Tell Me Your Secret

by Dorothy Koomson

  My reply is a large glass of white wine peeking out of the kitchen doorway. ‘You are the perfect man,’ I say, kicking off my shoes.

  Winston and I have been together ten years. He was a professional footballer (some people still recognise him in the street and ask for selfies) but he moved into property development and has been successful at it ever since. This flat is one of his properties.

  In the kitchen, the table is set with candles and linen napkins. The lights under the wall units are on, casting the kitchen in a soft, yellow-orange glow. The music surrounds me, as does the smell of plantain, gari and red stew with chicken – my favourites.

  ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ I ask as I pull up a chair.

  ‘Nothing. I just want us to connect again. We haven’t been doing that.’

  I lower the glass from my lips and look at my fiancé. He’s gorgeous. Truly. I love the way he shaves a line on the right side of his closely cut hair, the curve of his forehead, the shape of his chin, the succulence of his lips, the rich darkness of his eyes. He is tall and he is solid and he is fit. He is also mine.

  ‘Are you going to dump me?’ I ask.

  Neither of us wanted children back when we met. Then, like we all do, we changed, we decided that we did want children. And then found we couldn’t. I couldn’t. Turns out it wasn’t simply heavy, crippling period pain I had every month. It was fibroids, it was polycystic ovaries . . . It was several operations, changes in lifestyle, change of diet, acupuncture, yoga, reflexology, herbs, drugs and test after test after test, and soul-destroying IVF until it was clear: no baby. Was that too much for him to take? Was this the end of the road for him?

  He’s frowning when he abandons his stirring to ask me, ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve cooked, you’ve opened nice wine and got the good cutlery out. This is big stuff. It either means you’re going to dump me or propose. And seeing as we’re already engaged . . .’

  ‘Or how about I’m doing something that means I get to sit with my partner and eat a meal and talk to her without distractions?’

  Yes, how about that, Jody.

  ‘Right you are,’ I mumble into my glass. I forget, sometimes, that not everyone does things to get something in return.

  She’s sitting at my kitchen table, a whole tea service in rainbow colours is laid out in front of her. She sits patiently, her hands folded in her lap, waiting for me to arrive. When I come in, I’m a whirl of activity, ready to grab a couple of slices of bread to slot into the white toaster before I go to shower and change to head back to the office.

  ‘Sit with me a moment,’ she says and smiles.

  I need to get going, get detecting, but I do as she asks since she’s asked so politely. She was like that, though, polite. Calm. Even though her body must have been raging, ravaged as it was with pain, she was calm and polite, gentle.

  ‘What I find really hard to accept, Jody, is that you knew, didn’t you?’

  She pours me tea as she condemns me.

  ‘You knew. You could have stopped this. All of this, couldn’t you?’

  I can’t look at her, so pretty as she is. I can’t stand to see the quiet suffering in her eyes.

  ‘You could have stopped this a while ago, couldn’t you?’ Bess says. She is sitting beside Shania. She’s not calm. She’s visibly angry. ‘There was no need for this to have happened to me, was there?’

  ‘And me, there was no need for me to die, either,’ says Freya.

  ‘You knew, didn’t you, Jody? You knew and you didn’t stop it,’ Harlow says, sipping her tea.

  My eyes fly open and I wake up, gulping air. Trying to swallow, trying not to suffocate.

  The light from the TV casts images over the dark room, its sound is on mute so there are no words or music to go with the flickering. Winston is working on his laptop, white headphones snake from his ears to the computer.

  I struggle upright, pushing myself away from the dream, desperately trying to integrate myself into the waking world again.

  Winston pulls his headphones from his ears. ‘You just sparked out. So much for spending the evening together,’ he teases. He sets aside his computer and pulls me into a hug.

  The last thing I want right now is a hug, an interlude, a tender moment when I can forget for even a moment the mistake I made fifteen years ago. The mistake I made that has meant so many women have suffered.

