Dead Secret (10 page)

Shit.
The car swerves as a lorry thunders past. That was bloody close. Last thing I remember my eyes were glued to the white line, but I must have drifted, silently, dangerously. My hands shake on the wheel. The photograph album in my mind kept me awake at first, then slowly, seductively, it lulled me too deeply into its pages. The indicators tick-tock rhythmically as I stop the car in the next layby, close my eyes. Just for a moment. Just a rest.

Mr Mad… best forgotten. Mr Bad… well there were a few of him. I threw myself away on Mr Bads, deliberately I think now. Useless, disposable Becca who came from nowhere and was
going
nowhere. What did it matter?

And then there was Mr Dangerous, the only one I came close to loving. That’s why he was Mr Dangerous. He wasn’t free, of course. I see now that I never chose anyone who was free. Not after Tariq. Not
even
Tariq.

Maybe I thought I wasn’t worth it. And I learned that if you think you aren’t worth it, men don’t think you’re worth it either. If that sounds self-pitying, forget it. I am not a victim. I don’t want anyone’s pity, not yours and not even my own. Certainly not now. It’s just that after Tariq, nothing was worth it. Love, sex, lies, games… it was all the same to me. Tariq was my one shot at purity. After that, I didn’t believe in purity any more.

I see Mr Dangerous as I drift into a short, intense sleep in the car; see him standing naked in the half-light of the hotel
bedroom
, the smooth line of his back skimming into neat, muscular buttocks. He always stood by the window afterwards, drowning in the choppy waters of his own despair, while I lay watching him from the bed. He would lean his arm against the wall and lay his head on it, then he’d lift the curtain just a fraction with his free hand and peer through the crack into the world, like he couldn’t make up his mind whether to join it or not.

In my memory, it is always half light, constantly falling
shadows
. It was winter and he was never free except in the afternoon. By the time we drove well out of town where he could be sure he wouldn’t be recognised, darkness was already closing in.

He’d stand there with his back to me as the last of the light melted into darkness, like ice melting into water, until there was nothing left to illuminate the room but the insipid, dusty glow from the desk lamp.

The first time I ever saw him he had his back to me. I thought he looked like Tariq from behind: the same wiry, black hair that kicked out at the collar when it needed a cut; the same ascetic thinness. I fell for him then. People say women always fall for men they know they shouldn’t. It’s the challenge. If they can make the ones who mustn’t fall in love with them want them, how powerful is that?

It became a corrupt kind of power, a power I wielded lethally, like a weapon.

A samurai sword that I used to slice through every sinew of conscience. “I have responsibilities,” he’d murmur against my lips, and I’d use my tongue to lick the words into silence. I mistook that power for something else, as I so often have.

His desire was predictable; there was no cunning needed. A shorter skirt. A higher heel. The deeper plunge of my neckline; the moist, pearly lustre of lip sheen, glistening like the juice of blood oranges on my lips. I thought I was in control, didn’t realise until it was too late that I was playing with my own
emotions
as well as his. I could have loved him. He wasn’t worthy of it, but who said love was worthy?

He couldn’t contain his desire to get into bed but he couldn’t wait to get out of it. Before he had even withdrawn from inside me he was cutting the emotional ties that might have bound us, till all that was left was a sad, tattered heap of lost possibilities.

He never held me afterwards. His first instinct was always to move away from me. I cried the first time he stood at the hotel
window
, two sharp bitter tears of humiliation. He stood there so long he never knew. And I never cried again. I learned to watch him coolly, dispassionately, waiting for him to turn towards me. As he always did. He’d come over to the bed finally and lie for a few minutes, against my shoulder, wrapped in a blanket of his own self-pity.

“I can’t do this,” he said once, murmuring against my
shoulder
, waiting for me to comfort him, absolve him. Absolution, that’s the thing. Confession. And after confession, familiar temptation. “I think you just did,” I said. This time, I did not lift my arm to hold him. He half sat, twisting onto his elbow. “My God, Rebecca, you’re hard,” he said bitterly.

