Secret Smile (28 page)

'Where?' he said. 'Why?'

'I need to get away,' I said.

'That's fine,' he said. 'Take a weekend
break. There are some great deals. But don't go and live there. London is where
you live. Everywhere else in England is for...' He paused, as if it were
difficult to remember what it was for. 'I don't know, going for walks in,
flying over on your way somewhere.'

'I'm serious,' I said.

'So am I,' said Eamonn. 'We can't afford
to lose you. Look, there are people from all over the world stowing away on
ships and in containers and under lorries, just because they want to get to
London. And you're leaving. You mustn't.'

Philippa raised an eyebrow at her new
boyfriend.

'She said she was serious.'

Maybe Philippa thought that Eamonn was
being too nice to me. He sulked a bit and said he would talk to his boss to see
if he knew any people who 'weren't good enough to make it in London'. We
chatted for a bit and then the conversation lapsed and I felt a nudge. It was
the man sitting on the other side of me. He was one of the ones who had looked
familiar. Of course I hadn't caught his name. Unfortunately he remembered mine.

'Miranda,' he said. 'It's great to see
you.'

'David! Blimey!' I said. He'd cut his hair
short and had a small moustache over his upper lip.

He waggled his finger at me roguishly. 'Do
you remember where we last met?'

'It's on the tip of my

'I saw you sitting on your arse on the ice
at Alexandra Palace.'

A wave of nausea swept through me. Oh,
yes. He had been one of the group on the day I met Brendan. What was it? Was
God punishing me? Couldn't he have given me a single evening free of this?

'That's right,' I said.

David laughed.

'A good day,' he said. 'It's the sort of
thing you ought to do more often and you never really get around to it. Didn't
we do a sort of conga on the ice?'

'I wasn't really secure enough, I...'

He narrowed his eyes in concentration. I
could see he was trying to remember something. I thought to myself, please,
God, no.

'Didn't you...?' he said. 'Someone said
that you had a thing with that guy who was there.'

I looked around quickly, and I was relieved
that an animated conversation about life in the country was proceeding without
me.

'Yes,' I said. 'Briefly.'

'What was he called?'

Couldn't he shut up?

'Brendan,' I said. 'Brendan Block.'

'That's right. Strange guy. I only met him
a few times. He was an old friend of one of the guys, but...' David laughed.
'He's out there. He's just one of these people, the stories you hear about him.
Amazing.'

There was a pause. I knew, I just knew,
that I should start talking about anything else at all. I could ask him about
where he lived in London, what his job was, if he was single, where he was
going on holiday, just anything except what I knew I was going to say.

'Like what?'

'I don't know,' said David. 'Just odd
things. He'd do things the rest of us wouldn't do.'

'You mean,
brave
things?'

'I mean things you'd think of as a joke,
he'd actually go ahead and do.'

'I'm not following you.'

David looked uncomfortable.

'You're not still together, are you?'

'As I said, it was just a brief thing.'

'I just heard about this from someone who
was at college with him.'

'He went to Cambridge, didn't he?'

'Maybe later, this was somewhere in the
Midlands, I think. From what I heard, Brendan was really winging it. He did no
work at all. Apparently his idea of hard work was to photocopy other people's
essays. He was doing one course where the tutor got so pissed off that he
failed him altogether. Brendan knew where he lived and he went round there and
saw his car parked outside the house. He'd left one of the windows wound down
about an inch. What Brendan did was to put some rubber gloves on — you know,
the kind you use for washing up — and what he did was he spent an entire night
going around the area picking up dog shit and pushing it through that crack in
the window.'

'That's disgusting,' I said.

'But amazing, don't you think? It's like a
stunt in a TV show. Can you imagine coming down in the morning and opening your
car door and about a million dog turds fall out? And then trying to clean the
car. I mean, try getting
that
smell out of the car.'

'It's not even funny,' I said. 'It's just
horrible.'

'Don't blame me,' David said. 'He wasn't
my
friend. And then there was another story about a dog. I'm not exactly sure
of the details. I think they were renting a house somewhere and a neighbour was
getting on their nerves. He was some old guy with one of those scraggly, mangy
dogs. It used to run around the garden barking, driving everyone mad. Brendan
was very good with animals. My friend said that the most ferocious Rottweiler
could run at you and in about five seconds Brendan would be scratching it under
his chin and it would be rolling on the ground.
So
Brendan got hold of
the dog and he put it in the back of some builder's lorry that was just about
to drive off. There were these other people around who thought he was joking
and that he'd get the dog out, but he didn't. Someone came along and got in the
lorry and drove off, and it headed down the road with this barking coming out
of the back. Insane.'

'So this man lost his dog?'

'Brendan said he was testing those stories
you hear about in the local papers about dogs finding their way home from miles
away. He said he definitively disproved it.'

I looked around once more and the table
had fallen silent. Everyone had been listening.

'How cruel,' said a woman from across the
table.

'I must admit,' said David, 'that the
story came out sounding less funny than I thought it was going to. This guy was
always talked of as a practical joker, but you don't want to be on the
receiving end of his humour. Better to hear about it.' He looked around warily.
'Maybe better not even to hear about it.' The rest of the people started
talking among themselves again. David leaned closer to me and spoke in a
murmur. 'Not someone you want to get on the wrong side of. And if you do, roll
your windows up, if you get my meaning.'

'I don't understand,' I said. 'How could
you be friends with someone like that?'

'I told you,' David said, shamefaced now.
'I didn't know him that well.'

