Something Only We Know (40 page)

I made myself place the glass carefully down on the mat, and that simple gesture seemed to break the spell and reanimate the rest of them.

‘
Fuck
-ing hell.’

‘Woah!’

‘Steady, Mrs.’

‘Aye aye, what have you been up to, Joseph?’

‘Who’s this? Who’ve you been upsetting now?’

I swept my gaze round the table at them, at their wide grins and glittering eyes. This was proper entertainment, they were thinking. This was a floor show and a half. Aside from differences in
skin shade and build, they were pretty much Joe-clones, with their plaid shirts and short haircuts. One guy had wire-framed glasses, but that was the only real distinguishing feature. His gang,
they were. Like the one he’d probably had at school. Joe was making a big deal of licking his lips and fingers, trying to make out I’d done him a favour by delivering his drink that
way.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked me, looking straight into my eyes. ‘Do you need directing to the nearest psychiatric unit, love? Have I to give them a call?’

‘Fuck you, Joe Pascoe,’ I managed.

‘Oooooh,’ came the mocking chorus.
Go for it, darling
, I could hear them thinking.
Give us some more.

There was so much I wanted to say that I found myself speechless under their scrutiny.
Stay right away from my sister, you bastard. You’ve done enough damage. Leave her alone.
Don’t ever come round our house again, don’t phone, don’t write, don’t text her, nothing. Just disappear off the face of the earth.

‘You, you . . .’ I halted.

‘You drive me crayayzee,’ sang Joe.

Any power I’d had vanished in that second. My mouth worked but I couldn’t get another word out. I’d failed. I was a useless sister who did nothing but harm.

‘Seriously, love, what the fuck is the matter with you?’

All I could manage was to flinch out of the way as one of the Joe-clones fished out his mobile and began filming, making up a comedy commentary as he scanned the table.

‘So what happens is, this nutter walks into a bar . . .’

‘Get him a towel, Marky. Or some bog paper.’

‘You gonna speak to us, sweetheart? You gonna tell us what’s eating you?’

‘She doesn’t fucking know. Look in her eyes. She’s not all there.’

They were sneering and slapping him on the back and joking and congratulating him for being a Lad. Oh, the fun they’d have retelling the incident, inventing various back-stories. Joe the
ladykiller. Joe the Casanova. Women, they just couldn’t help themselves when he was around. Even when he dicked about and it caught up with him, he was a hero. My sister’s worst fears
were correct and he was invulnerable.

‘Honestly, guys,’ he was protesting now, ‘you have to believe me, I have no fucking idea what that was about. Not a clue. Never seen her before.’

‘Like we fucking believe that.’

‘My man!’

‘I thought you’d sworn off mad bitches.’

‘What are you like, mate?’

I left them in their smug tableau and ran to drag my boyfriend out of that hellish place.

A quarter to midnight and I was finally finished. Five hours I’d spent writing up the hunt story, shut inside my bedroom with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. I was
thirsty and my eyes were gritty and I’d barely spoken to my parents the entire evening. But this piece had to be right. Boy, did it have to be right.

Owen had prophesied correctly. Rosa had refused to let
The Messenger
criticise the Glasington in any way. In pursuing the story against her explicit instructions, I was stubborn, I was
wilful, I was arrogant and stupid. I was not some kind of maverick reporter, I was a clumsy underling who couldn’t even get the basics right. She’d already spelt it out to me. Mr
Williams’ claims were almost certainly provoked by envy. Or malice, or a personal grudge. He might even be a full-blown fantasist. If we printed the story, we’d be opening ourselves up
to libel. I hadn’t tried hard enough to get the Glasington’s response (even though I’d been on the phone for an hour trying to track somebody down who would talk to me; even
though I’d been misdirected by one person after another and eventually had some unidentified woman tell me to piss off). And no, I wasn’t going to be calling anyone else, Rosa
absolutely forbade it. I’d done enough damage to the paper by following up on this load of rubbish. Giving it credibility. I was completely unprofessional, dragging the name of
The
Messenger
through the mud. I needed to get my head down and start bloody well doing as I was told or she wouldn’t be answerable for the consequences.

