Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Follow Penguin
Nicci French is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. The couple are married and live in Suffolk.
There are now seven bestselling novels by Nicci French: The Memory Game, The Safe House, Killing Me Softly, Beneath the Skin, The Red Room, Land of the Living and Secret Smile, all published by Penguin.
Nicci and Sean discuss the writing of Secret Smile in an interview at the back of this book. And if you’d like to discover more about Nicci French go to www.niccifrench.co.uk.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Praise for Nicci French
‘A must read’ Cosmopolitan
‘This is a winner – a brilliant piece of characterisation’ Daily Mirror
‘Tense and unpredictable, this is Nicci French at the top of her game’ Woman and Home
‘A brooding tale of obsession, persecution and cruelty, masquerading as charm … Miranda’s story could be a case of “there but for the grace of God …”’ Eve
‘Genuinely gripping’ Heat
‘The reason, surely, why these books are such a hit with women – is to take the everyday and shake it up, ever so gently at first, so that it appears before the reader in unsettlingly topsy-turvy fashion’ Observer
‘The most tightly plotted of French’s thrillers to date, Land of the Living is also the most petrifying … don’t read it at home alone’ Independent on Sunday
‘A rollercoaster of a read … the novel leaves you emotionally exhausted – desperate to reach the conclusion but reluctant to let the thrill end’ Sunday Express
‘The best crime book you will come across this year’ The Good Book Guide
‘A dark and gripping thriller’ Heat
‘Another first-class psychological thriller from Nicci French’ Choice Magazine
‘The characterisation is first rate, and the solution to the mystery comes as a real surprise’ Sunday Telegraph
‘French is excellent at building up suspense and elegantly exploiting all our worst fears’ Daily Mail
‘Truly chilling … does not miss a beat as it courses towards its startling denouement’ Daily Mail
‘A nail-biting, can’t-put-it-down read … tightly constructed and thoroughly gripping’ Marie Claire
‘A chilling read … Nicci French gets better with every book’ Sunday Mirror
‘Brilliant’ Evening Standard
‘Cancel all appointments and unplug the phone. Once started you will do nothing until you finish this thriller’ Harpers & Queen
‘A chilling study of obsession [with] a nail-biting climax’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A real frightener’ Literary Review
‘Not only a nail-biting read, but also has great insight into male and female desire, obsession, self-destructiveness and the wilder shores of love’ Daily Telegraph
‘A narrative of striking complexity, with sleights of hand, malevolence and cupidity in abundance’ The Times Literary Supplement
‘[French] sustains the pervasive mood of terror and suspense before the final surprise. The result is a superior psychological thriller’ The Times
‘A potent, emotionally acute psychological thriller’ Mail on Sunday
‘A craftily plotted book in which the mystery unfolds layer by layer … right up until the surprise ending’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Packs a damn good punch … an ingenious storyline with plenty of twist and pace’ Daily Telegraph
‘A beautifully crafted psychological thriller … electrifying’ Harpers & Queen
‘A remarkable first novel … a thoroughly contemporary thriller’ Independent
‘A treat – both intelligent and unputdownable’ Cosmopolitan
To Patrick and Norma
I’ve had a dream recently, the same dream, over and over again, and each time I think it’s real. I’m back at the ice rink on the afternoon I first met Brendan. The cold stings my face, I can hear the scrape of the blades on the ice and then I see him. He’s glancing over at me with that funny look of his, as if he’s noticed me and he’s got something else on his mind. I see all over again that he’s good-looking in a way that not everybody would notice. His hair is glossy black like a raven’s wing. His face is oval and his cheekbones and chin are prominent. He has an amused expression on his face as if he has seen the joke before anybody else, and I like that about him. He looks at me and then gives me a second look and he’s coming over to say hello. And in my dream I think: Good. I’ve been given another chance. It doesn’t have to happen. This time I can stop it now, here, before it’s even begun.
But I don’t. I smile at what he says to me, and I say things back to him. I can’t hear the words and I don’t know what they are, but they must be funny because Brendan laughs and says something, and then I laugh. And so it goes, back and forwards. We’re like actors in a long-running show. We can say our lines without thinking, and I know what’s going to happen to this boy and this girl. They have never met before, but he is a friend of a friend of hers and so they are surprised that this is the first time they have come across each other. I’m trying to stop myself, in this dream which I both know and don’t know is a dream. An ice rink is a good place for a boy and a girl to meet, especially when neither of them can skate. Because they have to lean against each other for support and it’s almost compulsory for the boy to put his steadying arm around the girl and they help each other up and laugh at their joint predicament. Her laces are frozen together and he helps her to untie them, her foot in his lap for convenience. When the group starts to break up, it’s only natural that the boy asks the girl for her phone number.
The girl is surprised by a moment of reluctance. It’s been fun, but does she need something like this at the moment? She looks at the boy. His eyes are shining from the cold. He is smiling at her expectantly. It seems easier just to give him the number and so she does, even though I am shouting for her not to. But the shouting is silent and in any case she is me and she doesn’t know what is going to happen – but I do.
