‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I say.
‘Well,’ he says with obvious effort, ‘it wasn’t yours either. I know you didn’t behave well, but you weren’t to know what was going to happen. No one did. I should have kept more of an eye on her at the leavers’ party. We were close, Maria and I.’
How close, I wonder? Everyone used to comment on how protective he was of her, she even said so herself. Close enough to want to reopen old wounds, to punish the girls he sees as responsible for his sister’s unhappiness?
‘I knew she was… having trouble, you know…’ he goes on.
Having trouble. It’s kind of him to frame it like that, but I know the truth. We had made her life a misery.
‘No one else can take the responsibility for what happened to her. Either she bears that herself, or it was an accident, a misstep, a one-in-a-million chance.’ He’s watching me closely, and I shift from foot to foot, wishing the encounter over.
It’s a comforting fallacy, and I wish with everything in me that his version of events was the true one. Or if that can’t be (and of course it can’t), I wish that I could tell someone the truth without being judged, or worse. I wish that I could loosen this secret knot within me, a knot that is tied so tightly I don’t think anyone will ever be able to get their fingers into its intricacies to tug it apart, however hard they try.
Tim doesn’t know it, but we are talking at cross-purposes here. He thinks we’re talking about the fact that I abandoned Maria for Sophie and the promise of popularity, and how I was partly responsible for ostracising her at school. He thinks we are talking about a bit of schoolgirl bullying, not sticks and stones but words that were meant to hurt, and did. And it’s true; I did do all that. I ignored her, I deserted her, I let her down. What Tim doesn’t know is that I also did something else. Something much, much worse.
We say our goodbyes, and I drive slowly back through the streets of my childhood. As I put my foot down on the A11, something about my conversation with Tim tugs at the corners of my mind. It takes me a while to figure out what it is, but then I get it. She’s tougher than she seems, he started to say, but then corrected himself. A slip of the tongue maybe, or perhaps seeing me threw everything up in the air, flung him back in his mind to 1989. But whatever the reason, there’s no getting away from it: Tim referred to Maria in the present tense.
Chapter 11
Some days she feels like a prisoner in her own home. There’s no reason why she can’t go out, of course. Nobody could tell from simply looking at her. But on days like today, it feels as though someone has peeled back a layer of skin, leaving her face red raw, offering no protection from the elements. From anything. On these days she hides away, waiting until she feels able to face the world again; ready to put her mask back on, to keep smiling.
She wonders sometimes how long she will be able to keep it up. For ever? In some ways, she’s so used to keeping this secret that it comes naturally. And on the days when it doesn’t, when she yearns to open her heart, her mouth, to let it come spilling out, he is there to remind her, as he has been over all these years. Keep quiet. Don’t tell. The consequences will be worse for you than for anyone else. He’s just trying to protect her, she knows that, and is grateful for it.
So she carries on, shaking off those thoughts of the past that haunt her. It’s not only the past that scares her; she fears the present too, some days, and not even staying at home helps. Sometimes she feels even more suffocated there than she does out in the world.
She keeps her circle small because she finds it hard to trust people. Even those who she does let in don’t know the whole story, or even half of it. He is the only one who understands. Only he has helped her, reminded her that other people are not to be trusted with their story.
She doesn’t need reminding that not everyone is what they seem. She of all people knows that only too well.
Chapter 12
2016
Waking the morning after my Norfolk trip, I feel relieved to be at home in something resembling normality, although I can’t imagine how things will ever be normal again. I know Polly thinks I should do more for myself, reach out to the friends I’ve neglected over the past couple of years, but I can’t cope with adding anything new to my life. I am only just managing as it is.
Henry always goes to Sam overnight on a Wednesday, so in the morning I begin gathering his things – underwear, spare uniform, Manky – and chucking them into his little rucksack. He’s had Manky since he was a baby. At some point, when it began to get very ragged around the edges, Sam and I started calling it Manky Blanky and the name stuck. Things go back and forth from Sam’s house to mine so I’m never quite sure what he’s got there that he might need, but there is only one Manky and he is irreplaceable. As I shove a spare school jumper in, I feel something hard and sharp in the front pocket of the bag. I unzip it and peer in. When I see what it is, I sink down on Henry’s bed, staring at the photo of me and him on the beach, both of us grinning and squinting against the sun.
‘Henry, can you come here a minute?’ I call.
He comes running in from the kitchen, licking jam from his fingers, but stops dead when he sees what I’m holding.
‘Why have you got this in your bag, H?’
‘I like to look at it,’ he says under his breath.
‘When?’
He seems to grow smaller. ‘When I’m at Daddy’s. Sometimes I miss you.’
Tears ache in my throat and sting the backs of my eyes. ‘Come here.’
He rushes to me and leaps onto my lap, wrapping himself around me, his solid little body melting into mine.
‘I miss you too,’ I say, straining to speak lightly. ‘But you have fun with Daddy, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he says into my neck, ‘but sometimes I want to look at you.’
‘That’s fine, H.’ My voice cracks slightly and I swallow. ‘You didn’t need to take the photo, you could have just told me. Tell you what, why don’t we make up a big frame with lots of pictures of you and me, and you can put it up in your bedroom at Daddy’s?’