This Secret We're Keeping (26 page)

I hadn’t
slept. Like, at all. So by three a.m. I had given up and started making vats of strong black coffee in the I-heart-maths mug that Steve had bought me for my birthday (he’d assumed this to be a masterstroke in irony, which was ironic in itself given how much I did, in fact, heart maths). The mug was roughly the same size as your average household bleach bucket, and for its part the coffee was so strong, made as it was from pure exhaustion, that by the time I arrived at Hadley Hall I was literally shaking. The overdose of caffeine had worked its way inelegantly to my bowels, and as soon as I reached the school gates I was forced to make a hasty detour to use the toilets in the drama studio.

Yes, I hadn’t seen Jessica for the sum total of twelve short days, and I was, quite literally, crapping my pants.

If it had been up to me, I would quite happily have pitched up in Jess’s garden shed the previous night, when she’d finally returned home from her festive family trip to east London; but I had resisted on the basis of the reindeer notecard she had sent me shortly after arriving at her aunt’s flat. It had informed me, in her familiar stop-start handwriting, that they would be getting back really late on the Tuesday night because they were going to see
Swan
Lake
at the … well, it could have been anywhere. It could have been the MGM Grand for all I knew, because I hadn’t read any further. The first four sentences had been enough to send me crashing into the sort of doom spiral that always seems so much worse during the festive season (and would doubtless be exacerbated this year by my over-consumption of sherry and cheese straws, and enthusiastic masturbation several times a day because Jessica was more than a hundred miles away, leaving me alone in my cottage-slash-igloo with very little but the onset of frostbite to occupy my mind). The rest of the note, I learned afterwards, had gone on to explain that she wouldn’t be able to call me either, as her aunt’s phone was in the family kitchen where everybody had to sit all day because her aunt was too much of a tight-wad to heat the rest of the flat. And she definitely wouldn’t be able to leave the flat to find a payphone because apparently her aunt’s estate in Dalston was full of predatory men looking to jump young teenage girls.

The irony of this was not lost on me. Ha bloody ha.

So I decided, at the very last minute, to spend Christmas with my own family. Richard had brought his new girlfriend, Katy, home (new being code for first ever), so I wasn’t allowed to make my usual jokes about his hair or expanding waistline, and neither could we sit up together late into the night – as was by now tradition – swigging from our mother’s festive bottle of Baileys while working our way through Richard’s entire library of James Bond videos and talking, mostly theoretically, about girls.

Over the past couple of months, I had thought a lot about discussing Jess with Richard, but each time I thought I might broach the subject, I bottled out at the last moment. I sensed, somehow, that my brother might disapprove – and
this was Richard, who didn’t have much of an opinion about anything, except maybe the declining quality of the Christmas television scheduling, and whether the internet really had any potential as a money-spinner (he thought that, on balance, it probably did).

So Richard’s disapproval would really have meant something to me. In fact, I knew it had the potential to drive an irreversible wedge between us, so for that reason, I didn’t see the point. I decided to wait, perhaps until Jess turned twenty-one, before breaking the news to all my various friends and relatives.

I also got the feeling that Katy might not be the sort of woman who’d approve of sexual activity with a minor, and as she appeared to make Richard happy, it hardly seemed the ideal time to regale her with the story either.

With Katy in tow, Richard had conveniently ditched the James Bond obsession, and was even wearing a shirt with sleeves and a button-down collar, which thrilled our mother virtually beyond speech or movement. Given that the signs were now all pointing to a new unspoken Katy-regulation warning me off any mention of 007, I figured it would have been rude of me to suggest cracking open the video library, so I simply sat silently in the corner throwing nuts down the back of my throat and trying very hard not to fantasize about Jessica’s tits.

Our mother was irritatingly on-edge for the entire festive period because apparently Katy’s family was something to do with landed gentry and had maids to clean their various houses, which my mother didn’t. So everyone had to keep removing their shoes and doing bizarre stealth runs with the Hoover whenever Katy was in the toilet. On Boxing Day I found a copy of the Yellow Pages with the page turned down on Molly Maid.

