This Secret We're Keeping (9 page)

I smiled at her. ‘No. Close – but not the same guy.’

She smiled back. ‘Well, I like it. Sounds like good music for chilling out to.’ I couldn’t work out if she meant it as an observation or a suggestion, but either way it made me start to wonder if she really was here for the free maths.

‘Look, Jess. You know you shouldn’t be here, don’t you?’

She frowned. ‘Why not?’

‘Come on, Jess.’ The girl wasn’t stupid (though admittedly her ability to grasp Pythagoras still needed some work), so I just waited for her to drop the pretence.

She did, more quickly than I had been expecting. ‘Okay, I know. But you weren’t at maths club on Tuesday and then Miss Wecks took our class on Wednesday, and I thought maybe … well, I thought you might have left or something. And then I started to panic because you’re the only one who knows how to explain things to me.’

I watched her for a couple of moments. She was right in a way: I did know how to explain things to her. I wouldn’t have gone as far as to call it a bond, but we’d definitely developed something of an understanding. She was still arithmetically useless – completely terrible – but in maths club, without the Witches to distract her, she tried bloody hard and wrote down everything I said to her, word for word. And then, if I could hit on just the right way of phrasing it, there would be this little light-bulb moment of comprehension, and she would quite literally gleam. As a teacher, those were the moments I lived for.

Maybe I should have had loftier goals than running a half-decent after-school club for my D-grade students. But I liked the idea that, many years down the line, one of them might remark as they climbed the corporate ladder at KPMG or made waves at Credit Suisse,
It all started with Mr Landley. He was the best teacher I ever had
.

‘I haven’t left, Jess,’ I told her now. ‘I just had a funeral to attend this week in Southend.’ (An ancient great-uncle from my mother’s side. I had discovered to my mortification when I convened with the others outside the church that I had momentarily forgotten the poor sod’s name.)

Jess looked relieved. ‘Excellent.’ And then horrified. ‘Shit. Sorry.’ She covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Sorry.’

Smiling, I shook my head. ‘Don’t be. It’s fine. I know what you meant.’ By now I was actively suppressing the urge to take another swig of beer, because it suddenly seemed wrong to carry on drinking in front of her. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I asked her, mostly to distract myself.

I swear, I meant tea, coffee, cola, juice. Part of me thought she wouldn’t have the nerve to ask her maths teacher for a can of beer.

‘I’ll have what you’re having.’

I stared at her. ‘Oh, I meant … I meant something soft. Non-alcoholic.’

She shot me a smile that punched two perfect dimples into her cheeks, before appearing to hesitate – I assumed to deliberate on her choice of refreshment until she said, ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

‘I can’t offer you alcohol, Jess,’ I said. I knew that I had already crossed a fairly hefty line – probably the one that mattered the most – by letting her into my house on a Saturday night, but as long as alcohol was kept out of the equation (ha ha), I was confident that I could persuade her to leave before very long, and no harm would be done.

‘Okay,’ she relented with a smile.

‘What would you like?’ I asked her, trying to recall what I had in my fridge. ‘There’s lemonade, I think. Or milk.’

Milk?

‘Surprise me,’ she said, which to her credit made the choice sound a lot more exciting than it was.

I headed into the kitchen and stuck my head in the fridge, eventually locating the lemonade can where it had been pushed behind an ancient jar of mustard. On emerging again, I realized that Jess was behind me, leaning against my kitchen worktop, watching.

I stepped into the space between us and passed her the can. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, meeting my eye conspiratorially like we were outside the toilets at a nightclub and I’d just done her a deal on a handful of Es.

She cracked open the can and put her lips to the rim to catch the fizz, holding my gaze with steady grey eyes, her creamy blonde hair a waterfall framing her face and glancing off her cheekbones. I swallowed, not quite sure what to do with myself, and half turned away. But then – for what could only have been a couple of seconds – she closed her
eyes, tipped the can up and drank. The movement made her neck extend, drawing her long hair down between her shoulder blades as her back gently arched. And without warning it suddenly reminded me of … oh God.

I’d known that she was pretty before, in an objective sort of way – anyone who claims that becoming a teacher has bestowed them with a mysterious ability to no longer notice these things is lying. But right now, against the unlikely backdrop of my Formica-heavy kitchen, Jess’s good looks felt less like a realization than an assault: they’d crept up without warning and swiftly floored me, leaving me dazed and anxious, blood rushing hotly to my stomach.

