This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  That night marked the start of seven long days of agony for Jess, during which she was relentlessly and mercilessly ground down by the adults until she finally reached the point of miserably believing she had no choice. It had been a team effort – coordinated, deadly and, ultimately, effective.

  Matthew would be locked away for years, they’d told her. A decade, probably more, once the court had considered all the counts of sex offences, on top of child abduction. He was about to become a convicted paedophile, blighted for the rest of his life with no hope of ever returning to normality – and banned, of course, from ever coming near Jess again. He didn’t love her, that much was clear: what man gets a fifteen-year-old pregnant in circumstances like this? It was utterly abhorrent. And where would Jess go, what would she do? Because if she chose to keep this child she could forget about staying in Dalston or Norfolk. And she needn’t think that Anna’s mother would be willing to take her in, either – Mrs Baxter was still furious about Jess thieving the key to their villa, contaminating the place with her sordid affair. So where was she planning to go? Did she want to end up homeless, on drugs? What would her father say if he could see her now – no prospect of GCSEs, pregnant at fifteen? And then came the emotional blackmail, powerful as a poison dart. If the authorities were – by some chance – to discover she was pregnant, it could add years to the already weighty sentence Matthew would surely receive. Years.

  So eventually, dutifully, Jess attended an assessment at a private clinic, accompanied by her aunt. And after that, she had only seven more days to get used to the idea, to prepare her goodbye to the blossoming little bump in her belly.

  The night before returning to the clinic, Jess stayed up until late and left the flat after dark. She only went as far as the estate’s now-empty playground, standing close to the railings and watching the swings move in the breeze, the roundabout creaking sadly. She thought about Matthew, wretched and oblivious in his prison cell, and wondered whether he was thinking about her too.

  I’m sorry, she whispered to the vision of him in her mind. Please forgive me. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m trying to do the right thing. Please don’t hate me.

  And then she put her hand against her stomach and let the tears fall, because maybe in a different life, in a world far away from this one, the three of them could have been a family.

  But not in this life. Not in this life.

  After that, she quietly made her way back upstairs to the flat to eat cottage pie for the fourth night running (her aunt being bulk cooking’s most loyal disciple) and watch Debbie having a major meltdown over BSE contaminants in beef.

  Jess and her aunt walked the ten short minutes to the clinic the following day, journeying back to the flat by taxi just a few hours later. Her aunt had never been one for the lexicon of reassurance, but she did offer Jess some advice to the tune of never discussing the abortion with anyone, ever again.

  Two more years passed before Jess had amassed the requisite self-belief to verbalize her anguish and defy her aunt’s instruction. Over the past twelve months they’d been back in Norfolk, the three of them living together in a new cottage while Debbie studied to re-take her failed A levels and Jess made a half-hearted stab at her GCSEs. Their mother simply continued with her own unique practice of failing to be a parent, as determined a student of this particular discipline as either of her daughters were of theirs.

  But the night before seeing fit to remove her own face with a shotgun, her mother made the mistake of picking a fight with Jess about Matthew, prompting Jess to pick one back about the baby. This inflamed a row unlike any they’d had before, which somehow culminated in Jess backed up against the fridge defending herself with a bread knife while Debbie screamed hysterically down the phone at the police, who seemed coincidentally reluctant to attend a night-shift domestic that was kicking off at the same time as a Euro ’96 football match.

  ‘Rasleen told me I should be honest with you about how I really feel,’ Anna was saying now. ‘And how I really feel is that … maybe you’re the wrong person to see me through this.’

  ‘You told her?’ Jess stared at Anna. ‘You told Linda about Matthew and the baby?’

  Anna gaped at her, as if it hadn’t even crossed her mind that this should count as betrayal. ‘I had to tell her, Jess. You and me, we never talk about it, but it kills me every day that you chose to give up the one thing I want the most! It tears me up inside!’

  ‘It tears you up inside,’ Jess repeated numbly.

