This Secret We're Keeping (32 page)

She stared at him. Her teeth had stopped chattering now.

‘So I kept it. I kept it all this time because I had this stupid idea that one day … I might have the chance to give it to you properly.’ Shaking slightly as he spoke, he reached out and removed the necklace clumsily from its little box before leaning across to fasten it at the nape of her neck. She lifted her fingers to where she felt it against her breastbone, and he moved his hands to her shoulders.

‘How does it look?’ she whispered.

He smiled and shrugged happily. ‘Exactly as I thought it would.’ Then he pulled her into a hug, and mumbled into her hair, ‘Incidentally, I’m really sorry the quality’s not up to much. That was my first stab at buying jewellery. You deserve classier than that after a seventeen-year wait, Jess.’

She admonished him with a squeeze to his ribcage. ‘It’s
so
worth the wait. Honestly. That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.’

‘Jess, be serious,’ he said, pulling back from her and dropping his chin slightly to meet her eye. ‘
That’s
the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for you? Presented you with a crappy old necklace in the middle of a salt marsh at one in the morning?’

She knew he was teasing her really. ‘Yes.’

‘Then I think it’s probably time to get yourself a new boyfriend,’ was all he said.

She smiled and thought to herself that, on balance, she would have to agree.

So my beautiful girlfriend was going to be in Venice with the lower fifth on Valentine’s Day, and I desperately wanted to be there with her. But it had been looking like the only way that was going to happen was if I purchased my own plane ticket and stalked them all by water taxi.

As it turned out, however, Sexy Santa’s broken ankle could not have been more perfectly timed.

Sonia was one of the teachers with her name on the list for the trip – but several weeks after I had somehow fractured her fibula by watching her fall off my front step, Mackenzie asked me to go in her place.

We’d not said a word to one another since New Year’s Eve. Sonia was highly aggrieved and convinced that her ankle injury was a direct result of my failure to fancy her, so she’d spent the last few weeks getting most of the staffroom on side. This meant the vast majority of my (mostly female) colleagues now believed I’d tricked her into stripping off at my house before ejecting her on a whim that was no doubt related to lager, football or something I’d read in
Arena
. (I’d been naive enough to think we might both want to keep quiet about the whole thing in an effort to preserve her dignity, so to realize she’d been spreading pre-emptive lies about me in the staffroom really pissed me off.)

Mackenzie’s reasoning for banning Sonia from the Venice trip was three-fold. One, she’d been behaving like she’d lost all four limbs in a motorbike accident and it was becoming increasingly apparent that supervising on a school trip was a risky choice of assignment for someone so feeble. Two, I had rudimentary Italian. Three, I got on well with Brett Michaels, who as head of the language department was running the trip. We had bonded previously over our mutual suspicion of the cheap instant coffee in the staff-room and of Lorraine Wecks (also Venice-bound as Sonia’s partner-in-crime), as well as our shared disdain for Hadley’s most pointless unwritten codes of conduct, like the one to do with keeping facial hair in check. (Brett had once thought it would be funny to ask Lorraine if she needed bringing up to speed on that, to which Lorraine had responded by carefully angling her cup of soup all over Brett’s freshly shorn jawline. He had to stop shaving for a while to let the scorch heal up, which marked the start of a minor competition between us to see who could cultivate the hairiest face before someone lost patience and complained to Mackenzie. Our record so far was two working weeks, and I had won. Brett bought me a four-pack of Red Stripe lager as my prize.)

So I’d been all set to go, until Sonia turned up at school three days before the trip with a letter from her GP, claiming she was fighting fit. Brett chose to interpret this literally by going spare and nearly head-butting her. It culminated in the three of us battling it out in Mackenzie’s office, with Sonia fake-crying and Brett arguing loudly and angrily over the top of her head.

The upshot, eventually, was that both Sonia and I would be going to Venice – because we all knew that, in reality, Sonia was an emotional wreck who barely had any place teaching at all, let alone limping along at the back and
holding everybody up on an awesome holiday disguised as a field trip.

Brett and I exchanged a high five as we left Mackenzie’s study. We also failed to hold the door open for Sonia, which wasn’t deliberate but Brett thought in hindsight to be quite a nice touch. The battle lines were drawn. It was Landley–Michaels versus Laird–Wecks.

Oh, it was most definitely on.