She lowered the can then, drawing the back of her hand slightly clumsily across her mouth. ‘Mr L,’ she said, like she wanted to tell me something. There was a slight wobble to her voice that made me fear what might be coming next, but the disconcerting progression of thoughts inside my mind was scaring me more. So I took the only option available to me, which was a sharp exit left into my living room.

Sitting back down on the sofa, I wondered if perhaps I
was
drunk. But I’d had a mere can-and-a-half of beer, and unless the brewery had upped the percentage significantly since last Tuesday, I knew that the volume I’d consumed was unlikely to have distorted my mind to the point where I could find one of my own pupils attractive.

I briefly examined the can anyway before putting it down again, resolving not to touch it until Jess was safely on her way home. She’d already stayed longer than she should have done, which was (if you were interested in canvassing popular opinion, which unsurprisingly I wasn’t) around ten seconds – the time it might normally have taken me to establish she was lost and lend her my
A-Z
.

You need to ask her to leave. Ask her now
.

It wasn’t long before she came out of the kitchen and perched next to me on the sofa. The scent of her was synthetically floral, girly – of that body spray they were always passing around the room while they were supposed to be thinking about fractions. I tried very hard to breathe out and not in.

‘You want me to leave, don’t you?’ she said nervously.

I shifted uncomfortably then – a subconscious reflection, perhaps, of my reluctance to heartlessly boot her out of my cottage and on to the street – and as I moved, our dangling legs collided, the bare skin of my right foot coming to rest against the polka-dot cotton sock of her left one.

It should have been easy to deal with, not least because accidentally bumping body parts happened more regularly at Hadley Hall than you’d think – mostly between teachers during departmental meetings in Mackenzie’s office, where there wasn’t enough room for everybody’s personal space to fit around the table. But, deep down, I suppose I was quietly relieved that Jess hadn’t instantly recoiled in horror, or tutted, or offered me the mandatory muttered apology – any of those little social signals universally understood to mean you find touching a particular person to be at best inappropriate, at worst repellent.

I didn’t know anyone who would have preferred to be confirmed as repellent. But I did know it was now up to me to move decisively away.

It’s only a foot
.

I experimented briefly with the thought.
Only a foot. Big deal
. If Jess was Sonia, I’d doubtless have come into contact with much more of her anatomy than that by now. But Jess wasn’t Sonia, it wasn’t only a foot and it was a big deal. So I removed myself from her as politely as I could.

She didn’t really react, though I did think I could detect the faintest rising blush to the apples of her cheeks. Her head was resting against the back of the sofa, blonde hair splayed across the leather, bunched up around her shoulders. She was regarding me with an intensity I recognized from maths club, chronically misinterpreted to date as earnest concentration. It was slowly starting to dawn on me that she probably wasn’t that fussed about what
x
equalled after all.

My heart was pumping faster now. I was aware of everything beginning to gradually collide in front of my eyes, like some world-of-nature calamity that suddenly becomes beautiful when you watch it in slow motion: the smell of her perfume, the twitch of her foot, the arresting effect of her gaze.

Stop it.

‘Jess,’ I said then, in an attempt to halt the thought-cascade. ‘You really shouldn’t be here. This is –’ I released a breath of self-reproach – ‘not right.’

She nodded, because we’d already established that, but still I got the feeling I needed to explain it to her again. ‘What would your friends say if they knew you were here?’

She offered me a half-smile. ‘Do you mean, how many people know I’m here?’

I hadn’t meant that actually, but if she was offering to tell me, I wasn’t going to turn her down. The rest of Jessica’s year group was perpetually itching for gossip like this, always so desperate to spread salacious rumours that if there weren’t enough of them to go round, they simply started making them up. Given this ever-present appetite for scandal (whether real or imagined), it would be helpful to know exactly what I was dealing with.

‘Nobody knows I’m here, Mr L,’ Jess assured me. Our
eyes met again then, and I realized that she was asking me to trust her.

But it wasn’t only Jess’s friends I had in mind. ‘What about your mum? Your sister?’ I probed, though I did make a conscious effort not to sound too alarmist. Nobody likes a walking panic attack.

