Page 62 of Good Bad Girl

“It would appear so,” says Jude. “She’s still alive, I see.”

“Shh,” Clio says, closing the door behind her. “The doctor said she might still be able to hear.”

“I don’t care.”

“Never a truer word.”

“How long did the doctor say?” he asks.

“Not long.”

“Good, I’ve got things to do. This is all for the best, you’ll see. The girl is out of the way, the changes Mum made to her will are bound to be reversed. You’ll be able to pay your mortgage and I’ll be able to keep the gallery. Everyone’s a winner!” Jude says.

“How can you talk like this?”

“I open my mouth and the words come out.”

“For god’s sake.”

“Speaking of the chap, I suppose Mother dearest will finally meet her maker.”

“She didn’t believe in God anymore.”

“What?”

“She said they had a falling out. How do you not knowanythingabout your own mother?”

“I know she made us go to church, and always put money in the basket at Sunday mass even when she couldn’t afford to put food on the table.”

“I sometimes wonder if she did all of that to get us into a good school—”

“Nonsense. On the rare occasions when she wasn’t at work, she was running off to confession, desperate to hide in a wooden box and tell the priest her sins and secrets.”

“I don’t remember that,” Clio says.

“Do you remember when you refused to be confirmed and how angry she was with you?”

Clio hasn’t forgotten what happened then. It’s hard being raised in a religious home when you can’t believe in the things you are supposed to. And Clio couldn’t. Her First Holy Communion was meant to be a good day, but eight-year-old Clio felt like a fraud. She wanted to make her mother happy and she wanted to believe in God, but both things proved to be too difficult. By the time she was a teenager, she was sick of her mother’s rules and sick of God’s too. Neither of them made sense to her, and she has felt that way ever since. The sky doesn’t have rules, neither does the ocean. It is distinctly human to make up rules, and disappointingly human to follow them without question. Telling her mother that she didn’t want to be Catholic when she was thirteen years old did not go well.

“Do you remember how she started buying you chocolate and sweets and putting them in your school lunch box, while I got nothing?” Clio asks.

“Punishing one of us by being kind to the other was pretty standard,” says Jude.

“And that time when she said she couldn’t afford to get me new school shoes, even though the ones I was wearing literally had holes in—”

“Then she bought me a brand-new pair of trainers. Expensive ones. What were they?”

“Nike Air,” Clio replies instantly. She remembers them well. “I had asked for them for Christmas. She bought you a pair instead to make a point. You didn’t need or want them.”

Sometimes we want things just because other people have them. And Clio started wanting all sorts of things she’d never wanted before when she was a teenager: trainers, freedom, boys. Her mother punished her relentlessly for not believing in the same things as her, and for wanting things her mother thought she shouldn’t want.

“It wasn’t all bad though, was it?” Clio says, rememberinghappier times. Halloween parties with homemade costumes for just the three of them, a trip to the seaside, a parents’ evening when Edith was bursting with pride, the best Christmas when they all helped cook the roast dinner and Edith gave Clio a special watch wrapped in silver paper. Clio had seen it in a shop window weeks earlier and Edith remembered, saved up, and went back to get it for her. Their mother loved them sometimes. Just maybe not enough.

Jude shakes his head as though trying to dislodge his thoughts from it.

“No, it wasn’t all bad, but it wasn’t all good either. I won’t forgive or forget what she did to me.” He doesn’t need to say any more than that. When Jude told their mother he was gay she treated him like a stranger. “And I haven’t forgotten what she did to you,” he says.

Clio feels herself shrink. “Well, that’s all in the past now—”

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