To Keep You Safe

by Kate Bradley

  Contents

  Prologue

  Friday – 08:55

  Friday – 09:15

  Friday – 09:25

  Friday – 09:54

  Friday – 09:58

  Friday – 10:10

  Friday – 10:52

  Friday – 11:50

  Friday – 12:41

  Friday – 12:53

  Friday – 13:12

  Friday – 13:40

  Friday – 14:35

  Friday – 14:45

  Friday – 14:51

  Friday – 15:22

  Friday – 15:38

  Friday – 15:45

  Friday – 15:50

  Friday – 15:59

  Friday – 16:13

  Friday – 16:15

  Friday – 16:17

  Friday – 16:32

  Friday – 16:53

  Friday – 17:27

  Friday – 17:39

  Friday – 18:00

  Friday – 18:18

  Friday – 18:29

  Friday – 18:31

  Friday – 18:44

  Friday – 19:03

  Friday – 19:11

  Friday – 19:12

  Friday – 19:19

  Friday – 19:22

  Friday – 19:25

  Friday – 19:33

  Friday – 19:37

  Friday – 19:40

  Friday – 19:47

  Friday – 20:20

  Friday – 20:23

  Friday – 20:27

  Friday – 20:45

  Friday – 21:22

  Friday – 21:37

  Friday – 22:01

  Friday – 22:15

  Friday – 22:22

  Friday – 22:37

  Friday – 22:50

  Friday – 22:53

  Saturday – 00:02

  Saturday – 00:06

  Saturday – 00:24

  Saturday – 01:14

  Saturday – 01:20

  Saturday – 01:50

  Saturday – 04:02

  Saturday – 05:25

  Saturday – 05:27

  Saturday – 05:37

  Saturday – 05:47

  Saturday – 05:53

  Saturday – 05:57

  Saturday – 06:05

  Saturday – 06:20

  Saturday – 06:23

  Saturday – 06:29

  Saturday – 06:31

  Saturday – 07:06

  Saturday – 07:37

  Saturday – 07:59

  Saturday – 08:18

  Saturday – 10:47

  Saturday – 16:06

  Sunday – 09:09

  Sunday – 13:22

  Monday – 11:04

  Sunday – 14:36

  Monday – 06:59

  Monday – 14:31

  Monday – 14:56

  Tuesday – 10:10

  Wednesday – 01:02

  Wednesday – 06:30

  Wednesday – 13:06

  Wednesday – 13:49

  Wednesday – 13:59

  Wednesday – 14:05

  Wednesday – 14:09

  Wednesday – 14:24

  Wednesday – 15:10

  Wednesday – 15:38

  Tuesday – 15:50

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Copyright

  For my mother, Jenny.

  And for my husband, Brad.

  Both heroes.

  Prologue

  I hang my legs over the cliff edge and look over so I can imagine your broken body lying on the beach below. I never tire of sitting here. I come even in winter, when the storms seethe, forcing me to grip the scant grass, because I feel that I could die here too. I like that. I watch the crashing waves below, beating against the bluff, pushing and pulling the flotsam and jetsam, relentless, relentless, relentless.

  Then I do my own falling. I uncork a bottle and for a while feel the raw pain of my loss.

  Walkers have approached me in the past; they see my solo picnic of wine and the inches between me and certain death, and they think I’m going to jump. The police have been here too. Twice they’ve arrested me under section 136 of the Mental Health Act, determined to get me assessed, but my last psychiatrist intervened. He said that I push all of my grief and guilt onto the clifftop, as a coping mechanism. He’s wrong.

  As I sober up at home, I spend the night staring at my bedroom ceiling while the world sleeps. I think about my choices, questions writhing like worms in my mind. I replay everything: everything I did and didn’t do. What it caused; about the people who got hurt. Who died. I remember blue eyes locked on mine, eyes filled with the pain and the nearness of death. Then the peace, after.

  I know I am guilty.

