Sworn Secret (23 page)

She was woken by Jon speaking on the telephone.

‘I’ll try to get in by lunchtime. I’ll ring if I’m not going to make it . . . No, no, all well . . . just a minor domestic situation I have to deal with . . . that’s kind of you, no, we’ll be fine . . . if you could just let David know . . . yes, check my dairy, but off the top of my head I think Tuesday should work . . . OK, sure . . . Thank you, Laura.’

Kate stood and stretched her back, which ached horribly. She folded the throw and laid it over the arm of the sofa, then went into the kitchen. Lizzie was sitting at the table eating her breakfast.

‘Morning, Mum,’ she said, without looking up. ‘I can’t find my hockey kit. Do you know where it is?’

‘Your hockey kit?’

Lizzie nodded.

Kate tried to think, but her mind was blank, numb from her sleepless night. ‘I haven’t seen it.’

‘I brought it home to wash,’ Lizzie said through a mouthful of cereal.

Kate’s head was beginning to ache. ‘I can have a look, but I don’t remember seeing it.’

Lizzie checked her watch and then quickly shovelled the last spoonfuls of cereal into her mouth, milk dripping from her spoon as she did.

‘I’m late; I’ll check at school,’ she said.

She grabbed her school bag from the table and kissed both Kate and Jon on the cheek. Then she rushed out of the kitchen and slammed the front door behind her.

Jon handed her a cup of tea. She checked the clock; it was eight thirty. If she ever missed her seven o’clock tea, she would always make herself wait until her nine-thirty cup. She looked at the tea and then at Jon.

‘It won’t hurt you,’ he said.

She was about to explain to him for the hundredth time how her routine, however insane it seemed to him, was the backbone of her day, but decided not to. She reached for the tea and thanked him. She took a sip. It was just what she needed. She gave him a small smile and took another sip.

‘When you’ve finished that, you’d better go up and get some clothes on,’ said Jon. ‘I’m not going to work. We’re going to the police.’

A Floating Kiss

Jon stood alone in the kitchen. Kate had gone straight upstairs to paint. It had been hard at the police station. Harder than he imagined. The policeman they’d spoken to, an older man with grey hair and deep craggy lines, had been gentle but unemotional when they told him about Anna and her headmaster. He asked them to sit in the waiting room and left them for nearly forty minutes. Kate picked up a magazine and turned the pages too quickly to be reading. When the policeman came back he asked them to come with him and led them to a small interview room with no windows and an empty desk, three chairs and a water cooler, and took their statement. Jon had given it. He expected Kate to interrupt with incidental detail he might have forgotten, but she stayed quiet, running her finger up and down a gouge in the wooden desk. Jon played him the film. The policeman watched it without registering anything on his face, then nodded twice before turning the phone off and pushing it very deliberately to the middle of the desk so it sat like an unexploded bomb between them.

‘What happens now?’ Jon asked.

‘We are obligated to follow up your allegations with an investigation.’

‘Will he be suspended?’

‘I can’t tell you whether he will or not. However, in my experience, it is usual for any teacher to be suspended following an accusation of this nature.’

‘Will he go to prison?’ said Kate. She didn’t look up from the gouge in the desk.

‘That will be for the court to decide.’

‘He’ll deny it,’ said Jon.

‘They always do,’ said the officer.

Jon flicked the kettle on and stared at nothing while he waited for it to boil. When its click jolted him out of his staring, he put a tea bag into a mug and went to the fridge for the milk. The milk carton was empty. He couldn’t remember putting an empty one back that morning. He must have been in a daze; that sort of thing was very unlike him. Must have been Kate or Lizzie. He fished the tea bag out of the tea and put it in the bin, then he picked up his keys and walked out of the front door, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets as he kicked along the street.

As he turned into the corner shop, someone said hello to him. He looked up. It was Rachel. She was standing at the counter wearing a lemon-yellow sundress and brown leather flip-flops. Her hair, which shone like a shampoo advert, was held out of her eyes by sunglasses perched on her head.

‘Hi Jon,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine, thanks.’ He grabbed a pint of milk from the chiller. ‘No milk, though.’

She pointed at the loaf of bread she’d just paid for. ‘I’m no bread. I had an almost pregnant craving for a tuna mayo sandwich for lunch; no good without bread.’

