This Secret We're Keeping (41 page)

There was a pause, and Jess suspected Anna was thinking that Rasleen – with her smear-free lifestyle, ability to balance indefinitely on one hand and stoic abstinence from any solid foodstuff excepting maybe steamed pak choi – was in fact as close to perfect as any of them were going to get.

‘So tell me this, Jess. If Will makes you so happy, why do you sound like you want to cry whenever you talk about him?’

Jess reached down and stroked Smudge’s ears. His little
head was smooth and warm. ‘I don’t.’ It was a lie, of course – she was trying not to cry at this very moment – but she wasn’t sure if that was because she was thinking about Will, Charlotte or Zak. Pondering on any one of them for too long came with varying degrees of melancholic side effect.

‘Oh, really?’ Anna countered. ‘Then tell me what you’re doing right now.’

‘Right now?’ Jess repeated, pausing to survey the mound of batter and cherries that was halfway to her mouth on a spoon.

‘Yes.’

‘Pudding,’ she admitted.

‘See, this is what I mean,’ Anna said sternly. ‘You need to look after yourself more. That means cutting out all the junk food and it definitely means cutting out Matthew Landley.’

‘Clafoutis isn’t junk food,’ Jess objected, thinking that Anna was starting to sound a bit like Zak, albeit with added zen. ‘I made it from scratch.’

‘And Matthew?’

‘No comment,’ Jess mumbled, if only in response to Anna’s interrogative tone.

Anna tutted disapprovingly, which wasn’t too much of a surprise given that she’d recently expressed allegiance to the idea that keeping things to yourself gave you cancer, as well as a whole host of other health complaints that probably stretched as far as excess hair growth and athlete’s foot.

‘Okay, Jess. Look, I’m coming round tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. I need to talk to you about something.’

‘Something else?’ Jess said, momentarily thrown by the notion that they might be capable of having a conversation based on a topic other than the human reproductive system or Will.
How did it come to this?
‘Are you bringing Simon?’

‘Nope,’ Anna said, ‘but I’ll bring coffee.’

Jess scraped round the edge of the bowl as quietly as she could. ‘I’ll need it, if you’re coming at eight. Smudge might have to let you in.’

The dog opened one almond-shaped eye in response to his name, then promptly shut it again.

‘Stop thinking about him now, okay?’ Anna said softly. ‘Go to sleep, Jess. Matthew Landley’s not worth it.’

‘Actually, that’s where you’re wrong. Because I think he is.’

We
fled the scene of the crime – our exit path the grey and shitty A3, our destination Portsmouth (equally grey, even more shitty. I knew: I’d been there on a field trip before I started teaching at a private school). The windscreen wipers were on double time. I’d never witnessed a thunderstorm quite like it.

After Sonia had played her winning hand, our only real choice had been to cut and run. The tide had risen quickly, without warning, and now we needed to make snap decisions and only hope we wouldn’t drown in the process.

‘Holy fuck,’ Jess kept saying. She was fidgeting like she’d eaten a load of crack by mistake and swearing as if she’d only just realized. She didn’t seem to be able to stop her mouth from moving. ‘Holy fuck.’

‘Are you saying “holy fuck” because of the rain or because you’ve changed your mind?’ I had to ask her eventually as we passed our first sign for the ferry terminal. I’d been putting off the question for as long as I dared. The thought of turning round and heading back through the rain to the Sonia-infested snake-pit of North Norfolk quite honestly scared the shit out of me, but if it was what Jess really wanted, I was prepared to do it.

I’d not yet told her exactly what had gone on between me
and Sonia in my living room on Friday night. I had informed her that Miss Laird was armed and dangerous, menacingly poised to take me down with her fail-safe artillery of photographs and blackmail, but that was about the extent of the intel I was willing to share at that point. Supplying the pertinent details of me in the prayer position wearing only my pants was unlikely to inspire her to sleep with me again, I knew that much.

To my relief, Jess grabbed my hand. ‘I swear when I’m excited, Mr L.’ She turned to look at me, and her expression melted into what I could only interpret as love. ‘You know that.’

I do know that
. She was right, of course. Jess was always right.

