seven
SNEAKING OUT
I look like a cat burglar. Which is exactly the idea. I’m dressed in black from head to toe; black polo-neck sweater, black jeans (with a bit of stretch in them so I can climb anything I need to), and black trainers. I stare at myself in my bedroom mirror. Because my hair is almost black too, my face and hands are the only white things about me, floating eerily in the darkened room.
It’s a quarter past ten, and Aunt Gwen thinks I’m having an early night. But I’m not. I’m sneaking out to see Jase.
I want to see him so badly my whole body’s burning up.
Maybe if I’d been able to talk to Taylor after dinner, I could have let off some steam. I wanted so much to hang out with her, pour out all my frustration, tell her about the awful scene Aunt Gwen made today in the coffee shop, her threats, and then, to cap it off, bumping into Mr. Barnes outside my grandmother’s suite. But she’s gone all weird on me. Instead of drinking hot chocolate in her room after dinner like usual (tragically, this is what counts as debauchery here at Wakefield Hall. Or it did, before Plum came along. Right now they’re probably all drinking cocktails, popping prescription pills, and taking photos of each other starkers), Taylor said she had a ton of geography homework to do and slunk off in the direction of the dormitory block. I’m not ashamed to say that I pleaded with her. I really needed her company, and I felt very alone. But nothing I said had any effect.
I’m pretty sure that it’s Plum who’s wound her up like this; what’s baffling is why. Taylor is supertough and supercool. Very little bothers her, and if it does she tends to respond with maximum force. She says she wants to be a PI (which is a private investigator, in America), but secretly, the more I get to know her, the more I think she’s better suited to a job that involves a lot of jumping out of planes, breaking down doors, and kicking people’s bums. Or asses, as she would say.
So it’s even more of a mystery that my best and only friend, who’s so reluctant to back down from anything that she’d challenge Wonder Woman to an arm-wrestling match, is knuckling under to Plum.
I know how Plum operates by now. She likes to find your weakness and torment you with it. The only possible theory I can formulate is that Plum has some dirt on Taylor, and she’s let Taylor know about it, which is why Taylor won’t take Plum on.
But what could it possibly be? Taylor, as far as I know, is squeaky clean.
I shake my head, hard. It’s a mystery, but not one I have time to solve at the moment. I file it away in the back of my brain for later. Maybe a solution will pop into my head when I’m least expecting it: that happens sometimes.
For now, I’ve got to focus on the task ahead. Being a cat burglar. Sort of. Jase is going to meet me at the barn at ten-thirty, and I have to get out of here without Aunt Gwen having the slightest idea I’m sneaking out.
I opened the window hours ago, which was clever of me, because even though it’s been cold in here, there won’t be any telltale squeaking now to announce that I’m about to climb out onto the sill. I sit there, legs hanging, and swiftly run over my options. There’s a big oak tree ten feet away from the house, and one of its branches reaches close to the window. I used to climb along it when I was small, but that was back in the days when I was a little skinny, spindly monkey, before I got my period and the boobs and hips that came along with it. I seriously don’t think that branch will bear my weight now.
Aunt Gwen is watching telly in the living room below. The last thing I want is for her viewing of Antiques Roadshow to be interrupted by a huge crash from outside as a branch snaps under me and I hit the ground, snapping some bones in the process. And what with me dressed like a cat burglar, I can hardly claim that I was sleepwalking. Or sleepclimbing.
Once, I threw myself out of this window, caught and swung off a farther branch, and hit the ground running. I was chasing Taylor, believe it or not. But that was in daylight, when I could see clearly where I was aiming, and I took a run at it and probably made more noise than a stampeding herd of elephants. Even if noise weren’t a factor, I don’t trust myself to carry off that jump in the dark safely. I did gymnastics for years, and at the level at which I was competing, it’s all about calculated risk. Can I do that backflip on a beam and land on my feet, not my head? I think I can, and so does my coach. So off I go, and try not to break my neck.
Looking at that far branch, a dim shadow in the dark night, I don’t think I can. So I won’t be risking it. Though there’s soft yielding grass below, it’s too high to jump safely. So that leaves only one option.