  ‘You clearly needed that sleep, though,’ Winston says, lovingly running his fingers through my hair. ‘You’ve got the cutest snore.’

  I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve an adoring fiancé, a comfortable home, an unburdened life. I don’t deserve any nice thing to happen to me.

  I’m sorry. Every day I want to say that. To all of them. All of them who came afterwards, all of them who are dying now, I’m sorry. I’m so very, very, very sorry.

  ‘Hey,’ Winston says as I squeeze him tight, hold him close, try to show him how sorry I am. ‘It’s all right, you know? Everything’s going to be all right.’

  It’s not going to be all right.

  Six women are dead because of me.

  Six.

  Seven, if you count my twin sister, Jovie.

  Part 2

  Pieta

  Tuesday, 11 June

  I pick up Kobi from school on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Sazz does Mondays and Thursdays, but it’s only on Tuesdays that I have to get there for 4:15 p.m. I love Tuesdays.

  On the other days, I have to pick him up at the back gate from his after-school classes, but on Tuesdays I get to do the school gates. I get to experience the special ‘I’m a mother’ joy of watching him leave the building. He’ll have his green rucksack hefted on one shoulder while his black sports bag, covered with mud, will trail behind him. His hat will be on askew, his tie will be spirit-level straight, a triangle of shirt will be hanging out of the waistband of his trousers like an overgrown tooth.

  Today the air is chilled even though the sun is out. I watch my son make his way across the playground towards me. He’s flanked by his two friends, Miles and Austin, and I just know that I’m in some kind of trouble. It often feels that I am in trouble with my boy. This will be about yesterday’s playdate mix-up, about me not organising it properly, even though I did.

  ‘Mum, I’m going to have a cooking birthday party,’ Kobi says to me when they arrive in front of me.

  My eyes flick from Miles to Austin, both of whom look very serious. Austin is two years below Kobi and Miles at school, but is almost as tall as his brother and my son.

  ‘Pardon?’ I reply. I’d braced myself for a telling off, not for this proclamation.

  ‘My mum will run it,’ Miles tells me.

  ‘Yeah, our mum will do it,’ Austin says.

  The three of them are looking over my right shoulder as well as talking to me. I follow their line of sight and notice for the first time their mum, Allie. I didn’t see her when I got here because I was still in another world, trying to decide what to do about the meeting tomorrow.

  ‘What will I do?’ she asks cautiously.

  ‘A cooking party, apparently,’ I reply. I turn back to my son and his friends. ‘You hate cooking,’ I remind Kobi.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he replies.

  ‘Yes, you do. Every time I try to get you to help me make dinner it’s like I’ve asked you to go down the mines – you practically accuse me of exploitation and refuse to do it.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘I cook with Sazz all the time,’ he says with a shrug. He hands me his sports bag and rucksack. ‘And Miles and Austin’s mum would hold a great party. Other people have had parties at her kitchens and they say it’s really good. Fun.’

  ‘It’s true, they are,’ says Mike, Miles and Austin’s dad, while pushing his glasses back on his face.

  ‘But it’s not your birthday for another eight months,’ I remind him.

  ‘Me and Miles and Austin talked about it at la
st break, we could have a joint party. And we could have it at their mum’s kitchens.’

  ‘But your birthdays are months apart.’

  All three of them shrug at the same time and ‘Doesn’t matter,’ they say in unison.

  I look to Allie again and she’s curled her lips into her mouth, trying to keep in her laughter.

  ‘And who’s paying for this?’ I ask my son.

  He squeezes up his face as though I’m being ridiculous. ‘You, of course. It’s my party.’ He sheds his blazer and shoves it in my arms. Miles and Austin do the same to their parents.

  ‘Of course,’ I say.

  ‘That’s you well and truly told,’ Mike says with a laugh.

  ‘Right, you, piano lesson and then home for dinner.’ I’ve decided to take charge of this ridiculous situation. ‘You can help me make it since you’re such a dab hand at cooking you’re planning a party eight months in advance.’

