This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  As Will turned to face her at the car’s front bumper, Jess thought about complimenting him on the size of his garage to break the ice. She thought about saying sorry for Charlotte’s dress again. She thought about saying sorry for everything else.

  ‘We should keep the lights off,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anyone to see us.’

  She nodded. ‘Okay.’

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘Hello again,’ he said. ‘Sorry about that, with Charlotte. I panicked.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Is she okay?’

  ‘Of course, she just … we bought that dress especially for the party. She’s an occasion girl, like her mother.’

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Jess said softly.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said warmly, like he somehow knew what it took for her to be gracious about it.

  ‘There’s a lot of people in there.’ She had the impression he was relieved to be getting some air.

  ‘Yeah. Natalie’s something of a fast mover – socially, I mean. I don’t know how she does it. Catered house parties aren’t really my thing. No offence,’ he added quickly. ‘Your food was the best bit. Nothing says a good party like an asparagus cigar.’

  ‘I think you might be the only one still sober enough to appreciate it,’ she said with a teasing smile.

  ‘Ah. That’s because they all got pissed on your tomato vodka. They’re a discerning lot.’

  ‘Vodka gazpacho shots,’ she corrected him, trying and failing to keep a straight face.

  ‘Well, they went down a storm, Jess. You’ll have to come again.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So,’ Jess said, lowering her voice, ‘what are we doing in your garage?’

  ‘Ice?’

  ‘Ice.’

  Neither of them moved for a moment or two, during which time Jess’s gaze settled on Will’s weights bench. She smiled.

  ‘What’s funny?’ He was watching her, amused.

  ‘No, nothing, it’s just …’ She let a tiny laugh escape.

  Will laughed too, like it was catching, his eyes lighting up. ‘What?’

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I noticed before that you’d –’ she puffed her cheeks out slightly and made a shrugging motion with her shoulders that was supposed to indicate upper body bulk – ‘so I was going to ask if you’d been working out.’

  He laughed again, loudly. ‘Nice. The opener to beat all openers.’

  ‘I resisted. I’m too classy.’

  ‘That much I do know,’ he said with feeling. He leaned back against the chest freezer then, regarding her with soft eyes. ‘I actually had a dream about you last night.’

  She said nothing, sensing from his expression that this would not be a story that came with a punchline.

  ‘You were sitting in my living room with Natalie, and you’d told her everything.’

  ‘That’s really what you think? That I’m going to tell Natalie everything?’

  ‘That’s what my subconscious thinks,’ he corrected her. ‘Look, I’d understand, in a way. You’ve got every reason to hate me.’

  ‘Does it seem to you like I hate you?’

  He shrugged stiffly. ‘Perspectives change a lot in seventeen years. You were fifteen back then. You’re over thirty now.’

  ‘That doesn’t change what happened between us.’

  There was a brief silence. Jess eased the weight from her right leg, feeling the blood rush and then subside to a gentle pulse.

  ‘And how do you see it – what happened between us? Be honest.’

  She could tell that he was half expecting her to talk about a gross abuse of trust, a disgusting act of power play. ‘We fell in love,’ she whispered, looking right at him.

  He exhaled sharply, like she’d just shoved a fist into his stomach. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You really still think that?’

  ‘You don’t?’ she breathed, a ripple of sadness moving through her.

  He kept his gaze fixed firmly on the concrete floor. ‘Well, I did. I’m not so sure any more.’

  ‘Why not?’ Her voice was tiny, barely audible, even in the silence.

  ‘Well, unfortunately that’s what a prison sentence and enforced psychological assessment does for you. Oh, and let’s not forget all the hate mail from members of the public I’d never even met.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought our plan would work. I really did.’

  ‘Well, of course you did,’ he said, his voice slightly dazed, ‘you were fifteen.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying that,’ she said, ‘like you’ve had it drilled into you. It’s crap.’

