Tell Me Your Secret Read online

  ‘What’s this all about, Jason?’ I said as I passed the shut-up shop fronts along that stretch of the road. ‘Why are you saying things like that?’

  ‘Because . . .’ I could hear him now, and he sounded nervous, like he hadn’t planned on saying what he’d said and was wondering if he could take it back. ‘Because . . .’

  ‘That’s it? “Because”?’

  ‘Pieta . . . This is really hard for me. I don’t think you understand that. It’s utterly confusing. I wasn’t looking for anything like this at all. I thought we’d have fun, knock about together for a while. I didn’t expect to want to be your boyfriend, for it to go further. To want to talk to you every minute of the day. I mean, jeez, I know how irritating it is that I call and text so much. I’m not stupid. I’ve had loads of women do it to me. I just never understood it until now.’

  ‘But I’m not your type,’ I said. ‘You’ve all but said that a million times. We’re only a good fit in bed.’

  Silence was his reply. Blessed as he usually was with the gift of the gab, it was disconcerting. I turned back and looked at the queue to get into the club. It snaked back, almost to the corner of the road. There was no way I was getting back in there tonight – stamp or no stamp.

  I rolled my eyes at myself. Why didn’t I just ignore his calls? Why did I think, ‘If I talk to him it’ll make him go away’?

  ‘All I know is that I love you,’ Jason eventually said.

  ‘OK,’ I replied with a sigh shoring up the word. ‘This probably isn’t the conversation to have when I’m half cut and standing in the street getting colder by the second.’ My jacket! Erena had convinced me to put it in the cloakroom. Great. I’d now have to queue to get it back. Thanks again, Jason. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  ‘Will you? Will you really?’ That was it. His neediness was the final straw. I had to finish this ‘thing’ for good.

  ‘Actually, I’ll come over,’ I replied.

  ‘What if I come to yours instead?’ he replied. ‘Save you the journey.’

  There was no way he was coming to my flat. If he came to mine, he’d never leave if I dumped him. ‘No, I’ve got some stuff to do first, so I’ll come over afterwards, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ he said sulkily.

  Yeah, that’s going to endear you to me, I thought. ‘Got to go, Jason. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ he grumbled.

  I hung up and sighed, utterly frustrated.

  I bashed my mobile gently on my forehead. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  I knew I shouldn’t have got involved with him. It was there, in neon letters, when I was handing him my business card. Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. And I’d ignored my instincts. Had instead—

  A hand clamped around my mouth, an arm fastened around my waist. A sudden motion and I was jerked backwards off my feet.

  Quick, sudden, unexpected.

  I heard a crack as my mobile hit the pavement, and suddenly my heart was in my throat, the sound of my blood racing through my veins was rushing into my ears, my eyes were wide with shock.

  No. No. This was not going to happen to me. This was not going to be it.

  I screamed but it was swallowed by the hand around my mouth, the heart plugging up my throat.

  Move. Struggle. Fight. Don’t let this happen. Don’t let this be it.

  Another jerk, tightening around my body.

  No, no, no, no! This wasn’t going to happen. Not to me. Not to me. This wasn’t going to happen. Fight. I knew how to fight. I knew how to—

  The pain in my neck was sharp, precise, like a needle going in.

  My head swirled, the world upended. I couldn’t feel my body any more, I couldn’t move a single muscle. The world was floating and I—

  Monday, 10 June

  I make it to the toilets and throw myself into a cubicle. I think I’m going to be sick. I think all the breakfast I haven’t eaten is about to come spewing out of me. Bent double over the white (thankfully clean) toilet bowl, I heave a few times, my body jerking uselessly to try to expel everything that isn’t inside me.

  Slowly, I stand upright and just as slowly run my hands over my head.

  Lillian had wittered on, but she was a blur, her image fuzzy and ill-defined; her mouth a thin, dusky pink, curved line that moved together and apart; her voice a fog of sounds instead of words. I forced, cajoled, coerced myself to hold it together. Eventually she stopped talking and I got up, walked out of her office. I marched past all the desks in the office to the corridor outside and then had to run the last bit to make it.

