Authors: C. L. Taylor
It feels strange, standing outside the school gates. I haven’t picked Charlotte up from school since she was twelve, and when I see Ella strolling out of the main doors, her books clasped to her chest, her blazer thrown over one arm, I half expect to see my daughter walking alongside her, knocking elbows and laughing at each other’s jokes.
“Ella?” I reach out a hand and touch her elbow as she draws close. “Could I have a word?”
She glances around to check the reaction of her classmates, but they don’t seem to have noticed me as they stream out of the gates, laughing, chatting, and pulling faces at each other. Or if they have, they don’t care.
“Ella, please, it’s important.”
“Okay, okay.” She waves a hand to signal that we should move away from the gates, glances over her shoulder—to check for what I’m not sure—and then looks back at me. “What about?”
“About you and Charlotte covering for each other?”
Her defiant expression fades ever so slightly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.”
I could pretend that I know everything, but if she realizes I’m lying, that I’m clutching at straws, there’s no need for her to continue talking to me. “I read the conversation the two of you had on MSN Messenger. It was saved onto one of our home computers.”
Ella’s eyes grow large as she searches my face. She’s trying to work out if she’s in trouble or not. I need to go carefully.
“Who’s Mr. E, Ella?”
She glances away, toward the school, then back at me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mrs. Jackson.”
“Mr. E. In the conversation you and Charlotte had on Messenger, Charlotte said that if Mr. E found out what you’d done, he’d kill you both.”
She shrugs. “I think you’ve mixed me up with someone else.”
“Ellsbells,” I say. “That was the username of the person Charlotte was talking to. I know it was you.”
She shrugs again, purses her lips into a half smile, half pout, and turns to go. She knows there was nothing in that conversation to incriminate her and I can’t do a thing to persuade her otherwise. How can she be so callous when her best friend is in a coma she might never wake up from?
“Ella, please.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t care what you and Charlotte did or why you had to get your stories straight. I won’t be angry and I won’t tell your mum. Just please tell me who Mr. E is.”
“I told you.” She shakes my hand from her shoulder. “You’ve got the wrong person.”
She turns to walk away but I grab her again. “Is he someone’s dad, this Mr. E? Or a teacher? Is he one of your—” The expression on Ella’s face changes from anger to something else. “He’s a teacher, isn’t he?” I can’t keep the jubilation out of my voice. “What’s his name, Ella?”
“Get your fucking hands off me!”
Now
the other kids are staring at us. The stream of bodies passing by has stopped, and I’m surrounded on all sides by staring, surprised faces. Conversations fade and laughter turns to embarrassed giggles. “Who is she?” I hear someone ask, then, “Oh my god, it’s Charlotte Jackson’s mum.” “Shit, yeah! Total nut job. Apparently she wouldn’t let Charlotte have a bath or shower for a month because she thought someone had put acid in the water!”
Ella notices the commotion around us too. The base of her throat blushes red, but she flicks back her hair defiantly. I know I should remove my hand from her shoulder, but I’m terrified that if I let her go, I’ll never see her again.
I keep my voice soft. “Ella, there’s no need to cause a scene. Just tell me Mr. E’s full name and I promise I’ll never bother you again.”
The girl smiles, and for a second, I think that this awful, awkward moment is about to end, but then the smile disappears and is replaced by an ugly, curled lip.
“Help!” She tosses back her head and screams, “Someone help! Help! Help!”
I let go of her but it’s too late. I’m shoved to one side as someone bowls through the crowd and stands between us.
“Mrs. Jackson?” There’s an astonished expression on the face of the woman standing in front of me. It’s Clara Cooper, Charlotte’s English teacher.
“She hurt me. I thought she was going to pull my arm off.”
Miss Cooper turns to look at Ella. A group of girls have appeared around her, forming a protective arc of patting hands, murmured reassurances, and raised eyebrows.
“Mrs. Jackson hurt you?”
“Yes, Miss. I was just going for the school bus when she grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go.”
“Yeah,” says one of the girls behind her. “Yeah, she did.”
