The Secret Place (43 page)

I thought of Joanne and Gemma, snickering low in the darkness, and I believed her. So did Conway. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Fair enough.’ And as Julia turned away: ‘What’s Finn at these days? He doing OK?’

Just for a second, the slash of grief turned Julia’s face into an adult’s. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said, and went back into the common room and closed the door.

Selena was waiting outside her room. The low sun through the window at the end of the corridor sent her shadow towards us, floating over the glowing red tiles. The singing had started up again.
O virgin most tender, our homage we render
.
.
.

Selena said, ‘It’s break time. We should be outside. People are getting sort of fidgety.’

‘I know, yeah,’ Conway said, brushing past her and getting comfortable on Julia’s bed. Sitting differently this time, one foot tucked under her, teenager curled up for a chat. ‘Tell you what: when we finish up with all this, I’ll ask McKenna if she’d let yous have a late break outside. How’s that?’

Selena glanced down the corridor, dubious. ‘I guess.’

In danger defend us, in sorrow befriend us
.
.
. Raggedy, splintering at the edges. I thought I saw that flash of wide-awake silver in Selena’s face again, saw her seeing something we shouldn’t miss.

If it was there, Conway didn’t spot it. ‘Great. Have a seat.’ Selena sat on the edge of her bed. I shut the door – the singing vanished – and melted into a corner, got out my notebook to hide behind.

‘Lovely.’ Conway pulled out her phone, tapped at the screen. ‘Have a look at this,’ she said, and passed it to Selena.

It hit her. Even if I hadn’t been able to hear it – bumping footsteps, rustling branches – I’d’ve known what it was, by Selena.

She went white, not red. Her head reared back, away from the screen, and her face had a terrible, violated dignity to it. The shorn hair, nothing to hide behind, made her look stripped naked. I felt like I should look away.

‘Who?’ she said. She pressed her other hand down over the phone, palm covering the screen. ‘How?’

‘Joanne,’ Conway said. ‘Her and Gemma followed you. I’m sorry for hitting you with this, it’s a dirty trick, but it seems like it’s the only way to get you to stop claiming you weren’t going out with Chris. And I can’t afford to waste any more time on that. OK?’

Selena waited, like she couldn’t hear anything else, till the muffled sounds from under her palm ended. Then she loosened her hands – it took an effort – and passed the phone back to Conway.

‘OK,’ she said. Her breath was still coming hard, but she had her voice under control. ‘I was meeting Chris.’

‘Thanks,’ Conway said. ‘I appreciate that. And he gave you a secret phone that you used to keep in touch. Why was that?’

‘We were keeping things private.’

‘Whose idea was that?’

‘Chris’s.’

Conway shifted an eyebrow. ‘You didn’t mind?’

Selena shook her head. Her colour was starting to come back.

‘No? Me, I would’ve minded. I’d’ve figured, either this guy thinks I’m not good enough to take out in public, or he wants to keep his options open. Either way, I’m not happy.’

Selena said simply, ‘I didn’t think that.’

Conway left a pause, but that was it. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Would you say it was a good relationship?’

Selena had herself back. She said, slowly, turning over the words before she let them out, ‘It was one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever had. That and my friends. Nothing’s ever going to be like that again.’

The words dissolved and spread into the air, turned it those still, backlit blues. She was right; course she was. You don’t get a second first time. It seemed like she shouldn’t have had to know that, not yet. Like she should have had the chance to leave that glade behind, before she realised she could never go back.

Conway held up her phone. ‘So why’d you dump him after this night?’

Selena went vague, but I got that feeling again: she was wrapping the vague around her. ‘I didn’t.’

Conway tapped at her screen, quick and deft. ‘Here,’ she said, holding it out. ‘That’s records of the texts going back and forth between you and Chris. See here? This is the couple of days after that night in the video. He’s trying to get in touch, but you’re ignoring him. You’d never done that before. Why after that night?’

Selena never even thought about denying the number was hers. She looked at the phone like it was alive and strange, maybe dangerous. She said, ‘I just needed to think.’

‘Yeah? About what?’

‘Chris and me.’

‘Yeah, I figured that. I meant what specifically? Did he do something, that night, that made you rethink the relationship?’

Selena’s eyes went away somewhere, for real this time. She said quietly, ‘That was the first time we kissed.’

Conway gave her the scepticals. ‘That doesn’t match our information. You’d been seen kissing at least once before.’

Selena shook her head. ‘No.’

‘No? That doesn’t match with anything we’ve learned about Chris. You’d met up, how many times?’

‘Seven.’

‘And never laid a hand on each other. All pure and innocent, no bad thoughts, never anything the nuns couldn’t’ve seen. Seriously?’

A faint pink had come up in Selena’s cheeks. Conway was good; every time Selena tried to drift away into her cloud, Conway got a finger on her. ‘I didn’t say that. We’d held hands, we’d sat there with our arms round each other, we
.
.
. But we’d never kissed before. So I needed to think. Whether it should happen again. Stuff like that.’

I couldn’t tell if she was lying. As hard to gauge as Joanne, not for the same reasons. Conway nodded away, turning her phone between her fingers, thinking. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘So that means you and Chris weren’t having sex?’

‘No. We weren’t.’ No wiggle, no giggle, none of that shite. That rang true. Score one for Conway’s instincts.

‘Was Chris OK with that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Really? A lot of guys his age would’ve been putting on the pressure. Did he?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s the thing,’ Conway said. Her tone was good: gentle, but direct, no talking down to the kiddie; just woman to woman, working through something tough together. ‘A lot of times, people who get sexually assaulted don’t want to report it because the aftermath is so much hassle. Medical examinations, testifying in court, getting cross-examined, maybe watching the attacker walk away scot-free: they don’t want to deal with any of that mess, they just want to forget the whole thing and move on. Hard to blame them for that, right?’