  I need music, I need something loud and distracting like earlier to bash this out of my head.

  Mostly, I don’t think about it. I don’t dwell, don’t wallow, don’t even think about it as anything other than ancient, forgotten, buried history.

  Mostly, I play loud music, wear bright colours, and pretend my life has always been about living in Brighton, being a mother, working on BN Sussex and generally travelling from today to tomorrow without troubling the universe too much.

  Occasionally, I step outside of myself and I look for others like me – victims who survived too. I use my journalistic abilities and I research as much as I can, seeking and searching. In ten years, nothing. I’d heard other things, had seen the pictures of other women who’d been murdered and hurt and disappeared but nothing like the man I encountered.

  Occasionally, I step outside of my fears and I try to remember anything that might tell me who he was. I will question myself: what did he smell like? What did he sound like? What did he feel like? What did he say? How did he say it? Why did he say it? In ten years, nothing new has come to me. I remember it all, but nothing new has surfaced in my mind.

  Sometimes it hits me, what happened, and I all but collapse into myself as I have to ask myself again and again how I survived.

  Friday, 24 April, 2009

  My head. It was pounding, every part of it throbbing in an agony that was crushing my skull.

  I groaned and that sound was like two cymbals crashing in my mind; the inside of my mouth was dry, almost cracked it was so parched but I couldn’t produce enough saliva to begin to wet it.

  What did I drink last night? And how did I get home? I asked myself, too scared to move in case it caused more pain. What the hell did I do?

  ‘Ah, you’re awake.’

  The voice made me jump. It wasn’t familiar and I didn’t do one-night stands or falling asleep next to random men.

  Panic rose through my body, dragging in its wake the violence of being grabbed. The hand over my mouth, the arm around my waist, the falling away of the pavement as I was lifted in the air, the smell of my fear, the pain in my neck before the blackness took over.

  I couldn’t move.

  There was a heavy weight around both of my wrists, and my arms were above my head spread out and held. My ankles had a similar weight around them, and I couldn’t move them either. And there was something on my face, soft but heavy, covering my eyes. I could barely feel it through the agony in my head, but it was there.

  I couldn’t move anyway, I realised. The weights were tying me down, but even without them, I couldn’t move, couldn’t use my body because I felt disconnected from it.

  ‘The drugs haven’t completely worn off yet, Pi-eta,’ the voice said. ‘When they do, you’ll be able to move.’

  The sound of my blood was rushing in my ears again, my breath kept catching in my chest.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed, Pi-eta.’ The voice was low. Calm. Almost soothing. Almost. ‘They call me The Blindfolder.’

  That was why there was that weight on my face, a tightness around my head that I couldn’t reach up and move away.

  ‘We are going to spend the weekend together, Pi-eta. For the next forty-eight hours, we are going to get to know each other very well.’

  I gasped as the tingling started in my legs.

  ‘Ah, there, you see, the feeling is coming back, like I promised it
would.’

  The prickling sensation began in my arms, too, tiny sparkles as the feeling crept back into my body.

  ‘I am not going to kill you, Pi-eta. I very much want to keep you alive. But if you want to survive this weekend, there is only one thing you must do – keep your eyes closed . . . For forty-eight hours you must not open your eyes. If you do, I will end you.’

  My torso had come back to life and I could feel the breath stuttering in my chest.

  ‘No matter what you feel or hear, you must not open your eyes, not even for the briefest of seconds.’

  The tingling in my fingers hurt, the sparkles like little knives digging into my flesh.

  ‘If you do as I ask, I will release you. I will put you back where I found you. And then you can go back to your ordinary little life. It’s really that simple. Do you understand?’

  The pain in my head was intensifying, it felt like it was being crushed.

  ‘I’m going to take off this blindfold in a few moments, but before I do, I want you to nod if you understand . . .’