  And then when I tire of my self-hatred, I wonder what would’ve happened if we hadn’t come together like a planet spun from its orbit into the path of the other. How different my life would’ve been. And that’s what I can’t get over – that’s why I cannot know peace.

  I turn over what happened to us in my mind, the memories getting no less worn through the constant re-examination. Relentless, relentless, relentless.

  I don’t need this clifftop to remember you or what happened that Friday afternoon in May, three years ago, when everything that I’d ever loved, would be gone before the sun rose on Saturday.

  I think and I think and I think; thoughts of what I’m going to do next beating relentlessly into the shallows of my mind.

  Friday

  08:55

  May, three years earlier

  Jenni

  ‘Quiet! I’m taking the register.’ Fifteen minutes, twenty-six teenagers, one register. A sum I’ve done before, not a sum that should change my life. But change it, it did, because she was there.

  I didn’t notice her straight away as I looked out across the kids in my form group. I knew I should know them well by this point, particularly as some were also regulars in my maths class. But a year into teaching and it was clear that I was never going to find it easy. I still struggled with their names – there were so many of them. Finn Taggart stood out with his huge cloud of hair and permanent smile, and right then he was flicking balls of paper at the group of girls at the back. Jordan Shire I did know because at six foot four he was one of the few that stood taller than me and I watched him now threatening to punch his best friend. I still hadn’t forgiven Jordan for last week, when halfway through teaching fractions, he put on a perfect Dalek voice and imitated me, saying: ‘you will be mathinated’, instantly creasing up the class. I threw him out, of course, but the thought of what he meant bothered me more and more – at night, in particular. I couldn’t help wanting to know what he was insinuating. Was it that he had found me out? Could he somehow tell I struggled with certain things? Determined to let it go, I unscrewed the lid from my water bottle and took a swig, scanning the room, looking elsewhere so I wouldn’t have to deal with him. I hadn’t been sleeping well and I knew I wouldn’t be fair on him. As it was, I had woken this morning with a head full of thunder and fresh concern that perhaps something was wrong with me.

  Something more than the recent bad dreams.

  My sleeplessness was now threatening my ability to train – normally a granite wall wouldn’t stop me from a fifteen-mile run before work. Given I’d never seen a doctor in my life – except that spell in hospital prior to my discharge from the army – I wasn’t sure what to do. The sleeplessness didn’t shift with herbal remedies or any of the other advice I’d seen on the internet. I’d trudged to work this morning and with each footstep I thought I’m a drum, I’m a drum, over and over again. The thought didn’t make sense but I couldn’t shake it; I didn’t know what it meant, what I was supposed to feel. I felt nothing and I couldn’t stop the relentl
ess beat of my life.

  Then a child at the back of my classroom caught my eye.

  Destiny Mills sat alone.

  Destiny. How I worried about her right from the very start. But then, worrying about her was better than thinking about me.

  In a year group where some of the boys were already bigger than me and some girls seemed like adults, there were just as many at fifteen that still looked like young children. Destiny was one of the younger-looking ones. With wrists so thin a glare could snap them, she tamed dark curls into plaits and stood shorter than average. She had large watchful eyes and a mouth that never smiled. If she didn’t have to speak she wouldn’t, not to her peers or her teachers. She was rarely in school and when she was, she sat alone at lunch, playing on her phone if she could get away with it or reading obscure novels. Her small, silent demeanour could’ve meant that she slipped into the sea of unnoticeable kids, but she didn’t because she was exceptional.

  She was exceptional for two reasons: the first because she was the smartest kid in school. She was in year ten, which meant that she’d be taking her exams in a year. When she’d joined the school three months ago, she’d achieved nines in every subject assessment. Teachers would rather not predict let alone award a nine, particularly a year early, but after her mock exams last month when we’d all assessed her at the same grade, we quietly relaxed, glad to accept that perhaps Destiny Mills was simply a genius.