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said, but she wavered as she caught the expression on Jess’s face. ‘It does.’ She trailed off.

  Jess nodded. ‘Do you want to know what tears me up inside?’

  At this, Anna said nothing. Instead, she shut her eyes and mouth, a quiet act of bracing herself against what was coming next.

  ‘It tears me up inside,’ Jess said, her voice lurching clumsily outwards in lumps as she struggled not to break down, ‘that every year on 12 March is the day I should be celebrating a birthday. That by now, I’d have a sixteen-year-old son or daughter.’ Her breath became a hot shudder in her chest. ‘You know, I think about … what they might look like. Whether they’d have Matthew’s height or my eyes, or if they’d be good at sport, or if they’d have inherited his stupid sense of humour. I think about what it would feel like to see them smile. I think about giving them a hug.’ She stared at her friend, wide-eyed and stark with helplessness. ‘But do you want to know what really kills me, Anna? That they have a living, breathing half-sister. She’s it, Anna. Charlotte should have belonged to me and Matthew.’

  Across the table, Anna put her face in her hands; and together, but apart, the two girls finally began to weep.

  ‘And the worst part is, it’s all my fault. It’s not Matthew’s fault – it’s mine. He wasn’t there to stop it. I should have been stronger. It was my turn to fight.’

  From behind the screen of her fingers, Anna shook her head, unable to reply.

  ‘I owed it to him, Anna! It was his baby too! He loved me, and he would have loved the baby, and if he’d known what was happening he would have been screaming at me to fight them but … I didn’t. You want guilt, Anna? Walking away from that clinic is guilt. Seeing you fail to get pregnant over and over again every month is guilt. Looking Will in the face and knowing what I did on his behalf is FUCKING GUILT.’

  There followed a silence as stunned as if someone had been punched. It seemed for a while that it might never end, that neither of them would ever speak again.

  Eventually Anna found her voice. But it sounded weak and pitiful, an empty attempt to urgently back-pedal. ‘I know they ground you down, Jess, after Spain. I know you probably didn’t have a choice. I was only just saying that I’m finding it hard to be around you …’

  ‘Well, you know what? I find it hard to be around you too, sometimes, Anna. I find it hard to hold your hand and listen to how desperately you want to be pregnant, praying that it might happen for you without selfishly wanting to turn back the clock for myself. I find it hard to know that Will is such a fantastic father that all Natalie wants to do is pop out more of his babies left, right and centre. But worst of all, I find it hard to look Will in the eye without wondering what his face would do if I told him the truth.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should tell him,’ Anna urged. ‘Because you need to move on, Jess – you’re living in the past.’

  Jess shook her head. ‘I love him so much, Anna. If I told him now, after all this time, it would kill him. It would kill me.’

  ‘If you really love him, Jess, as much as you say you do, you’d tell him. Because right now, everything between you is based on lies. It’s just fantasy, without a future.’

  ‘It would kill him, Anna,’ she repeated.

  Anna looked almost blank, like she didn’t understand.

  Jess finally let her have it. ‘Don’t you get it, Anna? Matthew and me – we were supposed to be together! That’s the way it was SUPPOSED TO BE! But yo
u and my mother and my aunt – you took all that away from us, even though you were the ones who were meant to love me the most!’

  Anna made a choking sound, like she’d sampled Jess’s point of view and found it to taste utterly vile. ‘I can’t believe you’re blaming me. That you still can’t see Matthew Landley for what he really is.’

  ‘What is he?’ Jess exploded. ‘What does he do to me that’s SO BAD, Anna? I mean, come on – I really, really want to know!’

  The two girls locked eyes for just a moment, and then Anna looked down in the direction of Jess’s right hand. ‘Well,’ she said, breathing evenly, ‘you ended up with that fucking ugly scar for one.’

  Jess swallowed hard. She couldn’t have felt more shocked if Anna had spat in her face. ‘Ouch,’ she managed eventually.

  There was a pause. ‘Well, you asked,’ Anna said uncomfortably.

