This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  ‘They were the ones your aunt took back at Christmas.’

  She stared at the books for longer than I’d expected, and for a moment I thought she was working out how to tell me that somebody else had already replaced them. But when she finally looked at me, her grey eyes were spilling tears. ‘Why would you do this for me?’

  ‘Because I love you,’ I said, because I did.

  She crept across to me and as she tipped her head up, putting her lips to mine, I felt the dampness of her cheek against my own. ‘Thank you so much. I love them. I love you, Mr L.’

  ‘Call me Matthew,’ I mumbled into her mouth as I kissed her more passionately than I’d probably ever kissed her before. ‘Call me Matthew.’ And then I lifted her on to the table and sat her squarely on top of everyone else’s maths books, where we fucked each other harder and faster than even I had thought possible.

  Several hours later, in the middle of the night, I woke up: BANG.

  It was dark outside, and I wasn’t quite sure why I’d jumped. I wasn’t having a nightmare, as far as I could tell: there were no immediate looming visions of Mackenzie or Sonia Laird or pitchfork-wielding child-protection campaigners in my head. But the bedroom, the house and the street were all eerily still; I was alone; and it was freaking me out.

  I decided to go and get a glass of water, because that was what I did at school when the girls in my class were having hysterics about boys or periods or prime numbers, and it usually helped me to clear my head.

  As I reached the living room and started to make my way to the kitchen, I got the bizarre sensation again that I was being watched. I turned round, almost on auto-pilot, just to prove to myself that I was being a prime twat, never mind prime numbers, and virtually succumbed to cardiac arrest right there on the spot.

  Sonia Laird was sitting bolt upright on my sofa like a sodding fright-night waxwork.

  ‘JESUS!’

  She didn’t say anything for a moment or two. She just sat there, completely motionless (apart from her red lips, which were twitching slightly, as if it amused her to sit there and watch me momentarily spreadeagled against the living-room wall in my pants. Which it probably did).

  ‘What the fuck, Sonia!’ Even I was surprised by how quickly my fear turned to hands-down rage. ‘How the fuck did you get in?’

  ‘This is Norfolk, Matthew,’ she said, with a roll of the eyes. ‘Nobody locks their doors in Norfolk.’

  I thought about telling her that was probably because they didn’t know there were red-haired lunatics like Sonia out there on the loose, trying doors. You only had to look at her to know it was worth a dead-bolt or two.

  ‘Nice pants,’ she said then, raising an eyebrow and nodding in the direction of my crotch.

  For some reason, this pissed me off almost as much as the fact that she was in my living room in the first place. ‘WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT, SONIA?’ I shouted. ‘Tell me now or I call the police!’

  Sonia laughed then, like this was the funniest thing she’d heard in a long time – which didn’t exactly surprise me, given that she had the approximate wit of an invertebrate on tranquillizers. Slowly, she raised one of her freakishly long index fingers and rested it against her lips. I could imagine those sculpted scarlet fingernails scraping marks into skin, gouging out eyes. They were evil fingers.

  ‘Sssssh. I don’t think you really want the police round here. Do you?’

  I knew then that she knew – and that this time, it wasn’t guesswork. Even Sonia wouldn’t have had the nerve to break into my house in the middle of the night unless she had a hefty file of evidence that she could lob at my head like the killer Molotov cocktail we both knew it to be.

  She’d got my attention then. Folding her arms, she fixed me with a triumphant stare that was probably not dissimilar to the one I had used when I was taking the piss out of her tits in Venice.

  ‘Well, well, Mr Landley. Quite the smooth operator, aren’t you? Shagging a schoolgirl.’

  ‘You need to shut up now, Sonia,’ I growled at her, concentrating really hard on not marching over to the sofa and slapping her self-satisfied little face.

  ‘Or what?’

  I was reluctant to issue her with death threats straight away. I wanted to hear what she had to say first. ‘Just tell me what you want,’ I said steadily. I had to play it cool, appear calm, call her bluff. I’d watched Columbo enough times to know that, for God’s sake.

  ‘I’ve been following you.’ She let out a sigh, flicked her hair back over one shoulder and crossed her cankles smugly. ‘You and Jessica Hart. Everywhere.’

