The Summer of Secrets (2 page)

‘Mama?’ said Ray. ‘Are we nearly there?’

‘Nearly,’ said Catlina and picked him up. ‘Rest your head on my shoulder and close your eyes.’

The train swayed under the burning sun and eventually she felt his breathing become slower and even though he was too heavy for her arms to take somehow she found the strength to let him sleep until their nightmare was over.

She wondered if the sea would be as blue as she had heard, she wondered if she could forget her past in a place like that and build a future where she never felt hungry, where her son would sleep in a bed every remaining night of his young and tender life. She was tired but she was prepared to work hard. She would find a job.

They say the Caribbean is the sea of memories, because those who gaze upon it will feel their troubled past float away on the outgoing tide as the sea takes the memories into her own dark, cool heart. When Catalina finally fell to her knees on the blinding white sand it was not Cristobal or the Holy Virgin to whom she prayed, the memories that the sea pulled from her were too painful to do anything other than cry and pray for love.

It had been hard in Veracruz. It had been lonely. But the sea took her memories and she made a fresh start.

Catalina found work quickly as soon as she knew how to play the interviews. The senior managers at the hotels were middle-aged white men and she could speak just about enough English to flirt with them. She made sure that they knew they held her life and the strength to change it in their sweaty little fists and hoped the rush of power would cloud their judgement.

At first it was easy. She had her little job at a major hotel pushing the linen cart along the labyrinthine corridors of one of the very best hotels. She found an apartment and a woman in the building to watch Ray if she couldn’t sneak him into work with her. But Cancun took off, to the delight of the investors and the Mexican government, and people from all over Mexico started to flood the area, then immigrants from other countries and the tension on the streets rose as it became crowded and competitive. It got so bad that Catalina started feeling paranoid, not knowing if the women on the bus who caught her eye coveted her job. Cancun became a city.

Ray grew older, he started school, he became more difficult to hide. She knew that she should stop taking him into work at weekends but the childminder had hiked her rates in line with demand because weekends and evenings paid extra all over. Sooner or later they were bound to get caught.

And they did. ‘I suppose you’re going to try and tell me this is the first time you’ve ever brought your kid to work?’

Ray knew they were in trouble and was behaving impeccably.

‘It is,’ she said. ‘I swear. My friend usually watches him but she’s gone missing.’

‘Missing?’

‘You must have heard,’ she said. ‘A man like you must have many friends.’

People drifted in and out of Cancun constantly, the population was ever-shifting like the sand on Playa Langosta. But lately there were whispers that some of these comings and goings were not as simple as they seemed and a threatening seam of intimidation ran through the foundations of this new city.

‘She left?’ His Adam’s apple rocked up and down.

‘She disappeared,’ said Catalina. Catalina had a sense for people’s weaknesses. With this one it wouldn’t be flirtation or camaraderie, he wasn’t into the power trip, if he was he would have a better office. He could be distracted by fear.

‘But from tonight my mother will take him,’ said Catalina. ‘I’m sorry, it happened so fast, I didn’t want to call in sick.’

The manager nodded, keen to get this trashy little piece and her kid out of his way. ‘Very good, but this is going on record.’

Catalina grabbed her boy’s hand and backed out of the room, thanking him profusely. In a few brief seconds she had closed the door behind her and left the manager with the vague sensation that he had been manipulated, but not knowing quite how.

Catalina walked away from the situation in a cloud of triumph but the comedown left her wondering how she could always get what she wanted, yet life seemed be getting more and more difficult. She was haunted by the choices that she had made. She missed her parents and the friends that she had made were not the same as the friends she had left behind. Above all she had not found love...

Outside her window the full moon shone.

A few miles away Danny Featherbow won a hand of poker that would change both their lives forever.

Danny Featherbow’s grandmother, Alice, taught Danny, as a boy, the simple game that he would play every chance he had, until the day he died: the turn of three cards with a stake on the value of the third. So simple, so seductive. Like love.

Within half an hour Alice had taken all his pocket money.