‘I’ve a cup of black tea waiting at home for me.’

She smiled, then: ‘You look tired.’

Jon nodded.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

He didn’t want to talk about it. He smiled at her and shook his head as he handed the milk to the boy behind the counter.

‘Fifty-two, please.’

Jon patted his empty jacket pocket, then closed his eyes and swore silently.

‘Don’t worry,’ Rachel said. She opened her purse and counted some change on to the counter.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘No problem.’

‘I’ll drop the money round later.’

‘Consider it a present.’

They walked out of the shop and Rachel turned in the direction of her home. Jon was about to say goodbye, but had a sudden dread of being alone. ‘Rach, do you mind if I walk you home?’ he asked. ‘Five minutes’ company would be a good thing for me, I think.’

‘Of course. That would be nice.’

Though they were quiet, the quiet was a cosying one. The quiets that he and Kate now shared were laden with sadness or anger and were gruelling in their weight. It was nice to be with Rachel – it felt comfortable; she was a link to good times past.

‘You know,’ he said at last, ‘she still changes Anna’s sheets. Every Monday morning.’

‘I can see why,’ Rachel said. ‘It must be hard to stop doing that sort of thing.’

‘When I was a child, our dog died. I found him. He’d been run over outside the house. The person who hit him drove off and left him at the side of the road. His leg was broken, and there were all these splinters of bone and gunk, and his mouth was open with his tongue hanging out. He’d been dead long enough to look dead, if that makes sense – his fur was all matted and his eyes had lost their shine, and when I poked him he was stiff like he was made out of stone. I remember being scared to pick him up in case he moved suddenly.’ He paused. ‘It was my fault he died because I left the front door open. My mother said that. She said, “I’ve told you so many times, Jonathan, if you leave the door open the dog will run out and he’ll get hit by a car. You know that. We live in London. There are too many cars.” I didn’t leave the door open on purpose. I’d run in for the loo because I was desperate. I was ten.’

They reached the bus stop opposite Rachel’s house. Jon sat on one of the red plastic seats under the canopy. There was a pile of broken squares of glass on the floor where one of the panels had been smashed. He kicked the bits of greeny glass as Rachel sat herself next to him.

‘Losing a pet is hard when you’re a child,’ she said. ‘But anyone could have left the door open. Anyone could have made that mistake. It only takes a second for something to go wrong and an accident to happen.’

‘I know that now, but that pain stayed with me for years and years – crying on to my dead dog, saying sorry over and over, wanting him back more than anything.’ He kicked at the ground, sending squares of glass skittering across the road. ‘And then I see my daughter dead. My Anna lying on an ambulance stretcher, her face broken, blood knotting up her hair, her eyes staring straight ahead with nothing behind them, as if they were made of glass, and I think if I could lose that stupid dog a million times it would taste like honey compared to this.’

Rachel reached for Jon’s hand.

‘When is this ever going to leave us?’

‘It’s not,’ she said. ‘This is something that will be with you every day until the end. There’s no other way. You and Kate are Anna’s parents. You will never forget her. You will never stop wondering what might have been, and you will never get over her. But you will eventually learn to live with it. You’ll learn to go through life, step by step, and not be floored at every turn by reminders. You’ll get used to the pain, and when you get used to it you’ll be able to live more normally.’

‘I can’t imagine that. So much of the time Kate can’t even look at me. She finds it easier to shut me out. We have a moment of closeness and then it’s gone and she’s alone again. I feel like I’m losing her.’

‘You’re not losing her. You both need time, that’s all.’

‘And then to top it all,’ he said, ‘my father’s ill.’ Jon laughed bitterly.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Alzheimer’s. I can’t bear to be in the same room as him; just looking at him scares me.’

‘That’s natural. It’s a horrible illness.’

‘You’re being kind. It’s the least natural thing I’ve ever felt, and I hate myself for it.’

‘You seem to hate yourself for a lot of things.’

He was silent.

‘You mustn’t hate yourself. You’re a lovely person. I thought so the minute I met you. You remember? That dreadful bring-a-dish Sarah Roberts did for Valentine’s Day for the NCT crowd so we could all meet the husbands.’

