Secret Smile (17 page)

What I wanted to know now was this: had I
done it because he was going out with my elder sister? I came to a stile going
over a fence and sat down on it, feeling the dampness of the wood through my
trousers, the moistness of the soil through my thin shoes. I put my head in my
chilly hands, pressed my thumbs against my ears to seal me into my own interior
world. Because if I had done that, what did that make me and what was happening
now? What strange, ugly replica of that event was being played out, but now in
full view and with everyone witnessing it? In my mind, I heard my mother's
hissed commands, Troy's whimper. I saw them all looking at me. Kerry's white
face. I saw Brendan's smile.

More to the immediate point, what was I
going to do now? I opened my eyes and stood up. I saw it was cloudy dark, with
no moon. Here I was, on some remote lane in the middle of fields and woods, and
I had no idea of what to do next. A part of me just wanted to run away so I
didn't have to deal with any of this. But you have to run
to
somewhere,
make a decision to drive the car along this road to that town, where you eat
that food and sleep in that bed and get up in the morning...

So in the end, I returned to the car and
got in it and turned on the ignition and drove back the way I'd come. I was so
cold that, even when I turned the inefficient heating full on, I couldn't warm
up. I bought milk and cocoa powder and digestive biscuits at the corner shop a
few minutes from Laura's flat. When I let myself in, I could hear the sound of
taps running in her bathroom, so I made myself a large mug of hot chocolate,
with lots of sugar in it, and sat on the sofa with my legs curled up under me
and drank it very slowly, trying to make it last.

CHAPTER 19

I plucked up courage and rang my own flat,
and Brendan answered. My heart plummeted. I was tempted just to put the phone
down, but Brendan would have been able to discover who had called and then he
would have rung back or thought of something else and it would all have gone
wrong. For me, that is. Again. So I said hello.

'Are you all right, Miranda?' he said.

'What do you mean?'

'It must have been painful for you.'

'Whose fault is that?' I said and then
cursed myself immediately. I was like a boxer who had deliberately let his
guard down. The punch in the face duly arrived.

'Miranda, Miranda, Miranda,' he said in a
horrible soothing tone. 'I wasn't the one who betrayed Kerry.'

'You learned that by reading my diary,' I
said. 'And then you lied. You said I told you about it.'

'Does it really matter how I learned about
it? But maybe it's all for the best, Miranda. Secrets are bad for families.
It's cleansing to get them out into the open.'

For a moment I wondered if I was going
insane. It wasn't just what Brendan was saying that made me want to gag. I felt
as if his voice was physically contaminating me, even over the phone, as if it
were something alive and slimy, oozing its way into my ear.

'I was ringing to say I'm coming round
tomorrow to pick up some of my stuff.' I paused. 'If that's all right.'

'Do you know what time?'

I was going to ask why it mattered, but I
couldn't be bothered. I would just get sucked back into some sort of argument
and somehow come off worse.

'I'll come over on my way back from work.'

'Which will be when?' he said.

'I guess about six-thirty,' I said. 'Does
it really matter?'

'We always like to have a welcome ready
for you, Miranda,' he said.

'Is Kerry there?'

'No.'

'Can you ask her to call me?'

'Of course,' he said affably.

I put the phone down, rather hard, and
then looked guiltily up at Laura. Breaking her phone would not be a helpful
contribution to the household. She looked at me with a concerned expression.
She was being nice to me yet again.

'Are you all right?' she said.

'You don't want to know,' I said. 'It's just
that I feel like I virtually have to make an appointment to visit my own house.
I'm sorry. You'll notice I said you don't want to know and then told you.' She
smiled and gave me a little hug. 'You know, it's important that you and Tony
start having children as soon as possible.'

'Why?'

'Because I'll need to do about eight years
of babysitting to pay you back for what you've done for me.'

She laughed.

'I'll hold you to that,' she said. 'But
don't mention it to Tony for the moment. Whenever the idea of children gets
mentioned, his face closes down.'

Laura and Tony were rushing round the flat
getting ready to go out. They had obviously had an argument because Laura was
being curt and efficient, and Tony sulky. I was going to have a maudlin,
self-pitying Sunday evening alone. I had it all planned. A couple of glasses of
wine. A sandwich for dinner, made out of avocado and pre-cooked bacon and a jar
of mayonnaise that I'd bought on my way home from work. More wine. A bath. Bed.
Drunken stupor. Various sobbing and howling at moments yet to be decided.

I must have looked like a child on a
poster because I heard some muttering behind me, Laura hissing, and then Tony
asked me if I wanted to come with them.

'What me?' I said, feeling embarrassed and
pathetic. 'No, no, my gooseberry costume's in the wash. I'll be fine.'

'Don't be stupid,' said Laura. 'We're
going to a party. There'll be loads of people. You'll have a good time. You
won't be in
our
way.' This last sentence she said to Tony rather than
me. Turning away from her, he raised his eyebrows in a complicit gesture that I
tried not to notice.

'It's not right,' I said.

'Shut up,' said Laura. 'It's a friend of
mine, Joanna Gergen. Do you know her?'

'No.'

'Well, she knows about you.'

'Have you told her I'm insane?'

'I've told her you're my best friend.
She's having a flat warming. It'll be fun.'

They were insistent, and in the end I let
myself be persuaded. I had a thirty-second shower and then took another forty-five
seconds to throw my black dress on, and then I sat in the back of their car as
we drove across London and tried to apply mascara and lipstick in incredibly
adverse conditions.

