This Secret We're Keeping
Read This Secret We're Keeping Online
Authors: Rebecca Done
THIS SECRET WE’RE KEEPING
PENGUIN
BOOKS
Rebecca Done lives in Norwich and works as a copywriter.
This Secret We’re Keeping
is her first novel.
To Mark
The second
time Matthew Landley entered Jessica’s life, he nearly killed her.
Only minutes earlier, she had glanced up from where she was caught inside the closed fist of a crowd to see that he was standing with his back to her, just a few feet away. Incredibly, after more than seventeen years apart, he was now so near that if she had opened her mouth and uttered his name, he would have turned round.
She simply froze. Perhaps she was waiting for the sight of him to dissipate as she tried to work out why her mind seemed so determined to trick her. She had been seeing his ghost for weeks now, a haunting of her peripheral vision that kept disappearing before she could properly perceive it, like a shadow being chased by cats.
But then he smiled at something – and, instantly, she knew that he was real.
Undetected, Jess watched as he began to move off through the crowd. He was taller than most so was easy to pick out, and was graced too with the distinctive shadowy stubble and angled jawline of someone who always looked good in pictures. A pair of sunglasses was pushed up on top of his shaved head – but in another life, Jess knew his hair would have been wild and dark.
After all this time, he was as familiar to her as a favourite photograph.
Jess was a caterer, and had agreed several months ago to cook for an audience at a food fair in the grounds of a nearby stately home in North Norfolk. It was the first really warm day of the year, and the lack of free-flowing air, gently sweating grass and scent of fermenting microbrew inside the main marquee felt oddly reminiscent of waking up half suffocated and hung-over under canvas at a music festival.
As she tried to locate the Cookery Theatre, a thick, slow-moving crowd surrounded her, an impenetrable mass of damp T-shirts and craning necks. From what Jess could make out, she had arrived at the tail end of a crush following unsubstantiated reports of a celebrity chef being spotted somewhere near the antipasti stand – though it eventually turned out to just be someone with an uncannily similar taste in spectacle frames. Collectively disgruntled, the crowd was now attempting to disperse, but all the stallholders had seized upon the extra footfall as a good opportunity to make up for the disappointment by peddling free samples, so moving anywhere at speed was becoming about as achievable as pushing to the front at a Justin Bieber concert.
Strains of intermittent feedback emanating from a malfunctioning microphone headset at least meant the Cookery Theatre was easy to find, though it sounded more like a half-arsed soundcheck than something people would pull up a seat for. Jess was on next, with Asian Fusion Food, but she’d already begun to wonder if it was too late to make a dash for home and claim an eleventh-hour outbreak of gallstones or similar.
It was then, as she casually pondered her escape, that she saw him.
A few seconds elapsed before he started to walk away. Feeling her heart rate notch up slightly, Jess mirrored his
direction left, though reacting was made awkward by the stack of boxed ingredients she was carrying and the bag slung over her shoulder. As he emerged from behind a family buying armfuls of artisan bread, she saw that he was talking to a slender brunette – presumably his wife – in vertiginous heels and a coral dress that showed off to perfection her impeccable tan. A small dark-haired girl wearing shorts and a yellow smock top clung happily to his left hand.
They paused for a moment to look at a stall, and Jess saw him reach over to pick something out, turning his head to hear what his daughter was saying. Each movement he made was as deliberate as ever – careful, considered. For a few agonizing seconds, Jess thought she might have the chance to call his name. But by the time she was nearly upon them, they had already started to move again, his wife and daughter working hard to keep up with the long, purposeful stride Jess knew so well.
Beginning to feel as if a piston was going berserk back and forth in her chest, she strained to keep him in view as he made his way towards the marquee’s exit. A path opened up unexpectedly through the crowd in front of her and she caught her breath, breaking into a sort of improvised quickstep to keep pace. But then, from out of nowhere, she found herself boxed in by three carers who were patiently angling wheelchairs round the back of the queue for the specialist vinegars.
