Sworn Secret

by Amanda Jennings

  She ran all the way to Haydn’s house, worried she would lose her nerve if she didn’t get there quickly. When she reached the front door she was so out of breath she had to stand panting on the doorstep, waiting to catch her breath before ringing the doorbell.

  Mrs Howe looked shocked to see her and seemed unsure what to say. Her mouth opened then closed again.

  ‘Can I talk to Haydn?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure—’

  ‘He lent me something. I need to give it back to him.’ Lizzie spoke quickly, her stomach tumbling over itself as her bravery seeped away.

  Mrs Howe looked up and down the street over Lizzie’s shoulder then crossed her arms; her eyes turned hard. ‘I think you should be at home with your mother.’

  Lizzie felt her cheeks grow warm. From the tang of judgement in Mrs Howe’s voice, Lizzie figured she must be even more disappointed with her mum than she had imagined she would be. She looked at her feet and tried to steady her racing heart. She felt protective of her mother, wanted to explain how hard the year had been for her, make her deputy head realize she wasn’t herself, but sort of semi-permanently out of normal operation, and that though she might well be existing on a day-to-day basis, she wasn’t really living, because rightly or wrongly she didn’t seem to see the point of it. Maybe hearing those things would take that nasty edge out of Mrs Howe’s voice. But Lizzie couldn’t say any of it, not because it wasn’t true, but because if she said all those things then Mrs Howe might conclude that Lizzie wasn’t enough to keep her mum going, that Lizzie being alive was pale in comparison with Anna being dead.

  ‘Is Haydn in?’ she mumbled.

  ‘He’s in his room. He won’t want to come down. Just give me whatever it is.’ She presented the flat of her hand and flicked her fingers. ‘I’ll tell him you dropped—’

  Haydn’s face beside her stopped her flow. She plastered a bright smile on her face, and when she spoke, her voice was lighter. ‘Haydn, sweetheart, Elizabeth came to return something. I told her you were probably too busy to see her.’

  Lizzie tried to speak but found she couldn’t.

  ‘Do you want to come up?’ Haydn asked. His voice was almost too quiet to hear. He glanced at his mother. ‘That’s OK, right?’

  Lizzie looked at Mrs Howe, who sighed impatiently. ‘It’s not a good time, Haydn. I’m not sure—’

  ‘She won’t stay long. Five minutes,’ Haydn said, and then looked at Lizzie and gestured with a jerk of his head towards the stairs. ‘Come on.’

  Lizzie didn’t know what to do. Her deputy head clearly didn’t want her to come in, but she was desperate to follow him. She hovered on the doorstep and braved another glance at Mrs Howe.

  ‘Fine,’ Mrs Howe puffed. ‘Five minutes.’

  Lizzie dropped her head so she didn’t have to look at her as she passed, and followed Haydn, wordless, up the stairs. They reached a door at the far end of the corridor. It was covered in peeling black-edged football stickers, a Keep Out sign and scribbled black marker pen over every centimetre of exposed gloss paintwork. He disappeared inside, but she paused, suddenly self-conscious, worried about what she would say when they finally got to his room.

  ‘You coming in?’ he called from inside.

  Lizzie told herself not to be so wet, and tried to invoke the spirit of her sister, who would have skipped in and leapt on to his bed, legs crossed, smile on.

  Though not quite skipping, she managed to step inside. She was immediately knocked sideways by the smell, a mush of masculine sprays, stale cigarettes and sheets that hadn’t been changed for maybe months, a giddy, unfamiliar cocktail that was both exciting and intimidating. The room, too, was like nothing she’d seen before. Like the door, every spare bit of wall was covered. Heaving leather-clad Neanderthals who bared their teeth and shook sweat-drenched hair rocked guitars next to photographs of bloodied animals with political slogans scrawled beneath. There were CD covers, train and cinema tickets, handwritten paragraphs surrounded by biro cartoons, flattened lager cans and beer mats and foreign bank notes. Lizzie felt her cheeks redden at the naked torso of a part-plastic woman who snarled scarlet lips, her hands clasped and tied with a leather strap, legs dressed from stiletto heel to thigh in black. She thought of her own bedroom. Of the white wallpaper dotted with tiny blue flowers, the coordinating curtains and bedspread that covered her neatly made bed, the three framed prints: Van Gogh’s bedroom, Dali’s clock, Klimt’s kiss.

