White Villa

by Emily Hourican

Genres: General Fiction; Friendship; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

What happens when you invite an outsider in? It was supposed to be the holiday of a lifetime - a luxury villa in Ibiza, a group of university friends, and their last chance to cut loose before embarking on their serious adult lives. But when when one of the group invites an outsider, the aloof and beautiful Natasha, tensions begin to simmer. The days pass amid the sweltering rays, and dissolve into wild, humid nights. And Natasha seems bent upon a path of destruction, leading her to Jennifer's boyfriend, Todd - while Jennifer and the rest of the group look on . . . Then, one hazy afternoon, paradise is shattered. Ten years later, the friends reunite. Will what happened that afternoon at White Villa now destroy the lives and facades they have so carefully built?

Release date: August 3, 2017

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 320

Sample

The house felt emptier of more than just the people who had passed through in the days around the funeral, as if they had taken their good wishes away with them, along with their subdued voices and chilly hands.

It didn’t matter where Natasha went because all the rooms were the same. For all their lofty ceilings and deliberately sparse furnishings, they felt mean; crouched, dispirited, like dogs waiting for their master’s voice. Natasha, who knew that voice would never come again, pitied them. She wondered would the house ever respond to her, then decided it wouldn’t.

She knew how the house felt, as she wandered through its rooms, looking for something that wasn’t there. Someone who would never, now, be there. All that was left was the knowledge that there would never be anyone else for whom she was the most important person in the world.

As much as she looked for him, she also looked for the loss of him. Her own feelings of grief and pain, so raw in the few days after his death, were distanced from her now, a distance she couldn’t bridge, so that even though she could see her grief, could have spelled it out, she couldn’t feel it.

There was a thick layer of something heavy and congealed between her and it, something that subdued the edges not just of grief, but of everything. And so Natasha went in search of something that would trigger the storm of weeping that rose up inside her but would not break, except in dreams.

Since his death, she had dreamed, night after night, of being able to cry. In sleep, she found a release that was denied to her when awake. She dreamed of great tearing sobs that came, one hard upon the other, until she was, at last, thrown up, beached upon the shore of her own distress, brought through the storm and now calm, emptied, if only temporarily, of the pain of his loss.

But that was only in dreams. Waking, she had a split-second where her mind searched itself, feeling gently, the way she had often felt a bruised leg or ankle, to find out how bad the hurt was. Then it found the bruise, the break, and memory came rushing back – he was gone – and with it came the same feeling of cold lard settling upon her.

Having toured the house – in search of what she did not know … perhaps nothing more than the proof of its emptiness – Natasha went looking for some kind of sharpened stick, something to goad her beyond the place she was, where she felt as stuck as an insect in amber.

The sitting room at the back was the least cheerless spot she could find, although rain spat at its windows, and the garden beyond was huddled into a wet heap beneath the blanket of soggy grass and flattened flowers. It had been raining steadily since her father’s death, over a week earlier, and Natasha felt a savage satisfaction in nature’s recognition of an abomination.

The fire was lit, and Natasha momentarily admired her mother’s instinct towards comfort, her attempts to hold back the abyss that trailed at their feet with soup and freshly made pastries and warm fires. Natasha had a similar instinct, the opposite to her sister Nancy, who was more likely to tear off her clothes and run into the storm than she was to make herself a seawall of comfort.

Natasha went to the bookshelf with the photo albums – the work of one long summer when she was a teenager, but still a child too; beset by the confusions and uncertainties of her age, she had looked for order here, and imposed it as she had seen fit: carefully cataloguing the jumbled mess of family holidays, memories, changing haircuts and seasons, by name, by date, by place. Imposing order on chaos. Nancy, gnawed at by the same uncertainties and confusions, had turned her need for order inwards, divorcing herself from her body and accepting food under some peculiar system known only to her.

Natasha looked at photos of herself on a white-sand beach, skin coloured golden by the sun, her long dark hair lit up with reddish strands beneath a yellow sun hat. Behind her, the sky was blue velvet. ‘Nerja 1996’ was written in careful letters at the bottom of the page, which would mean she was then about ten years old. Beneath were more photos – of her in the water, Nancy in a hole dug up to her neck, both of them on a blanket eating slices of watermelon. In the first photo, her father in a khaki green T-shirt sat beside Natasha with a newspaper folded across his knees. The masthead said El País in assured letters.

