This Secret We're Keeping (4 page)

‘Look, are we going to forget this now and celebrate our anniversary? Because, if not, I’ll piss off back to the beach house. It’s been a long week, Jess, and I was sick enough of
discussing Octavia when we were getting divorced, let alone twelve sodding months later.’

Though still unsettled by his deception, there was a tiny part of Jess that was beginning to wonder if perhaps he was right. Maybe it wasn’t relevant. Hadn’t everyone had their heart broken, in one way or another? Did it mean he loved her any less?

But by the time she’d remembered that Zak had a particular talent for making her question herself, he was on his feet and waiting for her to choose: traditional anniversary as observed by functional couples or sullen celebratory stand-off?

So with some effort – given that her leg felt like it had been force-fed through a meat grinder – Jess got to her feet and made her way through the bar towards the door, Zak at her shoulder. But she’d only managed to take two steps on to the gravel outside before he reached for her arm and pulled her to a halt.

‘Jess, what the fuck is up with your leg? How pissed are you?’

For a brief moment, she felt relieved. Clearly he had not yet been privy to any local gossip about the accident and, with a bit of luck, it wouldn’t be long before her ageing collection of witnesses began to confuse it with something they’d seen on
Midsomer Murders
.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, wincing as she took the weight off it, though the pain was actually starting to feel worse.

Zak frowned and stared down at her thigh like he had X-ray vision. ‘Hang on, you’re not fine. What have you done?’

She hesitated, but the thought of his reaction if she told him exactly how it had happened deterred her. ‘Just bruised it,’ she mumbled eventually. ‘Nothing serious.’

‘Baby,’ he said, more softly then, ‘I’m a doctor, remember? I can tell when something’s wrong.’

This was true, and was one of the arguable downsides to dating a medical professional. (Another was the impromptu requests for medical advice Zak often received from friends-of-friends while out and about. They’d been at lunch a fortnight earlier when a middle-aged female acquaintance of his former best man had approached their table and virtually moonied him to get a second opinion on an arse boil that had gone septic.)

‘I’ll be fine,’ she insisted, praying he wasn’t overly adept in hands-off diagnoses.

He slid an arm round her ribcage to support her, putting up a hand to sweep the hair from her face with a tenderness that made her shiver. Clearly thinking they had reached that point of the night where he could attempt to disguise contentious issues as seduction, he put his mouth close to her ear. ‘Have you had any more thoughts,’ he murmured, letting his voice go gruff, ‘about moving to London with me?’

For a moment, she didn’t attempt to speak, just allowed herself to feel the heat of his breath on her skin as his lips moved down to gently graze her neck.

‘I’m sorry about all that Octavia stuff. I’ve thought about you all week,’ he whispered. ‘You keep me going when things get shitty.
Tú me alegras el día
.’

He did this occasionally – swapped over to Spanish when he thought he might need a little help in winning her over. His success rate with it to date was fairly low, in ratio terms of smile to shrug; but tonight Jess was particularly tired, in addition to which she appreciated the fact that he was holding her up and taking the weight off her bad leg.

‘I’m sorry I never told you about Octavia,’ he insisted then, lowering his head to kiss her. ‘I want to be with you,
cariño
. I want you to move to London with me. Happy anniversary, baby.’

Then his lips were on hers and, just like always, the taste of him shot straight to her groin, a sort of erogenous equivalent to mainlining class-A drugs. And as she found herself pressed up against a patch of nearby brickwork, Zak’s hands running all over her and their kissing becoming more and more urgent, Jess resolved – as she did every time – that tomorrow she would make her mind up about London once and for all.

It was the start of a new school year and, to mark the occasion, I’d been entrusted with teaching the first year of the GCSE maths syllabus to a portion of the lower fifth. Admittedly it was the portion at the base end of the ability spectrum, but that didn’t faze me – I loved a challenge and didn’t feel in the least bit intimidated. In fact, if you set aside the fact that the sadist in a boiler suit whom some people referred to as the school caretaker had cranked up the central heating to a temperature formerly unique to the equatorial tropics, I was about as cool and collected as it was possible to be when autumn blew in.

