Can't Let Go

by Jane Hill

  'Oh, I am pleased,' said my mother, who'd never liked the abbreviation Lizzie. 'I'd prefer Elizabeth, but at least Beth sounds like a proper grown-up name.'

  Beth was altogether a different person. She looked different. She seemed shorter, although she wasn't. Her hair was straighter and her clothes were much more discreet – jeans, a white shirt, a plain T-shirt, a simple trouser suit for work. There was, I'd discovered, an art to being unobtrusive, to slipping through life without making so much as a ripple. There was great skill involved in keeping your head down and not leaving traces. And just occasionally I worried that I had taken the art of unobtrusiveness too far, that I had become so unobtrusive, so secretive and hidden as to be positively noticeable, almost intriguing: a mystery to be solved. That seemed to be the case with Danny. He was intrigued by me, and that was dangerous for both of us.

  That was why my ability to run away was so precious to me. That was why I had so few possessions. I remembered Robert de Niro in the film Heat, playing a master thief who kept nothing in his life that he couldn't leave behind with just a few minutes' notice. That was the way I tried to live. That was why I had a car, the height of eccentricity for someone who lived just a stone's throw from the public-transport hub that was King's Cross: because, if all else failed, if I got discovered, I could just throw my life into my car and drive away. I could go to Cornwall, or to Scotland, or to the wild west of Ireland, or I could drive to Kent and catch the shuttle and head anywhere in Europe. My trusty little Polo could one day be my best friend.

  The third heading on my list, my third great fear, was that I would tell someone what I had done. Of all my fears, this was, I thought, the most likely to come true. It ought to have been the easiest to control but sometimes it felt like the most difficult. I usually subdivided this section into three sub-headings, three circumstances under which I might have spilled the beans. The first was when an apparently innocent conversation skirted too close to the subject: the chat at my sister's house about my summer in San Francisco, for example. Any casual chats in the pub with friends or in the staff room at work that touched on subjects like student life, or memories of past summers, or favourite songs from the late 1980s could be risky. I would walk away from those conversations, using a variety of excuses. 'Marking' worked well, but only with non-teachers. I had lost count of the times that I had suddenly remembered somewhere else I had to be. People expected it of me now.

  And then there was the risk of big emotional heart-to-hearts, the sort you had in relationships and in close female friendships. There was a simple solution to the problem: I didn't do relationships. It was that old cliche: I had a skeleton in the closet. I supposed in my case that it was close to being literally true. I imagined sometimes that it was. Rivers Carillo's skeleton was there, in my wardrobe, stuffed into an old suitcase that was pushed to the back, behind the winter coat that I hardly ever wore. Something it was just about possible to ignore, even though I could see part of the suitcase every time I opened the door. But sometimes, when I was sorting through my clothes, I would have to get it out. And then sometimes I'd open the suitcase, hoping that I had made a mistake, that I had dreamt the whole thing and that there was nothing there at all. But there always was. And to push an already overstretched metaphor even further, my fear was that if I were to get involved with someone, sooner or later they were going to want to go rooting around in my stuff, and one day I would find them sitting on the bed with the open suitcase in front of them and a horrified look on their face – a look that said, 'Oh my God, I'm in a relationship with Bluebeard.'

  So I didn't do relationships. And I was particularly cautious about close female friendships, too. Guys were okay. You could be great friends with a bloke and yet know almost nothing about each other. I had that kind of friendship with Danny. Sometimes I'd go round to his place and we'd have evenings of playing CDs and watching D V D s , and exchanging names of favourite films and bands, the kind of night that I enjoyed because it represented warmth and friendship rather than intimacy and involvement. That was something I really didn't want to spoil. But I steered clear of close women friends usually, because they would always ask questions about my personal life. Because I was scared that if I let myself get close to people, then one day there would be the inevitable exchange of innermost secrets after a few too many drinks and out it would come: I would reveal the whole, terrible truth. Blokes were safer. They weren't interested in that kind of conversation. They just wanted to know what sort of music you liked.

