One Secret Summer

by Lesley Lokko

  The door opened again. Niela looked up in alarm. It wasn’t Hamid. It was Fathia. She held a glass of a pale golden liquid in one hand and a pad of cotton wool in the other. ‘Come.’ She beckoned to Niela. There was no expression on Fathia’s face as she dipped the cotton wool in the whisky and brought the sodden pad to Niela’s face. The sharp sting caused the tears to jump straight out of her eyes. Fathia was surprisingly gentle. She worked in silence. She cleaned Niela’s mouth and eyes and dressed the cut on her shoulder. When she was done, she put away the empty glass and threw away the soiled cotton pad and turned to her. ‘Go to sleep. In the morning everything will be all right.’ She closed the door behind her. Niela sat on the edge of the bed, her legs still shaking. Her mouth was swollen and bruised and already the vision in her left eye was beginning to blur. She touched the lid cautiously. It was almost closed. The large gold signet ring that Hamid wore must have caught her just above the eyelid. It was painful to touch. She sat there for what seemed like hours, too afraid to lie down, too afraid to sleep. She had no idea what would happen next. She heard Fathia’s voice again. In the morning everything will be all right. How? She’d never been hit in her entire life. She couldn’t imagine her father lifting a hand to her mother, or anyone else for that matter. What on earth was she supposed to do now? Wait until the next beating? She tried to stop the tears falling – the salt stung like hell – but she couldn’t. She could feel them sliding, soft, salty and silky, down her cheeks, underneath her chin, soaking into the fabric of her nightdress. She had to do something. But what?

  ‘Niela?’ The look of alarm on Christian’s face was genuine. ‘Niela! What the hell happened to you? Are you all right?’ He ignored the frown his manager gave him and put up a hand to touch the glass screen separating them.

  Niela’s heart was racing so fast it hurt. ‘Christian … I need to withdraw my savings,’ she stammered, past caring what the others in the line behind her thought. ‘Right now. Everything. I need to close the account.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Christian turned to the teller next to him. ‘Cover for me for a second, will you?’ He started to get up but Niela stopped him.

  ‘No … don’t. Please. Just give me whatever’s in my account. I don’t have very much time.’

  ‘But where are you going? What’s happening, Niela?’

  ‘I’ll … I’ll explain later. Just give me everything I have. Hurry, please.’

  Christian’s eyes searched hers; there must have been something in her expression that convinced him she was both serious and desperate. He counted out a bundle of notes, put them in an envelope and slid it into the tray. She signed the slip and stuffed the envelope in her handbag. ‘Can you meet me outside at lunchtime?’ he asked her, his eyes still searching her face.

  Niela looked up at the clock behind him. She’d been gone for thirty minutes. Any second now, Fathia or Hamid would come looking for her. ‘I … I can’t,’ she stammered, her face flooding with heat. ‘M … maybe later?’ She turned away before he could say another word or see the tears that were building up rapidly behind her eyes. She had to get out of the bank as quickly as she could. She couldn’t believe she’d managed to escape. She’d been kept under lock and key for two days, ever since the beating. She’d lain in bed all day, her thoughts drifting dangerously low. That morning, she’d heard the front door bell and Fathia’s answering grunt. It was the man who’d come to check the gas meters. He’d asked Fathia to accompany him to do the reading. Niela knew the meters were kept in the basement. As soon as the door closed behind them, she jumped up. She hadn’t consciously formed a plan. All she knew was that she had to get away from there as fast as she possibly could. She turned on the shower in the bedroom – that would buy her an extra fifteen minutes or so – and hastily got dressed. She grabbed a small bag, shoved a sweater and some underwear in it and the photograph of her parents and brothers that stood on the dresser and was out of the front door in seconds. She’d run all the way down the road, praying the bus would come along soon. It did … before she knew it, she was running up the road towards the bank.

  Now she hurried out of the bank and crossed the road without looking left or right. Any second now she would feel a hand on her shoulder or hear Fathia’s voice. There was a bus waiting at the stop on the other side of the street. Marienplatz. She had a vague recollection that that was in the centre of the city. She ran across the road and boarded it. She had no idea where she was going or what she ought to do … head for the central train station? If she did make it there, where would she go? A few seconds later, the driver started the engine. Niela gripped the handle of her bag tightly. From here there’d be no going back. If Hamid or Fathia ever caught her, she was finished. This is it, she thought to herself wildly, as the bus pulled out into the traffic. This is it. But what was it? Where would she go?

