The Secretary

by Zoe Lea

  ‘You OK?’

  He nodded. His eyes were very round.

  I ran my hand over his head, along the back of his neck.

  ‘Here, does it hurt here? Does it hurt anywhere?’

  He shook his head, looked out of the window as I continued to check him over, to make sure he was OK.

  ‘You’re sure?’ I pressed. ‘I didn’t mean to slam on the brakes, I just panicked when—’

  ‘You hit it,’ Sam told me. ‘I heard it against the car.’

  I stared at him, unsure what to do, and then we heard it. A high-pitched cry filling the air, piercing. Like the wail of a small child, of a baby in turmoil. The kind that makes you stop what you’re doing and search for the cause of such a noise.

  ‘Where is it?’ Sam asked in a small voice. ‘Where’s the rabbit, Mum?’

  A large hare had darted in front of the car, forcing me to come to an emergency stop. But the bang we’d both heard, the feel of it against the car, told me I’d not been quick enough. And now its damaged cries were filling the air.

  ‘Stay here,’ I told him as I undid my seatbelt. ‘Don’t get out of the car, OK?’

  Sam nodded.

  It was at the rear of the car. There was a bright red smear on the road leading up to it from the back tyre. I walked slowly towards it and felt a wave of nausea wash over me as I saw the full extent of what I’d done. I had to turn away a moment, take in a lungful of fresh air.

  It was a large, beautiful creature. Its fur the deepest brown, its ears unbelievably long and its eyes wide and fearful. And it was screaming in agony. Its back legs, both of them, were completely flattened. The lower half of its belly open and gushing with blood, organs and other unrecognisable matter on display. It was screaming from the pain.

  ‘Hey,’ I said quietly as I went towards it. ‘Hey, it’s OK. Shh, it’s OK.’

  But it was very far from OK. The hare’s front legs were moving, trying in vain to drag its destroyed body away.

  My hand went to my mouth and I took a step back. I’d never seen anything so gruesome, never been in a position like this before. I looked up the empty road. I didn’t know what to do. And the sound it was making, the horrendous cry. It was all I could do not to put my fingers in my ears.

  ‘We need to take it to the vet.’ Sam was staring down at it, his face motionless.

  ‘I told you to stay in the car!’ I went to put my hand over his eyes but he pushed them away. ‘You should’ve stayed in the car!’ I shouted at him. ‘I told you to stay in the car.’

  Sam ignored me. He went forward as if to lift the hare up.

  ‘NO!’ I screamed and pulled him back. Unsure if the frightened creature would bite him if he went to touch it. It was in so much pain, panting and screaming, blood coming away from its mangled legs. I wasn’t sure how it would behave if we got too close.

  ‘It’s dying,’ Sam said, and I nodded, my throat going tight.

  ‘I tried to miss it,’ I told him. ‘It just jumped out. I was too late. Oh honey, I didn’t want you to see this, I thought I’d missed it.’

  ‘The vet will help … ’

  ‘Sam, we can’t take it to the vet,’ I told him. ‘Look at it, what vet can help that?’

  The hare was gasping now, in between the screams.

  ‘And how would we get it in the car? It’s frightened and in agony. If we go near it, it’ll attack, it’ll bite us.’ I bit my lip. Tears were pricking my eyes.

  ‘We can’t just leave it like that,’ Sam said, looking up at me. ‘Mum, you have to do something.’

  I stared down at the creature, the small pathetic movements it was making as if it could crawl away from death.

  Over by the grass verge were rocks, large rocks. One sharp knock and it would be over. The screaming would stop. The pain would stop.

  ‘Back in the car, Sam,’ I ordered.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Now,’ I told him, ‘back in the car now.’

  Sam stared at me a moment and then went back to the car. He slowly climbed in. ‘What are you going to do, Mum?’

  ‘Close the door, Sam,’ I ordered, ‘and don’t look out of the window.’

  I waited a moment, making sure he was doing as he was told, and then I picked up the largest rock I could find. I went back to the hare, back to the mangled body lying in the road, the screaming. I lifted the rock high in the air.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered, before letting it fall, and in an instant it was over. The screaming stopped. Silence.

