Oh shit, Oh shit, Oh shit
Robert’s mind was flooded with a sea of unanswered questions. Sally’s dark secret had burst a dam in his memory which he’d long since finished building.

Why, after all this time, was she sending him the money? What did “Sally, soon be gone” mean? And what the arsing fuck, was her darkest secret?

The kisses he understood. He expected that there would be 270 of them, he didn’t really need to count. ‘Soon be gone’, what did that mean? What was she planning to do? Where was she going? Was she coming here?

‘Soon be gone’. Shit, she couldn’t be…. His deep-fried mind was focussing on something. She was going to kill herself. She was going to fucking top herself to make him pay. God, he’d been so stupid, so young, so eager to bury the truth because it burned like acid in his brain.

He had convinced himself that she’d have got over it. That it hadn’t been nearly as bad as the twisted picture his memory had painted. The more time that went by without a call from the police or a visit from some angry relatives armed with bats or bars, the more he relaxed. The more bricks he put in his mental dam. The more distance he put between that naive, bewildered, weak youth and this cold, closed down, grey man.

Now she made the revelation. That which she’d studiously, mischievously, infuriatingly refrained from divulging at the fag-end of that crazy, fucked-up, sweat-soaked, drug-induced night.

She was going to take her own life. That was her darkest secret. She never had one then, her innocence was total. Now he’d given her one. He was going down.