The Secret Place (4 page)

Holly’s got so much new coming at her, the best she can do is keep up, keep a blank face and hope that, sooner or later, this starts to feel real. She’s dragged her suitcase down the unfamiliar tiled corridors of the boarders’ wing, the whirr of the wheels echoing up into high corners, to her new bedroom. She’s hung her yellow towels on her hook and spread the yellow-and-white-striped duvet, still neatly creased and smelling packet-fresh of plastic, on her bed – she and Julia have the window beds; Selena and Becca let them have first dibs, after all. Out of the window, from this new angle, the grounds look different: a secret garden full of nooks that pop in and out of existence, ready to be explored if you’re fast enough.

Even the canteen feels like a new place. Holly’s used to it at lunch hour, boiling to the ceiling with gabble and rush, everyone yelling across tables and eating with one hand and texting with the other. By dinnertime the arrival buzz has worn off and the boarders clump in little knots between long stretches of empty Formica, sprawled over their meatballs and salad, talking in murmurs that wander aimlessly around the air. The light feels dimmer than at lunch and the room smells stronger somehow, cooked meat and vinegar, somewhere between savoury and nauseating.

Not everyone is keeping it to a murmur. Joanne Heffernan and Gemma Harding and Orla Burgess and Alison Muldoon are two tables away, but Joanne takes it for granted that everyone in any room wants to hear every word she says, and even when she’s wrong it’s not like most people have the balls to tell her. ‘Hello, it was in
Elle
, don’t you read? It’s supposed to be totes amazeballs, and let’s face it, I mean not being mean but you could do with an amazeballs exfoliator, couldn’t you, Orls?’

‘Jesus,’ Julia says, grimacing and rubbing her Joanne-side ear. ‘Tell me she’s not that loud at breakfast. I’m not a morning person.’

‘What’s an exfoliator?’ Becca wants to know.

‘Skin thing,’ Selena says. Joanne and the rest of them do every single thing the magazines say you have to do to your face and your hair and your cellulite.

‘It sounds like a gardening thing.’

‘It sounds like a weapon of mass destruction,’ Julia says. ‘And they’re the droid exfoliation army, just following orders. We will exfoliate.’

Her Dalek voice is deliberately loud enough that Joanne and the others whip around, but by that time Julia is holding up a forkful of meat and asking Selena if it’s actually supposed to have eyeballs in it, like Joanne has never occurred to her. Joanne’s eyes scan, blank and chilly; then she turns back, with a hair-toss like paparazzi are watching, to poking through her food.

‘We will exfoliate,’ Julia drones, and then instantly in her own voice: ‘Yeah, Hol, I meant to ask, did your mum find those net bags?’ They’re all fighting giggles.

Joanne snaps, ‘Excuse me, did you
say
something to me?’

‘In my suitcase,’ Holly tells Julia. ‘When I unpack, I’ll— Who, me, you mean?’

‘Whoever. Is there a
problem
?’

Julia and Holly and Selena look blank. Becca stuffs potato into her mouth, to keep the ball of fear and thrill from exploding out in a laugh.

‘The meatballs suck?’ Julia offers. And laughs, a second late.

Joanne laughs back, and so do the rest of the Daleks, but her eyes stay cold. ‘You’re funny,’ she says.

Julia crinkles up her nose. ‘Awww, thanks. I aim to please.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ Joanne says. ‘You keep aiming,’ and goes back to her dinner.

‘We will exfoli—’

This time Joanne almost catches her. Selena comes in just in time – ‘I’ve got extra net bags, if you guys need them’; her whole face is knotted with giggles, but she’s got her back to Joanne and her voice is peaceful and sure, no hint of a laugh. Joanne’s laser stare sweeps over them and around the tables, searching for someone who would have the nerve.

Becca has shovelled her food down too fast: an enormous burp explodes out of her. She turns bright red, but it gives the other three the excuse they’re desperate for: they’re howling with laughter, clutching at each other, faces practically down on the table. ‘My God, you’re totally disgusting,’ Joanne says, lofty lip curling, as she turns away – her gang, well trained, promptly match the turn and the lip-curl. They just make the laughing fit worse. Julia gets meatball down her nose and turns bright red and has to try and blow it noisily into a paper napkin, and the others almost fall out of their seats.

