This Secret We're Keeping (13 page)

‘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.

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 kiss 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.

In that moment, I couldn’t have felt more relieved if I’d been a cardiac patient hearing the doctor say they’d had a fuck-up with the notes and I didn’t need open-heart surgery after all. ‘Oh yeah?’ I said jauntily to Steve, patting his shoulder a couple of times as I moved past him and headed for the kettle. A couple of strong coffees – however chemical the aftertaste – and I might just be able to make it through the morning.

‘Yeah.’ Steve made a machine gun from each of his index fingers and sprayed several rounds into the staff noticeboard. ‘Why didn’t you come, dude? You’d have loved it.’

I frowned. Steve wasn’t fully up to speed on the whole Sonia Laird drama and he wasn’t known for his subtlety either. I decided to gloss over it. ‘Headache.’

‘Jesus. You sound like my girlfriend.’

We both knew that Steve didn’t have a girlfriend, but details like that weren’t important first thing on a Monday morning. I made us both a coffee (foul, just foul), claimed my usual chair near the window and, still wearing my favourite denim jacket with the sheepskin collar, stretched my legs out across the carpet tiles to wait for the start of the Monday-morning staff meeting. I’d put on my cowboy boots today – for luck or something. Somewhere over to my left, I could see Bill Taylor swinging his pocket watch backwards and forwards like a menacing little pendulum.

As the chatter around me continued, I finally felt my little fog of fear begin to lift. All the signs were positive so far – if I could just make it to the end of the day without incident, I could go back home, lock all the doors and spend another few hours refining my defence (as if the situation were no more serious than being busted by my parish council
warden for nicking flowerpots from the gardens of kindly dithering pensioners).

When the staff meeting eventually kicked off, it became clear beyond all doubt that nobody had a clue about Jessica and me. I knew this because top of today’s agenda was a decisive show-of-hands on whether the ladies’ staff loos were to be made temporarily unisex until the end of term (the ladies, understandably, were not keen) while maintenance works were being carried out on the gents’ (which all the men knew to be code for industrial-level cleaning) – not the fact that I had been entertaining a pupil in my cottage on Saturday night. I felt fairly safe in assuming that, had it been public knowledge, the latter would have trumped the former on this particular agenda. Then again, Miss Gooch was in charge of setting it, and everybody knew she had an almost pathological hand-washing problem.

Fucking hell, it felt amazing.

Stop thinking about it.

Stop thinking about it
.

Now all I had to do was figure out if any of the kids knew, but this would only entail the very lightest of detective work, if any. Sniggers, sly looks and missiles fashioned from an interesting variety of sanitary items would more than give the game away.

I made it through double maths with the lower fourth and morning playground duty without incident. I made it through a lunchtime rehearsal of the sixth-form play,
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
, without incident (unless you counted all the props that kept going missing – so far we’d mislaid two Cossack hats, a fake baby and an entire tin bath). I made it through an early-afternoon session of marking test papers (oh God, hopeless) without incident.

One thing I did not do, however, was make it through the day without thinking an inappropriate thought about Jessica Hart.

It seemed that the more likely I was to escape death by lynching for what had happened, the happier I was to allow my thoughts to wander off-piste, back to my living room and the way I had taken her face and hair in my hands while I kissed her.

I kissed her.

It felt good. Oh, shit. Why did it feel so good?

Now what?

‘Matthew?’

I jumped so suddenly that I flung almost an entire mug of tea over my own lap. It soaked straight through my trousers and stung like shit. I leapt up and virtually into the arms of Sonia Laird, who I now realized had been standing in front of me in the staffroom for the past thirty seconds or so, trying to get my attention by repeatedly whimpering my name.

‘
Fuck
,’ I growled, much to the disapproval of the grey-haired couple – yes, they were actually a couple – who ran the library. If you happened to be looking for the last word in classification, the Pattersons were it. They could literally stun you with their expertise in cataloguing and index cards. Stun, as in, bolt gun.

Sonia pouted and fluttered about with a grotty-looking tea towel. ‘Sorry, Matthew. I didn’t mean to scare you.’

Reluctantly I took the microbe-infested tea towel from her, mumbling something barely comprehensible about corduroy not being as hard-wearing as you’d think.

‘Sorry,’ she said again, and I wondered then what she was really apologizing for. ‘I just came over to say …’ She lowered her voice. ‘I don’t want things to be “awkward” between us.’ She spoke delicately, as if we were discussing a
case of genital warts (hers, not mine). ‘I know you had plans to come to the cinema on Saturday, and I hope you didn’t drop them on my account?’

I swallowed. I’d convinced myself up to this point that I didn’t really care if Sonia cottoned on to the fact that I was avoiding her, but now that she was virtually asking me outright, it seemed a bit harsh to confirm that I thought she was slightly deranged.

‘Headache,’ I muttered, recycling the excuse I’d given Steve for continuity.

