The Secrets We Left Behind (25 page)

‘She likes having another girl around. It’s not usually girls who need somewhere to crash. There was Sapphire who stayed with us when we first moved in. Eve was quite upset when she
left; she missed her.’ He passed her the joint; even in the moonlight she could see the sheen of sweat on his face. ‘And I think she likes the fact that the two of you have so much in
common, you know, having no family and that. It’s one thing I can’t share with her. I can sympathise, but I can’t know what it’s like to have lost both your parents and your
only sibling.’

‘I didn’t know she lost a sibling as well.’ Jo thought about the photograph, the one that was now hidden in her own bag, of Eve’s mum, so obviously pregnant. ‘I
keep meaning to ask her about her family. I knew her mum and dad were dead, but—’

He turned to look at her. ‘Didn’t she tell you what happened?’

‘No. She started to, I think, but—’

‘Oh. Well, it was a bad scene. She had a baby brother, but he died not long after he was born – there were mistakes at the hospital, apparently; he shouldn’t have died. Then
her mum had a brain haemorrhage a few days later. She’d been complaining of headaches ever since the birth, but no one took any notice.’

‘Oh my God, that’s awful!’

Scott sighed. ‘There was an inquiry and everything; people were suspended. But none of that was any help to Eve and her dad.’ He shook his head. ‘She’s had a tough time,
Eve has; she’s lost a lot, man. That’s why she worries I’m going to drop dead or fall off a cliff or something.’

‘Poor Eve.’ She felt a wave of sadness wash over her, partly for Eve, but also for herself. Thinking about what had happened to Eve’s mum had opened up a big, yawning hole of
grief for her own mum. She blinked back the tears that had started to well up and lit a cigarette. She’d been going to ask what had happened to Eve’s dad, but she wasn’t sure she
could take it at the moment.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, smoking and looking out to sea.

Scott had a soft, dreamy look on his face. ‘I wonder where she is right now.’

She turned towards him. ‘Don’t you even know where she’s staying?’

‘She’ll find somewhere; she always does. She knows where the squats are; she’ll find someone who’ll let her crash.’

‘But—’

‘We don’t own each other.’

It was the same thing she’d heard Eve say again and again. ‘No, but . . .’ But what? What was wrong with being relaxed about what the other was doing? It was cool, she supposed;
maybe she should try to be more cool about it herself. She finished the joint and flicked it over the edge, then she lay back against the slope and closed her eyes. It was quiet and still. She
could hear the sea’s gentle rhythm in the distance, the occasional car going along the coast road. Now and again she could hear loud voices and laughter as people made their way home from a
pub or from the pier. She was feeling quite drowsy now. Apparently some people had taken to sleeping outside these last couple of weeks. What would it be like to sleep up here, under the stars? she
wondered. It was still pretty warm, but there was a tiny hint of a breeze, and just feeling that wisp of movement against your skin was probably enough to tempt people up onto the rooftops.

‘Look.’ Scott grabbed her arm. ‘Shooting star!’

‘Where?’ But she’d missed it.

‘Keep watching, we might see another one.’

She’d never seen a shooting star, so she stared up at the silver lights in the darkness, willing one of them to go zinging across the sky. She didn’t know how long she’d been
staring upwards, but she became aware that Scott wasn’t looking at the sky any more, he’d turned towards her and was looking at her, his face inches from hers. She didn’t move.
Slowly, he came closer, so close that she could feel his breath on her shoulder. ‘Jo,’ he whispered, ‘let’s take our clothes off ; let’s make love.’

She thought she must have misheard him.

‘It would be so beautiful;
you’re
so beautiful.’ He ran his finger down the inside of her arm, sending a pleasant quiver through her body. ‘Please.’ He kissed her
shoulder. ‘Right now, the only thing I can think about is you, and how it would feel to make love with you up here, outside, under this beautiful sky.’

She didn’t answer, didn’t move. She had that same cocooned feeling that she’d had earlier downstairs, a sort of timeless stillness, as though she could stay in that moment for
ever and nothing would change. Except that something
had
changed. Ever since she’d first arrived, she’d found herself wondering what it would be like to kiss Scott, even to go to
bed with him. But not really, not actually, physically,
really
having sex with him. She closed her eyes, as if doing so might allow her the privacy to think. But he started kissing her
eyelids. ‘Wake up,’ he whispered. ‘Wake up and make love with me.’