  She stood looking up at the destinations clicking their way up the departures board. Click. Whirr. Stuttgart. Berlin. Hanover. Bonn. Another set of clicks and whirrs as trains began to pull out of the station. She bit her lip. Stuttgart? She didn’t even know where it was. To the left of the board were the international departures. London. Amsterdam. Barcelona. Madrid. She looked around her. It was the week before Christmas. There were holidaymakers and tourists everywhere. Young couples, grandparents, families … everyone on the move, going to or coming from home for the holidays. She felt the tug of tears in her throat and the by now familiar churning of panic. She had neither family nor friends and nowhere to go. She looked at her watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock in the morning. Fathia would have noticed her absence by now and called Hamid. But they would never find her. Neither of them would work out that she’d taken a bus into the centre of Munich and from there another bus to the train station … no, they would never find her. She was free. Unless she made the decision to return, no one would ever hear from her again. She looked back up at the board. London. There was a train leaving for London in less than an hour. Via Paris. She swallowed. She knew no one in London. For that reason alone, it seemed a good place to start.

  20

  JULIA

  Oxford, January 1992

  It was dark by the time the train finally pulled into the station. Snow was falling lightly on the tracks, like icing sugar. Julia hauled down her case and moved into the corridor. She shoved down the window and opened the carriage door, shivering in the cold. There were only a handful of people on the platform; it was the second day of the new year and term wasn’t due to begin for another ten days or so. There wasn’t even a ticket collector at the barrier – he, like almost everyone else she knew, had better things to do in the days following New Year’s Eve. She didn’t. She’d gone back to Elswick for Christmas and had spent it in miserable silence with her aunt and uncle, begging a headache and leaving early the day after Boxing Day. She hated Christmas – a season whose sole purpose seemed to be to remind her just what it was she’d lost – her parents, her grandmother, her roots. She couldn’t wait for it to be over. She’d gone to a friend’s house in Elswick for a New Year’s Eve party – one of the few friends she still had – but there too she’d felt out of place and out of sorts. There were only two other girls in her class who’d gone on to university; neither had returned to Elswick since they’d all left school. Rebecca, in whose house the party was being held, worked in a travel agent’s. Aside from the usual cheery ‘how’re you?’, there didn’t seem to be much to talk about. Julia stood to one side, nursing a beer for most of the evening, and left shortly after midnight. After a day spent on her own in what had been her grandmother’s house, she packed her small suitcase, unable to stand the silence and the memories any longer. Now, arriving at an almost deserted Holywell Manor, she almost wished she’d taken Dominic up on his offer and gone to stay with him instead. She had only the vaguest idea of where Dom lived – he kept referring to it as a ‘bloodthirsty leech of a country pile’ – but she’d overheard someone saying once that his father was an earl. Not that she h
ad any clearer an idea of what exactly an earl was. And, being Julia and her father’s daughter, she’d been too embarrassed to ask. Well, whatever it was and whoever his father was, it was clear Dom was posh. A Christmas spent in the country with posh parents? She wasn’t sure she’d have coped. Not that she’d coped much better on her own, she reminded herself briskly as she got off the bus on the high street and walked down Longwall towards Holywell in the deepening snow. She skidded once or twice as she rolled her suitcase behind her. That would be the icing on the cake, she thought to herself bitterly, pushing open the wooden gate to the Manor. A broken leg.

  She made her way up the stairs, relieved to see there was no one about. She wasn’t sure she could have faced anyone – not even the three scrupulously quiet, scrupulously polite Chinese graduate students who, as far as she could work out, were the only other students at Balliol who seemed as out of their depth as she did. And at least they had each other. She often came across them in the kitchen, chattering animatedly amongst themselves in Cantonese or Mandarin, Julia couldn’t tell which, of course. As soon as she entered, they stopped, guiltily, as if they’d been doing something wrong. No matter how often Julia smiled at them, or how many times she said ‘hello!’ as brightly as she could, she’d never managed to get more than a timid smile in return and soon she gave up altogether. Now not even they were around. The Manor was deathly quiet.