I’m wondering how it is that I know what is going to happen. I know they are going to meet twice – a drink, a movie – and then, on her sofa, she’ll think, well, why not? And so I’m thinking, if I know what’s going to happen, it must mean that I can’t change it.
Not a single detail. I know they’ll sleep together twice more, or is it three times? Always in the girl’s flat. After the second time she sees a strange toothbrush in the mug next to hers. A moment of confusion. She will have to think about that. She will barely have time. Because the next afternoon, her mind will be made up for her. It’s at about that moment – the girl coming home from work, opening the door of her flat – that I wake up.
After weeks of greyness and drizzle, it was a beautiful autumn afternoon. A blue sky just beginning to lose its electric glare, a sharp wind that was shaking bright leaves from the trees. It had been a long day, and I’d spent most of it up a ladder painting a ceiling, so my neck and right arm ached and my whole body felt grimy and sore, and there were splashes of white emulsion over my knuckles and in my hair. I was thinking about an evening alone: a hot bath, supper in front of the TV in my dressing gown. Cheese on toast, I thought. Cold beer.
So I opened the door to my flat and walked in, letting my bag drop to the floor. And then I saw him. Brendan was sitting on the sofa or, rather, lying back with his feet up. There was a cup of tea on the floor beside him, and he was reading something that he closed as I came in.
‘Miranda.’ He swung his legs off the cushion and stood up. ‘I thought you’d be back later than this.’ And he took me by the shoulders and kissed me on the lips. ‘Shall I pour you some tea? There’s some in the pot. You look all in.’
I could hardly think which question to ask first. He barely knew what job I did. What was he doing, thinking about when I finished work? But most of all, what was he doing in my flat? He looked as if he had moved in.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘I let myself in,’ he said. ‘I used the keys under the flowerpot. That’s all right, isn’t it? You’ve got paint in your hair, you know.’
I bent down and picked up the book from the sofa. A worn, hard-backed exercise book, a faded red, the spine split. I stared at it. It was one of my old diaries.
‘That’s private,’ I said. ‘Private!’
‘I couldn’t resist,’ he said with his roguish smile. He saw my expression and held up his hands. ‘Point taken, I’m sorry, it was wrong. But I want to know all about you. I just wanted to see what you were like before I met you.’ He reached a hand out and gently touched my hair where the paint was, as if to scratch it away. I pulled away.
‘You shouldn’t have.’
Another smile.
‘I won’t do it again then,’ he said in a playfully apologetic tone. ‘All right?’
I took a deep breath. No. I didn’t think it was all right.
‘It’s from when you were seventeen,’ he said. ‘I like to think of you at seventeen.’
I looked at Brendan and already he seemed to be receding into the distance. He was on the platform and I was on the train which was pulling away and leaving him behind for ever. I was thinking how to say it, as cleanly and finally as possible. You can say, ‘I don’t think this is working any more,’ as if the relationship was a machine that has stopped functioning, some vital bit having gone missing. Or, ‘I don’t think we should continue,’ as if you were both on a road together and you’ve looked ahead and seen that the road forks, or peters out in rocks and brambles. You can say, ‘I don’t want to keep on seeing you.’ Only of course you don’t mean see, but touch, hold, feel, want. And if they ask why – ‘Why is it over?’ ‘What have I done wrong?’ – then you don’t tell them: ‘You get on my nerves,’ ‘Your laugh suddenly irritates me,’ ‘I fancy someone else.’ No, of course you say, ‘You haven’t done anything. It’s not you, it’s me.’ These are the things we all learn.
Almost before I knew what I was about to do, I said the words. ‘I don’t think we should go on with this.’
For a moment, his expression didn’t alter. Then he stepped forwards and laid his hand on my shoulder. ‘Miranda,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, Brendan.’ I thought of saying something else, but I stopped myself.
His hand was still on my shoulder.
‘You’re probably exhausted,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you have a bath and put on some clean clothes.’
I stepped away from his hand.
‘I mean it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘What?’
‘Are you about to get your period?’
‘Brendan …’
‘You’re due about now, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not playing games.’
‘Miranda.’ He had a coaxing tone to his voice, as if I were a frightened horse and he was approaching me with sugar on his outstretched palm. ‘We’ve been too happy for you to just end it like this. All those wonderful days and nights.’
‘Eight,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Times we met. Is it even that many?’
‘Each time special.’
I didn’t say, not for me, although it was the truth. You can’t say that it really didn’t mean much after all. It was just one of those things that happened. I shrugged. I didn’t want to make a point. I didn’t want to discuss things. I wanted him to leave.
‘I’ve arranged for us to meet some mates of mine for a drink this evening. I told them you were coming.’
‘What?’
‘In half an hour.’
I stared at him.
‘Just a quick drink.’
‘You really want us to go out and pretend we’re still together?’
‘We need to give this time,’ he said.
It sounded so ridiculous, so like a marriage guidance counsellor giving glib advice to a couple who had been together for years and years and had children and a mortgage that I couldn’t help myself. I started to laugh, then stopped myself and felt cruel. He managed a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all, but rather lips stretched tight over teeth, a grimace or a snarl.
‘You can laugh,’ he said at last. ‘You can do this and still laugh.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. My voice was still shaky. ‘It’s a nervous kind of laugh.’
