The Secret Place

Chapter 26

May comes in restless, fizzing in the warm air. Summer is almost close enough to touch and so are the exams, and the whole of third year is wound too tight, laughing too loud at nothing and exploding into ornate arguments full of slammed desks and tears in the toilets. The moon pulls strange hues out of the sky, a tinge of green you can only see from the corner of your eye, a bruised violet.

It’s the second of May. Chris Harper has two weeks left to live.

Holly can’t sleep. Selena still has her fake headache, and Julia is being a bitch; when Holly tried to talk to her about whatever’s up with Lenie, Julia blew her off so viciously that they’re still only kind of speaking. The bedroom is too hot, over-intimate heat that sends waves of itch across your skin. Things feel wrong and getting wronger, they twist and pull at the edges, drag the fabric of her all askew.

She gets up to go to the toilet, not because she needs to but because she can’t lie still another second. The corridor is dim and even hotter than their room. Holly is halfway down it and thinking cold water when the shadow of a doorway convulses, only a foot or two away. She leaps back against the wall and grabs a breath ready to yell, but then Alison Muldoon’s head shoots open-mouthed out of the shadow, vanishes in a burst of urgent squeaky noises, and pops back out again.

‘Jesus!’ Holly hisses. ‘You almost gave me a heart attack! What is your problem?’

‘OhmyGod, it’s you, I thought– Jo!’ And she’s gone again.

By this point Holly is getting curious. She waits and listens; the rest of the corridor is silent, everyone deep under the weight of the night.

After a minute Joanne appears in the doorway, frizz-haired and wearing pale-pink pyjamas that say ooh baby across the chest. ‘Um, that’s Holly Mackey?’ she snaps, examining Holly like something in a display case. ‘Are you retarded or what? I was asleep.’

‘Her hair,’ Alison bleats, just above a whisper, behind her. ‘I just saw her hair, and I thought–’

‘OhmyGod, they’re both blond, so is like everybody?Holly doesn’t look anything like her. Holly’s thin.’

Which is the biggest compliment Joanne knows. She smiles at Holly, and rolls her eyes so they can share a laugh at how thick Alison is.

The thing about Joanne is you never can tell. Today she could be your snuggled-up best friend, and she’ll get all wounded if you don’t play along. It puts you at a disadvantage: she knows who she’s dealing with; you have to figure it out from scratch, every time. She makes Holly’s calf muscles go twitchy.

Holly says, ‘Who did she think I was?’

‘She came out of the right room,’ Alison whines.

‘Which meansshe was going the wrong way, duh,’ Joanne says. ‘Who cares if she goes to the loo? We care if she goes out. Which, hello, is that way?’ Alison chews a knuckle and keeps her head down.

Holly says, ‘You thought I was Selena? Going outside?’

‘I didn’t. Because I’m not retarded.’

Holly looks at Joanne’s tight face, too hard for the cutesy pyjamas, and it occurs to her that Joanne is kicking Alison because she’s some strange combination of relieved and disappointed. Which is crazy. She says, feeling her way, ‘Where would Selena be going?’

‘Don’t you wish you knew?’ Joanne says, tossing Alison a smirk. Alison lets out an obedient sharp giggle, too loud. ‘Shut up! Do you actually want to get us caught?’

Holly’s heartbeat is changing, turning deeper and violent. She says, ‘Selena doesn’t go out on her own. Only when we all do.’

‘OhmyGod, you guys are so cute,’ Joanne says, with a nose-crinkle that doesn’t thaw her eyes. ‘All this blood-sisters-tell-each-other-everything stuff; it’s like an old TV show. Did you actually do the blood-sisters thing? Because that would be so totes adorbs I could just die.’

Not bessie mates, not tonight. ‘Just give me a sec,’ Holly says. If Joanne shows you her teeth, you bite first and hard. ‘I’m trying to look like I actually care what you think about us.’

Joanne stares, hand on her hip, in the thin dirty light. Holly catches the moment when she starts seeing a more interesting football than Alison. ‘If you’re such perfect little buddies,’ she says, ‘how come you don’t know where your friend goes at night?’

