The Secret Place (46 page)

After a moment Chris stops circling. He shakes his head, almost violently. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t’ve
.
.
. But those other girls, they were months ago. I’m not in touch with any of them any more. I swear. OK?’

Selena says, ‘That’s not what I meant. I don’t care about that.’ She thinks that’s true. ‘Just: when you say you’ve never told anyone something before, I don’t want to wonder if you’ve actually told the same story to a dozen other people and said “I never told anyone this before” every time.’

He opens his mouth and she knows he’s going to rip her apart, rip this into shreds they can never put back together. Then he rubs his hands up the sides of his jaw, hard, clasps them behind his head. He says, ‘I don’t think I know how to do this.’

Selena waits. She doesn’t know what to hope.

‘I should go. We can keep texting; I’d rather just do that than try seeing each other and have the whole thing go tits-up.’

Selena says, before she knows she’s going to, ‘It’s not like this
has
to go tits-up.’

‘Yeah? We’ve been here two seconds, and look at us. I shouldn’t have come.’

‘That’s just being dramatic. We were fine outside the dance. All we have to do is talk to each other. Properly.’

Chris stares at her. After a moment he says, ‘OK: I meant it. I never told anyone about the house before.’

Selena nods. ‘See?’ she says, ‘How hard was that?’ and grins at him, and gets a startled half-laugh back. Chris blows out a long breath, and loosens.

‘I survived.’

‘So you don’t have to leave. It won’t go tits-up.’

He says, ‘I should’ve been straight with you about the phone. Instead of
.
.
.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Being a prick to you, and all. That was shit. Sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ Selena says.

‘Yeah? We’re OK?’

‘We’re fine.’

‘God. Phew.’ Chris does a big exaggerated forehead-swipe, but he means it. He crouches to feel the grass. ‘It’s dry,’ he says, dropping down, and touches a spot beside him.

When Selena doesn’t move, he says, ‘I’m not going to
.
.
. I mean, don’t worry, I know you’re not – or we’re not—
Jesus.
I can’t
talk
. I’m not going to try anything. OK?’

Selena is laughing. ‘Relax,’ she says. ‘I know what you mean,’ and she goes over and sits down next to him.

They sit there for a while, not talking, not even looking at each other, just getting used to the shapes of them in the shape of the clearing. Selena feels the hidden things thinning away to black veils you could pop with a fingertip, puddling into harmless sleep on the ground. She’s a foot away from Chris, but that side of her is rich with the warmth off him. He has his hands clasped around his knees – they’re like a man’s hands, strong-knuckled and wide – and his head tilted back to look at the sky.

‘I’ll tell you something else I’ve never told anyone before,’ he says quietly, after a while. ‘You know what I’m going to do? When I’m old enough, I’m going to buy that house. I’ll fix up the whole place, and then I’ll invite all my friends round and we’ll have a party that lasts like a week. Great music, and lots of drink and hash and E, and the house is big enough that when people get tired they can just go off to one of the bedrooms and crash for a while and then come back to the party, right? Or if they want some privacy or just some quiet, there are all these empty rooms, there’s the whole garden. Whatever mood you’re in, whatever you need right then, this place will have it.’

His face is glowing. The house flowers in the air above the clearing, every detail carved and shimmering, every corner ringing and fountaining with someday music and laughter. It’s as real as they are.

‘And we’ll all remember that party for the rest of our lives. Like, when we’re forty and have jobs and kids and the most exciting thing we ever do is
golf
, that party’s what we’ll think about when we need to remind ourselves what we used to be like.’

It comes to Selena that Chris has never once thought it might not happen. What if when he’s old enough the people who own the house don’t want to sell it, what if it’s been knocked down to build an apartment block, what if he doesn’t have enough money to buy it: none of these have ever crossed his mind. He wants it; that makes it as simple and certain as the grass under their legs. Selena feels a shadow like a great bird’s flit across her back.

She says, ‘It sounds incredible.’

He turns towards her, smiling. ‘I’ll invite you,’ he says. ‘No matter what.’

‘I’ll come,’ she says. She hopes with every part of her that they’re both right.

‘Deal?’ Chris asks, holding out his hand to shake on it.

‘Deal,’ Selena says, and because she can’t not, she stretches out her hand and shakes his.

When it’s time to go, he wants to walk her back to the school building, see her safe in at the window, but she won’t let him. The moment they started talking about separating, she felt the things in the shadows stir and raise themselves, hungry; felt the watchman get restless, legs twitching for a walk in the full spring air. If they take any chances, they’ll get caught.

Instead she lets him watch her up the path towards the school till she knows she’s blurred into the dapple. Then she turns and stays still, feeling the shadows thickening at her back.

He’s thrumming in the centre of the clearing, full to exploding. When he leaps, it’s head back and punching the sky, and she hears the low jubilant burst of breath. He comes down grinning, and Selena feels herself smiling back. She watches while he runs down the rise to the path, in big bounds so he won’t crush the starting hyacinths, and heads for the back gate at a jog like he can’t keep his feet on the ground.

Last time he was the one who touched her, before she knew it was coming. This time she reached out to touch him.

Selena’s ready for the punishment. She expects the others to be wide awake and sitting up when she slips into the bedroom, three pairs of eyes slamming her back against the door, but they’re so floppy asleep they’ve barely moved since she went out – it feels like nights ago. She waits all the next day to be called into McKenna’s office so the night watchman can say
Yes that’s her
, but the only time she sees McKenna is sailing past in a corridor with her general-purpose majestic half-smile. In a bathroom cubicle, she tries whether she can still flicker the lights, whether her silver ring will still spin above her palm. She does it on her own so the others won’t see her fail and guess why, but everything works perfectly.

