Tana French - The Secret Place

The immensity of it is coiled tight inside every word. Holly can’t get a hold on her, amid the relentless buzz of both their circling secrets, can’t catch at what Julia knows or guesses. It’s nothing like Julia to back down.

‘I’m asking you as a favour here. Trust me. Please.’

Holly wishes, right down into deep parts of herself that she didn’t know existed, that it were still that simple. ‘I guess,’ she says. ‘OK.’

Julia’s face turns towards her. The layer of suspicion makes Holly want to do something, she can’t tell what: scream it right off, maybe, or give it the finger and walk out of the door and never come back. ‘Yeah?’ Julia says. ‘You won’t try and get her talking to anyone?’

‘If you’re sure.’

‘I’m so sure.’

‘Then OK,’ Holly says. ‘I won’t.’

‘Good,’ Julia says. ‘Let’s go get something out of the common room before Becs comes looking for us.’

They head off down the corridor, in step, baffled and alone.

Holly isn’t leaving it because Julia says so. She’s leaving it because she has an idea.

It’s the psychologist thing that made her think of it. She got sent to a counsellor, that other time. He was kind of a moron and his nose sweated, and he kept asking questions that were none of his business so Holly just played with his stupid puzzles and ignored him, but he kept talking and he did come out with one thing that actually turned out to be true. He said it would get simpler once the trial was over and she knew exactly what was going on; either way, he said, knowing would make it easier to put the whole thing out of her head and concentrate on other stuff. Which it did.

It takes a few days before Julia lets go of the wary look and leaves Holly and Selena alone together. But one afternoon they’re at the Court and Julia needs to get her dad a birthday card, and Becca remembers she owes her gran a thank-you card; and Selena holds up her bag from the art shop and starts drifting towards the fountain, and by the time Holly heads after her it’s too late for Julia to change anything.

Selena arranges perfect tubes of paint in a fan on the black marble and strokes the colour bands with a fingertip. Across the fountain a gang of guys from Colm’s turn to eye her and Holly, but they won’t come over. They can tell.

‘Lenie,’ Holly says, and waits the long stretch till Selena thinks of looking up. ‘You know one thing that might make you better?’

Selena watches her like she’s made of cloud-patterns, shifting gracefully and meaninglessly across a wide sky. She says, ‘Huh?’

‘If you found out what happened,’ Holly says. Coming this close to it makes her heart skid fast and light, no traction. ‘Last year. And if someone got arrested for it. That would help. Right? Do you think?’

‘Shh,’ Lenie says. She reaches over and takes Holly’s hand – hers is cold and soft, and no matter how tight Holly squeezes, it doesn’t feel solid. She lets Holly hang on to it and goes back to her paints.

Holly learned from her dad a long time back that the difference between caught and not is taking your time. She buys the book first, in a big second-hand bookshop in town on a busy Saturday; in a couple of months’ time Mum won’t remember I have to get this book for school can I have ten euros I’ll only be a sec , no one at the till will remember some blond kid with a musty mythology book and a glossy art thing to wave at Mum. She finds a phone pic that has Chris in the background and prints it off a few weeks later, on a lunchtime dash for the computer room; in no time the others will have forgotten her taking a few minutes too long to get back from the toilet. She slices and glues on her bedroom floor that weekend, wearing gloves she stole from the chem lab, with the duvet ready to yank over the whole thing if Mum or Dad knocks; after long enough they’ll forget any comforting playschool whiff of paper glue. She dumps the book in a bin in the park near home; within a week or two it’ll be well gone. Then she slides the card down a slit in the lining of her winter coat, and waits for enough time to move past.

She wants a sign to tell her when the right day comes. She knows she won’t get one, not for this; maybe not for anything after this, ever again.

She makes her own. When she hears the Daleks talking about OMG this stupid project taking forever have to go up on Tuesday evening so booooring, Holly says, at the end of art class, ‘Study time again on Tuesday?’ Watches the others nod, while they pour drifts of powdered chalk into the bin and coil copper wire away.

She is meticulous. She makes sure to chatter the others past the Secret Place, on their way into the art room and out again, so none of them see what isn’t there. Makes sure to leave her phone out of sight, on a chair pushed under the table, so no one spots it for her. Makes sure to say, ‘Oh, pants , my phone!’ after lights-out. Makes sure to run through every step, the next morning, up in the empty corridor: pin it, see it (quick gasp, hand to her mouth, like someone’s watching), get the envelope and the balsa knife, lever out the thumbtack as delicately as if there might actually be fingerprints there. When she runs back down the corridor, the sound of each footstep flies up into a high corner, slaps onto the wall like a dark handprint.

The others believe her when she says she has a migraine – she’s had three in the past two months, matching Mum’s symptoms. Julia pulls out her iPod, to keep Holly from getting bored. Holly lies in bed and watches them leave for school like it’s the last time she’ll ever see them: already half gone, Becca flipping through pages for her Media Studies homework, Julia hauling at a sock, Selena tipping a smile and a wave over her shoulder. When the door slams behind them, there’s a minute when she thinks she’ll never be able to make herself sit up.

The nurse gives her migraine pills, tucks her in and leaves her to sleep it off. Holly moves fast. She knows what time the next bus into town leaves.

It hits her at the bus stop, in the cool-edged morning air. At first she thinks she actually is sick, that what she’s doing has called down some curse on her and now all her lies come true. She hasn’t felt it in so long and it tastes different now. It used to be vast and dark-bloody; this is metallic, this is alkaline, this is like scouring powder eating through your layers one by one. It’s fear. Holly is afraid.

The bus howls up like a stampeding animal, the driver eyes her uniform, the steps sway precariously as she climbs to the top deck. Guys in hoodies are sprawled along the back seat blasting hip-hop from a radio and they eye-strip Holly bare, but her legs won’t take her back down those stairs. She sits on the edge of the front seat, stares out at the road diving under the wheels and listens to the raw laughs behind her, tensed for the surge that would mean an attack. If the guys come for her then she can push the emergency button. The driver will stop the bus and help her down the stairs, and she can get the next bus back to school and climb back into bed. Her heart punching her throat makes her want to throw up. She wants Dad. She wants Mum.

The song starts so small, fading up through the hip-hop, it takes a minute to reach her. Then it hits her like a shock in the chest, like she’s breathed air made of something different.

Remember oh remember back when we were young so young…

It’s crystal-clear, every word. It surges away the sound of the engine, bowls away the hoodies’ hooting. It carries them over the canal and all the way into town. It soars the bus through chains of lights all flashing to green, leaps it over speed-bumps, slaloms it two-wheeled around jaywalkers. Never thought I’d lose you and I never thought I’d find you here, never thought that everything we’d lost could feel so near…