When the laughter finally fades, their own daring sinks in. They’ve always got on fine with Joanne and her gang. Which is a very smart thing to do.

‘What was
that
about?’ Holly asks Julia, low.

‘What? If she didn’t quit yowling about her stupid skin thing, my eardrums were going to melt. And hello: it worked.’ The Daleks are huddled over their trays, shooting suspicious glances around and keeping their voices ostentatiously low.

‘But you’re going to piss her off,’ Becca whispers, big-eyed.

Julia shrugs. ‘So? What’s she going to do, execute me? Did I miss where someone made me her bitch?’

‘Just take it easy, is all,’ Selena says. ‘If you want a fight with Joanne, you’ve got all year. It doesn’t have to be tonight.’

‘What’s the big deal? We’ve never been best buddies.’

‘We’ve never been
enemies
. And now you have to live with her.’

‘Exactly,’ Julia says, spinning her tray around so she can reach her fruit salad. ‘I think I’m going to enjoy this year.’

A high wall and a stretch of leafy street and another high wall away, the Colm’s boarders are back too. Chris Harper has thrown his red duvet onto his bed, his clothes into his strip of wardrobe, singing the dirty version of the school song in his new rough-edged deep voice, grinning when his roommates join in and add the gestures. He’s stuck a couple of posters over his bed, put the new framed family photo on his bedside table; he’s wrapped that packed-with-promise plastic bag in a ratty old towel and tucked it deep in his suitcase, shoved the case far back on top of the wardrobe. He’s checked the swoop of his fringe in their mirror and he’s galloping down to dinner with Finn Carroll and Harry Bailey, the three of them all shouts and extra-loud laughs and taking up the whole corridor, dead-arming and wrestling experimentally to find out who’s got strongest over the summer. Chris Harper is all ready for this year, he can’t wait; he’s got plans.

He has eight months and two weeks left to live.

‘Now what?’ Julia asks, when they’ve finished their fruit salad and put their trays on the rack. From the mysterious inner kitchen comes the clatter of washing up, and an argument in some language that might be Polish.

‘Whatever we want,’ Selena says, ‘till study time. Sometimes the shopping centre, or if the Colm’s guys have a rugby match we can go watch that, but we can’t leave the grounds till next weekend. So we can go to the common room, or
.
.
.’

She’s already drifting towards the outside door, with Becca beside her. Holly and Julia follow them.

It’s still bright out. The grounds are layers of green, unrolling on and on. Up until now they’ve been a zone Holly and Julia aren’t really supposed to enter; not off limits, not exactly, but the only chance day-girls get is during lunch hour and there’s never time. Now it feels like a sheet of foggy glass has fallen away from in front of them: every colour is leaping, every birdcall is separate and vivid on Holly’s ear, the furls of shadow between branches look deep and cool as wells. ‘Come on,’ Selena says, and takes off running down the back lawn like she owns it. Becca is already after her. Julia and Holly run, throwing themselves into the whirl of green and whistle, to catch up.

Past the curly iron gate and into the trees, and all of a sudden the grounds are a swirl of little paths that Holly never knew about, paths that don’t belong just a corner away from a main road: sunspots, flutters, crisscrossing branches overhead and splashes of purple flowers catching in the corners of your eyes. Up and off the path, Becca’s dark plait and Selena’s stream of gold swinging in unison as they turn, up a tiny hillside past bushes that look like they’ve been clipped into neat balls by elf gardeners, and then: out of the light-and-dark dapple, into clean sun. For a second Holly has to put her hands around her eyes.

The clearing is small, just a circle of short grass ringed by tall cypresses. The air is instantly and utterly different, still and cool, with tiny eddies moving here and there. Sounds drop into it – a wood-dove’s lazy coo, the fizz of insects about their business somewhere – and disappear without leaving a ripple.

