This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  ‘Go to the nurse,’ I told her. ‘I’ll deal with the others.’

  She started to cry then. ‘Please don’t say anything.’ She put her hand over her mouth, a sort of instinctive reaction to try and disguise the fact she was crying, and ended up smearing the whole lower half of her face with blood.

  The feeling of everything spiralling rapidly out of control fell somewhere between a test I had to pass and a wind-up. ‘Jesus … just stay here, okay? Don’t move.’ I exited the room and strode sharply back out into the corridor.

  ‘Come on. Who did it? I don’t have time for this, and neither do any of you. In fact, I’d go as far as to say, I’m fucking pissed off. You’ve got GCSEs coming up. Do you want to fail your exams?’

  None of the other teachers ever used the f-word. This wasn’t the sort of school where the f-word was acceptable. Parents weren’t paying four grand a term to hear their daughters’ maths teachers throwing expletives around the minute things got a bit heated.

  When I’d applied for the post at Hadley Hall, I’d put on my application form that I ‘thrived under pressure’. I guessed that was one of the things the head, Mr Mackenzie, had liked about me (along with the fact that with my ponytail, facial hair, relative youth and refusal to wear cardigans, I had represented what he had termed a ‘well-needed breath of fresh air’ for Hadley. Mackenzie had always been happy to take risks in that way, championing the benefits of pushing one envelope or another, a fact for which I remained entirely grateful).

  But the problem with claiming to thrive under pressure was that I had never before really found myself under any. In fact, it could be said that my life was generally pressure-free: no real responsibilities, no stresses, a select handful of friends and no girlfriend to speak of. And apart from occasionally giving me the sense of being stuck in a bit of a rut, that was all fine – except now it wasn’t, because the shit was hitting the fan, and the sole onus for dealing with it was firmly on me.

  I made a quick mental tally. So far I had the girl with the unscheduled haircut downstairs, the one with a stab wound in the room behind me, and a defiant group of delinquents sloping sulkily against a wall, facing me down. Double maths, it was fair to say, was not going too well.

  At this point I had no other option than to remain doggedly convinced that I could claw it back, have them all rearranging formulas with their eyes shut by lunchtime – and my first move was to take a hard line. ‘Detention, every night next week. And I’ll be contacting your parents, you can be sure of that,’ I declared, slamming down my emergency hand of behavioural management ace cards. ‘Now get back inside, and I don’t want to hear another word from any of you. For the rest of the year.’

  As they shuffled back past me into the classroom, heads down and grim-faced like they were moving up the bread queue in Marxist Russia, I glanced through the glass panel of the door to my left. The injured girl was sitting down – not yet passed out, that was good – gripping her hand and biting her lip. She looked okay; but then again, maybe that was how schoolgirls always looked when they were bleeding to death. Impelled to hurry, I ran down the stairs two at a time to finally deliver the crying girl and her friend with a brief précis to Mackenzie – he’d seen it all before and would no doubt have something helpful to say. It would be more productive than talking to me, we all knew that: I had no words of wisdom to impart that didn’t relate in some way to mean, mode or median.

  Then I legged it upstairs again and opened the door to where I had left the fifteen-year-old with the blood-smeared face and slashed hand. I was starting to wonder how I was going to explain all this at the next parents’ evening.

  ‘Let’s get you to the nurse,’ I said. ‘You might need to go to hospital. It looks deep.’

  Seeming to accept this, she nodded. I held out my hand and helped her up. The blood from her palm smeared all over mine, wet and bright like the poster paint from a primary school art class. I could have used it to do something creative on A3 with handprints and taken it home to stick on my fridge.

  ‘I know why they do it,’ she informed me as we faced one another.

  ‘Huh?’ I couldn’t take my eyes off all that blood around her mouth. Flecks of it had dripped on to her shirt. She looked like an extra from a horror film. And now that I had touched her, so did I.

  ‘I know why they do it,’ she repeated quietly.

  I frowned. ‘You know why they do what?’

