Burning Secrets

by Clare Chambers

  “Thanks,” Daniel called after his departing back.

  “Do you think he’s a bit weird?” Louie asked, without troubling to lower her voice.

  “I dunno,” muttered Daniel. “Probably.” He shook his head. “This place.”

  “We’re going to be all right though, aren’t we?” said Louie, looking to him for reassurance.

  “Yeah. Course we are. Anyway, it’s better than…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Lissmore was never mentioned. The word was as unspeakable as cancer.

  They set off, following the path inland, keeping Chet on the lead in case he started chasing sheep. It was a hot, still day and the sun was pressing down from an empty sky. Louie must be boiling in that sweater, thought Daniel. But she would never wear short sleeves, however hot it was. Another unmentionable. Perhaps if they could find an empty beach like the one yesterday, with no one around, she might be persuaded to put on a swimsuit and go in the sea. She used to like swimming before the business with her arms.

  The footpath led them through fields of sugar beet, rapeseed and neatly furrowed soil parcelled up into tidy squares by dense hedgerows, on to the moor. On a distant hill what appeared at first to be a crucified man revealed itself to be a sagging scarecrow guarding a bare unploughed field. Above their heads birds with long forked tails wheeled and soared gracefully.

  “What are those birds called?” Louie asked.

  “Dunno,” said Daniel. “Birds all look the same to me.”

  After twenty minutes of steady walking the path divided, offering Stape to the left or Darrow to the right. Daniel remembered the name Stape from the previous day and turned automatically left, along a dirt track marked by the imprint of horses’ hooves. They wound their way upwards, beating off clouds of midges hovering at face level. From the top of a stile they had a panoramic view of brown moorland criss-crossed by footpaths and one snaking road. Beyond and below the moor lay the village of Stape, dominated by a large brick-and-glass structure that was unmistakably the school. It was surrounded by lush playing fields, on which groups of children appeared to be crawling around as if hunting for something.

  “I didn’t think term had started,” said Daniel.

  “Why would anyone go back before they had to?” Louie replied with a shudder. The thought of school, any school, made her queasy. Even the architecture depressed her.

  “What are they doing?” Daniel wondered aloud, watching the children foraging. It looked like a fingertip search of a crime scene.

  “Perhaps it’s some sort of punishment,” suggested Louie. “Like litter duty. Perhaps they have to weed the whole field.”

  They carried on, hot and thirsty by now and hoping that there would be somewhere to buy a drink. They hadn’t thought to bring anything, forgetting that unlike London, snacks might not be available on every corner, round the clock. After half an hour they reached the boundary of the school playing field and stopped for a moment to rest. At closer range they could see that the children weren’t as young as they’d first supposed, but were mostly teenagers, and were picking leaves from amongst the blades of grass and collecting them in pockets, paper bags or plastic lunchboxes. Those nearest the boundary stopped and glanced up at the newcomers, shielding their eyes against the glare of the sun. This movement triggered a Mexican wave effect around the field, with everyone gradually abandoning what they were doing and kneeling up to get a proper look. Daniel and Louie walked on hurriedly.

  Another few minutes brought them to the village itself – a dozen or so houses around a triangular green formed by the convergence of three roads. In the middle of the green was a pond, patrolled by pristine white ducks, and there was outdoor seating – overspill from the café opposite – which was occupied by a group of teenagers drinking coffee and enjoying the last gasps of summer.

  Daniel had the sensation of stepping out on stage as he and Louie made their self-conscious way across the green towards the café. Conversation at the tables fell silent as they passed, all eyes following their progress with frank but not unfriendly curiosity. The back of Daniel’s neck felt warm and prickly, as though stares of that intensity could actually generate their own heat.

  “Do we look like aliens or something?” Louie hissed as they reached the safety of the pavement.

  “I don’t know whether I feel like a celebrity or a freak,” Daniel muttered back, hooking Chet’s lead to a bollard and settling him down with a Bonio.

