Her Perfect Life: A gripping debut psychological thriller with a killer twist. Sam Hepburn
she tucks her into bed.
Freya stops bouncing her hippo on the pillow and looks up with a sleepy smile. ‘Can he come and see my dance show?’
‘You can ask him when you see him. He’s going to take you out this weekend.’
‘Can you come too?’
‘No, love. I’ve got too much work on.’ If only. Juliet hitches her legs onto the bed and wriggles down so they lie face to face. Freya gazes at her with steady brown eyes, blinking as Juliet reaches over to brush back a strand of hair that has fallen across her cheek.
‘He told me something really exciting.’ For a moment the words sit on her tongue, too painful, too powerful to speak. ‘He and Merion are going to have a baby. It’ll be your little brother or sister.’
Freya pushes her nose into the hippo’s fur and turns away to the wall. Juliet pulls her close, feeling the warm press of her back. ‘It doesn’t mean he’ll love you any less. And if my new project works out we’ll have all the money we need to do lots of fun things together. You and me. We might even be able to buy a flat of our own, maybe with a little garden.’
She lies in the half light, feeling the stillness of Freya’s held breath and the flutter of her ribs when she finally speaks. ‘Is my daddy going to marry Merion?’
Juliet’s voice rises high. ‘I don’t know.’
Kids are strange. Instead of worrying about sharing her daddy, she’s tuned straight in to Juliet’s fears about Ian wanting a divorce, as if somehow she senses her mother’s dread of a judge getting involved in the decision about custody.
Restless now, she kisses the top of Freya’s head and slips away to the sitting room where she lights a cigarette and logs onto Merion’s Facebook page. She clicks through the posts. No mention of wedding plans or even of the pregnancy and she is calm, calm, calm until she sees a post from last week and has to get up and there’s no room to walk off the panic so she’s beating at the wall with the side of her fist. Ian and Merion are buying a house in Sydney – a five-bedroom executive home. Juliet doesn’t give a damn about the price tag or the size of the pool. It’s the developer’s blurb that is tearing her up, the chatty The perfect home for a growing family, designed to accommodate the needs of children from tots to teens, that drags a silent yell from her throat.
Gracie had hoped that the Introduction to Adoption talk would be held somewhere large and impersonal. Instead it’s a cosy round-table gathering in one of the council meeting rooms, a high-ceilinged chamber filled with early evening sunlight. Just fifteen potential adopters; mainly women on their own sipping water from plastic cups, and a few fidgety couples whispering together as they study the handouts. A little of the tension breaks when a red-faced man bursts in demanding to know if this is the stand-up comedy workshop. A ripple of giggles and shaking heads sends him back down the corridor.
Tom doesn’t even smile. Gracie feels his nervousness and tries to distract him. ‘I’m popping down to the events site tomorrow to see how they’re getting on with clearing it. We should take Elsie down there one weekend. It’s such a beautiful spot—’
He shushes her as a large black woman enters the room. She has crisp greying hair braided tight to her scalp, and a mouth that seems to smile even in repose. She introduces herself as Thelma Johnson. Her assistant Carol, a smaller, neater, younger woman, gives off a palpable air of calm. These are good people, Gracie thinks. The ones who care.
Thelma welcomes everyone and talks of the adoption process as a journey that only the robust, committed and able will complete. ‘This is no time for self-delusion,’ she says, her dark-circled eyes taking in each face in turn. ‘It’s our job as social workers to get a sense of you, to make sure that you are the person you say you are and, just as crucially, to find out if you are the person you think you are.
‘What is your understanding of parenting? Do you have the emotional resilience to deal with stress, conflict and rejection? Do you have in mind a fantasy child that no reality can ever meet? Are you truly capable of love?’ The eyes of her audience flit away to settle on walls and thumbs. ‘If you see adoption as a way to get over the loss of a child, a parent, a job or a relationship, think again. This is not about what you want. It’s about what the child needs.’
Tom’s chair creaks as he leans back. He catches Gracie’s eye, seeking reassurance, which she cannot give. She turns her attention back to Thelma who is talking about babies given up voluntarily, describing them as ‘relinquished’, a word that whispers softly in Gracie’s ears, hinting at snapped threads and an endless ache of loss.
‘Even voluntarily relinquished newborns nearly always go into foster care to give the birth mother the opportunity to reclaim her baby,’ Thelma is saying. ‘So it’s very unlikely that you will be offered a child under two. But whatever the age of the child, where possible we encourage a meeting with the birth mother, and feel it’s important for that child to maintain contact with its birth siblings. Could you cope with that?’
Gracie twists at her rings.
‘Ask yourselves. Are you truly willing to devote yourself to the needs of a child who comes with a genetic endowment and a history separate from your own?’
Gracie and Tom walk out of the meeting with their fists full of forms and their heads full of words that have grown heavy with new meaning.
Juliet delivers Freya to the dance studio and heads to the kitchen. She stands by the window watching the reflection of the door in the grimy glass, swinging round with a ready smile when it opens.
It’s Dawn, tatty hair, Chinese tattoo stretched across her blotchy arm, dumping her bag onto one of the plastic chairs. She grunts at Juliet, ‘Not like you to be early.’
Juliet shrugs, rips open a strip of nicotine gum and folds it into her mouth. Stay calm. If it’s anything like last week Elsie will turn up with that snotty nanny who buggers off straightaway. She looks around her at the smeared sink, the dusty strip light, the desiccated mop sloped against the wall. She’s stupid to think that Gracie Dwyer would come back. Her nails press into her palms. Stupid to stand here waiting.
Juliet moves to the door. A flick of dark glossy hair, and there she is, pulling Elsie onto a bench, helping her into her ballet shoes. Juliet steps back, taking a moment to compose herself before she flips on the kettle. The music starts up, thumping out the passing minutes. Dawn settles down with a biro and a word search magazine and Leslie turns up complaining about the traffic. Juliet takes out her phone, pretends to dial a number and wanders out into the changing area. It’s empty. Gracie must have popped out to the shops.
She hurries down to the street. She’ll wait by the door, catch her as she comes back and they’ll hurry upstairs together, chatting and laughing the way the other mothers do.
Juliet smokes and paces as she scans the pavement. Gracie doesn’t come. Ten minutes before the lesson is due to finish Juliet climbs back up the stairs. At the top she hears Gracie’s laugh – the careless confident laugh of success. And then she sees her, in the kitchen, chatting to that moron Leslie. Damn! She hadn’t left at all. She must have been in the loo. Juliet squeezes past her. The women barely acknowledge her arrival although Gracie mutters ‘Help yourself’ and gestures at a Tupperware box that’s empty except for a couple of broken brownies.
There’s a tremor in Juliet’s hand as she takes one and bites through the dusting of sugar into nuts and chocolate. OK, here’s my chance. She lowers her eyelids and makes a warm throaty sound as if swept away by ecstasy. ‘You going to be selling these at the new bakery?’
Gracie