Secret Smile (4 page)

'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.'

'Actually, "OK" is about the
right word. There's nothing much to report.'

He nodded. 'Brendan's going to teach me to
fish,' he said.

'I didn't know you liked fishing.'

'I don't. I've never done it. But he says
one day we can go to the sea where a friend of his has this boat, and fish for
mackerel. He says you just haul them out of the water, one after the other, and
then cook them at once over a fire.'

'Sounds good.'

'He says even if it's raining, it's nice
to sit in a boat waiting for a tug on the line.'

'Have you seen him much, then?'

'A couple of times.'

'And you like him?'

'Yes. Can't imagine you with him, though.'

'Why not?'

He shrugged. 'He's not your style.'

'What's my style?'

'You're more of a cat person than a dog
person.'

'I don't have a clue what you're on
about.'

'He's more like a dog than a cat, don't
you reckon? Eager, wanting to be noticed. Cats are more independent and aloof

'Am I independent and aloof, then?'

'Not with me you're not. But with people
who you don't know so well.'

'What are you, then?'

'An otter,' he said immediately.

'You've really thought about this.'

'And Mum's a kangaroo.'

'Kangaroo?!'

'And she can't quite get used to the fact
we're no longer in her pouch. Except that I crawl in and out occasionally.'

'What's Dad?'

'Brendan once had a kind of breakdown as
well,' said Troy. He started threading alternating chunks of lamb and pepper on
to skewers.

'Did he? I didn't know that.'

'He said he never tells anyone. But he
told me because he wanted me to know that pain can be like a curse and like a
gift, and that it's possible to turn it into a gift.'

'He said that?'

'Yes. He's a bit of a hippy, really.'

'I'm going to have a beer, I think.'

'Dad's a duck.'

'I don't think he'd like that.'

'Ducks are all right. They're optimists.'

'And Kerry?'

'What about gazelle?'

'Has Brendan said anything to you about
me?' I tried to keep my voice casual.

'He said he hurt you.'

'Ah.'

'Did he?'

'No.'

'And he said you were too proud to admit
it.'

CHAPTER 5

'Are you all right?' asked Mum, as she
opened the door to me.

I was all right. But the way she kept
asking me, that sympathetic tone in her voice, it was like glass sandpaper
being rubbed on my skin. And because she kept asking me, I had become more and
more self-conscious about what to say in response. It was no longer enough just
to say 'fine' because that sounded defensive. I started to think of what a
person who was fine would say, what I could say that would genuinely convince
my mother that there was no awkwardness because in actual fact there wasn't —
on my side, at least.

'I'm absolutely fine,' I said. 'There's no
problem about any of this.'

Too much. My mother was immediately
sympathetic.

'You're looking lovely, Miranda,' she
said.

I was looking all right, but it had been a
delicate balance. There's the old cliché that when you're dumped — and of
course I hadn't actually been dumped, but that was neither here nor there — you
should make yourself look dazzling to show the person who has dumped you, or
who people think has dumped you, what they're missing. But because it's an old cliché
which everybody knows, then making a huge effort in those circumstances can end
up looking slightly pathetic. On the other hand, you can't go the other way and
give the impression that you've been lying in bed all day crying and drinking
cooking sherry. It should have been easy, but it wasn't, and the only way I
could decide what to wear was to think back to the last time I'd been out to
meet someone socially (not counting Kerry and Brendan) and wear what I'd worn
then. Unfortunately, that had been a hen night for an old friend and I'd worn a
skimpy black dress that was completely unsuitable for a Sunday lunch at my
parents'. But the time before that had been a casual night out at a bar and I'd
worn jeans and a white shirt and my new denim jacket with the suede collar, and
that would do fine.

'You're looking very nice,' said my
mother, which made me think something must be wrong. 'Everybody's here already.
Kerry is looking gorgeous. I don't mean...' She glanced at me awkwardly. 'Shall
we go through?'

'Is Troy here?' I asked.

'Yes. He seems quite well. A bit less
hyper than on Thursday, but on an even keel. Touch wood,' she added and thumped
the door for luck.

It seemed that all was well with the
Cotton family. Kerry was happy. I was looking lovely. Troy seemed all right. I
was tempted to make some sort of protest, but today was a day I was going to be
on my best behaviour. The sun was shining, as if in honour of the occasion, and
although it was October everybody was out in the long, narrow back garden.
Everybody except Troy, who was uncomfortable in groups. You'd see him there at
first and then he would melt away, go upstairs somewhere and read a book or
listen to music.

Even so, the small garden seemed crowded.
Bill and Judy were there as well. My parents hadn't told me they were inviting
my boss. So he knew as well. Know: there should be a different word for knowing
something that isn't actually true. The weather was so good that Dad had lit a
barbecue. I could see him at the end of the garden, standing over it, poking at
the coals with — yes, there was no doubt about it — with Brendan. The two of
them were talking to each other with great animation, but were too far away for
me to hear anything of what they were saying. Kerry was standing with Judy. She
was wearing baggy black trousers and a tight-ribbed pink top, and she looked
the way she did at La Table: happy, confident.

I decided to put off any potential
awkwardness for as long as possible and walked over to Bill, who seemed like
the most neutral person in the garden. He gave me a friendly nod.