The drainpipe.
A clock is ticking in my mind. Jase is waiting for me, and I have to get going. I scooch along the windowsill to the right, till I feel the drainpipe with my feet. Reaching out gingerly, I pull at it, gently at first and then harder, as hard as I can without falling off the windowsill: I have to be sure it’ll hold my weight.
It groans, metal under strain, but it barely budges from the wall. I’m banking on the fact that my grandmother is very strict about maintenance on Wakefield Hall and all its surrounding cottages and barns and outbuildings. Aunt Gwen is very precise too. I don’t think either of them will have let the drainpipe on the gatekeeper’s cottage get rusty enough to come away from the wall.
Time to put my money where my mouth is.
I’m still holding the drainpipe, and now I wrap my hands around it, feeling for the bolt that anchors it to the wall, digging my fingers in to stabilize my grip as I wriggle my bottom right off the edge of the windowsill. I shoot my knees out toward the pipe, clamping onto it as soon as they close over it, so tightly my bones hurt straightaway with the pressure.
A split second later, my entire body is supported only by my death grip on the drainpipe, fingers and knees straining. Aaaaaah, a voice in my head is saying very loudly. Aaaaaah. I don’t like this one little bit.
Shut up, I say back. It’s too late now. And you’re distracting me.
My wrists are locked strongly around the pipe, strongly enough so that I can release my knees a fraction and slide them down a foot or so, as far as I can safely go. I clamp them again once they’re in place and then, very cautiously, take one hand off the pipe—my left, the weaker one—and bring it down, again, as far as I can go, feeling for another bolt, a stud, anything that will give me enough purchase to hold on to it.
Nothing. The pipe is completely smooth and slippery. My fingers slide right down it. Panicking a little, I reach out farther, to the wall, and mercifully, scrabbling along the bricks, I find I can just get the tips of my fingers between two of them.
It’s lucky I’m not one of those girls who worry about the state of their fingernails.
I squash myself flat against the pipe, bracing myself with the fingers of my left hand crammed between the bricks, as, gingerly, I unwrap my right hand from the bolt above me. I don’t have enough purchase to go along the wall to find another gap in the bricks, so in desperation I shove my whole hand around the pipe and manage to make a sort of hook with my elbow, as if I’m giving the drainpipe a really clumsy hug. But it’s enough to keep me upright, and as I unwedge my aching left hand from between the bricks, I manage, using my thigh muscles, to slide down the pipe inch by inch, the crook of my right arm bracing me around the pipe and taking some of the strain off my knees. I try to dig my feet into the pipe, but the rubber on my shoes catches on the metal and slows my progress, which is the last thing I want.
Ow. Ow ow ow. My knees are being rubbed painfully raw by my jeans. I chance a quick look over my shoulder; it’s too dark out for me to see the ground, but I’m below the tree branches now, and that should just about mean I’m close enough …
Thrusting back against the wall with my left hand, I unwind the right one and push off clumsily, launching myself back as far as I can. I’m aiming for the grass, not the flower beds, and though it’s by no means a clean landing—I turn a foot and have to roll over it to avoid twisting my ankle—when I catch my breath and look around
me, I’m on the grass, well clear of the lavender beds below my window, and I’m almost sure the pipe didn’t make any telltale creaking sounds as I shoved away from it.
The lights are on in Aunt Gwen’s living room, the curtains drawn, the blue flicker of the TV showing faintly through the crack between them. I listen closely for half a minute, but all I hear is a commercial for some yogurt that will keep you regular and banish bloating. Aunt Gwen doesn’t turn the sound down or get up and look out of the window.
I’ve made it. I feel a small hot explosion of relief, like a firecracker going off in my head.
This is only the start, though, I tell myself, rising to my feet. Don’t get cocky. You still have to get back and forth from the barn without crazy Mr. Barnes catching you.
And then you have to climb back in again.