Katy herself spent most of the time perched on the edge of the sofa wearing an expression of faint repulsion as if my father had just exposed himself from behind the piano, while my mother waved bowls of cheese and onion crisps under her nose and waffled on about how pretty her hair looked.

I got the impression that Katy didn’t exactly take to me, mostly because whenever I tried to talk to her, she’d ignore me, squeeze Richard’s hand and look in the opposite direction. So I’d end up trailing off like an idiot while Richard picked up the baton and started talking about what holidays they had planned for next year or how well Katy’s dad’s sheep were doing on his farm. This annoyed me, because I knew for a fact that Richard didn’t and wouldn’t ever give a shit about anything to do with the countryside, or to be more specific, the importance of his girlfriend’s family flock to the UK wool industry.

Maybe Katy disapproved of my long-haired look, given that she was dating a man with a buzz cut, and not a very good one at that. I’d realized that some women were inexplicably distrustful of men with hair that had grown anywhere beyond an inch from the scalp. If that was the problem, she would fit in well at Hadley Hall. Interestingly, I could imagine her getting on with Sonia Laird like a house on fire.

Richard-and-Katy’s (
seriously? Joint gifts already?
) present to me that year was a box of Cuban cigars, picked up cut-price as part of a bulk purchase made by Katy at José Martí International Airport during a trip to Havana that July, before she’d even started dating Richard. Given that not once in our lives had Richard and I ever shared a cigar, I thought it was a bit of a weird, cop-out present, and hoped this wasn’t the shape of things to come. As I saw it, having a girlfriend
was not a good enough excuse for becoming thoughtless, boring or both.

I’d been hoping too to use my little festive interlude to have a chat with my dad about getting in touch with our Italian relatives, perhaps even mooting the idea of making a trip out to Tuscany in the summer. But with a guest in the house my dad was under strict orders not to deviate from his list of pre-approved conversation topics, for fear of causing the only girlfriend Richard had ever had to scarper in the direction of the ring road without looking back. Whenever an opportunity presented itself for us to chat, my mum, who had an in-built radar for this kind of thing, swatted my dad with her oven glove and ordered him back into the living room with a top-up for Katy’s bitter lemon – so I was forced to compromise by spending my downtime with my head in a travel guide to Italy, which seemed a bit of a waste when you had real-life Italian flesh and blood to talk to.

I’d planned to stay for New Year’s Eve, having imagined Katy (before I’d had the non-pleasure of meeting her) to be the sort of girl who might want to head to the pub for a few drinks and a drunken attempt at ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the stroke of midnight. But apparently Katy’s family was in the tradition of making health-related New Year’s resolutions, none of which involved finding yourself awake and pissed at one a.m. on New Year’s Day, since that was likely to interfere with running five miles before breakfast or drinking unpasteurized milk or whatever it was they did to make themselves thinner.

So I headed home to my little cottage before the main event, pausing only at a petrol station to purchase eight cans of lager for myself and a carton of eggnog for Mrs Parker. I had never bought eggnog before, but after presenting it to her, I planned straight away to do it again – she
received it with such awe and gratitude, you’d have thought I was Jesus Christ himself standing there on her doorstep. Mind you, with my hair and beard as they were then, in silhouette I was probably doing a passable impression of him – and to be fair she had once mistaken the milkman for Ian McShane.

My doorbell chimed just before midnight. I was watching Jools Holland’s Hootenanny and sinking my fourth lager, miserably contemplating the idea that Jess was probably partying somewhere in the West End with her cousins, meeting rich young boys from Chelsea and getting drunk on champagne. Watching the Hootenanny she most certainly was not.

On hearing the doorbell, I had a surge of hope that it might be her; that they’d been forced to flee Dalston because her mother had drunk too much coffee liqueur and caused a fire in the high-rise by knocking over the Christmas tree or something – which probably accounted for why I flung the door open with such gusto.

I stared, dumbfounded, at the vision that greeted me.

It was Sonia Laird in high heels, raincoat held wide open to reveal a stupidly tiny Sexy Santa costume in some cheap fabric that half resembled plastic.