“I thought she was going to hit me.” Ella’s face is the epitome of wide-eyed innocence. “I was really scared.”
Miss Cooper turns back to me and raises her eyebrows.
I feel hot, faint, and terribly dry-mouthed. I can’t believe this is really happening. I just want to go home. I want to crawl into bed, go to sleep, and wake up to find that all of this—Charlotte’s accident, James’s presents, the argument with Brian, and this—were all just a dream. “I tapped her on the shoulder,” I say. “That’s all. I just wanted to talk to her.”
Miss Cooper gives me a searching look then turns back to the crowd. “You lot, go home. Show’s over. Ella, go and stand by the gates. I’ll have a word with you in a second.”
Ella pulls a face. “But Miss—”
“Go.”
She pouts, puts her palms out as though she’s about to object, then seems to think the better of it and makes her way through the crowd. They disperse slowly, grumbling with disappointment that the spectacle is over.
Miss Cooper waits until there are no children within earshot and then looks at me. The frown has left her forehead now that we no longer have an audience. “How are you, Mrs. Jackson?”
The word “fine” is on the tip of my tongue, but there’s something about the softness of her tone and the gentle concern in her eyes that makes me say “tired” instead.
“I’m not surprised.” She touches me lightly on the arm and then her hand falls away. “How is Charlotte? She’s very much missed.”
“There’s no change,” I say, “but thank you for asking.”
Miss Cooper smiles sadly then glances over her shoulder. Ella is leaning against the gate. She has one foot on the ground, the other kicking the metal fencing beside the entrance.
Clang-clang-clang.
“Ella!”
She stops the second the teacher says her name and shoots a sulky look in my direction. Clara looks back at me.
“What’s going on there? With Ella?”
I explain about the MSN Messenger conversation and tell her I’m concerned that this “Mr. E” might be some kind of threat to the girls.
“And you think he might be a parent or teacher?”
I explain about Ella’s reaction when I suggested that Mr. E might be a teacher and Miss Cooper looks thoughtful.
“There’s a Mr. Egghart,” she says. “He teaches physics.”
I shake my head. Neither of the girls are studying physics.
“It’s definitely a Mr.?” she asks. “It couldn’t be Mrs. Everett, Miss Evesham, or Miss East?”
“No. They definitely talked about a Mr. E. One of them called him a prick.”
“I’m struggling to think of any more teachers with surnames beginning with E.” Miss Cooper twiddles her earrings and looks at the pavement, frowning in concentration. “Jenny Best from the office has a full staff list. She’d be a better person to as—oh!” She looks up in delight. “I’ve just remembered. There’s a teacher covering business studies for Mrs. Hart while she’s on maternity leave. His name begins with E. What is it…Eggers? No. Ethan? No. It’s a very common name. It’ll come to me. I know!” She smiles in triumph. “Evans! That’s it. Mr. Evans.”
“Evans?” I repeat, suddenly feeling strangely calm. It’s as though I’ve been lifted out of myself and I’m watching us have this conversation from ten feet above my head. “You don’t happen to know his first name, do you?”
When Clara’s lips part, I know what she’s about to say before she says it.
“James,” she says. “Same name as my boyfriend.”
The floating feeling stops as quickly as it started and I’m snapped back into my body so violently I have to take a step to the side to stop myself from falling over.
“James Evans?”
“Yes.” Clara is still smiling. “Why? You don’t think he’s somehow respons—”
“What does he look like? Is he over six foot? Blond? Well spoken?”
“Yes.” She looks at me in confusion. “Yes, he’s all of those things.”
“Wait!” she calls after me as I run past Ella and through the school gates. “Mrs. Jackson, please stop!”
