The Secret Place Read online

  She flipped the pen back onto the desk, neat snap of her wrist like skimming a stone. It rolled across the green leather, stopped an inch from Miss McKenna’s clasped hands. Miss McKenna didn’t move.

  The school had gone quiet, the kind of quiet made out of a hundred different low buzzes. Somewhere girls were singing, a madrigal: just snippets, layered up with sweet high harmonies, cut off and started over every couple of lines when the teacher corrected something. Now is the month of maying, when merry lads are playing, fa la la la la . . .

  Conway knew where we were headed. Top floor, down the corridor, past closed classroom doors (If tall dominates short, then . . . Et si nous n’étions pas allés . . . ). Open window at the end of the corridor, warm breeze and green smell pouring in.

  ‘Here we go,’ Conway said, and turned in to an alcove.

  The board was maybe six foot across by three high, and it came leaping out of that alcove screaming straight in your face. Like a mind gone wrong, someone’s huge mad mind racketing out every-coloured pinballs full speed, with no stop button. Every inch of it was packed: photos, drawings, paintings, jammed in on top of each other, punching for space. Faces blacked out with marker. Words everywhere, scribbled, printed, sliced.

  A sound from Conway, quick breath through her nose that could’ve been a laugh or the same shock.

  Across the top: big black letters, fantasy-book curlicues. THE SECRET PLACE.

  Under that, smaller, no fancy font here: Welcome to The Secret Place. Please remember that respect for others is a core school value. Do not alter or remove others’ cards. Cards that identify anyone, as well as offensive or obscene cards, will be removed. If you have any concerns about a card, speak to your class teacher.

  I had to shut my eyes for a second before they could start splitting the frenzy into individual cards. Black Labrador: I wish my brothers dog would die so I could get a kitten. Index finger: STOP PICKING YOUR NOSE AFTER LIGHTS OUT I CAN HEAR YOU!!! Cornetto wrapper stuck down with Sellotape: This was when I knew I love u . . . and I’m so scared u know too. Tangle of algebra equations, cut out and glued on top of each other: My freind lets me copy cos I’m never goin 2 understand dem. Coloured-pencil drawing of a soother-faced baby: Everyone blamed her brother but I’m the one who taught my cousin to say F*** off!

  Conway said, ‘“The card was pinned over one that has half a postcard of Florida on top and half a postcard of Galway on the bottom. It says, I tell everyone this is my favourite place ’cause it’s cool . . . This is my actual favourite place ’cause no one here knows I’m supposed to be cool. I like Galway too, so sometimes I look at it when I go past. That’s why I noticed the picture of Chris.’”

  It took me a second to cop. Holly’s statement; word for word, near as I could make out. Conway caught the startled look, gave me a sarky one back. ‘What, you thought I was thick?’

  ‘Didn’t think you had a memory like that on you.’

  ‘Live and learn.’ She leaned back from the board, scanning.

  Big red-lipsticked mouth, teeth bared: My mother hates me because I’m fat. Darkening blue sky, soft green hillsides, one golden-lit window: I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home. Downstairs, the same delicate curve of madrigal, over and over.

  ‘There,’ said Conway. She nudged aside a photo of a man cleaning an oil-stained seagull – You can keep telling me to be a solicitor but I’m going to do THIS! – and pointed. Half Florida, half Galway. Left-hand side of the board, near the bottom.

  Conway bent close. ‘Pinhole,’ she said. ‘Looks like your little pal didn’t make the whole thing up.’

  If she had, she wouldn’t have forgotten the pinhole; not Holly. ‘Looks like.’

  No point taking it for prints; anything proved nothing. Conway said, quoting again, ‘“I didn’t look at the Galway card yesterday evening when we were in the art room. I don’t remember when was the last time I looked at it. Maybe last week.”’

  ‘If the teachers on monitoring duty did their job, we’re down to whoever was in the building after class. Otherwise . . .’

  ‘Otherwise, a mess like this, a card could sit for days without getting noticed. No way to narrow it down.’ Conway let the seagull drop back into place, stepped back to take in the whole board again. ‘Your woman McKenna can yap on about safety valves all she wants. Me, I think this is fucked up.’

  Hard to argue with that. I said, ‘We’re gonna have to check the lot.’