Holly reminds herself that Joanne is a lying cow who would do anything for notice, while Selena is her best friend. She can’t picture Selena’s face.

‘You’ve got trust issues,’ she says. ‘If you don’t do something about them, you’re going to turn into one of those crazy women who hire private investigators to follow their boyfriends around.’

‘At least I’ll have a boyfriend. One of my own, not one I had to steal.’

‘Yay you?’ Holly says, turning away. ‘I guess everyone has to be proud of something?’

‘Hey!’ Joanne snaps. ‘Don’t you want to know what I’m talking about?’

Holly shrugs. ‘Why? It’s not like I’m going to believe you.’ She starts for the toilets.

The hiss flicks after her: ‘Come back here.’

If things were normal, Holly would wave over her shoulder and keep walking. But they’re not, and Joanne’s clever in her own special way, and if she actually knows any of the answers-

Holly turns. Joanne snaps her fingers at Alison. ‘Phone.’

Alison scurries back into the sleep-smelling cave of their room. Someone heaves herself over in bed and asks a drowsy question; Alison lets out a wild shush. She comes back carrying Joanne’s phone, which she hands over like an altar boy at the offertory. Part of Holly’s head is already hamming up the story for the others, snorting into her palm with laughter. The other part has a bad feeling.

Joanne takes her time pressing buttons. Then she hands the phone to Holly – the curl of her mouth is a warning, but Holly takes it anyway. The video is already playing.

It hits her in separate punches, with no room to get her breath in between. The girl is Selena. The guy is Chris Harper. That’s the glade. It’s turned into something Holly has never seen it be; something gathered and dangerous.

Joanne feels closer, licking up anything Holly lets out. Holly makes herself start breathing again and says, with no blink and her dad’s amused half-grin, ‘OMG, some blond chick is snogging some guy. Call Perez Hilton quick.’

‘Oh, please, don’t act stupider than you can help. You know who they are.’

Holly shrugs. ‘It could be Selena and Chris Whatshisname from Colm’s. Sorry to ruin your big moment here, but so?’

‘So oopsie,’ Joanne says, pursed-up and cute. ‘I guess you’re not bessie blood sisters after all.’

Bite fast and hard. Not one I had to steal– ‘What do you even care?’ Holly says, lifting an eyebrow. ‘You were never with Chris Harper. Just fancying him doesn’t make him your property.’

Alison says, ‘She was too.’

‘Shut up,’ Joanne hisses, whirling around on her. Alison gasps and vanishes into the shadows. To Holly, icy again: ‘That’s none of your business.’

If Chris actually dumped Joanne for Selena, Joanne is going to take Selena’s throat out. ‘If Chris cheated on you,’ Holly says, carefully, ‘he’s a prick. But why be pissed off with Selena? She didn’t even know.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Joanne says, ‘we’ll get him.’ Her voice calls up a sudden cold gleam, away in the thick dark corners of the corridor; Holly almost steps back. ‘And I’m not pissed off with your friend. It’s over between them, and anyway I don’t get pissed off with people like her. I get rid of them.’

And with that video, she can do that any time she wants. ‘Clichés give me a rash,’ Holly says. She hits the Delete button, but Joanne is watching for that: she grabs the phone back before Holly can confirm. Her nails scrape down Holly’s wrist.

‘Excuse me, don’t even think about it?’

‘You need a manicure,’ Holly says, shaking her wrist. ‘With, like, garden shears.’

Joanne slaps her phone back into Alison’s hand, and Alison scuttles off to put it away. ‘You know what you and your pals need?’ Joanne says, like it’s an order. ‘You need to stop acting like you’re such super-special amazing bessie friends. If you were, that manatee wouldn’t be lying to you about shagging Chris Harper; and even if she did, you’d like know telepathically, which you so didn’t. You’re exactly the same as everyone else.’

Holly has no comeback to that. It’s over between them. That scraped-out look to Selena, ice wind ripping right through her: this is why. This, the most obvious typical clichéd reason in the world, so typical she never even thought of it. Joanne Heffernan got there first.

