Sworn Secret (21 page)

‘You know, you should listen to Kiki. She’s got a right to her opinion.’

‘Jon does listen to me, Dan. It’s not that cut and dried. When we went to his house it was horrible. But,’ and now she addressed Jon, ‘I just don’t see why it’s you and me in such a mess while he carries on as normal. He can continue his life, uninterrupted, back at school, everybody in this bloody borough thinking he’s the bee’s bloody knees, and all the while he’s a perverted criminal who isn’t safe to be around kids.’

‘You see,’ interjected Dan. ‘Kiki’s got a point.’

‘Would you stop bloody calling her that!’ Jon shut his eyes against the anger that heaved inside him. He breathed deeply. ‘Let’s go home, Kate. We need to talk about this in private.’

Kate didn’t say anything.

‘Don’t go. Look, I’m sorry. It’s your business. I should keep my nose out of it. Stay. Have another drink. Something strong.’

‘I’d love a drink,’ said Kate.

Jon caught Dan’s smile.

‘Come home with me, Kate.’

He willed her to stand up and go with him. When she did, he was more relieved than he could ever have thought possible. They didn’t say goodbye to his mother. She was still upstairs with his father. Jon wrote a quick note saying thank you for lunch and left it on the worktop beside the hob with the present he’d bought for his father. He was relieved they weren’t going to have to watch him open it. It was a CD. The London Symphony Orchestra playing Mendelssohn. Uninspired.

When they arrived home he turned the ignition off. Rather than get out of the car they both sat quietly; the still of the silenced engine was restful. After a while Kate patted his knee. ‘Try not to worry about your mum,’ she said. ‘You can’t force her to have help.’

‘One day she’ll have to have help. She can’t carry on for ever, and it’s not going to be that long until she needs help herself.’

Kate was quiet.

‘What do we do then?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t think that far ahead.’

‘It might not be so very far ahead.’

‘To be honest, Jon, I can’t even think past now.’

They were quiet again.

‘Thank you for coming to lunch,’ he said.

‘No problem.’ She opened the car door. ‘I’m sorry I smoked.’

Musical Interlude: Number 2

‘I need to be back by four-thirty,’ said Lizzie, as soon as Haydn appeared on the corner of the road. ‘I told Mum and Dad I was going to the cinema with a friend and they said be back by then.’

‘Why do you need to tell them anything?’

She shrugged.

‘Just tell them you were seeing me, and they can deal.’

‘Mum seemed to know already.’ Lizzie paused. ‘She didn’t seem too happy about it.’

‘So?’

‘So . . .’ Lizzie recalled the disappointment and worry in her mum’s voice, but couldn’t think of anything to say to Haydn.

‘Forget it.’ Haydn reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarette-rolling gear. Lizzie waited while he carefully tipped the last dregs of spidery brown tobacco into the flimsy paper. She felt a flash of desire as he ran the tip of his tongue along the edge to seal it. ‘OK,’ he said, holding the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and lighting it. He squinted against the smoke, inhaled and took it from his mouth. ‘Our second date of the day. What shall we do?’

‘What do you feel like?’

‘It’s your turn, remember? I did the cemetery.’

‘OK,’ she said, dragging the word out as she thought. ‘Right, let’s start with another walk, and then, well, I’ve got something pretty special.’ She tried to sound as mysterious as possible, hoping a fabulous idea would come to her soon.

Haydn smiled. ‘Cool.’

They walked hand in hand. Talk was easy now, flowing from both of them like melt-water, bubbling over with sparkle and energy. Anna popped in and out of the conversation with ease, and Lizzie loved being able to share memories of her sister. It was liberating to laugh about her, hear stories she didn’t know, and to refer to her in passing without a wounded silence or gut-drenching guilt.

They stopped at a corner shop for him to buy more tobacco, and while she waited Lizzie absent-mindedly brushed her fingers over the packets of chewing gum displayed by the till. When she felt someone watching her she glanced up to see it was the shopkeeper, who looked incredibly suspicious. She dropped her hand away from the rack of sweets and then spoke without thinking.

‘What happened the night she fell?’