  ‘You killed it.’

  ‘SAM!’ I stumbled back. ‘I told you to stay in the car!’

  He looked down at the hare, now under the rock. ‘It’s dead.’

  I wiped my face, went over to him and put my arm around his shoulders. He didn’t respond.

  ‘It’s kinder,’ I told him. ‘No vet would’ve been able to save it. It was dying. It was in pain. It was kinder to kill it and put it out of its misery.’

  He stared at it a moment. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How do you know it was kinder?’ He looked up at me. ‘Maybe it wanted to die on its own. Maybe we should’ve left it. Or taken it to someone for help.’

  ‘Sam –’ I leaned down so my face was level with his ‘– it was the humane thing to do, you can’t just leave an animal in so much pain. It was better to kill it quickly rather than leave it to have a long, painful death. And where would we have taken it to? I’m not even sure the vet would look at a wild animal. It’s not a pet,’ I told him gently, ‘and it was in a lot of pain. Too much pain.’

  He nodded but I could see my words weren’t hitting home. In Sam’s mind he probably thought we should’ve done something else.

  Maybe we should’ve done something else. Would a vet have done anything? The RSPCA? I swallowed, my throat dry. Too late now.

  ‘Get back in the car,’ I told him, trying to be matter of fact. ‘I mean it this time, Sam.’ He looked at me for a moment, then slowly went to the car.

  We drove the rest of the way to my mother’s in silence, the dead hare wrapped in a Co-op bag in the boot. I was shaking and trying not to show it. My heart wouldn’t slow its beating, even though I kept repeating to myself that it was only a hare, only a stupid hare that ran in front of the car and there was nothing else I could’ve done.

  When we arrived, Sam got out of the car without saying a word. I felt like a murderer, like a killer. I couldn’t protect him from the bullies at school and now I’d killed a beautiful innocent creature right in front of him. I was still shaking slightly, upset and jittery from what I’d had to do.

  ‘Sam!’ I called after him, but my words were lost. He went straight up to my mother’s house. I watched him go. He was well built for his age. Looking at him you’d have thought his size and shape would’ve been a barrier to bullying, but it turned out to be the cause of it. They called him the ‘big fat giant’ and shouted out ‘BFG’ whenever he walked past, and now they were spitting on him.

  ‘Sam, it was an accident!’ I called again.

  He yanked open the front door. My mother never locked it and he went inside, leaving it swinging behind him. I took a moment, blinking away the tears.

  Why did everything have to be so bloody hard?

  There was a high-pitched ping from my bag, a text notification.

  I reached over for it quickly, thinking it was from Becca. I’d tell her what had happened, get some reassurance that I’d done the right thing in killing the hare, and then the thought that she’d found my hidden egg sandwich hit me. Perhaps she’d made the connection. Or the staff meeting had resulted in a different outcome for my job? They’d all complained and I was being suspended after all.

  I fiddled with the locked screen, putting in my password as the thoughts raced around my head. When the text screen opened I saw it wasn’t from Becca at all, but from an unknown caller.

  One word.

  SLAG

  SEVEN


  To a stranger, it looked like the cover of a chocolate box, my mother’s house. Think of those old oil paintings done of a cottage in the English countryside, wild flowers around a door. Add a couple of my mother’s large hanging baskets and decorative bird table out front and there you have it. What you wouldn’t know is that, once inside, the charm ends.

  When my parents moved here ten years ago, it was advertised as needing ‘quite a bit of TLC’, and my dad had major plans. He was going to renovate. Update the place, modernise it without losing its charm. He was going to spend his retirement and savings doing it up, installing central heating and double glazing. He wanted to expose the beams, knock through the pantry into the kitchen making it all open plan, put skylights in the back rooms to lighten the place up. He wanted to clear out the garden. I think he’d had ideas of a vegetable patch – there was talk of farmers’ markets and perhaps bee keeping eventually – but then he got ill. And the renovations happened sporadically or not at all.