At the end of last term, my ageing predecessor had been sacked for creative expense claiming, so it was now my job to turn this sorry ship around. I was determined to succeed, promising myself that in two summers’ time my class would ace their GCSEs and prove to the Hadley Hall staffroom that being sour, middle-aged and a big fan of diarrhoea-coloured knitwear were not, in fact, prerequisites for being a good teacher.

Oh, I was well aware that my habit of dressing for work like I was heading to a rock concert wasn’t exactly popular among my colleagues. I wore my dark hair long, cultivated my stubble and never tucked in my shirt; sometimes I’d even
team my cords (no jeans allowed) with cowboy boots to really stir things up and get them talking. I saw it as doing them a favour, in a sense, because they needed something to gossip about other than the growing non-attendance at the sixth-form choir rehearsals or the German exchange student who’d been caught dealing weed when she was supposed to be playing rounders.

But in my quest to work hard, I’d somehow, conversely, become lazy. Too tunnel-vision. Obsessed with grades and neglecting to observe behaviour.

We were only two weeks in, and halfway through simultaneous equations, I realized someone was crying. At first the sound came at me like the intermittent buzz of an insect, a mild irritation. This was the start of the GCSE syllabus – important stuff.
Why can’t they just pack it in?

Eventually my eyes followed the noise towards the back of the room, where the Witches sat. (That was my own private term for them, not something I would be sharing around the staffroom over coffee and Dundee cake any time soon. In the year since I’d started at Hadley Hall, I’d worked out that you were allowed to moan about bad behaviour, pierced ears or unfulfilled academic potential, but you weren’t allowed to take the piss out of them. That, apparently, was taboo in the manner of mentioning periods or hormones, or commenting on their legs.)

The crying girl wasn’t one of the Witches, I knew that much. She was new to the school this term, and I was annoyed with myself for not being able to instantly recall her name. (I’d not taught this year group before, but that didn’t mean I was planning on walking around with a register permanently appended to one hand like most of my colleagues. I was happy with my own personal system – individual pupil ability mapped out on a mental seating
plan – but admittedly I probably did need to expedite the addition of other identifying features, such as their names.)

‘Get on with your work,’ I barked at the rest of the gawping class. The Witches obediently and predictably lowered their heads too, a cheap trick to demonstrate their innocence: clearly, the crying was nothing to do with
them
. It was the oldest, most transparent ploy going, which on the plus side made it relatively easy to sidestep.

‘What’s going on?’ I strode purposefully forward, mainly because a bit of well-timed striding was sometimes all it took to get them to shut up.

The Witches twittered. The girl shook her head.

It was then that I noticed a clump of auburn hair lying on the desk behind her. One of the Witches tried too late to brush it away, and my gaze travelled down to the polished parquet floor, where an entire ponytail – a good eight inches of hair – had been shorn clean away from the girl’s scalp with a pair of craft scissors.

Actually, my first reaction was one of dented pride: I couldn’t believe they had been so fearless as to do this in
my
class. I could have understood if it had happened under the watch of Mrs Witts (English literature, walking stick, virtually deaf – great combination, the girls got away with murder) or Miss Gooch (Latin, nervous, blushed way too easily and over-sweated). But I hadn’t been expecting them to behave so brazenly in this class,
my
class – and to realize that the bullying had been going on under my nose came as a humiliating shock.

There were five Witches in total, and four of them were laughing, hard. The fifth one looked slightly pale and sick: it was perhaps not a testament to my fair-handed approach that I decided to start with her. I was furious, my supervisory
competence was hanging in the balance and I wanted to get to the truth as quickly as possible. She looked like she would be the easiest one to break.

‘
Out
,’ I told the five of them. They scuttled past me like cockroaches, all still twittering except the fifth, who paused as she reached the discarded ponytail but appeared to decide against saying anything when she came under the heat of my glare.