Joanna had a flat off Ladbroke Grove that
must have cost... Well, I made myself not think about how much it cost. I was
not at work. I was going to have an evening that was an escape from my wretched
normal life. Joanna, who had expensive blonde hair and a shamefully lascivious
scarlet dress, looked a little surprised when she opened the door and saw me
standing behind Laura and Tony like someone who had come to a fancy dress party
as a fifth wheel.

'This is Miranda,' said Laura.

Joanna's face broke into a smile.

'You're the woman who's been kicked out of
her own flat?' she said.

Laura looked apologetic.

'I just said that you were my best friend
and that you'd had one or two problems,' she said.

It didn't seem to matter and it broke the
ice. Joanna escorted me in and started telling me in too much detail about what
she'd done to the house and how long it had taken. She obviously knew other
things about me as well.

It was an improbably good party, though.
It was a large flat with a garden you could walk out to through French windows
in the kitchen. The garden was flickering with candles in jam jars. There was a
salsa band, a real-life salsa band, in the living room and the bath was full of
ice and bottles of beer. Apart from Laura and Tony, there was nobody at all I
knew, which I've always found kind of fun. A party crammed with strangers is
like going to another planet for the evening. I was struggling with the top of
a bottle when a man next to me took it, used his lighter to get the top off and
handed it back to me.

'There,' he said.

'You're looking a bit too proud of
yourself,' I said.

'I'm Callum,' he said.

I looked at him suspiciously. He was tall,
with dark frizzy hair and with that funny form of hair growth about the size of
a postage stamp just under the bottom lip. He caught me looking at it.

'You can touch it, if you want,' he said.

'Is there a word for it?' I asked.

'I don't know.'

'Is it difficult to do?'

'Compared with what?' he asked. 'Brain
surgery?'

'A beard.'

'It doesn't seem that hard.'

'My name's Miranda,' I said.

'I know,' he said. 'You're the woman who's
moved out of her own flat.'

'It's not that big a deal. It's just a
pathetic, sad tale.'

'It sounded pretty funny the way I heard
it,' said Callum.

'Well, it isn't,' I said. 'It's sad.'

I went into my Ancient Mariner mode,
telling him the full story. While I was talking, he steered me towards the food
table and loaded up a plate for me with a slice of pork pie and two kinds of
salad. I'd told the story to numerous people, but the odd thing was that this
time it did come out funny. Partly it was because Callum was about five inches
taller than me and was looking down at me with a quizzical expression, his hair
drooping over his forehead. Also, it's hard to remain dignified and solemn
while simultaneously telling a story, drinking from a bottle of beer, holding a
plate and trying to eat from it.

'What you should do,' said Callum when I
had finished, 'is chuck them out.'

'I can't do that,' I said instantly.

'Then treat this like a holiday, except
that it's in the place where you already live. You've got housesitters, so you
can go out and have fun in London.'

The conversation meandered on to other
areas. He already knew what I worked at and, like most people, he was too
impressed by the fact that I went up ladders and sawed pieces of wood for a
living. In the end he asked me for my phone number and I told him I didn't have
a phone number, that was the whole point, hadn't he been listening? He laughed
and said that he was a friend of Tony's and he would ring me there.

I felt a bit ashamed when I saw Laura and
Tony hovering, obviously wanting to be on their way. I was meant to be the
depressed one and I'd apparently had a better evening at their friend's party
than they had. In the car on the drive back I remembered what Callum had said.

'I'm going to chuck them out,' I said.

Laura looked round with a puzzled
expression.

'What?' she said.

'I've got too caught up in all of this,' I
said. 'I haven't been thinking straight. Now I'm going to act like a normal
person. I'll find somewhere for Kerry and whatsisname to stay, even if I have
to put them up in a hotel.'

'You can still stay with us, you know,'
said Laura. 'Can't she, Tony?'

'What?'

'Can't she stay with us?'

'You're the boss.'

'Oh, for God's sake.'

I intervened.

'No. You've been lovely. I feel like I've
been trapped in a room with the heating on and the curtains closed and
something rotting somewhere. I'm going to pull back the curtains and open the
window.'

'What about the thing that's rotting?'
asked Laura.

'I think that was just in my imagination.
You know, if other people want to be weird, that's their problem. I'm going to
get on with my own life.'

'It's good to hear you talk like that. Why
the sudden change?'

I laughed.

'Maybe it was talking to Callum. I'd been
thinking I was in a Greek tragedy. Maybe I'm just in a situation comedy.'

CHAPTER 20

I fastened the laces of my trainers and
drank a glass of water before opening the front door. It was half past six in
the morning, still dark outside and much colder than the previous day. There
was a glint of frost on the pavement, and car windows were iced up. For a brief
moment, I allowed myself to think that this was masochistic. Instead of
torturing myself like a medieval nun, I should go back to bed — or, at least,
the sofa bed. It would still be warm from my body. I put aside that thought,
pulled the door shut behind me and set out on a run that would take me up the
small roads to the park.

It had been a long time. At first I felt
chilly and a little stiff, but gradually I settled into a rhythm, and as I
jogged — past the newsagent that was just opening up its metal shutters, past
the deserted primary school, the recycling centre — I watched the dawn turn to
day. Lights came on in houses; street lamps turned off; cars spluttered into
life along the roadside; the sky that had been dark grey became gradually
lighter and streaked with pink clouds. The postman was doing his rounds. A
woman walking three huge dogs straining at their leads was pulled past me. I
thought of people turning over in bed to stop their alarm clocks; children
stretching and yawning and wriggling down under their duvets for the last
snatch of sleep; showers running, kettles boiling, bread toasting... All of a
sudden I felt a small stab of happiness, to be running along the empty London
streets as the sun rose on a glorious late autumn day.