OUR LITTLE SECRET
A Short Story
by
BARBARA SCOTT-EMMETT

The day the Sandersons went home, my little sister, Maisie, and I wandered down to the shore to watch the waves break against the rocks at Peak’s Point. Neither of us said much, though we both knew an important time in our lives had come and gone. And how quickly it had gone. One day we were all playing happily together on the sand, tossing a ball back and forward, screeching louder than the gulls when the cold sea splashed us. And the next, here we were, two listless girls, aimless and sad without knowing how to voice that sadness. It felt like summer was over, though it was only late July and the warm honeyed days had not yet taken on the first chill of autumn. Maisie ran ahead and I knew she was trying to bring the fun back into the day. But I was stubborn as only a fourteen year old can be. I was sullen and distant, though I tried to pretend nothing had changed. It seemed neither of us wanted to admit how we felt: that life in Whitehaven was flat and ordinary, as we had known it would be, once the Sandersons went home.
      We reached the far end of the beach where the old bathing huts were and plonked ourselves down on the duckboard. Maisie’s cotton skirt was damp around the hem and the clinging sand made it heavy where it trailed over the edge of the boards. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and squinted at the horizon. ‘Ship,’ she said.
     I looked where she was pointing and saw the tanker in the distance, moving imperceptibly. When we looked again it would have rounded the point and disappeared. Maisie had already lost interest in it and was scuffing her sandals against a rock jutting out of the side of the boarding. The chafing sound annoyed me and the sight of her sandy knees made an inexplicable rage rise within me. ‘Stop that!’ I said, nudging her shoulder with my own. She stared at me in silent surprise for a moment, then looked away, her face crumpled. I was immediately sorry but scowled so as not to show it. We said nothing for quite a long time after that, both of us gazing into our own private distances.
     Then Maisie worried an old scratch on her elbow from the time she fell off the roundabout and said, ‘Wanna go up to the pigpen?’
     I shrugged. The ‘pigpen’ was our name for a small enclosure by the stream up near Hillman’s Farm. It was nothing really, just a clearing in the undergrowth where the ground was muddy. There was an old oil drum there that we sat on to watch the stream sparkle past. Sometimes there were sticklebacks.
     ‘Want to?’ said Maisie, brushing away a fly.
     I shrugged again. Nothing held any interest for me now, now that the Sandersons had gone.

The pigpen was disappointing, as I knew it would be. The warm days of the previous week had dried the mud hard and the stream was lower than usual. Maisie was happy enough, though. She skipped about on the bank, scooping up water in an old tin can, and throwing it over some bedraggled blue flowers that drooped by the oil drum. Forget-me-nots, I suppose they were. She sang to herself, or to the flowers, as she went about her task. ‘Poo-er litt-el flow-wers. Poo-er litt-el flow-wers.’ I would have told her to shut up but was glad something had taken her mind off the Sandersons. Of course, she wasn’t as attached to them as I had been. She was just a child really.
     I was soon bored with the pigpen and I mumbled something about going elsewhere.
     ‘Where to?’ asked Maisie. ‘Whereto whereto whereto?’ She had mud on her sandals now, from the water’s edge and flecks on her face and arms and legs. I scowled again. Why wasn’t she more grown up? Why did I have to spend my summer holidays with someone so much younger? Would I ever find anyone to replace the Sandersons? Not this year. That wouldn’t be possible because I wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but looking back it’s so obvious. I would not allow any light to enter my chosen darkness. Would not allow the possibility that there could be others out there - other people - other friends. No, the Sandersons were special and no one was going to take their place.
     ‘Let’s just go home,’ I said. ‘I want to read.’
     Maisie screwed up her face. ‘Ah no,’ she whined. ‘Don’t wanna go home.’
     ‘Well you do what you want. I’m going.’ I pushed my way through the bushes to the lane. I knew Maisie would soon follow. If she hadn’t, I’d have gone back for her. I wouldn’t have left her there on her own. I wasn’t that irresponsible.
     I had only gone a few yards down the road when, sure enough, Maisie came scrambling out. With irrepressible good humour, she began to skip and jump and sing alongside me. She had forgotten them already.
     She was such a child.

