This Secret We're Keeping (27 page)

I put my head in my hands, knowing that I had to kill this, now. ‘Well, I don’t love you,’ I told her. ‘I never will. I love my girlfriend. I love her more than you will ever know.’ And in that moment, I knew that was it: I loved her. I loved Jess Hart. I wanted to jump on the next train to London and tell her, right now, how much I fucking loved her. Screw that Chelsea crowd. Screw her spaced-out mother and weird sister. I probably loved Jess more than the lot of them put together.

In front of me, Sonia was still standing in the middle of the room, working her jaw with humiliation, blushing scarlet.

Because that makes sense
, I wanted to say.
You can stand in front of me in polythene pants but you blush when I tell you I love another girl.

‘I’m sorry, Sonia,’ I said, though it was probably pretty clear that I wasn’t sorry at all.

‘Shut up,’ Sonia barked. She began to make her way to the door, tottering in her heels. She was in such a hurry that she left her raincoat lying there on the floor.

‘So now I’m the bad guy?’ I exclaimed, incredulous. ‘Jesus, Sonia, I didn’t ask you to come here …’

‘Just stay away from me,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t come anywhere near me again.’

‘Fine,’ I said. I was exhausted by the whole thing. ‘That’s absolutely fine.’

And then she turned to me and spat, ‘You know something, Matthew? You’re a real cunt.’

It was the last thing she said before yanking open the door, forgetting that I had a front step and snapping her ankle bone clean in two as she wobbled straight off the top of it.

A few days later was the start of spring term, and the story, of course, had spread around the whole school before lunchtime. A group of pupils from Hadley just so happened to have been trooping back with their parents from the firework display while Sonia was still writhing around on the pavement outside my cottage, screaming in agony – so our entire little drama was played out in front of a sniggering, tittering audience containing far more people with whom I was on first-name terms than ideally I’d have liked (zero really being my upper limit).

Once the paramedics had arrived, I’d gone inside to fetch Sonia’s coat in an effort to preserve what was left of her dignity (which to be fair wasn’t much), so I couldn’t even claim she’d just been tottering drunkenly past my house. Then I had to endure a lengthy interview with the police, who were trying to get me to say I’d pushed her off the step, just so they’d have something more exciting to process than
another festive drinker with an ankle injury. By this point I was half wondering if I could call Jess in to back me up on how useless Miss Laird was at doing anything in heels.

I spent almost an hour in with Mackenzie as soon as I arrived back at work on the first day of term. In expectation of getting a hard time for bringing the school into disrepute, I had ironed a shirt, pulled my hair into a ponytail and forgone the cowboy boots. Fortunately, none of it was necessary: Mackenzie seemed to agree that Sonia appeared to have unravelled somewhat over the Christmas break, so I was duly excused from much of the start-of-term rigmarole that I would usually have had to endure – including an abnormally lengthy staff meeting and the launch of some weird educational tombola to raise funds for a school in Djibouti. I was more than happy to escape both events, if only for the reason that they would have involved extended exposure to the icy, will-stab-you glare emanating towards me from Lorraine Wecks, which was almost as bad as having her wink at me.

But the whole day passed before I could speak with Jess – an entire seven hours of vacant teaching and nervous fidgeting. Eventually I spotted her crossing the atrium near the main hall, head down, and I stepped into her path, not caring if I was being obvious, barely concerned that we could be seen. I had to talk to her.

‘Hello, Jess,’ I said, in my best could-I-please-have-a-quick-word-about-your-homework voice. ‘Could I please have a quick word about your homework?’

I had no idea where to take her that would be private enough to say what I wanted to say; but I started walking anyway and, to my relief, she followed.

Finding an empty classroom – ironically enough, Miss Laird’s home ec lab – I pulled the door shut behind us.
Grabbing a load of textbooks from a shelf, I spread them all out on the bench in front of us to feign legitimacy in case anyone should happen to walk past; although quite how, as a maths teacher, I planned on explaining this impromptu lesson in home economics I had not, admittedly, fully thought through.

‘I know what happened,’ Jess said, her voice shaking, at around the same time as I came out with, ‘I’ve really missed you, Jess.’

I spoke again quickly before she could say anything else. ‘No, you don’t,’ I said. ‘You think you know what happened, but you don’t.’