  And, finally, there was the fear that one day I would just blurt it out. That perverse desire to confess was perhaps the thing that scared me most. 'Blurt' – what a strange and specific word that was. The dictionary definition was 'to utter suddenly or unadvisedly'. The word had no roots, nothing Latin or Old Germanic or anything of that sort. It seemed to be imitative, onomatopoeic: a word that made the sound of what it meant. Blurt – the sound of someone revealing the awful secret that they had kept buried for seventeen years. It was like the urge to press a big red emergency button or pull the cord on a train. The more you told yourself not to do it, the worse the urge became. There was no way to control this particular fear except to spend as much time as possible alone.

  So that was my life. That was why I lived like that. That was why on that Sunday afternoon, listening to Danny's C D , I was staring out of my open window at the roofs of London below me, trying to ward off a headache that felt like someone inside my head was intent on pushing my eyes out of their sockets. That was why I was just beginning to let myself wonder if I should lighten up a bit; if maybe I was safe now. Seventeen years on, nothing I feared had happened. Maybe I should let myself start living again. Maybe I had served my time. Maybe it was time to reconnect with the human race.

  Four

  'Miss Stephens?'

  I had my back to my class of year tens as I wrote on the whiteboard and I couldn't immediately tell who was speaking, since all the girls spoke in pretty much the same way: confident middle-class with a hint of affected Estuary. I turned and saw that it was Chloe – Chloe T., rather than Chloe P. In other words, the class daredevil, the one who asked the questions that the other girls wanted to but didn't. I looked at her and raised my eyebrows, waiting for the question. I was pretty sure I knew what it was going to be. I would get asked this question, or something like it, at this point every year. In fact, I probably encouraged it. I led the class discussion around to it. If we were going to study that story, the story that seemed to have been written about me, then I knew that I might as well brace myself for the question. I almost laid a bet with myself to guess which of my year ten GCSE English set would ask it, and on what day; and I had my bland, non-committal answer carefully prepared.

  'Miss Stephens, do you really think it's true? Do you really think that if someone killed someone and got away with it, they'd be desperate to tell someone?'

  Chloe T. put her head on one side after asking the question, a self-satisfied smile on her face. She was a clever girl and a funny girl and I had always liked her a lot. And I had often wished that she wasn't in my class. I looked at her as evenly as possible, and I said, in my brightest voice, 'I don't know. What do you think?'

  It was probably my catchphrase as a teacher: 'I don't know. What do you think?' The kids probably did impersonations of me, using that question. I used it all the time. It worked on almost any occasion, for almost any question a pupil might ask. And it worked that time, too. Chloe narrowed her eyes and started to think, and then the others girls joined in, all calling out with their thoughts; and I stood there with my gaze fixed on the far wall, on a point where the paint was peeling off, half listening to a bunch of teenage girls imagining that they were murderers, hoping that the conversation would drift away soon. One of them, Bella, was suddenly struck by something. 'Listen, think about it. Imagine the worst thing you've ever done, like, maybe, shoplifting? Or telling a whopping great lie to get out of doing something, but you're really proud of i
t because it was, like, a really clever lie? You'd be bursting to tell someone then, wouldn't you?'

  They liked that idea. They all started discussing the worst things they had ever done. There was a confession from one girl about borrowing her older sister's leather jacket and then losing it, and the elaborate lie she had told her sister. Another owned up to breaking her mother's favourite vase and blaming it on her two-year-old brother. I was feeling on safer ground. And then, out of the blue, Chloe T. piped up again. 'Miss Stephens, what's the worst thing you've ever done?'

  I felt myself start to blush. I wasn't prepared for that question. I turned back to the whiteboard. I tossed the marker pen in the air and tried to catch it, but I missed and it clattered against the rubbish bin. I took a deep breath, turned back to the class and smiled sweetly: 'Well, Chloe. Funny you should ask. A few years ago I throttled one of my pupils with my bare hands when she kept asking annoying questions.'

  The sound of several sharp intakes of breath. A few sniggers. I was getting into my stride now. 'I chopped her body up into tiny pieces and posted it to her parents.'