  There was an ominous silence.

  I didn’t for one minute doubt what she was saying. For weeks I’d felt as if we were being watched; now, it all made sense.

  ‘That’s right.’ She smiled again, and I realized then that this was the moment she’d been waiting for. ‘I knew what you were up to, so I’ve been following you, and I’ve got the photos to prove it.’ She bent over, giving me a gratuitous view straight down her top that nearly made me gag, and reached into the tacky red handbag at her feet. She pulled out a camera, a little point-and-shoot.

  Feeling my stomach flip clumsily, I took a step towards her. ‘Give that to me,’ I growled.

  She laughed again. ‘How rude! Weren’t you brought up to ask nicely, Mr Landley?’

  It was becoming obvious that Sonia was not going to be obliging in the manner of a cat caught defecating on my lawn, in that if I shouted at her loudly enough, she might piss off. Still, I had to try and shut this whole thing down as quickly as possible, so that I could get her the fuck out of my house and buy myself some time to think.

  ‘Sonia,’ I said, my voice shaking like I was trying to talk a loaded gun from her hand, ‘give me the camera. Now.’

  She smiled again. ‘Or what?’

  ‘Trust me when I say you don’t want to find out.’

  Sonia eyed me levelly. ‘If you touch me,’ she said, ‘I’ll scream blue bloody murder.’

  I didn’t doubt it, actually. I’d heard Sonia singing in assembly and though she couldn’t hold a tune to save her life, she had lungs like a town crier’s.

  ‘So if you don’t want the police to find out exactly what you’ve been up to, Matthew,’ she continued, like I was so pathetic that even my name didn’t warrant taking seriously, ‘you’ll stay exactly where you are.’

  It hit me then, like a violent smack to the nuts, that she was about to blackmail me. She was going to use those photos to get what she wanted. Of course – why else would she have taken them?

  At this point, my ongoing tactic seemed to consist of playing along begrudgingly until an escape route became apparent. Admittedly this was not exactly a watertight plan to exonerate myself, but I had nothing else. She’d caught me way off guard, as evidenced by the fact that I was standing in front of her wearing only my pants. ‘Okay, Sonia. You win. You’ve got me.’ Despite myself, I couldn’t resist giving her a sarcastic little round of applause. ‘So what the fuck do you want?’

  She smiled again. ‘Ooh,’ she crooned, ‘now you’re asking.’

  ‘Don’t fuck about, Sonia,’ I said, my voice quivering dangerously. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was naively thinking she might just say money, and I tried desperately to recall how much I had in my savings account. I’d been earmarking it for a flat deposit (or – why not? – maybe a down payment on a little trattoria), but if it meant getting Sonia the fuck out of my house, she was welcome to take the lot.

  But Sonia wasn’t talking about money. Instead, she was twirling a ringlet of red hair around her index finger and smiling the nastiest little smile I’d ever seen. ‘Weren’t you paying attention, Mr Landley? I already told you. I want you to ask nicely.’

  I swallowed. Clearly, the answer was no – I hadn’t been paying attention, which given that I was half naked in the middle of a blackmail situation, wasn’t a great start. ‘What?’

  ‘I want you to say you’re sorry,’ she sai
d, speaking very steadily, her green eyes flashing with her newly assumed power. ‘You’re going to tell me you’re sorry for treating me like shit all these months. You’re going to apologize for dismissing me and making me out to be an idiot in front of all your stupid fucking friends. You’re going to beg my forgiveness for looking at me every day as if I’m something you’ve trodden in.’

  But you are, Sonia. You’re as horrible as the very worst kind of excrement.

  I swallowed and said nothing. I was starting to sweat lightly. I had wanted to put a stop to this, not play her game – but I was beginning to realize they were going to end up being the same thing.

  I wondered briefly again if I dared to try and get that camera off her, but then I envisioned the strength of her scream, like an off-key foghorn in the early-morning silence of North Norfolk – a place where you couldn’t so much as buy a pint of milk without opening yourself up to a game of Chinese sodding whispers – and decided, with a resigned stab of mortification, that I didn’t.