  She opened the door to her room. It was exactly as she’d left it. She felt a sudden, unexpected surge of warmth at the sight of her patchwork quilt and the collection of pens she always kept on her desk. Her single room, small as it was, was more of a home to her than anywhere had been in the past few years and she was glad of it. She dragged her case to the centre of the room, eased off her boots and padded across the floor. She pushed open the window a crack and perched herself on the ledge.

  A few inches from her face, snowflakes fell in steady floating swirls. The grounds to the right of Holywell were already blanketed in white. All was quiet, still, serene. She breathed in the cold winter air, taking it down into her lungs, forcing out the sadness that lay at the bottom. She was back; she had a few days of comforting solitude before the Lent Term commenced. Best to take full advantage, she thought to herself. She had a lot of reading to do, and although she’d got through the Michaelmas Term without actually failing anything, there was still a long way to go to the top. At the moment, two people on the course held that spot. Douglas Parks and Jonathan Roddington-Palmer. Before the end of the year, she’d sworn to herself grimly, there’d be another name added to the list. Hers. It wasn’t enough just to be at Oxford – she wanted to be up there, counted amongst the best. She knew she was easily as good as them … it was just that they were so damned confident. When she was called on to present an argument or defend a point of view, Julia’s hands would go clammy; she could see them wincing at her accent and the way she kept tucking her hair behind her ears. She had none of the smooth, easy sophistication of the rest of them, and of the four women on the course, she was the only one who was neither blonde, flirtatious nor charming. In fact, she’d overheard one of their tutors saying that she was ‘entirely devoid of feminine charm’ – she hadn’t known whether to be pleased by the comment or dismayed.

  She closed the window with a snap and turned round. It was almost six o’clock. Aside from a rather soggy cheese and tomato sandwich on the train she’d had nothing to eat all day. Her stomach was rumbling. She’d left some dried pasta in the kitchen downstairs and possibly a jar of pesto in the fridge … she’d only been gone a couple of weeks … surely it would keep that long? She threw her suitcase a glance; she’d unpack when she’d eaten and then she’d get down to work.

  There was someone in the kitchen; light was spilling out from underneath the door and she could hear the banging of pots and pans, the slam of a cupboard door and then the fridge being closed. Whoever it was, they were making one hell of a racket. It didn’t sound like one of the Chinese students. She opened the door cautiously, wondering who else could have come back to Oxford the day after New Year … and why. She put a hand to her mouth as soon as she saw who it was. Aaron Keeler. He had his back to her, but there was no mistaking the tousled thatch of blond hair or the broad sweep of his shoulders. He turned as she walked in, and his look of surprise matched hers.

  ‘Oh. It’s you.’ He immediately turned back to filling his pot.

  ‘Yeah, and Merry Christmas to you too,’ she snapped, unable to help herself. She too turned away before he could answer and opened the cupboard where she kept her small stash of groceries. She blinked. Her bag of dried fusilli was gone. Aaron Keeler was holding it above his pan of boiling water. Her pan, as a matter of fact. Come to think of it, she’d never ever seen him in the kitchen. ‘Excuse me,’ she said icily. ‘I think that’s my pasta.’

  He looked down at the contents of the packet he’d just emptied, which were now swirling around merrily in the pan of boiling water. He shrugged. ‘Sorry. Didn’t have your name on it.’

  ‘You can’t just come in here and …’ Julia began hotly, aware that her indignation had both raised her voice a notch and deepened her accent. Ye can’t joost cooome in ’ere. She winced. ‘What I mean is—’

  ‘I know what you meant. Fine. You have the bloody pasta then.’ He shrugged off her complaint. ‘I’ll just nick someone else’s.’ He crossed the kitchen and opened another cupboard. ‘Ah. M and S. Much better.’ He held a packet aloft. ‘Happy?’

  ‘Look, I didn’t mean it like that … there’s more than enough for both of us,’ Julia said, her cheeks reddening. Christ, he was arrogant!