She opened her eyes. ‘Eve,’ was all she said. ‘What about Eve?’

‘Eve’s cool.’ He pushed the damp hair back from her forehead and looked at her. ‘Listen, I love Eve, and nothing’s ever going to change that, okay?’ And then
he started kissing her face again, and she felt his hand slide up her sweat-coated back to where her bra would have fastened had she been wearing one. She put her hand on his arm. ‘But
it’s not right, is it? I mean, Eve’s your girlfriend.’

He stopped what he was doing and faced her again. ‘Jo, Eve’s not “my” anything; I don’t own her, I love her and respect her, and the scene we’ve got together
is cool, I mean
really
cool. But it has nothing to do with me wanting to make love with you. It’s a beautiful night, we’re out here in the summer air together sharing it;
we’ve shared food and wine and we’ve shared hashish; why not share our bodies with each other? It’s just a different form of pleasure; a deeper form of communication.’ He
was looking at her intently, his eyes were deep and soft. ‘If you’re sure, I mean, like, really sure that you don’t want to, say so and I’ll stop.’

‘It’s not that I don’t want to,’ she said, and at that, he let out a sort of moan, pulled at the ties of her shirt and buried his face in between her breasts. She’d
only ever done it a few times before, back in Cornwall with Rob. She’d never really thought of him as her boyfriend, not in the ‘going out’ sense. He took her to the pictures
once, to see David Essex in
Stardust
, but mostly, they hung out round his dad’s house. He was just Rob. He smelled of cigarettes and motor oil and too much Brut, but he was kind and he
never said anything nasty about her mum, even when he’d seen her drunk. The first time they did it, it hurt like hell and she bled all over her new button-through dress. But when he’d
held her afterwards, she’d felt safe. They’d neither of them been that good at it – at sex – but there was a sense that it didn’t matter, because they were practising
on each other, learning what to do so that, one day in the future, when they were with a ‘proper’ partner, they’d know how the whole thing worked. Jo had liked it when their
bodies were so close together, the feel of Rob’s warm skin almost melting into her own. But apart from that, she didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

But what she was feeling now was different. Scott was leading her confidently as though in a dance, and all she had to do was follow. The intensity of the pleasure she felt almost scared her and
it was all she could do not to cry out. Scott did, though; he cried out so loudly she worried that people in the street below would hear, although there probably wasn’t anyone around.

Afterwards, bodies slick with sweat and hearts pounding, they lay still until their breathing slowed to normal. They were lying along the flat part of the roof now, just behind the parapet.
Jo’s knee was stinging; she must have scraped it on the concrete without noticing. Scott lay heavily across her and she tried to shift him to the side so that he wasn’t squashing her
quite so much.

‘That was fantastic,’ he said into her hair.

There was no doubt that sex with Scott was proper sex; real, grown-up sex, man and woman stuff, not the incompetent and unsatisfactory teenage fumblings she’d had with Rob. But the joy
and exhilaration she’d felt moments before was now rapidly evaporating as the sheer enormity of what she’d done started to sink in. Eve. No matter what Scott said, she didn’t
really believe that Eve would be ‘cool’ about someone else sleeping with her boyfriend while she was away for one night. Eve; lovely, kind, generous Eve. Jo felt tears beginning to
spill over her lower lids. How could she have betrayed their friendship like this? She let out a half-sob and heaved Scott away from her. She was completely naked; how had that happened? Scott had
taken her shirt off, but she didn’t remember him taking her hot pants or her knickers off . She sat up to look around for her clothes, and felt suddenly dizzy as she did so. God, she was
stoned; probably pissed as well. No wonder she didn’t remember some of the details.

‘Hey.’ Scott reached out lazily towards her. ‘Relax. There’s no hurry. Let’s stay up here all night.’