  ‘Erm, Mum,’ he says carefully, as though speaking to someone who needs careful handling. ‘Allie is a professional cooking teacher, you’re not. She’s good at making things fun, you’re—’

  ‘Don’t finish that sentence. If you want to eat in our house ever again, do not finish that sentence.’

  ‘Good on you for deciding what you want and sticking to it, Kobi mate,’ Mike says and sticks out his hand for a high five. My child slaps his hand as we go past.

  ‘Let me know when you want me to book in that party,’ Allie calls with a laugh.

  ‘Yeah, thanks, Baycroft . . . Baycrofts,’ I add, extending it to Mike who is chuckling to himself, too.

  ‘Do you really want to have a cooking party with Miles and Austin?’ I ask Kobi on the way home from his piano lesson.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says tiredly.

  ‘Even though their birthdays are quite far away from yours?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘You see the thing is, Mum, sometimes you have to do things that are good for everyone, not just yourself. Miles and Austin want to have a cooking party with me and I want to have one with them because we’re a team.’

  ‘You’re a team.’

  ‘Yeah. And sometimes you have to do things that are for the good of the team. That’s not being selfish.’

  My eyes go to him in the rear-view mirror. He sits tall on his booster seat, his tightly curly black hair is almost shaved on the sides and neatly squared on top. His face, which he hates being called cute, is open and wise despite his age. Kobi does this more times than I think possible for a young boy – he seems to know the right thing to say at the time I need it.

  I’ve been vacillating about what to do about meeting the so-called Miss X all night and all day. (Lillian had shown me the press notification and that’s what they were calling her, ‘Miss X’.) And I was no nearer to making a decision. I could only see what it would cost me if I couldn’t control myself, if I let anyone know what happened to me. But then, could I really let everyone down?

  I’d all but decided to call in sick tomorrow and then plan to leave as soon as possible, but that would be selfish, as Kobi has just verbalised.

  If BN Sussex got this, it could change everything. It could put us in the big leagues, help to comfortably set up the paper and magazine, as well as the people who work there, for a long time.

  The people who work there are my team; we fall out, we have disagreements, we get on each other’s nerves, but that’s all part of it. They were, and continue to be, an integral part of rebuilding my life in The After. Without them, my life wouldn’t be as balanced as it mostly is. Not going to this interview, not doing my best to get it, that would be selfish.

  ‘Mum,’ Kobi says.

  ‘Yes, light of my life?’

  ‘We’re the A team, though,’ he says.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know, like at school? In the matches? You have the A team and B team and C team. Me and you, we’re the A team.’

  I grin to myself as my heart feels like it’s going to burst with the rush of love I have for him. He does this. He makes me feel like everything is going to be OK. That I can handle anything the world throws at me because him and me, we’re together for ever.

  Jody

  Tuesday, 2 February, 1988

  ‘You don’t see it, do you, Jodes?’ Jovie said. ‘You can’t see how they make you dance to their tune.’

  I rolled my eyes at my sister because she was the eternal conspiracy theorist. We were thirteen and she was always railing against ‘The Man’ and wanted me to do it, too. ‘I don’t dance to anyone’s tune,’ I replied.

  There was a bit of a gap between our beds, big enough to fit a bedside table. She had the top drawer and I had the bottom one. Nothing much fit in there and it certainly wasn’t big enough for our secrets.

  ‘I wish you’d open your eyes, Jody. I wish you would see what’s going on around you.’

  ‘Just because you’ve read a couple of “right on” political books, doesn’t mean the world is a rotten place.’

  ‘I don’t think the world is a rotten place. I just think there are a lot of rotten people with power in it.’

  I couldn’t argue with that. I was trying to read by the light from the corridor and Jovie wouldn’t stop talking. Theorising, trying to get me to see things the way she saw them. Jovie was always in trouble. She was my twin, my other half, but we could not be more different. Mummy and Daddy were always down at the school because she was in hot water for this or that. I just kept my head down and got on with my schoolwork.

