The Secrets We Left Behind (15 page)

I drank a cup of hot chocolate in the hope that it would help me sleep, then crept back upstairs and into bed. I was still awake at four, still trying to think of a way out. Slowly, I began to
turn over an idea in my mind. Scott was too ill to work, which probably meant he was on benefits. He must have hated that. But Duncan and I, we had savings. I started to calculate how much I could
withdraw without him noticing, and before long, I drifted off to sleep.

I woke feeling slightly more positive, and when Duncan asked me sleepily how I was feeling this morning, I told him I was much better. He yawned and stretched expansively, lifting the covers as
he did so and causing a blast of cold air to hit my bare shoulders. I pulled the duvet up around my neck and tried to recapture the cocoon-like warmth for a few more minutes. Duncan’s arm
slipped around my waist and he moved nearer; I could feel his warm breath on the back of my neck and his penis nudging at my buttocks. This was my cue to turn over and wrap my arms and legs around
him, but I couldn’t. Much as I craved the comfort of his body, the sex could sometimes be too real, too truthful, and I was scared of what I might reveal. ‘Sorry, darling. I’m
still feeling a bit queasy.’ I felt his arm tense.

‘I thought you said you felt much better?’

‘I do. Much better, but still a bit, you know . . .’

He sighed, lifted his arm off me and moved away, and I wanted to cry out and pull him back, but instead I just said, ‘Sorry.’

*

I made coffee and fired up the laptop. Duncan had been quiet. He was still a bit put out, I think, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew something was up. He came
into the kitchen wearing trainers, jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt. ‘Going for a quick run,’ he announced, and he left without kissing me.

Having lied to Duncan about feeling queasy I found I now did feel quite sick. My stomach was unsettled and I felt weak and shivery, as though I had a fever. I tipped the coffee down the sink and
made myself some ginger tea instead. Eve always called it ‘tea’, but really it was an infusion; you took an inch-long lump of ginger, peeled it, sliced it finely and steeped it in a mug
of boiling water for five minutes, then you sipped until the nausea disappeared.

We had four bank accounts between us, a personal account each, a joint household account and another joint one for other expenses – holidays, Christmas etc. If I juggled things around, I
reckoned I could scrape together about £4,000 without Duncan knowing. Fortunately, the finances had always been my job, so he hardly ever looked at the accounts. I’d have to think of
some way of replacing it, but I could worry about that later. I felt a slight thrill at the thought that this was something I could try; it was a plan. If Scott really didn’t have long to
live, then some money might make his last days more comfortable. His
last days;
briefly, sadness pierced my thoughts, despite the fact that he was threatening everything I loved.

While I moved the money around, I tried to ignore the little voice telling me this wouldn’t work, that it wouldn’t make any difference. I was about to shut the laptop down when
Duncan came back from his run, breathless and looking a little sweat-dampened but healthy none the less. ‘I need to do this more often,’ he said. ‘I’ve only done a couple of miles
and I’m knackered.’ He took his trainers off and flung them in the corner. ‘Just going for a shower.’ He nodded towards the laptop. ‘What are you up to?’

It was a casual, non-threatening question, but I snapped ‘Nothing’ too quickly and he flinched at the sharpness of my tone. ‘Only asking,’ he said.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. I was wasting time, that’s all. Seeing what’s on telly tonight, looking at eBay.’ I was a despicable liar and I hated myself.

I saw his face relax. He nodded and headed off for his shower.

It took daily trips to the cashpoint to withdraw the money, but after a few days I finally had £4,000 in cash. Tuesday was admin day at the Project so I was in the office
rather than out on a visit. At eleven, my phone pinged. It was a text from Scott.
Feeling bad, can’t travel. Pls come here.
He gave an address not far from the city centre. I felt a
flash of irritation that he was telling me what to do rather than asking, but then I reminded myself that he was dying, and even if he hadn’t been, he definitely had the upper hand.

I knew roughly where the road was – I’d lived a few streets away when I first moved to Sheffield. London Road was busy as always, and as I drove along it, past the scruffy pubs, the
PC repair shops and the many restaurants and takeaways, I felt like I was playing one of those simulated driving games where hazards pop out at you every few hundred yards. Today I narrowly avoided
a cyclist who turned in front of me without signalling, a Staffordshire bull terrier who was running in and out of the traffic and a woman who pushed a double buggy out in front of me twenty yards
from a zebra crossing.