  ‘That’s right.’ Sonia was fingering the camera meaningfully. ‘Say you’re sorry, and you get your sordid little reel of film.’

  Briefly, I considered the conversation that I actually wanted to have with her. My opener would have been a polite enquiry as to the state of her mental health followed by a series of little newsflashes – she was the one who thought it was normal behaviour to keep hitting on me even though she had a boyfriend, then throw indignant little fits around like hand grenades when it didn’t achieve the desired result. She was the one who had turned up like a prostitute on my doorstep wearing nothing but Christmas-themed underwear, demanding to be seduced. She was the one who kept persuading the rest of the staffroom to help her drag out our tiresome little tug-of-war, in which I hadn’t even been a willing participant to begin with. The thought of apologizing to this woman – who since the day I set foot inside Hadley Hall had been about as easy to please as a tethered pit bull – repulsed me; but then I looked back at the camera in her hand, and I knew I had no choice.

  If sorry is all she wants, just swallow your pride and play along. Think of Jess. Just do it.

  I forced my mouth to form the words. ‘I’m sorry.’ I felt like I was gagging on a particularly repulsive foodstuff, like undercooked egg or a forkful of mollusc. Dry and at a higher pitch than was strictly acceptable, it didn’t even sound like my own voice, but Sonia didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she looked positively gleeful.

  ‘Are you?’ she said, folding her arms, enjoying every second. ‘How sorry, Mr Landley?’

  I should have known that it wouldn’t be as simple as just saying the words and booting her off my property, but still I clung to the idea that if I just played along, I could get hold of that camera and regain the upper hand. I could always pour salt into her tea on Monday morning, let her car tyres down at lunchtime, accidentally trip her up as she walked back from supervising detention. The potential for inflicting a long, slow campaign of needling revenge was infinite, I told myself. Infinite.

  So I swallowed. ‘Really sorry.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  I nodded. My mouth was annoyingly dry. Okay, you’ve got what you wanted. Now just hand over the fucking camera.

  Sonia shook her head and made a sarcastic little tutting noise. I wanted to punch the sound right out of her. ‘You’re going to have to show me how sorry you are, I’m afraid. Saying the words – well, that’s just not going to cut it.’

  My heart thudded helplessly. ‘What?’

  She smiled again, and spoke slowly, relishing every word as if it tasted delicious. ‘Yeah. Get down on your fucking knees and beg me for forgiveness.’

  ‘Come on, Sonia.’ My words came out like I’d dry-heaved them up. ‘You’ve got what you wanted.’

  ‘Oh no, I haven’t, Mr Landley – not yet.’ She let out a little laugh. ‘Don’t worry, nobody’s looking! Or did you want your sexual exploits with a child made public knowledge by Monday morning?’ She waved the camera gleefully from side to side.

  I made a groaning sound that was supposed to indicate no.

  ‘Then you had better get on your knees right now.’ With that, she stood up in front of me and crossed her arms, waiting.

  So, I’m ashamed to say, I did it. I got down on my knees right there on the carpet in my own living room and let her make me beg her like a dog, three times, for her forgiveness, apologize for ignoring her, tell her she was beautiful – and all the while she towered over me, snapping away with her nasty little camera.

  It must have only lasted a minute or so, but the grinding humiliation was such that it felt more like days. When she finally permitted me to get up off the floor, I experienced a minor head rush, sweating, feeling faint and needing air.

  Get it together, you pathetic fucking loser.

  ‘So give me the camera,’ I rasped, holding out my hand, failing to meet her eye. In an attempt to preserve my dignity on an internal level at least, I attempted to recall all the things I had promised myself I would do to her when we got back to school on Monday. Car tyres, salt … what was the other thing?

  Sonia laughed shrilly then, smashing my naive illusion of closure like a soprano shattering glass. ‘Oh, Matthew,’ she said, making a big show of sliding the camera tauntingly away into her handbag. ‘You didn’t think I was actually going to hand this over, did you?’

  The realization of my own stupidity struck me in the stomach with the approximate force of a wrecking ball. I struggled to focus. I thought for a moment that I might have to grab her by the hair and neatly knock her face against my living-room wall.