  I saw her think it: ditch me with the scut work, go do the good stuff herself. She was the boss.

  She said, ‘Quickest way would be to take them down as we go. That way we can’t miss any.’

  ‘We’ll never get them back right. You OK with the girls knowing we’ve been through them?’

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Conway. ‘The whole case was like this. Fiddly pain-in-the-hole walking-on-eggshells bullshit. Better leave them where they are. You start from that side, I’ll take this one.’

  It took us the guts of half an hour. We didn’t talk – lose your place in that tornado, you’d be banjaxed – but we worked well together, all the same. You can tell. The rhythms match up; the other person doesn’t start to annoy you just by existing. I’d been all ready to put in the work, make sure this went smooth as butter – straight back to Cold Cases for me, if I held Conway up or mouth-breathed into her ear – but there was no need. It was easy; effortless. Another surge of that lifting feeling I’d got on the stairs: your day, your luck, catch it if you can.

  By the time we were finishing up, the good had gone out of that. I’d a taste in my mouth and a turn in my stomach like gone-off cider, fizzy and strong and wrong. Not because it was such bad stuff up there, it wasn’t; they were right, Conway and McKenna in their different ways, we were a long way from my old school. Someone had done a bit of shoplifting (box off a mascara, I stole this + I’m not sorry!!); someone was well pissed off with someone else (photo of a laxative packet, I wish I could put this in your stupid herbal tea). Nothing worse than that. A lot of it was sweet, even. A little young fella from the grin down, squeezing a worn-to-bits teddy: I miss my bear!! But this smile is worth it. Six bits of different-coloured ribbon twisted together in a tight knot, each trailing end sealed to the card with thumbprinted wax: Friends forever. Some was dead creative; art, near enough, better than you see in some galleries. One card was cut out in the shape of a window-frame full of snowflakes – fine as lace, must have taken hours; scraps of a girl’s face behind the frame, too snowed over to recognise, screaming. Tiny letters cut out of the edge: You all think you see the whole of me.

  That there was what was giving me the off-cider feel. That gold air transparent enough to drink, those clear faces, that happy flood of chatter: I had liked all that. Loved it. And underneath it all, hidden away tight: this. Not just one messed-up exception, not just a handful. All of them.

  I wondered, hoped, maybe most of it was bollix. Girls bored, having a mess about. Then thought maybe that was just as bad. Then thought: no.

  ‘How much of this do you figure is true?’

  Conway glanced at me. We’d worked our way in close, from the edges; if she’d been wearing perfume, I could’ve smelt it. All I smelled was soap, unscented. ‘Some. Most. Why?’

  ‘You said they’re all liars.’

  ‘They are. But they lie to get out of trouble, or to get attention, or to look cooler than they are. Shit like that. Not much percentage in that if no one knows it’s you.’

  ‘But you figure some of it’s bollix anyway.’

  ‘Oh, God, yeah.’ She flipped a fingernail off a photo of your man out of Twilight. The caption said, I met him on holiday and we kissed it was amazing we’re meeting again next summer.

  I said, ‘So where’s the percentage in that?’

  ‘That one there, I’d say your one’s dropping hints to all her mates every time they go past; that way everyone’s convinced it’s her, but she doesn’t have to come out with a bollix story upfront, so she
can’t get called on it. Other stuff . . .’ Conway’s eyes moved across the board. She said, ‘If someone liked making trouble, some of these could make plenty.’

  The madrigal had come together, skipping along, clean and perfect. The spring, clad all in gladness, doth laugh at winter’s sadness, fa la la la la . . .

  ‘Even with the monitoring?’

  ‘Even with. The teachers can look all they want; they don’t know what to look for. Girls are smart: if they want to start trouble, they’ll find ways that adults can’t spot. A mate tells you a secret, you stick it up here. You don’t like someone, you make something up and put it up like it’s hers. That?’ Conway tapped the lipsticked mouth. ‘Quick shot of the mammy photo that someone keeps on her bedside locker, and away you go, you can tell her that her ma thinks she’s a pig and hates her for it. Bonus points if everyone else recognises the photo and thinks she’s spilling her guts.’

  ‘Nice,’ I said.

