Can't Let Go

by Jane Hill

  But as my father put the crossword down on the table to talk to me, I could tell at a glance that he had got one of the answers wrong. Suddenly I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry because my parents were getting old. I wanted to cry at the stifling familiarity of it all. I wanted to cry, because I was tired and scared and because there was love there if I wanted it, but I couldn't take it, not properly. I wanted to cry because I was wondering what my father would have said if I had told him; whether he could have coped, or whether the truth would have killed him. I wanted to cry because I'd been there for five minutes and already I knew that I wouldn't be able to stay for long. Already I wanted to walk away.

  Dinner was early, and it was some kind of bean stew. My mother was convinced I was a vegetarian. I'd told her, countless times, that I ate meat. I'd been eating meat all my life except for about eighteen months in my mid twenties. But I didn't have the heart to tell her again. Later, we left my father dozing in front of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and my mother drove me the short distance to the seafront.

  We walked along the prom in what was, I suppose, friendly silence. It was still very warm, and suddenly I got the urge to paddle. I walked down to the sea, took off my sandals, rolled up my jeans and hobbled over the last few inches of shingle and into the sea.

  I don't think I had ever known the sea in Sussex to be that warm. It lapped around my ankles, gently licking and fondling my feet. I found a rare patch of sand to stand on, and the grains dribbled around my toes. There was a yacht with a white sail moving slowly along the horizon. I closed my eyes. I could feel the evening sun on my right shoulder. I could hear the seagulls shrieking to each other. I could feel tears start to form in my eyes. I thought: maybe I can just stand here – in this precise spot – for the rest of my life. I counted to four, to eight, to sixteen, and then I turned around and walked back up the beach.

  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.

  Fifteen

  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.
r />   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.

  Sixteen

  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 w
alked 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?'