This Secret We're Keeping (43 page)

Anna took a steadying breath. ‘Rasleen did warn me that you might reject my truth, Jess, but I’ve offered it to you. That’s all I can do.’

‘Well, I must say I appreciate having your truth shoved down my throat, Anna. Shame it’s made me feel like I want to throw up.’

Anna looked away from her and down into her cooling cup of raspberry leaf tea.

‘So what happens next? You fall pregnant?’ Jess clicked her fingers. ‘Just like that?’

‘Well,’ Anna said, seeming oddly surprised that Jess would
be so heartless as to bring that into the equation, ‘of course I hope so.’

Jess swallowed back a glut of fierce tears. ‘Why didn’t you just do what most people do, Anna, and take some time out to relax instead? Book yourself a holiday somewhere hot? It might have had the same result in the end. But hey – what would I know?’

Anna waited for a couple of seconds. ‘But of course you would, Jess,’ she spat. ‘Of course you would fucking know. Who the fuck are we pretending for now?’ Suddenly animated, she swept an arm dramatically around the empty kitchen.

The meaning behind her words was so brutal, so unexpected, that it struck Jess almost physically – as if Anna had whipped out something sharp without warning and plunged it very deliberately into Jess’s gut.

Anna began to discharge accusations then, rapid-fire in quick succession like they were bullets. ‘It’s not fucking fair, Jess. Do you know how hard it is for me to go through this month after month – to look you in the eye and ignore the fucking great elephant in the corner of the room? You chose to throw away the one thing I want most in the world. So you tell me, Jess, how is that fair? TELL ME HOW THAT’S FAIR!’

She gasped for breath, her face pink and furious, clenched up with the outrage of injustice like a child in the grip of a violent and unstoppable tantrum.

Jess was so stunned by Anna’s outburst that she could barely form the words. ‘I think I stopped believing in fair a long time ago, Anna.’

After Matthew’s arrest, Jess had been taken straight to her aunt’s flat in Dalston, where the artfully minimal square footage would only serve to aggravate already-precarious
relations between Jess and her aunt, mother and sister over the following thirteen months. The totalitarian regime they imposed on Jess in the wake of the scandal should really have been punishment enough – but then her secret was discovered by nosy Debbie when it was a mere five weeks old, only minutes after Jess had learned of it herself. Suspecting something was up, her sister had until that point been conducting a crude and unsubtle style of investigation that essentially amounted to bursting through the bathroom door whenever Jess was in there, and staring meaningfully at her stomach whenever she wasn’t. So in a way it had seemed inevitable that Debbie should clock the pregnancy test by the sink one night while Jess perched numbly on the toilet – upon which Debbie snatched it up and rushed breathlessly into the living room with it like she was carrying fistfuls of dynamite. Triumphant, she threw down the lit fuse of her sister’s pregnancy, complete with her spite-laced informant’s commentary, before making a hasty retreat to the kitchen to observe the ensuing explosion. The row was indeed so forceful that a neighbour ended up calling the police, upon which Jess was shooed outside to shiver and sob on the balcony wearing only a T-shirt while her mother and aunt assured the nice men from the Met that they’d both just had a bit too much to drink. The nice men from the Met stayed for exactly the length of time required to verify this – approximately twenty seconds – before legging it off up the Balls Pond Road without looking back.

That night marked the start of seven long days of agony for Jess, during which she was relentlessly and mercilessly ground down by the adults until she finally reached the point of miserably believing she had no choice. It had been a team effort – coordinated, deadly and, ultimately, effective.

Matthew would be locked away for years, they’d told her. A decade, probably more, once the court had considered all the counts of sex offences, on top of child abduction. He was about to become a convicted paedophile, blighted for the rest of his life with no hope of ever returning to normality – and banned, of course, from ever coming near Jess again. He didn’t love her, that much was clear: what man gets a fifteen-year-old pregnant in circumstances like this? It was utterly abhorrent. And where would Jess go, what would she do? Because if she chose to keep this child she could forget about staying in Dalston or Norfolk. And she needn’t think that Anna’s mother would be willing to take her in, either – Mrs Baxter was still furious about Jess thieving the key to their villa, contaminating the place with her sordid affair. So where was she planning to go? Did she want to end up homeless, on drugs? What would her father say if he could see her now – no prospect of GCSEs, pregnant at fifteen? And then came the emotional blackmail, powerful as a poison dart. If the authorities were – by some chance – to discover she was pregnant, it could add years to the already weighty sentence Matthew would surely receive.
Years
.

So eventually, dutifully, Jess attended an assessment at a private clinic, accompanied by her aunt. And after that, she had only seven more days to get used to the idea, to prepare her goodbye to the blossoming little bump in her belly.

The night before returning to the clinic, Jess stayed up until late and left the flat after dark. She only went as far as the estate’s now-empty playground, standing close to the railings and watching the swings move in the breeze, the roundabout creaking sadly. She thought about Matthew, wretched and oblivious in his prison cell, and wondered whether he was thinking about her too.

I’m sorry
, she whispered to the vision of him in her mind.
Please forgive me. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m trying to do the right thing. Please don’t hate me.

And then she put her hand against her stomach and let the tears fall, because maybe in a different life, in a world far away from this one, the three of them could have been a family.

But not in this life.
Not in this life.

After that, she quietly made her way back upstairs to the flat to eat cottage pie for the fourth night running (her aunt being bulk cooking’s most loyal disciple) and watch Debbie having a major meltdown over BSE contaminants in beef.

Jess and her aunt walked the ten short minutes to the clinic the following day, journeying back to the flat by taxi just a few hours later. Her aunt had never been one for the lexicon of reassurance, but she did offer Jess some advice to the tune of never discussing the abortion with anyone, ever again.