Holly can’t take one more second of her face, swollen fat with all the delicious gotcha she was after. The corridor lights flicker, make a noise like paint spattering and pop out. Through the surge of chicken-coop noises from Joanne’s room, Holly feels her way back to bed.

She says nothing. Not to Becca who would freak out, not to Julia who would tell her she was talking bullshit, not to Selena; especially not to Selena. When Holly can’t sleep a few nights later, when she opens her eyes to Selena’s whole body one curve of concentration over something cupped glowing in her palms, she doesn’t sit up and say softly Lenie tell me. When a long wait later Selena takes a shivery breath and shoves the phone down the side of her mattress, Holly doesn’t start making up excuses to be on her own in the bedroom. She lets the phone stay where it is and hopes she never sees it again.

She acts like Selena is totally fine and everything’s totally fine and the biggest problem in the world is Junior Cert Irish which OMG is going to destroy her brain and turn her whole life into a total failure. This makes Becca chill out and cheer up, at least. Julia is still a bitch, but Holly decides to think this is because of exam stress. She spends a lot of time with Becca. They laugh a lot. Afterwards Holly can’t remember about what.

Sometimes she wants to punch Selena right in the soft pale daze of her face and keep punching. Not because she got off with Chris Harper and lied to them and broke the vow that was her idea to begin with; those aren’t even the problem. But because the whole point of the vow was for none of them to have to feel like this. The point was for one place in their lives to be impregnable. For just one kind of love to be stronger than any outside thing; to be safe.

Becca is not stupid and, no matter what people sometimes think, she’s not twelve. And a place like this is riddled with secrets but their shells are thin and it’s crowded in here, they get bashed and jostled against each other; if you’re not super-careful, then sooner or later they crack open and all the tender flesh comes spilling out.

She’s known for weeks that something is wrong and spreading. That night in the grove, when Holly was going on at Lenie, Becca tried to think it was just Holly having a mood; she does that sometimes, digs into something and won’t let go, all you need to do is pull her attention somewhere else and she’s fine. But Julia doesn’t care about Holly’s moods. When she jumped in to make everything all sweet and smooth, that was when Becca started knowing something real was wrong.

She’s been trying hard not to know. When Selena spends the whole of lunchtime staring into her hand wrapped in her hair, or when Julia and Holly snap like they hate each other, Becca digs her heels into the ground, stares at her beef casserole and refuses to get pulled in. If they want to act like idiots, that’s their problem; they can fix it themselves.

The thought of something they can’t fix sends her mind wild, yipping with terror. It smells of forest fires.

It’s Holly who corners her into knowing. The first time Holly asked – Does Lenie seem, like, weird to you, the last while? – all Becca could do was stare and listen to her own crazy heartbeat, till Holly rolled her eyes and switched to Never mind it’s probably all fine. But then Holly starts sticking to her harder and harder, like she can’t breathe right around the others. She talks too fast, she makes smart-arsed jabs at everything and everyone and keeps going till Becca laughs to make her happy. She tries to get Becca to do things just the two of them, without Julia and Selena. Becca realises that she wants to get away from Holly; that, unbelievably, for the first time ever, they all want to get away from each other.

Whatever’s wrong, it won’t go away by itself. It’s getting worse.

A year ago Becca would have kept slamming doors and turning keys between her and this. Got a load of books out of the library, never stopped reading even when someone talked to her. Pretended to be sick, stuck fingers down her throat to puke, till Mum showed up tight-jawed to take her home.

Now is different. She’s not a little kid any more, who can hide on her friends when something bad is happening. If the others can’t fix this, then she needs to try.

Becca starts watching.

One night she opens her eyes on Selena sitting up in bed, texting. The phone is pink. Selena’s phone is silver.

The next day Becca wears last term’s outgrown kilt to school, and gets sent back to her room to change into something that doesn’t show the world her legs. It takes her like thirty seconds to find the pink phone.

The texts turn every soft part of her to water, spilling away between her bones. She’s crouched on Selena’s bed and she can’t move.

