The Good Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

properly,’ said Ailsa, trying to regain control of the situation.
    ‘There is always opportunity to be had in adversity,’ said Loveday with a smile. ‘That’s one of my mantras.’
    Another face appeared at the car window. Loveday introduced her son, Jay. He was wearing a hastily pulled-on T-shirt and pair of jeans. His eyes were half closed as he wearily offered to help.
    ‘Jay?’ questioned Rachel. ‘Like the bird? Because your mother’s an eagle?’
    He looked perplexed. ‘After my grandfather,’ he then said with a smile. ‘Shall we try giving it a push?’
    Ailsa closed the window.
    ‘Lock up your daughters,’ Rachel laughed as Romy came out of the house to see what was going on. Jay looked across at her and their eyes met. Sometimes that was all it took.
    ‘Actually,
lock up your sister,’ said Rachel. ‘Did you see the definition in his arms? He’s hot.’
    ‘You’re too old to call people hot,’ says Ailsa. ‘You’re beginning to remind me of some old bottom pincher.’
    Rachel leaned on Ailsa’s shoulder and they clung to each other, laughing like they used to when they were children. Ailsa waited for Romy to come over and tell her to stop being embarrassing, but when she looked up at her Romy was smiling too.

2
    We moved to Luckmore at the end of the summer of 2013 but all of us agree life there didn’t really begin until the Fairports arrived next door a couple of months later. Until then we were just existing, hoping Mum’s mantra that life was about getting on with it was true. ‘If in doubt, create a routine,’ was her personal philosophy. Sounded more like slow death to me, but stranded in the middle of the countryside with crap Wi-Fi, what else could you do but get up, eat, sleep, repeat?
    At first we protested. Luke the loudest. We formed a united front, refusing to unpack our stuff, bring home new friends or leave the house, unless it was to go to school, until they promised we could go back to London. Ben wrote a petition. He told Mum and Dad that he would for ever look back on his childhood with sadness. Dad said he was absolutely right because traumatic experiences are stored in our long-term memory more than happy ones, and studies show 80 per cent of our earliest memories have negative associations. Mum and Dad were totally unmoved. Ben created a fantasy world where he was a British spy captured in Syria, because he had a theory that if something really bad happened, it helped to imagine an even worse scenario.
    I
couldn’t imagine anything worse than leaving London. Things I missed: the cafés, the pavements, the smell of Indian food, and even things I could never imagine missing like street lights and dodging dog shit on the pavement. I longed for the smell of the Underground. I missed the noise of Shepherd’s Bush Market. I was oppressed by the huge grey sky. Mum claimed it made her feel light and free, but I felt as if I was being buried alive, slowly suffocating beneath the weight of its constant scrutiny. She was from these parts. So she belonged to the landscape. I didn’t.
    I hated the attention-seeking wood pigeons and the gangs of deer that woke me up before it was light. Most of all I missed my friends. Mum suggested I invite them up for a weekend but I said they would die of boredom. Then she got angrier with me than she had with Luke, even though he had been a lot ruder. She told me not to be so selfish and reminded me that Granny had just died and we needed to move to Norfolk to look after Grandpa, which totally contradicted their cover story about having to move because of Mum’s new job.
    For the first month the only person we saw from our old life was Mum’s sister, my Aunt Rachel, who was between writing jobs and came every weekend to help organize our new home. Rachel kept telling Mum that death and moving house were the most stressful life events apart from divorce. I wondered how useful it was to keep going on about this but now of course I realize