  ‘Sonia,’ I said, my voice shaking dangerously, ‘you got what you wanted. Now give me the fucking camera.’ I couldn’t let her walk away with it, I just couldn’t. I even put out my hand, a last vestige of hope.

  ‘Oh no, Mr Landley.’ She patted her handbag and – evidently sensing my panic and the related possibility I might be about to do something rash – began to edge backwards towards the front door. ‘This is staying with me. In case you ever decide to start behaving like a cunt towards me again.’ Her eyes sparkled with greedy delight at the prospect of forever having a hold over me. ‘But thank you for being so game.’ She started laughing. ‘That was absolutely priceless.’ She offered up a jaunty little wave, waggling those poisonous red fingernails, before finally leaving.

  I sank straight back on to my knees, hanging my head right down towards the carpet like I was about to be sick.

  I knew then that it was over. I knew then that we were going to have to leave.

  23

  Saturday evening, and a fine mist of pre-thunder drizzle was trying and failing to disperse some of the humidity that had slithered eastward from the mid-Atlantic via Wolverhampton last week to hang selfishly around like a hot fog ever since. Jess was at work in the small unit she rented near Carafe, preparing salted cod fishcakes for a lunch party the following day. She paused when she heard car tyres, ripping off her vinyl gloves and quickly rinsing her hands, hoping it might be Will.

  Through the glass panel of the front door, only an enormous bunch of flowers was visible. As she hesitated, Zak’s head slid out sideways from behind a purple chrysanthemum.

  Her heart flexed slightly. Not Will. For one reason or another (one being Natalie, the other being Charlotte), she hadn’t seen him since that night out on the marsh, and she was missing him.

  She opened the door. ‘Do chrysanthemums even come in that colour?’ was all she could think of to say as she pushed a damp strand of hair from her face, already strangely resentful of the fact that Zak would probably be expecting her to gasp and swoon under the enormity of his gesture. She noticed, somewhat ungenerously, that the bouquet contained no carnations.

  He stepped past her, swiping the flowers against her chest and smothering her whites in powdery yellow pollen, possibly deliberately. Oddly, she noticed, the blooms barely carried a scent.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said, making a big deal of offloading
the bouquet into the sink in the manner of a harassed executive forced to shoehorn the funeral of an ancient relative in between a Canary Wharf lunch meeting and after-work cocktails in the West End. He glanced at Jess’s iPod. ‘Oh, okay. Now it all makes sense.’

  The music was Ani DiFranco, Zak’s least favourite singer ever – mostly because she was politically minded and an advocate of feminism, and Zak was definitively neither.

  ‘What all makes sense?’

  ‘The twitchy suffragette act. I can spot it a mile off.’

  Jess sighed. ‘It’s not an act, Zak, I’m just busy.’

  He pushed a hand through his hair, a small gesture that indicated he was already struggling to preserve his own patience – though he managed to style it out with a smile. ‘Well, that’s a relief. Since I’ve only just turned up, I’d have thought that even you would find it hard to be pissed off with me already, Jess.’ He checked his watch to make his point, then leaned back against the work surface to observe her.

  ‘Well, give it ten minutes,’ she mumbled, failing to look at him, feeling suddenly and stupidly self-conscious in her stained whites, clogs and hairnet. She tried to forget the times he’d turned up here unannounced and they’d had sex against the sink, and once on top of a chopping board where she’d been rolling pastry for an apple pie. Zak had thought it hilarious that the following morning she was still emitting a tiny fog of flour from her knickers; Jess was more annoyed that the pastry had gone to waste. They’d done it in the cold store once too, a sort of thrill-thing that she secretly worried fell somewhere on the same spectrum as erotic asphyxiation – but in the end she had been so paranoid that the door was going to shut on them, condemning them to a long and horrible death by hypothermia, that she couldn’t really get into it. That evening had concluded with Zak roaring back off down the A11, playing Eminem at top volume and making repeated calls to her mobile for the sole purpose of ranting at her for spoiling a great weekend.

  ‘Well, I must say, you look beautiful,’ he said now. ‘How many girls can pull off a hairnet and clogs?’