by Rebecca Done
I knew – of course I did – that it was unrealistic and naive to feel invincible, and occasionally my father popped up unhelpfully in my subconscious to remind me that pride comes before a fall and blah, blah, blah; but as the minutes, hours and days ticked past and no Spanish sirens came hurtling up the mountainside, I felt increasingly confident that nobody was going to find us. Perhaps we really could hide out here until September and Jess’s sixteenth birthday, surviving on our strange little diet of home-made lemonade, plain pasta and somebody else’s wine collection. Or maybe in a few weeks we’d move on to Italy. I began to imagine that my fantasy of a family and a life in the sun with Jess could really, incredibly, be just a train ride away.
Occasionally I’d indulge in a minor daydream about what might be happening back at Hadley Hall, happily picturing the look on Sonia’s face when she found out that I’d pissed all over her nasty little plan to have me arrested. I imagined her bitching noisily about us to Lorraine Wecks, blabbing on and on about it to Mackenzie, moaning to the National Union of Teachers – all of whom were powerless to act, mainly because we were holed up in the middle of a Spanish mountain range and nobody had a fucking clue where we were.
Nobody, that is, unless you were counting the CNP, Interpol, the UK Immigration Service and the British Embassy in Madrid.
Late that afternoon, I heard the crunch of car tyres against gravel (the police were evidently wise to the use of sirens in an area where if somebody so much as sneezed it was audible from several hillsides away). Ironically enough, it was my birthday, and we were celebrating by soaking up the last of the sun and drinking our latest batch of lemonade, alternately wincing and mumbling to one another about perhaps daring to venture out for a paella supper.
Paella supper my arse.
Years later, I can still clearly picture Jess as she was that afternoon, flat on her back in her pink bikini top and cut-off denim shorts, a pair of plastic sunglasses clamped across her face – a clumsy attempt at glamour. I realized with some sadness that she looked disturbingly like a child on her first ever foreign holiday, which in hindsight probably didn’t do a lot to endear me to the Spanish authorities.
‘Jess,’ I said softly, squeezing her hand.
Whenever I had permitted myself to think about how this moment might feel, I had assumed a fireball of terror or similar would spontaneously erupt in my gut – after which I could only hope I’d be man enough not to run off screaming and hurl myself from the nearest rocky outcrop. So it was something of a pleasant surprise to realize that, now the time had finally come, I felt utterly calm. Stupidly calm – as calm as only someone slightly high on sex and sunshine can be. I didn’t even come close to having an aneurysm.
I reached across and took her sweet face between my hands for the last time. ‘I love you,’ I whispered as her eyes filled up and she understood what was happening.
‘No,’ she said simply as she started to sob. ‘No.’
And then there was a lapse of approximately five seconds before everything went crazy, with the police springing out of their cars to corner me like I was a puma escaped from a zoo, spray cans trained on my face and pistols on my shins. Some people were screaming in Spanish and some of us in English as they tried to lure Jess away from me and towards their cars, as if I had my arm round her neck and a gun to her head. Her reluctance to obey them by leaving my side seemed to throw them off a bit, and in the end I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d had to whip out a lasso to finish the whole thing off.
True to form, Jess used those final five seconds productively by kissing me for the last time and pushing something desperately into my hand. It was my birthday present, I realized, a bracelet woven in black leather. She must have bought it from the roadside with a snatched peseta note when we stopped for petrol en route to our perfect little hideout.
I only just had time to get it round my wrist before they slapped the handcuffs on.
I turned to look at her as they shoved me roughly on to the rear seat of the police car, hands behind my back in the cuffs, and a lot tighter than they needed to be. A female police officer had her arm round Jess’s shoulders, and they’d made her put on a weird blue shirt to hide the bikini, as if I was some sort of gangmaster who’d been forcing her to wander about semi-naked for my own entertainment.
She’d been crying so hard the whole time that the skin around her eyes was red, and as the police car started up, she began to sob hysterically all over again. The flashing blue light, which was ready to announce the triumph of my capture all the way back down the mountainside, was reflected against her beautiful brown skin.
I shouted it out. I didn’t care. ‘I love you, Jess.’ I thought about maybe giving it a go in Spanish too, but the police didn’t look as if they were going to wait around patiently while I fucked up my syntax.
Jess sobbed harder, beside herself – so hard that, to my dismay, she was unable to form words.
‘Wait for me, okay?’
But before she could even attempt to answer, they had slammed the car door shut rather unceremoniously against the side of my head. It hurt like fuck, and burst my naive little bubble of happiness like a Mexican taking a baseball bat to a papier-mâché donkey.
30
Zak’s incoming text crash-landed amongst a flurry of others from Anna, all variations on a theme – to please stop ignoring her calls, to at least text with news on Smudge, to answer the sodding door. Flicking over those, and with some trepidation, Jess opened the one from Zak.
It simply read: Happy Friday, baby! So is it two cases of champagne for your welcome-to-London party, or three?
She rolled back over into the pillow and shut her eyes. As far as I’m concerned you can buy fifty, she thought to herself, and shove the whole bloody lot of them up your arse.