  Her eyes took their time wandering the display, and when they finally came to rest, they did so on a drawing stuck to the wall by his pillow. It was a drawing she knew. She moved close enough to look at it properly, folding her arms protectively across her stomach. Described in black ink, the drawing showed a cavernous empty room. There was a cage in the corner with a naked girl crouched inside, who gripped the bars of her cage with both hands. Behind her was a pair of enormous folded wings, like an angel’s, feathered in extraordinary detail. The girl’s inked face stared back at her. Her eyes were full and watery, pools of longing, and the marks used to draw them were finer than hair. Her lips were opened as if she were about to ask something. Lizzie expected to hear her familiar voice at any second begging to be freed.

  ‘It’s one of Anna’s,’ she said.

  She stared at it, biting back tears. Her sister was an amazing artist. She took after their mum. Lizzie was all maths and logic like their father. She wasn’t dreadful at drawing, but her stuff lacked creative flair. Where her houses always had four windows, a front door and a neat spiral of smoke coming out of a rectangular chimney, Anna’s would perch on rocky outcrops with windows made from irregular panes of rainbow glass.

  ‘She was brilliant at art.’

  Haydn didn’t reply.

  ‘She used to tell me all the time that she felt caged, that there was so much out there she couldn’t get at.’ Lizzie tore her eyes off the girl in the cage. ‘I’d say there was life all around her, but she used to laugh at me as if I didn’t get it.’ Lizzie paused. ‘She was wrong, though. I did get it.’ They caught eyes for a moment and Lizzie flushed, suddenly self-conscious.

  While they waited for the heaviness of Lizzie’s words to lift out of the room, Haydn reached across the desk and picked up a bag of tobacco and began to roll a cigarette. Lizzie checked the door, suddenly worried in case his mother or, even worse, his father, came up and found him smoking. He offered her the cigarette, white and thin as a lollipop stick. She shook her head and watched as he put it in his mouth and lit it. Then he walked towards her, and as he passed he brushed her arm. Her heart started racing. Haydn leant over his chaotic desk and lifted the window open, then sat on his bed with his long lean legs stretched out in front of him and smoked. The cigarette filled the room in seconds and soon, despite the window, the charged air became thick and smoky. She closed her eyes to stop her head swirling.

  Lizzie found it peculiar to be so close to the person who had last seen Anna alive. It was eerie and at the same time addictive. It drew her to him like iron to a magnet. Her head filled with questions she wanted to ask about those last few hours, irrelevancies that would embellish that final picture of her sister. It was as if Lizzie was umbilically tied to him and the cord was Anna.

  She couldn’t believe how much he’d changed in the year since Anna died. He was a boy back then, with a neat haircut and clear skin, quiet and shy, well behaved, the headmaster’s son. Now he was grown up, he’d filled out, got taller. He was almost totally dressed in black, with jeans so tight they might be sprayed on, black T-shirt, greyed with washing, and a moth-eaten black cardigan with his fingers pushed through holes in the sleeve like he was wearing evening gloves. His hair was dyed black, too, and flopped over his eyes, and there were two rings in one ear. He was very good-looking. Beneath his fringe were deep blue eyes like his dad’s, and he still had perfect skin, not a spot to be seen.

  ‘So why did you come?’ he asked, as he drew heavily on the cigarette, then squinted at her through the smoke. Ther
e was a hint of impatience in his bluntness that threw her.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you,’ she muttered.

  ‘What?’ The look of amused surprise on his face caved her lungs.

  ‘I mean . . . well . . . I . . .’ Her voice dried up.

  He didn’t say anything. She knew he was laughing at her. Why did she tell him she’d been thinking about him? Now she looked like an idiot. A child. It was the type of thing a baby would say.

  ‘I . . . it was . . .’

  ‘It was what?’ He drew on his cigarette and stared at her.

  She didn’t really have a reason why she’d come and now she wished the floor had a big hole that led right back to her bedroom. Her heart sank. ‘Your iPod,’ she managed to whisper.