The illusion of a free holiday faded almost as soon as the plane touched down at Treviso airport, when it dawned on Brett and me at roughly the same time that we were in charge of twenty teenage girls on a week off from private school with well-constructed game plans to fall in love with Italian men. For my part, I was in a state of such nervous distraction for the first twenty-four hours that I barely even noticed Jess, let alone remembered our shaky strategy for getting some alone time on Valentine’s night. (She would wander out of her bedroom at eleven p.m. as if sleepwalking, at which point I would Just So Happen to be coming back from checking bedrooms. We’d then dart off down a corridor for a sneaky kiss. Perfect.)

Our second full day of sightseeing was St Mark’s Square and a climb up the Campanile. Jess declared that she was scared of heights and wanted to stay down in the square. Like an idiot, I nearly busted us both by turning to her in surprise and saying, ‘Are you? You never said.’

I tried quickly to cover it up by muttering something to Brett about checking phobias for insurance purposes before we flew out, and just about got away with it. Just.

Jess was mostly hanging out with her friend Anna Baxter in Venice. The Witches, thankfully, were all at home, no doubt spending their respective half-terms dispersed
between shopping centres, bowling alleys and various fast food outlets. I’d recently noticed that Jess had begun to distance herself from them of her own accord anyway; in fact, she really seemed to be thriving at school. The difference was not so much evident in my maths classes – she’d unwittingly signed herself up for compulsory arithmetic progress the minute she became my girlfriend – but in the improvements she appeared to be making all-round. I’d overheard complimentary comments in the staffroom lately from several other subject teachers, and it had actually started to look as if she might be a realistic A-star prospect by the time it came for her to take her GCSEs next year. She was coming across as more studious on this trip somehow too, more engaged – even when Lorraine was monotonously lecturing everybody about Marco Polo with about as much dynamism as a brick at the bottom of the Grand Canal, and it was beginning to seem likely that one of us was going to have to push her in it.

All of this could not have made me happier. But there was something about Anna Baxter that slightly unnerved me, which was that she always seemed to be watching – Jess, me, gondoliers on the make … she wasn’t so different to Sonia in that way. Wherever I turned, I got the feeling she’d turned there herself thirty seconds earlier and was waiting for me to catch up so she could catch me out.

Having publicly expressed my ignorance of my secret girlfriend’s secret acrophobia (
not vertigo
, I informed the assembled group like a typical sodding teacher,
it’s not the same thing
), I still only cottoned on to what Jess had been trying to do when the time came for everyone to head up the tower and she shot me a look. But, by then, it was too late.

‘I’ll stay with you, Jess,’ Sonia said loudly. ‘I can’t get up there with these crutches. You go up, Anna. Jess will be fine
down here with me.’ And then she turned and smiled at me – only it wasn’t a real smile, it was a hollow impression of one: the sort of smile a woman might give her husband if she’d invited the neighbours round for dinner, knowing all along that he was fucking one of them stupid every time her back was turned. It was the sort of look that said:
I know. I know about you two, and I’m going to get to her first
.

I started to panic, probably visibly. ‘I could stay too,’ I gabbled to Brett. ‘Recce the cafes.’

‘Nah,’ Brett said, looking affronted. ‘You’re climbing the tower with me, Landley.’

As it turned out, there was a lift, meaning there had been no need at all for Sonia to bow out in the first place, which only served to heighten my suspicion and alarm. So the whole time I was at the top of the tower looking out over Venice, when I was supposed to be counting heads and pointing out the island of Giudecca and the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute, or whatever the hell it was, all I could think about was what Jess might be saying to Sonia down in the square. It was absolutely bloody freezing up there, but I was sweating like it was the middle of summer. I kept obsessively craning my neck to try and spot them over 300 feet below us on the ground – but, of course, they were nowhere to be seen.

Brett had one p.m. lunch reservations by the Rialto Bridge at some crappy tourist restaurant he’d picked out of the guidebook. We were all seated outside on the cobblestones, which thankfully came complete with patio heaters, the girls at three pods of tables closest to the bridge, and me with Sonia, Lorraine and Brett nearer to the restaurant itself.

Everyone was wearing their coats and trying to appreciate Venice’s beauty on one of the bitterest days of the year.
Hunched up in my favourite denim jacket with the sheepskin collar, I personally would have killed for some rum in my cola. I was finding it challenging to be in the same room as Sonia, let alone share breadsticks and soft drinks across the same table, all the while wondering if she was about to bust me wide open for being a grade-A pervert.

I was desperate to get the chance to talk to Jess so I could find out what Sonia’s little game was, and I didn’t have long to wait. We’d only been seated about five minutes when I caught sight of Jess pushing back her chair across the cobblestones. I’d become somewhat adept in the art of peripheral vision over the past few months, and I managed to watch her glance at me, make her way to the restaurant and vanish inside it all without looking up once from my laminated photographic menu.