  ‘Don’t worry, wouldn’t dream of robbing you.’ He busied himself with finding another pot. Julia was left standing in the middle of the kitchen, wishing she’d shut her mouth. If there was one thing she couldn’t bear being accused of, it was being mean. Stingy. Ungenerous. She’d never been stingy in her entire life! And his faint but unmissable emphasis on ‘you’ spoke volumes. He’d rather rob someone else – someone who could afford it. She felt her temper begin to rise.

  ‘Look,’ she said hotly. ‘All I meant was it would’ve been polite of you to ask, that’s all. I don’t care about the bloody pasta. You can eat the whole packet for all I care! And in fact, whilst you’re at it – here, you can have the rest of my pesto too.’ She yanked open the fridge door. Her jar of pesto was gone. She whirled round. It was standing next to the cooker, a teaspoon already stuck inside it. She glared at it, then at him, and then, without trusting herself to utter a single further word, she stalked out of the kitchen and made her way back towards her room, her hunger momentarily forgotten. She’d sooner starve than argue with Aaron Keeler over food! She pushed open the door to her room, slammed it loudly behind her and threw herself on the bed. Her heart was beating fast. She couldn’t help it – there was just something about the way he was that set her teeth on edge. Everything about him – from his assured good looks to the sneer that hovered permanently on his lips. Don’t worry, wouldn’t dream of robbing you. Ugh! She glanced down at her hands; they were clenched tightly shut. She let out a small sigh of exasperation. Not only was she angry, she was hungry too. And unless she waited another hour to make sure Keeler was out of the way, it looked as though she’d stay that way all night. It was too bloody much! What the hell was he doing back here anyway? A quick image of him floated up in front of her eyes. He was tanned. She’d been too angry to take it in at the time but he had the telltale T of slightly reddened skin across his forehead and nose … He’d either been on a beach or on the ski slopes somewhere. Whichever, he looked alarmingly healthy and … she stumbled across the thought … alarmingly attractive. Urgh! She rolled over and buried her head in her pillow.

  It took a few minutes for the realisation that there’d been a knock at the door to penetrate her consciousness. She raised her head, wondering if she’d misheard. There was nothing. She got up, still clutching her pillow as if to ward off whomever might be standing there
, and cautiously opened the door. There was no one. The corridor was empty save for the unmistakable scent of warm pasta and pesto. She stood uncertainly in the doorway for a few minutes – should she go back to the kitchen? He’d obviously come down the corridor to her room … what was she supposed to do now? Go back after him? She stood there for a few minutes, catching her lower lip in her teeth, then she turned and walked slowly back into her room. Damn him, she thought to herself for the umpteenth time. He’d wrong-footed her, and there was nothing she hated more than not knowing how to behave. Had he come to apologise and offer her a plate of food? Or had he come to gloat? Knowing Keeler, probably the latter. But that was the problem – she didn’t know him at all. Not really. Not in the way that would answer the question. She opened her suitcase and rummaged through it until she found her nightdress. She was too tired, too hungry and too upset to think about it any further. She opened the door again, looked quickly up and down the corridor to make absolutely certain he wasn’t around and marched to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Enough. She’d had enough. And the second term hadn’t even yet begun.

  What had started out as a silent animosity born largely out of mutual disdain between Julia Burrows and Aaron Keeler had, by the time Lent Term ended, escalated into an almost full-scale, no-holds-barred war. In the week following the pasta ’n’ pesto incident, as Dom liked to refer to it, Julia had been surprised to see Aaron coming to and from the Balliol law library with almost as many books as she. Now he was rarely seen in the MCR without his nose buried in a book. Julia was puzzled. His first term had been spent largely in the bar. ‘Well, that’s because you’ve got his goat,’ Dom told her smugly when she mentioned it as off-handedly as she could. ‘Look, he’s spent his life coasting on his mother’s tails. Now it’s down to him. And with your marks shooting spectacularly upwards, my dear … well, it’s no wonder. If there’s one thing those damn Keeler boys can’t stand, it’s being beaten. Doesn’t matter what it is. Rowing, rugby, reading … it’s all the same to them. I think you’re putting him under pressure. He looked as though he’d bust a gut when you won that argument in class yesterday.’