The Secret Place

Chapter 6

Out behind the Court there’s a field, or sort of; people call it that, at least, the Field, with a dab of snigger on top because of what goes on there. It’s where another wing of the Court was supposed to get built – there was going to be an Abercrombie & Fitch – but then the recession happened. Instead there’s a wire-fenced expanse of tall raggedy weeds, with raw patches of hard earth still showing through like scars where the bulldozers had started work; a couple of stacks of forgotten breeze blocks, sliding to heaps because people are always climbing them; a piece of mysterious machinery gone rusty. One corner of the wire fencing has been worked loose from its pole; bend it out of your way and you can slide through, if you’re not fat, and fat people mostly wouldn’t come here anyway.

The Field is the Court’s shadow side, the place where all the stuff happens that can’t happen in the Court. Colm’s guys and Kilda’s girls wander round the side of the Court, so innocent they’re practically whistling, and slip in here. The emos who think they’re too deep for a shopping centre, mostly – there’s always a gang of them down by the back fence playing Death Cab for Cutie on their iPod speakers, even when it’s freezing or lashing rain – but sometimes other people, too. If you’ve no-blink bluffed a bottle of vodka off some shopkeeper or nicked half a pack of smokes off your dad, if you’ve got a couple of joints or a handful of your mum’s tablets, this is where you bring them. The weeds grow high enough that no one outside the fence can see you, not if you’re sitting down or lying down, and you probably are.

At night other things happen. Some afternoons people come in and find like a dozen condoms, used ones, or a scatter of syringes. Once someone found blood, a long splashed trail of it across the bare ground, and a knife. They didn’t tell. The next day the knife was gone.

Late October, a sudden blond smiling afternoon that popped its head up in the middle of a string of shivering wet days, and it set the Field stirring in people’s minds. A gang of Colm’s fourth-years got someone’s big brother to buy them a few two-litres of cider and a couple of packs of smokes; word spread, till now there are maybe twenty people sprawled in the tangle of chickweed or perched on the breeze blocks. Dandelion seeds drift, spiky ragwort is flowering yellow. The sun melts over them, fools the wind-chill away.

The makeup hall in the Court is pimping a new line, so all the girls have had their makeup done. Their faces are stiff and heavy – they’re afraid to smile, in case something cracks or slips – but the new way they feel is worth it. Even before they got a first swig of cider or breath of smoke, they were sashaying bold, their new careful head-high walk turning them haughty and inscrutable, powerful. Next to them the boys look bare and young. To make up for it, they’ve gone louder and they’re calling each other gay more often. A few of them are throwing rocks at a loll-tongued grinning face that someone spray-painted on the back wall of the Court, roaring and punching the air when anyone gets a hit; a couple more are shoving each other off the rusty machine. The girls, to make sure everyone knows they’re not watching, get out their phones and take photos of each other’s new looks. The Daleks pout and thrust on a pile of breeze blocks; Julia and Holly and Selena and Becca are down among the weeds.

Chris Harper is behind them, blue T-shirt against the blue sky as he balances arms-out on top of another pile of breeze blocks, crinkling his eyes down at Aileen Russell as he laughs about something she’s said. He’s maybe eight feet away from Holly and Selena wrapping their arms around each other and puckering up their new lipstick ready for a dramatic smooch, Becca rounding her heavy lashes and her Fierce Foxxx mouth at the camera in fake shock, Julia hamming up the photographer act – ‘Oh yeah, sexayyy, gimme more’ – but they barely know he’s there. They feel someone, the green fizz and force of him, the same way they feel hot patches of it pulsing all across the Field; but if you closed their eyes and asked them who it was, none of them would be able to name Chris. He has six months, three weeks and a day left to live.

James Gillen slides in next to Julia, holding a bottle of cider. ‘Oh, come on,’ he says to her. ‘Seriously?’

James Gillen is a babe, in a dark slicked way, with a curl to his mouth that puts you on the defensive: he always looks amused, and you can never tell whether it’s at you. Plenty of girls are into him – Caroline O’Dowd is so in love with him that she actually bought a can of Lynx Excite and she puts it on a piece of her hair every morning, so she can smell him whenever she wants to. You look over at her in Maths and she’s there sniffing her hair, with her mouth hanging open, looking like she has an IQ of about twenty.

‘Hi to you too,’ Julia says. ‘And: what?’

He flicks her phone. ‘You look good. You don’t need a photo to tell you that.’

‘No shit, Sherlock. I don’t need you, either.’

James ignores that. ‘I know what I’d like a few pics of,’ he says, and grins at Julia’s boobs.

He obviously expects her to blush and zip up her hoodie, or squeal and get outraged – either one would be a win for him. Becca is blushing for her, but Julia isn’t about to give him the satisfaction. ‘Believe me, buddy,’ she says. ‘You couldn’t handle these.’

