‘No,’ I replied weakly. ‘I meant it was a stapler, not a staple gun.’
Right on cue, Apocalypse Now shuddered into life, whistling its warning before lighting up the whole sky with blinding white flashes. The look on my dad’s face was not one I ever wanted to see again. The corners of his mouth drooped and his eyes were flat and grey, all the colour gone from his cheeks.
‘Oh, Gwen,’ he said sadly, reaching one hand out towards me and letting it hover an inch above my shoulder before he pulled it away. ‘Oh dear.’
‘But I can explain,’ I started, tears burning behind my eyes. ‘Let me explain.’
‘I don’t think this is the right place for this conversation,’ he said, looking around at our interested audience. Without another word, he pushed through the crowd and disappeared around the corner of the house. Mum looked at me, her own features weighed down by disappointment. She inhaled sharply then shook her head, following Dad up the path.
‘What was it you were saying about this being exactly what I needed?’ I asked, my words sticking in my throat as Manny pulled me into his chest for a hug. ‘A nice family Christmas, wasn’t it?’
As the rockets finally ran out of steam and all little plastic tubes landed in the snow with a series of soft thumps, the whispers around us turned into murmurs and the murmurs escalated into good old-fashioned gossip. I looked over to where Cerys and Oliver were having what seemed to be an equally heated conversation, the look on my sister’s face full of fury. I’d have thought she’d be more pleased with herself but what did I know?
‘Don’t stress yourself,’ Manny said, stroking my hair. ‘But if you’d told them when it happened, all this could have been avoided.’
I pulled away from Manny’s hug, stung.
‘If you don’t mind, I could do without an “I told you so”,’ I said, wiping away a tear. ‘This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell them in the first place.’
‘All I meant was—’
‘I know what you meant,’ I replied, cutting off his apology. Even in the chill of the snowy evening, I could feel the burn of every pair of eyes on me and shrank down into my jacket, pulling the hood up over my head. ‘I can’t be here, I’ve got to go.’
‘Go where?’ he called as I walked briskly away, hot tears trickling down my cold face. ‘Gwen, where are you going?’
When I was little and things got too much, there was only one place I could hide where no one would find me. Between the back of the garage and the garden shed was a narrow gap, too tight for my dad, too claustrophobic for Manny and altogether too dirty for my mum, but just right for me. Holding my breath, I shuffled in sideways, only breathing out when I was on the other side, in my very own secret spot, a tiny clearing behind the two buildings that was closed in by hedges on either side. A light canopy of branches kept the spot mostly dry and shielded from the wind, and a well-placed street light kept it bright enough for me to see the smears of mascara on the backs of my hands. When I first started sneaking away to my hiding place, there was nothing there but an upturned plant pot for me to sit on, but over time I’dupgraded to a pair of sturdy wooden boxes, one for me and one for the only other person who knew about my den. The same person I saw shuffling down the gap between the garage and the shed a little while later.
‘I thought I might find you here,’ Dev said, brushing cobwebs out of his thick black hair. ‘That was a pretty impressive scene between you and Cerys?’
‘Oh God, you were there,’ I covered my face with my hands as he pulled up the second box. ‘Please tell me you’ve come to put me out of my misery.’
‘Sorry. Took that pesky do no harm oath, didn’t I?’
‘You couldn’t have run away and joined the circus, could you?’ I groaned. ‘Thanks a lot, Dev.’
Once when I was fifteen and he was sixteen, Mum and Dad were reading Manny the riot act over another late night with no phone call home and, not wanting to interrupt the argument you could hear from three doors down, Dev took it upon himself to climb on top of our garage to retrieve an errant frisbee. All well and good until he fell off the garage and landed in the hedge behind me. I took his falling out of the sky and landing at my feet as a sign that we were meant to be. Dev took it as a sign to be petrified of heights from that day forward, which I thought was a far sillier a response than mine, but most importantly, he promised to keep my secret spot a secret and to the best of my knowledge he always had.
‘Want to talk about it?’ Dev fished a handful of Celebrations out of his pocket and held them out to me. I hesitated for a second before choosing the mini Bounty. No one liked the mini Bounty but it was the polite thing to do. He looked at what remained and handed me theonly Malteser in the bunch. ‘I’m assuming it’s still your favourite?’
‘It is,’ I admitted as I tore into the shiny cellophane wrapper, bottom lip quivering at the epic gesture. Only a true gent would give up his only Maltesers Teaser. ‘Thank you.’
‘You never were any good at asking for what you wanted,’ he said, chomping into a miniature Mars Bar, completely unaware of how right he was. ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but as a trained medical professional, I am an excellent listener.’
‘You always were,’ I said, managing part of a smile. ‘First of all, I didn’t get sacked, that’s not what happened.’
‘But youdidsmack someone with a staple gun?’
‘It was a stapler, not a staple gun, there is a massive difference,’ I dropped my head back into my hands and let my hair fall all the way in front of my face. ‘I’ve never done anything like it before, I don’t know what happened, I really don’t.’
‘Never?
‘Never ever.’
‘What about that time you kicked Jason Broadhurst in the nutbag when you caught him copying off you in the GCSE mocks?’
‘Fine. I’ve only ever done something like it once before,’ I replied through my fingers. ‘I have this insufferable client at work, Andrew Jergens. If there’s a tech company in existence and Google, Facebook or Amazon don’t already own it, you can bet it belongs to his dad. He lets his little prince run around with a couple of billion quid a year, buying up companies and pretty much running them into the ground.’
‘Sounds like a fun chap,’ Dev commented as he deftly unwrapped a Galaxy Caramel.