Sunday, March 31, 1991
I bumped into Hels on Oxford Street yesterday. My first reaction when I caught sight of her, looking beautiful in a black and green polka-dot dress with her red hair piled on top of her head, was delight—but then I remembered we weren’t friends anymore and darted into HMV to try and avoid her. She must have seen me because the next thing I knew there was a hand on my arm and, “Sue? It is you, isn’t it?” She looked so pleased to see me I could have cried. I didn’t though. I didn’t want her to see how miserable I’d been without her. I made small talk instead—telling her about the costumes I was making for
Waiting for Godot
and how my mum was a little happier in the care home, although her condition was continuing to deteriorate. Hels in return told me she’d been promoted at work and that she and Rupert had just gotten back from a week in Florence where they’d gotten engaged. I hugged her then. I couldn’t help myself, and it was only when she pulled away and raised my left hand so she could get a good look at my ring that I remembered that I was engaged too.
“Aren’t you the dark horse?” she said, but instead of a smile, a cloud crossed her face. “Congratulations, Susan. You must be very happy.”
That’s when I started to cry, right there and then in the middle of HMV, surrounded by people picking through the latest chart CDs.
Hels looked so horrified I tried to run off. It was bad enough that I was crying in public without my ex-best friend looking at me like I was some kind of basket case. She chased after me and grabbed my hand.
“Please, Susan, let’s go for a drink. Tell me what’s wrong. I’ve missed you.”
We went to the Dog and Duck in Soho and found a dark corner where I could talk without too many people seeing my tear-stained face. I told Hels everything. I told her about meeting James’s mum, about the trip to Prague, about James refusing to sleep in my bed and him throwing Bunny out of the window, and she listened attentively, saying nothing apart from the occasional uh-huh or hmm. But when I told her how he’d asked me to have anal sex with him to prove how much I loved him, she gasped.
“Did you?” Hels looked at me, her big green eyes wide with concern. “You swore you’d never do it again after you tried it with Nathan.”
“I know. And I kept telling James that I didn’t like it and I wasn’t going to do it again but he kept going on and on, saying that I obviously loved my ex-boyfriend more than I loved him if I would do it with Nathan but not with him. He brought it into every conversation, and it got to the stage where, even if we were having a nice time, I couldn’t relax because I was waiting for him to start up again. I figured if I just got it over and done with once, then that would be that.”
“And?”
My eyes filled with tears and I looked away.
“You need to leave him, Sue.” Helen reached for my hands. “And you need to do it now.”
I tried to argue. I tried to explain that James had been abused as a child, that he felt stifled living with his mother, that he’d been such a romantic he’d hung onto his virginity until he was twenty-four, and that he really did love me, he was just struggling with disappointment and jealousy, but Hels kept on shaking her head.
“That’s not love, Sue. The things he says, the way he treats you, that’s not love.”
“But…” I tried to explain how it wasn’t all bad, how things could be magical between us, how we had so much in common, how I’d never felt so alive, how every day could be an adventure when James was in a good mood.
“Exactly—when he’s in a good mood. Because we both know what happens when he’s not. Is it worth it, Sue? Is it worth being criticized, degraded, and judged just for a few happy moments? Is it worth walking on eggshells, constantly wondering when he’s going to have a go at you next?”
“But it’s not like he hits me. He’s never done that, not once.”
“Yet.” She shook her head. “Just because James doesn’t raise his fists doesn’t mean he’s not abusing you, Susan. You need to get out. Now.”
She didn’t need to say any more, because everything she had said, I’d thought myself a hundred times. But it was different hearing someone else say it; it was different seeing the shock and concern in her eyes. It made me feel like I wasn’t overreacting or going mad, that James wasn’t treating me how I should be treated, that I’d be happier alone.
So I’m going to do it. I’m going to leave him. I’ll do it on Friday when we’ve agreed to go for a drink.
I just hope I’m not shaking as much as I am now.
“Brian!” I shout into my mobile as I sprint down the corridor, past artwork displays, sporting achievements, and tall metal lockers. “Brian, you need to come home
now
. James Evans is working at Charlotte’s school. I read a conversation on your computer between her and Ella and they were scared of him. Call the police, Brian. I’m at the school now.”
I reach the stairs and speed up them, using the banister to yank myself up, cursing my legs for not moving faster. I haven’t been to Brighton Academy for at least a year, but I can still remember where the headmaster’s office is.
“Can I help you?”