  Destiny was also notable because she was in care. Teachers have to know about vulnerable children and as her form tutor I had to know more than most. But unlike most kids in care, she wasn’t tucked up with a foster family. Social services claimed that she was unplaceable. They said they’d moved her halfway down the country because they couldn’t find another children’s home that would take her – apparently, not only did she constantly lie about being sexually abused in every home she’d been placed, but at the last one she’d set fire to her room. Arson meant she’d failed risk assessment after risk assessment. The school had never had an arsonist before and we’d all had to be briefed. If George Danvers, the head, was right, if she failed her placement at either this school or at her new care home, then she’d be moved to a secure unit. She wouldn’t get nines there.

  If she didn’t get great results, maybe she’d never climb out of the pit of her life. Since I’d retrained, I clung to the meaningfulness of education – the fact it could change someone’s life. It wasn’t the army, it wasn’t life and death, but it had purpose and I grasped on to that as a reason to stay. I was too new to teach the top sets, so I didn’t teach Destiny, but I liked the idea that schools gave kids the opportunity to change their lives. We all wanted good things for this friendless, diminutive, damaged girl.

  But a bright future was starting to look impossible. She often truanted, so I didn’t expect to see her in registration. She was missing lessons too. The way the exams were now, if she didn’t start attending it didn’t matter how bright she was – if she didn’t know the content of the curriculum, she’d fail her exams.

  What a waste.

  Glad of the excuse not to have to challenge Jordan and determined to speak to Destiny about her attendance, I started to cross to the back of the room. Her demeanour now in this noisy classroom, the way she held herself so small, made me think of a frightened hermit crab. Is that what she was? Frightened? I couldn’t be sure.

  As I got closer, I noticed something new – Destiny Mills had a huge black eye. I crossed the classroom, put down my water bottle and sat on the table. ‘Are you OK?’

  She stared at her twisting hands, her bottom lip quivering as she shrugged.

  ‘Destiny?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  I paused, deciding the best way to build a relationship. The topics like black eyes and care and truanting needed time to work into, but there was never any time in teaching. Everything had to be done in a hurry because there were so many things to do. I’m not sure it made my alexithymia worse, but perhaps it didn’t help that I didn’t tell anyone. My dad said it didn’t matter, it just meant I wasn’t ‘a people person’. He said lots of people aren’t able to read what people are thinking, but I shouldn’t let it stop me from being out in the world. I wished I could be bright and chatty like most of the other teachers. But I wasn’t, I had nothing to say. I thought of the drum again; beating, yet empty.

  Perhaps I was the drum.

  Destiny bit her lip, her gaze darting anywhere but at me. The bell sounded for the first period. Everyone bundled out, but I paid no attention – I hadn’t even asked her about her bruise yet. ‘How did you get your black eye?’

  Destiny jumped up, bag in hand, banging the table as she tried to get away. I moved quicker, standing in her way to stop her from leaving. Around us were crashes as someone knocked the door against the wall, the cacophony of noise from the corridor, scraping chairs and shouts as the pupils began their brief chaos of getting to their class on time.

  I waited until the rest of the tutor group left. ‘Your eye looks like it must hurt,’ I said, taking a closer look: it had the green and yellow of an ageing bruise. I also noticed a cut near her eye. Whoever had hit Destiny had hit her hard. ‘What happened to you? Is this why you’ve been off school all week?’

  She shrugged. Just as she edged again towards the door, a phone rang in Destiny’s bag. She jumped. Finding it with shaking hands, she saw the number and gave a strange moan like a keening gull.

  I felt a thump of disquiet. ‘Destiny? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Miss, I’ve got to go,’ she said, her voice a husk as the colour dropped from her face.

  My condition meant that I couldn’t feel things right and not knowing what the hospital doctor called ‘the full spectrum of emotions’ made it difficult for me to recognise some emotions in others. But I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know what was going on here. I couldn’t use my condition as an excuse this time. I’d only been teaching for two of my forty years, but I’d never seen any child before or since look like Destiny did right then, with unadulterated fear. I’d seen grown men look like that under fire, but that’s different. War is difficult, adult. But real fear in the classroom? Seeing it made my own heartbeat quicken. ‘No taking calls in school.’

