Tangled Secrets

by Anne-Marie Conway

  “Run!” shouted Nathan as I took off towards first base. The rest of the team cheered me on: “Mad-die! Mad-die!”

  I made it all the way round to third before Scott got the ball back. I was still one base away from scoring my first rounder but it was the greatest feeling in the world. I’d had no idea I’d enjoy rounders club so much when Gemma dragged me along.

  “Why can’t I be as good as you?” Gemma moaned when I flopped back down on the grass next to her.

  “I’m not that good,” I said, glancing back at the sycamore trees, knowing I’d only managed to hit it so far with Nan’s help. “And anyway, you only missed because of Nathan.”

  The words shot out before I could stop them.

  “What do you mean?” she said, turning scarlet.

  “Nothing…I didn’t mean anything, it’s just I thought maybe you kept missing because you like him and…”

  “I don’t!” she cried. “I don’t like him!” She put her hands up to her flaming cheeks. “Well okay, I do a bit. Actually I like him a lot, Maddie, like LOADS…but he’s never going to notice someone like me, not in a million years.”

  “He might notice you,” I said. “Especially if you managed to hit the ball!”

  She somehow blushed even more. “I’ll never be able to hit the ball,” she groaned. “I can’t even see it without my glasses on, but they make me look like such a geek.”

  “Are you being serious? Is that why you keep taking them off? And there was me thinking you only did it in case they got broken!”

  We were still laughing about it on the way home. Gemma said she’d had no idea where the ball was, or if Scott had even bowled it yet. “I just randomly swung the bat and hoped for the best. I mean if the ball was a bit bigger I might’ve stood a decent chance.”

  “Well I can’t see Mr Skinner changing the size of the balls any time soon, so I think your best bet is to wear your glasses. They look nice anyway, they really suit you, and think how surprised Nathan would be if you actually managed to hit the ball. You might even score a rounder for the team.”

  I couldn’t believe how easy it was for us to talk about Nathan. In fact I couldn’t believe how easy it was to talk full stop. It was the closest I’d felt to her in ages. Maybe opening up to Vivian was helping me more than I realized? I was tempted to tell Gemma about the sessions and how anxious I’d been feeling since Nan died, but the truth was that I was a tiny bit frightened she wouldn’t understand; that she might think it was weird that I needed special help from a counsellor.

  When I walked into the Blue Room the next morning Kieran was already there, sitting in my seat. I stood by the door for a moment, relieved to see him in a way, but uncomfortable about being forced to sit somewhere different. I grabbed the pad from Vivian and sat as far away from him as I could.

  “Sally-Ann won’t be joining us this morning,” said Vivian. “It’s just the three of us.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Kieran, sneering. “She’s discovered some new allergy. Haven’t you realized yet, there’s nothing wrong with her, she just pretends to be ill to get attention.”

  Vivian kept her eyes fixed on his face. She has this amazing way of listening as if she’s thinking things through very carefully. “Well, Sally-Ann isn’t here to defend herself, so it wouldn’t be right to discuss her allergies. However, it’s probably true that we all have certain strategies for getting attention. The way I see it, drawing attention to yourself, however you choose to do it, is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just a way of asking for help.”

  “That’s rubbish,” said Kieran. “The last thing I want is anyone helping me.” He shot me a look. “I don’t want any help and I don’t need it.”

  “How about you, Maddie?” said Vivian. “What do you think?”

  I shrugged, staring down at my pad. I could feel Kieran’s eyes on me, accusing me. Letting me know he wanted me to butt out. It was hot and stuffy; sweat dripped down my back.

  “Sometimes,” Vivian went on, “not saying anything is still saying something. It can still be a way of asking for help.”

  My tummy tightened. She was talking about me. I tried to work out what she meant – if keeping everything bottled up inside was just my way of showing her and Mrs Palmer and Mum how scared and out of control I’d been feeling. I drew a big mouth on my pad and then scribbled over it until it was completely covered.