  ‘Stuff like that.’ She made a scissoring motion with her left hand.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, wondering what explanation she could possibly offer me to disprove my less-than-complex theory that they did it because they were misbehaving little shits.

  ‘They’re bored.’ She wouldn’t look at me as she said it.

  ‘Bored?’ I repeated, like she’d invented a new word.

  Just as I was about to inform her that only boring people get bored (and, for good measure, that there was no such word as can’t), she elaborated. ‘It’s because they don’t understand. None of us do. You’re going too fast, you’re only interested in Laura and you’re forgetting about the rest of us.’

  Laura Marks was the star of my class, a girl who had already shown herself to be an entirely competent mathematician – so far ahead of the others in terms of ability that I had started to wonder recently if she was in fact some sort of departmental plant, sent in by the other teachers to spy on the rookie.

  ‘Too fast?’ This still wasn’t making sense. I’d been praised on my pacing ever since my first day of teacher training. For a moment, I felt like telling her that, then decided against it. It would have seemed a bit petty. I could rise above these baseless allegations, for God’s sake.

  ‘Yeah, like … you moved on to quadratic equations, and we still don’t get …’

  ‘Equations?’ I supplied with a sinking feeling.

  She shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

  Though I could sense there was an opportunity here to delve deeper, I decided it might be prudent to revisit this unsolicited feedback on a day when things were slightly less fraught. ‘I still don’t think that’s an excuse for poor behaviour though, do you?’ I said, my way of reminding her that there was a girl downstairs who by late morning had succeeded in retaining only half the head of hair she’d woken up with.

  Another shrug. They could shrug instead of speak for days at a time, these girls. ‘Maybe not. I’m just telling you what I think.’

  As she said this I noticed that blood was beginning to trickle between her fingers again. ‘Don’t ball your fist,’ I told her. ‘Come on, we’d better get you to the nurse.’

  Please don’t pass out. Please.

  ‘You know,’ I said to her as we walked, drawing a few strange looks and the odd question from stray pupils and teachers on the way (with her blood-smeared jaw and my bright red hand it could easily have looked to the casual observer, I realized afterwards, like I’d punched her in the mouth), ‘I do run a maths club. After school on Tuesdays.’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Maths club? That’s not cool, Mr Landley.’

  Well, you’ve got to admire her honesty. I smiled. ‘I know it might not seem cool now, but don’t you think you’ll feel cool when you ace your GCSE and get a really great job after university?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, deadpan, ‘but I’ve heard maths club’s really dross.’

  For some reason, that made me laugh. I didn’t bother to ask her what dross meant – it clearly wasn’t a compliment.

  ‘Tuesdays,’ I said as we reached the nurse’s office. ‘Check with your mum first.’

  ‘I might do,’ she said.

  ‘Tuesdays,’ I repeated.

  A few days later, she caught up with me after school. As I was unlocking my car I sensed someone standing behind me, and when I turned round, there she was – with significantly more colour in her face than the last time I had seen her. ‘I bought you a present, Mr L.’

  ‘A present?’ I repeated, slightly confused. In my experience, pupil
–teacher presents only really featured at Christmas, Easter and (when the parents were feeling flush, which at Hadley was always), the end of term. I regarded her with a bemused expression as she fished around in her bag, admittedly slightly intrigued to see what she was going to pull out of there.

  ‘Here you go.’ She held it aloft, triumphant.

  It was … a can of Diet Coke.

  She looked so excited to give it to me that the smile I shot her was genuine. In fact, I probably seemed a lot happier to receive it than I should have been. ‘Wow, thank you. What have I done to deserve that?’

  She thrust it towards me, and I took it. The scar from her scissor wound was still a mess of stitching across her palm.

  ‘To say thanks for looking after me the other day. And you work so hard,’ she added, her expression steady, as I gave the can a jaunty little toss without thinking. ‘I thought you could maybe do with a Diet Coke break.’

  Of course, I completely missed what she was saying – mostly because I was wondering if this could be an opportunity to renew her interest in solving basic formulae.