‘Is that how you behaved with your sister?’
‘My sister?’ The air seemed to cool around me.
‘Yes. Kerry.’ He said the name softly, musing over it. ‘I read about it in your diary. I know. Mmm?’
I walked over to the door and yanked it open. The sky was still blue and the breeze cooled my burning face.
‘Get out,’ I said.
‘Miranda.’
‘Just go.’
So he left. I pushed the door shut gently, so he wouldn’t think I was slamming it behind him, and then I suddenly felt nauseous. I didn’t have the meal in front of the TV I’d been looking forward to so much. I just had a glass of water and went to bed and didn’t sleep.
My relationship with Brendan had been so brief that my closest friend, Laura, had been on holiday while it was going on and missed it completely. And it was so entirely over and in the past that when she got back and rang to tell me about what a great time she and Tony had had – well, after all that, I didn’t bother to tell her about Brendan. I just listened as she talked about the holiday and the weather and the food. Then she asked me if I were seeing someone and I said no. She said that was funny because she’d heard something and I said, well, nothing much and anyway it was over. And she giggled and said she wanted to hear all about it and I said there was nothing to tell. Nothing at all.
It was two weeks after Brendan had walked out of my door. It was half past two in the afternoon, and I was up a ladder and just reaching up with the brush to get into the corner when my mobile went and I realized it was in my jacket pocket and that I didn’t have my jacket on. We were working on a newly constructed house in Blackheath, all straight lines and plate glass and pine. I was painting the wood in a special, almost transparent oil-based white paint that had been imported at great expense from Sweden. I scrambled down and put the brush on the lid of the tin.
‘Hello?’
‘Miranda, it’s Kerry.’
That was unusual enough. We met fairly regularly, every month or so, usually at my parents’. Maybe once a week we would talk on the phone; I was always the one who rang her. She asked if I were free that evening. I’d half arranged something, but she said it was really important. She wouldn’t ask if it weren’t. So of course I had to say yes. I started to discuss where we should meet, but Kerry had it all worked out. A very straightforward French restaurant had just opened in Camden, fairly near where I lived, and Kerry would book a table for eight. If I didn’t hear back from her, I should assume it was set.
I was completely baffled. She’d never arranged anything like that before. As I slapped the paint over the huge pine wall, I tried to think of what she could possibly have to tell me and I couldn’t even come up with a plausible answer to the basic question: was it likely to be something good or something bad?
Within families, you’re stuck with the character they think you are, whatever you do. You become a war hero and all that your parents ever talk about is something supposedly funny you used to do when you were in nursery school. You can end up moving to Australia just to get away from the person your family thinks you are – or you think they think you are. It’s like a room made out of mirrors, with reflections and reflections of reflections going on into infinity. They make your head ache.
I hadn’t fled to Australia. I lived less than a mile from the house I grew up in and I worked for my uncle Bill. Sometimes it’s hard to think of him as my uncle because he is so unlike my father. He has long hair that he sometimes wears in a ponytail, and he hardly ever shaves. What’s more, rich and trendy people queue up to employ him. My father still calls him a painter and decorator, and when I was a child I remember him working with a ragtag collection of no-hopers, usually driving a dodgy van he’d borrowed from someone. But nowadays Uncle Bill – which I never call him – has a big office, a company, a lucrative agreement with a team of architects and a waiting list that you can hardly even get on to.
I arrived at La Table at about one minute past eight and Kerry was already there. She was sitting at the table with a glass of white wine and the bottle in a bucket by the side, and I knew immediately that this was good news of some kind. She looked illuminated from the inside and it showed through her eyes. She’d changed her appearance since the previous time I’d seen her. I have my hair cut quite short. I liked the look anyway, and it made particular sense when I was working so that my hair wouldn’t get dipped into resin or caught around a drill. Kerry wasn’t someone who had ever had much of a particular look, just medium-length hair, practical clothes. Now she had had her hair cut short as well and it suited her. Almost everything about her was different. She was wearing more make-up than usual, which emphasized her large eyes. She had new clothes as well – dark, flared trousers, a white linen shirt and a waistcoat, of all things. She had an elfin, eager look about her. She waved me over to the table and poured me a glass of wine.
‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘You’ve got paint in your hair, by the way.’
I wanted to say what I always want to say to this, which is that naturally I have paint in my hair because I spend half my life painting. But I never do and I especially wasn’t going to this evening when Kerry looked so happy and expectant. Expectant. It couldn’t be, could it?
‘Occupational hazard,’ I said.
It was round the back where I couldn’t see. She scratched at my hair, so that we must have looked like two grooming chimpanzees in the middle of the restaurant, and I even let her do it. She said it wouldn’t come off, which was comforting. I took a sip of the wine.
‘This place seems nice,’ I said.
‘I was here last week,’ she said. ‘It’s great.’
‘So how’s things?’
‘You’re probably wondering why I called you,’ she said.
‘There doesn’t have to be a special reason,’ I said, lying.
‘I’ve got some news for you,’ she said. ‘Some pretty startling news.’
She was pregnant. That was it. That was all it could be. I looked at her more closely. A bit surprising to see her drinking, though.