This little thing, harmless, this is what’s turned everything wrong. The phone feels black and hot in her hand, denser than rock.

It takes a long spinning time before she can think. The first thing her mind holds up: there’s no name in the texts. Who who who, she thinks, and listens to the lonely hoot of it through her mind. Who?

Someone from Colm’s; that’s obvious, from the stories about teachers and rugby matches and other guys. Someone cunning, to fracture a crack into their high white wall and wiggle his sly way through. Someone smart, to guess how Selena would sway to all these poor-sensitive-me stories with her arms out, how she would never abandon anyone so special who needs her so much.

Becca keeps watching. Down at the Court, as they wander through the chilled hollow air and the candy-coloured neon, she watches for some guy who looks over their way too much or too little, for some guy who changes Selena just by walking past. Marcus Wiley’s eyes ferret down Selena’s top but even if he wasn’t disgusting Selena would never, not after he sent Julia that picture. Andrew Moore checks if they’re looking as he dead-arms one of his friends and howls with lunatic laughter; Becca is about to think Yeah right, a no-personality moron like that, she would never, when she realises like a punch in the gut she has no clue what Selena would never.

Andrew Moore?

Finn Carroll, head flicking away too sharply when he sees Becca see him looking across the doughnut stand? Finn is smart; he could do it. Chris Harper, crossing them on the escalators with a red slash on his cheek that might not be just sunburn, Selena’s eyelashes flickering fast as she bends her head low over her carrier bag full of colours? The thought of Chris fishhooks Becca under the breastbone in weird sore ways, but she doesn’t flinch: it could be. Seamus O’Flaherty, everyone says Seamus is gay but someone cunning could start that rumour himself, to get close to girls off guard; François Levy, beautiful and different, different could make Selena feel like it didn’t count; Bryan Hynes, Oisín O’Donovan, Graham Quinn, for a second every one of them leaps out with a wet red grin like it’s him him him. He’s everywhere; he’s claiming everything.

The air in the Court has been processed to something so thin and chilly that Becca can hardly breathe it. Next to her Holly is talking too fast and insistent to notice that Becca’s not answering. Becca pulls her cardigan sleeves down over her hands and keeps watching.

She watches at night, too. It’s Selena she’s guarding – not that she knows what she would do if – but when she finally sees the slow rise and unfurl of bedclothes, it’s on the wrong bed. Becca can tell by the delicacy of every movement, the wary flash of eyes before Julia straightens, that she’s not going to the toilet.

The sound comes out before Becca can stop it, rips out of her gut, dirty and raw. This guy is running all through them, like an infection looking for the next place to erupt, he’s everywhere-

Julia freezes. Becca turns and flops, doing bad-dream mutters; lets them subside, breathes deep and even. After a long time she hears Julia start moving again.

She watches Julia sneak out, watches her sneak in an hour later; watches her change fast into her pyjamas and jam her clothes deep into the wardrobe. Watches her disappear to the bathroom, come back a long time later in a thick fog of flowers and lemon and disinfectant.

There’s no phone down the side of Julia’s bed, the next evening during second study when Becca finds an excuse. There’s a half-empty packet of condoms.

It scalds Becca’s fingers like hot grease; even after she shoves it back it keeps scalding, corroding right into her blood and pumping all through her body. Julia isn’t Selena; no one could sweet-talk her into this, no amount of puppy-dog eyes and sensitive stories. This had to be something vicious, clotted with cruelty, a hard jerk of her arm up behind her back: Do it or I’ll tell on Selena, get her expelled, I’ll send tit shots of her to every phone in the school– Someone more than cunning. Someone evil.

Becca, kneeling on the floor between the beds, bites into the meat of her palm to keep that sound from wrenching out of her again.

Who who?

Someone who doesn’t understand the immensity of what he’s done. He thinks this is nothing. Turning girls from what they are into what he wants them to be, twisting and forcing till they’re nothing but his desires, that’s no big deal: just what they were there for, to begin with. Becca’s teeth make deep dents in her hand.

