This Secret We're Keeping (36 page)

Since Venice, I had gone out of my way to avoid Sonia. I only went into the staffroom if I knew she wouldn’t be in there, and I’d memorized her timetable in order to steer clear of any possible corridor clashes. She had tried to corner Jess on her own a few times recently – asking her to stay after class and glaze her bread, enter into pointless discussion on the best way to avoid a sagging soufflé, that sort of thing – but Jess, far more intelligent than Sonia would ever be, always had some excuse to hand about having a bus to catch, or being on her period, and so far it had worked.

But even more pressing to my mind than handing in my notice, pissing on Sonia’s bonfire or even just doing something a bit exciting, was my desire to simply be with Jess. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the two of us spending a few incredible years in Italy, getting married, one day starting a family. I knew what kind of future we could have – it was there for the taking – and it excited me. I could
trip out on the thought of that like a hippy with a pocketful of acid tabs.

Jess was still sitting in the middle of the carpet, wet tea towel in hand, carnations slotted back into the empty jam jar. They looked like a slightly sorry prop from the school play – and as its leading lady, Jess appeared to be lost for words.

So I got down from the table and joined her, taking her free hand in mine as I continued to enthuse. ‘You could get a job in a restaurant, and then maybe after a couple of years we could come back here and open that trattoria,’ I said. ‘We could ship in the wine barrels. We’d be free, Jess.’

‘But … I can’t leave my mum.’ The little sparks of excitement that had flared momentarily in her eyes began to fizzle miserably.

I was never going to be Jess’s mum’s biggest fan, but I was willing to make a small concession for the fact that she was flesh and blood. ‘Well, we could come back and visit.’

‘What about my GCSEs?’ she said quietly. ‘My dad really wanted me to get A-levels at Hadley and go to university. It was his dream.’

This I suspected to have come straight from the mouth of her mother: the same woman who couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning until she’d knocked back a double gin. Who was so out of it every night that she would frequently wet the bed like a baby. Who had taught her own daughters by example how to crush diazepam into vodka if they wanted a quick and easy way to pass out.

‘Your dad would want you to be happy,’ I told her then, meaning it. I was sure I was right. What father wouldn’t? Being dead didn’t make too much of a difference on that front. ‘And university … well, it might not be for you, anyway. What about catering college or cookery school? There’s
places in Italy you can do that.’ Yes, there were – I’d done the research during several recent lunch hours, hunched over piles of gap-year books in the school library, pretending I was all about the maths.

‘You really think I could?’ She hesitated for just a moment. There was something about any discussion featuring Jess’s mum that always seemed to tip her temporarily into uncertainty.

‘Yes,’ I said firmly, and I knew I wasn’t lying. If there was ever a girl who had the potential to really make something of her life, it was Jess. ‘Do you want to do this, Jess? Because if you do, we will, and it’ll be perfect.’ And then I didn’t say anything else because, actually, I didn’t want to persuade her. I wanted her to want it like I did.

She looked up at me without saying anything further for what seemed like a full minute. ‘Yes,’ she breathed eventually. ‘Let’s do it, Mr L. Let’s go to Italy together.’

And after that we simply stared at one another for a while, holding hands and breathing in sync as we both absorbed the magnitude of what we had agreed to do. It felt as if we were readying ourselves to step off the edge of something, like we were counting down to jump with no real way of knowing who or what would break our fall.

Finally, seeming to nudge herself back to reality, Jess sighed. ‘I should go. I told my mum I’d be back by ten.’

Well, people probably told her mum things all the time, I resisted the urge to point out – like to steer clear of mixing alcohol with prescription drugs, for example. And look how much attention she paid to that.

As Jess began to cast her eyes around the room for her stuff, I suddenly remembered something. ‘Hey, I nearly forgot.’

‘Forgot what?’

‘Sorry it’s taken me so long, but …’ I reached under the dining table and passed her a gift-wrapped bundle. ‘I wrote down what they were but I lost the piece of paper. Found it in a pocket last week.’

She looked bemused. ‘What’s this?’

‘Open it.’

Inside the parcel were three hard-backed books:
Delia Smith’s Christmas
,
White Heat
by Marco Pierre White and – most relevant perhaps – Antonio Carluccio’s
Passion for Pasta
.

‘They were the ones your aunt took back at Christmas.’

She stared at the books for longer than I’d expected, and for a moment I thought she was working out how to tell me that somebody else had already replaced them. But when she finally looked at me, her grey eyes were spilling tears. ‘Why would you do this for me?’