  It was like they grew into each other, my parents and the house. They got new carpets and some oil-fired radiators, but the windows stayed single pane and insufficient, so the log fire was on more than not. They never did knock through the pantry and kitchen, so my mother used it as was originally intended, as a kind of semi-fridge. I’d often wander in and find a bit of cake that she planned to finish later, or half a banana.

  As my father’s condition got worse, my mother took to collecting miniature china animals and they decorated every available surface. It was a common pursuit for them in his final months, scouring the internet for these small woodland ornaments, and my mother lined them up along the window-sills so they hid the mould. They adorned the mantelpiece that my father had originally declared monstrously old fashioned, added to the overall clutter, and, in short, my parents became the exact kind of people that would live in a run-down cottage. Slight hoarders, generally living in a couple of rooms and who, no matter what the weather, always lit a fire.

  The ceilings are low, it’s quite often dark and the walls are full of faded photographs. But there is a certain cosiness to it, despite the slight smell of damp and ill-fitting doors.

  ‘Back’s still bad,’ she said, as I switched on the kettle to boil. ‘Ibuprofen not touching the sides.’

  I heard her groan, purely for my benefit, as she shifted herself into the wooden chair at the kitchen table.

  ‘I wish you’d get teabags,’ I said, as I scooped out the tea; it smelt dry. ‘You’re the only person I know who insists on loose tea.’

  She made a clicking sound with her teeth. ‘Tea without a teapot is not done proper. And don’t give me that builders mug, I want mine in a cup. With a saucer.’

  The teapot was stained from use, the lid chipped. I made a mental note to get her one for Christmas. I would’ve liked to get her a new kitchen entirely, or sort out the damp in the dining room, or at the very least replace the leaking tap in the bathroom, but a teapot was about all I could manage at the moment.

  Sam was in the lounge, sat on the sofa with Trixie, my mother’s old Yorkshire Terrier, on his knee. The pair of them were watching my dad’s old DVDs of On the Buses. It had been his favourite sitcom from the seventies and was now Sam’s failsafe. I heard Blakey’s laugh and then Sam’s quiet titter in response and knew he was some way towards calming down.

  ‘He’s fine,’ my mother said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘The hymns and singing that animal got was better than your dad’s.’

  We’d buried the dead hare in the field behind my mother’s. I want to say garden, but that doesn’t really go far enough to describe the space at the back of her cottage. Mostly because the partitions between my mother’s property and that of the farmers have long since worn away, meaning that behind my mother’s house is a large expanse of fields. Fields and fields, going on for ever.

  I’d dug a hole near some shrubbery and we’d put the Co-op bag containing the dead hare inside. Then my mother, who isn’t remotely religious, did a kind of service for Sam’s benefit. Even making us all sing some half-remembered version of ‘Jerusalem’. It worked. Sam seemed placated and was now watching his favourite show.

  I took the brewing teapot, the china cups and saucers, to the pine kitchen table where my mother was sitting.

  ‘It’s just here,’ she was saying, ‘right at the base. I think it’s something serious, has to be for it to be so painful.’

  ‘Mother –’ I heard her shuffling ‘– please.’ I looked up and inwardly groaned. ‘Pull your jumper down.’

  ‘At the base.’ She rubbed at the small of her back that she’d turned towards me. ‘See? Is there anything there?’

  I shook my head. ‘Mum, please, not today.’

  ‘I’ve checked in the mirror but can’t see anything.’

  ‘What d’you expect to see?’

  She shrugged. ‘Slipped disc? Lump or something?’

  I closed my eyes again.

  She paused a moment. I heard her sigh and then move, her heels clicking as she got up. She was going for the biscuit tin.

  ‘That’s your problem,’ I told her, looking down.

  She paused, her face innocent, then looked at her feet.

  ‘These?’ She lifted her foot and rotated it at the ankle to show off her shoes, black velvet, stiletto heel.

  ‘You wearing those around the house? Cleaning in them? No wonder your back’s hurting.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said, and I noticed how her back didn’t make her wince once as she reached up for the biscuit tin. ‘They’re practically slippers.’