Those moments in the glade that were supposed to last forever, that were supposed to be theirs to reclaim no matter how far away and apart the four of them travel: he’s robbing those. He’s scrubbing away the glowing map-lines that were supposed to lead each of them back. Selena’s and then Julia’s, he’ll go after Holly next, he’s a crow gobbling their crumb-trails and never full. The road of dots across Becca’s belly leaps with fresh pain.

Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places-

Outside the window the moon is a thin white smear behind purple-grey clouds. Becca unclenches her teeth and holds out her palms.

Save us

The clouds pulse. They bubble at the edges.

Julia broke the vow; even if she was forced to, that doesn’t matter, not to this. So did Selena, whatever she did or didn’t do with him. If she danced along the line, if she broke up with him before they went right over, this doesn’t care. None of those things change the punishment.

Forgive us. Burn this out of us turn us pure again. Get him out get us back to how we used to be

The sky simmers and thrums. The answers heave under a thin skin of cloud.

Something is required.

Whatever you want. You want blood I’ll cut myself open

The light dims, rejecting. Not that.

Becca thinks of poured wine, clay figurines, flash of a knife and scatter of feathers. She has no clue where she would get a bird, or wine actually, but if-

What tell me what

With a vast silent roar the sky bursts open, the clouds explode to fragments that dissolve before they hit the ground. Out of the white and enormous blaze it drops into her open palms:

Him.

She was thinking like a stupid little kid. Booze nicked from Mum’s wine rack, chicken blood; baby stuff, for eyelinered idiots playing witch games they don’t understand.

In old times, there were punishments for forcing a girl who had made a vow. Becca’s read about them: buried alive, flayed, clubbed to death-

Him. No other sacrifice could ever be enough, not to purify this.

Becca almost gets up and runs, back to the common room and French homework. She knows she could, if she wanted. Nothing would stop her.

Selena staring into her palmful of hair, the hunch of Julia’s shoulders when she came back in from the seething dark, the fast desperate beat of Holly’s voice. The moments, over the last few weeks, when Becca’s hated all three of them. Any day now it’ll be too late for them to find their way back, ever again.

Yes. Yes I’ll do it. Yes I’ll find a way.

The ferocity of celebration that rises to meet that, outside her and inside, almost throws her across the room. The dots across her belly drum wild rhythms.

But I don’t know who I need to

Not Chris Harper. Chris didn’t need to be kind to Becca, he didn’t do it to get something – Becca knows perfectly well that a guy like Chris isn’t after someone like her – and free kindness doesn’t go with evil. But that leaves Finn Andrew Seamus François everyone, how can she-

It comes to her like the curve of a great smile: she doesn’t have to know who. All she has to know is where and when. And she can choose those for herself, because she’s a girl, and girls have the power to call guys running any time they want.

Becca knows how to be super-careful. Nothing is going to crack open her secret.

All the sky streams with white, great joyous cool sheets of it pouring down over her hands and her upturned face and her whole body, filling her open mouth.

On Thursday morning Becca wears her outgrown kilt again, and this time Sister Cornelius loses the head and bangs her desk with the ruler and gives the whole class a hundred lines of I will pray to the Blessed Virgin to grant me modesty. And then she sends Becca back to her room to change.

There’s no way to know what time this guy and Selena were meeting, but at least Becca knows one place where they met. Tonight in that clearing place? one text said, way back in March. Same time?

In the last place in the world where she should have brought him. For a second, zipping up her too-long new kilt, Becca’s afraid this guy must have power of his own behind him, to turn Selena into such a total lobotomised idiot. She spots a dropped scrap of paper on the carpet, launches it spinning like a moth around the light fixture to remind herself: she has power too.

The phone doesn’t feel black and hot any more; it’s turned foam-light and nimble, buttons pressing themselves almost before Becca’s thumb can find them. She redoes the text four times before she’s positive it’s OK. Can you meet tonight? 1 in the cypress clearing?