I take a long loop through the grounds, around the back of the main hall, past the lake enclosure, over the hockey fields, across Lime Walk, around the netball courts, and over the fence that marks the boundary beyond which Wakefield Hall girls are not allowed to go.
Having grown up and played here for years and years all by myself in the school holidays, I know the grounds so well I could pretty much run through them blindfolded. I never thought this familiarity would come in so useful. Plus, my regular runs with Taylor, who sets a punishing pace, have ensured that I’m fitter than I’ve ever been.
All of which I’m hugely grateful for. Because now that I’m so close to seeing Jase, I feel that my heart’s about to explode out of my chest with excitement and anticipation.
Me and Jase, together, in the dark, where no one can interrupt us or break in on us or pull us away from each other.
I literally cannot wait.
I make it to the barn in under ten minutes, my breath not even coming that fast. As I skid to a halt, turning my trainers on the roughly packed dirt surrounding the barn, I feel as if I’m having an out-of-body experience, as if I’m floating out of my own skin. I want to be with Jase right now, this instant, in his arms, hugging him, breathing in his scent, feeling the solid, muscular heft of his chest rise and fall, his arms as tight around me as mine are around him …
“Jase?” I whisper. “Jase?”
No answer. I’m sure that in his text he said to meet outside the barn, and I pad up to the wall, touching it, feeling for the loose planks, making sure I’m in the right place.
Sure enough, one of the planks comes away in my hands as soon as I try to move it. I look inside the pitch-black interior and whisper:
“Jase?” My voice is absorbed instantly into the darkness. Not a single echo. It’s soaked up as if I’d never breathed a word.
I’m about five minutes late, but that doesn’t mean anything. Jase certainly won’t have come and gone already.
Maybe his dad’s kicking up a fuss, and Jase needs to wait till he’s gone to bed, or passed out. Maybe something else has come up that’s delayed him. I lean against the wall of the barn, and wait.
That’s the really annoying thing. You say you can’t bear to wait, you feel like you’ll burst if you have to hold out a moment longer to see your boyfriend. But then he isn’t there, and you have to do what you thought you could never manage: you have to wait for him, even though it’s agony and you want to scratch your arms up with whatever nails you have left just to get a bit of the frustration out.
I didn’t bring my phone. I didn’t think I’d need it: all I needed to know was that I had a rendezvous with Jase at ten-thirty. Now, of course, I’m kicking myself black and blue for not having my phone on me.
Did he get here early? I think, my brain racing. Did he get here so early that he thought he’d wait for me inside, go up to the loft, and maybe fall asleep on the blankets?
I know it’s incredibly unlikely, especially as the planks are leaning in place against the hole in the barn wall, but the waiting is driving me mad. I slide the plank farther aside and crawl in through the hole, feeling in my pocket for the tiny torch attached to my key ring, pulling it out, and clicking it on. It throws out a beam only a few inches wide, barely enough to see my hand in front of my face, and if I hadn’t been to the barn before, if I didn’t know my way around, it wouldn’t be any use at all.
As it is, it gets me across the barn without crashing into the tractor, and up the ladder. I know Jase isn’t up in the loft, curled up in a warm nest of hay, wrapped in blankets, fast asleep, waiting for me to curl up next to him so he can throw an arm over me while we cuddle together. I know it’s a total fantasy.
And of course it is. He’s not there. There’s no one in this barn but me.
Eventually, I emerge. The night air is cold after the shelter of the barn, and still Jase is nowhere to be seen. I squat down miserably to wait some more, my ears pricked to hear any movement, any footfalls that could possibly, conceivably, be Jase running across the grass to keep our appointment.
It’s past eleven by my watch when I stop being upset that he’s not here and start to be scared for him.
What if he’s having a fight with his dad? I think, rising to my feet. What if something really bad’s happening at their cottage?
I know it’s not a good idea. I should go back to Aunt Gwen’s instead, climb up to my room, check my phone and see if Jase has been trying to get in touch. But as soon as the image pops into my head of Jase and his dad, fighting, as I saw them once before by the lake when Jase was trying to protect me, I can’t leave it alone.