  “So basically,” said Kieran, still sneering, “if you’re noisy it’s a cry for help, if you’re quiet it’s a cry for help and if you pretend to be ill it’s a cry for help. Is everything a cry for help? How about laughing too much? Or crying? Or stuffing your face? Or starving yourself?”

  “Pretty much all of those, yes,” said Vivian. “But it sounds to me as if you’re saying that any way of asking for help is rubbish.”

  Kieran narrowed his eyes. “Well I’m not about to ask you for any help, if that’s what you mean.”

  Vivian shook her head. “No, that’s not what I mean exactly. I mean that sometimes it’s very difficult to ask for help and that accepting it is even harder. If everything Vivian says is rubbish then I don’t have to think about it, or do anything with it, I can just throw it all in the bin.”

  I held my breath watching Kieran’s face. He looked as if he wanted to put Vivian in the bin.

  But he just took his stones out and started piling them up and knocking them down. I wondered if they helped him to calm down when he was upset, like me sleeping with my ribbon.

  “So if I think everything you say is rubbish,” he said after a bit, “why do I bother coming here in the first place?”

  “Only you know the answer to that,” said Vivian. “Maybe there’s a part of you that does want some help, however scary that might seem.”

  Kieran didn’t say anything this time, and Vivian’s words hung in the air. I think she was trying to say that we were being brave just by turning up to nurture group.

  “It’s time to finish now,” she said a few moments later. “Thank you for coming. I’ll see you both on Monday.”

  “You’ll be lucky,” muttered Kieran, grabbing his stones and scraping his chair back so hard it fell on the floor. “And in case you were wondering, the only reason I come here is because Mrs Palmer makes me.”

  He left his chair where it was and strode out. I waited for a moment and then walked around the table to pick it up and tuck it back under the table.

  “Thank you, Maddie. You didn’t need to do that, but I appreciate it. Things can get a bit heated in here sometimes.”

  “It’s okay, I’m not scared of Kieran,” I said, and I meant it. I used to be scared of him, but I wasn’t any more, not now I knew about his mum.

  I was just about to hand the pad back, to tell Vivian how much the sessions were helping me, even if I still found it difficult to talk about my feelings, when something caught my eye through the open door.

  It was a flash of blue.

  A flash of blue silk.

  I blinked and then looked again, wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me. Someone wearing a blue silk headscarf had just walked straight past the room and down the corridor.

  Chapter 13

  I rushed out into the corridor. It was her, the woman from the cemetery. I could see her up ahead. She was smaller than I remembered and impossibly thin, but it was definitely her. I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out. It was as if someone had stolen my voice again, like the day Nan collapsed. Wait! I thought. Don’t go. Please don’t go. I really need to talk to you.

  She disappeared round the corner heading towards the exit.

  “Wait,” I tried again, and this time it came out – not very loud, but loud enough to spur me on.

  I rushed down the corridor and round the corner, pushing past anyone who got in my way, but she wasn’t there. I swallowed down a sob, batting the tears away. She couldn’t have disappeared that quickly. She couldn’t! She must’ve gone into the school office.

  I waite
d for as long as I dared, praying she’d come out. I had to speak to her but I couldn’t go barging in without a good reason. I should’ve moved faster, called out louder. The hall began to clear around me until it was almost empty. A monitor came over to ask where I was supposed to be, threatening to report me if I didn’t go straight to class.

  It was a nightmare. I couldn’t stop thinking about her for the rest of the morning. I kept imagining a flash of blue silk every time I came out of class or turned the corner. I needed to know who she was and how she knew Nan and what she was doing here, at Church Vale. It was so frustrating. But there was no way of finding out. I didn’t even know her name.

  “What’s going on with you and Kieran Black?” said Gemma. We were in the canteen at lunch and she was staring past my shoulder across the room. “He hasn’t taken his eyes off you for a single second, not for the entire time we’ve been in here.”