‘I’ve got a new boyfriend,’ she said.
‘That’s wonderful, Kerry. That’s great news.’
I felt more puzzled than before. I felt happy for her, I really did, because I knew that she hadn’t had a boyfriend for some time. It was something that worried her. My parents were always a bit concerned about it, which didn’t help. But for her to announce it in this formal way was bizarre.
‘It’s a bit awkward,’ she said. ‘That’s why I wanted to tell you before anybody else.’
‘How could it be awkward?’
‘That’s right,’ she said eagerly. ‘That’s right. That’s what I’ve been saying. It really shouldn’t be a problem at all, if we don’t let it become one.’
I took a sip of wine and forced myself to be patient. That was another characteristic of Kerry. She veered between being so incommunicative that she wouldn’t say a word to a sort of babbling incoherence.
‘What problem?’
‘He’s someone you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Actually, it’s more than that. It’s someone you went out with. It’s an ex-boyfriend of yours.’
I didn’t respond to this because I started thinking frantically. Who could this be? Lucas and I had had a massive bust-up and he was with Cleo anyway. I’d been with Paul for a year and he’d certainly met Kerry once or twice. But wasn’t he still in Edinburgh? Then it was back to ancient history. There were a few odds and sods from college, but that was at a time when I was hardly in touch with Kerry at all. I tried to imagine the massive coincidence that could have brought Kerry together with some figure like Rob from my distant past. But they hadn’t even met, had they? Or perhaps it was way back even beyond that into my primeval past at school, with someone like Tom. That must be it. Maybe there was a school reunion …
‘It’s Brendan,’ she said. ‘Brendan Block.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘Isn’t it amazing? He’s just about to arrive. He said he thought it would be good if we all got together.’
‘That’s not possible,’ I said.
‘I know it might seem a bit odd …’
‘Where did you meet?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you everything. But I wanted to tell you something quickly before Bren arrives.’
‘Bren?’
‘I just wanted to say straight away, my lovely Miranda, that Bren has told me all about it, and I want you to know that I hope it won’t be embarrassing.’
‘What?’
Kerry leaned across the table and put both her hands on mine. She looked at me with big, sympathetic eyes.
‘Miranda, I know that it was painful for you when you parted.’ She took a deep breath and gave my hand a squeeze. ‘I know that Bren broke up with you. He’s told me how upset you were, how angry and bitter. But he has told me that he hopes you’re over it. He says he’s fine about it.’
‘He says he’s fine about it?’
And at that moment Brendan Block came into the restaurant.
Kerry met Brendan in the middle of the room, and he bent down to kiss her lingeringly on the lips. She closed her eyes for a moment, looking tiny beside his tall, bulky figure. She stood on tiptoe and whispered something in his ear, and he nodded and looked across at me with his head slightly to one side and a very small smile on his lips. He gave a nod and walked towards me with both arms outstretched. I didn’t know quite what to do. I half-raised myself from my seat, so by the time he arrived at the table I was crouched awkwardly with the chair jammed behind my knees.
‘Miranda,’ he said. He put his hands firmly on my shoulders, making me sink a bit lower towards my chair, and stared me in the eyes. ‘Oh, Miranda.’
He bent down to kiss me on the cheek, too near my mouth. By this time Kerry had managed to wrap her arm around Brendan’s waist, so she bobbed towards me too, and for one awful second we were all a few inches from each other’s faces and I could see the sweat in the divot above his upper lip and the small scar in Kerry’s eyebrow where I’d hit her with a plastic spade when I was four and she was six. So close I could smell his soap and her perfume and something sour in the air between us. I pulled myself free and sank gratefully back on to my chair.
‘So Kerry’s told you?’ By now he was sitting too, positioned between me and Kerry so that we were crammed around a small segment of the table, our knees touching. He put a hand over Kerry’s as he spoke, and she looked up at him with her shining eyes.
‘Yes. But I …’
‘And it’s really all right?’
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ I said and realized I’d answered a question that hadn’t been asked. It made me sound tense, rattled, which I was, a bit. Anyone in the world would have been. I saw them exchange a glance. ‘I mean, it’s fine.’
‘I know this must be hard for you.’
‘It’s not hard for me at all,’ I said.
‘That’s very generous of you,’ he said. ‘Typically generous. I told Derek and Marcia you would be like this. I told them not to worry too much.’
‘Mum and Dad?’
‘Yes,’ said Kerry. ‘They met Bren a couple of days ago. They really liked him. Well, of course they did. Troy did too, and you know how hard he is to please.’
Brendan gave a modest smile. ‘Sweet kid,’ he said.
‘And you told them …?’ I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I suddenly remembered a phone call the night before last, when both my parents had talked to me, one after the other, and asked me how I was feeling at the moment. A small tic started up under my left eye.
‘That you would understand because you were a big-hearted woman,’ said Brendan.
I felt myself getting angry now at the thought of these people talking behind my back about the way they assumed I would react.
‘The way that I remember it is …’
Brendan held up a hand – large and white, with hairy wrists. Hairy wrists, big ear lobes, thick neck. Memories bobbed to the surface and I pushed them back down again. ‘Let’s not go any further right now. Give it time.’