She had no idea what she was going to do about Zak, but this much she did know: she was categorically not going to move to an overdeveloped mews house in Belsize Park with a four-by-four in the garage, a cleaner whom everybody referred to as a maid, self-cleaning glass where all the ceilings were supposed to be and fewer interior walls than a distribution warehouse. Added to which, she would far rather go and drown herself on the salt marsh than be made to celebrate her enforced relocation with the aid of twenty-quid-a-glass champagne, a pretentious buffet of hummus-on-things and lots of smoothed-out affected wankers called Glen who were big in pharmaceutical sales and still thought that being mildly pissed was sufficient justification for manhandling the arses of passing females.
Her time had finally run out, but she knew what she was going to do. She was going to fight. And she was going to fight for Will.
En route to Carafe for bread mid-morning, having struggled against the impulse to grab Smudge’s lead from the coat hook and whistle him to her side, Jess made the surprising discovery of Will on her front doorstep. She wondered at first if he’d been there all night – such was his spaced-out demeanour – but he claimed she hadn’t responded to his knocking, which was weird, because she hadn’t heard a thing.
He looked almost formal in dark brown jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, like they had some sort of appointment, and his behaviour was odd. Moving awkwardly, he wasn’t relaxed at all, and did nothing for a few moments but rub his chin and fail to look at her. He seemed stiff too, like he’d come straight off the weights bench in his garage.
But he was lovely as ever: tall, brown, kind. He smelt faintly of baby shampoo – the scent of early childhood, safety and happiness.
They were running out of time, though. Zak’s nasty little clock was ticking – she was all too aware of that.
Standing there in the middle of the room with his head almost touching the beams, Will allowed his gaze to rest on her; and his expression was so sad, it almost made her heart break.
‘I’m really sorry about Smudge, Jess.’
Just the sound of his name made the tears rise. ‘Oh, don’t,’ she pleaded, afraid that if they talked about him, she might start
to cry and never stop. ‘I can’t talk about it. I really can’t, I’m sorry …’
‘Oh, hey, don’t,’ he said, but he didn’t make a move towards her. ‘I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it.’
They stood there for a couple of moments, just regarding each other. Will looked as if he had something he wanted to say but no words to say it with.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked him. ‘You seem a bit …’
What was left of his smile flattened then, before disappearing completely. ‘Actually, I’m not, Jess. I’ve got something I need to tell you.’
She swallowed. Good, because I’ve got something I need to tell you too. Something I should have told you seventeen years ago.
But the words simply wouldn’t form. So she just stared weakly at him, her mouth dry, and nodded. ‘Something-like-herpes or something-like-you-don’t-think-we-should-do-this-any-more?’ she managed eventually.
There was a long silence before he said, ‘Something like I don’t think we should do this any more.’
She stared at him. For some stupid reason, she hadn’t been expecting him to say that at all. She had been expecting him to choose option C. Whatever the fuck option C was.
‘What?’ she said, her voice weak but her heart thumping fast as if she’d just been mugged.
‘Natalie’s pregnant.’
Feeling her chest clench, she blinked fiercely. It took her a few moments to recall the art of speech. ‘Oh,’ was all she could think of to say. If he had whipped out a cricket bat and swung it into her stomach she could not have felt more stunned or more wounded.
‘So we’re moving back to London next week.’
She’s what? You’re what? When? What?
‘What … what about the house?’ What happened to staying until September?
There was a long pause. ‘Well, Natalie tells me the building work’s ahead of schedule.’
‘Oh,’ she said, with a single bewildered nod.
He shut his eyes for a moment as if he couldn’t bear to see her looking at him. ‘What happened with Charlotte the other night made me realize how much I love her, Jess.’
Does he mean Charlotte or Natalie?
‘Do you mean Charlotte or Natalie?’
He didn’t answer her straight away, making her wait for the one response that should have come easily. ‘Both, of course,’ he said eventually. ‘I love both of them, very much.’
‘Oh, right,’ she said, struggling for a moment to digest this particular thunderbolt. ‘Sorry to ask. I must have misunderstood, before.’
He hung his head then, like he was completely exhausted. ‘What’s been happening with us, Jess … it’s just fantasy. It’s not real.’
The tears stung. ‘What? Will! I don’t believe you …’ She stepped towards him, grabbing his hand. It felt limp and cool, like he wasn’t even in there. ‘Look – I could come to London,’ she said, her mind and voice moving quickly as if she was first on the scene at a road traffic accident and was desperately trying to stop him from slipping into a coma. ‘I could come, and we could see what happens. You’re just scared, you’re just panicking …’
And then she met his eye, and he shook his head slowly, and she felt despair like she had never felt before. Not in Spain. Not with her mother. Not even when she was stroking Smudge’s head and whispering her goodbyes.
Her gaze fell in exasperation, and as it did, she realized that there was something missing from round his wrist.
‘You’re not wearing your bracelet,’ she observed sadly. And then, her voice smaller, ‘Did it break?’
He swallowed and said nothing, which she took to mean he had removed it out of respect for his freshly pregnant girlfriend.