  He laughed then, a proper laugh. ‘It’s crap? Would you like some selected highlights from the assassination of my character to date?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m a monster,’ he said. ‘I’m evil. I deserve to die, to be chemically castrated. I should never be allowed near children again, never work again, never be happy again. I’m an animal, clinically insane, a danger to society. I should be locked away in prison for the rest of my life. I should never stop looking over my shoulder. I should be stabbed to death, have my throat slit, my genitals mutilated.’ He looked at her. ‘What do you think about that?’

  She shook her head, wiping away a single, silent tear that had dribbled down her cheek.

  ‘Or I could tell you all about what happened to me in prison, if you like? They were waiting for me, Jess. Do you want to know?’

  She shook her head again, and he appeared to check himself. As a silence descended, the gloom seemed to intensify. From somewhere that sounded very far away, she could just about hear the music – ‘This Love’ by Maroon 5 – drifting towards them.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Sorry, Jess. It’s not your fault. It’s just that tonight is the first time in a while that I’ve been forced to shake hands and make small talk with strangers, and I’m terrified. I’ve literally spent the entire night hiding out in the playroom with Charlotte, telling everyone that she doesn’t want to come out, that she’s shy. No wonder my girlfriend thinks I’ve got mental health problems. I had to take a sedative just to make it downstairs tonight.’

  She said nothing, waiting.

  ‘I thought I was ready to come back to Norfolk, Jess, and start meeting people again, but … I’m not. I’m terrified that I might bump into an old face. Or that someone could see you and me in the same room together – that it might jog a memory and they might remember something, recognize me, tell the papers. And that’s it, my life would be over. Natalie would leave, I’d lose Charlotte. Or they might … you know. Something might happen. I don’t care if they hurt me, but I love my daughter, Jess.’

  I care if they hurt you.

  ‘I do the same thing myself all the time,’ she told him. ‘I think about who’s around. But there’s no one in there who knows. I promise.’

  He swallowed and nodded. ‘Funny. That’s exactly what my sedative said.’

  She permitted herself a careful smile at his joke. ‘Would it help … I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you’d be better off back in London.’

  ‘We’ve already had that conversation,’ he said. ‘And by conversation I mean screaming row. Coming to Norfolk, doing up the house … it was Natalie’s big plan for family time. If I go back, she and Charlotte are staying and I can find somewhere else to live.’ He hesitated. ‘She puts up with a lot, you know.’

  ‘You really can’t tell her? She might surprise you, Will, she might understand.’ Jess swallowed. ‘She clearly loves you.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘She loves who she thinks I am, and that’s not her fault because she doesn’t know that Will Greene isn’t real. For God’s sake, I chose her because she’d been in America while everything was happening. We met online, Jess: I picked her out of everybody else because I knew she’d be ignorant. I wanted to date her for the sole reason that I could lie to her more easily.’ He shook his head, like he couldn�
��t quite believe it himself. ‘Added to which, she campaigns for women’s rights, you know? She fundraises for Women’s Aid. She helps to run a rape crisis helpline every other weekend.’ He looked at Jess. ‘Trust me, she wouldn’t understand this.’

  A moment passed.

  Will frowned, working his jaw, lost in his thoughts. ‘She saved my life, actually.’

  ‘How … how do you mean?’ Jess asked him, her voice small.

  ‘She made me feel like I had a horizon again,’ he said without hesitation, as if it was something he had thought about a lot. ‘You know, like I had somewhere to look other than at my feet. I actually think … I’ve become a better person since I met her.’

  From outside, they heard Maroon 5 get louder, and then a voice – not Natalie’s – calling his name. A door slammed. They both froze, waiting for the sound of footsteps crunching on gravel. None came.

  ‘Jess,’ Will said then, into the gathering darkness. ‘I know this is coming about seventeen years too late, but … thank you for your statement. I just wanted to say that.’

  She shook her head, a rejection of his gratitude. ‘Don’t be crazy. I just told them the truth.’

  ‘Well, it helped me. So thank you.’

  ‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there,’ she said, her voice a rush of remorse. ‘In court. Me and Debbie were at my aunt’s in London, with my mum. She wouldn’t let me go back, not even for the sentencing. And when you went to prison … social services banned me from seeing you.’