‘Because I love you,’ I said, because I did.

She crept across to me and as she tipped her head up, putting her lips to mine, I felt the dampness of her cheek against my own. ‘Thank you so much. I love them. I love you, Mr L.’

‘Call me Matthew,’ I mumbled into her mouth as I kissed her more passionately than I’d probably ever kissed her before. ‘Call me Matthew.’ And then I lifted her on to the table and sat her squarely on top of everyone else’s maths books, where we fucked each other harder and faster than even I had thought possible.

Several hours later, in the middle of the night, I woke up:
BANG
.

It was dark outside, and I wasn’t quite sure why I’d jumped. I wasn’t having a nightmare, as far as I could tell: there were no immediate looming visions of Mackenzie or Sonia Laird or pitchfork-wielding child-protection campaigners in my
head. But the bedroom, the house and the street were all eerily still; I was alone; and it was freaking me out.

I decided to go and get a glass of water, because that was what I did at school when the girls in my class were having hysterics about boys or periods or prime numbers, and it usually helped me to clear my head.

As I reached the living room and started to make my way to the kitchen, I got the bizarre sensation again that I was being watched. I turned round, almost on auto-pilot, just to prove to myself that I was being a prime twat, never mind prime numbers, and virtually succumbed to cardiac arrest right there on the spot.

Sonia Laird was sitting bolt upright on my sofa like a sodding fright-night waxwork.

‘JESUS!’

She didn’t say anything for a moment or two. She just sat there, completely motionless (apart from her red lips, which were twitching slightly, as if it amused her to sit there and watch me momentarily spreadeagled against the living-room wall in my pants. Which it probably did).

‘What the
fuck
, Sonia!’ Even I was surprised by how quickly my fear turned to hands-down rage. ‘How the fuck did you get in?’

‘This is Norfolk, Matthew,’ she said, with a roll of the eyes. ‘Nobody locks their doors in Norfolk.’

I thought about telling her that was probably because they didn’t know there were red-haired lunatics like Sonia out there on the loose, trying doors. You only had to look at her to know it was worth a dead-bolt or two.

‘Nice pants,’ she said then, raising an eyebrow and nodding in the direction of my crotch.

For some reason, this pissed me off almost as much as the fact that she was in my living room in the first place. ‘WHAT
THE FUCK DO YOU WANT, SONIA?’ I shouted. ‘Tell me now or I call the police!’

Sonia laughed then, like this was the funniest thing she’d heard in a long time – which didn’t exactly surprise me, given that she had the approximate wit of an invertebrate on tranquillizers. Slowly, she raised one of her freakishly long index fingers and rested it against her lips. I could imagine those sculpted scarlet fingernails scraping marks into skin, gouging out eyes. They were evil fingers.

‘Sssssh. I don’t think you
really
want the police round here. Do you?’

I knew then that she knew – and that this time, it wasn’t guesswork. Even Sonia wouldn’t have had the nerve to break into my house in the middle of the night unless she had a hefty file of evidence that she could lob at my head like the killer Molotov cocktail we both knew it to be.

She’d got my attention then. Folding her arms, she fixed me with a triumphant stare that was probably not dissimilar to the one I had used when I was taking the piss out of her tits in Venice.

‘Well, well, Mr Landley. Quite the smooth operator, aren’t you? Shagging a schoolgirl.’

‘You need to shut up now, Sonia,’ I growled at her, concentrating really hard on not marching over to the sofa and slapping her self-satisfied little face.

‘Or what?’

I was reluctant to issue her with death threats straight away. I wanted to hear what she had to say first. ‘Just tell me what you want,’ I said steadily. I had to play it cool, appear calm, call her bluff. I’d watched
Columbo
enough times to know that, for God’s sake.

‘I’ve been following you.’ She let out a sigh, flicked her
hair back over one shoulder and crossed her cankles smugly. ‘You and Jessica Hart. Everywhere.’

There was an ominous silence.

I didn’t for one minute doubt what she was saying. For weeks I’d felt as if we were being watched; now, it all made sense.

‘That’s right.’ She smiled again, and I realized then that this was the moment she’d been waiting for. ‘I knew what you were up to, so I’ve been following you, and I’ve got the photos to prove it.’ She bent over, giving me a gratuitous view straight down her top that nearly made me gag, and reached into the tacky red handbag at her feet. She pulled out a camera, a little point-and-shoot.