  Inside the café was no better. All heads turned as Daniel and Louie hovered in the doorway, uncertain whether to sit and wait to be served or order from the counter. Fortunately the woman behind the till came to their rescue and beckoned them forward. “What can I get you?” she asked, smiling helpfully. There didn’t seem to be anything much on display, apart from a modest selection of filled rolls.

  “A Diet Coke and a Tango, please,” said Daniel, bringing out a handful of change.

  The woman sucked in her breath and shook her head as though Daniel had requested some rare and exotic cocktail. “I don’t think I’ve got any of that. Goodness me, Coca-Cola. That’s a blast from the past. No one’s asked me for one of those for a long time.”

  Daniel and Louie glanced at each other. “Oh, er, well, Sprite, 7-Up, whatever?” Louie suggested.

  Again, this drew a blank. Daniel began to wonder if this was a wind-up, a special way of letting strangers know they weren’t welcome, but the woman didn’t seem hostile. On the contrary she was full of apologies for not stocking what they were after. He glanced around to see what the others in the café were drinking: bottled water, black coffee and glasses of murky-looking lemon squash.

  “Water?” Daniel suggested, uncomfortably aware that they were the focus of fascinated attention, and wanting only to get away as quickly as possible.

  “Hold on,” said the woman, as if struck by inspiration. “There might be some of that stuff out the back.” Before they could protest, she clattered through a curtain of plastic beads and a moment later they could hear the distant sound of furniture removal, crates being dragged across the floor and bottles clanking. Minutes passed, Daniel and Louie’s discomfort increasing as whispered conversations struck up at the tables behind them, the words ‘new’ and ‘yesterday’ and ‘Brow’, clearly audible above the murmur.

  Beside him he could sense Louie beginning to simmer. She couldn’t stand being stared at, whispered about, sniggered over. That sensation of walking into a room and it falling silent because everyone has just been bitching about you. He gave her neck a reassuring squeeze as she bristled.

  “Here we are,” said a triumphant voice and the woman reappeared brandishing two dusty bottles of budget brand cola, their labels faded to pink. “Found them!” They were warm to the touch and didn’t look very appetising, but Daniel didn’t want to hurt her feelings by refusing. He held out a palm full of coins, but the woman waved it away. “I won’t charge you,” she said, “seeing as they’re a bit old.”

  They mumbled their thanks and turned to leave, a dozen or more pairs of eyes boring into them with undisguised curiosity, as they threaded their way between the tables.

  At the exit Louie stopped, suddenly made confident by the prospect of their departure. “Do you mind?” she addressed the room. “It is actually quite rude to stare.”

  Daniel bundled her out of the door on to the pavement, sweating with embarrassment. “What did you want to go and do that for?” he demanded. “Now we’ll never be able to go back in there!”

  “Like we want to go back to a café that only sells water!” Louie retorted. “Or flat, warm hundred-year-old Coke.” She blew the fluff off her bottle and opened the lid – it surrendered its last remaining bubble of gas with a faint sigh. “Oh, gross. I’m not drinking that,” she said, pouring it into the gutter. Immediately half a dozen wasps materialised from nowhere.

  “She was only trying to be nice.”

  “I don’t like being gawped at,” snapped Louie.

  “Well, s
top being so loud and lairy then,” Daniel hissed, bending down to untie Chet. He’d been brought a plastic dish of water and he was drinking noisily.

  Daniel looked around for someone to thank, at which point one of the girls drinking coffee at the picnic tables detached herself from the group as if taking up a dare and sauntered over, chewing. She had blonde hair done up in plaits and was wearing a dazzling white shirt and shorts. She had blue eyes and peachy skin, and if she was wearing any make-up it was too subtle for Daniel to notice. She looked – the word leapt to his mind – clean.

  “Hello,” she said, turning from him to Louie as if to share herself out evenly. “You’re new, aren’t you?”

  “We’re new to here,” Daniel replied.

  “I’m Ramsay Arkin,” said the girl, holding out a hand to shake.

  Daniel tugged her hand with its neat oval fingernails, so different from Louie’s sore nibbled stumps which she was now doing her best to conceal.