  Some giggles, then a wave of laughter. I could almost see what the girls were thinking: 'Good old Miss Stephens – she's not as dull as she looks.'

  I wondered what would have happened if I'd told them the truth, if I'd answered Chloe's question with complete candour. 'When I was just a few years older than you I killed a man. I looked him in the eye and I killed him. I got away with it, and I've never told a soul – until today.'

  Probably their response would have been the same: the same sharp intake of breath, the same sniggers and giggles, the same assumption that I was joking. Because how could Miss Stephens, with her neat brown hair and her cheap black skirts and trousers, and her plain, mannish shirts in shades of white and cream and grey, possibly have been a killer?

  The reason for that intensely, horribly apposite discussion? And the reason why I had to put up with it almost every year? Blame Edgar Allan Poe.

  It had been bad enough having to teach Macbeth every year, with the hand-washing scene, and Lady Macbeth going to pieces because of her guilt about the murder, and a class full of girls debating whether they could carry off a killing without going mad. But what bright spark decided to put the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe on the GCSE syllabus? Of course, his tales of death, disease, imprisonment and burial alive were hugely popular with fourteen to sixteen-year-olds. Call it Goth, call it emo, whatever name you gave it, the dark side always held a powerful allure for that age group. And most of the tales were fun to teach: 'Ligeia', 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Premature Burial' – the kids lapped it up. But there was one story that I wished had never been written, and certainly never added to the syllabus. It was called 'The Imp of the Perverse'.

  The narrator of the story had committed a murder, a very clever murder for which he would never be suspected. He had got away with it. But something was eating away at him – the perverse desire to confess. Sound familiar? In the Edgar Allan Poe story, the narrator did confess, and it all ended badly as he awaited his death on the gallows. Imagine me having to teach that story every year to a class of inquiring girls.

  I became a teacher because it seemed the safe, unobjectionable thing to do. I got my degree, did my teaching certificate, kept my head down, didn't make waves. Despite everything, I discovered that I was good at it. It was one of the few things in my life that I enjoyed. I felt safe and normal when I stood in front of a class and communicated with them. Three years earlier I had moved to a fee-paying independent North London girls' school. A teacher's dream, you would have thought. Classes full of bright, attentive girls: Louisas and Amelias, Ellies and Ellas, Alices, Freyas and Floras. Great parental support, a warm and exciting atmosphere in the school and a willingness to encourage pupils to go beyond the syllabus. But, oh, the questions. The school encouraged inquiring minds. And it wasn't just the lessons the girls liked to inquire about. Why wasn't I married, did I have a boyfriend, had I got any action at the weekend, was I a lesbian, why were my clothes so dull, why didn't I try to do something more interesting with my hair? What was the worst thing I had ever done?

  School was quiet that day. It got like that in May and June. Year Elevens and the Upper Sixth were no longer in lessons. Exam season was under way. I had taught them all that I could. Now it was down to them. The rest of the pupils, the ones who didn't have big exams, were getting a bit demob happy. It was the time of year when they liked to push their luck and ask outrageous questions.

  It was a very warm day, the third one in a row, and people were already beginning to predict a long hot summer. Outside it was glorious. But it had become almost unbearable in the creaky, un-air conditioned Victorian building where I taught most of my classes. The girls had already abandoned their uniform of thick black tights or trousers in favour of skirts, the shorter the better. The bell went, and Year Ten packed up their bags and filed out, still giggling at the thought of Chloe T . chopped into tiny pieces and posted to her parents. 'Nice one, Miss S,' said a couple of the girls as they left the classroom.

  It was lunchtime, and I had no classes for the rest of the day. I ran my hands over my face, feeling the sweat that had pooled on my forehead and in the dip above my top lip. I rummaged in my bag for a ponytail band, and pulled my hair back off my face and neck, enjoying the instant if fleeting sensation of coolness. I walked across to the window and climbed onto one of the desks so that I could stick my head out of the open part of the window and feel the fresh air on my face. Outside, I could see a cluster of A-level students sitting on the wooden bench in the shade of the huge old tree in the playground. They had open books on their knees, as if they were doing last-minute revision, but from where I was standing it looked as if they were goofing around instead.

