The Secret Place (78 page)

Chris Harper has been dead for three and a half months. No one mentions him; not them, not anyone. No one wants to be the first, and after a few days it’s too late.

A couple of weeks into term the rain lets up a little, and on a restless afternoon the four of them can’t face another hour of the Court. They slip on their innocent faces and drift round the back, into the Field.

The weeds are higher and stronger than last year; rock-slides have taken down the heaps of rubble where people used to perch, turned them into useless knee-high jumbles. The wind scrapes chicken wire against concrete.

No one’s there, not even the emos. Julia kicks her way through the undergrowth and settles with her back against what’s left of a rubble-heap. The others follow her.

Julia pulls out her phone and starts texting someone; Becca arranges pebbles in neat swirls on a patch of bare earth. Selena gazes at the sky like it’s hypnotised her. A leftover spit of rain hits her on the cheekbone, but she doesn’t blink.

It’s chillier here than round the front, a wild countryside chill that reminds you there are mountains on the horizon, not that far away. Holly shoves her hands deep in her jacket pockets. She feels like she’s itchy, but she can’t tell where.

‘What was that song?’ she says suddenly. ‘It used to be on the radio all the time, last year? Some girl singer.’

‘What’s it go like?’ Becca asks.

Holly tries to sing it, but it’s been months since she heard it and the words have gone; all she can find is
Remember oh remember back when
.
.
. She tries to hum the melody instead. Without that light speeding beat and the thrum of guitar, it sounds like nothing. Julia shrugs.

‘Lana Del Rey?’ Becca says.

‘No.’ It’s so totally not Lana Del Rey that even the suggestion depresses Holly. ‘Lenie. You know the one I mean.’

Selena looks up, smiling vaguely. ‘Hmm?’

‘That song. In our room one time, you were humming it? And I came in from the shower and asked you what it was, but you didn’t know?’

Selena thinks about it for a while. Then she forgets it and starts thinking about something else.

‘God,’ Julia says, shifting her arse on the dirt. ‘Where is everyone? Didn’t this place use to be, like,
interesting
?’

‘It’s the weather,’ Holly says. Her itchy feeling has got worse. She finds a Crunchie wrapper in her pocket and twists it into a tight ball.

‘I like it like this,’ Becca says. ‘All it used to be was dumb guys looking for someone to pick on.’

‘Which at least wasn’t
boring
. We might as well have stayed inside.’

Holly realises what the itchy feeling is: she’s lonely. Realising makes it worse. ‘Then let’s go in,’ she says. Suddenly she wants the Court, wants to stuff herself full to the seams with synthetic music and pink sugar.

‘I don’t
want
to go in. What’s the point? We have to go back to school in like two minutes.’

Holly thinks of going inside anyway, but she can’t tell whether any of the others would come too, and the thought of dragging through the grey rain on her own swells the loneliness. Instead she launches the Crunchie wrapper into the air, spins it a couple of times and hovers it.

No one does anything. Holly floats the wrapper temptingly towards Julia, who bats it away like an annoying bug. ‘Stop.’

‘Hey. Lenie.’

Holly practically bounces it off Selena’s forehead. For a second Selena looks bewildered; then she gently plucks the wrapper out of the air and tucks it into her pocket. She says, ‘We don’t do that any more.’

The reasons hum in the air. ‘Hey,’ Holly says, too loud and ludicrous, into the wet grey silence. ‘That was mine.’

No one answers. It comes to Holly, for the first time, that someday she’ll believe – one hundred per cent believe, take for granted – that it was all their imagination.

Julia is texting again; Selena has slid back into her daydream. Holly loves the three of them with such a huge and ferocious and bruised love that she could howl.

Becca catches her eye and nods at the ground. When Holly looks down, Becca skips a pebble through the weeds and lands it on the toe of Holly’s Ugg. Holly has just time to feel a tiny bit better before Becca smiles at her, kindly, an adult giving a kid a sweetie.