  “I live over there.” She pointed vaguely in the direction they’d come from. “We’re having a sort of end-of-the-holidays barbecue tomorrow night. Come if you want.”

  “Who’s we?” asked Daniel.

  “A bunch of us from school. That lot.” She indicated her friends on the green. “Plus a few others. We’ll just cook sausages and play volleyball on the beach. No big deal.”

  “What beach?” Daniel asked, although he’d already decided he wouldn’t go.

  “Joff Bay.”

  Daniel shook his head. “I don’t know it.”

  “Well, you were walking on it yesterday afternoon.” She bit her bottom lip to stop herself smiling at this admission.

  “Oh.” Daniel was taken aback. He tried to remember whether he’d done anything embarrassing, apart from rooting around in a bin. “I never saw you.”

  “I was up on the cliff with my sister.”

  “I didn’t realise it was called Joff Bay. We only got here—”

  “I know. You only got here yesterday. You’re from London, and you’re staying at The Brow.”

  “You seem to know a lot about us,” Louie said, bridling. “Are we under surveillance?”

  She gave a tinkly laugh, revealing teeth stained bright green. Daniel and Louie tried not to look startled. “Oh, it’s nothing personal,” she said cheerfully. “It’s just the Wragge grapevine. I practically know what you had for dinner.”

  I’ve got a pretty good idea what you had for lunch, Daniel thought. He’d quite fancied her until he’d seen those teeth.

  “Everybody knows everybody’s secrets here,” she added over her shoulder as she went to rejoin her friends, hips and plaits swinging as she walked.

  Daniel and Louie exchanged a look: you don’t know ours.

  “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  The man sitting on the other side of the desk had my file open in front of him, tilted away so I couldn’t read it. He said he was my key worker and told me to call him Alan. I thought it meant he was the one who would lock me in. That’s how much I knew.

  “I meant you shouldn’t be at Lissmore,” he said. “It’s not for lads like you.”

  For a second I felt hopeful: maybe they’d changed their minds and would let me go. Then a sudden plunging dread: maybe they were sending me somewhere worse.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “You’ve never been in any kind of trouble before this.” He read on slowly, shaking his head. “You’re not a Lissmore boy,” he said.

  This was a compliment: they were psychos.

  You know that feeling you get when you’re coming home on the night bus and someone gets on and comes weaving along the aisle, off his face, looking for a fight? You sit there trying to make yourself invisible, gazing out of the window as though there’s something out there so interesting you hadn’t noticed the psychopath on the bus. And you don’t dare stand up and go downstairs where it’s safer, because the minute you move he’ll notice you. The other passengers are doing exactly the same as you: all trying to be invisible, knowing that one of you is going to get your head kicked in and hoping like hell it isn’t them. That was the feeling I had at Lissmore. Every day.

  Chapter 5

  “AND IF YOU come when all the flowers are dying And I am dead, as dead I well may be…”

  Fifteen clear soprano voices bounced off the high walls of Stape High’s music room and the teacher let her fingers trail across the piano keys, until the singers straggled to a halt. She had never come across a choir with such tuneful voices and yet so little musical sense. They sang as if they were reading out a shopping list. “Could we try that again with a little bit of emotion?” she pleaded. “Danny Boy is meant to be a sad song. It’s famous for reducing beefy Irishmen to tears. But not the way you’re singing it, girls.”

  In the back row of the choir Ramsay was finding herself distracted by thoughts of another boy. He hadn’t turned up to the beach barbecue, which was a shame as she’d worn her new red dress and ended up getting sand and sausage fat on it for nothing. And they’d been back at school for a week now and every day he’d failed to turn up. Ramsay’s one tiny criticism of life on Wragge, which was otherwise perfect, was the lack of new faces. It was reassuring to know and be known by everybody on the island, to be safe wherever you went day or night. She hated the way people lived in cities; squashed together in their little boxes, not talking to the neighbours, frightened to go out after dark. But sometimes Ramsay wondered what it would be like to walk into a roomful of strangers: people who hadn’t already made up their mind about her because they knew her parents and her grandparents and had watched her grow up. It would be nice, just once in a while, to go to a party and not be absolutely certain that she would know every single person there.