I had been trying to dab at my crotch with the tea towel in a way that wasn’t too obvious, but now I stopped. It felt strange to have my hand anywhere near that region of my body at the same time as being in touching proximity to Sonia. Unfortunately, Sonia seemed to interpret this as an open invitation for her to pluck the tea towel from my grasp and offer to take over, so I sat swiftly back down without saying anything else and hoped that she wouldn’t join me.

My hope was short-lived. ‘We could go together, if you like?’ she suggested in a voice that was becoming worryingly guttural as she settled into the chair next to me. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.’

I cleared my throat, which was probably a subconscious effort to encourage Sonia to clear hers. She had evidently arrived at the conclusion that the first time I’d declined to kiss her had simply been an error of judgement on my part. I needed to help her arrive at a different conclusion, namely that it hadn’t been.

‘Don’t you think your boyfriend might have something to say about that, Sonia?’ I asked her as tactfully as I could.

She simpered, offered up a light shrug and put one hand on my knee. ‘Not if I don’t tell him.’

My heart was beating faster now, and not for any reason
remotely complimentary to Sonia. Attempting to skin my own legs with boiling water hadn’t helped, and to make things worse, Lorraine Wecks had walked back into the room and seemed to think that the occasion of me and Sonia sitting next to each other warranted a series of unsubtle winks from over by the kettle. Some people can pull off a wink, and Lorraine wasn’t one of them. They were so clumsily executed I couldn’t even tell if they were aimed at me or Sonia.

The whole thing was starting to get out of hand. ‘Should go,’ I muttered.

‘But you’ve got a free period,’ Sonia protested.

I scooped up my book bag and got to my feet. ‘I really need to dry these out,’ I told her, meaning my trousers, which unfortunately only gave her the green light to once again start eyeballing my groin.

I turned the collar up on my jacket, taking care to avoid Lorraine’s convulsing eye, and strode quickly from the room.

Steaming across the playground like an oil tycoon fleeing a leaking wellhead, I was stopped in my tracks by the sound of a voice calling my name. This time, for a change, it wasn’t the vacant mewl of Sonia Laird. This time, it sounded upbeat and excitable.

‘Mr L!’

My heart pounded. It was Jess. She was walking swiftly towards me, wrapped up in a woollen coat and grey knitted scarf, bag slung over one shoulder like she was ready to go home.

I observed straight away that she didn’t look as if she was about to give me a slap or the heads-up on my arrest warrant. She actually seemed ridiculously happy to see me. I felt awash with relief.

‘You’re supposed to be in PE, Jess,’ I told her, surprising myself with a knowledge of the lower fifth timetable I didn’t know I had.

‘I know, but –’ she held up a bright blue tub of decongestant ointment – ‘having problems with my sinuses.’

Her eyes were shining, her gleaming curtain of blonde hair flipped over itself. She was smiling at me like I was someone who mattered. I was pretty sure that if I had been staring a few years into the future, I would have been looking at the girl of my dreams.

S
eriously. Get it together.

I swallowed. ‘You didn’t have any sinus issues the last time I checked.’

I didn’t mean it to come out as dirty as it sounded. Honestly.

She gave a simple shrug and an even simpler smile. ‘Well, you
are
my teacher … so I can neither confirm nor deny.’

I smiled back. It was becoming clear that I hadn’t needed to dread this moment after all. She was making it stupidly easy on me. ‘I haven’t seen you then.’

‘Thanks, Mr L,’ she said, and that was her cue to depart, except she didn’t. She lingered, shifting her bag on to her other shoulder and gently tossing the tub between her left hand and her right.

It was my turn.

‘Jess, can I have a word?’ I said formally, rubbing my hands together against the cold.

She nodded.

‘In private would probably be best,’ I said, starting to walk in the direction of the drama studio, away from the playground, which for all the three-storey buildings that surrounded it might as well have had a permanent follow-spot
trained on to anyone daring to cross it. I kept walking until we reached the side of the studio, where I knew that a well-concealed footpath led into a patch of stiff shrubbery. Against my better judgement, I took it.

After a couple of turns, the path petered out at a wooden bench dedicated to an ancient tap teacher.
For Peggy, teacher of tap and modern dance 1977–1989, from her friends. She loved this place
.

I looked around the laurel bushes.
This
place?

Our hideout was concealed from view, and it looked dry. An excellent place to sit down and sort this all out.

‘Have a seat,’ I told her, already mentally defending myself to the person who might happen to stumble across us with,
We’re just sorting out her sinus problems
.

We both sat down and Jess folded her hands patiently in her lap, generously opting not to question why I deemed all the foliage to be necessary.

I fumbled around with the words in my head for a few moments before saying – in a deep voice that was supposed to convey my regained sense of responsibility but ended up sounding more Leonard-Cohen-with-laryngitis – ‘Saturday night was a mistake, Jess.’