Natasha looked hard at the photo, trying, not to recapture the moment, which was gone from her entirely, so much as to feel again in her imagination the warmth of his arm close to hers, the solid reassurance of his body beside her. She stared hard, without blinking, as if the intensity of her effort could melt the barriers in her mind. Light from the fire flickered across the photo behind its plastic sheet, so that it seemed as if the sun of that day burned still.

She couldn’t see who she was behind the wide grin, and wondered if the man beside her had known, or had he only seen what he had wanted to see – a child he believed to be in his own image: bright and fearless.

Her mother walked in then, looked at Natasha curled up on a high-backed leather armchair with the photo album on her lap and came over to her.

Natasha turned the pages. Together they watched as the past flickered by in a series of bright images, no more real than advertising posters. Any one of them could have been used to sell washing powder, Natasha thought. Or cheese, or breakfast cereal. They spoke of effort and contrivance, posed photos tending all towards the same result: perfection. Where are the out-takes? Natasha wondered. The bloopers. Anything to give a dose of reality to the sterile images in front of her. Were all family photos like that? Lies. Or was it just theirs?

‘Look.’ Her mother stopped the flick of pages, the stop-motion animation of time passing, bringing a finger down heavily on a picture of Natasha and her father in a convertible sports car. The car was lean and camel-coloured, like the filter of a cigarette, Natasha remembered thinking. She was older in this photo, maybe fourteen, hair piled on top of her head in an obvious bid for sophistication, wearing a pink cardigan over a white summer dress. Her mother’s finger, with its carmine nail, rested in the space between Natasha and her father.

The car had been lent, along with a house in the south of France, for a few weeks by friends. Her father had found it in an old stone shed and had driven it round to the front of the house where Natasha, her mother and Nancy had been unloading cases from their own navy Ford.

‘Who wants to come for a drive?’ he had called, tooting the horn and laughing so that they’d all dropped their boxes and run to him. ‘So, who’s coming?’ he’d said. ‘Natasha?’

‘Yes, please!’ She’d reached for the door handle, but Nancy’s voice, plaintive, held her back.

‘I want to come too.’

‘I can only take one,’ their father had said. ‘It’s a two-seater.’

‘Why does Natasha get to go?’ Nancy had been shrill, building to a scene. ‘I want to.’ There was silence then, and it had swirled around them like a dust storm.

‘Because she’s the eldest?’ Her mother had said it helplessly, an interrogation, not a statement.

‘She’s not. You are, Mum. So why don’t you go?’ Nancy had been triumphant, thinking her blow unanswerable. And it was, Natasha knew, the perfect solution for Nancy. As long as Natasha didn’t get singled out, she was happy. Natasha had waited for her parents to respond but there was only more silence. She’d watched her mother look at her father – another interrogation – and had seen her father close himself to it.

‘I can only take one,’ he’d repeated. ‘Natasha’s coming.’

She had considered ceding her place but knew it was too late, so she’d slid into the car instead, leather seats already warm from the sun, like melting caramel, and watched as Nancy and her mother grew small behind them.

She wondered now was her mother remembering the same scene. The finger with its carmine nail moved to flick a grain of something from the page.

‘The car of envy,’ her mother said, and Natasha knew that she too had played out the scene in her mind, but with who knew what extra shading and detail. Even after all these years, the inflections of the land of her mother’s birth were still obvious.

‘I’m hungry,’ Natasha said, shutting the photo album.

‘Good.’ Her mother said it mechanically. ‘You should eat.’

It’s what they had said to each other since his death: You need to rest. You should eat. You ought to get out. The currency of their interactions was ambiguous – careful stepping-stones made up of trite reminders, the kind that could have covered a depth of concern and kindness. Or could simply have been all that they felt able to say to one another.

They went into the kitchen together and Natasha ate the ham and rocket sandwich her mother made, slumped on one elbow at the table. The effort of sitting straight was too much for her, the weight of grief too heavy.

‘I know what you have lost,’ her mother said suddenly, an attempt at sympathy.

‘What we all have lost.’ Natasha tried to be fair.

‘Most of all you. What I lost, I lost a long time ago.’