Feeling my stomach flip clumsily, I took a step towards her. ‘Give that to me,’ I growled.

She laughed again. ‘How rude! Weren’t you brought up to ask nicely, Mr Landley?’

It was becoming obvious that Sonia was not going to be obliging in the manner of a cat caught defecating on my lawn, in that if I shouted at her loudly enough, she might piss off. Still, I had to try and shut this whole thing down as quickly as possible, so that I could get her the fuck out of my house and buy myself some time to think.

‘Sonia,’ I said, my voice shaking like I was trying to talk a loaded gun from her hand, ‘give me the camera. Now.’

She smiled again. ‘Or what?’

‘Trust me when I say you don’t want to find out.’

Sonia eyed me levelly. ‘If you touch me,’ she said, ‘I’ll scream blue bloody murder.’

I didn’t doubt it, actually. I’d heard Sonia singing in assembly and though she couldn’t hold a tune to save her life, she had lungs like a town crier’s.

‘So if you don’t want the police to find out exactly what
you’ve been up to,
Matthew
,’ she continued, like I was so pathetic that even my name didn’t warrant taking seriously, ‘you’ll stay exactly where you are.’

It hit me then, like a violent smack to the nuts, that she was about to blackmail me. She was going to use those photos to get what she wanted. Of course – why else would she have taken them?

At this point, my ongoing tactic seemed to consist of playing along begrudgingly until an escape route became apparent. Admittedly this was not exactly a watertight plan to exonerate myself, but I had nothing else. She’d caught me way off guard, as evidenced by the fact that I was standing in front of her wearing only my pants. ‘Okay, Sonia. You win. You’ve got me.’ Despite myself, I couldn’t resist giving her a sarcastic little round of applause. ‘So what the fuck do you want?’

She smiled again. ‘Ooh,’ she crooned, ‘now you’re asking.’

‘Don’t fuck about, Sonia,’ I said, my voice quivering dangerously. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was naively thinking she might just say
money
, and I tried desperately to recall how much I had in my savings account. I’d been earmarking it for a flat deposit (or – why not? – maybe a down payment on a little trattoria), but if it meant getting Sonia the fuck out of my house, she was welcome to take the lot.

But Sonia wasn’t talking about money. Instead, she was twirling a ringlet of red hair around her index finger and smiling the nastiest little smile I’d ever seen. ‘Weren’t you paying attention, Mr Landley? I already told you. I want you to ask nicely.’

I swallowed. Clearly, the answer was no – I hadn’t been paying attention, which given that I was half naked in the middle of a blackmail situation, wasn’t a great start. ‘What?’

‘I want you to say you’re sorry,’ she said, speaking very steadily, her green eyes flashing with her newly assumed power. ‘You’re going to tell me you’re sorry for treating me like shit all these months. You’re going to apologize for dismissing me and making me out to be an idiot in front of all your stupid fucking friends. You’re going to beg my forgiveness for looking at me every day as if I’m something you’ve trodden in.’

But you are, Sonia. You’re as horrible as the very worst kind of excrement
.

I swallowed and said nothing. I was starting to sweat lightly. I had wanted to put a stop to this, not play her game – but I was beginning to realize they were going to end up being the same thing.

I wondered briefly again if I dared to try and get that camera off her, but then I envisioned the strength of her scream, like an off-key foghorn in the early-morning silence of North Norfolk – a place where you couldn’t so much as buy a pint of milk without opening yourself up to a game of Chinese sodding whispers – and decided, with a resigned stab of mortification, that I didn’t.

‘That’s right.’ Sonia was fingering the camera meaningfully. ‘Say you’re sorry, and you get your sordid little reel of film.’

Briefly, I considered the conversation that I actually wanted to have with her. My opener would have been a polite enquiry as to the state of her mental health followed by a series of little newsflashes –
she
was the one who thought it was normal behaviour to keep hitting on me even though she had a boyfriend, then throw indignant little fits around like hand grenades when it didn’t achieve the desired result.
She
was the one who had turned up like a prostitute on my doorstep wearing nothing but Christmas-themed
underwear, demanding to be seduced.
She
was the one who kept persuading the rest of the staffroom to help her drag out our tiresome little tug-of-war, in which I hadn’t even been a willing participant to begin with. The thought of apologizing to this woman – who since the day I set foot inside Hadley Hall had been about as easy to please as a tethered pit bull – repulsed me; but then I looked back at the camera in her hand, and I knew I had no choice.