Why couldn’t I understand? Things were so complicated. He had another life, a life quite separate from me that couldn’t
include
me. So choose, I said, with a carelessness I didn’t feel. He looked at me then like he hated me. He probably did.

I don’t think he ever took responsibility for what happened; he wouldn’t admit it but he blamed me. I was a woman and I was
strong and I should have been strong for him. He despised
himself
for wanting me, but he despised me more for making him. And I despised myself for being with a man like him.

So many broken promises, he said once. Broken vows. I had to help him.

Leave him. Move away. And when he called, I asked? What then? Should I refuse to talk to him? Because he
would
call. Even he knew he would.

Sometimes he called my mobile late at night. He liked to call when I was in bed.

Sometimes, he didn’t say anything for a full minute but I
always
knew it was him. I couldn’t go to his house, obviously. And he couldn’t come to mine. So he had to make do with
connecting
to me by a telephone line. It suited him best, engagement at a distance.

Whatever the pattern of his remorse – the cold shame of his head against the wall, or the pleading need for understanding – there were always tears. He would sit by the desk with his head in his hands, or he’d come over to the bed and turn into the firm curve of my upper arm and sob, the warm drip of bitter tears running down my breast and ribcage onto the sheets. I would hold him loosely then, stroking his hair lightly, or circling my thumb gently over his arm.

“I’m sorry,” he would sob. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” Sorry for who, I would think, looking up at a small patch of damp spreading from the light rose.

Sometimes I would look down on the dark hair and try to pretend he was Tariq, imagine what it would have been like to be with Tariq. It’s the biggest betrayal I can think of, to make love to someone while pretending they are someone else. Somehow,
I could never feel guilty. There was so much pretence between us that a little extra didn’t seem important. Every lover I have ever had, I’ve imagined was Tariq.

It must end, he would say. I would kiss his tears then, but in a half-hearted, desultory kind of way. Even as I tasted them, I knew we would be back here next week, back in this room with the magnolia woodchip walls, and the desk with the dusty globed lamp, and the fusty smell of a shower
sprouting
mould in the grout between the tiles. We were caught in a cycle of guilt and recrimination and desire, and the most powerful of those was desire. Even at the very height of his protests about how this must never happen again, I knew for certain it would. There would be confession in between, of course.

That’s the way it is with Catholic priests.

As I write this all down so many years later, I can see how bad it sounds. Secrets rarely make pretty reading. I think I felt a vague shame even back then, when it all tumbled around inside my head on that lonely car journey north. That’s my memory. A sense of embarrassment that if Da did still exist in some way, he might now know what I had been up to. It was a strange turning of the tables. First I read his love letters to my mother, then he found out about my affair.

I did not need to ask if he disapproved. I knew the answer too well to even consider asking the question. But I wanted him not to think too badly of me. I am not a bad person. A priest, yes, but
he
was the priest, not me. His collar, his cloth, his promises to a God I couldn’t share.

The convent schoolgirl in me thought it was the worst thing I could do, but another part of me took a perverse satisfaction in that. Perhaps it was just another sign of my instinct for
self-destruction
. This God Father Dangerous had devoted his life to had taken Tariq, so I took him. One of mine for one of His. Maybe part of me was prepared to burn to have even a second’s revenge.

The miles flashed by. Newtonmore. Kingussie. Miles eaten by memories. I don’t know which of us used the other more. Father Dangerous was screwed up about sex because of his vocation; I was screwed up about love because of Tariq. Sometimes you make do with one and pretend it’s the other. But in my heart, I know the difference. I never had sex with Tariq but he taught me the difference.

And the others, well, there were not so many. A few. A few who for a week, a day, an hour, made me feel there was
something
in me that was worth having. I think, deep down, I felt that if I had been worth anything, Tariq would have lived. Those who came after were nothing, nothing at all. It didn’t make me a bad person. There were worse things, I told myself as I drove into the night. It wasn’t unforgivable, was it? It’s wasn’t like I killed anybody.