  She held it out towards him. He didn’t move, so she took a couple of steps closer to his desk and placed it carefully on the corner. Then, so embarrassed she could hardly walk, she went to the door and reached for the handle. Now he thought she was a freak and she’d never see him again. If you don’t speak now, she told herself sternly, you’ll have to live with the shame for ever. She forced herself to turn. ‘What you did . . . at the memorial . . . was . . . well, you really helped me. I don’t know what I would have done . . . you know, if you hadn’t come when you did. And . . . and, I . . . well, thank you, that’s all. That’s what I really came here to say. I wanted to thank you.’ She turned again and opened the door.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Don’t go.’

  Her stomach flipped and she stopped, turning back to face him, painfully aware of the way her hands were shaking and the fact she was only able to look at him in snatched glances. He flicked ash out of the window and leant forward on the bed to pick up the iPod. ‘Did you like the music?’

  ‘I loved it,’ she said, grasping at his words with relief. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it! The singer has an amazing voice.’

  ‘Had an amazing voice,’ Haydn said. He stubbed the cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray on his desk. ‘He OD’d on happy tabs about thirty years ago.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What kind of music do you listen to usually?’

  ‘I don’t, really.’

  ‘Don’t what?’ he cried. ‘Listen to music? What’s on your iPod?’

  She flushed.

  ‘You do have an iPod?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘You don’t have one! Shit. Shit!’ he laughed. ‘Keep mine.’

  ‘Keep it?’

  Haydn nodded.

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not? You need fucking music. I can’t believe you don’t have any music. How do you get through the day? Serious, have it.’

  ‘It’s yours, though.’ Lizzie looked at the iPod through the prickle of tears. ‘Thank you, but I really can’t.’

  Then he shrugged. ‘Did you listen to the whole album?’

  Lizzie nodded.

  ‘What was your favourite track?’

  ‘Um . . .’ She wondered which was the one that should be her favourite.

  ‘It’s not a trick question,’ he said, reading her mind. ‘Just which one did you like the best?’

  Of course she knew. It was the one he’d plugged her into when the world around her had crumbled into bedlam. ‘The third one.’

  ‘I like that one too.’ Haydn reached for a guitar that was slotted between the bed and desk, sat back down on the bed and rested it on his knee. He looked just like a rock star. He began to play the tune she’d mentioned, very softly, slower than the original and not note-perfect, but mesmerizing. Lizzie was like a snake in a basket, hypnotized, spellbound. She thought of Anna up in this room, alone with him and his music, and wondered how often he used to play for her. If she’d been Anna she would have begged him to play to her every single day.

  ‘Do you miss her?’ she asked.

  Haydn stopped playing, but didn’t look up. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not any more.’ He plucked a string and let the note sound to nothing. ‘I think about her, though.’ He closed his eyes and his face screwed up as if he was being cut into.

  ‘I miss her,’ she said.

  Lizzie’s voice echoed around the room, ringing in her ears, and she realized that even though she’d thought those words every day since Anna died, it was the first time she’d heard them aloud.

  Thankfully, he began to play again, and this time he sang too. His voice was thinner than the other man’s, with less resonance, but to Lizzie it seemed as if the lyrics were Haydn’s own, his private thoughts for only her to know, and as the room filled up with Haydn’s music, for the second time so did Lizzie. For what happened next she could only blame the man who’d written Haydn’s song. He had clearly been a magician of some sort, and with his extraordinary powers he reached out long fingers that stretched through the decades and from beyond the grave to grab hold of her and drag her to the boy who played the heavenly tune on the edge of his bed. He made her kneel. It was he who put her hand on the strings to stop the music, and when the boy looked at her, he who made her lean in to kiss him, and, when the boy drew back in surprise, it was he who made her pull him in to kiss her again.

  Eleven o’Clock Coffee

  ‘It’s after eleven. Would you like your cup of coffee?’

  She hadn’t heard him come into the kitchen. She was absorbed with watching next-door’s cat asleep in the sun on the roof of their lean-to conservatory. It was a tabby mog, old and thin, with dusty fur that stuck up in all directions, but she thought it couldn’t look happier curled on the roof up in the warmth with nothing to disturb it.