Natasha felt this was true but couldn’t work out exactly why, or whether that gave her mother more or less of a claim to misery than her. Because of how much the answer to that mattered, she closed down the conversation, the better to think about it at another time.

‘What will you do next?’ she asked.

‘I have many things. I need to clear the house.’

‘Will Nancy help you?’

‘I don’t know. She didn’t say when she’ll be back from London. Maybe you will help me?’

‘I can’t. I can’t go through his things. I can’t look at them and decide what they are without him. Which have value and which don’t. Either they all do or none does.’ She shrugged off the impossibility of explaining further. ‘I don’t understand how you can.’ The accusation stood between them, an invitation. But her mother refused it.

‘Someone has to’, was all she said.

Knowing she would scream if she sat there any longer, Natasha finished the sandwich and stood up.

‘I’m going to rest,’ she said.

‘Good.’ Her mother watched her go, and Natasha tried to force herself to catch her mother’s eye at the door and smile, but she couldn’t.

Up in her room, staring out into the darkening sky, hoping for one late gleam of light before the day collapsed in on itself, Natasha thought about what her mother had said, I know what you have lost, and wondered why she had restrained herself from screaming, ‘Everything! I have lost everything!’

Why had she not said it? Was it because she suspected her mother wouldn’t understand? Or because her mother might resent this declaration of absolutism, a declaration that should surely have been hers?

She wished Nancy were there. That they could have patrolled the house together, searching its corners and crevices, looking for proof of what they had all been. Except she knew Nancy wouldn’t see what she saw, or even seek what she sought. Instead, Nancy would have looked for confirmation of what she suspected: that her own loss, like their mother’s, was different. Second best.

Natasha wished there could have been a unity of purpose between them in death. For a few days she had even pretended it was so, until Nancy’s determined rejection of her efforts forced her to withdraw. Even choosing the readings for the funeral hadn’t brought them together in the way she had hoped.

‘Choose what you want,’ Nancy had said when Natasha had suggested ‘The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God’.

‘Well, do you think ‘The just man, though he die early, shall be at rest’ would be better?’ Natasha had persisted.

‘Honestly, Natasha, you choose. You know I don’t think it matters what we read over a dead body. You could read the shipping forecast and he wouldn’t know or care.’

Natasha had flinched from the hardness of the words.

At the funeral itself she had tried to stay close to Nancy, in the belief that they needed to be together. But Nancy had eluded her, slipping off after the mass to stand with John and a knot of his friends, so that Natasha had been left with the long line of people who stood, one behind another, shuffling forward to clutch her hand and whisper their regrets. ‘A good man,’ they had said. ‘A brilliant man. A loss to us all.’ Natasha had wondered at their idiocy in trying to put their pain on a par with her own. Her mother had stood beside her, taking refuge in her foreignness and saying little.

‘You won’t always feel like this.’ The woman who had said it was, Natasha thought, a work colleague of her father’s. She had said it urgently, intimately, as if the delivering of this message were a sacred charge. You won’t always feel like this. It was the only thing that had made sense to Natasha that day, the hope she continued to cling to.

‘Natasha.’ Her mother tapped at the bedroom door, startling her. ‘Nancy is on the phone. She wants to speak to you.’

‘Nancy!’ Natasha opened the door and grabbed the phone. ‘When are you coming back?’

‘Not for a while,’ Nancy said, distant, evasive. ‘I’m staying here for a bit longer, then I might go to France for a few days, or Italy. It depends.’

‘On what?’ Natasha demanded, wishing that Nancy would say, ‘Come too. Meet me there. Let’s do something – just the two of us.’

But Nancy didn’t say that.

‘A few different things. John, for one. But I’ll let you know when I have a plan.’

‘OK.’ Pride would not allow Natasha to say anything else.

‘Look after her.’ Nancy coolly delegated what had always been her role.

Natasha gave the phone back to her mother, who stood, awkward, in the corridor so that Natasha had to say, ‘Why don’t we watch that detective thing I recorded? I’ll be down in a minute.’

‘OK,’ her mother said. ‘I will make mint tea.’

She went down the broad staircase of polished wood, back straight, hand drifting lightly along the bannister, and Natasha envied her a poise she believed came from birth and upbringing, although it could just as easily have been learned the hard way, through years of humiliation.