‘Well, I already knew that Miss Laird had a thing for you.’ She stared at me with a strange expression, like she’d forgotten who I was. It was making me panic slightly. ‘I said that to you before.’ Her grey eyes were full of tears. I wanted to kiss them away. ‘Everyone’s laughing about it.’

‘Yeah –
she
has a thing for
me
,’ I said desperately. ‘She turned up on my fucking doorstep, Jess, wearing that stupid fucking costume, and I told her I had a girlfriend I was in love with.’

It was a cheap time to play that particular card, I knew that; but I also knew that I wasn’t lying. I loved this girl –
loved
her – and I wanted her to know.

‘What?’ she breathed. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said, I love you,’ I repeated, my voice quiet but firm. ‘I mean it. I would never touch Sonia – Miss Laird. It’s you I want. I’ve missed you so much.’

‘Oh my God,’ she said, and then she began to cry. ‘Oh my God. I’ve missed you too.’

‘Hey,’ I whispered. And then, because I knew to step forward and hug her was too risky, I just stood there limply, one hand pointlessly half extended into the space between us as I mumbled, ‘Don’t cry. Don’t cry.’

Despite this winning effort at being ineffectual, Jess shone me a smile through her tears before wiping her eyes and cheeks with the cuff of her white blouse. ‘I’m crying because I’m happy, Mr L,’ she said, offering me a relieved giggle to confirm it.

For possibly the first time in twelve days, my whole body relaxed. I leaned back against Sonia’s workbench, my hands resting next to my hips, feeling suddenly warm with reassurance. Still, I felt compelled to glance up every now and then at the classroom door, just to check we didn’t have an audience. We should have been safe, given that Sonia hadn’t made it from her sickbed into school; even so, it wouldn’t have exactly shocked me to look up and see her face mashed against the glass window in the door, eyes aflame with a mixture of outrage and triumph. Bitter experience was starting to teach me that Sonia liked nothing better than to catch me off guard. She was in that same vein of sly as someone with press accreditation and a red-hot deadline.

‘So how was your Christmas?’

‘Oh, you know – okay,’ Jess replied delicately, as if her Christmas had been the familial equivalent of gastroenteritis and she was only just entering the recovery period. I’d almost have preferred her to be saying she’d been partying non-stop with the same rich boys from Chelsea who’d been gallivanting boorishly and illogically around my head since the day she’d left.

She sighed. ‘My mum thinks Christmas is just a really good excuse to get wasted.’

Well, we all thought Christmas was just a really good excuse to get wasted – but I sensed Jess’s mother probably took it to a whole new level. I envisaged less carol singing and Quality Street, more wrestling the sherry bottle from someone else’s grasp while hurling strings of profanities
at the Queen’s speech. I didn’t picture her happily tipsy on the sofa getting all the answers wrong to Trivial Pursuit (
Is Washington a city or a state, for fuck’s sake?
W
ho in God’s name is Imelda Marcos?
) but bawling bitterly to herself in her bedroom, party hat on the piss, cheeks a similar colour to the cranberry sauce and last-night’s mascara all over her face like she’d given Santa’s elves free run of her make-up bag.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I really was. I would have loved to have taken Jess home, introduced her to my family and
Elvis’ Christmas Album
, allowed my mum to darn her socks and my dad to force-feed her mince pies and Ferrero Rocher. Wasn’t that how Christmases were supposed to be?

‘It’s okay,’ Jess said, accepting and pragmatic as ever. ‘That guy from the support group came round and gave her a book.’

‘Oh,’ I said, nodding as if this was a positive step forward and not just a way for ex-alcoholics to occupy their time in the hope of preventing themselves from falling off the wagon. Never mind it being the sort of thing that nobody did at Christmas ever. ‘Well, maybe that will help.’

‘I really hope she uses it,’ Jess said with a frown. Then her face brightened. ‘But the good news is, I spoke to my aunt. She’s going to pay for me to go to Venice. I asked Mr Michaels today.’

‘Wow. That’s brilliant, Jess.’ I’d been planning to offer her the money myself, but I hadn’t yet worked out the logistics of how she would explain popping off to Italy for a week cost-free to her mother. Now, I didn’t have to.

‘She’d already got me a present, but she said I could have the school trip instead.’

‘What did she get you?’ I asked, thinking somewhat smugly that it would have to have been pretty awesome to top Venice.