When I saw where Scott was staying, I felt quite hopeful about persuading him to take the money. It was a dump, one in a row of terraced red-brick houses, all with satellite dishes like ugly
growths sprouting from their walls. Some of the windows were boarded up, while others framed filthy net curtains or had blankets nailed across. A broken television lay outside one house, its guts
spilling out onto the pavement; the whole street was littered with empty pizza and burger boxes, beer cans, cigarette ends and dog shit. Number 89 was smaller than the others, stuck on the end as
though the builders had found they had a few bricks left over and thought they might as well use them up by throwing together one more tiny house to finish off the terrace, like a makeweight. There
was an overturned wheelie bin in the front yard and a scrawny-looking black cat chewing vigorously on a bone from a KFC box. The cat hissed as I approached, eyed me warily for a moment, then
carried on chewing, the tip of its tail flicking sharply from side to side. There was no doorbell, so I knocked hard on the peeling front door and waited. Just as I was about to knock again, my
phone pinged:
Come round the back. Door open.

You had to go through a shared gennel to get to the back door, which opened into the kitchen. I could immediately smell incense – patchouli; it was so evocative I almost expected Eve to
appear and offer me a cup of chamomile tea. On the windowsill was a plastic tray of dried-up soil that had shrunken away from the sides, and a saucer containing a rusty key, a couple of corks and
an open packet of seeds, mung beans, by the look of it. An old image flashed up: egg boxes crammed onto the kitchen windowsill in Hastings, the tender young shoots of cress, mung beans and alfalfa
sprouts, bright green sparks of life pushing their way up through the soil and into the light.

‘Hello?’ I called.

‘In here,’ came the weak reply. He looked dreadful, thinner, if that was possible, than he had last week, and his eyes seemed yet further sunken into his face. He sat in an armchair,
his feet up on a wooden stool with a woven canvas top. I wondered if he’d made the stool himself; it was the sort of thing he used to do.

‘So, how are you?’ Usually when we asked this question, we didn’t really want to know the answer, but I did want to know now.

‘Had better days,’ he said. ‘Had worse, though.’ There was no colour left in his voice. My eyes strayed to the guitar that hung on the wall in one of the alcoves. I
wondered when he’d last been able to sing. ‘A long time since I’ve made music,’ he said, as if reading my mind.

The wallpaper in here was dark, with an old-fashioned leafy pattern, and there was a torn and faded poster bearing the words:
If God gives you lemons, make lemonade
stuck to the chimney
breast with Sellotape. A coal-effect gas fire sat in the fireplace, chucking out heat and swallowing up oxygen.

‘I can offer you nettle tea.’ He nodded to the flask on the floor next to him. ‘Or you can go through and make yourself something else.’ He gestured towards the off
– shot kitchen.

‘I’m fine.’ My eyes flicked around the room. There were a few books and CDs here and there, a couple of dry-looking cactus plants on the windowsill. It wasn’t
particularly homely, but it was reasonably clean and tidy. He read my mind again. ‘My landlady lives next door. She comes in a couple of times a week to do my laundry, a bit of cleaning and
so on.’ His eyes closed when he stopped speaking and his body appeared to deflate, as though the effort of speaking had taken all his energy.

‘What about meals?’ Why was I asking this? Why should I give a damn?

It was a second or two before he opened his eyes. ‘Takeouts, mainly, and Brenda – the landlady – brings me meals when I ask her to. I pay her, obviously.’

I looked at him. ‘Scott, I’ve been thinking about what you said.’

He met my gaze without speaking. His eyes had lost their sharp cornflower colour and were paler now, a weak, sickly blue.

‘And I need to talk to you.’

He waited.

‘You’re not going to like—’

‘I told you, Jo, I’m not letting it go.’

‘Just hear me out. And don’t call me that.’

He opened his mouth to interrupt again but I put my hand up. ‘Look, I listened to you, now listen to me.’

He sighed and his body sort of slumped. ‘Go on then, say your piece.’ He closed his eyes again.