  “There’s nothing going on,” I said, thinking of the nurture group and how he’d kicked off, the way he’d looked at me when he said he didn’t need any help. “I’m not even turning round.” He was only trying to intimidate me, scare me into keeping quiet, but I meant it when I said to Vivian that I wasn’t scared any more. I felt sorry for him more than anything else.

  He kicked off again later that day during art. Mrs Morris had displayed all our portraits around the studio for everyone to see, like a mini exhibition. They weren’t finished yet, but she thought it would be cool for us to see how they were progressing so far. There was a buzz in the room as we walked round, everyone talking about which ones they liked best and who they could recognize.

  Kieran turned up fifteen minutes late. By that time everyone had claimed their pictures so his was the only one left, propped up on a table against the wall. He’d done a simple portrait of a woman using very thin charcoal. I thought it was really beautiful, especially the eyes, and I wondered if it was supposed to be his mum.

  A shadow passed across his face as he scanned the room and saw the picture on show. I remembered the way he’d been working on it, bent right over the paper so no one else could see what he was doing. A split second later he lunged towards the table, grabbed the portrait and tore it in half – chucking the two torn pieces at Mrs Morris.

  It all happened so fast Mrs Morris didn’t have time to say anything or try to stop him as he stormed out of the room – she seemed to be as shocked as the rest of us. She asked us to get on with our work and then spent ages taping the two pieces of the portrait back together until it was difficult to see it had been torn in half in the first place.

  At the end of the lesson she asked me to stay back for a minute. I stood at the front waiting for the others to file out, wondering if I was in trouble. Was she going to say my marks had slipped or I wasn’t concentrating enough in class?

  “There’s no need to look so scared, Maddie,” she said when everyone had gone. “I just wanted to have a chat with you about your portrait of Gemma. You know, in all the years I’ve been doing portraits with Year Eight, yours is definitely the most unusual. I think it’s fantastic.”

  I stared at her as if she was speaking another language. My portrait? Fantastic?

  “Seriously, Maddie,” she went on. “I can’t wait until it’s finished. I’m going to get it framed and put it up where everyone can see it. I just can’t believe how well you’ve managed to capture the essence of Gemma’s face using something as simple as newspaper.”

  I couldn’t believe it either. Any of it. I was smiling so hard it felt as if my face was about to split in half.

  “That was all really,” she said. “I just wanted you to know how impressed I am and that I’ve told Mrs Palmer as well. You should be really proud.”

  I practically floated through the rest of the day. I couldn’t wait to tell Mum and Dad; it was ages since I’d had anything good to say about school. I forgot all about Kieran kicking off and the woman in the blue headscarf, it was as if Mrs Morris’s words had pushed everything else out of my head.

  I rushed out of school and down Banner Road as soon as the bell rang; my tummy flipping over every time I replayed the conversation. My portrait, the best she’d ever seen! I could feel the words fizzing around inside me, warm and bubbly, bursting to get out. I didn’t even stop at the cemetery, there was no time. I wanted to get straight home.

  I’d only been in for about half an hour when Mum and Charlie got back. They came slamming through the front door shouting at each other about something. Charlie yelled at Mum to leave him alone and then ran straight into the garden and began to kick the ball, pounding it against the wall.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, as Mum came in behind him. “I don’t think the wall can take much more!”

  “I don’t think I can take much more,” said Mum. “There’s been an incident at school.”

  “What do you mean, an incident? What happened?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. Mr Maddox was waiting for me when I went to pick him up. He said Charlie lost his temper, kicked a boy in the year below him called Finn. We had to go and talk to Mrs Conner. It sounded really bad.”

  “What did you say? Did you tell them how upset he’s been about the football team?”