  ‘Don’t apologize, Jess. Seriously, the whole thing was a big fucking mess. It must have been hell for you too.’

  She could only nod, disarmed for a moment as the secret she had yet to confess to him rose rapidly in her mind once again, silent but ominous like the lick of a flame.

  ‘Jess.’ An expectant stillness briefly settled. ‘What happened with your mum? I mean, I read about what happened, but not … what happened. If that makes sense.’

  ‘Well, there’s not much to say, really,’ she replied, meaning only that the story wasn’t at all complex.

  ‘Please tell me. I need to know.’

  Jess kept her eyes on the floor. ‘Okay. Well, it was … it was a Tuesday night. She’d cooked shepherd’s pie for me and Debbie. We were all sitting round the kitchen table, listening to Jeff Buckley.’ She released a breath, slow and steady. ‘And then she just … got up and walked out of the front door.’ Swallowing, she looked up at him. ‘Me and Debbie were still eating.’

  He was just watching her, saying nothing.

  ‘I had this strange feeling about it. It was late, dark. She hadn’t taken the car, or her wallet, or a coat.’

  Silently, he reached out and took her hand, giving it a tiny squeeze and bringing tears to her eyes.

  ‘She’d planned the whole thing. It was a huge tide. She’d borrowed a shotgun from her friend Ray, and she just … shoved it into her mouth and pulled the trigger. We heard it from the house. So I went out to the salt marsh and found her on her back, floating in a creek.’ She shook her head, remembering the sight of it, the smell, the deathly sound of the bitter silence. ‘I mean, it didn’t really look like her, though. Her head was … well, it was obliterated, obviously. From the force of the blast. I just couldn’t grasp the fact that I’d only seen her walking around our kitchen ten minutes earlier. Still can’t, actually.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Um, I just stood there. And then I threw up all over my shoes. And then I waded in there and pulled her out.’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he muttered.

  She was quiet for a long time before she spoke again. ‘I think that was the beginning of the end, for me and Debbie. Life went downhill for her after that and she never really recovered from it. She blames me. Although –’ Jess paused, and looked down at where their hands were welded together – ‘I’m actually glad that it was me who found my mum, and not Debbie. I don’t think she could have handled that.’

  ‘Well, in fairness,’ Will said, ‘no one should have had to handle that.’

  She made to nod, but she wasn’t sure if she entirely agreed. She had always partly felt that being the one to find her mum was a form of just punishment for what she had done.

  ‘Did she leave a note?’

  Jess shook her head. ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘You don’t know why … ?’

  ‘Well, we’d had a fight the night before. About …’ She trailed off. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘God, Jess. I blame myself. Everything that happened with us – it must have been devastating for your mum.’ His voice wavered slightly as if he was battling some deep internal pain. ‘I didn’t really realize what I’d done to you until I had a daughter of my own. I had a hard time coming to terms with that, after Charlotte was born.’

  ‘Don’t ever feel guilty about my mum, Will.’ Her voice grew quieter. ‘You know what she was like.’

  ‘Jess,’ he said, all at once abrupt like there was something he’d been trying to tell her. ‘I want you to know. I came back to find you, before –’

  But then Natalie’s voice came sharply at them, a drunken bark across the lawn.

  ‘I should go,’ Will said, into the dark, though his fingers firmed around her hand.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I like your garage, by the way.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. I’d give you a tour, but it’d be a bit bumpy.’

  ‘So who’s been stockpiling the non-perishables?’ she asked, nodding somewhere in the direction of the groceries. ‘Is there some impending doom I should be worrying about?’

  ‘Erm, I get this stupid phobia sometimes, about running out of food. It’s ever since … well. Being in prison.’ He sounded slightly embarrassed. ‘I had a bit too much time to come up with conspiracy theories while I was in there too. You know – apocalypse, solar flares, Doomsday … that kind of thing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yep, I’m that guy,’ he said, his voice like a wince. ‘Just a scare story away from keeping emergency gas masks in my garage.’