  No, I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand any of it. Couldn’t work it through my brain. I didn’t know why it was happening, why I was here. Where I was. Why he chose me. And how he knew my name but wasn’t saying it properly, like the boy’s name, but was instead separating it after the ‘I’. None of this made any sense, so, no, I didn’t understand.

  ‘Just a little nod to show you know what I’m talking about. A nod to let me know you’re going to do as I say, that you understand.’

  I didn’t understand and I didn’t want to nod.

  But I did want to live.

  More than anything, I wanted to live.

  ‘Come on, Pi-eta, nod for me.’

  More than anything, I wanted to live.

  ‘That’s it, that’s right. Thank you, Pi-eta. Now our weekend together can begin.’

  Monday, 10 June

  Everyone’s going to find out.

  The thought lands with a thud in my mind like the arrival of a heavy parcel. I’m washing my hands, watching the white soap suds slip and slide over my fingers, while simultaneously pulling myself together so I can go back into the office and get on with my job, when the thought is delivered.

  Because there is someone else now, someone who is going to tell everyone about him and what he does, everyone is going to find out about me. That I was one of them, that he did that to me.

  This is like the time when I was twelve and I took one of my mother’s favourite ornamental plates out of the sideboard in the living room. I’d just wanted to look at it, because I’d been obsessed with the painting of the sea on it. I wanted to see it up close and touch the paint, which was so glossy it looked wet, to see if it was still tacky or if it was that way because of how the light fell on it.

  Somehow, I wasn’t ever sure how, it slipped out of my hands and fell. It cracked in several places, before breaking completely into three. I’d stared at it, horrified. We weren’t allowed to look too long at my mum’s plates, let alone touch them. And look, I hadn’t just touched it, I’d broken it.

  Working on fear, I’d glued it back together with superglue before replacing it in the cupboard. I told no one, not even my sister, what I’d done. I just put it back and pretended nothing had happened.

  I hadn’t fixed it, of course. The cracks were there if you were looking, but who actually looks at something they’ve seen every day for years? Who actually looks at anything closely when they’re used to it just being there? I knew it was there, cracked, broken, badly fixed, but I could live with that secret, I could pretend away what I had done.

  This feels like that. I know something is broken, I know I attempted to fix it, but it’s always there, damaged and imperfect; waiting to be discovered, unmasked, held up to scrutiny in its disfigured, damaged state.

  Everyone is going to find out.

  The thought of that, the idea that everyone will find out this secret I’ve harboured and carried for ten years, sends me back to the toilet to spew out pale green, coffee-tinged slime.

  Tuesday, 28 April, 2009

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  The banging on the door wouldn’t stop.

  It’d started as a knocking sound, hammering through the fug. Knock-knock-knocking to be let in. It went on for a while, getting louder, more insistent, as if the person knew I was in but wasn’t coming to the door.

  Tuesday. It was Tuesday. I was pretty sure it was Tuesday. Did Tuesday mean banging, hammering at the door? Is that what Tuesdays were about?

  I edged it open, scared suddenly of who was on the other side. What if he’d meant it? He now knew where I lived, like he’d known my name, and what if he was back to finish the job? I hadn’t gone to the police. I hadn’t gone anywhere. But what if that wasn’t enough? I’d thought about going to the police, telling them everything, showing them . . . I’d only thought about it, but what if he knew I’d thought about it?

  I realised that I shouldn’t be opening this door, but by then, it was too late, I’d broken the seal, I’d let the outside in.

  ‘I knew you were in there,’ he said. ‘I knew you were in there and you were trying to avoid me.’

  His face was familiar, it was a blur – everything was – but it was known to me. And his voice, though the edges of it were fuzzed; I knew it, too. Everything was hazy, confused. I closed my eyes, tried to reset, tried to start again.

  Jason.

  This man was Jason. I’d spoken to him in The Before.

  I knew him in The Before.

  This was how my life was going to be carved now, I realised. Before. After. The Before. The After. The During.

