This Secret We're Keeping (44 page)

‘Are
you ready?’

Jess nodded numbly. She was standing in a white, windowless room that smelt of antiseptic and dog biscuits, stroking Smudge’s damaged ears, gently massaging his silken fur over and over with her fingers. He’d already been sedated, and his breathing was laboured, as if he was sleeping by the fire on a winter’s night, his paws on the edge of the rug and his eyes squeezed contentedly shut, tail on standby to wag if she said his name or got up to make a drink.

‘He doesn’t know what’s happening,’ the vet said kindly. ‘I promise. He’ll just go quietly to sleep.’

Jess tried to recall the last time that Smudge’s trusting brown eyes had blinked up at her, the last time she’d looked back into them and smiled. Had it been in the kitchen, when he had moved so loyally from Anna’s side to hers?

She smiled faintly as she remembered teaching him to give her a paw, to roll over, to fetch his favourite toy – a battered old ring made from plastic that was supposed to resemble a doughnut. She thought of the miles they’d walked side by side, the nights they’d spent stretched out together on the sofa watching the sheepdog trials on television, the way that he would lick her hand and nudge her gently with the damp tip of his nose, as if to let her know that he would always be there.

She had once read somewhere that during a dog’s final moments, it was kindest to act normally, as if today was just
like any other day and tomorrow would start as it always did, with a long, lazy walk followed by breakfast in the back garden, soaking up the sun. She wondered now if the person who wrote that had ever lost their dog in this way – if they themselves had ever tried not to shake as they drew a hand across the warm fur of their loyal companion for the very last time.

She nodded, and as the vet applied the needle, Jess shut her eyes. She kept her fingers against Smudge’s ears, fondling them steadily, hoping he could somehow feel her there.

When she opened her eyes again, she was just in time to see his paws flex slightly as his little chest made one tired, final breath, and then he was still.

Jess leaned forward and buried her face against his warm neck, inhaling his familiar smell.

‘I love you,’ she whispered into his fur, her voice thick with grief and desperate tears. ‘Be good, okay?’

‘Will?’

‘Jess? What’s wrong?’

She couldn’t quite bring herself to say the words. ‘How’s Charlotte?’ she asked him.

He exhaled. ‘Fine. Natalie panicked. The needle on the adrenaline pen bent. But she was quick-thinking enough to shove a load of antihistamines down her neck, thank God. She spent the night in hospital, but she’s okay.’

‘That’s great,’ Jess said, but her voice broke as she spoke. Hot tears escaped down her cheeks, but tonight there was no calm neck to bury her face against, no bundle of warm fur on her toes. There was just an empty space on the floorboards where Smudge used to be.

‘Jess? What is it?’

‘Smudge was hit by a car.’

Will waited, presumably for her to say that it was a close shave, but he was okay.

‘He was put to sleep this morning.’

‘Oh my God.’ He sounded almost breathless, his voice tight, like her news had winded him. ‘Jess, I’m so sorry.’

‘He was with me every day,’ she said, the pain becoming almost physical. ‘I don’t know what to do now.’ She wanted to reach into the phone and grab his hand. ‘Can you come over?’

There was a long silence.

‘I can’t leave Charlotte.’ He spoke like it was tearing him in two to say it. ‘I’m so sorry, Jess. But I can’t leave her, not tonight.’

She felt an uncomfortable wave of grief and bitterness rising up inside her then, and for a couple of moments she didn’t trust herself to speak.

‘Friday?’ he asked her, sounding nearly as distraught as she was. ‘I’ll try and call …’

A vision of Zak taking a claw hammer to Will’s kneecaps loomed large and ominous in her mind. ‘Will, I need to tell you something …’

‘Bollocks,’ he said, almost under his breath. ‘Natalie’s looking for me. I’ve got to go.’

‘I love you,’ she said, but it was too late. The tone of the dead line cut right through her, as harsh and unbearable as the noise of squealing brakes.

As soon as we’d disembarked at Santander, I made the conscious decision to try and forget my former life. We were virtually fugitives now, and Matthew Landley was gone – at least for the foreseeable future. Rather than dwell on the enormity of this fact, I attempted to embrace the idea that I could completely reinvent myself, free as I now was to become someone brand new – but, of course, that concept only really held appeal if you didn’t much like the person you were to begin with. I’d thought about it, and the only thing about myself I was desperate to change – other than my feet, and my propensity to blink like a nerd when I was tired – was the fact that I was the sort of guy who could sleep with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. But that wasn’t something I had plans to stop doing any time soon.

As it turned out, forgetting was easy in the Picos. Compact and (at some point in ancient history) whitewashed, our little hideout was just ramshackle enough to be romantic and for it not to really matter if we spilt coffee or red wine on the floor; but not so run-down that we were afraid to open cupboards for fear of disturbing vermin or flush the toilet in case the septic tank exploded. The villa was perched neighbour-less on one sharp, green slope of a lush Cantabrian mountain; most days, the only sound that could be
heard was the soaring swish of raptor wings against the vibrant blue of a Spanish sky.

Each morning, the sun would flare and throb, and the scent of citrus would rise in the garden. Jess would pluck fat yellow lemons from the trees, and together we’d squeeze out the juice by hand, adding chunks of brick-hard sugar from an ancient packet we’d found in the kitchen. The resulting concoction was still so sharp that it made my tongue shrink on contact, but it definitely outdid any shop-bought lemonade I’d ever drunk.

And, of course, we raided the wine cellar on our very first night. Pulling bottles from dirt-encrusted racks by torchlight and brushing layers of dust from the labels, we made a big deal of pretending to examine and assess them before finally admitting to one another that, actually, we couldn’t care less what was what because as far as we could both tell, and in the absence of an expert to advise us otherwise, wine was pretty much always going to be just wine.

‘Plus they were never going to drink it anyway. I doubt they even knew what was down here in the first place,’ Jess said.

I was a big fan of this theory too, but the teacher in me felt forced to point out that it fell roughly on a par with siphoning loose change from the piggy banks of children on the basis that they’d failed to maintain an accurate running total.

Over the next few days, since we had very little to do except stretch out on the patio in the sun, Jess’s skin slowly turned a beautiful shade of freckled sun-kissed brown, and her hair crept a couple of tones blonder. I’d look over at her as we lay there holding hands and swigging lemonade, and think about how lucky I was to have found her all those months
ago, albeit at the back of my maths class and heading straight for a D-grade in her GCSE. She’d talked more since arriving in Spain than I’d ever heard her talk before, about our dream of Italy, and wanting to finally arrange some proper help for her mum when we got back to England, and what was the point of pi anyway, and did I think that Mr Michaels was happy? And I just shut my eyes and listened to her and thought that if I never had to go back to England for the rest of my life it would be too sodding soon.

There was no phone to the villa, and no means of accessing newspapers, unless I actually wanted to go out and buy one, which I definitely did not. Jess occasionally wondered out loud what was going on back home, and more than once expressed concern for her mum. Quite honestly I was of the private opinion that her teenage daughter fleeing the country should have been her mother’s big fat cue to quit the muscle relaxants and stop using gin as a substitute for breakfast cereal, but I assured her that all we had to do was wait a week or so for the inevitable shit-storm back in England to subside. After that, I said, we could perhaps think about a safe way of getting a message to her – although whether she would be able to tear herself away from daytime television for long enough to pay attention to it was anybody’s guess.

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.