I don’t know what her motives were – fear of offending those people she’d spent months assiduously courting, I guessed, or a desire to protect friends of friends – but
they clearly were more important to her than circulation figures. What was it Mr Williams had said?
Thumb your nose at one and they all rear up.
It didn’t matter. This story was
being published whatever.

So to my boss’s face I pretended I was just a bit cheesed off. Rolled my eyes, sighed, glowered, settled down at my desk and began something else. The minute I was home, however, I logged
into the newspaper’s website and got busy. I rang the contacts given to me by Mr Williams and gathered some more examples of alleged hunt intimidation. The article I headlined
Hunt Mafia
in Village Terror –
might as well go for it – and then I laid out the events in blunt, uncompromising detail. Mr Williams’ and Owen’s photos I uploaded next to the
text. The one of the saturated dead chickens laid out in a row was particularly strong. Then, when the page looked the way I wanted, I sent out links to social media. As a very last stratagem I
created a blog and reproduced the text and images on that, so that when Rosa spotted the story and removed it from the
Messenger
website, the article would still be accessible. I knew this
was the end of my career at that newspaper, and maybe as a journalist full stop. I did consider the years I’d invested in getting my degree, and how lucky I’d been to land that
internship against the competition, and about the money my parents had spent subbing me, but I truly felt I had no choice. If we weren’t in business to print the truth, what were we there
for? How, in all conscience, could I have called Mrs Williams back and told her the case was closed?

After I shut my laptop down I sat for a while on my bed. Then I decided I needed to get some fresh air, clear my racing brain.

I crept out onto the landing. Mum and Dad had gone to bed and the house was pretty much silent and dark, though there was a faint light showing from my sister’s room. I made my way
downstairs, groping through the gloom towards the kitchen, across the tiles, till I reached the door and turned the key. The door tended to jam in its frame during hot weather, but with careful
tugging it eventually juddered open and I was able to step outside.

The air was warm and the sky a breathtaking dome of stars. I tiptoed across the patio, avoiding a fat frog which had appeared out of nowhere and was squatting by the steps. Then I walked to the
centre of the lawn. Moths were circling the carriage lamps on the wall of the garage, white daffodils loomed out of the planters. I tipped back my head and took in the glory of the constellations.
The vastness of the night was both reassuring and unsettling. So much sky and so little me. As I followed the familiar patterns with my eyes, I felt I was slipping out of my own life and out of
time entirely.

I knelt, then lay down on the grass, flat like a sunbather. It was cooler down here and damper. Something rustled inside the bushes behind me, as if my presence had disturbed a small animal.
Mouse? Rat? Hedgehog? I imagined the creatures of the night emerging, Bambi-style, to check out this prostrate stranger on their lawn. The next moment my mind skidded off heavenwards, so I was
convinced I could feel the earth revolving and wondered if I might get tipped off into the atmosphere to float around with space junk and satellites. Perhaps I’d become a constellation of my
own. The Great Fool.

What have you done, girl?

You’ve jumped without checking where you’ll land, that’s what. You’ve leapt out into the void and tomorrow you’ll find yourself in free-fall. For God’s
sake, you can’t bail out whenever you happen to disagree with your boss.
This was my dad’s voice, I realised.
I thought you had more backbone than that.

Mum’s face loomed in my imagination, anxious and exasperated.
But you were the independent one, Jen, the one who was going places. We had high hopes. What are you going to do now? We
can’t keep supporting you forever.

I’ll get another job, I’d tell them.

Oh yes? As what?

As what, as what.

Owen would be more sympathetic when I told him.
Well done, Jen!
he’d say.
That’s so cool! And about time, too. I told you all along that place was bad for you.

Like you’d know anything about the world of work, I’d snap at him. Rosa’ll fill that position again before I can clear my desk. Essentially, with the click of a mouse,
I’ve thrown away everything I’ve struggled for.

I recalled now his puzzled expression when I’d dragged him away from the middle of his pub lunch, no explanation. Pushed him through the door, jostled him into the van. ‘What is
it?’ he’d asked in bewilderment. ‘Someone I need to avoid, someone I did a story on,’ I’d lied. ‘No, don’t go in and look. Just drive.’ Running away
from my own rash stupidity.