‘Miranda,’ said Kerry pleadingly. ‘Bren just told them what we thought they needed to know.’ I looked across at her and saw on her face the luminous happiness that I wasn’t used to. I swallowed hard and stared at the menu.
‘Shall we order, then?’
‘Good idea. I think I’ll have the daurade,’ said Brendan, rolling his ‘r’s at the back of his throat.
I didn’t feel like eating anything.
‘I’ll just have the steak and chips,’ I said. ‘Without the chips.’
‘Still worried about your weight?’
‘What?’
‘You don’t need to,’ Brendan said. ‘You look fine. Doesn’t she, Kerry?’
‘Yes. Miranda always looks lovely.’ For a moment she looked sour, as if she’d said ‘Miranda always looks lovely’ too many times. ‘I think I’d like the salmon and a green salad.’
‘We’ll have a bottle of the Chablis, I think,’ said Brendan. ‘Do you want a glass of red with your steak, Mirrie?’
That was another thing. I’d always liked the name ‘Miranda’ because it couldn’t be shortened. Until I met Brendan. ‘Mirrie’. It sounded like a misprint.
‘White’s fine,’ I said.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’ I gripped the table. ‘Thanks.’
Kerry got up to go to the ladies, and he watched her weave her way through the tables with that small smile on his face. He ordered our meal before turning back to me.
‘So …’
‘Miranda.’
He just smiled, then laid a hand over mine.
‘You two are very different,’ he said.
‘I know that.’
‘No, I mean, you’re different in ways you couldn’t possibly know.’
‘What?’
‘Only I can make comparisons,’ he said, still smiling at me fondly.
It took me a few seconds to understand. I pulled my hand away.
‘Brendan, listen …’
‘Hello, honey,’ he said over my head, then stood up to pull back Kerry’s chair for her, placing a hand on her head as she sat down again. The food arrived. My steak was fat and bloody, and slid around the plate when I tried to cut it. Brendan watched me hack at it, then lifted a finger to a waitress as she passed. He said something to her in French, which I didn’t understand, and she brought me a different sort of knife.
‘Brendan spent time in Paris,’ said Kerry.
‘Oh.’
‘But you probably knew that?’ She glanced up at me then looked away. I couldn’t read her expression: was it suspicious, resentful, triumphant or simply curious?
‘No, I didn’t.’ I knew very little about Brendan. He said he was between jobs. He’d mentioned something about a psychology course and about travelling around Europe for several months, but beyond that I could hardly think of a single detail of his life. I’d never been to his flat, never met his friends. He hadn’t talked about his past and he had been vague about his plans. But then of course, there had been so little time. We had been approaching the stage when you start telling each other about your lives when I’d caught him finding out about my life in his own way.
I finally managed to insert a mouthful of steak into my mouth and chewed it vigorously. Brendan inserted a finger and thumb delicately into his own mouth and extracted a thin bone, laying it carefully on the side of his plate then swilling back the rest of his mouthful with white wine. I looked away.
‘So,’ I said to Kerry. ‘How did you two meet?’
‘Oh,’ she said, and glanced up at Brendan sideways. ‘By accident, really.’
‘Don’t call it accident. Fate,’ said Brendan.
‘I was in the park after work one evening and it started to rain and this man …’
‘That would be me …’
Kerry giggled happily. ‘Yes. Bren. He said he knew my face. “Aren’t you Kerry Cotton?” he said.’
‘I recognized her from your photograph, of course. Then there she was in front of me in the rain.’
‘He told me he knew you – I mean, he didn’t tell me about, you know – he just said he knew you. Then he offered to share his umbrella …’
‘Like the gentleman I am,’ said Brendan. ‘You know me, Mirrie.’
‘We carried on walking together, even though it was belting down with rain. We got wetter and wetter, and our shoes were squelching with water.’
‘But we kept on walking through the rain,’ said Brendan and put his hand on her hair and stroked it. ‘Didn’t we?’
‘We were soaked through, so I invited him to come and get dry at mine …’
‘I towelled her hair for her,’ said Brendan.
‘That’s enough,’ I said, lifting up my hand, pretending to laugh. ‘We’ll stop with the getting dry, shall we?’
‘I can’t tell you how relieved I am that you know,’ said Kerry. ‘When I discovered about you two, well, for a bit I thought it would ruin everything. I would never do anything to hurt you. You know that, don’t you?’ She looked remarkably pretty: soft and slim and radiant. There was a small pain in my chest.
‘You deserve to be happy,’ I said, turning my back on Brendan and speaking only to her.
‘I am happy,’ she said. ‘We’ve only known each other for a few days, ten to be precise, and it’s not been long since the two of you – well, you know … So perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I can’t remember being so happy.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. Ten days, I thought.
We ate our meal, drank our wine. Glasses chinked. I smiled and nodded, and said yes and no in the right places, and all the time I was thinking. Trying not to think. Not to remember: the way his tummy bulged slightly over his boxer shorts; the black hair on his shoulders …
Finally I looked down at my watch and gave a fake start of surprise at the time it was, though it was only just gone nine-thirty, and told them I had to get back – early start tomorrow; long drive, no time for coffee, so sorry … We had to go through the whole rigmarole of saying goodbye, with Kerry hugging me hard and Brendan kissing me too close to my mouth and I resisting the urge to wipe the dampness away with the back of my hand, and everyone saying how we must meet again very soon, oh yes, how lovely I’d been, how kind, how good.