She might not get the chance to check for an answer, but it doesn’t matter: he’ll be there. Maybe Julia’s already set up a meeting for tonight – Becca doesn’t know how she contacts him – but he’ll blow Julia off, if he thinks Selena’s beckoning. It rises off his texts like heat: what he really wants is Selena.

He can’t have her.

Becca leaves soon after midnight, to give herself time to prepare. In the mirror on their wardrobe door, she looks like a burglar: dark-blue jeans and her dark-blue hoodie, and her designer black leather gloves that Mum gave her for Christmas and she’s never worn before. Her hood strings are pulled so tight that just her eyes and nose stick out. It makes her grin – You look like the world’s fattest bank robber – but the grin doesn’t show; she looks solemn, almost stern, balanced on the balls of her feet ready for battle. Around her the others breathe slow and deep as enchanted princesses in a fairy tale.

The night glows like some strange daytime, under a huge low half-moon packed tight in stars. Over the wall and far away music is playing, just a tantalising thread of it, a sweet voice and a beat like running feet. Becca freezes in a shadow and listens. Never thought that everything we lost could feel so near, found you on a– and it’s gone, faded on a change of wind. After a long time she starts moving again.

The groundskeeper’s shed is dark, thick earth-smelling dark and she’s not about to turn on the light, but she prepared for this. Two steps forward, face left, five steps, and her outstretched hands hit the stack of tools propped against the wall.

The hoe is at the far right of the stack, where she left it yesterday. Spades and shovels are too heavy and too clumsy, anything short-handled would mean getting too close, but one hoe had a blade so sharp it almost split her fingertip like ripe fruit. Gemma came in and saw her choosing, but Becca’s not worried about her. This isn’t balconette bras and low-carb foods; this is a thousand miles outside what Gemma’s mind can reach.

She sets branches parting like swinging doors in front of her, to leave her path clear. In the centre of the glade she practises, swinging the hoe up behind her head and down; getting used to the heft of it, the reach. The gloves mean she needs to hold it extra tight, to stop her fingers sliding. The swish of it is fast and strong and satisfying. Low under the trees, here and there, luminous eyes watch her, curious.

One more go because it feels good, and Becca stops: she doesn’t want her arms to get tired. She spins the hoe between her palms and listens. Only the comfortable, familiar sounds of the night: her own breathing, the undergrowth-rustles of small things about their business. He’s nowhere near.

He’ll come from the back of the grounds. The path, under arching branches, is an endless black cave flecked with snippets of white light. She pictures different guys stepping out of it: Andrew, Seamus, Graham. She pictures, carefully and methodically, everything that needs to come after that.

The hoe has stopped spinning between her hands. She hears its swish again, and this time the splintering thud and squelch at the end.

Her whole body would love it to be James Gillen – the thought opens her mouth in almost a smile – but that at least she knows Selena would never. She hopes it’s Andrew Moore.

Becca feels lucky, so lucky she could lift right off the ground and somersault amid the whirling stars, to have been chosen for this. The beauty of the glade turns her heart over. All the clearing is lavish with every glory it can call up; the air is drenched with moonlight and the sweetness of hyacinths, owls sing like nightingales and hares dance and the cypresses are pearled in silver and lavender, for the celebration.

In the crosshatched dark away down the path, something cracks. The cypresses catch one deep breath and shiver on tiptoe. He’s here.

For one second Becca is terrified, bones jackhammered to jelly by the same terror that Julia must have felt as she lay down for him, that Selena must have felt in the instant before she said I love you. It comes to her that, afterwards, she’ll be different from everyone else. Her and this guy: that thud will take them both across one-way borderlines, into worlds they can’t imagine.

She bites down on her cheek till she tastes blood, and with one arc of her hand she sweeps a long rustle like a black wing all around the tops of the cypresses. The other place has been there all along; for months now the borders have been turning porous, sifting away. If she wanted to be frightened, if she wanted to run, the moments for that were a long time ago.

The terror is gone, as fast as it came. Becca moves back into the shadows under the trees and waits for him like a girl waiting for a secret lover, lips parted and dark blood thrumming in her throat and her breasts, all her body reaching out for the moment when at long last she’ll see his face.