‘Cookbooks,’ she said. ‘They were really nice, actually. But it’s fine. She’s taking them back for a refund.’

I thought that was pretty shitty. Even my own family – set in their ways and routines as they were – would never have done something like that. If her aunt could afford to drop several hundred pounds on Jess’s school trip fee, I was sure she could have written off the cost of a few cookbooks. I made a mental note to find out what the books were next time I had a pencil on me, promising myself I’d go straight out and replace them.

‘So what about your sister? Is she going to Venice too?’

Jess made a face. ‘No. She hates holidays. She got homesick after twenty-four hours in Dalston.’

I smiled, trying to think of a polite way to suggest that a week in her aunt’s east London flat was not in quite the same league as the Hadley Hall trip to Venice. ‘I have a feeling Venice will be a bit different to Dalston, Jess.’

She fixed me then with her gaze in a way I was beginning to find addictive. ‘You should see if you can come.’

I hesitated, not because the idea of being in Italy with Jess didn’t sound like the most exciting thing I’d heard this year (unless you were counting this lunchtime’s forty-five-minute update on the school gym refurbishment, which I wasn’t), but because I already knew there was no room for any more teachers on the Venice trip. Almost instantly, I began to experience a surge of indignation towards the lucky few who’d clearly been paying attention, rather than taking it upon themselves to descale the staff kettle, when the trip was first being announced.

‘Venice,’ Jess was whispering, her eyes like pale grey magnets drawing me towards her. ‘Come to Venice. It would be amazing. It would be perfect.’

And then she leaned forward, stood on tiptoe and kissed me. But only a second after I’d responded she pulled away, glancing over at the classroom door before grabbing my hand.

‘Come on,’ she breathed.

As she tugged at me to follow her, a choir of startled voices began to bellow at me in my head, a chorus of alarm to inform me that this was one step too far – that yes, I was clearly stupid, but surely not
that
stupid?

Actually, I was that stupid.

The extent of my protest was to urgently say her name several times as she led me by the hand in the direction of the home ec store cupboard – because even the prospect of what she wanted me to do was enough of a turn-on to make this more of an argument with myself than with her. ‘Jess, seriously – we can’t.’

But as it turned out, we could.

The cupboard was narrow and windowless, and smelt faintly of bread and cinnamon. It was also fucking freezing. We left the light off and shut the door, and I let Jess push me up against the shelves at its far end. She felt for my outstretched hand, lifting her other hand to my face before delivering an urgent kiss to my mouth. Everything I had been worrying about over the past couple of weeks evaporated as I kissed her back. ‘I love you too, Mr L,’ Jess groaned, the words sliding off her tongue on to mine. ‘I love you too.’

I don’t know how long we were kissing for. It could have been seconds or it could have been minutes. It felt more like days, and I hoped it would never end. There was something just so incredible about being there with her like that in the dark, about knowing that – given our surroundings – this
couldn’t go any further than a kiss. It was tantalizing to the extreme; beautifully excruciating. The sweetest form of torture possible.

Until, that is, she reached down and gently unzipped my flies.

I knew I should resist and for a few moments made a weak attempt to do so by mumbling incoherently, ‘Jess, we can’t. We can’t. Not here,’ as she undid my belt and let my trousers slip to the floor. But then she was easing down my boxer shorts, dropping to her knees, taking my cock in her mouth. And that was it. I was gone, catapulted into a state of frenzied euphoria.

In a way, I thought later, I was glad the cupboard was dark that day. I didn’t particularly want to look down and see the picture of myself, trousers round my ankles and boxers at my knees, while one of my pupils – a girl in school uniform – engaged me in the oral sex session of my life. Oh, I was painfully aware that the skirt she had on was a little too short; that she was wearing those pull-up black stockings (all the rage at the time among the top four year groups); that her tie was knotted up high over her thin, white blouse (which I was technically supposed to tell her off for – all ties were supposed to reach down to below the ribcage). Oh yes, every ingredient of the stereotypical male fantasy was right there in front of me. But that wasn’t what I got off on. I got off on
her
– her sweet laugh, her charming, uncomplicated personality, how easily she seemed to love me back. I fancied her as much when she was slobbing about in her ripped jeans and T-shirt as when she was in her uniform – more probably, because it didn’t make me feel like quite so much of a pervert.