  Kate wondered then, before Jon came in, if maybe the cat was actually dead. It was so still. So peaceful. Maybe it had passed away in its sleep. Its family would be sad, of course. She heard them calling it to bed every night. Always an excited greeting when it trotted out of the shadows and scooted into their kitchen, a hello poppet, caught any mousies tonight, or something similar. But when they called that night he wouldn’t appear. The man might drive the streets, peering out of the car windows, desperate to return home with their pet, desperate to wipe the anxious look from his wife’s face. In bed they’d worry about telling the children. Then, the next day, or the day after that, one of them might spy him on the conservatory roof, curled up, cold and stiff, and after they’d buried it they’d cry for a day or two, and every now and then after that they’d feel sad, but other than those occasional times, life would carry on as normal.

  Kate sighed; she hated how much she thought about death. She hated how even looking at a contented sleeping animal would spark morbid thoughts inside her. Black thoughts, from anything. She didn’t want to think like that but there was nothing she could do about it; she was an addict, morbidity her drug.

  ‘Kate?’ Jon said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Would you like a coffee?’

  She turned away from the cat and looked at the clock. It was two minutes past eleven.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That would be nice.’

  Two teas. One at seven. The next at nine thirty. Then, sometime in the hour between eleven and twelve – not a minute before eleven – she’d have her cup of coffee. Milk and half a sugar. White mug. Another tea at four thirty. A black decaff at six. The same at ten. This happened every day.

  Before Anna died she frowned on routine. Routine was an affliction of the uptight. Kate was fluid and spontaneous, chaotic, with double-figure late marks in the school register. Kate booked holidays two days before they went, she ran out of milk, she conjured impromptu suppers for friends who only popped in to say hello.

  ‘Stay for supper.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course!’ Laughing as she cracked open a bottle of wine. ‘We’d love you to join us.’

  ‘But we only popped in to say hello.’

  ‘Well, now you’re staying for supper!’

  But since Anna, she found routine helped; it was routine that got her through the onslaught of dark days and nights that threatened to
stretch out for ever in front of her.

  Jon put the mug on the table in front of her. He rubbed her shoulder. She leant against him and closed her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jon,’ she whispered, wincing again at the memory of Rebecca in the playground.

  ‘Sshhh.’ He gripped her shoulder briefly.

  ‘What’s happened to me?’

  He placed his own mug down and pulled a chair beside her. He laid a hand on hers.

  ‘Your daughter died.’

  Kate took a sip of too-hot coffee and burnt the tip of her tongue. She sipped again.

  ‘I tried to go to the supermarket today,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t get out of the car. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I did to Rebecca and trying to work out how I became this awful person.’

  Kate circled her finger around the rim of the mug. Jon didn’t say anything but she knew he was waiting for her to continue. He wouldn’t interrupt her. Jon believed talking was therapeutic. He was always telling her she needed to paint less and talk more.

  ‘I looked up,’ she went on, ‘and something caught my eye out of the windscreen. It was a key, just hanging there on one of those posts beside the walkway, on a red cord.’ She rubbed her face and took a steadying breath. ‘First, I wondered what it was for. A house or a bike, maybe. And then I thought of the poor person who had lost the key and couldn’t get into her house, especially if she had things for the freezer that were melting. But then it dawned on me that the key was meant for me, that I was supposed to find it – someone had put it there for me to find – and that it was a magic key to a different world, like a portal or something.’

  She searched his face for signs of boredom or confusion. But he was staring right at her, his eyes soft, understanding.

  ‘I imagined,’ she said, as she fixed her eyes back on the cup of coffee in front of her, ‘that whoever had left it wanted me to get out of the car, take the key, find the lock and go into the other world. And while I was thinking this I saw the world.’ Her eyes filled with tears that misted her mug out of sight. ‘It was beautiful, really beautiful. It was like this one, only brighter and sharper and all the sounds were crisper and the smells sweeter and I felt at home. I closed my eyes and breathed it all in. And then I heard her voice, Jon. It was Anna. She was there. Alive.’ She looked at him, but his face was lowered. ‘I got out of the car.’ She breathed deeply. ‘And I took the key.’ She breathed again. ‘And then, oh my God,’ she groaned quietly, covering her face with her hands. ‘What’s wrong with me . . . then I looked for the lock.’