Can't Let Go (9 page)

My mother looked at my face and said, suddenly,
sharply, as if she had just discovered something, 'Are you
all right?'

I thought for a moment. This was what I wanted to say:
'Mum, I have something to tell you. I did something
stupid – bad – wicked. A long time ago. When I was
eighteen I killed a man, and I ruined my life. And now it's
come back to haunt me.' I wanted her to tell me it was all
right. I wanted her to hug me; to kiss me and make it
better.

But this was what I actually said: 'Yes, of course I'm all
right. I'm just tired, that's all.'

'You work too hard.'

'No, I don't. I work more or less as hard as millions of
other people do.'

'Well, it's the holidays soon. Are you going to come
and stay with us at all?'

That question. The one she would always ask. 'I don't
know. Probably not. I have lots of stuff to do, people to
see. I've got paperwork to finish, and I want to get
cracking on my lesson plans for next term.'

'You haven't forgotten the party, have you?'

The party: my parents' fortieth wedding-anniversary
party, the big party looming a couple of weeks from then,
the party that they'd been planning for months. Yes, I'd
forgotten it.

'No, of course I haven't. I'll be there. Looking forward
to it.'

'Are you seeing anyone?' The other question she
always asked.

'Kind of,' I said, remembering my night with Danny.
And then I shrugged, wondering if I should continue with
him; wondering if the note-writer would let me. 'I don't
know. Maybe.'

'Do you want to bring him with you to the party?'

I looked at my mother. I think she already knew what
my answer would be. 'Probably not. You know, I
wouldn't want to expose him to our family en masse.'

My mother smiled to herself. She knew me well
enough, at least, not to push any further.

I always had bad dreams when I slept at my parents'
bungalow in the narrow, tightly blanketed single bed in
the tiny, flowery, dusty guest bedroom. That night was no
exception. I dreamed of being trapped in a lift that was
crashing over a cliff. I dreamed of masses of envelopes and
parcels being pushed through my door and piling up until
they trapped me in the hallway of my flat. I dreamed of
being chased into a narrow alleyway by Rivers Carillo
who was dressed in the white hat and overall he'd been
wearing at the motorway services. But when he caught
me, it wasn't Rivers Carillo at all but Danny Fairburn.
When I woke up I wondered what, if anything, that was
supposed to mean.

I didn't want to hurt Danny. Please believe that. I didn't
want to hurt Danny and I didn't want him to get hurt.
I didn't want him to be collateral damage in my
nightmare. It wasn't fair to let him get involved with a
woman who had killed someone, a woman who was being
stalked by someone who knew her secret. As I drove back
to London from my parents' house I knew what I had to
tell him. I would have to let him down, very gently. I
would have to tell him it was a mistake, us trying to have
a relationship, and that it would spoil our friendship. I
needed to nip it in the bud before it developed any further.
It would hurt him, but it would be less hurtful in the long
run. I knew what I had to do.

Danny Fairburn was unlucky in love. Make that
'unlucky in love', for that was the very phrase he'd used
soon after we'd first met. He'd added the inverted commas
himself, with a pause and an arch of the eyebrows,
knowing that he was using an appalling cliché. On the rare
occasions when our conversations had touched on such
matters, I'd gleaned that he had married young and
divorced early because his wife – his childhood sweetheart
– had left him for a friend of his. Since then I'd seen
him in action a couple of times, trying to chat up girls in
pubs. I'd tried, in a gentle, joshing way, to let him know
that a full-on discussion of the oeuvre of Neil Young or
the Wachowski Brothers was not a good way to attract
most women. We had had one dangerously intimate
conversation, a few months earlier, just after he'd split up
with a girl he'd been seeing for only a few weeks, a
blonde, high-maintenance, utterly unsuitable woman. I'd
gently tried to suggest that he should find a woman he
liked, a mate; and he'd said, 'But not you, right? Because
of the witness-protection thing?'

He was such a sweet and lovely guy. He had his obsessions:
his lists of his top ten films, his alphabetised CDs; but
what guy doesn't? He was happiest when he was telling me
things. He was interestingly boring, a sexy nerd. I liked him
very much, and I knew that he liked me a lot too. And so I
felt terrible over what I was about to do. But I also knew that
it was the only thing I
could
do. I had to break it off with him.

But when I got back to my flat after my drive home to
London from the coast I could see Danny on the walkway
outside his front door, sitting on a deckchair with his feet
up on the railing, reading a book, enjoying the late afternoon
sunshine. He was wearing baggy combat
shorts, and his legs were long and wiry. He saw me arrive.