A clunk-thud from over the other side of the lawn brought me to myself. I blinked and sat up to see Hel, in bare feet and a long kimono, close the door behind her and begin picking her way
towards me.

‘Did you want something?’ I asked irritably when she reached my side.

‘To know if you’re OK.’

‘Not really, no.’ I lay down again and fixed my sights on Orion. Odd how some of the stars that made him up were stronger than others. One was so faint it was hardly there.
Disappeared altogether if you looked to the side.

‘Can I do anything?’

‘Nope.’

She sat down next to me, hugging her knees. ‘Is it Owen again?’

‘I’ve got myself sacked.’

‘Oh. God.’ Something that may have been the bat fluttered into the pool of garage light for a moment, then was lost in the dark. ‘What happened? Did you finally tell Rosa where
to get off?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Don’t ask me to give you the detail right now. I’m too tired.’

‘OK. Well. Good for you.’

‘Yes, good for jobless me.’

I was still absorbed in the sky, but I became aware of her stretching out next to me so that the crown of her head was close to mine but her feet were pointing away, towards the house. From
above we must look like the hands on a clock. A soft tearing noise started up as she began to pluck at the grass by her sides.

‘What am I going to tell Mum and Dad, Hel?’

‘You definitely can’t rewind here? You are officially unemployed?’

‘Come tomorrow I will be.’

‘Wow.’ There was a silence between us, not unfriendly. ‘Listen,’ she said at last, ‘I know you. Whatever it is you’ve done, there’ll be a decent reason
for it. You wouldn’t jeopardise your career over nothing. So when it comes to explaining, just be straight with them, keep calm. Say you had to do what you had to do. There was no
choice.’

‘There wasn’t.’

‘Right, then. I’ll back you up. Mum and Dad might be pissed off for a while but they’ll get over it. Trust me, I’ve had plenty experience of that. Put your head down,
insert your mental earphones and tough it out. For God’s sake, Jen, you’re twenty-three. You make your own decisions, remember?’

‘My own cock-ups.’

‘Sometimes you do have to upset a few people. You have to shake it up. Reach for what matters. Live a life less constrained.’

Ned’s face rose before my eyes, imprinted against the stars.
Be careful what you advise, sister
.

I heard her sigh. Then she said, ‘Anyway, at least you’ve got Owen. Things worked out for you there, didn’t they?’

‘Owen!’

‘What?’

I remembered a summer evening when I was a kid and Dad had brought me out into the garden to look for a meteor shower that was scheduled. Normally with these events the weather turns cloudy at
the crucial hour, but conditions for this one had been perfect and we’d seen loads of shooting stars, so many I’d lost count. I’d run out of wishes by the end, not that it made
much difference as none of the things I wished for came true anyway. After the show was over, Dad had taken me inside, found Mum and Hel were in bed, and made me hot chocolate and let me stay up
with him to watch an unsuitably violent thriller on TV. So, looking back, the wishes hadn’t been the point. Most of them had been ridiculous anyway. Why did we get ourselves mired in
unhappiness when the world was full of ordinary joy?

I said, ‘I’ve been trying not to admit this to myself, but it isn’t working between us.’

‘Hey? I thought—’

‘I know. When Owen and I broke up, I genuinely believed he was all I wanted in the world. But now I can see that what he said at the time was true: regardless of Chelle, we’re just
not a good fit. Each of us wants to change the other too much. He’s right. He’s always right about everything, and that’s what makes him wrong.’

‘I thought he’d been trying harder?’

‘He has. That only shows it up more. It’s a constant struggle to be what he wants me to be and somehow I’ve run out of energy. While we were apart – ’ While we were
apart, there was Ned – ‘the spark died. Something fundamental changed. I tried to pretend it hadn’t, tried talking myself round, but it’s gone.’

‘Does he know?’

‘I don’t think he has a clue.’ Last Saturday night, sitting in Owen’s window, sipping rum-laced hot chocolate together and gazing out over the weir. The place I’d
thought I wanted to be. ‘So there we are. You
and
me. Ironic, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

‘Both of us in the same boat. I mean, stuck with boyfriends we no longer love.’