That afternoon I lay on my bed while Maisie played outside in the garden. I could hear her chattering to herself, and to Candy, her big white cat, as she skipped about under my window. Though I tried to read, I couldn’t concentrate, because my mind kept slipping back to them. To the days we had spent together, and in particular, to him. It was the first time in my life I had had so much attention. I knew it was wrong - I was nearly fifteen after all. I knew there was something not quite right, not quite acceptable, about it. But I was innocent then, sheltered and unsophisticated, and anyway, I didn’t want to think about the rights and wrongs of it. All I wanted was to remember. To lie on my bed with my hands behind my head, and remember.
     But even lying on the bed thinking about it felt wrong. Sunlight streamed through my window and accused me. The afternoon was too beautiful; it was a crime to be inside. My mother shouted up the stairs for me to come outside. ‘Leave me alone,’ was all I would say. ‘Leave me alone.’ As it turned out, it was the last of the really warm days. August was wet that year. It was indeed the last day of summer - the day the Sandersons went home.
     I lay there with my arms folded behind my head, staring at the shadows the trees made on the ceiling as the sun sank slowly over the sea. I didn’t go down for milk and biscuits at four o’clock. I was far too old now for that nonsense anyway. When I was with them it was Pepsi Cola and crisps or ice cream. Something we all did together, the grown-ups too - though even that seemed childish now. I allowed myself a smile as I thought about the little Italian cafe we went to. We would all pile into one booth, squeezing ourselves up against the wall, laughing at the crush of it. Maisie, Fiona and her, on one side. Me and Bobby and him on the other. He would put a coin in the jukebox and play our favourite record. I’ll send you all my love, every day in a le-et-ter. Sealed with a kiss.
     Of course, no letters ever came, sealed with kisses or otherwise, but as I lay there watching the shadows of the leaves dance, I half believed they would. Or did I? Now that I look back, I think I knew even then, there would be none. No letters. No postcards. I had always known that when it was over, it would be over forever. It was no ordinary holiday romance. There was no promise to keep in touch, no vow to meet again, same time next year.
     As the evening light softened and the rays of the dying sun moved slowly across the ceiling, I lay there, stiff and still, delaying going down to dinner. I didn’t want to eat. I wanted to fade away, become ethereal, a wisp, a waif, a ghost perhaps. For something in me had died. Innocence, though I protest it now, had died already. Childhood, too, had gone. I was a woman now, for I had loved. And more importantly, I had been loved. Or so I believed, as I lay there ignoring my mother’s summons to come and eat.

Maisie and Fiona had found each other on the beach one day. That’s how we met the Sandersons; how it all began. We tagged along with them every day after that. We went with them on their expeditions. We showed them places they hadn’t discovered for themselves. Bobby was a year younger than me, and of no interest whatsoever. Fiona was slightly older than Maisie, and far less naive - as if she too had had experiences - but I didn’t think of that at the time.
      We could have passed for one family perhaps, though that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted only to be acknowledged as his. His special friend. The best times were when we were alone, just the two of us. If we hadn’t found those few opportunities, my life would have taken a very different course. But we did. A stolen hour in a bathing hut. Twenty minutes in the little cave under Peak’s Point. It wasn’t as sordid as it sounds now. In those days there were no used condoms littering the ground, no crumpled lager cans. Once, daringly, we spent an afternoon in their room at the Selkirks’ B & B. The whole house was empty that day; the Selkirks were down at the promenade with everyone else to watch the parade. We pretended to get lost in the crowd and ran, panting and laughing, away from the noise and bustle, up the hill through the deserted streets. Looking back, I don’t know how the truth didn’t come out then. Surely it was written all over my flushed and apprehensive face. She didn’t seem to suspect at all, though. Well, why should she? To her, I was still a child, while he- Oh but I wasn’t a child. Not any more.
     Of course, we had to be careful. He made me promise not to say anything. No one must know. It was our little secret. And though I was bursting to tell someone -my schoolfriend Betsy, if she’d been around, or Vickie Chalmers at the Youth Club- I told no one. And I’ve told no one since. It’s still our little secret.

Finally, at my mother’s insistence, I got up. I went to the bathroom to splash my face with cool water before I went downstairs. My pale reflection stared back at me from the mirror as if striving for understanding, but I turned away, unable to meet my own eyes.
     It was sliced ham and new potatoes that night, with tomatoes and lettuce smothered in salad-cream. I picked at it and slipped bits of meat to Candy, who purred her thanks. Maisie giggled at this but didn’t tell. For afters there was tinned fruit salad, which I loved, especially the cherries, but I refused it that night. My mother felt my forehead and gave me one of her looks. ‘Hmmm,’ was all she said.

I’m trying to remember. I’m trying really hard, to describe exactly how I felt that first evening. I don’t want to cloud it with how I felt later. Because later, well, everything went haywire and I didn’t know how to feel. My mother was devastated when she found out. ‘I knew,’ she said. ‘I knew there was something wrong.’ My father simply looked embarrassed and avoided my sullen gaze. He asked who the ‘boy’ was, and tried to get angry when I wouldn’t say, but his heart wasn’t in it. They didn’t tell Maisie. I don’t think she knows even to this day. She thought I was away at school. They had been talking about it anyway, my parents, talking about sending me away to a sixth form college for my exams. In the event, I didn’t take any. Maisie always assumed I was a failure, the dunce of the family, while she did really well for herself.
     She got to know Fiona again some years later. Quite by chance they did the same subject at St. Andrew’s, a year apart. I can still remember now how my heart lurched when she told me. But of course Fiona knew nothing about it either, so our little secret was still safe. Funny how things turn out. Fiona would have been its sister but instead she’s Godmother to Maisie’s eldest. The last time I heard his name mentioned was when she came to the Christening and that’s over twenty years ago now. He’d left her by then, of course - Fiona’s mother - and was living with a girl just out of school. I can still see the way Fiona’s lips tightened when she told me. There was something in her eyes - something very like the guilt and evasiveness I saw in my own eyes when I looked into the bathroom mirror, that hot summer’s day.
     The day the Sandersons went home.

END