He smiled at me and his eyes lit up. Before I even had my
key in my door he had come over to me, that huge smile
on his face, and he touched my cheek. He looked at me,
deeply, and then he kissed me.

And I kissed him back. Blame my lack of sleep, my fear,
my vulnerability. I found that I couldn't help myself.

We were in a pub in Kentish Town. There was some
kind of acoustic open-mike session going on, and
it wasn't particularly good. There was a young guy
singing, sweltering in an army jacket, trying to look hip or
cool or however singer-songwriters were supposed to
look. He had a guitar, and paused every so often when he
struggled to find a chord. He had a pretty voice and a
pretty face, with a little bit of bum fluff under his chin. He
was singing a world-weary song about love and hate, even
though he was only about twelve. Danny and I were
drinking beer and we were getting gently merry. We were
applauding like crazy each time the singer finished one of
his songs, and I even bought him a drink and took it over
to the little stage area.

'You look really pretty,' said Danny, squeezing my
hand under the table. I squeezed his hand back. I had lip
gloss on, and a whole vat of Touche Éclat hiding the dark
circles under my eyes. I knew I was doing the wrong
thing. I was pushing away the shadows, shutting the door
on my fear, and in the process I was pulling someone else
into my nightmare.

There was an embarrassing silence and then we both
started talking at once. Danny was telling me something
about music, one of the fascinating-yet-dull monologues
he liked to take refuge in – something to do with Nick
Drake, I think – and I was asking him how his weekend
had been. We looked at each other and then we laughed,
and then we started kissing again, and I knew I had no
resistance any more. Danny kissed my eyebrows, of all
things. I shut my eyes and then he kissed my eyelids, very
gently. I ran my fingers up and down the firm bones in his
neck at the top of his spine. Our lips locked. Our tongues
met. I felt desire in every inch of my body. It had been so
long since I'd let myself do something like that.

The pub was filling up and a couple of blokes came to
sit at the other end of our table. 'Oi, get a room, you two,'
one of them said. Danny pulled away from me. 'Shall we?'
he said, and I nodded.

I didn't want to give it up, that closeness. Whatever it
took, I didn't want to let go of it. I invited him back to my
flat. I never did anything like that; I barely let anyone
cross the threshold. But I wanted Danny in my flat.
Afterwards, we lay on my sofa in a tangle of limbs and bits
of clothing. Danny's latest mix CD was on the stereo and
we were just lying there, listening to it. Willie Nelson was
singing 'Someone to Watch over Me' and, although I
knew that the letter, that vicious piece of white paper, was
lying in a file just a few feet away, I felt safer than I had in
years. My fingers were linked in Danny's and every so
often I kissed one of his.

After a while I got pins and needles in my arm. I disentangled
myself, and realised that Danny had been
asleep. He stretched and groaned, and smiled at me.
'Hello, sleepyhead,' I said. 'Do you want to stay the
night?' I said it casually, but inside I was pleading with
him to stay.

He shook his head. 'No. Better not. I've got some stuff
to sort out for work tomorrow. I'd better go now.'

He picked up his jeans and T-shirt and pulled them on.
He picked up his shoes and carried them in his hand. At
the door he stopped and turned back to me, enveloping
me in a big hug. 'So, is this a relationship?' he asked,
making inverted commas with his voice around the word
'relationship'. He grinned, to let me know he was joking,
sort of.

'Course it isn't. I don't do relationships, remember?' I
was joking too, of course. Except also I wasn't. I wanted a
relationship but I didn't want one either. I wanted to be
safe, protected, but I didn't want Danny to get hurt. I
didn't want to get in so deep that I put him in danger –
genuine physical danger, or even just the danger of having
his heart broken. I needed to keep this as ambivalent as
possible. But Danny just laughed and kissed me on the
forehead.

As he kissed me I got a sudden cold feeling – a feeling
that maybe I'd just been even more stupid than usual.
Suspicion, unease – it was something like that. I'd got the
note the day after I'd first slept with Danny. Surely he
wasn't involved. It can't have been him. I put my guard up
again. I could almost feel the armour clanking into place.
Before Danny left I needed to ask him something. I told
myself that I was just checking; that I didn't suspect him,
of course I didn't. But something told me to rule him out.
'Danny, have you ever been to San Francisco?'