I can hear the yelling from the Barnes cottage as I approach, and my feelings are incredibly mixed. I’d recognize Jase’s voice anywhere, so I know that’s him, shouting at his dad, and although I hate that they’re fighting, I’m also hugely, stupidly relieved that it was this that kept Jase from coming out to meet me. Not that he doesn’t care about me, or that he met someone else.
I know it’s probably ridiculous to have these insecurities, and that they’re much more to do with me than they are with Jase. I don’t bang on about them to him. But every so often I look at a girl like Susan, or Plum, if I’m honest, and I do think: God, there are so many girls out there prettier than me. And Jase is so gorgeous. What if he wakes up one day and realizes that he could have any girl he wants?
The curtains at the downstairs windows are all drawn. I can’t see anything.
“For the last time, you’re not going anywhere, boy!” Mr. Barnes’s unmistakable bellow rattles the windowpanes.
“Dad, I just want to get some fresh air—”
“You’re a liar!”
This is bad. I can’t bear the frustration of not being able to see inside. Desperately, I look around for an elevated area, because the curtains are those old-fashioned ones, like they have in the coffee shop, that only cover the lower part of the window; the upper panes are clear, light pouring through them.
There’s a cherry tree behind me. Not ideal, because it has whippy, thin branches, which bend and buckle under me and aren’t wide enough to sit on in any comfort. But I swarm up it in record time, and wedge myself into a really awkward, narrow V by the trunk, my bottom braced between two branches, each only a few inches wide. They cut into me, but I wrap my arms around a higher branch, pulling myself up to take a little strain off the ones I’m sitting on, and twist so I get a good view down into the cottage.
The Barnes cottage is as old-fashioned as its gingham curtains. It still has the original layout, with a central staircase and a kitchen on one side, probably with the bathroom beyond it to keep all the plumbing together, and a living room on the other. I can see the living room, the foot of the stairs, and a good chunk of the kitchen. And I can see Jase, standing by the door, his motorbike jacket on, yelling:
“I can go out for a walk if I want to! I’ll be up for college in the morning!”
“Don’t give me that!” shouts his father. I spot Mr. Barnes, his bulky body propped up in a recliner, his face red and swollen, his fist raised. “You’re going out to moon round after that Wakefield girl! I know you, Jase Barnes!”<
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“So what!” Jase sounds really angry. “Even if I am, what’s it got to do with you?”
He swings around, reaching for the door. This provokes Mr. Barnes, who levers himself up to his feet, his face distended with rage, and yells:
“Don’t you turn your back on me when I’m talking to you!”
Jase cranes back, and I see anger in his face, his eyes blazing gold with fury. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him like this, and it shocks me, even scares me a little, because I can tell he’s itching for a fight.
“Or what, Dad?” Jase says, taking a step toward his father.
“D’you want me to take a belt to you, like I did when you were little? Do you?” his father shouts, swaying on his feet. “You’re not too old to feel the back of my hand!”
“Oh yes I am! Want me to prove it to you?” Jase yells back.
My breath catches as I see that Jase’s hands are clenched into fists.
And at that moment, someone pushes past Jase and interposes her small body between him and his father.
It’s Jase’s grandmother. I’ve rarely been so grateful to see anyone in my life.
“That’s enough!” she pipes in a high, eldritch voice. “I won’t have this shouting, you hear me? I’m sick of it! Kevin, the boy’s grown now. He’s too old for this kind of nonsense, can’t you see that?”
“Nonsense?” Jase says bitterly.
“And you, keep a civil tongue in your head,” his grandmother says, turning on him.
White hair piled messily on top of her head, little wire-framed glasses shoved high up her nose, her dowager’s hump bowing her spine, she looks tiny and frail between the bulk of Jase’s father and Jase himself, with his height and his square shoulders. She’s wearing a floral winceyette dressing gown, a white nightie showing at the neck, and she’s resting heavily on her stick, both hands pressed down on it; clearly she’d topple over if it were taken away from her.
Scarlet Wakefield 03 - Kiss In The Dark Page 6