This Secret We're Keeping (8 page)

It was high tide.

I was renting a cottage just outside Holt at the time, a brick-and-flint end terrace which had come furnished, with space for the car. It wasn’t exactly cool – unless you were a particular fan of condemned 1970s gas fires and textured ceilings – but the landlord hadn’t yet cottoned on to the principle of economic inflation and he didn’t seem to care if his tenants stained the carpets either, both of which were plus points.

Sometimes, I hung out with the other teachers at the weekends. They weren’t a bad crowd. We’d divide our hours of freedom fairly evenly between Josh’s Super Nintendo, drinking at Salthouse and games of five-aside in Fakenham.

Hadley Hall’s home economics teacher, Sonia Laird, often came along to watch our football games, or to share a drink in the pub. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, but Sonia had a boyfriend she’d been seeing on-and-off for five years.

For someone who had a boyfriend, Sonia was incredibly flirtatious when she got pissed. She would sling one of her legs across my thigh, all eyelashes and lipstick, and purr, ‘So come on. How come a gorgeous guy like you doesn’t have a girlfriend?’

I could never really think up a good answer to that.

Sonia was big into fifties style – halterneck dresses that skimmed her knees, hair with bouncing curls she’d fashioned with enormous rollers and stunned into place with hairspray, lipstick so red it made her teeth look yellow – and when she was really pissed, she’d lean over and slur what I could only assume to be further seductions into my ear.

I didn’t mind too much: listening to Sonia when she got like this rarely required me to do anything but nod and occasionally shift out from beneath her wandering hand, but I felt a bit sorry for her boyfriend.

Looking back, she seemed so intent on me fancying her that it was almost inevitable we would soon find ourselves alone together. If there was something she wanted, Sonia was as determined as bindweed.

It had started out innocently enough on a Saturday night in Salthouse, where I’d arranged to meet Josh and Steve for a drink. But I was surprised to see on arriving at the pub that the only person at our usual table was a wide-eyed Sonia in a low-cut top, who straight away began fluttering and making out like bumping into me was the most outrageous coincidence.

It soon became obvious that the others weren’t going to show, but Sonia – probably sensing my strong desire to flee – worked hard to convince me they were just running late. (They weren’t: Steve’s defence the following morning was that he’d been struck down by chronic food poisoning, with Josh claiming he’d been prevented from going anywhere by a sugar-beet lorry that had jackknifed at the end of his road. At first I thought the whole thing might have been a set-up, but Steve had lost almost a stone by the next time I saw him, and over a similar timescale Josh had become embroiled in a sort of bitter turf war with the
sugar-beet farmer. Plus, I had never shown the slightest bit of interest in Sonia Laird, even when she was flinging her legs around, so what pleasure Steve and Josh might have hoped to derive from me continuing to show no interest, I couldn’t really imagine.)

As soon as enough time had passed for my friends’ poor time-keeping to become implausible, Sonia changed tack by insisting that her boyfriend would be joining us shortly, and would I mind waiting until he got there? I was reluctant to just get up and walk out, leaving her on her own, but whenever I asked her what time he was likely to turn up, her response was to raise a finger to her lips and wink. Three rounds of that unnerved me enough to shut up about him, so for another hour or so I indulged her with some company and stilted conversation, which mostly consisted of Sonia laughing uproariously at everything I said.

By nine o’clock, I decided to call time on our little tête-à-tête. This was partly because Sonia had started slurring her words and I could no longer be bothered to try and decipher what she was saying, and partly because I judged there still to be a small risk of her boyfriend showing up, and I didn’t really fancy the idea of him taking issue with all his girlfriend’s empty wine glasses and using them as weaponry.

Sonia lived in a village halfway between Holt and Sheringham, so it made sense for us to share a taxi. So far, I hadn’t been paying too much attention to her repeated complaints that she was hungry, but I did as soon as our taxi driver pulled up outside the address she’d given me – which turned out to be a terraced house masquerading as a Lebanese restaurant – and attempted to charge me a tenner for the pleasure.