The question tumbled out of her by mistake and she hoped for a moment that maybe he hadn’t heard. Though it was a question she asked him in her mind all the time, it was something she’d been determined not to
actually
ask him. After all, he’d told the police what he knew; it was all there in their report. She practically knew it off by heart. Anna had called him and told him to take his dad’s keys and meet her at school with a bottle of vodka. They went up to the roof, and over the course of a few hours they finished the bottle between them. They were both very drunk. He was so drunk he felt ill. He had asked her to go home but she said no. She climbed up on the roof ledge. She laughed when he asked her to get down. She started dancing on the ledge. He was terrified, but she kept refusing to get off the wall. He didn’t know what else to do so he went back to the cushions where they’d been drinking and used her phone to call his parents, who said they’d come and pick them up. As he was going back towards her, he saw her stumble and that was it. He had been too far away to help her. The rest of the report came from Dr Howe. He and his wife had arrived at the school and found their son on the roof in a state. Haydn managed to explain that there had been an accident and while Mrs Howe stayed with him on the roof, he went down and found Anna in the playground. He checked her pulse. She was dead. Dr Howe went to his office and called the emergency services and then her parents, who came immediately. The death was estimated at sometime between Haydn’s phone call at three minutes to midnight and twenty-four minutes past midnight. These facts Lizzie knew. It was the incidental detail she was interested in. She wanted to know what they talked about, what song she was singing when she danced around the roof in the humid warmth of that fated night, whether Anna was happy or suicidally sad.

But looking at Haydn’s face she knew she should have kept her mouth closed. It was just too painful, and she could have kicked herself. He walked out of the shop in a thundery silence and she followed like a beaten puppy.

‘I’m so sorry. Haydn? Don’t be cross. I shouldn’t have brought it up. The man was staring at me; he thought I was stealing gum . . . I . . . wasn’t thinking. It just popped out.’

She glanced up at him, and her heart sank to see him closed off from her. He was having bad thoughts. She could see them wavering behind his beautiful eyes. She wished she could rub the dumb question out of his mind so he’d never even heard it.

‘I told it all to the police,’ he said.

‘I know . . . I know. It was a stupid question.’

Haydn didn’t say anything. He opened his new packet of tobacco and began to roll a cigarette, making a conscious effort not to look at her. Lizzie looked away from him, tears spiking her eyes. She watched a group of kids across the road who were kicking a football up and down the pavement to each other. They celebrated imaginary goals, lifting their T-shirts over their heads and punching the air victoriously. Then a man in a suit on a bike with shiny brown brogues and a fluorescent safety sash was cycling on the pavement towards the boys. He tutted and shook his head when they didn’t move out of his way. Lizzie wondered if he knew he shouldn’t cycle on the pavement. He swerved around them, narrowly missing a post box. The boys laughed as he wobbled onwards and then went back to their game.

‘She and I were never together, you know,’ Haydn said.

‘Sorry?’ She stopped looking at the boys and turned back to him.

‘When you talk about her, you talk as if we were, you know, together.’

‘She told me you were.’

He shook his head and lit his cigarette.

‘But I remember helping her pick clothes to wear when she was going to meet you. She used to tell me stuff . . . about what you did.’

Lizzie felt her cheeks redden as she remembered those chats with Anna, lying next to her on her bed, giggling, desperate for her to tell her more, trying to disguise both her curiosity and envy.

‘I kissed her once. But after that she didn’t want anything to do with me. Not like that, anyway. She said I was too good a mate to be a boyfriend. Her BBM. Best boy mate.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘That was my problem; I was too nice, she said, like a brother or something. She was weird. She used to come round our house a lot. You know, watch TV, hang out and stuff, like we really were best mates or whatever. Then other times she’d totally blank me, walk right past me in the corridor at school like she didn’t even see me. It made me crazy.’ He glanced at Lizzie and gave her an embarrassed smile. ‘Because, well, I was in love with her.’

Lizzie’s stomach knotted with sudden jealousy and Haydn closed his eyes, his face scrunched up, and then he covered his pained expression with the flats of both his hands, his cigarette burning between two yellow-tinged fingers. Lizzie felt as if she were spying on him and dropped her eyes for a moment, as if to give him a moment of privacy to deal with whatever thought had jabbed him.

‘She let me watch her undress once,’ he said then.

‘What?’

‘All the way, no underwear or anything.’

‘You have to be joking!’ said Lizzie, stifling a nervous burst of laughter.