A fair-haired, middle-aged woman in a pale pink blouse with pearls at her neck looks up from her desk as I charge into the small room adjacent to the headmaster’s office. She’s about the same age as me, maybe four or five years older. Her name is Clarissa Gordon. She was here the last time I came to see the head.
“I’m here to see Mr. Anderson.” I make a halfhearted attempt to pat down my hair. “It’s urgent.”
I can tell from the expression on Clarissa’s face as she looks me up and down that she remembers me. Her nose narrows, and the hint of a smile plays on her pursed lips. “And your name is?”
“Jackson. Sue Jackson. It’s very important that I see him. The safety of two of the pupils is at stake.”
Clarissa raises her eyebrows. She’s remembering the last time I was here, when I stormed into Charlotte’s biology lesson and demanded I remove her for her own safety. We’d been burgled a month earlier and that, plus a news report I’d just watched on the TV about a teenager being raped in a local park, had convinced me that James had found me and my daughter was in danger. I was shaking so much I couldn’t breathe. Mr. Prosser, the biology teacher, took me through to see Mr. Anderson, who called the school nurse. I can still remember Clarissa’s pinched face peering at me through the glass panel in the head teacher’s door as the nurse instructed me to take slow, deep breaths while I shouted that no one understood how much danger they were putting Charlotte in by stopping me from seeing her. I was on high-dose anti-anxiety medication for six months afterward.
“The safety of two pupils, you say? Gosh. Well, if you could give me a few more details, perhaps I could call through to Mr. Anderson and…” She tails off, distracted by half a dozen staff chatting noisily as they stroll past the window behind me.
“There’s no time.” I sidestep her desk and reach for the door handle to her right. “I need to speak to him now.”
“Excuse me. Excuse me, Mrs. Jack—”
Her chair squeaks as she rises to come after me, but I turn the handle and I’m in the headmaster’s study before she can reach me.
“Clarissa, I—” The head looks up from his desk, his lips parting in surprise as I burst into the room, his secretary in close pursuit.
“Sorry, Mr. Anderson,” she gasps. “She just burst in. There was nothing I could do to stop her.”
“It’s okay, Clarissa.” He nods. “I’ll take it from here.”
“But you specifically said you didn’t want to be disturbed.” She pulls a face. “You said you had to prepare a report for the governors about—”
“I’ll take it from here, Clarissa. Thank you.”
“Yes, Mr. Anderson.” She retreats, stepping backward out of the room. From her expression, I’m fairly certain that if we were thirty years younger, she’d be waiting for me at the gates later with two of her mates.
“I’ll just be outside,” she says, closing the door with a click.
Ian Anderson eyes me from under his heavy brow and waves a hand in the direction of the empty chair in front of me. “Do take a seat, Mrs.…”
“Jackson. I’ll stand, thank you.”
“Okay.” He leans back in his chair and folds his arms across his broad chest. “What can I do you for, Mrs. Jackson?”
“I’m sorry for bursting in on you,” I say, gripping the back of the chair, “but it’s urgent. One of your teachers poses a very real danger to the children.”
He sits up sharply. “One of our teachers?”
“I have reason to believe that one of your teachers is working at this school under false pretenses. I think he may have harmed Charlotte and possibly her friend Ella too.”
“Charlotte…” Mr. Anderson looks at me as though seeing me for the first time. “Not Charlotte Jackson? You’re her—”
“Mother? Yes.”
I wait for him to jump to his feet and take action. Instead he keeps staring at me like he’s expecting me to say something else.
“Please.” I motion for him to stand up. “Can we just go and find him? The longer we wait, the more chance there is that he’ll leave for the day.” Or maybe forever. I can’t shake the feeling that James knows I’m onto him. “Please, Mr. Anderson. He needs to be stopped before he hurts someone—if he hasn’t already.”
“If who’s hurt someone?”
“James Evans.”
“James Evans—our business studies teacher?”
“Yes. No. He’s not really a teacher; he’s an impostor.” I inch toward the door. “Please, Mr. Anderson. Let’s go.”