He walked me to the door of the restaurant.
‘It’s been raining,’ he said.
I ignored him.
‘It’s an incredible coincidence,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I break off with you and a few days later you meet my sister in the street and you start going out. It’s hard to believe.’
‘There’s no such thing as coincidence,’ said Brendan. ‘Maybe it’s not surprising that I’d fall in love with someone who looked like you.’
I looked over Brendan’s shoulder at Kerry, still sitting at the table. She caught my eye and gave me a nervous smile and glanced away. When I spoke to Brendan I smiled, so that our conversation would seem friendly to Kerry.
‘Brendan,’ I asked, ‘is this some kind of weird joke?’ He looked puzzled and a bit hurt.
‘Joke?’
‘If you’re playing with my sister as some way of getting at me.’
‘That sounds pretty self-centred,’ said Brendan, ‘if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘Just don’t hurt her,’ I said. ‘She deserves to be happy.’
‘Trust me. I know how to make her happy.’
I couldn’t bear to be with him another second. I walked home through the damp streets, breathing in deeply, letting the air cool my face. Had he really fallen in love with Kerry? Did it really matter how they had met? I walked faster, till my legs ached with the effort.
I often think of positions in families, the difference it makes to you. Would I have been someone else if I’d been the oldest? What about Kerry, if she’d been in the middle, instead of me? Would she have been more confident and extrovert, more like me – or, at least, more like the me the family assumed I was? And Troy, the baby of the family, who came along nine years after me? If he hadn’t been all on his own, the obvious mistake, what would that have meant for him? Or if he’d had brothers who could teach him how to kick a football and use his fists and play violent computer games, instead of sisters who petted and ignored him?
But we were stuck with what we’d been given. Kerry had come first and had to lead the way, although she hated being a leader. And I was second, impatient to grow up and chafing to be first, always trying to overtake her, push her out of my way. And Troy was third and the only boy – very much the last, but almost the first as well, thin-shouldered, wide-eyed, dreamy, strange.
I let myself into the flat. It was true that I had an early start tomorrow, but for a while I couldn’t get to sleep. I lay in bed, shifting to different positions, turning the pillow to find a cooler spot. There was no photograph of Kerry in my flat, of course there wasn’t. But then I hadn’t believed Brendan’s story anyway, so what did it matter? He tracked down Kerry because she was my sister. Considered from a certain angle, it might seem romantic.
As I drove home from work the following day, the buildings wavered in the drizzle, the skyline was soft and blurred. If it were this time in summer, then it would be light for hours more, but now people were drawing their curtains, turning lights on. In my flat, I pulled off my overalls and stood under a tepid shower for thirty seconds before dressing in a baggy pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. I stood in front of the mirror and pulled in my stomach. What had Brendan said about my weight? I turned sideways to the glass and gazed at myself, dissatisfied. Maybe I should start running. Every morning before going out to work, perhaps. What a horrible idea.
The phone rang as I was leaving to meet Laura.
‘Miranda?’
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘I tried calling before, but there was never any reply.’
‘My answering machine’s packed up.’
‘How are you? Are you all right?’
‘Fine.’
‘Sure?’
I wasn’t going to help her.
‘I’m fine, Mum. Just a bit tired. I’ve been busy at work, now Bill’s away. How are you and Dad?’
‘I spoke to Kerry. She said you’d had a lovely dinner together.’
‘It was nice to see her.’ I paused and then relented. ‘And Brendan.’
‘Miranda, you’re being very good about this. Don’t think we don’t realize the effort. I just wish you’d told us when it all happened. I hate to think of you being miserable and not telling me.’
‘There wasn’t anything to tell. Everyone’s got the wrong idea.’
‘If it’s any consolation, Kerry is transformed. You saw what she looked like yourself. She’s like a different person. I’m happy. But I’m almost frightened as well.’
‘You mean because Brendan might leave her?’
‘Oh, don’t say that! Anyway, he seems to adore her too.’ I was silent for a second too long and she said sharply, ‘Miranda? Don’t you think so?’
‘They both seem very happy,’ I said.
‘So are you really all right?’
‘Really. But I’m running a bit late.’
‘Yes, but before you dash off, will you come over at the weekend? How about Sunday lunch? Then we can all get together.’
‘You mean, with Brendan too?’
‘With Kerry and Brendan, yes.’
My stomach clenched.
‘I’m not sure I’m free then.’
‘I know it’s hard for you, Miranda, but I feel this is important. For Kerry, I mean.’
‘It’s not hard for me. At all. I just don’t know if I’m free, that’s all.’
‘We could make it Saturday lunch. Or even the evening if that suited you better. Or are you going away for the whole weekend?’
‘All right. Sunday,’ I said, defeated.
‘It’ll be very casual. You’ll be fine.’
‘I know I’ll be fine. I’m not anxious. Not in the least. Everyone’s got the wrong idea.’