I knew that Jess’s dad wasn’t around – or, to be more accurate, that he was dead. He’d been a solicitor until he keeled over, according to the rumours, of heart failure at his desk. Overwork: surely the worst way to go. I briefly pictured myself flat on my back in the staffroom at Hadley Hall – death by equation overdose – while Sonia made the most of the best opportunity she’d had yet to feel me up, scarlet fingernails running unchecked all over my dead body. I shuddered, then realized Jess was confiding in me.

‘My mum’s whacked out on diazepam and my sister just watches TV,’ she was saying, looking down and fiddling with the ring pull on the lemonade can. ‘Neither of them has any idea what I do on a Saturday night.’ She thought about it. ‘Or any night, actually.’

I was well aware that the pastoral carer in me was obliged to be concerned about this revelation. I knew I should make a note of it, ask her more, follow up on Monday – and I would. But for now I needed to park it in favour of labouring a point.

‘Jess, listen. You can’t tell anyone that you came here tonight, that you were in my house. You do understand that, don’t you?’

To my relief, she nodded. ‘Of course. I’m not stupid.’

‘I should probably call you a taxi then.’

‘Okay. Or there’s a bus in fifteen minutes,’ she said, turning her wrist to glance down at her watch. I caught sight of the scar on her hand again then, still bright pink though the
stitches had been removed. For some reason – guilt, perhaps, because I’d been the one who’d failed to prevent it all from happening – I couldn’t take my eyes off the ragged seam of it, the way it knitted shut the two halves of her palm with an unflinching, accusatory rawness.

Eventually I managed a nod of acknowledgement. Fifteen minutes: that was okay. Fifteen minutes to make sure she got home safely. Fifteen minutes to pull myself together, which should have been achievable, given that it was a time window far longer than the ones I normally offered my pupils in which to start behaving responsibly.

‘Hey, Mr L,’ she said then, a soft smile inching across her face. ‘Before I go, will you settle a bet for me?’

I was starting to feel more relaxed now. Teacherly. Perhaps her question would be something related to school.
Finally – back on track. Nothing to see here
. ‘Well, I can try.’

‘Okay.’ She bit down on her bottom lip. ‘Do you have tattoos?’

I couldn’t help smiling at my own misplaced optimism. ‘Okay, Jess. You really shouldn’t be asking me stuff like that.’

She laughed then, feigning surprise like I was teasing her. ‘Mr L! Why not? We all reckon you have.’

Well, the answer to her question was no – but, in fact, I had been thinking of getting one. I’d seen a picture in a magazine of a guy with a crow tattoo on his back, but it wasn’t filled in – it was more like a doodle, made out of hundreds of tiny coils. The overall image was huge, powerful. It looked pretty cool.

Recognizing this detail to be not entirely pivotal to the conversation, I rubbed my chin. ‘Why, er … why did you think I’d have tattoos, Jess?’

She sent another smile my way, this one more coy. ‘You’re
the coolest teacher at Hadley. I mean, you’ve got long hair, and you wear cowboy boots.’ She hesitated. ‘You look like a rock star.’

Assuming this to be a compliment, I allowed it to imbue the air between us for a couple of seconds. Quite what she wanted me to do with it, I wasn’t sure. Maybe I should have taken the opportunity to point out that being the coolest teacher at Hadley Hall really wasn’t much of a challenge. To pick an example at random, Derek Sayers wore his grey beard long, rotated a selection of grimy-looking bow ties and sported a comb-over with misguided pride in the manner of someone who had once been told it took ten years off him. Meanwhile Bill Taylor’s NHS-issue glasses came complete with a string, and he carried a pocket watch, which he’d slap emphatically on to the table at the beginning of staff meetings like the thing was a sodding hourglass. (I had once thought about leaning across and turning it upside down as a sort of joke; but I also knew that Bill drank alone at bars in his free time and occasionally liked to ram people with his front bumper in supermarket car parks, so I’d opted for keeping my shins intact at the last minute instead.)

But rather than say any of that, I said the only thing that sprang to mind – which seemed not only to be a bad habit I was developing, but one that got worse whenever I was with Jessica Hart. ‘Yeah, and I’m a maths teacher. Lots of cool points for that one.’ I gave her a slightly moronic thumbs-up, before instantly (and quite rightly) regretting it.