Evenings like this one stretched in front of her. Nights in front of the TV with her mother. Dinners in the kitchen while the rain hurled itself in derision against the windows, and the offers of help, of company and sympathy, dried up from underuse.

Her phone beeped. A message from Jennifer: Do come. It’ll do u good.

Jennifer stretched out on her sun lounger, saw Natasha smile at her and smiled back automatically. She wished she hadn’t invited Natasha. She had thought long and hard before doing so, had decided not to, then found the words falling out of her mouth, blurted in a moment of pity for the misery writ so plain on Natasha’s face. ‘Why don’t you come with us?’ she had said, uneasy even as she spoke. ‘It’ll be fun. They’re a nice group, and they’d love you to come.’

It hadn’t been true even as she said it. If anything, the rest of the gang was used to regarding Natasha with a hint of suspicion. She moved in different circles in college – an older group, scholars and tutors as well as students, known to be smart and sometimes rude. Natasha always seemed entirely at home with them, something to do with her upbringing as a diplomat’s child, Jennifer had decided; an ability to fit in, blend, to always find something to say that reflected well on her and moved the conversation along.

Sometimes she appeared in photographs on the back pages of fashion magazines, on the social pages, at gallery openings and book launches, perhaps with a glass of wine held lightly in one hand; often with the author or painter at her side. So the group hadn’t been happy when Jennifer had announced, ‘I’ve asked Natasha to come. She needs a break.’

They had grumbled, pointing out that the villa was full, they’d have to hire another car, skirting round the main objection until Julie, always the least tactful, dumped it unceremoniously. ‘She’ll be a total downer. She’s grieving, and we’re all off to get loaded and have fun. It’s just a mismatch.’

‘She has a point,’ Jennifer’s boyfriend, Todd, had said. ‘This is a holiday, it’s not a Vincent de Paul volunteer day out to the seaside.’

Sometimes, Jennifer found his hard arrogance a turn-on. At other times, like then, she worried that it wasn’t just an attitude – it was actually him.

She had persuaded them, finally, by saying, ‘Well, it’s too late now anyway because I asked her and she’s coming. Unless any of you wants to tell her she can’t?’

None of them did. So here they were, embarking on a holiday that reached out into their wide-open futures. And Natasha was with them, for better or for worse.

Villa Blanca – White Villa – was even more lovely than the website had suggested. The photos, although pretty, had not been able to capture the lazy charm of its L-shaped embrace, the way it arranged itself around the bright-blue pool that tipped into infinity at one end. The riot of honeysuckle that climbed across the walls spilled towards the water in sweet-smelling fronds. Below them, the sea stretched to an unbroken horizon in many undulations of blue. It was, Jennifer thought, as much like paradise as anywhere she had seen.

Julie was out of the taxi and into the villa faster than anyone, leaving Paul to get her bags, knowing he would. Her speed had a purpose: she had bagged the best bedroom and pronounced herself satisfied, almost before the rest of them had got their bearings.

‘Well done, Jennifer,’ she said. ‘This is very nice.’

‘Of course it’s nice,’ Jennifer said. ‘It’s Ibiza!’ But inwardly she felt relief then delight as the exclamations kept coming. ‘Look at this amazing balcony. You can see right down to the sea!’ That was Katherine – prepared to be pleased almost before she set foot in the place. ‘Five bathrooms – practically one each. What luxury!’ ‘Look at this,’ Martin called from outside. ‘There’s a pizza oven built into the wall of the terrace.’

As the only couple, Jennifer and Todd took the biggest room – Julie had passed it over on her predatory tour because it was on the ground floor – but Jennifer made sure Natasha was installed in one of the prettiest. She watched, amused, as Martin, who had entered the room first, insisted that no, Natasha must have it, and the way Natasha seemed genuine in her refusal, saying she really didn’t mind where she slept, until she gave in at last and thanked Martin so warmly that he blushed.

But such was the obvious potential of the vine-covered terrace with its barbeque and outdoor oven, pool and sun-drenched surrounds, that everyone was prepared to be pleased.

Even Dermot declared he didn’t mind at all when he got the worst bedroom, small, airless and too close to the kitchen, because he was a single man and because he moved more slowly than Paul, who was quick to grab the room beside Julie’s. ‘We’re not here to sleep,’ Dermot said cheerfully. ‘A broom cupboard would do me.’