‘Maybe you can bring someone with you.’
‘What?’
‘Someone. You know. If there’s anyone …’
‘There isn’t anyone at the moment, Mum.’
‘I suppose it’s still early days.’
‘I’ve got to go now.’
‘Miranda?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just … well, you’ve always been the lucky one. Let Kerry have her turn. Don’t stand in her way.’
‘This is stupid.’
‘Please.’
I imagined her fist clenched tightly round the receiver, her frowning, intense face, the strand of hair that always hung loose over one eye.
‘It’ll all be fine,’ I said, just to stop her. ‘I promise I won’t do anything to stand in Kerry’s way. Now I really do have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow when I pick up Troy, though.’
‘Thank you, dear Miranda,’ she said emotionally. ‘Thank you.’
‘I never met him, did I?’
We were sitting cross-legged on the floor, backs against the sofa, eating jacket potatoes. Laura had dotted sour cream on hers, but I’d split mine open and mashed several large knobs of butter into it, then sprinkled grated cheese over the top. It was very comforting. Outside it was dark and wet.
‘No, it was so brief. When you went to Barcelona it was before the beginning, and when you came back it was after the end.’
‘You finished it with him?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So why do you mind?’
‘I don’t,’ I said before all the words were out of her mouth.
‘You do. I can tell you do.’
I thought for a moment.
‘Yes, I do. Because it’s creepy. It feels incestuous. And the way my mum and presumably everybody else thinks I’m heartbroken. It makes me want to smash things.’
‘I can see it must be irritating, but it’s quite funny too.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not in any way at all. She calls him “Bren”.’
‘Well …’
‘And he called me “Mirrie”.’
‘Families,’ said Laura vaguely. She wiped her chin.
‘Mirrie,’ I repeated. Then, ‘Am I overreacting?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’re right. I’m overreacting.’
I’d eaten all the potato and only the crisped skin was left. I put a bit more butter on it and bit off a piece. Then I took a large swallow of wine. I didn’t want to move; it was warm in here and I was full up and pleasantly tired, while outside the wind rustled in the trees and cars drove through puddles.
‘How are things with Tony?’ I asked after a while.
‘Oh. All right. I suppose.’
I looked at her. She’d pushed her glossy dark hair behind her ears, and her face looked very young.
‘You suppose? What does that mean?’
‘They’re OK. You know. It’s just sometimes …’ She stopped.
‘Sometimes?’
‘Sometimes I wonder what happens next.’ She frowned and poured the last of the wine into our two glasses. ‘I mean, we’ve been together for nearly three years. Do we just continue like this? I think that’s what Tony would like, just to go on year after year, being comfortable together, as if we were already married – except with separate houses. Or do we start living together – properly, I mean. Buy a place together. A fridge. Plates. Put our books and CDs together. You know. And if we don’t, then what are we doing together now? You have to keep moving forwards, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in a relationship that long.’
‘That’s the thing. You have all these dramas and excitements in your life.’
‘Me?’
‘Things beginning and things ending.’
‘And things not happening at all.’
‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But I’m only twenty-six. Is that part of my life all over? Is this it?’
‘Do you want to move in together?’
‘Well, sometimes I think it’d be …’
But then there was the sound of a key in the lock and the door swung open.
‘Hello,’ Tony called cheerfully, dropping his bag on the hall floor with a thump, kicking first one shoe then the other off his feet, so his shoes skidded over the wooden boards. He came into the room, hair damp on his forehead, cheeks reddened from the air. ‘Oh, hi, Miranda. How are you?’
He bent down and kissed Laura, and she put one hand up to his cheek and smiled at him. It looked all right to me.
He was out of the door before I’d even parked the van, and running down the garden path. He couldn’t wave because he had a bulging plastic bag in one hand and was holding his backpack by the other, but his pale face was shining, and he was grinning and saying something to me that I couldn’t hear. He tripped over something on the path and half stumbled.
His backpack swung against his legs, but he kept on smiling and mouthing words. Sometimes it is more painful to see Troy happy than to see him low.
‘Hi there,’ I said as he pulled open the door and clambered into the passenger seat, his bag getting tangled up with his angular body in the process. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Fine. Good. Really good.’ He wrapped the safety belt round himself and his baggage. ‘I’ve been teaching myself to play the guitar, you know. Do you remember your old guitar? I found it in the junk room. It’s a bit clapped out, but I don’t suppose that matters much at the moment. Anyway, I thought I’d cook us supper tonight, all right? I brought the stuff with me. You haven’t got any other plans, have you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No other plans. What are we having?’
‘Savoury profiteroles first of all,’ he said. ‘I saw them in this recipe book of Mum’s and it says they’re really simple. I haven’t got any filling for them, but you must have something I can put in. Cheese, maybe? Or tuna fish. Even you must have a tin of tuna in a cupboard somewhere. Then kebabs. I have to marinade them first, though, so it might take a bit of time. I’ll start when we get to your flat. I haven’t thought about pudding. Do you actually want pudding? I thought we could just have the starter and the kebabs and that would be enough. I could make rice pudding. But hang on, we’re having rice with kebabs, so it’s probably not a good idea.’