  ‘Well, that was very thoughtful of you, but you really shouldn’t be spending your money on me,’ I told her. ‘And you know, fizzy drinks aren’t good for your teeth.’ I wiggled the can at her like a twat and she started laughing.

  ‘Oh, by the way, Mr L,’ she said then, brushing her hair back from her face, ‘my mum said it’s okay.’

  I smiled at her. ‘Your mum said what’s okay?’

  ‘Maths club,’ she said, as if there could only be one thing in the world that a fifteen-year-old would be begging her mother permission to do after school (ironically enough, such a scenario was indeed the stuff of my teaching fantasies). ‘I’m coming to maths club.’

  I didn’t know it then, of course, but the simple act of signing her up that afternoon was the moment the tide began to rise.

  4

  ‘Fuck,’ Zak growled. ‘Late.’

  Zak had a habit of restricting his sentences to single syllables when he was tired or stressed – something Jess assumed had come straight from his hospital A & E department, where such efficiencies probably meant the difference between life and death. Hung-over and sour-tempered, he was supposed to be dashing off to meet his father, a retired architect who was redesigning the roof of Zak’s new weekend bolthole to let more light in. Zak always referred to it as a beach house but, in fact, it was of that industrial style of architecture that made it look more like a misplaced storage facility. There was steel involved, and talk of tensile forces, and given that Zak’s neighbours already considered him to be a crass city-dweller with no respect for surrounding sand dunes, Jess could envisage raised voices, which she didn’t foresee doing much for her headache. So she opted to quietly nurse her hangover solo with the aid of some fresh coffee – a free sample from Colombia via Philippe, which was very generous of him, given that he usually sold the stuff for five quid a cup.

  Unable to sleep, she’d risen early this morning, creeping down the staircase and on to her mother’s old Shaker-style chair next to the Aga in the kitchen. Smudge, her border collie, had loyally migrated from his basket to lie on top of her feet, squeezing his eyes shut and keeping her toes warm while they’d waited together for the sun to rise.

  One year with Zak, yet all she could think about when she closed her eyes was Matthew.

  ‘Where are my fucking keys?’ Zak was raging now, his neck going pink as he turned over the contents of Jess’s living room with escalating frustration like a drug addict in urgent need of items to sell for cash. ‘Jesus, Jessica. If you actually chucked out some of this junk then maybe you wouldn’t lose things so often.’

  The junk he referred to – her trinkets made from driftwood, collection of vintage postcards, half-burnt candles, old photographs and miniature glass milk bottles – was scattered lovingly across her stuffed, creaking bookcases, mantelpiece, mismatched furniture and upright piano that still had the book of Christmas carols open on ‘Joy to the World’. She knew that it was ramshackle and tumbledown, and that it all probably could have done with a squirt of furniture polish, but it was her.

  ‘I like my junk,’ Jess replied, feeling a little bit riled that Zak was criticizing her for losing things while he looked for something he’d lost.

  Finally he located his keys within the folds of her cotton paisley scarf, which he’d hastily unwound on her behalf last night before discarding it on the sideboard. ‘Okay,’ he said, shaking his head and bending down to kiss her where she was curled up on the sofa, ‘I’ll see you tonight. I’ll pick you up at seven, okay? Be ready.’

  She nodded up at him, hands wrapped round the coffee cup. He’d surprised her with a dinner reservation at Burnham Manor, where apparently there was no leeway for being late as they served the food in a single sitting, shouting out the Michelin-starred menu to a room full of salivating food fanatics.

  ‘Dress up,’ he threw over his shoulder as he exited the cottage. ‘Wear your new shoes.’

  She glanced over to where her anniversary present – a pale brown paper bag bearing the famous scrawling logo of Christian Louboutin – was resting by the fireplace. Inside, a matching cardboard box stuffed with folds of creamy tissue paper, and nestled down amongst it all, a pair of shoes – flawless black patent with distinctive scarlet soles, heels not much sturdier than chopsticks.