  She smiled sadly. ‘But you’re only here for a few months.’

  ‘Well, you know, global cataclysm applies to all postcodes. It’s very non-discriminatory in that way. Wherever you are, Jess, you need canned goods.’

  ‘Thanks for the tip,’ she said.

  And as she spoke he squeezed her hand again, the cluster of their fingers a small misshapen orb suspended in the darkness between them. ‘Sorry again. I feel like I’m just going to keep apologizing to you for the rest of my life.’

  ‘You really don’t have to.’

  ‘Don’t be too nice to me, Jess. I’m not sure I’m mature enough to handle it.’

  And then, without meaning to at all, she stepped forward and placed a hand on his chest, finding his lips with her own and kissing him as definitely as she dared, putting her other hand against his face to steady herself. She waited a moment for him to respond, and he did for just a second more before pulling away from her, breathing hard with shock or something else.

  ‘If you wanted to know how I really feel about everything that happened,’ she said, her voice quivering with emotion, ‘that’s how.’

  And then she let herself out of the garage and headed back towards the house, limping fiercely like a defective clockwork toy. She would dish up dessert, she told herself firmly, then leave quietly, without a trace.

  10

  Matthew

  Monday, 29 November 1993

  My heart was pounding like a copper on the door of a drugs bust as I made my way across the school car park. A whole Sunday had passed with no reproach – no phone calls, no vigilantes chucking bricks through my living-room window, no friends-of-Jess walking threateningly past the cottage. I knew this because I had spent most of the day eyeing up the road outside my house like I was putting in a stint for the Neighbourhood Watch, replaying what had happened the previous night over and over in my mind, desperate to convince myself that perhaps a stupid drunken k
iss could be forgotten – that it could even be laughed about, in time. (I wasn’t quite sure who I thought would be laughing about it: distinctly unamused thus far, were they to learn the truth, would be Mr Mackenzie, Sonia Laird, Jess’s mother and the PTA. And I had the uncomfortable suspicion that, after them, my next available sphere of influence was typically to be found sitting inside a Vauxhall Astra with a blue flashing light on the roof.)

  Striding as purposefully as possible into school, I was half braced for a cacophony of cat-calling and verbal abuse. I had already prepped my defence: if challenged, I would say she had a crush on me, that it was all in her imagination.

  I knew that this strategy was cowardly in the extreme – but I reasoned that I could always apologize and make it up to her after the event. Like, way after. During university or something. Right now, I had to focus on damage limitation.

  But my little plan – the same one that had seemed so watertight at home on a Sunday afternoon over a packet of nuts and a bottle of warm ale – seemed ridiculous now, almost laughable. What if she could describe my living room? What if someone had seen her go inside? What if she had swiped something from my kitchen – a little memento that would later serve as indisputable evidence, placing me beyond doubt at the scene of the crime?

  I had made, as my mother would say, some highly unwise decisions on Saturday night. There was evidence enough of that anyway.

  ‘Morning, Mr Land-lay!’ Steve Robbins clapped me hard on the back as I entered the staffroom, an annoying habit I had not yet got round to confronting him about. As the school’s IT technician, Steve was inexplicably permitted to turn up at work every day wearing a Red Dwarf T-shirt, jeans and a pair of bright white Hi-Tecs trainers. He positioned himself in front of me, blocking my path and bending his knees slightly as if we were about to wrestle, which we definitely were not.

  ‘Two words for you,’ he said, arms stretched out, palms inward, like he was preparing to karate chop a chunk of wood with his bare hands. ‘Stallone. Awesome.’

  Inhaling the bitter smell of substandard coffee, I scanned the room. Nobody seemed to be paying me the slightest bit of special attention. Even Sonia Laird was deep in conversation with Lorraine Wecks, which told me everything I needed to know. I was sure that Sonia would have been crouching behind the door with a meat cleaver if she’d caught wind of me kissing a fifteen-year-old.