  ‘I warned you.’

  Fie, then, why sit we musing, youth’s sweet delight refusing, fa la la la la . . .

  I said, ‘Our card. What do you think are the odds there’s anything in it?’

  I’d wondered from the start. Didn’t want to say it; didn’t want to think about all this ending a couple of hours in, with some crying kid getting suspended and me getting sent back to Cold Cases with a pat on the head.

  ‘Fifty-fifty,’ Conway said. ‘Maybe. If someone wanted to make trouble, this is doing the job, all right. But we get to treat it like gospel anyway. You about done, yeah? Any second now that bleeding bell’s going to go again and we’ll be mobbed.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. I wanted to move. My feet hurt from standing in the one place. ‘I’m done.’

  We had two cards that needed keeping. Photo of a girl’s hand underwater, pale and blurred: I know what you did. Photo of bare ground under a cypress tree, deep-dug Biro X marking the spot, no caption.

  Conway dropped them into evidence envelopes out of her satchel, tucked them away. She said, ‘We’ll talk to whoever was meant to check this yesterday. Then we’ll get that list of the girls who were in here, have the chats. And the list better be ready, or there’s gonna be hassle.’

  When we turned to go the corridor looked a mile long, after that cramped alcove. Under the hum of classrooms and the trill of fa la la la la I thought I could hear the board behind us, boiling.

  Chapter 6

  Out behind the Court there’s a field, or sort of; people call it that, at least, the Field, with a dab of snigger on top because of what goes on there. It’s where another wing of the Court was supposed to get built – there was going to be an Abercrombie & Fitch – but then the recession happened. Instead there’s a wire-fenced expanse of tall raggedy weeds, with raw patches of hard earth still showing through like scars where the bulldozers had started work; a couple of stacks of forgotten breeze blocks, sliding to heaps because people are always climbing them; a piece of mysterious machinery gone rusty. One corner of the wire fencing has been worked loose from its pole; bend it out of your way and you can slide through, if you’re not fat, and fat people mostly wouldn’t come here anyway.

  The Field is the Court’s shadow side, the place where all the stuff happens that can’t happen in the Court. Colm’s guys and Kilda’s girls wander round the side of the Court, so innocent they’re practically whistling, and slip in here. The emos who think they’re too deep for a shopping centre, mostly – there’s always a gang of them down by the back fence playing Death Cab for Cutie on their iPod speakers, even when it’s freezing or lashing rain – but sometimes other people, too. If you’ve no-blink bluffed a bottle of vodka off some shopkeeper or nicked half a pack of smokes off your dad, if you’ve got a couple of joints or a handful of your mum’s tablets, this is where you bring them. The weeds grow high enough that no one outside the fence can see you, not if you’re sitting down or lying down, and you probably are.

  At night other things happen. Some afternoons people come in and find like a dozen condoms, used ones, or a scatter of syringes. Once someone found blood, a long splashed trail of it across the bare ground, and a knife. They didn’t tell. The next day the knife was gone.

  Late October, a sudden blond smiling afternoon that popped its head up in the middle of a string of shivering wet days, and it set the Field stirring in people’s minds. A gang of Colm’s fourth-years got someone’s big brother to buy them a few two-litres of cider and a couple of packs of smokes; word spread, till now there are maybe twenty people sprawled in the tangle of chickweed or perched on the breeze blocks. Dandelion seeds drift, spiky ragwort is flowering yellow. The sun melts over them, fools the wind-chill away.

  The makeup hall in the Court is pimping a new line, so all the girls have had their makeup done. Their faces are stiff and heavy – they’re afraid to smile, in case something cracks or slips – but the new way they feel is worth it. Even before they got a first swig of cider or breath of smoke, they were sashaying bold, their new careful head-high walk turning them haughty and inscrutable, powerful. Next to them the boys look bare and young. To make up for it, they’ve gone louder and they’re calling each other gay more often. A few of them are throwing rocks at a loll-tongued grinning face that someone spray-painted on the back wall of the Court, roaring and punching the air when anyone gets a hit; a couple more are shoving each other off the rusty machine. The girls, to make sure everyone knows they’re not watching, get out their phones and take photos of each other’s new looks. The Daleks pout and thrust on a pile of breeze blocks; Julia and Holly and Selena and Becca are down among the weeds.