  Without saying anything more, Jess got up and headed to the front door, put her fucking ugly scar against the handle and shoved it open as wide as it would go.

  ‘Get out.’

  It all happened so quickly – it could only have been ten seconds, possibly less – and on a day when her head felt less like a wet sandbag she might have been quicker to react.

  At that moment, a cat streaked across Jess’s front lawn in the direction of the road, and Smudge bounded through the open door after it.

  The cat made it safely to the opposite pavement, but Smudge did not.

  27

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Jess nodded numbly. She was standing in a white, windowless room that smelt of antiseptic and dog biscuits, stroking Smudge’s damaged ears, gently massaging his silken fur over and over with her fingers. He’d already been sedated, and his breathing was laboured, as if he was sleeping by the fire on a winter’s night, his paws on the edge of the rug and his eyes squeezed contentedly shut, tail on standby to wag if she said his name or got up to make a drink.

  ‘He doesn’t know what’s happening,’ the vet said kindly. ‘I promise. He’ll just go quietly to sleep.’

  Jess tried to recall the last time that Smudge’s trusting brown eyes had blinked up at her, the last time she’d looked back into them and smiled. Had it been in the kitchen, when he had moved so loyally from Anna’s side to hers?

  She smiled faintly as she remembered teaching him to give her a paw, to roll over, to fetch his favourite toy – a battered old ring made from plastic that was supposed to resemble a doughnut. She thought of the miles they’d walked side by side, the nights they’d spent stretched out together on the sofa watching the sheepdog trials on television, the way that he would lick her hand and nudge her gently with the damp tip of his nose, as if to let her know that he would always be there.

  She had once read somewhere that during a dog’s final moments, it was kindest to act normally, as if today was just like any other day and tomorrow would start as it always did, with a long, lazy walk followed by breakfast in the back garden, soaking up the sun. She wondered now if the person who wrote that had ever lost their dog in this way – if they themselves had ever tried not to shake as they drew a hand across the warm fur of their loyal companion for the very last time.

  She nodded, and as the vet applied the needle, Jess shut her eyes. She kept her fingers against Smudge’s ears, fondling them steadily, hoping he could somehow feel her there.

  When she opened her eyes again, she was just in time to see his paws flex slightly as his little chest made one tired, final breath, and then he was still.

  Jess leaned forward and buried her face against his warm neck, inhaling his familiar smell.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered into his fur, her voice thick with grief and desperate tears. ‘Be good, okay?’

  28

  ‘Will?’

  ‘Jess? What’s wrong?’

  She couldn’t quite bring herself to say the words. ‘How’s Charlotte?’ she asked him.

  He exhaled. ‘Fine. Natalie panicked. The needle on the adrenaline pen bent. But she was quick-thinking enough to shove a load of antihistamines down her neck, thank God. She spent the night in hospital, but she’s okay.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Jess said, but her voice broke as she spoke. Hot tears escaped down her cheeks, but tonight there was no calm neck to bury her face against, no bundle of warm fur on her toes. There was just an empty space on the floorboards where Smudge used to be.

  ‘Jess? What is it?’

  ‘Smudge was hit by a car.’

  Will waited, presumably for her to say that it was a close shave, but he was okay.

  ‘He was put to sleep this morning.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ He sounded almost breathless, his voice tight, like her news had winded him. ‘Jess, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘He was with me every day,’ she said, the pain becoming almost physical. ‘I don’t know what to do now.’ She wanted to reach into the phone and grab his hand. ‘Can you come over?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I can’t leave Charlotte.’ He spoke like it was tearing him in two to say it. ‘I’m so sorry, Jess. But I can’t leave her, not tonight.’

  She felt an uncomfortable wave of grief and bitterness rising up inside her then, and for a couple of moments she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  ‘Friday?’ he asked her, sounding nearly as distraught as she was. ‘I’ll try and call …’

  A vision of Zak taking a claw hammer to Will’s kneecaps loomed large and ominous in her mind. ‘Will, I need to tell you something …’

  ‘Bollocks,’ he said, almost under his breath. ‘Natalie’s looking for me. I’ve got to go.’