It was Da who introduced me to him, the new, dynamic young parish priest. I think maybe he thought he’d lead me back to the Church. As I suppose he did, just not in the way Da thought.

I’d go to mass with Da sometimes that winter. I was old enough not to have to rebel any more. I kept him company, though later, for obvious reasons, I wouldn’t go near the place.

The first time I saw him, he was down the bottom of the church steps as I came out. He was saying goodbye to someone and he turned and walked up the steps, meeting us halfway. I wasn’t aware of much of a frisson on his part; perhaps his eyes held mine a little longer than necessary, but nothing more. But later he would say it was instant. I saw him a few times after that before I started dropping into morning mass. I don’t know what I was hoping for. It was deliberate but not calculating.

I came in late once. The door slipped from my hand when I opened it, swinging back noisily. He said he would have seen me anyway, that the moment he walked on the altar he knew if I was there or not. His eyes would pick me out at the back from the sea of old biddies and young mums with noisy toddlers. If I wasn’t there, he would feel the cut of disappointment. And if I was there, he was on fire. That’s what he said. On fire.

Even I was shocked by that. You think when a man puts on his priest’s robes, he transcends his humanity. No masculinity. No troublesome sexuality. But it doesn’t work like that. In the end, I saw through those vestments. I saw his nakedness. The more fervent his sermon on that altar, the more anguished his prayer, the more I knew he burned.

He was disappointed that day I was late, began the mass with sullen heaviness. Then the door banged and it was like a match hitting petrol. I felt, rather than saw, the effect, the connection blazing silently between us from him on the altar to me at the door. It wasn’t that he faltered; there was no hesitation, no stumble in his words. But I saw the awareness ripple through his body. Every tiny movement, every gesture, every almost imperceptible glance, became like a series of dots and dashes in our own
personal
Morse code. He knew I was there. And I knew that he knew.

We died together slowly. It took a year all in, from start to finish, though it was only after six months that we started
renting
the hotel room. In those early months when he needed to be held, I held him purely. Wanting more but expecting nothing. Sometimes, I thought he almost enjoyed the anguish of it, the torture. Suffering was grace.

We ended up in bed together for the first time only when he came back from Peter Gallacher’s house, after Peter’s wife Eva passed away. She was thirty-five. She left four kids under ten and Peter just sat there looking bewildered while the youngest screamed for a bottle. Father Dangerous said it was only when he got up to go that Peter had looked at him properly for the first time since he came into the house. “Will you pray with me, Father?” he said.

It touched him that, the simple faith of it. His own faith wasn’t simple; it was a tangled web of love and devotion and doubt and insecurity. He’d come back from Peter’s changed somehow. He saw how fragile life was. I think that night he was frightened he would die without knowing what it was like to be with a woman. He phoned me and asked me to meet him in a pub in town. It was the first time he had ever turned up not wearing his collar. His collar was his guard; I knew immediately the significance of its absence.

He greeted me with a kiss, held me close. Reckless he was that night, and it was I who burned then. His lack of caution made his desire for me seem so intense that I mistook it for love. I had imagined this relationship so often that when it finally
happened
, it seemed more important than it really was. To be that wanted, that needed, that important; it was everything. But it never lasted. The heat of his recklessness was always followed by a cold shower of guilt and remorse. Even that first night.

I told him in the end to choose, because I knew he never would unless I made him. It took me a while to make the
ultimatum
because inside I always knew what the choice would be. I had to make him say it. But he never could. Not even at the end. I gave him a date and told him he had until midnight to phone.

I lay in bed that night, my phone lying on the bedside table and switched to vibrate. At two minutes to midnight, the phone began to buzz, moving slightly on the cabinet top with the
vibration
. I picked it up and said nothing. The caller said nothing. We sat in silence for a while.

“Rebecca,” he whispered finally, and then his voice broke.

I looked at the phone in the palm of my hand for a moment before gently pressing ‘end call’. I switched the phone off so that it couldn’t ring again, then flicked the bedside light, and lay
staring
into the darkness until my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and I saw things the way they really were.