‘You shouldn’t trust the cards as much as you do, Danny’ she said, and she turned a silver coin down through her four fingers and back up again in a skilful way that he immediately wanted to master. ‘The cards will always let you down eventually,’ she said. ‘Trust yourself, always yourself, only yourself.’ His grandmother bent close to him and he could smell her rose scented face cream and see the furrows in her face that it could not help. ‘The trick is to leave the game while you’re ahead,’ she said.

She stood up and returned to the business of keeping their tiny house spick and span in case someone should visit. But they never did.

The following week Danny won his money back again. In fact, he never lost money to his grandmother again. He stopped taking silly risks and only put his coins on the table if he was more likely than not to get them back. He paid no attention to the voices tempting him to play a hand anyway because you never know. He didn’t bet on maybe. Life was cruel.

He had barely started to learn higher maths at school and yet on an instinctive level eleven year old Danny was able to calculate complicated probability, percentages and the odds of winning the simple card game she called Acey Duecey. And so it became easy to win.

He could feel his grandmother’s curious gaze upon him as he sat counting the coins he had amassed. He liked to stack the coins in a single tower, reaching a fraction higher with every winning hand, and he liked to imagine that one day he might have a tower of money that was taller than him, taller than his grandmother, taller then them both. A pile of silver that he could climb away from here to the moon and stars.

‘Teach me that thing you do with the coin,’ he said, trying and fumbling.

She reached down to ruffle her fingers through his messy brown hair in an uncharacteristic display of affection and he lifted his bowed head.

‘I think perhaps you were born lucky,’ she said.

He was sixteen before he fell in love. All the girls at school were mad about Danny Featherbow but he barely noticed, which of course only made them giggle behind their hands all the more. His hair stood up in shocks of misbehaviour and was the last trace of boyishness that remained on a serious, handsome face.

Harriet was standing in line at the butcher’s on a freezing cold evening shortly before Christmas. She had milky skin and fine blonde hair, almost white, which fell halfway down her back. It was tied with a dark green ribbon and immediately Danny imagined untying that ribbon and seeing that hair cascade over those shoulders like spun silk. At that precise moment she looked directly at him, she was staring at him, this angel with the skin and the hair and the shoulders, and all the moisture was sucked out of his mouth so that he felt an insatiable urge to swallow, but he couldn’t and so he started to choke a bit. He thought he heard music. And then the whole world flooded back in and he realised she had been staring because the butcher’s boy was asking him what he wanted and somehow he had to recover his breath and remember where he was. He walked halfway home before he was able to feel normal again.

‘Gran?’ he yelled. Perhaps he would tell her about the girl in the butcher’s. She was forever on at him to meet a nice young lady. ‘Gran?’

The radio was on, which was unusual, she normally turned it off after tea so that she could enjoy a bit of peace and quiet. Outside it was pitch black already. A gust of wind moved the clouds and the moon washed the garden as brightly as the mid-morning sun in springtime.

That’s when he saw her lying on the cold, wet grass and he started to yell. His heart jumped in his chest, painful and frightening. With three enormous strides he was at her side and calling to her and she was limp in his arms as he cradled her, feeling the terribly faint puff of her laboured breathing, the damp seeping through his jeans onto his knees, one eye refusing to open, her face crumpled and limp except for the single fearful eye that stared. By the time the ambulance came he was freezing cold and shaking with fear.

His grandmother died early the next day.

A neighbour came to find him on hearing the news and offered him somewhere to stay. ‘Just temporary,’ she said, knowing the options that were available to a sixteen year old with nobody else. ‘Just until you finish school and we figure out what we’re going to do.’

People said that she was good to take him in, to give the boy a home. The longing in Danny swelled up from his gut and threatened to consume him. He didn’t talk to anyone about it.

He dressed for her funeral slowly in his black suit, borrowed from a cousin he did not know, and a black tie, bought new and never to be worn again.

Everyone came back to the house afterwards, which was a big mistake. There were more people than he expected. The distant family turned out to pay their respects as did all their neighbours, and in every face he saw the same combination of pity and hope. It was excruciating. He stood with his back in the corner of the small living room, horrified at these people in their home picking over the dry sandwiches and sponge cake that had appeared.