‘No pudding,’ I said. I could already picture the chaos that lay ahead.
Every Thursday I see Troy. It’s been a pretty constant arrangement for the past two years, when he was fifteen and in trouble. I collect him from Mum and Dad’s after work, and I bring him back later in the evening, or else put him up for the night on my sagging sofa bed. Sometimes we go to the movies or to a concert. Occasionally he meets some of my friends. Last Thursday I took him to the pub with Laura and Tony, and a couple of others, but he was in one of his lethargic moods and simply put his head on the table after his first sip of beer and went to sleep. Sometimes he seems paralysingly shy, at other times he just doesn’t bother. He’ll pick up a book in the middle of a conversation, wander off when he feels like it.
Quite often we just go back to my flat and do stuff together. In the past few weeks he’s become keen on cooking, with varying results. His enthusiasms flare up and then they die away again. He went through a phase of playing games of patience. He would have to complete the game before he did anything else. If he managed to get it out, it was a good omen, but he hardly ever managed it. In the summer he was fanatical about jigsaw puzzles: he brought one to my flat that was called ‘The World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw’. It had thousands of tiny pieces with pictures on both sides. And you didn’t know what the final image was meant to look like. For weeks, I couldn’t use my table because bits were scattered over it, straight sides at one end and in the middle the gradually emerging picture of a street scene. Suddenly he became bored. ‘What actually is the point of doing jigsaw puzzles?’ he said to me. ‘You work for hours and hours, and then when you complete it you break it up and put it back in the box.’ He worked for hours and hours, but he never completed it and it’s now in a box under my bed.
Where did it go wrong? That’s what my mother says sometimes, especially when Troy is silent and withdrawn, skulking in his bedroom, his face a sullen mask. He was always clever, sometimes bafflingly, dizzyingly clever, talking at one, reading at three, dazzling teachers with his aptitude, shown off to my parents’ friends, paraded in assemblies, showered with school prizes, written about in the local paper, put into classes with children who were one, two years older than him – and two feet taller than him as well because he never seemed to grow. He was tiny, with bony knees and sticking-out ears.
He was bullied. I don’t just mean pushed around in the playground or jeered at for being a swot. He was systematically tormented by a group of boys and excluded by everyone else. The bullies called him ‘Troy Boy’, locked him in the school toilets, tied him to a tree behind the bike shed, threw his books in the mud and stamped on them, passed notes around the classroom about him being a sissy and a gay. They punched him in the stomach, ran after him at the end of the day. He never told anyone – and by this time Kerry and I were so much older than him that we occupied entirely different worlds. He didn’t complain to the teachers or to my parents, who just knew that he was quiet and ‘different’ from the other boys in his class. He just worked harder than ever and acquired a pedantic and slightly sarcastic manner that of course isolated him further.
Finally, when he was thirteen, my parents were summoned to the school because he’d been discovered throwing firecrackers at boys in the playground. He was wild with rage, weeping and swearing at anyone who came near him, as if the results of eight years of abuse had surfaced all at once. He was suspended for a week, during which time he broke down and ‘confessed’ to Mum, who stormed round to the school making a fuss. Boys were hauled in front of the head, given detentions. But how can you tell children that they have to like someone and be their friend, particularly when that someone is like my little brother: shy, scared, socially dysfunctional, crippled by his own particular brand of intelligence? And how do you undo damage that’s been built into the foundations? With houses, it’s easier to pull the whole thing down and start again. You can’t do that with people.
I had left college by this time. I didn’t understand how serious it was until Troy did his GCSEs. Maybe I didn’t want to understand. He was expected to do well. He said the exams had gone fine, but he was vague about them. It turned out he hadn’t done a single one. He’d sat in the park near his school, throwing bread to the ducks, staring at the litter on the banks of the pond, looking at his watch. When my parents discovered this, they were stunned. I remember being with them one afternoon when all Mum did was cry and ask him what she’d done wrong, was she such a bad mother, and Troy just sat there, not talking, but on his face an expression of triumph and shame that terrified me. The counsellor said it was his cry for help. A few months later he said that Troy’s cutting himself – dozens of shallow abrasions across his forearms – was a cry for help. And the way he sometimes didn’t get out of bed in the mornings – that was a cry for help too.
He didn’t go back to school. There was a private tutor and more therapy. He goes three times a week to a woman with letters after her name to talk about his problems. Every so often I ask him what goes on in these forty-five-minute sessions, but he just grins and shrugs. ‘Often I just sleep,’ he says. ‘I lie down on the couch and close my eyes and then suddenly there’s a voice telling me my session is over.’
‘How’s it all going?’ I asked as I made us a pot of tea and he cut red peppers into strips. Already the kitchen was a mess. Rice bubbled ferociously in a pan, making its lid bump and water splash over the sides. Eggshells littered the table. Bowls and spoons stacked up in the sink. There was flour on the lino, as if there had been a light snowfall.
‘Have you noticed,’ he asked, ‘that people always ask me how I am, in that careful, tactful kind of voice?’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘I’m bored to death with talking about me. How’s it going with you?’
‘OK.’
‘No, you’re supposed to really tell me. That’s the deal. I tell you, you tell me.’