At first I tried to stand my ground, but taxi drivers in the
rural counties aren’t known for their equanimity, a reputation he was more than happy to uphold by immediately switching the meter back on. With Sonia still flirtatiously refusing to tell me her real address and the fare racking up, I had no choice but to take her inside for a quick salad, whereupon I hoped I could sober her up and possibly ask the owners if I could borrow their BT book so I could track down this nomadic boyfriend of hers and bribe him into taking her back.

The restaurant was essentially a converted living room, and we were the only customers. An elderly woman gave us a bowl of withered olives to share that I hoped were complimentary, along with a side plate for spitting stones on to. I ended up ordering a lamb kebab on Sonia’s behalf and nothing for myself in the hope of hurrying things along, which turned out to be ironic because the food took so long to arrive that I was tempted to politely enquire if they were shipping it in across the Med. The wait had given Sonia more time too to get off her face on house wine and become staunchly resident in my personal space – but fortunately she’d also let slip that she lived opposite the church, so I asked for the bill before she’d even started eating and didn’t argue when she suggested we got out of there about ten minutes later.

The whole disastrous evening culminated in Sonia threatening to be sick on the walk home before almost passing out in her own front garden. As tempting as it was to leave her there, I managed to haul her up and fit the door key into the lock for her, upon which she took advantage of the one-and-a-half seconds I was standing still to try and stick her tongue down my throat.

When I finally made it back to the safety of my own cottage, I was greeted by a series of six fairly abusive
answerphone messages, each one demanding with escalating outrage to know why I had resisted.

After that, Sonia seemed determined to make me feel like I’d done something heinous by refusing to manhandle her on demand, so I resolved to try and avoid her as far as possible. I was wary of unwittingly giving her the wrong impression – as she’d informed me via my answerphone that I had done already – and of somehow finding myself held hostage in a restaurant again while she masticated olive stones. So if I got the heads-up that she was coming to the pub, or to watch us play football, I’d cancel at short notice. It was simply less complicated to spend an evening at home by myself with a Pot Noodle than be made to feel like failing to kiss her had been a crime akin to punching her in the face.

That Saturday evening in November was one such occasion. Five of us had arranged to see a film in Norwich – sci-fi action starring Sly Stallone – but then Craig informed me that Sonia was coming, so I cancelled. I was pretty pissed off about that. It wasn’t as if I was a die-hard Sly fan or anything – unlike my slightly weird brother, Richard, who secretly believed he was Rocky in disguise and had spent much of our childhood petulantly begging our dad for boxing lessons – but still, I wanted to see the film. Even more irritating, I’d overheard Sonia earlier in the day saying she thought Hollywood action films were sexist claptrap appealing only to nerds who would never have the balls to throw a punch in real life. I was now regretting the missed opportunity to tell her there’d been a last-minute change of plans and we were meeting at the cinema in Lowestoft instead – or even better, Hull.

The upshot of all this was that I would either have to go and see the film alone (loser) or take Richard along (ditto). I
was fairly sure too that a viewing with Richard would come complete with some sort of skills-of-Sly running commentary, which wasn’t exactly the cinematic experience I had been hoping for. Sod it: I would just have to write tonight off and borrow the video from Richard in a few months’ time.

I stretched out on my sofa (black leather and wipe-clean, it neatly fulfilled my landlord’s bad-taste criteria of being both ugly and practical), sank a beer and came up with a brief but satisfying revenge fantasy in which Sonia was caught in the back row of the cinema giving head to someone who wasn’t her boyfriend.

The doorbell went at about eight. Over the past two hours I hadn’t really moved from my position on the sofa except to put on a Smiths tape and crack open some more beer – an unbeatable combination.

I thought perhaps my elderly neighbour, Mrs Parker, was going to be on the other side of the door with an objection to music and an order for me to get out more (both conversations we’d had previously in some depth), but when I opened it I was surprised to see Jessica Hart, the girl from my maths club, standing in front of me.

‘Can I help?’ I said politely, which was pretty stupid. I knew who she was. Obviously the way to approach this
wasn’t
to pretend I thought she was a Girl Guide trying to recycle my tinfoil or sell me strange flavours of home-made jam, or whatever it was they did.