I knew I shouldn’t get up and follow her until at least sixty seconds had elapsed, but my impulse control petered out at thirty. I got to my feet, muttering something about needing the toilet to Brett, who was arguing with Sonia about the correct pronunciation of
chiesa
(predictably, it was Sonia who was convinced it should be pronounced
chee-ay-sa
, and with a heavy English accent to boot). I shot a quick glance at Lorraine too, but she had her eyes on the bridge and a breadstick in her mouth. I couldn’t be sure that any of them had even noticed me stand up.

Heading across the cobblestones with purpose, like a wino spotting an off-licence, I stepped inside the frigid gloom of the restaurant lobby where I saw off an overly eager waiter keen to seat me all over again. Jess was waiting for me at the foot of a spiral staircase that was cordoned off with a sign that threatened
Divieto di accesso!
along with a yellow hazard warning cartoon of a stick man tripping into an open flame. You had to wonder what the hell was up there.

Jess put a gloved hand out to touch me, but I shook my head. I really did look like a wino now, only one who’d located the off-licence and discovered it to be shut: I had started jigging edgily from foot to foot, partly to keep warm, but mostly because I was feeling really agitated.

‘Is this about Miss Laird?’ I asked her.

Jess looked nervous too, but it was hard to know if that was because of something Sonia had said or because my consternation was catching. Eventually she nodded. ‘Yes.’

A little bud of fear bloomed inside me. I knew we didn’t have much time – as soon as Sonia noticed that both Jess and I were missing, she’d be through here like a shot, broken ankle miraculously healed like a cripple on the Sabbath.

‘Does she know?’ I asked Jess.

‘I think she might do.’

‘Fuck.’ I ran a hand through my hair. It felt damp from the cold. ‘What did she say?’

Jess exhaled steadily. ‘I made that stuff up about being afraid of heights.’

I admit I was privately relieved to hear that, because it hadn’t really made sense to me before. ‘Right.’

‘Miss Laird’s been trying to get me on my own ever since we left Norfolk. So I thought … might as well see what she wants.’

An open mind to engaging with Sonia – red flag number one. I bit my lip. ‘Okay.’

Before now, I’d always thought it was a good thing that Sonia was about as subtle as a cockerel at dawn, because this generally meant it wasn’t too hard to keep one step ahead of her. But I had a horrible feeling that I was about to watch that particular theory crash and burn, in a manner not dissimilar to the stick man who’d had the misfortune to venture up the staircase to my left.

‘Um, so I sat with her in the square, and I just started telling her about my mum, and Debbie. You know – all the personal stuff I could think of. I wanted her to think I was cool with talking about … well, anything.’

This was a tactic that made sense, because Sonia was a stickler for boundaries, and everybody knew it. Even Lorraine teased her about it from time to time. She carried a ‘Teacher Not Friend’ key ring and referred girls to the school nurse if she found them crying. Sonia would never have started making conversation with Jess about her personal life unless she thought it was going to give her something she really wanted. Such as priceless leverage over me.

‘And then … she just asked me.’

I felt in that moment as if I’d been shoved very firmly off the top of the Campanile, which probably explained why I shut my eyes.

‘She asked … about you and me?’ It was beginning to feel as challenging to form words as if I was, in fact, hurtling through the air at terminal velocity – but I had to know.

Jess let out a little gasp, which only served to exacerbate the sensation that I was about to hit the floor face-down at speed. ‘No! Not that. Just – whether I had a boyfriend.’

I opened my eyes and, to my relief, everything looked calm and still. ‘That’s it? Just … a boyfriend? Not me?’

She nodded, her face still pink from the cold. ‘Yes, that’s it. She didn’t mention you at all.’

I leaned back against the wall and tried to think, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been, thanks to the repetitive strain of piped-in chamber music being spat sporadically through a pair of cheap defective speakers above our heads.

‘And what did you tell her? When she asked you that?’

‘I said I wasn’t interested in boys. I told her I wanted to focus on school.’

Sensible
.

‘And she said …?’

‘She said that was good. But then we couldn’t talk any more because Mr Michaels tripped over her crutches coming down from the tower and they started arguing.’

Normally this would have made me smile, but today I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything other than deep unease. From out of the cheap imitation frescoes framed with gold plastic on the opposite wall, Sonia’s face began to loom, and she was the one with the smile on her face. But it was a sickly triumphant smile – the sort that made my heart pump faster, and not in a good way.