Jess gasped audibly in panic as she was forced to wait. The crowd converged, and she lost sight of him. Sensing her impatience, the carers attempted a coordinated manoeuvre to let her past, but the surrounding throng was now too thick and there was nowhere for any of them to go. She met their helpless apologies with tears in her eyes. ‘It’s okay, don’t worry, don’t worry,’ she managed, ashamed of her
rudeness, flooded with embarrassment and dismay. The humidity in the tent was becoming almost unbearable.
By the time she could move again, he had disappeared. Jess’s hands were so damp that her boxes kept nearly slipping from her grasp. Too nervous to dump them – she’d convinced herself somehow that in less than fifteen minutes she would be tracked down and frogmarched on stage by someone very strict with a clipboard and set jaw – she began to push shoulders and elbows aside like swing doors as she made for the tent’s exit. She was strangely aware that this might not bode well for audience appreciation later on: a middle-aged woman swore as she passed, and a young father exclaimed as her knee caught the arm of his toddler.
Sorry
, she tried to gasp, pushing on.
Sorry
.
She spotted the three of them instantly, halfway down the sloping field that led back to the car park. As her feet hit the grass and her lungs finally drew fresh air, she wanted to call his name, but internal hysteria had decimated her capacity for speech. She was running clumsily after him now, like a child trying to catch up with a pissed-off parent, her chef’s clogs slapping awkwardly as she moved, slowing her down.
Eventually she was forced to stop and bend over, heaving and helpless, as she watched him climb into a black estate car. Strapping their child into the rear seat before joining him up front, his wife laughed loudly as she slammed the door. It was as if, having spotted Jess sweating and struggling to catch her breath above them on the hill, she had decided to taunt her with a triumphant display of family unity.
For just a few precious minutes Jess had found him again – yet far too soon he was slipping away from her. She had to move now.
The car began to reverse. Jess felt a simmer of panic in her chest as she watched it swing smoothly round to join the bottleneck at the exit gates. The driveway leading to the main road was long and single track with no passing places: it was one in, one out. The car’s brake lights gleamed, the engine humming as it idled.
She saw then that she had a chance, a window of perhaps thirty seconds or less. So she finally ditched the boxes and her bag and ran, cutting across the lawn to meet the driveway where it made a sharp elbow of ninety degrees beyond the line of cars. She had only intended to perhaps memorize his number plate or catch his eye – but as she approached the edge of the gravel, he reached the front of the queue and a space opened up on the single track. He accelerated, possibly with impatience.
He was about to disappear for ever. The impulse to step out and stop him was so instinctive, it was barely a decision.
Right at the last moment, he must have seen her – because the car came to a screeching halt at exactly the same time as it knocked her off her feet. The impact in the end was more like a sharp nudge, which left her sitting down in the middle of the gravel as if she had simply decided to take a break from walking across it.
Her half-trance was interrupted by the strange orchestra of a car door slamming, a child crying and a woman swearing, accompanied by the first stab of pain somewhere in the area of her right thigh. And then he was squatting down next to her, putting his hand against her back, asking her if she was okay.
He hadn’t yet seen her face.
‘Oh my God,’ his wife was exclaiming, each word a convulsion of shock as if she was the one who’d just been hit by
one-and-a-half tonnes of German engineering, ‘oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’
‘Don’t move. Are you okay?’ he asked Jess again. ‘Don’t move.’ To anyone else, he would have sounded calm, but Jess could detect the panic in his voice.
And then she turned to look at him at the same time as he pushed his sunglasses on to the top of his head, and her tears came instantly.
At half the speed, half the volume, he echoed the words of his wife. ‘Oh my God.’
His eyes were exactly the same. Green. Penetrating. He looked older, browner, more self-assured, as if the previous version of him had been in draft.
They stared at each other for a full five seconds, during which time her legs began to compute the impact of what had taken place – or perhaps they were processing the enormity of the real drama, unfolding now – and they began to twitch slightly. In the cherry trees flanking the driveway, a flock of chaffinches was chattering merrily amongst the blossom like nothing had happened.