  ‘When was the last time you got an A in English, Jody?’

  I didn’t have to think about it, I hadn’t had one all year. Last year I got them all the time, this year I couldn’t seem to manage it, no matter how hard I worked. ‘None this year.’

  ‘But you still like English, right?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just don’t any more.’

  ‘Could it be you’ve been told in so many subtle ways that you’re not good enough at it any more, or there’s something going on with the teacher? I mean, you read more than anyone I know. You’re always scrawling away in your notebooks, but never anything more than a B. Reckon there might be something going on with Mrs Binchcliffe?’

  ‘No! I’m not like you, I don’t get in trouble with the teachers over every little thing.’

  ‘I’m fine with my Cs cos I know I put in no effort. But are you OK with your Bs when you’ve slogged your guts out?’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t think my work is up to it,’ I said. This was the problem with Jovie – she knew how to get under my skin. What she was saying sounded so true, but Mrs Binchcliffe was just the nicest woman, the loveliest teacher. She was always singing my praises, using my work as an example, telling my parents how super I was.

  ‘All right, Jody. How come blonde Caitlin is always getting As but Mrs Binchcliffe never uses her work as an example to the class for how it should be done? Not ever. Whose work does she use . . .? Oh, that’s right, yours. Even in my class she puts up your work. Not A-student Caitlin’s.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying you have to work a hundred times harder than people like Caitlin to get a lower mark than her. And you can’t argue with it because people like Mrs Binchcliffe are ever so nice.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this, Jovie? I can’t do anything about it, it just makes me down. Makes me not want to bother.’

  ‘You need to open your eyes, Jody. You can’t let them win by giving up, by letting people like Binchcliffe stop you liking English, but you can’t close your eyes to them, either. You need to see them for who they are. Then you can beat them at their own game.’

  I tossed my book onto the bedside table, I couldn’t read now. What Jovie was saying was wafting around my mind like the fumes that hooked into your clothes whenever you stood near someone smoking a cigarette. I loved English, reading, writing, but I hadn’t enjoyed it as much this
year. Mrs Binchcliffe was, it often felt, looking for reasons to mark me down. The slightest thing and she took off a mark. It all made sense when you looked at it the way Jovie explained it. But would it make just as much sense if I tried really, really hard to find another way to explain it?

  Jovie was always forcing me to think about things. I wasn’t ever allowed to ignore stuff, try to pretend away the injustice and hurt. And sometimes, I just wanted to. Sometimes I just wanted to keep my head down, to believe all the nice people around me who were at pains to tell me that the prejudice and injustice and racism I was seeing just wasn’t there; that I was mistaken and wrong and just a bit hypersensitive. I wanted to do that because everything would be so much easier if I didn’t have to deal with the truths of my life.

  When my twin wasn’t getting into trouble, she was trying to make me open my eyes to the world when, sometimes, I just wanted to lie very still with my eyes shut.

  ‘I feel utterly depressed now, thanks, Jovie.’

  ‘Don’t feel depressed,’ she said. ‘Like I said, just open your eyes.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to open my eyes?’ I replied. ‘What if I want to keep them shut.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine, just make sure you do it properly!’ she said with a laugh and lobbed her pillow right at my head.

  Monday, 12 July, 1993

  ‘So this is your graduation?’ Mummy said to Jovie. ‘This is the day we have all come together to celebrate your achievements.’

  We were sitting in the waiting area outside the courtroom, waiting to go in to hear her case. There was dark wood everywhere and the dark, royal-blue soft furnishings were all worn in several places. I didn’t feel like we belonged here, surrounded by criminals; sitting among people in badly fitting suits, looking as if they’d give vital body parts to be allowed to smoke in here.

  Jovie was wearing a suit because Mum had made her. She’d been all for wearing her jeans and trainers and ‘Fight the power’ T-shirt to appear in front of the court after being caught smoking weed in a park. She had, apparently, shrugged when the police officer accused her of it, saying, ‘Yeah, what of it?’