After that she realises it’ll be less obvious than that, more oblique, a blow from the side when she isn’t braced. A phone call telling her that they’ve lost all their money somehow, and she’ll have to drop out of Kilda’s. Her stepdad losing his job and they all have to emigrate to Australia.

She tries to feel guilty about it, whatever it is, but there’s no space in her mind. Chris is shining into every corner. His laugh, sliding higher than you’d expect from someone with such a deep voice, turning him suddenly young and mischievous. The chop of pain,
When things weren’t great at home,
slicing off all his careful cheerful façade, turning his face taut and private. The narrow of his eyes against moonlight, the shift of his shoulders as he leans forward, the smell of him, he’s in every moment. She can’t believe the others don’t taste her hot and cinnamony, don’t see it spinning off her like gold dust every time she moves.

There’s no phone call. She doesn’t get hit by a lorry. Chris is texting her
When?
The next time Selena and the others go to the glade, she thinks up at the moon:
Please do something to me. Or I’m going to meet him again.

Silence, cold. She understands that Chris is her battle; no one is going to fight it for her.

I’ll tell him we can’t meet up any more. I’ll tell him he was right and we should just text.
The thought of it knocks her breath out, like icy water.
If he’s not OK with that, then I’ll stop texting him.

The next time they meet, in a grassy and moonless silence between two secrets, she takes his hand.

Chapter 19

We went to the bedroom door, watched Selena down the corridor and safe to where she was supposed to be. The sing-song was over; when Selena swung the common-room door open, the silence surged out at us, tight and brittle, thrumming.

Conway watched the door click shut. ‘So,’ she said. ‘You think Chris raped her?’

‘Not sure. Gun to my head, I’d say no.’

‘Same. But there was more to the breakup than she’s saying. Who dumps a guy because they kissed? What kind of reason is that?’

‘Once we get those texts, they might give us something.’

‘If Sophie’s guy’s gone home for his dinner, I swear I’m gonna get his address and track the little bollix down.’ A couple of hours earlier, it would’ve come out like she meant it. Now it was auto-pitbull, too tired to clamp down. She checked her watch: quarter to seven. ‘Fuck’s
sake
. Come
on
.’

I said, ‘Even if Chris didn’t rape Selena, someone could’ve thought he had.’

‘Yeah. They break up, she’s all upset, crying into her unicorns. One of her mates knows she was seeing Chris, figures he did something to her
.
.
.’

I said, ‘She thinks one of her mates killed him.’

‘Yeah. She’s not sure, but she thinks so, yeah.’ This time Conway wasn’t pacing: slumped against the corridor wall instead, head back, trying to rub the day out of her neck. ‘Which means she’s out. Not officially, but out.’

I said, ‘She’s not
outside
, but. She’s
.
.
.’ That vortex pull of Selena, things spinning round her axis, I didn’t know how to say that. ‘When we get the story, she’ll be in it.’

Talking like an eejit, and in front of one of the Murder squad, but Conway wasn’t sneering. Nodding. ‘If she’s right and one of her mates did the job, it was because of Chris and Selena. One way or another.’

‘That’s what she thinks, too. At least one of the mates knew all about her and Chris, and didn’t like it. And Selena knew they wouldn’t; that’s why she didn’t tell them to start with.’ I leaned on the wall beside Conway. Fatigue kicking in, me too, the wall felt like it was swaying. ‘Maybe they knew he was a player, thought he’d end up hurting Selena. Maybe he’d done something shite on one of them – just casually, like what Holly told us about – and he was the enemy. Maybe one of them was into him. Maybe one of them had already been with him, earlier in the year.’

‘OK,’ Conway said. Rolled her neck, winced. ‘Say we pull them back in, one by one. Tell them we think Selena did it, we’re getting ready to arrest her. That should shake them loose.’

‘You think if one of them’s our girl, she’ll come clean to get Selena off the hook?’

‘She might. That age, self-preservation isn’t high on their list. Like we were saying before: nothing matters as much as your friends. Not even your life. You’re practically
looking
for a good reason to sacrifice it.’

Beat of pain at the base of my throat and in the crooks of my elbows, places where veins run near the surface. I said, ‘That cuts two ways. If one of them confesses, doesn’t mean she did it.’

‘If they all go bloody Spartacus, I swear I’ll take them up on it. Arrest the fucking lot, let the prosecutors sort it out.’ Conway pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, like she didn’t want to see the corridor any more. We’d been there long enough that the place was starting to look familiar, in a glitchy way, something you saw in a stuttering DVD or when you were too hammered to see straight. She said, ‘We’ll go at the three of them as soon as we get those full texts. I want some clue what went down between Chris and Selena – the breakup, and after. See her face, when she looked at those records? The ones for just before the murder?’

I said, ‘Startled. Looked like the real thing to me.’

‘You think everything’s the real thing. How you got this far
.
.
.’ She didn’t have the energy. ‘It did, but. She didn’t expect to see all those texts. She might’ve just flaked out and forgotten them; she’s spacy enough to start with, and she says herself she’s not too clear on those couple of weeks. Or else
.
.
.’

‘Or else someone else knew about her phone. Used it to send some of those texts.’

Conway said, ‘Yeah. Joanne must’ve figured that Selena had a special Chris phone, same as she did. Julia must’ve, too, since she knew about Joanne’s. And did you see Selena clam up when I asked about finding the phone in the wrong position? Someone was at it, all right.’

I said, ‘We need those texts. Even if they’re not signed—’