Jon nodded. He did remember; Kate had shone that evening. He’d got stuck with two dull men with baby boys who’d asked him what his son was called. When he replied he had a daughter called Anna, they looked at him pityingly then ignored him, talked non-stop about which rugby club their boys would join and the optimum age they should start if they wanted a shot at the national squad. Then Kate floated up behind them. She was a vision that night in a fitted black above-the-knee dress, her milk-full breasts spilling over just enough, her stomach almost flat. Pregnancy and birth had given her a glow and motherhood suited her. Unfair as it was, next to the other exhausted, bloated mums she was a goddess, and when she pressed her lips against Jon’s cheek both men were silenced.

She leant close to his ear and whispered: ‘Your challenge, lovely boy, is to get as many different fruits into conversation as possible.’ Then she kissed him again and winked at the other two, before coming back to his ear. ‘I’m doing veg.’

He snorted a burst of laughter that fired a spray of mustard-glazed cocktail sausage. Kate flashed the men her brightest smile. ‘Goodness, what turnip wouldn’t I shag to get a slice of roasted aubergine right now!’ Then she sashayed through the crowd and away from him.

‘Your wife?’ one of the men asked, his eyes crawling after Kate.

‘Sure is,’ Jon said, popping an olive into his mouth. ‘The apple of my eye. A real peach.’

Jon looked at Rachel. ‘I remember.’

‘You were the most desirable man in the room,’ Rachel said.

Jon wrinkled his brow in disagreement. ‘That’s a sweet thing to say. Untrue, of course.’

‘We all said so. We were hormonal, remember, and most of us were stuck with pretty rubbish husbands. We were jealous of Kate from the off.’ She smiled and patted his hand. ‘You’ve got to be kinder to yourself.’

He looked at her and was suddenly knocked sideways by the suggestion of a kiss that leapt out from nowhere to hang in the air between them. Rachel cleared her throat with a quiet cough, then fixed her eyes on something over his shoulder. He rubbed a hand around his face, pressing his forefinger and thumb hard into the bridge of his nose and then he stood.

‘I should get back.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Me too. I’ve a bowl of tuna mayo waiting for some bread.’

‘You’ll be all right getting home?’

‘I should be OK,’ she laughed. ‘I’m not sure I’m in too much danger in Brook Green at midday as long as I stop, look and listen, of course.’ She nodded in the direction of her house, directly across the road from them.

Jon looked over and his eyes immediately settled on her front door. The kiss in the air was forgotten as he stared at the door through which his daughter had escaped. He saw her then, so clearly, watched her step out of the house, close the door quietly. She stood motionless, holding her breath and listening hard, making sure she hadn’t been heard. Then he saw her creeping through the shadows, turning on to the pavement, and once she was clear of the house, he saw her break into a jog in the direction of the school.

Rachel stepped up to the curb. ‘Enjoy your tea,’ she said.

She crossed the road and walked the short distance to her house. Her lemon-yellow sundress shone as if it were the only splash of colour left. Like that film, Jon thought as he watched her, the one with the child in the red coat who wanders through the greyscale decimation.

Scars

Lizzie felt like a prison inmate in a bid for freedom, terrified that any minute there’d be a shout, the click of aimed rifles, the wail of an urgent siren.

She kept her head down and walked with purpose, counting her steps to the front gates to ease her thumping heart. The unfamiliar kick of being naughty jumbled with the thrill of seeing Haydn, knowing that in a matter of minutes she’d feel his skin against hers and smell his sweet tobacco-tainted breath, and sent adrenalin pumping into her blood by the litre.

As she got closer to the school gate and the promise of beyond, a sweat began to crawl over the palms of her hands and down the hollow of her back.
Surely it couldn’t be this easy
, she thought. But then she was out, through the gates. She laughed out loud as she pulled her tie loose and stuffed it into her bag. She’d been sure someone would stop her. She’d been worrying about it all morning, so engrossed with watching the clock on her classroom wall that she’d not heard a word from anyone. But there she was, out of school, sunshine on her face, about to meet her boyfriend. Her boyfriend! She still couldn’t believe it.

When she turned the next corner he was there, leaning against the wall and smoking, his iPod plugged in, hair covering his face, and jeans so tight she could see every line of his leg. She smiled and broke into a jog. When he caught sight of her he pulled the earpieces out of his ears and wrapped them around the iPod, which he slipped into his jacket pocket. Then he smiled back and she ran faster, jumping into his arms as soon as she could. He twirled her twice around and nuzzled his face into her neck.