‘Thanks.’ I was slightly thrown at how easily he gave in. ‘I understand why you feel the way you do. Believe me, I’ve dreamed of unburdening myself ever since it
happened, but it’s not that simple, is it? I could walk into a police station now and tell them everything, and I’m sure I’d sleep easier if I did, but what good would it do? It
won’t change the past or make anything better; all it can do is make things worse.’

‘For you, maybe. But do you only think of yourself?’ He opened his eyes and turned towards me. ‘Look at you. You’ve come a long way since you turned up on my door-step
looking pathetic, haven’t you? ‘

‘Your
doorstep?’

‘Nice house, nice car, nice clothes. I bet your husband’s nice, too. Good, solid provider-type.’ He shook his head dismissively.

‘I’ve been lucky, I know that. I told you, Duncan’s a good man and he’s been a good father to Hannah.’

‘She’s my daughter.’

‘But you didn’t want to know.’ I slapped my hand down on the arm of the chair and stood up. ‘You can’t pull that one on me now. You don’t care about her; you
haven’t even asked about her life.’ I felt tears threatening, but they were tears of frustration and anger. ‘You don’t know anything about her,’ I shouted at him.
‘Whether she’s married or single, whether she’s happy, what she does for a living. You don’t know whether she was bullied at school, whether she had chickenpox or mumps or
measles or . . .’

He tipped his head back and closed his eyes again. ‘She married in 2008; husband’s name, Marcus Wilson, a physiotherapist, I believe. She’s a qualified acupuncturist and
reflexologist, and they work together at an alternative healing centre on the outskirts of the city. Their baby’ – he opened his eyes and looked at me defiantly – ‘my
grandson was born not long before Christmas.’

‘How the hell—’ But I stopped myself. He’d found me easily enough, I supposed he was bound to look Hannah up as well. ‘Bastard,’ I muttered as I rummaged in
my bag for a tissue. ‘Not your grandson, actually.’ But I didn’t know if he heard that. How dare he! How dare he turn up after all this time hell-bent on ruining our lives.
‘You’ve got a nerve,’ I said, anger making my voice falter. ‘Have you been following her as well? Making anonymous phone calls to her in the middle of the night?’

He shook his head slowly. ‘No. And I never called you in the middle of the night, either. Well, I know it was late on New Year’s Eve, but I knew you’d be up then.’ He
looked at me. ‘Listen, I needed to make sure I spoke to you, that’s all. I didn’t want to follow you to work, or creep up on you in the park.’

‘Well, how very bloody generous of you.’ I walked over to the window and looked out, glad to have turned my back on him. ‘I haven’t “come a long way” as you
put it; all right, I made a good marriage, but only after years of struggling on my own.’ I snapped round to face him again. ‘You’ve no idea what it was like for me. I’m the
one who fed her and clothed her on next to nothing, bathed her cuts and grazes, sat up all night with her when she was screaming with earache – you haven’t a bloody clue, have you?
Being a parent is not just about providing the sperm, you know. You can’t spend your life mooning around in the sunshine with your guitar and then think you can suddenly come back and decide
to play at being a father because, I don’t know, because you feel unfulfilled or something, or because I have a family and you don’t and you’re jealous.’ I ran out of steam,
and there was a silence when I stopped speaking. Scott still had his eyes closed and his head was tipped forward now so that his chin was almost on his chest.

‘I know what it is to be a father,’ he said, without opening his eyes. ‘I had a daughter – I mean, another daughter. I had a family.’ He still didn’t look at
me. I waited. ‘Alice, my little girl, she was killed.’

The room was silent, but I could hear the whine of a rubbish-collection truck outside in the street. I knew I was staring at him and that my mouth was open; I closed it and swallowed, trying to
gather my thoughts. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

He sighed heavily. ‘She was only twelve when it happened, and Kara – my wife – she couldn’t . . . we couldn’t . . . after the funeral, we stayed together for about
eighteen months, but . . . ’

‘What. . . ?’ But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

‘It was a hit and run.’

I shook my head, and now I sighed, too. I looked at my nails, then I looked out of the window where the orange light from the rubbish truck flashed steadily as the bin men made their way down
the street. ‘I really am sorry, Scott. It must have been awful for you. And for your wife. But. . . but that still doesn’t make it all right for you to come here and stir up our lives
like this. Surely having been a father you can see that?’