A pause to let Selena nod. She didn’t. She was listening, though, eyebrows pulled together. She looked bewildered.

Conway said, a notch slower, ‘See, though, this is different. There’s not gonna be any medical exam, since this happened a year ago; and there’s not gonna be any trial, since the attacker’s dead. Basically, you can tell me what happened, and it won’t blow up into some huge big thing. If you want, you can talk to someone who’s had a load of practice helping people deal with things like this. That’s it. End of story.’

‘Wait,’ Selena said. The bewilderment had got bigger. ‘You mean me? You think Chris
raped
me?’

‘Did he?’

‘No! God, no way!’

It looked real. ‘OK,’ Conway said. ‘Did he ever make you do anything you didn’t want to do?’ You always rephrase this one, keep coming at it from different angles. Scary, how many girls think it doesn’t count as rape unless it’s a laneway stranger with a knife; how many guys do.

Selena was shaking her head. ‘No. Never.’

‘Keep touching you after you told him to stop?’

Still shaking her head, steady and vehement. ‘No. Chris wouldn’t have done that to me. Never.’

Conway said, ‘Selena, we know Chris wasn’t an angel. He hurt a lot of girls. Slagging them, two-timing them, messing them around and then blanking them when he got bored.’

Selena said, ‘I know. He told me. He shouldn’t have done that.’

‘It’s easy to romanticise someone who’s dead, specially someone who meant a lot to you. Fact is, Chris had a cruel streak, specially when he didn’t get what he wanted.’

‘Yeah. I know that; I’m not romanticising.’

‘Then why’re you telling me he wouldn’t have hurt you?’

Selena said – not defensive, just patient – ‘That was different.’

Conway said, ‘That’s what all the other girls thought, too. Every one of them thought she had something special with Chris.’

Selena said, ‘Maybe they did have. People are complicated. When you’re a little kid, you don’t realise, you think people are just one thing; but then you get older, and you realise it’s not that simple. Chris wasn’t that simple. He was cruel and he was kind. And he didn’t like realising that. It bothered him, that he wasn’t just one thing. I think it made him feel
.
.
.’

She drifted for long enough that I wondered if she’d left the sentence behind, but Conway kept waiting. In the end, Selena said, ‘It made him feel fragile. Like he could break into pieces any time, because he didn’t know how to hold himself together. That was why he did that with those other girls, went with them and kept it secret: so he could try out being different things and see how it felt, and he’d be safe. He could be as lovely as he wanted or as horrible as he wanted, and it wouldn’t count, because no one else would ever know. I thought, at first, maybe I could show him how to hold the different bits together; how he could be OK. But it didn’t work out that way.’

‘Right,’ Conway said. No interest in the deep and meaningfuls, but I could feel her clocking that I had been right: no short bus for Selena. She skimmed a finger over her phone, held it out again. ‘See here? After that night on the video, you ignored Chris for a few days, but then you stopped. These here, these are texts from you to him. What changed your mind?’

Selena had her head turned away from the phone, like she couldn’t look. She said, to the slowing light outside the window, ‘I knew the right thing to do was cut him off totally. Never be in touch again. I knew that. But
.
.
. you saw that. The video.’ A bare nod towards the phone. ‘It wasn’t just that I missed him. It was because that was special. We made it together, me and Chris, it was never going to exist anywhere else in the world, and it was beautiful. Wrecking something like that, grinding it up to nothing and throwing it away: that’s evil. That’s what evil is. Isn’t it?’

Neither of us answered.

‘It felt like a terrible thing to do. Like it might even be the worst thing I’d ever done – I couldn’t tell for sure. So I thought maybe I could save just some of it. Maybe, even if we weren’t going to be together, we could still
.
.
.’

Everyone’s thought that:
maybe even if, maybe we could still,
maybe small bits of precious things can be salvaged. No one with cop-on thinks it after the first try. But her voice, quiet and sad, shimmering the air into those pearly colours: for a second I believed it, all over again.

Selena said, ‘It would never have worked out like that. Probably I knew that; I think I might’ve. But I had to try. So I texted Chris a couple of times. Saying let’s stay friends. Saying I missed him, I didn’t want to lose him
.
.
. Stuff like that.’

‘Not a couple of times,’ Conway said. ‘Seven.’

Selena’s eyebrows pulling together. ‘Not that many. Two? Three?’

‘You were texting him every few days. Including the day he died.’

Selena shook her head. ‘No.’ Anyone would’ve said that, anyone with half a brain. But the bewildered look: I would’ve nearly sworn that was real.

‘It’s right here in black and white.’ Conway’s tone was turning. Not hard, not yet, but firm. ‘Look. Text from you, no answer. Text from you, no answer. Text from you, no answer. This time Chris was ignoring you.’

Things moved in Selena’s face. She was watching the screen like a telly, like she could see it all happening in front of her, all over again.

‘That had to have hurt,’ Conway said. ‘Didn’t it?’

‘Yeah. It did.’

‘So Chris was prepared to hurt you, after all. Right?’

Selena said, ‘Like I told you. He wasn’t just one thing.’

‘Right. So is that why you broke up with him? Because he did something to hurt you?’

‘No. That, when he didn’t answer my texts, that was the first time Chris ever hurt me.’

‘Must’ve made you pretty angry.’

‘Angry,’ Selena said. Turned the word over. ‘No. I was sad; I was so sad. I couldn’t figure out why he’d do that, not at first. But angry
.
.
.’ She shook her head. ‘No.’

Conway waited, but she was done. ‘And then? Did you figure it out in the end, yeah?’

‘Not till afterwards. When he died.’