  Visitors from the mainland or abroad were a rarity – like her friend Georgie’s cousin Josh who came for Christmas. He had been at all the parties, but she’d hardly spoken to him because he was always surrounded by a crowd of admirers. Although more than once she’d caught him staring at her. Then at the New Year’s Eve fireworks at Port Julian she found herself next to him when the countdown to midnight began, and he had grabbed her hand and in the confusion of everyone saying “Happy New Year” and hugging each other he’d pulled her around the back of the war memorial and kissed her. It was the best moment of her life. You could still see the crushed poppies where she’d stumbled and stuck her foot through the wreath. The next day he went back to the mainland and she never saw him again. He’d be eighteen now, she supposed. At university or off travelling somewhere.

  As she sang, Ramsay made a mental list of the known facts about the new occupants of The Brow. Their name was Milman. The mum had inherited the cottage from old Mr Ericsson. (She knew this because her dad was Mr Ericsson’s solicitor, and had witnessed the will.) There seemed to be no dad around. Someone in the house was an artist, because there was an easel in one of the upstairs windows which wasn’t there when Mr Ericsson was alive. Mrs Milman smoked Benson & Hedges and drank Bombay Sapphire Gin and someone in the house was a vegetarian, according to Ellen, who had a Saturday job at the grocer’s shop. She’d overheard Kenny the handyman, their nearest neighbour, telling the school cook he’d seen the kitchen light burning through the night – that they sometimes didn’t go to bed before 3 a.m. It painted a slightly odd picture of family life that made Ramsay curious to know more.

  “But come you back when summer’s in the meadow,” the choir warbled, mechanically, “Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow…”

  “You’re bringing tears to my eyes, girls,” the music teacher called out as she laboured away at the piano, “for all the wrong reasons.”

  Chapter 6

  OVER THE NEXT few days when he was out walking Chet, Daniel often found himself drawn in the direction of Stape High. He would stand at the edge of the field looking at the rows of silhouetted figures at their desks. It gave him a buzz to be outside and free, while othe
rs were stuck inside working. Since Lissmore he couldn’t stand being shut in.

  If it was break or lunchtime and there were students out on the field then he would walk straight past without slowing down. He didn’t like being stared at either.

  Sometimes he would see shuttlecocks or basketballs flying to and fro through the high windows of the gym. That wasn’t such a good feeling. Sport was one of the things he missed. Louie was no good as an opponent; she could hardly catch a ball without falling over, and never cared whether she won or lost. Swimming was OK, because you were competing against yourself, but only team games gave you that sense of belonging. Already, the novelty of ‘home education’ was wearing off, and he was bored with his own company.

  Another reason for choosing this route was the possibility of seeing the girl from the café. He hadn’t gone to the party on the beach and regretted it almost immediately. Now people would think he was stuck-up or unfriendly or just a recluse, and there would be no more invitations. He kept on looking out for her, although he wasn’t sure he would recognise her in a crowd. Her face had become confused in his memory with a girl back in London who used to catch his bus. She was much older and never even glanced at him, but he’d fancied her like crazy. Once, when there were no other spaces upstairs, she’d sat in the empty seat beside him, and immediately turned her back so she could talk to her mates. When she leant forward her T-shirt rode up and he could see the top of her thong showing above the waistband of her jeans. It amazed him that he could find this tiny T-shaped bit of elastic so exciting. Now her face was a blur too, all mixed up with blonde plaits and green teeth.

  It was Chet who indirectly brought Daniel into much closer contact with Stape High and its occupants. On one of their walks Daniel had let the dog off the lead as soon as they came down off the moors into the village and Chet had been trotting happily along at his side.

  As they passed the boundary of the school grounds Chet’s ears pricked up. He had noticed something interesting in the distance – a cat or a squirrel – and before Daniel could grab his collar he took off across the field, straight through the middle of a five-a-side football match, barking joyfully.