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Tristan, Mina, Ava and Ash are all talking at once and Lydia is shouting something down the hallway but it all merges into a faraway storm as I open Jenna’s journal and start reading from the first page.
75
AFTER
No, I could never have done it. Never would. Never could.
I’m not all bark and no bite. I wouldn’t be in here, teaching chess to a silent boy-man called Furo Adeyemi, if that were so.
Yes, that’s right, the silent refugee child whose expulsion led me into private education. That’s who I recognised on Halloween movie night. What luck! How convenient!
He moves a piece and sucks his cheek and raises an eyebrow at me.
‘Checkmate?’ I ask.
He nods.
I sigh, look down at the board and shake my head. ‘No mate,’ I say, moving my knight.
I’m not afraid of serving up a mean punishment.
But still, I have my limits.
And the truth is, after spending all that time with Jenna, all I really wanted was to help her.
I’d spent so many years imagining the downfall of Tristan and Frances, Mina and Lydia. I’d come to Port Emblyn in a mid-life crisis rage of failure in my relationships, in my ability to look at myself in the mirror, and I’d let myself indulge in rich fantasies of how I would take them down, one by one. But would I ever have hurt a single one of them outside the Saw III funhouse of my head?
It’s hard to admit it, but no.
I sat on that bathroom floor with Jenna in my arms, hit by waves of sorrow and fury and what-the-fuck-do-I-do-ness, and the need in me to save her that had sparked the second I saw her burst into all-encompassing flames.
Her family be damned. They bullied me. Their accusations against my mother put a silk belt around her throat and destroyed me.
But how could I really take revenge when, in all honesty, in the bright excoriating sunlight of the truth, I couldn’t be sure they deserved it?
After all, there were rumours about Miss Smith.
And maybe some of them were true.
She did get cosy with the dads on parents’ evenings.
She did climb up on chairs to hang posters in class and pretend she didn’t know the boys were sneaking a look up her long legs.
No hemline can be seen as an invitation, but her skirts were too short. For a school.
I had seen myself how she dipped her head and laughed at the jokes of the taller boys, how she relished class discussions about love and sex and how exactly actors made it look like they were doing it and the films in which they actually did.
And I knew why she was like that. She was desperate. She needed to feel wanted. She needed someone to see how desirable she was because my dad didn’t.
What if she had come on to Tristan? What if she hadn’t heard him say ‘stop’, just as he hadn’t heard me? The doctors had said her bruising was inconclusive.
I would never know. Not for certain.
I didn’t truly believe it. Of course I didn’t. My mother was gorgeous. She couldn’t help but flirt. She didn’t treat her sixth-formers like children.
But never, never, would she have done that.
Her husband might not have loved her back. But she was a woman. Tristan was a boy.