  Chris Harper is behind them, blue T-shirt against the blue sky as he balances arms-out on top of another pile of breeze blocks, crinkling his eyes down at Aileen Russell as he laughs about something she’s said. He’s maybe eight feet away from Holly and Selena wrapping their arms around each other and puckering up their new lipstick ready for a dramatic smooch, Becca rounding her heavy lashes and her Fierce Foxxx mouth at the camera in fake shock, Julia hamming up the photographer act – ‘Oh yeah, sexayyy, gimme more’ – but they barely know he’s there. They feel someone, the green fizz and force of him, the same way they feel hot patches of it pulsing all across the Field; but if you closed their eyes and asked them who it was, none of them would be able to name Chris. He has six months, three weeks and a day left to live.

  James Gillen slides in next to Julia, holding a bottle of cider. ‘Oh, come on,’ he says to her. ‘Seriously?’

  James Gillen is a babe, in a dark slicked way, with a curl to his mouth that puts you on the defensive: he always looks amused, and you can never tell whether it’s at you. Plenty of girls are into him – Caroline O’Dowd is so in love with him that she actually bought a can of Lynx Excite and she puts it on a piece of her hair every morning, so she can smell him whenever she wants to. You look over at her in Maths and she’s there sniffing her hair, with her mouth hanging open, looking like she has an IQ of about twenty.

  ‘Hi to you too,’ Julia says. ‘And: what?’

  He flicks her phone. ‘You look good. You don’t need a photo to tell you that.’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock. I don’t need you, either.’

  James ignores that. ‘I know what I’d like a few pics of,’ he says, and grins at Julia’s boobs.

  He obviously expects her to blush and zip up her hoodie, or squeal and get outraged – either one would be a win for him. Becca is blushing for her, but Julia isn’t about to give him the satisfaction. ‘Believe me, buddy,’ she says. ‘You couldn’t handle these.’

  ‘They’re not that big.’

  ‘Neither are your hands. And you know what they say about guys with small hands.’

  Holly and Selena are getting the giggles. ‘Jesus,’ says James, eyebrow lifting. ‘You’re pretty fucking forward, aren’t you?’

  ‘Better than being backward, dude,’ Julia tells him. She clicks her phone shut and puts it back in her pocket, ready for whatever’s going to
happen next.

  ‘You’re so disgusting,’ Joanne says from her breeze block, wrinkling her nose cutely. To James: ‘I actually can’t believe some of the stuff she actually says?’

  But Joanne’s out of luck: James has his eye on Julia, not on her, for today anyway. He gives Joanne a grin that could mean anything and turns his shoulder to her. ‘So,’ he says to Julia. ‘You want some?’ and holds out the bottle of cider.

  Julia feels a quick puff of triumph. She shoots Joanne a super-sweet smile, over James’s shoulder. ‘Sure,’ she says, and takes the bottle.

  Julia doesn’t like James Gillen, but that’s not the point, not out here. In the Court, back in the Court any eye you catch could be Love peal-of-bells-firework-burst Love, all among the sweet spray of the music and the rainbowing prisms of the lights, this could be the one huge mystery every book and film and song is sizzling with; could be your one-and-only shoulder to lean your head on, fingers woven with yours and lips gentle on your hair and Our Song pouring out of every speaker. This could be the one heart that will open to your touch and offer up its never-spoken secrets, that has spaces perfectly shaped to hold all of yours.

  Out here in the Field it’s not going to be Love, it’s not going to be the mystery everything talks about; it’s going to be the huge mystery everything talks around. The songs try so hard to pump it in your face, but they’re just throwing the right words into the air and hoping they sound dirty enough to fuzz your mind till you can’t ask questions any more. They can’t tell you what it’s going to be like, someday when; they can’t tell you what it is. It’s not in the songs; it’s out here, in the Field. In the apple and smoke of everyone’s breath, in the reek of ragwort and the milk of broken dandelion stems sticky on your fingers. In the emos’ music, rising up through the earth to pound at the bottom of your spine. Everyone says the reason Leanne Naylor didn’t come back for fifth year is because she got pregnant in the Field and she didn’t even know which guy it was.