And he was right, of course. That evening, as the sun set before them, the delicate translucent pink of the lip of a seashell, they pledged again their troth: No sleeping! No complaining about hangovers! No wimping out!

The villa had worried Jennifer – what if it was horrible? Or didn’t exist and she had been conned? But Natasha had worried her even more. What would they do if Natasha stood aloof, made them all feel small and silly by refusing to join in? But that first night, Natasha had promised as enthusiastically as any of them to throw herself into the aggressive hedonism of the holiday. And she had. In fact, Jennifer noticed, everyone had very much come round to Natasha. More than come round, in fact. They were all a bit charmed by her. Even Todd. Especially Todd, she knew. She had caught him staring, too often to be simply an accident, and she noticed that he made sure to manoeuvre his way beside Natasha as they set out on their reckless careering journeys across the island, often wasted, nearly always half drunk. They hadn’t got another car in the end, they’d simply opted to squash everyone into the one, and Todd was careful to try and squash in beside Natasha, rammed close inside, on the sticky leather, her bare brown leg and arm pressed close against him. Jennifer, who got car sick, hadn’t been able to do anything but take her allotted place in front with the driver, usually Martin, and pretend to ignore what was so very visible.

‘You tan so easily,’ Todd said on the third day, running a finger lightly along Natasha’s arm, and indeed she had adapted to the heat quickly, voluptuously, unlike the rest of them. She didn’t seem to burn or get strange rashes and patches of redness brought on by the alternation of heat and salt water and compounded by insufficient sleep and too much booze. Her skin soaked up the sun, giving it back in a smooth glow, even except for a faint smattering of freckles across her nose – small, dainty ones, Jennifer noticed, not the big splodgy ones she herself produced.

‘I’m lucky,’ Natasha responded, smiling up at Todd. ‘I never really burn. It must be such a pain to have to go through an entire paint-and-prep session before leaving the house.’

Had Natasha, Jennifer wondered, cast a sly look in her direction as she said it? Maybe not, but Todd had turned and looked openly at Jennifer, even then applying more Factor 50 to her red nose, and smirked.

The flirting had intensified over the next few days, deepening over the silly green and blue cocktails they all knocked back and through the long nights out. And because they had all chosen the holiday precisely because they wanted to behave carelessly, Jennifer didn’t know what she could say, what curtailment she could ask for. She and Todd shared a room, in which they crashed out at different times, depending on who was the more smashed and exhausted. They’d had sex just once since arriving five days earlier, a hurried, almost absent-minded shag, in which he had stared over her shoulder as she sat astride him, moving his hips in time with her but seeming distant, preoccupied. Since then, for all the eroticism of the island – the light, the warmth, the smells – they had avoided each other subtly but neatly.

It was easily done – they were all bent on partying, forever coming up with novel ways to get trashed, whether shots of something small and strong, or a hollowed-out melon, filled with vodka and left to ferment for hours before they consumed it, eating the mushy strips of booze-soaked fruit, laughing and grimacing because it didn’t taste terribly nice – gone off really, too potent – but insisting that ‘it does the job’. The comings and goings were so frequent that the house was in constant motion – smaller groups were forever setting off on trips, to shops, the beach, a new bar someone had told them about at the club the night before, or coming back from somewhere. At first, Jennifer thought she must be mistaken about Todd avoiding her – surely it was simply that he was caught up in the merry ebb and flow? – but then she realised that he wasn’t so caught up that he didn’t make sure to be always where Natasha was. And Natasha, who probably did not seek him out, kept no distance between them, smiled invitingly when she saw him approach. In the haze of heat, hangover and lack of sleep that surrounded them all, Jennifer thought she could see the desire ripple in the air between them, hotter even than the sun that beat down in seeming approval of excess.

As she sat by the pool she remembered the first time she had met Natasha, over two years earlier. Natasha had fallen down the stairs of the bus, right in front of Jennifer, landing hard.

‘Are you alright?’ Jennifer asked.

‘I’m fine,’ the girl replied, cheeks burning hot with mortification. Jennifer would rarely see her so discomfited again.

As they got off the bus, Jennifer noticed that the girl was limping.

‘You sure you’re OK?’

‘Actually, I seem to have buggered my ankle.’ The girl grimaced. ‘But it’ll be fine.’

‘Let me carry your bag at least,’ Jennifer insisted.

