Can you keep a secret? Forty years of shame

“Can you keep a secret?” Jason asked me.

This was unusual vocabulary to use. We never spoke to each other like this normally, as under normal conditions, Jason would have simply said, ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ or even, ‘Keep this to yourself.’

Why was he now speaking in this semi-formal, stilted manner, I wondered. Whatever he wanted to tell me, it had to be pretty important, I figured, so I merely nodded in acquiescence.

…….

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Jason and I had known each other for about four years, since I had moved into the area with my family back in early 1978. We had gone to primary school together, but hadn’t been particularly close friends. That had changed when we found ourselves cast together in the same class at secondary school, and we had gone on to form a much closer bond. Now, in the third year at our rather grubby Essex comprehensive, we were pretty much inseparable and were firmly established as one another’s ‘best mate’.

…….

There was something in the way Jason was speaking to me now that was unnerving. Not only were the words he was using unusual, but his voice and intonation also seemed out of sequence.

‘What is it?’ I ventured: ‘You can tell me.”

Jason hesitated.

Then he told me.

……………………………………….

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The past forty years have been good to me. I left school after my ‘O’ levels in 1984, and almost immediately started working in London for an insurance company that promptly sent me to college on day release for two years to get a BTEC diploma, hence giving me the best of both worlds. A couple more years were spent in ‘the City, before a somewhat fortuitous chain of events saw me land on my feet as a trainee stockbroker.

It was about now my life started to take on a surge of its own, and through a combination of hard work, basic common sense, and sheer good luck, I managed to carve out a more than satisfactory niche for myself. I married in my late twenties, and went on to be blessed with two daughters - both grown up now, of course - and enjoyed the trappings of a comfortable middle-class existence in which we all never really wanted for anything.

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Now, I am not far off 60, and I am starting to look forward to easing back a bit and sliding into at least part-time retirement. I know I have been lucky. I know I have been blessed. And yet…

………..

I will never forgive myself. I can’t forgive myself. I mustn’t forgive myself.

The guilt I feel is the penance I pay, and must keep paying, for the rest of my life.

​Occasionally, I tell myself that I did what I did because I was asked to. Because I promised to. I was being honourable, noble even, by keeping my word. But I know deep down that isn’t true. Not really. No, the reason I did what I did is because I was a coward. I was a coward then just as much as I am a coward now.

………

So, I promised Jason he could trust me with his secret, and in that, at least, I have kept my word. I have never told a soul or even hinted at what Jason imparted to me all those years ago, and if truth be told, I know I would do exactly the same again. Only now I know it would not be through any sense of loyalty that I would keep quiet, but rather through moral ineptitude.

My silence was costly. Just as costly as any action taken by Jason or by anyone else, and although speaking up at the time would not have prevented what had already happened from occurring, it might just have changed the course of what happened next. In fact, I’m sure it would have done.

Now, however, it’s too late. It will always be too late. Nothing will change now, nothing can. And even if I were to tell anyone all the sordid details of our four-decade past conversation, it would have no effect or bearing on the world. Not really. Perhaps a sense of closure for some people might be possible, but more likely, there would simply be a fresh outpouring of grief and an opening of old wounds.

​No, putting my unbounded cowardice aside, I know I will make no move to shed any light on one of the bleakest eras of history in the town where I grew up.

,,,,,,,,,,,

While Jason let it all spill out of him, I stood rooted to the spot, both mute and incapable of either speech or movement. Although haltingly, he explained everything that had happened, all he had been told, and what he had witnessed himself. Everything he said - he assured me - was God's honest truth, and he was depending on me now, as his best mate, to stand by him and the others he’d mentioned.

When I had recovered the power of speech, I asked a couple of trite and almost inconsequential questions which he either brushed off or else ignored completely.

That was the last time either of us ever spoke of the matter. Even later, when things escalated and I automatically knew how and why and who was responsible for them, not another word was uttered on the subject.

……….

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And so that brings us to the current day. Jason and all the others involved all those years ago are long gone, and so much remains, but in a way, so little.

Unlike mine, Jason’s life did not go well and the early promise he’d shown at school was squandered over the years. What happened seemed to follow him like a black cloud, and when the end came for him, it came brutally and cruelly.

So, now there is just me.

Me alone with my guilt and my shame. The burden I have to bear for not speaking up; for ‘being a good friend’; for keeping my promise.

And for being a coward.

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