  ‘Jason,’ I said carefully.

  I brought my hand up to tug together the top of my red towelling dressing gown, to hide the skin at the top of my chest, obscure the flesh at my throat.

  ‘You didn’t come over and you haven’t answered your phone all weekend,’ he said. His words were accusatory. I remember in The Before, we’d made plans. I was going to see him, I was going to finish it with him, whatever it was that we had. Love. He’d thought what we had had bled out into love, I’d thought it was time to call it a day.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him. ‘Something came up.’

  I watched his eyes, a dirty green-blue, fringed by light-brown eyelashes, look me over. From my scraped-back hair to my slipperless feet. ‘What have you been doing all weekend?’

  I shook my head, I couldn’t speak about it. Not now, not to him.

  ‘Have you been shooting up or something?’ he asked when I didn’t speak. ‘You look like you’ve been on the biggest bender of all time. And I’ve had the police at my door.’

  I tugged the top of my dressing gown even closer together. ‘Jason, this isn’t the best time.’ Words were hard. Difficult, gruelling, rough enough to stick in my throat. I remember in The During, words were all I had. Talking, speaking, saying whatever was needed to get . . . It was a struggle now, to form them, to deliver them, to be able to see what the effect is of having them heard.

  ‘Right. Not the best time. I tell you I love you and you decide it’s not the best time. Is he here?’

  ‘Who?’

  Jason craned his neck, trying to see past me into my flat. ‘Whoever he is. The one you spent the weekend with. The one who you got into this state with. Is he here?’

  I shook my head. It was not just the words, it was the lining of my throat. Sore, rough, scratched. My head thumped, a vice-like pulse that threatened to macerate my skull. I do not want to have this conversation. I don’t want to have any conversation ever again. The sound of my voice was like thunder in my mind, lightning incinerating my nerve endings.

  ‘Right. Great. So you admit it? You spent the weekend with someone. I told you I loved you and the first thing you do is find someone else. Or has it been going on for a while?’

  ‘You don’t love me, Jason,’ I managed to say.

  ‘You don’t know how I feel,’ he
replied. ‘Don’t tell me how I feel.’

  My mind was scattered. Thoughts about anything other than The During were even more difficult than words. I knew that this man did not love me. How could anyone love me? Even if he had loved me in The Before, there was no way he could love me in the now, The After, with all that had happened, all that had been done, all that I had done.

  He took a step forward and my whole being reared up. No, I did not want him near me. I did not want him any closer. I needed space, I needed a boundary.

  ‘What the hell?’ he said, disgusted and hurt in equal measure as he stepped back and away. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. You’re acting like I’d ever hurt you. What the hell is going on, Pieta?’

  I shook my head. ‘Jason, I can’t do this right now. You don’t love me. You don’t even know me.’

  You don’t know that I woke up outside The Evangelicals, the club I was in on Friday night, with all my stuff, except my driving licence. You don’t know that I had to beg a taxi driver to take me home because I live south of the river and black cabs will still avoid coming down this way, no matter what the law says they have to do. You don’t know I’ve been sitting here for hours, unsure what to do, how to go back to normal life. You don’t know that I thought I’d felt pain before, but I am in so much agony right now, I think I’m going to pass out. ‘You don’t know me at all.’

  ‘Just tell me who he is and how long it’s been going on for and I will leave.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ I reply. ‘I don’t want you to love me. I don’t want to see you any more. I want “us” to be over. I want this conversation to be finished.’

  Even through the fug and clouds, I could see the truth finally hit home – I didn’t want him and no amount of pressure was going to change that. Jason looked crestfallen; hurt and humiliated. I didn’t even do anything to him, it was his ego that had finally heard the words I was saying and it was his ego that was smarting. The rest of him would be fine, the rational part of him would not only accept but would embrace the end of ‘us’. It was just that his ego, which had been used to having whoever it wanted, to being satisfied and sated on a regular basis, had ‘lost’ this time and that hurt him.