‘They’re not that big.’

‘Neither are your hands. And you know what they say about guys with small hands.’

Holly and Selena are getting the giggles. ‘Jesus,’ says James, eyebrow lifting. ‘You’re pretty fucking forward, aren’t you?’

‘Better than being backward, dude,’ Julia tells him. She clicks her phone shut and puts it back in her pocket, ready for whatever’s going to happen next.

‘You’re so disgusting,’ Joanne says from her breeze block, wrinkling her nose cutely. To James: ‘I actually can’t believe some of the stuff she actually says?’

But Joanne’s out of luck: James has his eye on Julia, not on her, for today anyway. He gives Joanne a grin that could mean anything and turns his shoulder to her. ‘So,’ he says to Julia. ‘You want some?’ and holds out the bottle of cider.

Julia feels a quick puff of triumph. She shoots Joanne a super-sweet smile, over James’s shoulder. ‘Sure,’ she says, and takes the bottle.

Julia doesn’t like James Gillen, but that’s not the point, not out here. In the Court, back in the Court any eye you catch could be Love peal-of-bells-firework-burst Love, all among the sweet spray of the music and the rainbowing prisms of the lights, this could be the one huge mystery every book and film and song is sizzling with; could be your one-and-only shoulder to lean your head on, fingers woven with yours and lips gentle on your hair and Our Song pouring out of every speaker. This could be the one heart that will open to your touch and offer up its never-spoken secrets, that has spaces perfectly shaped to hold all of yours.

Out here in the Field it’s not going to be Love, it’s not going to be the mystery everything talks about; it’s going to be the huge mystery everything talks around. The songs try so hard to pump it in your face, but they’re just throwing the right words into the air and hoping they sound dirty enough to fuzz your mind till you can’t ask questions any more. They can’t tell you what it’s going to be like, someday when; they can’t tell you what it is. It’s not in the songs; it’s out here, in the Field. In the apple and smoke of everyone’s breath, in the reek of ragwort and the milk of broken dandelion stems sticky on your fingers. In the emos’ music, rising up through the earth to pound at the bottom of your spine. Everyone says the reason Leanne Naylor didn’t come back for fifth year is because she got pregnant in the Field and she didn’t even know which guy it was.

So Julia not liking James Gillen is beside the point. The point out here is the hard handsome curve of his lips, the flecks of stubble along his jaw; the tingle sparking down her wrist veins when their fingers touch on the bottle. She holds his eye and licks a leftover drop off the rim of the bottle, with the tip of her tongue, and grins when his eyes widen.

‘Do we get some of that?’ Holly wants to know. Julia passes her the bottle without looking at her. Holly rolls her eyes and takes a good swig before she passes it on to Selena.

‘Want a smoke?’ James asks Julia.

‘Why not.’

‘Oops,’ says James – he doesn’t even bother patting his pockets first. ‘I must’ve dropped my smokes over there. My bad.’ He stands up and holds out his hand to Julia.

‘Well,’ Julia says, only a tenth of a breath of hesitation. ‘Then I’ll just have to come help you find them.’ And she catches James’s hand and lets him pull her up. She takes the cider bottle off Becca and winks while she’s got her back to James, and they walk away side by side, into the tall bobbing weeds.

The sunlight opens to receive them and blinks closed again behind them; they’re lost in its dazzle, vanished. Something between loss and pure panic shoots through Becca. She almost screams after them to come back, before it’s too late.

‘James Gillen,’ Holly says, half-wry, half-impressed. ‘For God’s sake.’

‘If she starts going out with him,’ Becca says, ‘we’ll never see her again. Like Marian Maher: she doesn’t even talk to her friends any more. She just sits there texting Whatshisname.’

‘Jules isn’t going to go out with him,’ Holly says. ‘With James Gillen? Are you joking?’

‘But what…? Then what…?’

Holly shrugs, one-shouldered: too complicated to explain. ‘Don’t worry. She’s just snogging him.’

Becca says, ‘I’m never doing that. I’m not getting off with some guy unless I actually care about him.’

There’s a silence. A shriek and an explosion of laughter, somewhere down the Field, and a girl from fifth year leaps up to chase after a guy waving her sunglasses over his head; a victory howl as someone gets a bullseye on the graffiti face.

‘Sometimes,’ Holly says suddenly, ‘I actually wish it was still like it used to be fifty years ago. Like, no one shagged anyone till they got married, and it was this huge big deal if you even kissed a guy.’

Selena is lying back with her head on her jacket, scrolling through her photos. She says, ‘And if you did shag a guy, or even if you just acted like you might someday think about it, you could end up locked in a Magdalen laundry for the rest of your life.’

‘I didn’t say it was so totally perfect. I just said at least everyone knew what they were supposed to do. They didn’t have to figure it out.’

