Secret Smile

CHAPTER 18

I left the house, though Judy tried to hold me back at the door, and I got in my car and drove to the bottom of the road, where I pulled in at a bus stop. I felt cold to the bone, but sweaty at the same time, and my hands were trembling so badly that I could barely turn the ignition off. There was a nasty taste coating the inside of my mouth: game pie, blue cheese, red wine, dread. For a moment, I thought I would be sick. I sat for a while, just staring ahead but barely seeing the traffic that flowed past me as the day just started to turn dark, as if the colour were running out of everything, leaving the world grey.

A loud horn sounded behind me, and I glanced in the rear-view mirror to see a bus waiting. I started up the car and edged out into the road. But I didn't know where to go. For a while I drove as if heading home, but that was the last place in the world I could be right now. Anyway, it didn't feel like home any longer. I'd loved it, it had been my haven. Not now.

I could just go back to Laura's. But I wanted to be alone, desperately. So I just kept on going, not turning left or right, heading east out of London, past shops selling old fridges, mobile phones, catering equipment, BB guns, cheap videos, garden gnomes, floor tiles, wind chimes… The streets grew poorer; there was graffiti on the bridges overhead, dank little cafes, queasy-looking butchers still open with slabs of meat swaying in the window, and at a set of traffic lights a young man in combat gear banged on my window and mouthed orders at me to give him money. After I'd passed a flyover and several arterial crossroads, the surroundings grew more prosperous again, and houses thinned to detached properties with gardens in front and behind. Lights were beginning to go on. Street lamps glowed in the greying dusk. At last there were fields, large trees with scarcely any leaves left on them, a river running by.

I took a random left up a small road, then left again up a smaller lane, and stopped the car in the entrance to a field where cows were standing in the far corner. In an hour or so it would be dark, and when I opened the door I could feel the cold biting through my jacket. I wasn't dressed for outside, wasn't wearing the right shoes, but it didn't matter. I started to walk along the lane and welcomed the sting of the wind, the way my hair whipped against my face. For several minutes I just walked, fast so my calves ached. And then I started to think and to let myself remember.

When Kerry was nineteen, she was pretty but she didn't think she was, so of course people rarely noticed her. At least, boys didn't. Michael wasn't her first boyfriend, but he was the first she really let herself fall in love with, and maybe he was the first she had sex with. She never said and I never asked, at first, because I was waiting for the right intimate moment, and later because there never would be that right moment. It was in the summer holidays, just before she went to university, and in the meantime she was working in the local cafe, washing dishes and serving customers chocolate fudge brownies and coconut flapjacks. He was about three years older than her, studying civil engineering at Hull, but home for the holidays, and he saw her a few times and then one day he leaned over the counter and asked her for a cup of tea and if she'd like to go out for a drink.

Maybe it was because he knew nothing about her, had no part of the world in which she was always on the sidelines, or maybe she was just ready to get carried away – anyway, she was very taken up with him. She seemed proud of herself as well because he was older than her, and not exactly handsome but extroverted and rather a charmer, and he made her feel more worldly and glamorous than she'd felt before. She visibly bloomed, in much the same way, I thought, pounding along the lane with the darkness falling, that she had bloomed with Brendan.

And then… I had spent too many years trying not to think about this, and I had to wrench my mind round to contemplating the forbidden memory. It didn't go on for that long between Kerry and Michael, and after a few days it seemed obvious that she was keener than he was. Or that's what I said then, and after. At first, he'd taken no notice of me. I was five, maybe six years his junior. I had homework and a meagre allowance. And I was a virgin. I don't think I flirted with him exactly, but I remember a look he gave me one day – a suddenly appraising look, right over the head of Kerry, and I remember even now how I was filled with a rush of triumph and violent self-loathing. All at once, I couldn't stop thinking about him, just because he'd looked at me like that, public-private. I glowed with secret, guilty pleasure.

He kissed me, outside Kerry's bedroom, very quickly, and I let him and told myself it didn't matter, didn't count, I'd done nothing. We had sex, one afternoon after school, on my bed, while Kerry went round the corner to buy cigarettes for him. I couldn't tell myself that didn't count. It took about two painful, horrible minutes, and even before we'd begun I realized I was making the biggest mistake of my life. I was no longer able to stand the sight of his shallow, self-satisfied face. I kept out of his way completely after that. If he was coming round, I went out. If the phone rang, I never answered it. I waited for the flooding shame to subside. He and Kerry stayed together a bit longer, but gradually he stopped calling her and then he didn't return her calls either. A week or so later, when he'd gone back to Hull, Kerry started university. I felt sure he would have left her anyway; I tried to find ways of justifying my actions so they weren't so bad, but never succeeded. I didn't know and didn't want to know how much Kerry minded. I couldn't believe what had happened. Sometimes, I still couldn't believe it. I'd never told anyone about it. Except for my diary. I had written it down almost as a way of getting it out of my head, turning it into an object that could be thrown away, or hidden. Because I never could throw my diary away. It would have been like throwing away a piece of myself.

What I wanted to know now was this: had I done it because he was going out with my elder sister? I came to a stile going over a fence and sat down on it, feeling the dampness of the wood through my trousers, the moistness of the soil through my thin shoes. I put my head in my chilly hands, pressed my thumbs against my ears to seal me into my own interior world. Because if I had done that, what did that make me and what was happening now? What strange, ugly replica of that event was being played out, but now in full view and with everyone witnessing it? In my mind, I heard my mother's hissed commands, Troy 's whimper. I saw them all looking at me. Kerry's white face. I saw Brendan's smile.

More to the immediate point, what was I going to do now? I opened my eyes and stood up. I saw it was cloudy dark, with no moon. Here I was, on some remote lane in the middle of fields and woods, and I had no idea of what to do next. A part of me just wanted to run away so I didn't have to deal with any of this. But you have to run to somewhere, make a decision to drive the car along this road to that town, where you eat that food and sleep in that bed and get up in the morning…

So in the end, I returned to the car and got in it and turned on the ignition and drove back the way I'd come. I was so cold that, even when I turned the inefficient heating full on, I couldn't warm up. I bought milk and cocoa powder and digestive biscuits at the corner shop a few minutes from Laura's flat. When I let myself in, I could hear the sound of taps running in her bathroom, so I made myself a large mug of hot chocolate, with lots of sugar in it, and sat on the sofa with my legs curled up under me and drank it very slowly, trying to make it last.