‘On my life,’ he said, and held a hand against his heart.

‘And you weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend?’

He shook his head. ‘I know. Insane.’

‘Blimey,’ breathed Lizzie. ‘I can’t imagine
ever
doing something like that.’

‘And Mum and Dad were downstairs.’

‘No way!’

He nodded. ‘She left the door open, like she got a kick out of them coming up and catching us.’ He paused and glanced at her, then drew on his cigarette. ‘She also made me, you know, touch myself in front of her.’ He paused, waiting perhaps for her to say something. She didn’t, though, so he went on. ‘She said she wanted to make sure she could do it properly, you know, see exactly what happened and stuff. So she sat on the bed next to me, got me to unzip my trousers, then told me to get on with it while she watched. She was asking me what it felt like, how hard I did it and that. Then when it was over she just got up as if nothing had happened.’

Lizzie kept her eyes fixed on the pavement in front of her, making sure she stepped over the cracks between the slabs. She felt terribly uncomfortable. It was one thing to enjoy talking openly about her sister, but it was a whole different game listening to graphic stories about her doing things that made her shiver with revulsion. The way he spoke about it made it sound as if it were quite normal to ask a boy to masturbate in front of you, perhaps a bit out there but not totally bonkers, no more shocking than dissecting a rat in biology.

‘Don’t tell me anything more like that,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know that about her.’

‘Sorry.’

She shrugged.

‘You know, we used to go up on that roof all the time.’ He put his hands into his jeans pockets and hunched his shoulders. ‘There were all those old cushions and rugs up there, and I’d take my iPod and we’d listen to music. It was our place. Even though other people went up there, it was us that discovered it, so we always said it was ours.’ His voice cracked and Lizzie saw him swallowing hard. He shook his head as if the memories playing were so sharp they were making cuts in his brain. ‘I go over what happened, putting the key I copied in my pocket, buying the vodka with my fake ID, unlocking the school, walking up the stairs. How dark it was, my heart thumping mental, Anna giggling in front of me, her shoes tapping on the concrete, echoing like we were in a cave or something.’ His head was low to his chest. ‘If I’d said no, if I’d made her meet me in the park or in my room, she’d still be alive. And why didn’t I pull her off that wall when I had the chance? Hold on to her so hard she couldn’t have fallen, no matter what happened.’

‘You can’t think like that,’ said Lizzie. She lifted his chin to look at her. He moved without resistance, but when he met her eyes he suddenly turned away from her. ‘Haydn,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t help. We can all say what if. There are a million things that we all could have done differently that might mean she was still here.’

Lizzie lifted her hand to touch his elbow, but he jumped backwards as if she’d given him an electric shock. Then he turned and ran at a garden wall that flanked the pavement, kicked it twice with his boot. He kicked it a third time and as he did he spun and collapsed with his back against the wall, arms crossed across his bent knees, head buried in the crooks of his elbows. He began to cry like a badly hurt child, his body raked with fierce sobs. She knelt next to him and put her arm around his shoulders. She rubbed his knee with her other hand, tried to shush him, but he only cried more, and she began to feel scared. She wanted to help him but had no idea what she should do. She looked up at the people walking past, hoping to catch a kindly eye, but nobody allowed a kindly eye to wander. Instead they passed on by, pretended the crying boy and the fretful girl didn’t exist, turned their heads in the opposite direction, pointedly checked their watches for the time and crossed the road.

‘Haydn,’ she said. ‘Haydn. It’s OK. Please. It’s OK.’ She put her other arm around him and held him tightly to her.

He lifted his head. Snot and tears streaked his face. His eyes were bloodshot and puffed and searched her face backwards and forwards. ‘She was dead.’ He began to scratch at his forearms, raking his fingers up and down through his T-shirt. ‘I’d saw her lying on the ground. This weird, still shape on the ground. How could she be dead?’

Lizzie pulled one of her sleeves over the heel of her hand and gently dabbed his face dry like a nurse cleaning the wounds of a soldier. They stared at each other. Her pupils fixed to his and she marvelled how deep and black they were, how she felt like diving into them just to find out how far they reached. A stab of hot desire shot through her. She would have kissed him, but he opened his mouth as if to speak, then shook his head, let out a frustrated sigh.