  Her stomach had churned when she’d opened the box, partly because she suspected Zak was still basing all his gift choices on the things that had made Octavia happy, but partly because the shoes were two sizes too small, and she hadn’t had the heart to tell him.

  As lunchtime approached, Jess took a shower, soaping her skin in something vanilla-scented and finishing with a blast of cold water for her damaged leg – admittedly not the ice she’d been advised to use, but the sole item currently in her freezer was an oversized portion of home-made beef lasagne, and she could only think that combining it with compression and elevation would result in half-thawed beef and marinara sauce becoming inconveniently smeared across her sofa and thighs.

  She finally chased away the stubborn dregs of her hang-over with a late lunch, caramelizing some cauliflower in the Aga with olive oil and coarse sea salt before devouring it greedily from a soup bowl with loosely scrambled yellow eggs, her thoughts rotating steadily between Zak, Octavia and Matthew. Finishing off with a damp slab of banana bread, she exchanged a couple of texts with Anna as she ate, although she was currently unable to say much about last night without wanting to caramelize her own head.

  While the air was still warm, she popped several ibuprofen, eased on her wellies and headed for the beach with Smudge at her side.

  Walking extra slowly, they made their way on to the perfect expanse of empty marsh, transected at its horizon by a dense block of clouded sky. Jess took time to savour the salty breeze, allowing it to whip her bob of blonde hair across her face.

  The southern edge of the marsh closest to the village was where children came to play on the hot summer mornings of their school holidays, to cake themselves in mud the colour and texture of treacle and hunt for slim, silver fish in the creeks and pools with bright, cheap fishing nets purchased from Wells-next-the-Sea. It was where dogs could charge freely and parents could stand idly chatting, collecting plump strands of electric-green samphire from the damp ground, getting clay between their toes and salt spray in their hair.

  The tide was going out, so the mud was still wet and the creeks half full. Together Jess and Smudge picked their way expertly across the thick carpet of sea lavender and fleshy crops of sea purslane, Smudge bounding along his favourite well-worn route over the winding channels, the white patches of his coat quickly turning grey. Jess favoured her own path across the uneven ground, averting her eyes as she always did from the small wooden cross planted near the bridge.

  Sunk deep into its own little patch of wiry sea lavender, nobody else would even have known it was there, but Jess did. It stared her down every si
ngle time she passed it, but she never stopped and she never looked. Just keep walking.

  The roar of the outgoing tide crescendoed and the breeze became a stiff wind as they approached the beach. Smudge picked up speed, jumping and delighting in the vast stretch of deserted sand ahead of him. They crossed it together to the shoreline, where Jess stared out at the horizon and thought – as she had almost every day for as long as she could remember – about Matthew. She threw Smudge’s tennis ball into the edge of the surf over and over again, while he cantered around in delight like an overexcited pony. Then the sun dipped down behind a bank of solid cloud, so they turned back and headed for home.

  The knock on the door came as Jess was mixing up Smudge’s tea. Setting his bowl on the floor, she rinsed her hands and hobbled through to the living room, Smudge at her ankles, too curious to ignore a visitor in favour of eating.

  And just like that, Matthew Landley was on her doorstep, locking eyes with her properly for the first time in seventeen years.

  For a few moments, he didn’t speak, seemingly needing to absorb the sight of her. Then, eventually, he found his voice. ‘Hello,’ was all he said.

  As she moved silently aside to let him past, she caught the scent of him, still deliciously familiar. He was an attractive combination of muscular and brown that suggested he worked outside shifting things for a living, his back and shoulders far broader than she remembered. Suddenly he became the only man she could think of who could carry off a grey T-shirt and jeans quite so impressively. Tattoos that hadn’t been there before covered his upper arms, and she couldn’t help noticing that his biceps had bulked up too. But the most significant difference was his shaved head and jawline.

  He’s aged so well he’s barely aged at all.

  She shut the door, and they turned to face one another. Trying to speak, she realized there was a lump in her throat she needed to bypass first, and it was proving problematic.