The Secret Place

Conway dropped them into evidence envelopes out of her satchel, tucked them away. She said, ‘We’ll talk to whoever was meant to check this yesterday. Then we’ll get that list of the girls who were in here, have the chats. And the list better be ready, or there’s gonna be hassle.’

When we turned to go the corridor looked a mile long, after that cramped alcove. Under the hum of classrooms and the trill of fa la la la la

I thought I could hear the board behind us, boiling.

Chapter 6

Out behind the Court there’s a field, or sort of; people call it that, at least, the Field, with a dab of snigger on top because of what goes on there. It’s where another wing of the Court was supposed to get built – there was going to be an Abercrombie & Fitch – but then the recession happened. Instead there’s a wire-fenced expanse of tall raggedy weeds, with raw patches of hard earth still showing through like scars where the bulldozers had started work; a couple of stacks of forgotten breeze blocks, sliding to heaps because people are always climbing them; a piece of mysterious machinery gone rusty. One corner of the wire fencing has been worked loose from its pole; bend it out of your way and you can slide through, if you’re not fat, and fat people mostly wouldn’t come here anyway.

The Field is the Court’s shadow side, the place where all the stuff happens that can’t happen in the Court. Colm’s guys and Kilda’s girls wander round the side of the Court, so innocent they’re practically whistling, and slip in here. The emos who think they’re too deep for a shopping centre, mostly – there’s always a gang of them down by the back fence playing Death Cab for Cutie on their iPod speakers, even when it’s freezing or lashing rain – but sometimes other people, too. If you’ve no-blink bluffed a bottle of vodka off some shopkeeper or nicked half a pack of smokes off your dad, if you’ve got a couple of joints or a handful of your mum’s tablets, this is where you bring them. The weeds grow high enough that no one outside the fence can see you, not if you’re sitting down or lying down, and you probably are.

At night other things happen. Some afternoons people come in and find like a dozen condoms, used ones, or a scatter of syringes. Once someone found blood, a long splashed trail of it across the bare ground, and a knife. They didn’t tell. The next day the knife was gone.

Late October, a sudden blond smiling afternoon that popped its head up in the middle of a string of shivering wet days, and it set the Field stirring in people’s minds. A gang of Colm’s fourth-years got someone’s big brother to buy them a few two-litres of cider and a couple of packs of smokes; word spread, till now there are maybe twenty people sprawled in the tangle of chickweed or perched on the breeze blocks. Dandelion seeds drift, spiky ragwort is flowering yellow. The sun melts over them, fools the wind-chill away.

The makeup hall in the Court is pimping a new line, so all the girls have had their makeup done. Their faces are stiff and heavy – they’re afraid to smile, in case something cracks or slips – but the new way they feel is worth it. Even before they got a first swig of cider or breath of smoke, they were sashaying bold, their new careful head-high walk turning them haughty and inscrutable, powerful. Next to them the boys look bare and young. To make up for it, they’ve gone louder and they’re calling each other gay more often. A few of them are throwing rocks at a loll-tongued grinning face that someone spray-painted on the back wall of the Court, roaring and punching the air when anyone gets a hit; a couple more are shoving each other off the rusty machine. The girls, to make sure everyone knows they’re not watching, get out their phones and take photos of each other’s new looks. The Daleks pout and thrust on a pile of breeze blocks; Julia and Holly and Selena and Becca are down among the weeds.

Chris Harper is behind them, blue T-shirt against the blue sky as he balances arms-out on top of another pile of breeze blocks, crinkling his eyes down at Aileen Russell as he laughs about something she’s said. He’s maybe eight feet away from Holly and Selena wrapping their arms around each other and puckering up their new lipstick ready for a dramatic smooch, Becca rounding her heavy lashes and her Fierce Foxxx mouth at the camera in fake shock, Julia hamming up the photographer act – ‘Oh yeah, sexayyy, gimme more’ – but they barely know he’s there. They feel someone, the green fizz and force of him, the same way they feel hot patches of it pulsing all across the Field; but if you closed their eyes and asked them who it was, none of them would be able to name Chris. He has six months, three weeks and a day left to live.

James Gillen slides in next to Julia, holding a bottle of cider. ‘Oh, come on,’ he says to her. ‘Seriously?’