  I have to, she mouthed before turning away. ‘It’s me – Candydoll.’

  Candydoll? Why was a child answering a phone like that? I sat down hard on the table and crossed my arms, so she knew I wasn’t going anywhere. And I wasn’t – I had a free period so this could take as long as it needed to.

  She turned and looked at me with eyes like she’d been stung, before turning back to the window. I got up to look outside, but didn’t see anything. Then I noticed urine puddled by her feet. Destiny had wet herself. But even worse – she didn’t seem to know or care. She said something into the phone that I couldn’t catch. She whispered something else, and I realised she was fearful. ‘No, please, it’s only Miss Wales.’ Her voice was the whine of a kicked dog.

  Why was she talking about me? The weeing on the floor, the fear in her voice, made my own bladder twitch in response.

  I thought: confiscate the phone. As I reached for it, she spoke: ‘She’s nice, leave it!’ She turned to me and pointed outside. There was a van outside of the school gates. She covered the phone with her hand and said: ‘I’m sorry, Miss.’

  Then, turning away again, she added: Run.

  Friday

  09:15

  Jenni

  I ran.

  My brogues hit the empty corridor, bang, bang, bang. Everyone was in lessons and the school was quiet.

  I covered the long corridor in seconds. I ran through reception, ignoring the receptionist at the front desk. Through the foyer. Pushed through the front double doors. Ran three steps down onto the front drive.

  Cold wind smacked my face as I saw it: a large Ford transit. White. Clean. Two men staring right at me from the front seats. They had parked further down the drive, but now as I ran towards them, they
revved their engine and sped towards me.

  I jumped onto the grass verge. Just in time, as I felt the front wheel throw gravel on my shoes. Shiny hubcaps. It skidded to a turn and then sped out onto the street beyond. A large padlock swung from the rear doors.

  As the van left, I only then noticed Aaron Vaughn from year eleven staring after it. The boy’s mouth hung open. ‘Miss! How bad was that! Are you all right?’

  ‘Did you see that van’s number plate?’

  A shadow crossed his face. He shrugged, his usual insolence returning to his voice. ‘I didn’t see nothing, Miss.’

  ‘Then get going, you’re late.’

  He glanced back over his shoulder as he went, our brief roles as comrades restored back to the status quo.

  Friday

  09:25

  Jenni

  Destiny.

  I realised that Destiny still stood in her own urine in room 12.

  I ran back past the reception, jogged up the now silent corridor.

  Destiny was still in my classroom. Using my desk tissues, she was mopping the floor.

  ‘Let me help.’ I took the wodge of paper off her and finished wiping the floor. ‘We better get you to Mrs Hodges.’

  Terri Hodges was the nearest we had to a school nurse now that the school’s welfare team had been cut from six to two. She was in charge of the school reception, but behind reception was a small room with the medical bed where kids went with temperatures, banged heads, bleeding noses. With the room came the responsibility. I didn’t know her, really; I worked in the maths department and barely left it. I’d noticed that other staff who’d joined the school at the same time as me seemed to know everyone by now and were always in the staffroom, laughing and chatting at lunch. I kept to myself; it was better that way. That way I couldn’t make any mistakes about what they meant, like when Paul Goods, the science teacher, had been saracastic about the deputy head and I thought he was being serious and everyone had just stared at me like I was from another planet. It hadn’t been like that in the army.

  I hoped Terri was kind.

  I could leave Destiny with Terri, I decided, but I also needed to report the incident. Since we’d lost our protection officer, Mary Nightingale, one of the two assistant heads, had taken over the responsibility for safeguarding student welfare. But she might be teaching. I checked my watch; I still had twenty minutes before my next class.