He holds up a hand. “Mrs. Jackson, sit down for a minute and let’s start this again. I’m struggling to keep up.”
“There isn’t time.” I cross the room and stoop down, my hands gripping the edge of his desk, my face at the same level as his. “Please. I’ll explain everything but I need you to find James Evans with me
now
. You have no idea how much danger the children are in. We need to stop him before he can escape.” I can’t keep the exasperation out of my voice. “Please, let’s go.”
“We take accusations against our teachers very seriously, you know, Mrs. Jackson.” He gets up interminably slowly, and I wait as he pulls his jacket from the back of the chair and slips one arm, then the other, into it, then smooths it over his shoulders. For one terrible second, I think he’s about to do up his buttons too, but he suddenly becomes animated and crosses the room in four large strides.
“Mrs. Jackson,” he says as he opens the door and I catch sight of Clarissa’s arched eyebrows, “if you’d come with me.”
Even with Mr. Anderson’s long-legged strides, it takes forever to reach the staff room. When we cross the bridge between the science block and the main building, I pause to press my hands up against the floor-to-ceiling window and search the parking lot. A dozen or so teachers mill around below, some chatting in small groups, the others letting themselves into their cars. I scan the group for James’s face, but he’s not down there.
“Mrs. Jackson?”
The headmaster is standing at the far end of the bridge. I hurry after him.
“Of course, he might not even be here,” he says, holding open the door to the staff room. “There’s every chance he’ll have left for the day, be in the business studies room, or even…”
I don’t hear the rest of the sentence because my heart is hammering so hard in my chest, I feel sick.
There is a man standing at the opposite side of the staff room. He has his back to us, his blond head dipped as though he’s reading a book or marking a pile of papers. I can still hear Mr. Anderson’s voice, but I can’t make out a word he’s saying. Every fiber of my being is commanding me to turn, run, and never look back, but I can’t. I can’t tear my eyes away from the broad expanse of back and the strong arms of the man across the room. The air stills, the distance between us closes, and it is as though I am standing behind him and breathing in his musky scent. I reach out a hand and feel the coarse wave to his hair, the soft skin on the back of his bent neck, and the starchy stiffness of his shirt collar under my fingertips. I have seen this shape, felt these things, in a hundred nightmares. He just needs to turn around so I can see his face, so I can wake up.
“James?” I whisper as the edges of my vision turn amber and then black. It’s as though a match is being held to a photograph. I blink to try and clear my vision, but now there are black spots and my ears are ringing with the sound of the ocean. I feel like I’m swimming under water, deep, deep down under the—
“Mrs. Jackson?”
I feel a hand touch my elbow and try to turn my head to the left to see who has touched me, but I’m fighting so hard to keep my balance, I’m worried that even the slightest movement will send me hurtling like a stone toward the seabed.
“Mrs. Jackson, do you need to sit down?”
There is another hand, touching my right elbow, and I feel something nudge the back of my knees and then I’m pushed/pulled down until I am sitting. Everything is black and the ocean inside my head pounds the sides of my skull. My stomach lurches and—
“Oh god, she’s been sick.”
“There are paper towels in the gents. I’ll get some.”
“And a glass of water if you—”
“We’ve got mugs. There might be a clean one some—”
And then there is silence.
***
“Mrs. Jackson. Mrs. Jackson, can you hear me?”
“Mrs. Jackson?” A different voice, female this time.
Then, “Sue?”
My eyes flick open.
“Brian?” I say, but no sound comes out. I try to sit up, but gentle hands press down on my shoulders, on my hips, and I am forced back down.
“Don’t move. You hit your head when you fainted. The paramedics are on their way.”
“James,” I say, staring into the bright blue eyes that are looking at me with a mixture of concern and puzzlement.
“No, Sue. It’s Brian.”
“I know. I know you’re Brian. Where’s James?”
My husband twists around to look at someone behind him, someone out of my eye line.
“James, she wants to talk to you.”
“No! No!” I try to scream but the words catch in my throat. “No!”
“Mrs. Jackson?” A face I’ve never seen before appears beside Brian. “I’m James Evans.”
