In a Dark, Dark Wood(70)

Clare rang me when I got home, and she was angry. ‘Where the hell were you? You stood me up! I waited half an hour in the Odeon foyer and you weren’t answering your calls!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I had … I had stuff—’ I couldn’t finish.

‘What? What’s happened?’ she asked, but I couldn’t answer. ‘I’m coming over.’

He never called. Instead he texted, later that night. I’d spent the afternoon with Clare, agonising over what to do, whether to tell my mum, whether James would be charged – we’d first done it when I was fifteen, although I was sixteen now and had been for a couple of months.

The text came through about 8 p.m. Lee. I’m sorry but this is your problem, not mine. Deal with it. And don’t call me again. J.

And so I dealt with it. I never did tell my mum. Clare … Actually Clare was kind of amazing. Yes, she could be snappy, and snide, and even manipulative, but in a crisis like this she was like a lion defending her young. Looking back at that time, I remember why we were friends all those years. And it makes me realise again just how selfish I was afterwards.

She took me to the clinic on the bus. It was early, early enough to just take the pills, and it was all over surprisingly soon.

It wasn’t the abortion. I don’t blame James for that – it was what I wanted myself, I didn’t want a child at sixteen, and whatever happened, it was my fault as much as his. And whatever people might think, it wasn’t that that f*cked me up. I don’t feel a crucifying guilt over the loss of a cluster of cells. I refuse to feel guilty.

It wasn’t any of that.

It was … I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it. It was pride, I think. A kind of disbelief at my own stupidity. The thought that I’d loved him so much, and had been so mistaken. How could I? How could I have been so incredibly, unbelievably wrong?

And if I went back to that school, I would have to live with that knowledge – the memory of us both together in everyone’s eyes. The telling of a hundred people, No, we’re not together. Yes, he dumped me. No, I’m fine.

I wasn’t fine. I was a fool – a f*cking stupid little fool. How could I have been so mistaken? I’d always thought myself a good judge of character, and I had thought James was brave, and loving, and that he loved me. None of that was true. He was weak, and cowardly, and he couldn’t even look me in the eye to end it between us.

I would never trust my own judgement again.

We were on study-leave when it happened, revising for our GCSEs. I went into school to take the exams, and then I never went back. Not to collect my results, not for the autumn social, not to see any of the teachers who’d coached and cheered me through my exams. Instead I changed to a sixth-form college two train rides away, one where I was sure no one could possibly know me. My day was insanely long – I left the house at 5.30 and got home at 6 every night.

And then my mother moved house anyway, to be with Phil. I should have been angry, because she sold my grandfather’s house where I grew up, where we’d all lived together for so many years, where all our memories were. And part of me was. But part of me was relieved – the last tie with Reading and with James was cut. I would never have to see him again.

No one knew what happened apart from Clare, and even she didn’t know about the text. I told her the next day that I’d decided I couldn’t keep the baby, and that I was breaking up with James. She hugged me and cried and said, ‘You’re so brave.’

But I wasn’t. I was a coward too. I never faced James, I never asked him why. How could he do that? Was it fear? Cowardice?

I heard afterwards that he was sleeping his way systematically round Reading, girls and boys. It confirmed what I already knew. The James Cooper I thought I knew never existed. He was a figment of imagination. A false memory, implanted by my own hopes.

But now – now as I look back across ten years … I don’t know. It’s not that I absolve James for the thoughtless cruelty of that text, but I see myself: furious, righteous, and so hard on both of us. Perhaps I absolve myself, for the mistake I made in loving James. I realise how young we were – hardly more than children, with the careless cruelty of childhood and the rigid black and white morality too. There is no grey when you’re young. There’s only goodies and baddies, right and wrong. The rules are very clear – a playground morality of ethical lines drawn out like a netball pitch, with clear fouls and penalties.

James was wrong.

I had trusted him.

Therefore I was wrong too.

But now … now I see a frightened child, confronted with an immense moral decision he was not equipped to make. I see my words as he must have seen them – an attempt to shift this irrevocable choice onto his shoulders, a responsibility he was not prepared for, and did not want.

And I see myself – just as frightened, just as ill-prepared.

And I feel so very sorry for us both.

When Lamarr comes in the morning I will tell her. I’ll tell her the whole truth. Unpicked like this, in the dying light of the evening, it’s not as bad as I feared. It’s not a motive for murder, just an old, tired grief. Nina was right.

Then, at last, I sleep.

But when Lamarr comes in the morning, there’s a new kind of grimness in her face. There’s a colleague hovering behind her, a big hulk of a man, with a fleshy face set in a permanent frown. Lamarr’s holding something in her hand.