I was just about drunk enough to let my mouth fall open while it still contained lager; and Sonia took advantage of the ensuing confusion to slip past me into the living room while I swore and wiped my chin furiously with the sleeve of my freshly soaked jumper.

It was freezing, so I shut the door behind us, even though I really wasn’t keen on sharing an enclosed space with Sonia for any length of time.

‘Sonia … what the fuck are you doing?’ I asked her from the doorway. If I hadn’t been thinking by now that she
definitely had something missing, cerebrally speaking, I might have found her little outfit funny.

Sonia’s unique way of answering my question was to purr, ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Landley,’ before removing her raincoat entirely and letting it fall to the floor. The vision of her standing there with her red shock of over-styled hair, limbs so white they were almost transparent and yellow teeth adorned with a smudge of crimson lipstick was in turn-on terms about as kinky as watching my own grandmother attempt a striptease.

‘Sonia,’ I said, and then wasn’t sure how to continue. What I really wanted to do was eject her from my house, but even I could appreciate the guts it must have taken for her to stand there half naked in front of someone who had visibly recoiled when the coat came off.

But Sonia clearly wasn’t planning to back down with her dignity intact. ‘Come on, Matthew,’ she crooned doggedly. (You had to hand it to her, she was nothing if not tenacious.) ‘You’re single. I’m single. Let’s have some fun. Or did you want to sit here on your own and watch –’ she glanced at the television – ‘the Hootenanny?’ She pronounced it in a stupid Scottish accent, like a school bully ridiculing the class nerd. I felt oddly protective of Jools in that moment.

‘Sonia, you’re not single,’ I reminded her. It felt like I had been reminding her of that since the first day I’d met her.

‘Actually,’ Sonia replied perkily, as if she was about to impart some nugget of information that would make me fall spontaneously and passionately in love with her, ‘Darren and I have split up.’

My immediate thought was,
Lucky Darren
. And then I took a long swig of lager.

‘So …’ Sonia said, obviously convinced that my next
move would be to vault the sofa and attempt to remove her Sexy Santa costume with my teeth.

‘I have a girlfriend, Sonia,’ I said, before I’d even had a chance to think it through.

She gave a tight little scoff of disbelief. ‘No, you don’t.’

That annoyed me. On the one hand, Sonia was always seemingly trying to get off with me; on the other, she appeared consistently determined to make me feel like the biggest loser who’d ever walked the planet. ‘And how the fuck would you know?’ I said.

Sonia didn’t move. She stayed where she was, swaying slightly on those stupid high heels of hers. She looked so unstable on them that I was tempted to extend an arm and give her a shove. ‘Well, Steve Robbins would know, which means Josh would know, which means the entire bloody staffroom would know,’ she retorted eventually.

‘Well, actually, none of you know,’ I said, which was pushing it slightly, given the particular circumstances of my current relationship.

‘Well, where is she then?’ Sonia said, looking around the room, presumably to illustrate just how much of a fantasist I was. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve, and your
new girlfriend
is nowhere to be seen!’

She even had the nerve to use air quotes too.

Just then, the clock struck midnight and fireworks began to explode outside. My cottage backed on to the village playing field, where swathes of functional-though-slightly-pissed middle-class parents clutching polystyrene cups of microwaved mulled wine had gathered with their well-adjusted children to cheer in another successful and prosperous twelve months. Meanwhile, I was being held hostage once again – this time in my own home – by a woman I had once stuck my head in a coat stand to avoid, who was wearing
nothing more than plastic underwear and having the audacity to claim it was all for my benefit.

I was drunk, and I was confused. All I really wanted was to be holding Jess in my arms – and right now, I didn’t even know if I would ever get to hold her again.

I wanted to scream with frustration, which probably explained what happened next.

‘WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?’ I shouted at Sonia. ‘I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU WANT! ONE MINUTE YOU HATE ME, THE NEXT YOU WANT TO FUCK ME! WHICH IS IT? WHICH IS IT?’

Outside, the fireworks boomed and screamed.

‘I love you,’ she said then. ‘I love you, Matthew.’

I stared at her. At no point in time had I ever expected her to come out with anything as stupid as that.