‘Are you okay, are you okay, are you okay,’ his wife was gabbling now, but it was coming out like more of a shrill imperative than a question.
He let his head hang, and Jess moved a shaking hand from her mouth to cover her eyes, and they sat there like that on the gravel for a few moments as if this was the conclusion of everything that had come before, like they’d both just exhaled a breath they’d been holding for a very long time.
As all the sound around them seemed to fade they became their own island in the middle of the driveway, bunched up and motionless against one another. Jess was aware of nothing beyond the anaesthetic warmth of him breathing by her
side, the comforting span of his hand on her back, the sliver of distorted joy she could feel from them being – in the smallest of ways – together again. All the commotion appeared by now to have been suspended somewhere far away. The seconds stretched. She felt oddly calm.
But then came the brutal blast of a car horn ripping between them, forcing Jess to finally raise her head. She could see his wife angling her manicure against a mobile phone – nine, nine, nine – as a queue formed in both directions, the cars taking turns to circumvent the awkwardly positioned vehicle. Some people thought it was important to rev their engines very loudly as they passed, presumably to make a point about the inconvenience of unforeseen queueing on a three-day weekend. Others simply stared out at Jess from behind their windows with the same sort of blank indifference they probably reserved for the mentally ill or mortally drunk.
‘Jesus
Christ
, Will!’ his wife barked then, at which the child’s cries made a sharp crescendo.
Jess’s eyes met his. ‘Will?’ she whispered, to check she’d heard it right.
‘Please,’ was all he said. The fear was scrawled across his face like bad handwriting. He didn’t need to say anything else.
Jess looked down. Her jeans were intact and as such there was no visible damage, like protruding fibulas or kneecaps pointing in the wrong direction. She could fake it, for now. Trying to ignore the pain, she said, as loudly as she could manage, ‘I’m fine.’
He hung his head again with what could have been anything between relief and grim despair while his wife began to project-manage the accident scene, barking orders for Jess to stay where she was, for Will to give her his jacket, for
their daughter (who was frozen with fear) not to move – ‘Do not move, Charlotte!’ Then she turned her attention back to her phone: ‘He’s run someone over, Sheri, fucking hell, Sheri, he’s run someone over.’ It was unclear if she was already on first-name terms with the emergency dispatcher or if she’d redialled a friend in the time it took Jess to grab on to the car bumper and haul herself to her feet. Either way, she felt an unexpected stab of pity for whoever was on the other end of the line.
‘Are you okay? Can you move your leg?’ He still had one hand at her back, and was using the other to grip her elbow and steady her.
Jess stuck her foot out and jiggled her leg gently. It hurt like fuck. She felt his fingers tense against her as she winced.
‘Oh my God Will Jesus Christ,’ his wife kept repeating, though she was keeping her distance, shielding herself with the car door as if she was afraid of getting blood on her shoes. ‘Fuck. Is there any damage?’
Jess realized she might be talking about the car.
He turned round and regarded her then like he had no idea who she was, this meddlesome stranger with the high-end motor and untouchable footwear. ‘No,’ he said, though his voice was wavering, ‘she’s okay.’ He gestured gently at Jess with an open palm as if she was an animal at a petting farm he thought his daughter might want to come and stroke.
From somewhere to their left, Jess noticed a female steward wearing a luminous tabard and determined expression striding towards them, preparing to vault a stationary hatchback and organize the chaos. Unwittingly, though, she only really added to it by starting to shout bossily around for witnesses, most of whom were pushing ninety with failing eyesight.
He looked across at her one last time, but just as he began to speak, Jess found herself being rugby-tackled from behind into a fold-out wheelchair by someone from the first aid tent clearly desperate to break up the monotony of a day on OAP-watch. And as she was wheeled briskly from the scene with a sheet of tinfoil over her knees, she could hear his wife still breathlessly exclaiming, ‘Oh my God Will Jesus fucking Christ,’ like he was giving her the best orgasm of her life.