  Mum shook her head. “I don’t want Charlie to get into the team just because they feel sorry for him. He’d hate that, and anyway, kicking someone, Maddie. He can’t do that however angry he gets…” She glanced out of the window to where he was kicking the ball. “I don’t know, maybe we’ve given in to him too much, treated him differently? It’s just I can’t bear to see him get hurt…”

  Charlie…it was always about Charlie. I looked past Mum’s worried face, my eyes blurring, desperate to conjure up Nan behind the kitchen counter – desperate to go back to the days when she was waiting for me after school, excited to hear my news.

  “Mrs Morris loves my portrait of Gemma,” I whispered. “She thinks it’s fantastic…”

  And suddenly Nan was there, lifting her arms above her head, cheering for me just like she used to whenever I had something exciting to tell her. She was even less smudgy than on the rounders field, more solid. I could almost stretch my hand out and touch her…

  “Maddie? Maddie?” Mum touched my arm. “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?”

  I blinked at her, confused for a moment and when I looked back there was nothing there, no outline or anything, just thin air.

  “Maddie? Please, talk to me.” Mum pulled me into her arms. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “I just miss my nan,” I said, leaning my face against her shoulder. It felt as if someone was squeezing my heart, wringing it out, as if the tears would never stop. Mum held me tight, stroking my hair, telling me over and over that everything was going to be okay, and I wanted to believe her, more than anything, but I knew it wasn’t true. Nan would never be there again. She’d never be waiting for me in the kitchen after school to hear my news.

  Dad was hardly around all weekend. He had a big rewiring job on Saturday and then on Sunday he left straight after breakfast without really saying much. Mum said he had an arrangement he couldn’t break and that there was nothing he could do. I wanted to ask her straight out if he was spending the day with Sharon, but every time I opened my mouth I had a rush of nerves and clamped it shut again; scared Mum might say something I didn’t want to hear.

  Charlie was much more vocal than me. Dad usually takes him to the park on Sunday mornings to play football with some other dads and their children and it was the third week in a row he’d missed it. He was in the foulest mood all day, slamming in and out of the house, refusing to come in for lunch, answering Mum back.

  Dad didn’t get home until just after eleven in the end. I was still awake, listening out for him, my ribbon twisted round my hand so tight it hurt. As soon as I heard his key in the door I let out a long, ragged breath, but a moment later Mum was in the hall, half-shouting, half-hissing at him for being so late.

  I sat up, straining to
hear what she was saying…something about putting us second and getting his loyalties wrong.

  “I knew this would happen,” she said, her voice growing louder. “You don’t know what sort of day I’ve had. It’s so bloody selfish. Leaving me here to pick up the pieces! It’s up to you to talk to the kids. I can’t keep fobbing them off. It’s Charlie’s check-up next week and I’m already worried enough about that!”

  I couldn’t hear what Dad said back, if he said anything, but Mum went on and on. He was letting us down, putting himself first, forgetting his responsibilities, upsetting everyone. It was horrible. She was still hurling insults at him when Charlie pushed my door open.

  “Do something, Maddie,” he said. “Please, I don’t like it. Make them stop.”

  I pulled my covers back. “Come on, you can sleep in here with me if you don’t mind squashing up.”

  He stumbled over in the dark and climbed in. “I hate it when Mum gets angry with Dad. It sounds like she hates him, like they’ll never make up.”

  “I’m sure it sounds worse than it is,” I said, wrapping my arms round him, holding him close. “Don’t you remember what Nan used to say whenever Mum was cross?”

  He shook his head, snuggling closer, his body hot and sticky through his T-shirt.

  “You must remember. She used to say, Calm down, Sophie. There’s no point getting your kippers in a twist.”

  “It’s not kippers, Maddie, it’s knickers.”

  “Well, some people say knickers, but not Nan. She always said kippers.”

  “Don’t get your kippers in a twist,” Charlie said sleepily. “That’s funny.” He lay very still for a bit. I thought he’d dropped off to sleep, but then he said, “I’m not sorry I hurt Finn the other day. Mrs Conner made me apologize but I had my fingers crossed behind my back so it doesn’t count.”