Selena says, only a little out of breath, ‘We come here.’

‘You never showed us this place before,’ Holly says. Selena and Becca glance at each other and shrug. For a second, Holly feels almost betrayed – Selena and Becca have been boarding for two years, but it never occurred to her that they would have separate stuff together – until she realises that now she’s part of it too.

‘Sometimes you feel like you’re going to go crazy if you don’t go somewhere private,’ Becca says. ‘We come here.’ She drops down on the grass in a spider-tangle of skinny legs and looks up anxiously at Holly and Julia. Her hands are cupped together tight, like she’s offering them the glade for their welcome present and isn’t sure it’s going to be good enough.

‘It’s great,’ Holly says. She smells cut grass, the rich earth in the shadows; a trace of something wild, like animals trot silently through here on their road from one nighttime place to another. ‘And nobody else ever comes?’

‘They’ve got their own places,’ Selena says. ‘We don’t go there.’

Julia turns, head tilted back to watch birds wheeling in the circle of blue, in and out of their V. ‘I like it,’ she says. ‘I like it a lot,’ and she drops down on the grass next to Becca. Becca grins and lets her breath out, and her hands loosen.

They stretch out, shift till the slipping sun is out of their eyes. The grass is dense and glossy, like some animal’s pelt, good to lie on. ‘God, McKenna’s
speech
,’ Julia says. ‘“Your daughters already have such a wonderful head start in life because you’re all so
literate
and
health-conscious
and
cultured
and just super-awesome all over, and we’re so totally thrilled to have the chance to continue your good work,” and pass the puke bag.’

‘It’s the same speech every year,’ Becca says. ‘Every single word.’

‘In first year my dad almost took me straight home because of that speech,’ Selena says. ‘He says it’s elitist.’ Selena’s dad lives on some commune place in Kilkenny and wears handwoven ponchos. Her mum picked Kilda’s.

‘My dad was thinking the same thing,’ Holly says. ‘I could see it. I was terrified he was going to say something smart-arsed when McKenna finished, but Mum stood on his foot.’

‘It totally was elitist,’ Julia says. ‘So? There’s nothing wrong with elitist. Some stuff is better than other stuff; pretending it’s not doesn’t make you open-minded, it just makes you a dick. What made me want to puke was the fawning. Like we’re these
products
our parents shat out, and McKenna’s patting all their heads and telling them what a
good
job
they did, and they’re wagging their tails and licking her hand and just about peeing on the floor. How does she even know? What if my parents never read a book in their lives, and they feed me deep-fried Mars bars for every meal?’

‘She doesn’t care,’ Becca says. ‘She just wants to make them feel good about spending a load of money to get rid of us.’

There’s a snip of silence. Becca’s parents work in Dubai most of the time. They didn’t make it back for today; the housekeeper brought Becca in.

‘This is good,’ Selena says. ‘You being here.’

‘It doesn’t feel real yet,’ Holly says, which is only sort of true but is the best she can do. It feels real in flashes, between long grainy stretches of dizzy static, but those flashes are vivid enough that they throw every other kind of real out of her head and it feels like she’s never been anywhere else but here. Then they’re gone.

‘Does to me,’ Becca says. She’s smiling up at the sky. The bruise has faded out of her voice.

‘It will,’ says Selena. ‘It takes a while.’

They lie there, feeling their bodies sink deeper into the glade and change rhythm to blend with the things around them: the
tink tink tink
of a bird somewhere, the slow slide and blink of sunbeams through the thick cypresses. Holly realises she’s flipping through the day, the way she does every afternoon on the bus home, picking out bits for telling: a funny story with a bit of boldness in it for Dad, something to impress Mum or – if Holly’s pissed off with her, which it seems like she mostly is these days – something to shock her into letting a reaction slip out:
Sweet Lord, Holly, why would anyone want to say such a
.
.
.
while Holly rolls her eyes to heaven. It hits her that there’s no point in doing that now. The picture each day leaves behind isn’t going to be given its shape by Dad’s grin and Mum’s lifting eyebrows, not any more.