They walked up to college together, with the tight, clear smell of autumn around them and a showy display of reds, yellows and soft, squirrelly browns on all the trees.

‘The only time this place looks nice is now,’ the girl said. ‘In summer it’s so dry and dead, and in winter it’s bare and dead. Only autumn works for it.’

‘What’s your name?’ Jennifer asked, feeling silly because it was such a dull question, wishing she could have said something wonderful in response to her comment.

‘Natasha,’ the girl said, pronouncing the second ‘a’ hard so that it came out ‘Nataasha’, in a way that was faintly familiar. Where have I heard that name before? Jennifer wondered.

They discovered they were both taking first-year English, but that Natasha had combined it with history and politics, whereas Jennifer was doing Spanish and Italian. Natasha was far more critical in her appraisal of the course and lecturers than Jennifer, to whom everything was still so new, so exciting, that she couldn’t see that there were separations and joins beneath the shining mass of it all; bits that were less good than other bits. To her, it was still all of a piece. Later, she realised that Natasha’s analysis had been correct, her dismissal of one lecturer as ‘a day-tripper; he goes round and round the point and never gets to it’ was cruel but accurate.

She found that she was quite shy of Natasha, who seemed far more autonomous, more self-possessed, than anyone else she knew of their age, but she was determined to befriend her. After all, she had come to college to meet new and unusual people, not just the same sort of girls she had shared years of hockey practice and schoolyard chat with. The fever that burned in her to get out, get more, grasp the world, was too strong to trick with what she had always known. Natasha was interesting, she decided, and so she made plans to meet her for coffee after their next lecture.

Friendship with Natasha wasn’t easy. She was reserved and avoided intimacy, skipping away from it like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. She was better in a group, where her wit and gift for mimicry thrust her into the centre, but when they were alone, Jennifer often struggled for conversation, embarrassed by the silences that fell between them in a way that Natasha wasn’t.

‘Where did you go to school?’ Jennifer asked over their first cup of coffee together in the canteen. It was morning and the place was empty and smelled of vinegar. The sun lit up the grimy streaks on the large windows. She knew her question was gauche, but it was what they all still asked each other, that first year, because they had so little else within the frame of their reference to talk about. She didn’t dare, yet, ask Natasha about the things she really wanted to know: How come you’re so poised? Where did you learn to analyse books like that? How is your hair always so perfect and glossy?

‘I didn’t much,’ Natasha replied. ‘I went to boarding school for a while, in France. A few months in a place called Mary Immaculate, not far from here. Mostly I was schooled at home, by my dad.’

‘Mary Immaculate! Miss Mary’s,’ Jennifer said in excitement. ‘Me too! How amazing.’ Then, as the scenery of her mind shifted, the painted backdrops shuffling apart so that she could see into the further reaches, said. ‘Wait! Nataasha … I think I remember you! You were in our class, but only for a while, not quite a year, and then you left, and for ages I wondered what happened to you!’

‘Oh, right.’ Natasha seemed far less excited, with no answering gleam of recollection on her face.

‘I was a boarder, you were a day pupil. In fifth class, right? We were all so curious about you. You sat beside Sarah McGovern.’

It was all coming back to her. The new girl, who had arrived midway through the year, turning up one Monday morning without the uniform; a navy skirt and neat white shirt with rounded collar, in the sea of rust-brown. The next day, she was in the proper uniform, but something about her had still stood out.

‘This is Natasha,’ Sister Margaret had said. ‘She will be joining us.’ But she never really did. She had done lessons and played hockey and gone to the swimming pool and church with them, but had never seemed to sink into their world. She’d remained on the surface, polite but unenthusiastic; oil on water.

At first, the bitchier girls had been inclined to look for a weakness, imitating her quaint accent, a jumble of Irish and Spanish that had come out as almost English, and the way she’d stood, shoulders down and back rigidly straight. She had been taller than most of the girls in the year, with a style that had clearly irritated them. Dark, neat hair, brown eyes and golden skin, a nose that was too big for her face and very little inclination to be liked. The bitchy girls had mocked the few things she’d said, but Natasha had seemed so indifferent, they had given up. After that, one or two had tried to be friends, but she’d been indifferent to that too.

Natasha had spoken to Sarah McGovern, a sweet girl with terribl