  I wandered down to the staff room feeling uncharacteristically relaxed. I'd had a couple of sleepless nights after Saturday's encounter and Sunday's headache. I'd been lying awake thinking about Danny's invitation, too. But on a beautiful bright day like that day I felt as if I could put everything out of my mind. The weather was making me feel light and excited, almost as if I was on holiday. I made plans for the afternoon. I'd walk home instead of taking the Tube. I'd take my marking with me, and I'd stop in Regent's Park on the way home and do it there. And I guessed it was my happy mood that knocked me off guard and led me to do something I rarely did: I accepted a social invitation from one of the other teachers. Lesley, probably the nearest to a friend I had at the school, invited me out to a comedy night in a pub in North London. I figured that maybe someone had pulled out and she had a spare ticket. Otherwise I couldn't imagine why she would have invited me; I had turned down many overtures of friendship in the past. Because the invitation coincided with the beginning of my change of heart – that half-formed decision that perhaps it might be time to rejoin the human race – I found myself saying yes. Various people in the staff room reacted with double takes. It had seemed like a simple decision. I had no idea what it would lead to.

  I walked home still feeling happy. It wasn't long until the end of term, and I was feeling that mildly euphoric mood I sometimes got on the first truly hot day of summer. If you had asked me exactly what I was feeling, I'd have said that the worst was over. The weather was beautiful. It would soon be the summer holidays, I had survived the toughest question I could possibly have been asked, I had decided that the ghost of Rivers Carillo could just get lost and not bother me again. London felt alive. People were sunbathing in Regent's Park. They were smiling; I was smiling. The time had come to relax, to make friends, finally to put everything behind me. I was actually looking forward to spending time socially with a group of people from work. Maybe I would even say yes to Danny's invitation. Whatever had come over me?

  Five

  Did I bump into Zoey or did she bump into me?

  Whose fault was it? Was it fate or just a clumsy collision? The woman with the yellow T-shirt was in front of me at the bar, her back
to me. She turned around and she didn't see me. That was nothing unusual. I had spent my adult life perfecting the art of being unnoticeable. She stumbled into me, or I knocked into her. Anyway, one way or another, I found myself standing at the bar with most of her pint glass of Coke dripping down my T-shirt and jeans.

  'Jesus, I'm sorry,' she said in an American accent. She had wild frizzy hair and an offhand way of speaking. The words spilled out, seemingly without any thought beforehand. 'Christ. Look at you. You're soaked. My God, I'm sorry. Look, listen, I have to run. I'm doing this – this thing. Upstairs. It's my first-ever headliner. I'm nervous. What can I say? I didn't see you there. I'm sorry. Can you wash it out? Will it stain? Will you be okay?'

  She patted me on the shoulder somewhat absently and then darted off before I could say anything in reply. I went into the ladies' toilet at the back of the pub and splashed water onto my T-shirt to wash off as much Coke as I could. I was glad it was such a warm night: it would dry quickly. I was a bit annoyed but not unduly so. It happened. I got bumped into, had things spilled on me. It happened a lot. I never made a fuss.

  The next time I saw her was an hour or so later, and she was on stage. Her name was Zoey Spiegelman and her hair was now even wilder. It exploded from her head in dark henna-tipped Medusa spirals. Her bright yellow T-shirt had some kind of logo on it, and she was wearing it with low-slung khaki combat trousers and a pair of red trainers with elaborate soles that looked like they were springs. She wasn't particularly young, not as young as you might have thought from her clothes. I thought perhaps she was my age or a couple of years younger, maybe early thirties. She was lean and athletic looking, and she prowled the stage, microphone in hand, with the barely suppressed bouncy energy of a gymnast about to do the final vault that could snatch the gold medal. American, of course, possibly a New Yorker; with a crisp don't-mess-with-me tone to her voice. She was very funny.