‘And the rain is kind of cool,’ she added, just in case it had momentarily slipped my mind that she was fifteen years old.

It had actually been Jess’s idea to flee. That wasn’t to say I hadn’t started fantasizing about pitching up at my relatives’ Tuscan alabaster estate almost as soon as Sonia had shut my front door behind her (failing, I’d noted with some bitterness, to break her ankle again on her way out). But I had been too afraid to suggest it – because suddenly the idea of it threatened to sully us somehow, to make what we were doing seem slightly grubby. Moving to Italy to build a life for ourselves after she’d turned sixteen was one thing; scarpering illegally across international borders with her while she was still underage felt worryingly close to sex trafficking.

But I also knew Sonia well enough to realize that we didn’t have a choice. She was unlikely to keep her mouth shut or her horrible little roll of film a secret for much longer than forty-eight hours. I had guessed from the immediate
lack of law enforcement in my living room that her plan was to wait until I’d arrived at school on Monday before calling them in, nicely timed so that I could be handcuffed and shoved into a police car in full view of parents, staff and pupils – herself and Jess included. And there it would be: |the perfect opportunity for her to catch my eye one last time and let me know she’d won with a final little fuck-you wave, before I was driven straight off to Norwich police station to be charged with multiple counts of God-knows-what.

I had been trying to work out what to do, pacing backwards and forwards across the living room like my television had broken and I was waiting to hear who’d won the World Cup. Fortunately Jess had popped over to Anna’s, so she hadn’t been there to witness me pounding out the miles on my carpet. But what I didn’t know at that point was exactly what she’d popped over there for: the key to the Baxter family’s Spanish villa, high up in the Picos mountains.

‘What the fuck is this?’ I asked her, two seconds after she’d slapped the key into my palm and told me what it was. I shook my head. ‘Sorry. I mean … how did you get this?’

‘I took it.’ She shrugged, like that was explanation enough, which it wasn’t.

‘You haven’t told anyone?’

‘Of course not. I know where they keep the key.’ She gave me a quiet beam of pride then, which made me feel a bit like Fagin debriefing returning child pickpockets.

Given the choice, Italy would have been my preferred location of criminal stronghold, but even I could appreciate that having not seen any of my father’s family since before I hit double figures, it might be a tad presumptuous to turn up
now with a teenage girl on my arm and an international manhunt on my tail. Plus, we apparently had a ready-made hideout waiting for us in the Picos. Jess assured me that the Baxters had no plans to return to their Spanish villa until Christmas – so it was sitting there empty, practically begging to be squatted in.

I had procrastinated on it for the sum total of about fourteen minutes before relenting and admitting that the villa was our best – or possibly only – option. Jess simply nodded and smiled, like,
Well, duh
. She was the very epitome of calm while I was flapping and flustering about like a duck being chased by a dog.

‘You really think it’ll be okay?’ I asked her, referring to the unauthorized occupation of the Baxters’ villa but realizing too late that it sounded like I meant our plan overall. It should have been me masterminding logistics and issuing all the relevant reassurances, not Jess.

Then again, Jess having the capacity to think on her feet hadn’t really come as a surprise. I’d seen her self-confidence blossom in the months we’d been together. Not that I was about to try and claim all the credit for that, but I sure as hell wasn’t giving any to her mother or sister.

Jess replied by smiling possibly the calmest smile I’d ever seen, deflecting my anxiety with perfection by saying, ‘Let’s go to Spain, Mr L.’ It was exactly the same technique I employed in my maths classes whenever I needed to stem a flow of meaningless questions and get everyone just to focus on the task in hand.

Still. Thieving the key to someone else’s holiday home so we could break the law in private made me feel highly uncomfortable. But I knew I had run out of time to waste on thinking about it.

‘You know Anna’s parents have a wine cellar?’ Jess was saying now. She’d been to stay in the Picos with the whole Baxter family last summer, which at least gave me some basic level of reassurance that we weren’t heading for a fictional log cabin hidden away in the depths of some fairy-tale forest. This was despite the fact that Jess had drawn me a map of the place this morning that seemed unlikely to relate to anywhere on planet earth, let alone in Europe.

‘The wine came with the villa,’ she continued, ‘but they’re teetotal.’