  I watched as she brought the tin over to the table, then, as she remembered, did a kind of limp, her hand going to her back, before sitting down. It was comical really. Since my father, it was one thing after another, and always something madly dramatic.

  A bad back was a slipped disc, a headache was a brain tumour, any slight cough was lung cancer. After weeks of discussing ailments and symptoms, of suggesting medicine and appointments that were all ignored, I’d come to the conclusion that she didn’t really want my help, or the help of any medical professional. She just wanted sympathy and to be listened to, and any other day I would have indulged her. Let her carry on while I zoned out a little, barely listening until she’d got it all out of her system. But not today. Not when I had Janine and Rob’s faces looming in my mind. Not when the words ‘gross misconduct’ were circling at the forefront, not when I’d just slaughtered a wild animal in front of my son, who was now sitting in the next room, comforting himself after another excruciating day at a school with classmates who were now spitting on him.

  ‘You OK?’ my mother asked. ‘How’s the cake business going?’

  I made a face as I thought. ‘Not bad. Got an order for a birthday party this week, one of the dinner ladies at school. Turning fifty so it’s a lot of cupcakes, all with fancy toppers and icing.’

  My mother made an agreeable sound.

  ‘And I’m hoping to do the farmers’ market on Sunday –’ I went on nodding ‘– so I’ve a lot to do.’

  ‘Want me to have Sammy?’ she asked quickly and I shook my head.

  ‘Will’s got him this weekend,’ I told her and felt the familiar clench of anxiety in my stomach. I hated Sam going to his father’s, and after hearing Will’s threat of making him live with him, I didn’t want him to go at all. Impossible, as the agreement was every other weekend, but at the moment I was finding that too much. I’d have preferred it if Sam never saw Will again.

  ‘So,’ she said after a moment, ‘what’s happened to the back of your head?’

  I went to tell her and then checked myself. I couldn’t tell her part of the story without telling it all, and there are some things – no, there are lots of things – that I can’t talk to my mother about.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Is it to do with Sam?’ she asked, biting into a custard cream, and I snapped.

  ‘Why does it have to be Sam?’

&nbs
p; ‘I’m just asking because last time, when you hurt your hand, it was one of Sam’s tantrums that—’

  ‘It was not Sam,’ I said carefully. ‘And last time was my fault, he didn’t know my hand was in the doorway.’

  We were both quiet as she picked up the strainer and placed it over one of the tea cups.

  ‘Sam’s doing great,’ I said after a moment. ‘Sam’s not a problem, but there’s this one boy in his class … ’

  She nodded and waited for me to go on. It was an ingrained memory from childhood, my mother sat at a table, making tea as things were discussed. She did it for her friends. For my father. I felt a waft of sadness as I thought of her doing this alone.

  ‘I didn’t mean to snap,’ I said, taking the cup, ‘but Sam’s being bullied by this awful boy in his class and he doesn’t want me to tell the teacher. And his teacher isn’t doing much about it. I should’ve said something today, but I didn’t get a chance and now I’m not sure what to do.’

  My mother took a moment.

  ‘He’s spitting on him,’ I told her, and her eyes went wide.

  ‘In my day,’ she said, ‘bullies got the same treatment they dished out.’

  I shook my head. ‘I can’t tell Sam to spit back.’

  ‘A good smack,’ she said, and I snorted on my tea. ‘One sharp shock instead of all this namby-pamby talking and meetings and whatever else they do. If a jumped-up little whippersnapper thinks it’s funny to spit at people, then he needs to know there’s consequences to his actions.’

  ‘I don’t think smacking is … ’

  ‘It was the back of a shoe for us. We were sent to the headmaster and he got the back of our legs with the underside of a rubber sole.’

  ‘Mum … ’

  ‘Was there bullying back then? Of course there was. But did it carry on like today? It did not! And don’t get me started on all that ADHD … ’

  ‘Mother, you can’t just—’

  ‘I can! And I’m only saying this to you, in here, but I don’t think it exists. ADHD –’ she took a sip of her tea ‘– or OCD. All those kids need are less stimulants, less TV, less screens and a proper diet.’