'That behaviour sounds psychotic'

'Some of the stories were a bit extreme,
but he seemed all right when I met him. I didn't know the people he played
jokes on. Anyway, you know more than I do. You... well, you went out with him.'

Fucked him. That's what David meant. I
breathed deeply. I couldn't stop myself now. I was furious, but I wasn't
exactly sure who to be angry with. I tried to speak calmly.

'I wish I'd heard these supposedly amusing
stories about Brendan before I went out with him.'

'It might have put you off.'

'Of course it would have fucking put me
off.'

'You're a grown-up,' said David. 'You have
to decide for yourself who you go out with.'

'I didn't have the information,' I said.
'For fuck's sake, I thought I was with friends. I feel like someone who's been
given a car with dodgy brakes.'

'It's not like that. I remember you
talking to him. I only heard about you as a couple later.'

'Did you think of us as a nice couple?'

'I wouldn't have chosen him for you,
Miranda. Maybe someone could have said something. Does it really matter? You
said you weren't seeing him any more.'

'I think it does matter,' I said. 'You
know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking of a group of people I thought of as
friends watching me get into conversation with someone who had filled a car
with dog shit because he got an F.'

'I'm sorry,' said David. 'I didn't think
of it at the time.'

'Whose friend was he?'

'What?'

'You said he was an old friend of one of
the guys. Which one?'

'Why do you want to know?'

'I just do.'

David thought for a moment.

'Jeff,' he said. 'Jeff Locke.'

'Do you have his phone number?'

David gave a half-smile.

'You want to get in touch?'

I looked at him. The half-smile vanished.
He started to rummage in his pockets.

CHAPTER 31

When I woke, I was drenched in sweat and
my heart was thudding. I had been dreaming, but the dream was breaking up and
sliding away. I tried to hold on to a corner of it. Something about drowning.
Drowning, not in water but in a substance that was slimier. Thrashing around
and looking up at the bank and there were people sitting there, talking to each
other and smiling. Lots of faces: my mother's face; an old friend from school
whose name I no longer remembered; and my own face too, suddenly there on the
bank. I lay in bed, my skin prickling, and tried to draw more of the dream back
into my conscious mind. Something about Troy. I saw his face in my mind now,
chalky-white and his mouth calling something, except no sound came out.

I sat up in bed, drawing the duvet around
my shoulders. It was just past four, but there was still orange light from the
street lamps and blue light from the moon shining through the half-open
curtains into my room. I waited for the panic to subside. It had just been a
dream, I told myself. It didn't mean anything: random images flickering in the
night. I was scared to go back to sleep again because then I'd see Troy
shouting for help in my head.

I hauled myself out of bed, pulled on my
dressing gown and padded into the bathroom. In the mirror, my forehead looked
shiny with sweat and my hair was damp, though I was now shivery with clammy
cold. I rubbed a towel over my face, then went into the kitchen and made myself
a mug of hot chocolate, which I took back to bed with me, along with an
A to
Z
of London. I opened it at the right page and squinted down at the tiny
letters, the network of roads. When I'd found what I had been half-dreading I
would see, I put it on my pillow and lay down. I closed my eyes. Soon, it would
be light and the birds would be singing and the sounds of the morning would
start.

I had to be in Bloomsbury by eight-thirty,
so I got up at half past six, pulled on my shorts and singlet, and put a
sweatshirt over the top. I had two glasses of water and then went out to my van.
The traffic wasn't thick yet, so it only took me fifteen minutes to drive to
Seldon Avenue in E8. It was a broad road, with apartment blocks and terraced
houses on either side, not really like an avenue at all. I parked directly
opposite number 19. I looked at the
A to Z
one more time, to make
absolutely sure I had the route in my head, then took off my sweatshirt and got
out. It was still quite cool and there was a slight mist softening the horizon.
I jogged on the spot for a few minutes to warm up and loosen my limbs, then ran
up and down the road twice, getting ready to start properly.

I looked at my watch. 7.04. A deep breath
and I set off, quite fast: halfway down the road, right on to a parallel road,
right again and then up through a small alleyway with scrubland on one side and
houses the other. It led to a housing estate, and I dodged round the fire
gates, into the parking space and out the other side. Along the small road with
lock-ups and a railway bridge; left on to a cul-de-sac, through a narrow
cutting that led on to a pedestrian bridge over the railway line. I knew
exactly where I was now. I'd been here dozens of times. Hundreds of times. I
sprinted along the street, turned right and stopped, panting for breath.
Kirkcaldy Road. Laura's road. Laura's house. I gazed up at her window. The
curtains were not drawn, but no lights were on. I looked at my watch. 7.11.
Seven minutes.

I waited for a minute or so and then ran
back, retracing my footsteps. This time it took just over six minutes. It would
take around twenty minutes, maybe, if you followed the streets, which went the
long way, along a railway embankment, across a bridge and round a series of
builders' yards. But the direct pedestrian route, the alley, cutting through
the flats, the one you couldn't see if you were driving around in a squad car,
that was a quarter of the distance at the most. Not twenty-five minutes in any
way at all.

I arrived at eight in the morning at the
flat in Bloomsbury, letting myself in with the key I'd been given. I was going
to sand the floorboards. It wasn't my favourite job: it's noisy and stirs up a
storm of dust. I covered the shelves with sheets and put on my ear protectors
and mask, and for three hours I moved steadily up and down the spacious living
room, planing the dark grot of decades off the wood and seeing it turn
honey-coloured and grainy again.