In my view, a bunch of teetotals sitting on an unused wine cellar were no better than OAPs with their life savings stashed underneath their mattresses: there was a certain smugness to their untouched plenty that rendered pilfering almost defensible. What’s more, I had a feeling I was about to enter a period of my life where the term
teetotal
would become about as relevant as the words
law
and
abiding.

Jess had discovered Blur’s
Modern Life is Rubbish
in the glovebox and was jiggling her knees up and down completely out of time to the music, attempting to disperse nervous energy. The uneven rhythm of the rain on the windscreen was adding an odd syncopation to the music, distracting me. There was too much going on at once.

Currently, my concentration was divided between the road ahead of us (cars, pile-ups, lane closures), slip roads (traffic-slash-undercover police lying in wait) and the rear-view mirror (serious crime squad in hot pursuit). The level of steady focus required of me represented a strange release from the stress of the previous night, which I had mostly spent jolting bolt upright in bed every time a car drove past the cottage. Given that my bedroom looked out over a B-road, this had occurred frequently enough for me
to give up after a couple of hours and head downstairs in my boxer shorts to consume as much of last year’s Christmas haul as possible – the stupidly expensive single malt from my dad, as yet unopened because I really wasn’t much of a whisky drinker, and Katy’s thoughtless airport gesture of rolled-in-China Cuban cigars. Fuck it, why not? Who knew when I would be coming back – if at all – and I certainly wasn’t planning to risk an encounter with customs in Santander by packing a vast stash of alcohol or tobacco-based goods into the bottom of my sports bag. So I unearthed an old Christmas cassette tape just to complete the picture and sat there in the dark, drinking, smoking and listening to my favourite festive hits, thankful that Jess was not around to witness quite how tragic I could be when pushed. I think deep down I was quietly saying goodbye to my little cottage, my life and probably – thinking about it now – my freedom.

Our passage appeared so far to have gone undetected, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to relax yet. I was saving that for Spain. Until I was somewhere high up in the Picos, having avoided any unscheduled detours to local police stations en route, I had to focus and get us there in one piece, under the radar.

I turned my head and watched Jess in profile for a couple of seconds. Her face was tipped up, her chin raised slightly; she was listening to the music and humming, atonal as always. She was also sporting a brand new haircut, courtesy of her ham-fisted pervert boyfriend and a pair of blunt scissors. I had been close to tears as I’d hacked into it that morning in the manner of a seasoned child abductor – and it had pained me that afterwards she’d scooped it all quickly off the floor and stuffed it methodically into a carrier bag without so much as passing comment on her wonky fringe,
like she was subjected to this sort of deranged behaviour every day of the week. (Then again, Jess’s own mother was a woman who had once drunk a shot glass of bleach because she’d run out of vodka, so it was little wonder really that the impromptu haircut had failed to faze her.)

I had debated doing something similar myself – shaving my head perhaps, ridding my chin entirely of facial hair for the first time since I was sixteen – but something had stopped me. It wasn’t fear, exactly, but a sense that I might need to save that particular form of disguise for when I really needed it.

Packing for my new life had quite literally consisted of chucking some randomly selected clothing into a bag before dousing down my cottage with wet wipes like a petty thief in training, a feeble attempt to remove all traces of my underage girlfriend. I’d hoped as I was doing this that I would never be forced to commit any form of violent crime, primarily because I would be embarrassingly inept at covering up the evidence.

I’d wavered for a moment over tipping all the loose change from my giant plastic whisky bottle into a carrier bag and taking it along for the ride as well. The collection had been mounting up for years, and it seemed prudent in a way to arm myself with as much cash as possible if I was about to go on the run. But the reality was that a Spanish bank clerk was likely to be singularly unimpressed by having to count out a Safeway bag full of English pennies, so with some reluctance, I left the bottle untouched in my bedroom. One day, I thought, I’d use all that spare change to get Jessica something nice.

I did throw the little copper statue into my bag, though, along with the necklace I’d bought for Jess but had never given her. Maybe, with the help of some sunshine,
relaxation and contraband wine, I would finally work up the nerve.

Or maybe I would go one better and buy her a ring.

The thought made my stomach skip.