I'm sure that my tone of voice was cold and hard,
maybe even accusatory. Danny looked surprised for just a
moment and then, because it was him, and because he
liked answering questions, and because he didn't think too
hard about other people's motives and meanings, or
perhaps because he wasn't all that good at reading them,
he gave me a considered answer. 'No. No, I haven't. I've
been to Austin, as you know. And New York. And also
New Orleans. That was amazing. Pre-Katrina, of course.
I went with a mate, and we hung out in bars listening to
jazz and blues. I'd love to go back there now, to see what's
happened to the place, but maybe it would be voyeuristic.
I don't know. They say that they're trying to encourage
tourists back so maybe it would be okay. But the city I'd
like to go to next, if I'm honest, if I get a chance to go back
to the States sometime soon, is Chicago. Apparently
there's a fantastic live-music scene there.'

Bless him. Such a Danny answer. Not the slightest
flicker of interest in why I'd asked, and not the slightest
possibility that he had any connection with Rivers Carillo
whatsoever. I had just felt I needed to be sure.

I closed the door behind him. I bolted all the bolts.
One, two, three, four. I walked around the living room,
counting my steps. Four, eight, twelve, sixteen. I pulled
some clothes on. I looked out of the window and listened
to the night-time sounds of London. I made myself a mug
of tea and I turned on the television, flicking from channel
to channel to find something to watch. I was feeling fine
and then all of a sudden I wasn't. My flat felt very empty
again and I was scared, deep in the pit of my stomach.

There were many things in my life that I was afraid
of, but I had never thought that going to work
would be one of them. I sat on the edge of my bed
for quite a while that next morning, the Monday after
Danny nearly stayed the night, the first Monday of the last
week of term. I wondered if I could – should – call in sick.
I could feign another migraine, or perhaps extend the
fictional one I'd pretended to have on Friday when the
note had arrived. I sat on the edge of my bed in a sweat of
indecision until it became too late to call in sick, too late to
do anything except leap under the shower, dry my hair,
pull on a pair of black trousers and a white shirt and run
for the Tube.

I don't think I'd ever noticed before how the school
loomed over the narrow street it was in. The three-storey
frontage was red-brick and imposing, like that of so many
Victorian institutional buildings. It seemed that morning to
be impossibly tall and dark. At the top of the building, the
chimneys were decorated in elaborate, twisted, patterned
brickwork. I stopped and stared at them and was chilled by
their dark outline against the weird white humid sky.
Someone could be up there, I thought. Someone could be
hiding, watching, from an eyrie on the roof of the building.

I was late. T o o late to go into the staff room, too late to
check my pigeon-hole; and I was glad about that. I was
too scared to look, too scared to see if another white
envelope had appeared. I was completely unprepared for
lessons. I knew I'd have to busk it. But it was the last week
of term; it would be okay. Year Seven, my first class of the
day, were fidgety, looking forward to the holidays, so I let
them do their favourite thing. We moved the desks into a
circle and I let them act the mechanicals' play, 'Pyramus
and Thisbe', from that year's Shakespeare,
A Midsummer
Night's Dream.
I took one of the seats in the circle, a seat
that couldn't be seen from the glass panel in the window
of the classroom door, as safe as it was possible to be, and
I tried to empty my mind.

I didn't get to the staff room until the mid-morning
break. I cast a quick sideways look at my pigeon-hole.
No sign of a white envelope, just the usual memos. I
pulled the papers out gingerly and stood there, my back to
the staff room, as I flicked through them, checking for
another envelope, almost unable to breathe.

'Did you get the note that I put in your pigeon-hole?'

The deep voice made me jump. I turned, the bunch of
memos falling from my hand and onto the floor. Jeff
Woodhouse, IT: tall and dark and loud. He'd asked me
out once, and I'd said no. 'You?' I could barely believe it.

'What do you mean, "you"?'

'
You
sent me that note?' My mind was racing, trying
out different possibilities – why he'd sent it, why he'd
written it, what he meant by it, who he really was.

He had picked up the papers from the floor. He handed
them to me. He was smiling. 'No, no. It was from one of
the girls. She asked me to give it to you.'

'Who?' I knew I was snapping at him. I tried to make
my face look neutral.

'Didn't the note say? That's a bit weird.'

I took a deep breath and tried to sound as calm as
possible. 'Jeff, who gave you the note?'

'Uh, I think it was Vicky. Vicky – Barron, is it? The
ginger girl in Year Ten. With the non-regulation skirt.
One of the smokers.'