‘Aimee,’ I said, addressing the desk partner of the crying girl, who looked about as stunned as if someone had taken a brick to her head, ‘would you two please go together to Mr Mackenzie’s office and wait for me there.’ And then I strode from the classroom.

As Aimee and her shorn friend made their way past us down the staircase, I turned to face the offending rabble, who had lined themselves up against the thick brick walls of the corridor, all short skirts and sardonic expressions. The blonde girl, the quiet one, still looked like the easiest target, so I pulled her aside into an empty classroom and barked at the others not to move.

She blinked at me as I shut the door behind us. ‘It wasn’t me,’ was the first thing she said.

‘Oh, come on,’ I snorted. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that. I’ve been a teacher long enough to know when someone’s lying.’

(That wasn’t strictly true. I’d only started teaching three years ago, but I was well aware that in the eyes of a fifteen-year-old, three years probably counted as a lifetime.)

‘I didn’t want her to do that. I told her not to. I tried to take the scissors.’ She opened her right hand then and my jaw dropped. It was an absolute bloody mess, quite literally: a deep red gash had been sliced across the pale flesh of her palm. She was holding a pool of blood in her fist and, as she
unfolded her hand, it began to drip horrifically through her fingers, turning the carpet crimson at our feet.

I wasn’t great with blood at the best of times. ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Don’t say anything!’ she said, her eyes wide with fear. It was only then that I registered how white she’d become. ‘Don’t say anything, Mr Langley, please.’

‘Go to the nurse,’ I told her. ‘I’ll deal with the others.’

She started to cry then. ‘Please don’t say anything.’ She put her hand over her mouth, a sort of instinctive reaction to try and disguise the fact she was crying, and ended up smearing the whole lower half of her face with blood.

The feeling of everything spiralling rapidly out of control fell somewhere between a test I had to pass and a wind-up. ‘Jesus … just stay here, okay? Don’t move.’ I exited the room and strode sharply back out into the corridor.

‘Come on. Who did it? I don’t have time for this, and neither do any of you. In fact, I’d go as far as to say, I’m fucking pissed off. You’ve got GCSEs coming up. Do you
want
to fail your exams?’

None of the other teachers ever used the f-word. This wasn’t the sort of school where the f-word was acceptable. Parents weren’t paying four grand a term to hear their daughters’ maths teachers throwing expletives around the minute things got a bit heated.

When I’d applied for the post at Hadley Hall, I’d put on my application form that I ‘
thrived under pressure
’. I guessed that was one of the things the head, Mr Mackenzie, had liked about me (along with the fact that with my ponytail, facial hair, relative youth and refusal to wear cardigans, I had represented what he had termed a ‘well-needed breath of fresh air’ for Hadley. Mackenzie had always been happy to take risks in that way, championing the benefits of
pushing one envelope or another, a fact for which I remained entirely grateful).

But the problem with claiming to thrive under pressure was that I had never before really found myself under any. In fact, it could be said that my life was generally pressure-free: no real responsibilities, no stresses, a select handful of friends and no girlfriend to speak of. And apart from occasionally giving me the sense of being stuck in a bit of a rut, that was all fine – except now it wasn’t, because the shit was hitting the fan, and the sole onus for dealing with it was firmly on me.

I made a quick mental tally. So far I had the girl with the unscheduled haircut downstairs, the one with a stab wound in the room behind me, and a defiant group of delinquents sloping sulkily against a wall, facing me down. Double maths, it was fair to say, was not going too well.

At this point I had no other option than to remain doggedly convinced that I could claw it back, have them all rearranging formulas with their eyes shut by lunchtime – and my first move was to take a hard line. ‘Detention, every night next week. And I’ll be contacting your parents, you can be sure of that,’ I declared, slamming down my emergency hand of behavioural management ace cards. ‘Now get back inside, and I don’t want to hear another word from any of you. For the rest of the year.’