‘Mr Landley, it’s me – Jess.’ She laughed slightly nervously and pushed a glossy sheath of straight blonde hair back over her shoulder. ‘Don’t you recognize me out of school uniform?’

I slapped a hand to my forehead. ‘Oh,
Jess
. Sorry.’ I realized then that I had a beer in my other hand. Inappropriate.
‘You caught me …’ I floundered for a cool activity I could be in the middle of. No teacher wants to be unmasked as a loner or a nerd, however close to the bone that might be. I wished then that I’d spied something interesting to pick up en route to answering the door, but the only prop I had was the beer can, so I raised it lamely. ‘I’m a bit busy.’

She peered past me then, presumably to try and spot all the trendy people I was doing my drinking with. I shifted sideways to block her view, then cleared my throat. ‘So, er, Jess – what can I do for you?’ Had I not been a beer-and-a-half down, I might have told her straight away she could catch me on Monday if she needed to ask me anything, and shut the door firmly in her face. But instead I just stood there, the beer can dangling at my side, waiting for her answer.

To my surprise, she fished around in her bag and produced her battered old maths textbook, flicked to a page marked with a piece of folded notepaper and pointed to it. ‘I know I’m probably being really stupid, but I just don’t
get
why
x
equals …’

At that moment I was distracted by a passing car and a young female face staring out of the passenger window. It looked a bit like my star pupil, Laura Marks, watching me with my beer and the girl from my maths class.

I took a sideways glance at the street. There were probably people peering at us from behind their living-room curtains at this very moment. I needed to take this inside, not conduct it out on my doorstep for everyone to gawp at.

‘Come in,’ I said gruffly, promising myself I would quickly tell her what
x
equalled and then show her out – possibly through the back garden, just to be on the safe side.

She followed me into the living room, where I gestured for her to sit down on the sofa. It occurred to me that her
weekend clothes – jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt – made her appear older than she did at school.

Her eyes met mine then, which was the part where one of us was supposed to establish exactly what she was doing in my living room on a Saturday night. I had been expecting her to be completely self-assured, entirely unfazed by the fact that she was here – but now that we were looking at one another, she actually appeared slightly hesitant, as if someone had just dropped her off and she’d never met me before in her life.

I had to ask. ‘Jess, how did you know where I live?’

She frowned. ‘Your car’s parked outside.’

‘Yes, but I mean – how did you know I live here? In this village?’

Her hesitancy melted a little. ‘Your house is on the bus route to Norwich, Mr Landley,’ she said gently, like she thought she might be breaking bad news.

I shook my head and took another swig of beer. ‘Sorry. I’m a bit –’

‘Drunk?’ she supplied, a teasing smile creeping over her face.

‘No,’ I said firmly, as if to pretend there was orange squash in my beer can and I only ever drank at weddings. And then I just sort of stood there, which was probably force of habit, given that standing up while my pupils sat was how I spent most of my working days. All I needed to complete the picture was a board rubber in my hand and a pained expression on my face.

‘I like your house,’ Jess said then, seeming strangely enchanted by its distinct lack of charm, and I wondered at first if she was taking the piss before remembering that most teenagers thought any house not belonging to their parents or parents’ friends was the epitome of cool. I hadn’t been
sure before now where maths teachers happened to fall on that particular spectrum but I’d suspected towards the lower end of the scoring system. Clearly things were looking up.

From her seat on the sofa, she tipped her head at the music. ‘What’s this?’

I cleared my throat. ‘The Smiths.’

Her face remained blank.

‘
The Queen is Dead?
Lead singer’s Morrissey?’ I prompted.

She frowned. ‘The guy out of
Men Behaving Badly
?’

That earnest little juxtaposition of Morrissey and Neil Morrissey was so beautifully innocent it was almost the funniest thing I had heard all year. (Almost. The actual funniest thing I’d heard all year was the real story behind Josh’s broken hand last summer, which did not involve a love triangle as Josh had claimed but a mere low score on a fruit machine, one too many pints of lager and the idea that the screen might apologize if he punched it hard enough.)