  ‘I love you,’ she said, but it was too late. The tone of the dead line cut right through her, as harsh and unbearable as the noise of squealing brakes.

  29

  Matthew

  Thursday, 9 June 1994

  As soon as we’d disembarked at Santander, I made the conscious decision to try and forget my former life. We were virtually fugitives now, and Matthew Landley was gone – at least for the foreseeable future. Rather than dwell on the enormity of this fact, I attempted to embrace the idea that I could completely reinvent myself, free as I now was to become someone brand new – but, of course, that concept only really held appeal if you didn’t much like the person you were to begin with. I’d thought about it, and the only thing about myself I was desperate to change – other than my feet, and my propensity to blink like a nerd when I was tired – was the fact that I was the sort of guy who could sleep with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. But that wasn’t something I had plans to stop doing any time soon.

  As it turned out, forgetting was easy in the Picos. Compact and (at some point in ancient history) whitewashed, our little hideout was just ramshackle enough to be romantic and for it not to really matter if we spilt coffee or red wine on the floor; but not so run-down that we were afraid to open cupboards for fear of disturbing vermin or flush the toilet in case the septic tank exploded. The villa was perched neighbour-less on one sharp, green slope of a lush Cantabrian mountain; most days, the only sound that could be heard was the soaring swish of raptor wings against the vibrant blue of a Spanish sky.

  Each morning, the sun would flare and throb, and the scent of citrus would rise in the garden. Jess would pluck fat yellow lemons from the trees, and together we’d squeeze out the juice by hand, adding chunks of brick-hard sugar from an ancient packet we’d found in the kitchen. The resulting concoction was still so sharp that it made my tongue shrink on contact, but it definitely outdid any shop-bought lemonade I’d ever drunk.

  And, of course, we raided the wine cellar on our very first night. Pulling bottles from dirt-encrusted racks by torchlight and brushing layers of dust from the labels, we made a big deal of pretending to examine and assess them before finally admitting to one another that, actually, we couldn’t care less what was what because as far as we could both tell, and in the absence of an expert to advise us otherwise, wine was pretty much al
ways going to be just wine.

  ‘Plus they were never going to drink it anyway. I doubt they even knew what was down here in the first place,’ Jess said.

  I was a big fan of this theory too, but the teacher in me felt forced to point out that it fell roughly on a par with siphoning loose change from the piggy banks of children on the basis that they’d failed to maintain an accurate running total.

  Over the next few days, since we had very little to do except stretch out on the patio in the sun, Jess’s skin slowly turned a beautiful shade of freckled sun-kissed brown, and her hair crept a couple of tones blonder. I’d look over at her as we lay there holding hands and swigging lemonade, and think about how lucky I was to have found her all those months ago, albeit at the back of my maths class and heading straight for a D-grade in her GCSE. She’d talked more since arriving in Spain than I’d ever heard her talk before, about our dream of Italy, and wanting to finally arrange some proper help for her mum when we got back to England, and what was the point of pi anyway, and did I think that Mr Michaels was happy? And I just shut my eyes and listened to her and thought that if I never had to go back to England for the rest of my life it would be too sodding soon.

  There was no phone to the villa, and no means of accessing newspapers, unless I actually wanted to go out and buy one, which I definitely did not. Jess occasionally wondered out loud what was going on back home, and more than once expressed concern for her mum. Quite honestly I was of the private opinion that her teenage daughter fleeing the country should have been her mother’s big fat cue to quit the muscle relaxants and stop using gin as a substitute for breakfast cereal, but I assured her that all we had to do was wait a week or so for the inevitable shit-storm back in England to subside. After that, I said, we could perhaps think about a safe way of getting a message to her – although whether she would be able to tear herself away from daytime television for long enough to pay attention to it was anybody’s guess.