‘Then just decide you’re not going to shag anyone till you get married,’ Becca says. Usually she likes cider, but this time it’s left her tongue coated in a thick stale layer. ‘And then you’ll know, and you won’t have to figure it out.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ Selena says. ‘At least we’ve got the choice. If you want to be with someone, you can. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to.’

‘Yeah,’ Holly says. She doesn’t sound convinced. ‘I guess.’

‘You don’t.’

‘Right. Except if you don’t, hello, you’re a total frigid freak.’

Becca says, ‘I’m not a total frigid freak.’

‘I know you’re not. I didn’t say that.’ Holly is stripping the lobes off a ragwort leaf, carefully, one by one. ‘Just… why not do it, you know? When it’s hassle if you don’t, and there’s no reason why not? Back then, people didn’t because they thought it was wrong. I don’t think it’s wrong. I just wish…’

The ragwort leaf is coming apart; she rips it in half and tosses the pieces into the undergrowth. ‘Forget it,’ she says. ‘And that dick James Gillen could’ve at least left us the cider. It’s not like they’re going to be drinking it.’

Selena and Becca don’t answer. The silence settles and thickens. ‘I dare you,’ Aileen Russell’s high overexcited voice yelps behind them, ‘I so dare you,’ but it skims off the surface of the silence and fizzles away into the sunlight. Becca feels like she can still smell Lynx Sperminator or whatever it’s called.

‘Hi,’ says a voice beside her. She looks around.

This little spotty kid has edged up next to her in the weeds. He needs a haircut and he looks about eleven, both of which Becca knows she does too, but she’s pretty sure this kid actually is in second year, maybe even first. She decides this is OK: he’s presumably not looking for a snog, and he might even be all right with the two of them getting some rocks and joining the guys throwing stuff at the graffiti face.

‘Hi,’ he says again. His voice hasn’t broken.

‘Hi,’ Becca says.

‘Was your dad a thief?’ he asks.

Becca says, ‘What?’

The kid says, in one fast gabble, ‘Then who stole the stars and put them in your eyes?’

He looks at Becca hopefully. She looks back; she can’t think of a single thing to say. The kid decides to take this as encouragement. He scoots closer and tries to find her hand among the weeds.

Becca takes her hand away. She says, ‘Has that ever worked for you?’

The kid looks injured. He says, ‘It works for my brother.’

It hits Becca: he thinks she’s the only girl out here who might be desperate enough to snog him. He’s decided she’s the only one on his level.

She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far enough to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that’s about what it can do, not all about how it looks. She’s fast, she’s always been fast, she can cartwheel and backflip and climb anything; that used to be good, but now all that matters is that she has no tits. Her legs stretched out in front of her look limp and meaningless, made out of a bunch of lines that add up to exactly nothing.

Suddenly the spotty kid leans in. It takes Becca a second to realise he’s trying to snog her; she turns just in time to give him a mouthful of hair. ‘No,’ she says.

He sits back, looking crestfallen. ‘Ahhh,’ he says. ‘Why not?’

‘Because.’

‘Sorry,’ the kid says. He’s gone scarlet.

‘I think your brother was taking the piss out of you,’ Holly tells him, not being mean. ‘I don’t think that line’s ever worked for anyone. It’s not your fault.’

‘I guess,’ the kid says miserably. He’s obviously still there only because the walk of shame back to his mates is too horrible to contemplate. Becca wants to curl up like a bug and pull weeds over herself till she disappears. The makeup feels like someone held her down and painted HAHAHAHA across her face.

‘Here,’ Selena says. She hands the kid her phone. ‘Take a photo of us. Then you can head back to your friends, and it’ll look like you were just here doing us a favour. OK?’

The kid shoots her a look of pure animal gratitude. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘OK.’

‘Becs,’ Selena says, and holds out an arm. ‘Come here.’

After a second Becca shuffles herself closer. Lenie’s arm wraps tight around her, Holly leans in against her other shoulder; she feels the warmth of their skin straight through tops and hoodies, the solidity of them. Her body breathes it in like it’s oxygen.

‘Say cheese,’ says the spotty little kid, kneeling up. He sounds a lot more cheerful.

‘Hang on,’ Becca says. She drags the back of her hand across her mouth, hard, smearing Fierce Fox super-matte long-lasting lipstick across her face in a wide war-paint streak. ‘OK,’ she says with a great big smile, ‘cheese,’ and hears the fake click-whirr of the phone as the kid presses the button.

Behind them, Chris Harper shouts out, ‘OK, here I go!’ To the soundtrack of Aileen Russell’s squeal he straightens, high on the breeze blocks, and launches himself up and over in a backflip against the sky. He lands staggering; his momentum takes him skidding through ragwort, onto his back in a patch of shuddering green and gold. He lies there, splayed and breathless, looking up at the cheating blue sky and laughing his heart out.