‘I brought her back to my place, which you’ll see soon. Just outside the cathedral close, tall, thin, early Victorian, untidy, dark, piles of books. My father was always loving but he spent most of his time in his study and didn’t like to be disturbed. A local lady came in to cook my tea. So we were on our own, and we liked that. We made a den in an attic room, we had adventures in our overgrown garden. We watched TV together. A couple of years later, we clung to each other in the first bewildering days of secondary school. We did our homework together. She was far better at maths and good at explaining problems. I helped her with her written English. She was hopeless at spelling. As time passed and we became more self-conscious, we spent hours talking about our families. We had our first periods within a few weeks of each other. Her mother was really sensible and helpful with that. We also talked about boys, although we didn’t go near them. Because of her brothers, she was less bothered, more sceptical about boys than I was.
‘The years passed, our friendship continued and became just a fact of life. Our last summer at school came around. We sat our public exams and thought about university. She wanted to do science, I was interested in history. We were worried that we’d end up in different places.’
Miranda stopped. She took a long slow breath. As she resumed, she reached for my hand.
‘One Saturday afternoon I got a call from her. She was in a very bad state. At first, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She wanted to meet me in a local park. When I got to her, she couldn’t speak. We walked around the park, arm in arm and all I could do was wait. At last she told me what had happened the day before. Her route home from school took her by some playing fields. It was dusk and she was hurrying because her parents didn’t like her out alone after dark. She became aware of a figure following her. It seemed to be getting closer each time she turned to look. She thought of breaking into a run – she was fast – then decided she was being silly. And she had a satchel full of books. The person following her was getting closer. She turned to confront him and was relieved to see it was someone she vaguely knew – Peter Gorringe. He wasn’t exactly popular, but he was known at school as the only boy who had his own place. His parents were abroad and had rented a small bedsit for him for a few months rather than trust him to look after the house. Before she could speak to him he ran at her, took hold of her wrist and dragged her behind a brick shed where they keep the mowers. She screamed but no one came. He was large, she was very slight. He wrestled her to the ground and that was where he raped her.
‘Mariam and I stood in the park, in the middle of this big lawn surrounded by flower beds and hugged and cried together. Even then, as I was trying to take in this horrific news, I thought that one day everything would be all right. She would get through this. Everyone loved and respected her, everyone would be outraged. Her attacker would go to prison. I would go to whatever university she chose and stay close to her.
‘When she recovered enough, she showed me the marks on her legs and thighs, and on each wrist, a row of four little bruises from his grip when he’d held her down. She told me how she got home that night, told her father she had a heavy cold and went straight to bed. It was lucky, the way she saw it, that her mother was out that evening. She would have known immediately that something was wrong. That was when I began to understand that she hadn’t told her parents. We started walking round the park again. I told her she must tell them. She needed all the help and support she could get. If she hadn’t been to the police yet, I would come with her. Now!
‘I’d never seen Mariam so fierce. She seized my hands and told me that I understood nothing. Her parents were never to know, nor were the police. I said we should go together and tell her doctor. When she heard that, she shouted at me. The doctor would go straight to her mother. He was a family friend. Her uncles would hear about it. Her brothers would do something stupid and get themselves in serious trouble. Her family would be humiliated. Her father would be destroyed if he learned what had happened. If I was her friend I had to help her in the way she needed to be helped. She wanted me to promise to keep her secret. I resisted but she came back at me. She was furious. She kept telling me that I understood nothing. The police, the doctor, the school, her family, my father – no one was to know. I was not to confront Gorringe. If I did, it would all come out.
‘And so, in the end, I did what I knew to be wrong. Since we didn’t have one with me, I swore on “the idea” of the Bible to keep Mariam’s secret, and on the Koran too, and on our friendship, and on my father’s life. I did as she asked, even though I was convinced that her family would have gathered round her and supported her. And I still believe it. More than that. I know it for a fact. They loved her and would never have cast her out or enacted whatever mad idea she had of family honour. They would have put their arms round her and protected her. Her ideas were all wrong. And I was worse, I was criminally stupid, going along with this and entering into her secret pact.
‘For the next two weeks we saw each other every day. We talked of nothing else. For a part of that time I tried to change her mind. Not a chance. She seemed calmer, even more determined, and I began to think that perhaps she was right. It was certainly convenient to think so. Keep silent, avoid a family trauma, avoid giving evidence to the police, avoid a terrifying court case. Stay calm and think about the future. We were on the edge of becoming adults. Our lives were about to change. This was a catastrophe but she would survive it with my help. Whenever I saw Gorringe at school I stayed clear of him. That was getting easier as the term ran down and we school-leavers began to disperse forever.
‘At the beginning of the holidays my father took me to France to stay with friends who had a farmhouse in the Dordogne. Before I left, Mariam begged me not to phone her home. I think she was afraid that if by chance I started speaking to her mother, I would forget my promise and tell her everything. By then, lots of people had mobile phones but they hadn’t quite reached us. So we wrote letters and postcards every day. I remember being disappointed by hers. They were not exactly distant so much as dull. There was only one subject and she couldn’t write about it. So she wrote about the weather, and TV programmes and said nothing about her state of mind.
‘I was away two weeks and during the last five days nothing came from her. As soon as we were home I went round to her house. As I approached I saw that the front door was open. Her older brother, Hamid, was standing by it. A couple of neighbours went in, someone came out. I was filled with dread as I went up to him. He looked ill, very thin, and for a moment he seemed not to recognise me. Then he told me. She had slit her wrists in the bath. The funeral had already happened two days before. I took a couple of steps back from him. I was too numb for grief, but not too numb for guilt. Mariam was dead because I’d kept her secret and denied her the help she needed. I wanted to run away but Hamid made me go into the house and speak to his mother.
‘In my memory I moved through a crowd to get to the kitchen. But the house was small. There must have been no more than a dozen visitors. Sana was sitting on a wooden chair with her back to the wall. There were people around her but no one was talking, and her face – I’ll never escape that face. Stricken, frozen in pain. As soon as she saw me, she stretched out her arms towards me and I stooped over her and we embraced. Her entire body was hot and clammy and trembling. I wasn’t crying. Not yet. Then, while her arms were around my neck, she asked me in a whisper, she actually asked me to be honest with her. Was there something she should know about Mariam, was there something, anything I could tell her that would make sense of this? I couldn’t speak but I lied with a shake of my head. I was truly scared. I couldn’t even begin to grasp the enormity of my crime. Now I was adding to it by condemning my lovely surrogate mother to a lifetime of anguish and ignorance. I’d killed her daughter with my silence, now I was crushing her with it.