The smokers. The group of girls who lurked outside
the school gates at lunchtime, holding cigarettes behind
their backs whenever teachers walked past, as if we didn't
know what they were doing. The girl had been there with
her cronies when I'd met up with Zoey that Friday.

I found Vicky Barron leaving a French class in the
language building with a bunch of her mates. I tried to
adopt my best calm, stern teacher's voice. 'Vicky, can you
please explain the note that you gave to Mr Woodhouse –
the one you asked him to put in my pigeon-hole?'

'Oh, you got it, then. That's good. He made it sound
like it was really important.'

'He? What do you mean?' Chills went up my spine and
settled on the back of my neck.

'This guy. He came up to me, gave that letter to me,
asked me to give it to you.'

'What guy?'

Vicky shrugged. 'Just some guy.'

'Did you know who it was?'

'No. It was just some bloke. He just said would I give it
to that lady when she got back from lunch. So there you
are.'

I looked at her closely. I could smell cigarette smoke
mingled with mint on her breath. I forced some words out
of my mouth. 'Vicky, this "bloke", the man who dropped
this letter off, what did he look like?'

She looked blank for a moment. Then she furrowed her
forehead. 'Um. I don't know. Just a bloke.'

'How old?'

'Quite old. About your age? I dunno.'

'Come on, think. What did he look like? What colour
hair? Was it dark?'

'It might have been. Yeah, I think so. I wasn't really
concentrating.'

'What did he sound like?' I thought for a moment, and
then I asked the question I really wanted the answer to.
'Was he American?'

It surprised her. 'American? I don't think so. Why? Is
it important?'

She just stood there, looking at me as if I was mad. One
of her mates laughed. I turned to her and realised it was
Chloe, Chloe T., from my Year Ten English set. 'Miss
Stephens,' she said, 'maybe he was a private detective?
Maybe he found out what you did, about chopping up that
girl last year?'

And with that, all the girls started laughing – not
maliciously, just as if they'd been trying hard not to laugh,
and now they had to let it all out; as if they were all sharing
a really great joke. I felt myself go cold again, and then
hot, and then I realised I was blushing. I felt so stupid. I'd
been taken in by a stupid, thoughtless, practical joke. 'Oh,
very funny,' I managed to say, before turning and walking
away, wondering whether to laugh or cry.

It seemed so obvious all of a sudden. The girls had
liked my joke. They knew I had a strange, black sense of
humour – that joke had proved it. And so they'd decided
to take it further. It was the end of term, the time for
playing practical jokes. I was generally thought to be a
pretty cool teacher, the sort who wouldn't mind a joke like
that. They'd seen me go out for lunch with Zoey; they
knew I wouldn't be in the staff room They'd taken their
chance and written that vaguely threatening note, and
they'd knocked on the staff room door and asked Jeff
Woodhouse to put it in my pigeon-hole; and it was all
such an obvious, silly prank that I wanted to cry with
relief.

There were lots of things I could have done. I could
have asked straight out which of the girls had written
the note. I could have compared the handwriting with the
latest bunch of essays from Year Ten. I could have
compared the paper with the stock of white A 4 we used at
school. There were lots of things I could have done to
check it was just a prank; that one of my pupils had sent it
to me. But I didn't. Was that because I didn't want
anything to unconvince me?

That evening, when I got home, I took the note out of
the file where I'd put it. I made my decision. I tore the
letter right down the middle, lengthways, enjoying
the straightness and evenness of the tear as it followed the
grain of the paper. Then I took those two long pieces of
paper, lined up the edges and tore lengthways again.
Twice more, until I had nothing but narrow strips. I lined
them all up and tore widthways this time. It was a jagged
tear – I was going against the grain. More widthways tears
– now I was just ripping up the strips into tiny shreds,
angrily, destructively, as small as I could possibly get
them. And eventually all I had was a lot of little confettisized
pieces of white paper. I scooped them up in my
hands, went across to the open window and tossed them
out.

I wanted it to be a grand dramatic gesture, but there
was no wind to carry them. The pieces simply fluttered
downwards, like dandruff or a half-hearted snow shower,
catching in window boxes and on sills, and behind the
drainpipe; and the rest of the pieces fell to the ground,
onto the pavement outside my flat. I knew that next time
I walked outside some of them would still be there. The
pieces of paper would be taunting me, saying, 'Are you
sure that's all it was? Just a schoolgirl prank? Are you sure
that someone isn't watching you?'