‘No! I don’t want to stay here all night.’ She started to scrabble around for her clothes, pulling them on clumsily so that her shirt went on inside out and her hot pants back
to front. She couldn’t find her knickers at all but then had a sudden memory of tossing them joyously over the parapet and then giggling as she imagined them sailing down and landing on
someone’s head. Although that was unlikely, given that the part of the roof they were on mainly overlooked the garden, and anyway, it was rare for anyone to be walking past, especially in the
middle of the night.

She swayed as she stood up and put a hand out to steady herself on the chimney stack. She had to get down-stairs; she began stumbling along, looking for the door they’d come through, but
the roof now seemed huge and with multiple slopes and stacks and recesses, and she had no idea how to get back down.

‘Jo, hang on,’ Scott said, pulling on his T-shirt and getting to his feet. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Going back downstairs,’ she called over her shoulder as she walked along a flat part between the slope and the parapet. ‘I shouldn’t have come up here.’ She was
crying now. ‘Shouldn’t have smoked so much.’

‘You’re going the wrong way. Don’t go past that stack—’

But she already had, and now she froze. Just ahead of her, a large section of the parapet was missing. One more step and she’d have no protection if she slipped or stumbled. Her hand still
held onto the stack, and the parapet wall came way up past her knee; she tried to tell herself that it was all right, that she was perfectly safe, but six inches in front of her an open gap yawned
to the left. She didn’t know how high up she was, but it was a four-storey house, so it had to be at least fifty feet. Despite the heat of the night, a cold, sick sensation started to creep
through her body. She became aware of the crumbly feeling of the chimney stack bricks and the softness of the moss under her fingers. She recognised the beginnings of a shiver and prayed that it
would not be a violent one that would jolt her body forward even so much as an inch. She wanted to call out to Scott but what if using her body to produce a sound caused her to move inadvertently?
Scott was not far behind her, she could sense him moving nearer, but did he know about the missing section? What if he didn’t and he tried to barge past her? She had to tell him not to come
too near, but her voice had vanished and she found herself unable to produce even the smallest sound. She half turned towards him but in doing so looked down and felt a cold lick of fear. Oh my
God, she thought; I could fall; I might actually die tonight. Her fingers were sweating; what if they became so slippery that she lost her grip on the chimney stack? But then she realised she
didn’t actually have a grip on the bricks, her fingers were just resting against the mossy surface. Scott stopped a few feet away and she knew he’d seen the gap and realised what was
happening, that she had suddenly and unexpectedly been paralysed by abject terror. The air was still incredibly warm, given that it must surely be one or two in the morning by now, but the sweat on
the skin of her bare arms had turned icy. Just go back, she told herself; it’s perfectly safe as long as you don’t go forward. But she simply could not move. The expression
scared
stiff popped
into her mind; she understood it now.

‘Jo.’ Scott’s voice was low and gentle. ‘Come back towards me; you’ll be fine.’

She couldn’t answer.

He took a step nearer and slowly held out his hand towards her. ‘Jo, take my hand,’ he said softly. It flirted through her mind that he might wonder if she was thinking about
jumping, but no, she was upset, but she wasn’t stupid, and nor was he.

‘Jo, it’s cool, okay? You’re going to be fine, it’s just vertigo. You know, like in that Hitchcock film. I’m going to come a bit nearer so you can take my hand and
walk back, okay?’

Still she couldn’t speak, and there was no point in her taking his hand because she knew that there was no way, absolutely no way she could move, not even if he was holding on to her. How
long would she be standing here, she wondered? What about when she needed to pee? Or when it got light? Oh, God, it would be even worse when it got light because she’d be able to see clearly
just how high up she was. Her stomach shifted again at the thought. Then she felt Scott’s hand rest ever so lightly on her arm and at the same moment something small and furry flew into her.
Instinctively she screamed and put both hands up in front of her face, enabling Scott to grab her wrists and pull her towards him. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,’
he said, clasping his arms around her. ‘It was only a bat, that’s all. You’re safe; everything’s cool.’ He walked her back around the other side of the stack, along
the flat walkway and down through the door into the house. It was only when he locked the door and Jo could feel the carpet beneath her feet that she began to shake. She sat down on the step,
unable to stop trembling. Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction. Or maybe it was because it was beginning to dawn on her; not only had she slept with Eve’s boyfriend, but they
hadn’t used anything – what if she was pregnant?