As they shuffled back past me into the classroom, heads down and grim-faced like they were moving up the bread queue in Marxist Russia, I glanced through the glass panel of the door to my left. The injured girl was sitting down – not yet passed out, that was good – gripping her hand and biting her lip. She looked okay; but then again, maybe that was how schoolgirls always looked when they were bleeding to death. Impelled to hurry, I ran down the stairs two at a
time to finally deliver the crying girl and her friend with a brief précis to Mackenzie – he’d seen it all before and would no doubt have something helpful to say. It would be more productive than talking to me, we all knew that: I had no words of wisdom to impart that didn’t relate in some way to mean, mode or median.

Then I legged it upstairs again and opened the door to where I had left the fifteen-year-old with the blood-smeared face and slashed hand. I was starting to wonder how I was going to explain all this at the next parents’ evening.

‘Let’s get you to the nurse,’ I said. ‘You might need to go to hospital. It looks deep.’

Seeming to accept this, she nodded. I held out my hand and helped her up. The blood from her palm smeared all over mine, wet and bright like the poster paint from a primary school art class. I could have used it to do something creative on A3 with handprints and taken it home to stick on my fridge.

‘I know why they do it,’ she informed me as we faced one another.

‘Huh?’ I couldn’t take my eyes off all that blood around her mouth. Flecks of it had dripped on to her shirt. She looked like an extra from a horror film. And now that I had touched her, so did I.

‘I know why they do it,’ she repeated quietly.

I frowned. ‘You know why they do what?’

‘Stuff like that.’ She made a scissoring motion with her left hand.

‘Oh,’ I said, wondering what explanation she could possibly offer me to disprove my less-than-complex theory that they did it because they were misbehaving little shits.

‘They’re bored.’ She wouldn’t look at me as she said it.

‘Bored?’ I repeated, like she’d invented a new word.

Just as I was about to inform her that only boring people get bored (and, for good measure, that there was no such word as
can’t
), she elaborated. ‘It’s because they don’t understand. None of us do. You’re going too fast, you’re only interested in Laura and you’re forgetting about the rest of us.’

Laura Marks was the star of my class, a girl who had already shown herself to be an entirely competent mathematician – so far ahead of the others in terms of ability that I had started to wonder recently if she was in fact some sort of departmental plant, sent in by the other teachers to spy on the rookie.

‘Too fast?’ This still wasn’t making sense. I’d been praised on my pacing ever since my first day of teacher training. For a moment, I felt like telling her that, then decided against it. It would have seemed a bit petty. I could rise above these baseless allegations, for God’s sake.

‘Yeah, like … you moved on to quadratic equations, and we still don’t get …’

‘Equations?’ I supplied with a sinking feeling.

She shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

Though I could sense there was an opportunity here to delve deeper, I decided it might be prudent to revisit this unsolicited feedback on a day when things were slightly less fraught. ‘I still don’t think that’s an excuse for poor behaviour though, do you?’ I said, my way of reminding her that there was a girl downstairs who by late morning had succeeded in retaining only half the head of hair she’d woken up with.

Another shrug. They could shrug instead of speak for days at a time, these girls. ‘Maybe not. I’m just telling you what I think.’

As she said this I noticed that blood was beginning to trickle between her fingers again. ‘Don’t ball your fist,’ I told her. ‘Come on, we’d better get you to the nurse.’

Please don’t pass out. Please
.

‘You know,’ I said to her as we walked, drawing a few strange looks and the odd question from stray pupils and teachers on the way (with her blood-smeared jaw and my bright red hand it could easily have looked to the casual observer, I realized afterwards, like I’d punched her in the mouth), ‘I do run a maths club. After school on Tuesdays.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Maths club? That’s not cool, Mr Landley.’

Well, you’ve got to admire her honesty
. I smiled. ‘I know it might not seem cool now, but don’t you think you’ll feel cool when you ace your GCSE and get a really great job after university?’