“No.” I shake my head from side to side. “No, you’re not.”
The man smiles. It’s a warm smile that lights up his face, spreading his nostrils wide and crinkling the skin under his eyes. “You can ring my mum or check my birth certificate if you like but I’ve spent the last twenty-nine years being called James Evans—well, Jamie to my friends—so I’m pretty sure—”
“The other one,” I say. “Where’s the other one?”
I try to sit up so I can look around the room, but Brian shakes his head.
“This is James Evans.” He puts a hand to my face and gently brushes the hair from my cheeks. “Charlotte and Ella’s business studies teacher. He’s the only James Evans in the school, Sue.”
“But…” I look from Brian to the young, blond-haired man beside him and instantly realize my mistake. James Evans wouldn’t be blond anymore, not at forty-eight. “Oh god.”
I cover my face with my hands and close my eyes. What have I done?
“The girls skipped a school trip,” I hear Brian say. “They were supposed to go to London with Mr. Evans but—”
“They called in on the day and said they had food poisoning. Said they’d been to Nando’s together the night before and had some bad chicken and were up all night with dodgy stomachs. I had no reason not to believe them, although, in retrospect, perhaps I should have called you to check.”
“You should,” says a voice I recognize as Mr. Anderson.
“The MSN conversation you read, Sue. They weren’t really scared that Mr. Evans was going to kill them,” Brian says. “It was just a figure of speech.”
I remove my hands from my face and look at the four faces hovering over me.
“If they didn’t go on a school trip with Mr. Evans that weekend,” I say, “and they weren’t at home with us, where were they?”
Brian shakes his head. “We don’t know.”
Saturday, April 6, 1991
I’ve been a mess all week. I haven’t been able to sew or sleep and I’ve barely eaten. Every time the phone’s rung, I’ve jumped, certain it was James, terrified he’d found out what I was about to do. As it was, he only rang me once this week, and then it was just a brief call midweek to check where we were meeting on Friday.
I didn’t want to go. I kept telling myself James wasn’t that bad, that there were a lot of men out there who were worse than him, but then, almost as if she could sense my resolve wavering, Hels called me at 5 p.m.
“I’ll be there for you,” she said. “We both will. Rupert and I will help you through this. Be strong, Susan. Remember all the times he’s made you cry.”
Typical then that James, sitting alone at a wooden table by the bar, jumped out of his seat the minute he spotted me walking into the Heart in Hand, wrapped me in his arms, and told me how beautiful I looked. He was in a fantastic mood, buzzing about a television role he’d seen advertised in
The Stage
, and apologizing profusely for not ringing me because he’d been so busy preparing for his audition.
“It went well, really well,” he said, squeezing my hands between his. “And if I get this, I’ll be able to afford somewhere big enough for you and me to live with a granny flat on the side for Mum. We’ll have our privacy and she’ll have the reassurance that I’m close by. And, and”—he practically jumped out of his seat—“you can have your own sewing room, maybe start up a business rather than do it for free for the Abberley lot. It’ll be perfect.”
We stayed in the pub—him gushing and fantasizing—me nodding and playing the supportive girlfriend for a good two hours until, unable to bear it a second longer, I suggested we grab a takeaway and go back to my place. James was surprised—he’d expected to go on to a restaurant—but I said I was tired and he acquiesced. The walk home was horrible. I was too preoccupied to talk, and we lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, James glancing at me every couple of seconds while I avoided his eyes.
He wrapped his arms around me as I unlocked the front door and nuzzled his face into my neck.
“Maybe coming home wasn’t such a bad idea after all. You just wanted to lure me into your bed, didn’t you, you little minx?”
I stiffened at his touch and slipped out of his arms. He followed me into the kitchen and watched from the doorway as I opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of wine. I could feel his eyes boring into my back as I unscrewed the lid and poured myself a large glass.
“Want one, James?”
He didn’t reply.
I put the bottle back in the fridge, then, noticing how messy it had become, set about rearranging packets of ham, cartons of milk, and half-empty tins of baked beans.