It’s Transition Year, things would be weird anyway. The four of them do their work-experience weeks in different places with different hours; when teachers split the class into groups to do projects about internet advertising or volunteer work with kids with handicaps, they break up gangs of friends on purpose, because Transition Year is all about new experiences. That’s what Holly tells herself, on days when she hears Julia’s laugh rise out of a crowd across the classroom, on days when the four of them finally have a few minutes together in their room at lights-out and they barely say a word: it’s just Transition Year. It would have happened anyway. Next year everything will go back to normal.

This year when Becca says she’s not going to the Valentine’s dance, no one tries to change her mind. When Sister Cornelius catches Julia snogging François Levy right on the dance floor, Holly and Selena don’t say a word. Holly isn’t positive that Selena, swaying off-beat with her arms around herself, even noticed.

Afterwards, when they get back to their room, Becca is curled on her bed with her back to them and her earbuds in. Her reading light catches the flash of an open eye, but she doesn’t say anything and so neither do they.

The next week, when Miss Graham tells them to get into groups of four for the big final art project, Holly grabs the other three so fast she almost falls off her chair. ‘Ow,’ Julia says, jerking her arm away. ‘What the hell?’

‘Jesus, chillax. I just don’t want to get stuck with some idiots who’ll want to do a massive picture of Kanye made out of lipstick kisses.’

‘You chillax,’ Julia says, but she grins. ‘No Kanye kisses. We’ll go with Lady Gaga made of tampons. It’ll be a commentary on women’s place in society.’ She and Holly and Becca all get the giggles and even Selena grins, and Holly feels her shoulders relax for the first time in ages.

‘Hi,’ Holly calls, banging the door behind her.

‘In here,’ her dad calls back, from the kitchen. Holly dumps her weekend bag on the floor and goes in to him, shaking a dusting of rain off her hair.

He’s at a counter peeling potatoes, long grey T-shirt sleeves pushed up above his elbows. From behind – rough hair still mostly brown, strong shoulders, muscled arms – he looks younger. The oven is on, turning the room warm and humming; outside the kitchen window the February rain is a fine mist, almost invisible.

Chris Harper has been dead for nine months, a week and five days.

Dad gives Holly a no-hands hug and leans down so she can kiss his cheek – stubble, cigarette smell. ‘Show me,’ he says.

‘
Dad.
’

‘Show.’

‘You’re so paranoid.’

Dad wiggles the fingers of one hand at her, beckoning. Holly rolls her eyes and holds up her key ring. Her personal alarm is a pretty little teardrop, black with white flowers. Dad spent a long time searching for one that looks like a normal key ring, so she won’t get embarrassed and take it off, but he still checks every single week.

‘That’s what I like to see,’ says Dad, going back to the potatoes. ‘I heart my paranoia.’

‘Nobody else has to have one.’

‘So you’re the only one who’ll escape the mass alien abduction. Congratulations. Need a snack?’

‘I’m OK.’ On Fridays they use up their leftover pocket money on chocolate and eat it sitting on the wall at the bus stop.

‘Perfect. Then you can give me a hand here.’

Mum always makes dinner. ‘Where’s Mum?’ Holly asks. She pretends to focus on hanging up her coat straight, and watches Dad sideways. When Holly was little her parents split up. Dad moved back in when she was eleven, but she still keeps an eye on things, especially unusual things.

‘Meeting some friend from back in school. Catch.’ Dad throws Holly a head of garlic. ‘Three cloves, finely minced. Whatever that means.’

‘What friend?’

‘Some woman called Deirdre.’ Holly can’t tell whether he knows she was looking for that,
some woman
. With Dad you can never tell what he knows. ‘Mince finely.’

Holly finds a knife and pulls herself onto a stool at the breakfast bar. ‘Is she coming home?’

‘Course she is. I wouldn’t bet on what time, though. I said we’d make a start on dinner. If she gets back for it, great; if she’s still off having girl time, we won’t starve.’

