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He keeps saying he’s going to leave us as if it’s a threat. He says he’s got a woman but it’s a lie, though I wish it weren’t.
Jonah lifted his head. Shay nodded at him to continue.
…Mum screaming at him to leave Rachel alone… asking me to help her.
‘Jesus Christ. He was a bloody animal.’
I feel so calm writing this, diary. I know it won’t last because what I’ve done is so big and my brain is only letting me take in bits at a time, as if it’s feeding me so I can swallow it properly. I didn’t mean to kill him, I just wanted him to get off her…
Jonah lowered the book. ‘Denny killed his grandfather? Oh my god, Shay, I can’t read this.’ He put it down on the table, pushed it away from him as if by doing so he would be pushing away the truth.
‘Denny hit him with a brick that Rachel used as a doorstop. And something must have snapped in him because he kept hitting him. They cleaned up and Ella said they should bury him in the scrub down by their stream. It must have been a nightmare for him.’
‘Why didn’t they just ring the police?’ asked Jonah, with a groan.
‘They panicked. They didn’t know what to do and Ella just wanted to shield them so she tried to make the problem go away, except it didn’t. If you read on, Denny started to process it all and he wanted to ring the police, but they’d made it so much worse by burying him with his things to make it look as if he’d left, how could they explain that? Ifthey confessed, Ella was frightened she’d be taken away from Rachel and that Denny would be locked up. And they’d have to say why they killed him and Ella couldn’t bear the shame of people realising all the rumours about them were true, and so their only course of action was to brazen it out, pretend the old bastard had run off as he’d told so many people he was going to, and they’d just have to live with what they’d done.’
‘Oh God, no, no.’ Jonah rubbed his head as if to wipe away the images inside it.
‘Every awful detail is in there. Denny killed his grandfather and when the enormity of it hit him, he couldn’t live with himself. He knew people would say that they always thought he was weird, and he didn’t feel he had anywhere to turn. Nothing would be able to erase the fact he’d killed someone.’
Jonah tilted his head back and squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to take it in.
‘Why didn’t he tell us?’
‘Ella made him swear not to say anything to anyone, she’s good at that.’ A small dry laugh. ‘She told him he’d have to forget it and carry on as normal and it would all go away but only if he never told a soul. She was probably right in that, because we’d have made him go to the police, wouldn’t we? We couldn’t have just said nothing.’
Jonah got up from his chair, walked around to expend the nervous energy which was building inside him.
‘We would have been there for him,’ he said.
‘I know. And maybe if things had settled in his brain he would have realised that, but all this must have gone off like a bomb in his head and he didn’t think he could ever put the pieces back together.’ She picked up the diary and read one particular paragraph to him aloud:
‘I feel as if I am in a nightmare. I have killed someone and I want to go to the police. I have begged mum to let me. I want to run away but there’s no place to go. I can’t breathe. I can’t undo what I’ve done and I can’t tell anyone because I swore. Even if I broke my promise, if I told Shay or Jonah I will be passing them the weight of this to carry too and I can’t do that. They will never see me as I am again. I am changed forever.’
‘That’s why he was nasty to me when I went up to the farmhouse, he just wanted to keep me out of the mess.’
‘Oh Denny, you bloody, silly boy.’ Jonah smudged the tears out of his eyes.
‘And the reason why he chose our tree to end his life was because he was happiest there.’ Shay hiccuped a laugh, an ironic, mirthless laugh. ‘It was his way of telling us how much he loved us, not how much he resented us. He set it all up as if we were camping together – our place, the three of us – the best memory he had to go with him, that’s what he planned. Why didn’t we even think of that before?’
Jonah slumped back down on the chair. ‘And Ella knew all this?’
‘Yes. Denny wrote his confession in the diary, he took full responsibility, and Ella kept it in case she ever needed it. Read it and you’ll see that he was trying to protect his mother more than she ever tried to protect him. Of course, I’d played into her hands when I went up to the farm the day before he died. If people thought Denny was upset because of us, maybe they wouldn’t go poking around for any other explanation. She said she didn’t foresee it would cause so much damage. She kept the diaries for me, hoping to make amends somehow. She said she wished she hadn’t lived so long.’
‘Her and me both,’ said Jonah with a grimace. ‘The old bitch.’
He took her hand, rubbed warmth into it.
‘What are you going to do with them, Shay?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nothing yet. I’ll keep my promise. But there’s more to tell, Jonah.’
She pulled her hand from his, picked up another diary where she’d left a marker. ‘There are some lovely memories in here as well as awful ones; listen.
‘I love Shay Corrigan with all my heart. Tonight we were coming home from the cinema and we bumped into Glynn Duffy, Antony Shepherd and Kye McHugh. I thought we were goners. Shay pushed in between us and said to GD, ‘GET LOST, NOSE’. He went ballistic. She just stood there while he was shouting at her, spit flying everywhere, and then the rugby boys came round the corner like an army. It was fantastic. Jonah Wells smiled at them and said ‘HELLO LADIES’. I wanted to laugh, cry and throw my arms around him at the same time. He’sfab.’
She picked up another diary.