Two more years passed before Jess had amassed the requisite self-belief to verbalize her anguish and defy her aunt’s instruction. Over the past twelve months they’d been back in Norfolk, the three of them living together in a new cottage while Debbie studied to re-take her failed A levels and Jess made a half-hearted stab at her GCSEs. Their mother simply continued with her own unique practice of failing to be a parent, as determined a student of this particular discipline as either of her daughters were of theirs.

But the night before seeing fit to remove her own face with a shotgun, her mother made the mistake of picking a fight with Jess about Matthew, prompting Jess to pick one back about the baby. This inflamed a row unlike any they’d had before, which somehow culminated in Jess backed up against the fridge defending herself with a bread knife while
Debbie screamed hysterically down the phone at the police, who seemed coincidentally reluctant to attend a night-shift domestic that was kicking off at the same time as a Euro ’96 football match.

‘Rasleen told me I should be honest with you about how I really feel,’ Anna was saying now. ‘And how I really feel is that … maybe you’re the wrong person to see me through this.’

‘You told her?’ Jess stared at Anna. ‘You told Linda about Matthew and the baby?’

Anna gaped at her, as if it hadn’t even crossed her mind that this should count as betrayal. ‘I had to tell her, Jess. You and me, we never talk about it, but it kills me every day that you chose to give up the one thing I want the most! It tears me up inside!’

‘It tears you up inside,’ Jess repeated numbly.

‘Yes,’ Anna said, but she wavered as she caught the expression on Jess’s face. ‘It does.’ She trailed off.

Jess nodded. ‘Do you want to know what tears me up inside?’

At this, Anna said nothing. Instead, she shut her eyes and mouth, a quiet act of bracing herself against what was coming next.

‘It tears me up inside,’ Jess said, her voice lurching clumsily outwards in lumps as she struggled not to break down, ‘that every year on 12 March is the day I should be celebrating a birthday. That by now, I’d have a sixteen-year-old son or daughter.’ Her breath became a hot shudder in her chest. ‘You know, I think about … what they might look like. Whether they’d have Matthew’s height or my eyes, or if they’d be good at sport, or if they’d have inherited his stupid sense of humour. I think about what it would feel like to see them smile. I think about giving them a hug.’ She stared at
her friend, wide-eyed and stark with helplessness. ‘But do you want to know what really kills me, Anna? That they have a living, breathing half-sister. She’s it, Anna. Charlotte should have belonged to
me and Matthew
.’

Across the table, Anna put her face in her hands; and together, but apart, the two girls finally began to weep.

‘And the worst part is, it’s all my fault. It’s not Matthew’s fault – it’s mine. He wasn’t there to stop it. I should have been stronger. It was my turn to fight.’

From behind the screen of her fingers, Anna shook her head, unable to reply.

‘I owed it to him, Anna! It was his baby too! He loved me, and he would have loved the baby, and if he’d known what was happening he would have been
screaming
at me to fight them but … I didn’t. You want guilt, Anna? Walking away from that clinic is guilt. Seeing you fail to get pregnant over and over again every month is guilt. Looking Will in the face and knowing what I did on his behalf is FUCKING GUILT.’

There followed a silence as stunned as if someone had been punched. It seemed for a while that it might never end, that neither of them would ever speak again.

Eventually Anna found her voice. But it sounded weak and pitiful, an empty attempt to urgently back-pedal. ‘I know they ground you down, Jess, after Spain. I know you probably didn’t have a choice. I was only just saying that I’m finding it hard to be around you …’

‘Well, you know what? I find it hard to be around you too, sometimes, Anna. I find it hard to hold your hand and listen to how desperately you want to be pregnant, praying that it might happen for you without selfishly wanting to turn back the clock for myself. I find it hard to know that Will is such a fantastic father that all Natalie wants to do is pop out more
of his babies left, right and centre. But worst of all, I find it hard to look Will in the eye without wondering what his face would do if I told him the truth.’

‘Well, maybe you
should
tell him,’ Anna urged. ‘Because you need to move on, Jess – you’re living in the past.’

Jess shook her head. ‘I love him so much, Anna. If I told him now, after all this time, it would kill him. It would kill me.’

‘If you really love him, Jess, as much as you say you do, you’d tell him. Because right now, everything between you is based on lies. It’s just fantasy, without a future.’

‘It would kill him, Anna,’ she repeated.

Anna looked almost blank, like she didn’t understand.

Jess finally let her have it. ‘Don’t you get it, Anna? Matthew and me – we were supposed to be together! That’s the way it was SUPPOSED TO BE! But you and my mother and my aunt – you took all that away from us, even though you were the ones who were meant to love me the most!’

Anna made a choking sound, like she’d sampled Jess’s point of view and found it to taste utterly vile. ‘I can’t
believe
you’re blaming me. That you still can’t see Matthew Landley for what he really is.’

‘What is he?’ Jess exploded. ‘What does he do to me that’s SO BAD, Anna? I mean, come on – I really, really want to know!’

The two girls locked eyes for just a moment, and then Anna looked down in the direction of Jess’s right hand. ‘Well,’ she said, breathing evenly, ‘you ended up with that fucking ugly scar for one.’

Jess swallowed hard. She couldn’t have felt more shocked if Anna had spat in her face. ‘Ouch,’ she managed eventually.

There was a pause. ‘Well, you asked,’ Anna said uncomfortably.

Without saying anything more, Jess got up and headed to the front door, put her fucking ugly scar against the handle and shoved it open as wide as it would go.

‘Get out.’

It all happened so quickly – it could only have been ten seconds, possibly less – and on a day when her head felt less like a wet sandbag she might have been quicker to react.

At that moment, a cat streaked across Jess’s front lawn in the direction of the road, and Smudge bounded through the open door after it.

The cat made it safely to the opposite pavement, but Smudge did not.