‘Thank you so much for coming,’ he said by rote. ‘It would have meant a lot to her.’

He felt incredibly anxious. He longed to tell them all to go home so that he could crawl back into bed but he had never been to a funeral wake, and he no idea what was expected of him. He tried to back further into his corner but then he saw her. The angel from the high street.

‘I know you, don’t I?’ she said.

Close up he immediately realised two things. One, she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. Two, she was older than he was, not by much, but she was.

‘I’m Harriet.’

‘Harriet,’ he echoed dumbly.

‘Yes. Hey. Are you okay?’

He snapped to his senses. ‘I’m Danny,’ he said. ‘Daniel. Dan.’

‘All at once?’ she said, her hand fluttering to her throat, the soft pads of her fingers caressing the delicate skin there in a way that made him feel light-headed. ‘Pick one.’

‘Danny,’ he said. Maybe Danny sounded like a little boy’s name. He should have said Daniel. Or Dan. Too late. He stood tall and pushed his hair back. ‘Danny,’ he said firmly.

She was wearing a dark green dress and a sombre little jacket to match and had a sprig of fresh rosemary pinned to her lapel, with small purple flowers and spiky silver-green leaves ‘I’m so sorry about your grandmother. She was a good friend to my aunt.’ He was pulled into Harriet’s concerned grey gaze and felt as if he had drawn into calm moonlit waters. His breath came more easily.

‘I think this is the worst day of my life,’ he said. ‘All these people. She didn’t even like most of them. I feel like I’m letting her down.’

‘What would she do if she were here?’

‘Point at the clock and ask them all to leave.’

Harriet’s grey eyes were burning, like the ashy coals at the end of a fire. She slipped her hand into his. It was light and supple. His thoughts blurred at the edges and he thought he could hear his own heartbeat, the blood pulsing in him as proof of life, and he drew in a breath that briefly and tantalisingly held the scent of rosemary. He swept his thumb over the crook of hers and felt a small increase in pressure.

‘Do it,’ she whispered.

Danny raised his voice to be heard over the idle chatter. ‘Excuse me? Excuse me?’

He picked up a tea cup and let it fall back onto its saucer with a loud clatter that drew the attention of the room. As all these unknown people turned to face him he felt his throat itch the way it always did when he was nervous. He took a single deep breath and fixed his eyes on the portrait of his grandmother in a frame on the mantelpiece, a young woman shortly after the war, determined and free.

He addressed the room in a voice that was rich and constant. A voice that demanded to be obeyed. A man’s voice. ‘Excuse me? Everyone? I’d like you to go.’

There was a hushed silence and several people looked embarrassed, shuffling and looking down at their feet. Nobody made a move to leave.

He started to gather up the cups and saucers, sloshing unfinished lukewarm tea as he tried to carry too much crockery into the little kitchen. Harriet helped, smiling apologetically at the bewildered mourners and offered to help get people’s coats.

The house was eventually silent, but for the sound of Harriet washing teacups in the little back kitchen. Danny opened the stuffed drawers in the sideboard and together they went through her things. The council house needed to be vacant by the end of the following day.

He wanted to find old love letters and poetry, dried rose petals and secrets, but instead he found bank statements and dust.

‘Don’t cry,’ said Harriet, squeezing his hand.

‘She would be upset about the dust,’ he said, blinking back the tears.

‘What will you do, Danny?’ said Harriet. ‘What will you do now that you’re all alone?’

In years to come Danny would marry Harriet. For their honeymoon, they would journey to Mexico, their lives ahead of them.

When did you decide you wanted to become a writer?

I have never really considered doing anything else. I wrote my first romance when I was about nine or ten, I distinctly remember that I didn’t want to write the word ‘bra’ so my heroine was wearing a bikini before she got seduced by a piano player and I was terrified that my mum would find my notebook. I was reading a lot of
Sweet Dreams
and
Sweet Valley High
at the time. I studied screenwriting at university, then I was a writer’s agent for a while. The epiphany moment, when I decided to knuckle down and write a complete novel, was making peace with the fact that I prefer Jackie Collins to Anna Karenina, and realising that was what I should write.