of fear looms high above me. There’s something wrong with her eyes. She’s looking at me, but I can tell nothing inside her head is working.

Mum glides towards me and rattles the bars from her side, saying something I can’t hear, and my fear leaks from me in a high whine. I realise I’m the one on the inside, trapped, but I need to keep it that way. She mustn’t get in. And I feel my body start to disintegrate as her fingers find the lock.

I wake up with a pool of sweat on my chest and Mike snoring on his back beside me. It was just a dream. A dream to make sense of the clamour of the pipes. I check the bedside clock and it’s five thirty. We got in about two. I peel off my t-shirt, let it fall on the carpet and clamp my eyes shut. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.

I stripped right in front of Johnnie and Mike – in front of Johnnie, in front of Mike. Had Mike cared? Had he noticed any flicker of difference in Johnnie? I wondered what Johnnie saw – if he noticed the slight slackness to my stomach, the widening of my bellybutton that came from carrying a baby. I wondered if it were a shock, or if he still thought I was beautiful.

When I jumped in the water the cold didn’t touch me. I must’ve been so drunk. I haven’t been drunk in years. I needed the release. My mother would have said I was getting sloppy. But it was gorgeous.

I swam down into the freezing black and looked up at the swirling dots of light. I came bursting up for air and laughed with the rest of them, our limbs touching underwater. Floating on my back under the bright moon and the endless stars, I felt fingertips brushing up my side, lingering for a moment on the curve of my right breast, and I wondered whose they were, and then if something similar were happening to Sophie.

But I let it go. Mike was mine. There was no question.

I decided Johnnie wasn’t out to get me. I hurt him, and he wanted me to know, but he wasn’t going to do anything to me. And Sophie, she didn’t know, but he wasn’t out to hurt her either. That was just my paranoia. Maybe, if I let the lie slide, we could all live happily, side by side even. Maybe, when Johnnie and Sophie finally got their kid, he or she really could be friends with Arla.

The sweat from my chest has dampened the duvet. Now I’m sober, do I feel the same? Mike snorts and turns over.

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