She sensed things were coming to an end. ‘You can choose me,’ she said desperately, squeezing his hand, her voice spun with the tiniest, most delicate thread of hope.
He shook his head. ‘No. I can’t.’ He sounded like it physically pained him to speak, like someone had their hand pressed very firmly against his windpipe.
Jess met his eye, trying desperately to save him from the long lifetime of dumb slumber he seemed determined now to enter. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this, Will.’
‘I think,’ he said, almost talking over her, ‘you should go out and find a good guy.’
Please don’t.
‘Someone who can give you what you need. Just please promise me that. If there’s nothing else to say, at least tell me that you’re going to find yourself a really good guy.’
She smiled at him. ‘Well, actually,’ she whispered, her eyes full of tears, ‘I think I’ve already found him.’
Incredibly, he missed it completely. ‘You mean Zak?’ he said, his voice shaking slightly. ‘Yeah – you could probably have a good life with him, Jess. Move to London, give it a go.’
She could hardly believe what she was hearing. ‘You told me the other day that I should be with someone who really and truly loves me,’ she said, incredulous.
He swallowed. ‘Well, I probably got it wrong about him. I mean, he’s a bloody doctor, after all. How bad can he really be? You should give it some thought, at least.’
She was starting to feel dizzy, like she needed to rest her head. ‘Please don’t. You’re actually making it worse. Which is amazing, because it was pretty bad already.’
He met her eye then and despite his words he looked as if he could happily have stuck himself in the chest with her sharpest Swiss fillet knife. ‘Well, didn’t anyone tell you, Jess? I specialize in wanker. It’s the only thing I’m really fucking good at.’
There followed a long silence during which Jess attempted to imagine never seeing him again, to realize that he was ending it now, today. He must have decided, as Anna would say, that everything between them was just fantasy without a future.
And she knew then that if he was leaving, if she might never actually see him again, she had to tell him. She could no longer justify keeping it from him, if not having the courage had ever been justifiable in the first place.
She thought back to his words on the marsh that night. ‘It should have been us, Mr L.’ Her voice was a fierce twist of emotion. ‘It should have been us, with the marriage and the baby and the perfect fucking life.’
Painfully, incrementally, the expression on his face began to change – as if she had taken something very sharp and was winding it steadily into his abdomen. And she knew then that he knew.
Somehow, without her even having to say the words, he knew.
Almost straight away, she started to cry, because the reality of telling him was so much harder than she’d even imagined. She had to force her mouth to release the words, to let them scatter into the room like tiny prisoners on the run, determined to wreak havoc after so much time inside. ‘I’ve got something I need to say. If this is it – if you’re really leaving, I need to tell you something I should have told you seventeen years ago.’
He had become almost entirely motionless, like he was hoping that if he stayed very still, her words might somehow fail to find him.
‘I was pregnant, Matthew.’
The gaze of his green eyes remained unflinching against her face. And then he slowly shook his head and mouthed the single word, Don’t.
But she couldn’t comply; she had to continue. She had kept it from him for too long. He deserved to know the truth about what she’d done.
‘I’m so sorry.’ She could hardly summon the breath to say it. ‘I had an abortion. I’m so sorry. It was a mistake. I didn’t know what else to do.’
It was a few more seconds before his face completely broke in half. ‘Oh, no.’ Tears pooled rapidly in his eyes as he covered his mouth with his hands. ‘Please don’t, Jess.’
Her own tears began to fall now too. ‘I’m so sorry. I wish I hadn’t. Please know how much I wish that.’
He put his hands up then to hide his face and silently shook his head, begging her with his whole body to stop.
‘I thought it
would make everything worse,’ Jess said, painstakingly transferring her regrets from heart to mouth. ‘They told me you were going to get years. I thought we wouldn’t ever be allowed to see each other again.’
She had realized long ago that hindsight was caustic like acid, corroding excuses over time until all that was left was a toxic mess where reason and judgement used to be.
‘It was the biggest mistake of my life,’ she continued, hating the sound of her own voice as she was sure Will now did too. ‘I regret it every single day.’
Will took his hands away from his face, and the sight of him failing to fight his tears made her crumple up inside. ‘How could you not tell me, Jess?’ His voice was raw with devastation and disbelief. ‘How could you not tell me this?’
Seventeen years of dread was too quickly becoming reality. The realization that everything was about to change irreversibly came at her as brutally as iced water being shoved down her neck, and for a moment she was forced to catch her breath. ‘I couldn’t,’ she finally managed. ‘The social workers –’
‘Not then.’ He shook his head, cheeks freshly wet with tears. ‘Now. For these past few weeks? I’ve been so happy just to know you again, Jess, and all along …’
Her voice, when it arrived to meet his, was tiny. ‘I’d only just found you. I didn’t want you to leave again.’
Why could she not say a single thing that sounded even slightly defensible? Perhaps, she realized, because none of it actually was.
Will swallowed, nodding several times in quick succession in that way people did when they were trying really hard not to say what they were thinking. ‘Wow. Okay.’
‘But you’re leaving now,’ she finished quietly. ‘I might never see you again, and I couldn’t let you go and not tell you.’
There followed a silence so dark she could almost see it.