‘Let’s get pizza,’ Holly says, giving Dad the corner of a grin. When she used to go to his depressing apartment for weekends, they would order pizza and eat it on the tiny balcony, looking out over the Liffey and dangling their legs through the railings – there wasn’t enough room for chairs. She can tell by the way Dad’s eyes warm that he remembers too.

‘Here’s me giving my mad chef skills a workout, and you want pizza? Ungrateful little wagon. Anyway, your mammy said the chicken needed using.’

‘What are we making?’

‘Chicken casserole. Your mammy wrote down her recipe, give or take.’ He nods at a piece of paper tucked under the chopping board. ‘How was your week?’

‘OK. Sister Ignatius gave us this big speech about how we need to decide what we want to do in college and our whole entire lives depend on making the right decision. By the end she got so hyper about the whole thing, she made us all go down to the chapel and pray to our confirmation saints for guidance.’

That gets the laugh she was looking for. ‘And what did your confirmation saint have to say?’

‘She said I should be sure and not fail my exams, or I’m stuck with Sister Ignatius for another year and
aaahhh
.’

‘Smart lady.’ Dad tips the peelings into the compost bin and starts chopping the potatoes. ‘Are you getting a little too much nun in your life? Because you can quit boarding any time you want. You know that. Just say the word.’

‘I don’t want to,’ Holly says, quickly. She still doesn’t know why Dad is letting her be a boarder, especially after Chris, and she always feels like he might change his mind any minute. ‘Sister Ignatius is fine. We just laugh about her. Julia does her voice; once she actually did it all the way through Guidance, and Sister Ignatius didn’t even realise. She couldn’t work out why we were all cracking up.’

‘Little smart-arse,’ Dad says, grinning. He likes Julia. ‘The Sister’s got a point in there, though. Been doing any thinking about what comes after school?’

It feels to Holly like the last couple of months that’s all any adult ever talks about. She says, ‘Maybe sociology – we had a sociologist come in to talk to us in Careers Week last year, and it sounded OK. Or maybe law.’

She’s focusing on the garlic, but she can hear that the rhythm of her dad’s chopping doesn’t change, not that it would anyway. Mum is a barrister. Dad is a detective. Holly doesn’t have a brother or a sister to go Dad’s way.

When she makes herself look across, he’s showing nothing but impressed and interested. ‘Yeah? Solicitor, barrister, what?’

‘Barrister. Maybe. I don’t know; I’m only thinking about it.’

‘You’ve got the arguing skills for it, anyway. Prosecution or defence?’

‘I thought maybe defence.’

‘How come?’

Still all pleasant and intrigued, but Holly can feel the tiny chill: he doesn’t like that. She shrugs. ‘Just sounds interesting. Is this minced enough?’

Holly’s been trying to think of a time when her dad decided she shouldn’t do something and she ended up doing it anyway, or the other way around. Boarding is the only one she could come up with. Sometimes he says no flat out; more often, it just ends up not happening. Sometimes Holly even winds up, she’s not sure how, thinking he’s right. She wasn’t actually planning to tell him about the law thing, but unless you concentrate you end up telling Dad stuff.

‘Looks good to me,’ Dad says. ‘In here.’ Holly goes over to him and scrapes the garlic into the casserole dish. ‘And chop that leek for me. Why defence?’

Holly takes the leek back to her stool. ‘Because. There’s like hundreds of people on the prosecution side.’

Dad waits for more, eyebrow up, inquiring, until she shrugs. ‘Just
.
.
. I don’t know. Detectives, and uniforms, and the Technical Bureau, and the prosecutors. The defence just has the person whose actual life it is, and his lawyer.’

‘Hm,’ says Dad, examining the potato chunks. Holly can feel him being careful, looking over his answer from every angle. ‘You know, sweetheart, it’s not actually as unfair as it looks. If anything, the system’s weighted towards the defence. The prosecution has to build a whole case that stands up beyond a reasonable doubt; the defence only has to build that one doubt. I can swear to you, hand on heart, there’s a lot more guilty people acquitted than innocent ones in jail.’