The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets Read online

  See? I’m not stupid. What chance is there that someone as unrefined, morose and yobbish as Ian Prudhoe will ever make it into a published book without my help? None, I would say. And he will know that. So when I tell him about The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets, he will realise how much he needs me. He will write the story of himself, M8 and the second cricketer (if this mythical figure even exists) and he will submit it to me.

  ‘Tamsin, I’m afraid we’ve had some complaints about you,’ says June. It is the day she called tomorrow yesterday. I am happy to be in her office receiving a ticking-off. It is preferable to wrestling with a giant mound of soggy whiteness, looking for spots of red or brown. On June’s desk are two framed photographs, each of a different pudding-like child, a girl and a boy. The word ‘lumpen’ springs to mind.

  ‘Complaints from whom?’ I mutter sarcastically. ‘Noone ever sees me. Unless some of the towels have complained.’

  ‘Christine says you forced her to put this on reception.’ She produces my box from under her desk. I read my own handwriting on the label: ‘Coming soon from a major UK publisher: THE FANTASTIC BOOK OF EVERYBODY’S SECRETS. Anonymous contributions welcome! See your own deepest, darkest secret in print!’ I made the box out of an old cereal packet.

  I want to snarl at June to give it to me. There might be some new offerings inside it. Actually, part of me can’t believe how few people have contributed so far, given how many pass through the Hathersage, Loughborough – hundreds every day. And my box has been around the hotel for nearly a month. Is it possible that some people wouldn’t want to publish their secrets, even anonymously? I suppose it must be, although, hard as I try, I cannot get inside the mind of such a person.

  ‘Tamsin, why do you think Debbie and Lisa asked to transfer to other hotels?’ says June. ‘And even then you didn’t get the hint. Apparently you’ve given them each a similar, er, contraption, and they’re not at all comfortable with that. They’re worried about you, Tamsin, and so am I.’

  I do not want June’s concern, only Ian Prudhoe’s. I care nothing for anybody else. Even the news of Debbie and Lisa’s betrayal doesn’t hit me as hard as I would have expected it to.

  ‘Surely, as a caring employer,’ I suggest, ‘you shouldn’t stand in the way of employees’ creative projects.’

  ‘It’s not real, though, is it? It’s a silly game you’re playing. You must know this book of secrets is never going to be published, even if you do manage to collect enough secrets to make a book. And…well, you must know that’s never going to happen.’

  ‘I know no such thing,’ I assert calmly. ‘I’ve put serious time and energy into this project. I certainly wouldn’t have bothered if I didn’t believe the end result would be worth it.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to buy a book of secrets? Why would anyone want to put their secret in a book? What’s the point?’ June says impatiently, revealing her philistinism.

  To tell her even a fraction of what I know and she doesn’t would take too long; I can’t be bothered. Would she have said the same to Nancy Friday, about My Secret Garden? ‘Who’d want to read about strangers’ sexual fantasies? Who’d want to send in details of their own sexual fantasies to be included in a book?’ Plenty of people, actually, June. That’s why there have been two sequels; that’s why all three books have been international bestsellers.

  It would be pointless to talk to June about the huge popularity of confessional and misery memoirs. Equally pointless to explain that secrets – which often are basically misery with the added bonuses of suspense and intrigue – might have an even wider appeal. What could be more fascinating than to read about the things people find it necessary to conceal? What greater insight into the minds and hearts of others could there possibly be? It would be – it will be – a book not only about secrets but about psychology, the human condition, morality and social norms at the start of the twenty-first century. And the relief of finally being able to express yourself, within the framework of a safe, anonymous community of fellow secret-sharers. To get it off your chest, without having to suffer the consequences in your daily life: the suspicious looks, the sarcastic comments… To take what has been festering inside you and make it part of something constructive, something instructive…

  I realise I need to write an advance information sheet for the book to send to publishers, highlighting the project’s unique selling points, where exactly in the market The Fantastic Book would fit. Why haven’t I done this already? I also need to make a new label for my secret-collection box, one that’s worded less lasciviously. It was a mistake, I realise, to dumb down in order to appeal to the Hathersage’s clientele. My box will attract more deposits if I highlight the social science aspect of the project. These days everyone wants to appear clever in front of their friends, especially people who aren’t.

  ‘Anyway, you can’t keep that box in the hotel,’ says June. ‘If you want to… well, you’ll have to do it in your own time and on your own premises.’

  ‘I need the hotel,’ I explain. ‘I need a constant supply of new people. If I put the box in my bedsit, noone will see it except me.’ June has no faith in The Fantastic Book because it is my idea, and she thinks I am just a towel-scrubber. If she knew about my literary background, would she change her mind? One thing’s for sure: if the idea were not mine but Elaine Showalter’s, or Natasha Walter’s, or Susan Sontag’s, if June saw any of those women talking about it on The South Bank Show, she would be visibly impressed.

  ‘Tamsin, I think you’re ill. I think you need medical help.’

  I find this notion interesting. ‘Really?’ I say. If I am ill, then a whole range of things might not be my fault. ‘How long might I have been ill for?’ I ask, wondering if I could find a doctor who would certify that my disease, whatever it might be, started long before the Ian McEwan incident.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go, Tamsin.’

  ‘What? But you just said I was ill! That’s discrimination! I should be off work on full sick pay until such time as I’m well enough to resume my shitty-towel-scrubbing career.’

  ‘I’ve never liked your sarcasm, Tamsin.’

  ‘I’ve never liked you, June. Your skirts are ridiculously short for a woman your age. You think you can get away with it because your legs are long and slim, but you’ve obviously never seen the cellulite on the backs of your thighs. I, on the other hand, see it every day, through your laddered tights. And you have a face like a donkey.’

  She shrieks, then begins to cry. I try to enjoy the spectacle, but find I cannot. Perhaps I am sicker than even June imagines.

  4) My husband doesnt know our babys not his. Shes Gary from works. Now I cant tell him or hed walk out on us both, so I have to lie for ever and its doing my head in.

  5) I am nothing. I used to manage one of the world’s leading literature festivals almost single-handedly, until I was fired. After that, I worked in the laundry department of a hotel. My job was to sort out the bloody and shitty towels from the unblemished ones, and apply stain remover before throwing them in with the rest of the washing. I was fired from this job too. As I write this, I am sitting on a bench on the top of Ludlum Hill. It is the middle of a January afternoon and my hands are numb with cold.

  My secret is the incident that led to my being fired from the literature festival. It is an odd sort of secret, because it is known by almost everybody who considers themselves part of the literary scene. However, it led to my moving to a new town to start a new life, and in that new life it has remained a secret. I did once try to tell someone – a man – but he told me he wasn’t interested. So I will tell the readers of this book instead, because I have to let go of the past and this is the only way.

  It was the 2001 literature festival. Ian McEwan was about to read to a full house at the Maltings, and I was hosting the event. I arrived late, a little flustered. You see, I’d had another of the phone calls that had been plaguing me for some time, and I’d found it di
fficult to tear myself away from the phone, even knowing Ian McEwan was waiting, in case it rang again.

  Two years earlier, I had split up with my boyfriend. To be more specific, he had left me. One day I returned from work and he and all his possessions had vanished. He refused to meet me or talk to me, and used his sister to relay the message that I was not to try to contact him at any time in the future. His sister said that she knew his reasons, but that she was not allowed to tell me. It was baffling, because the day before he vanished he asked me to marry him and I said yes. Later, in bed, when he kissed me goodnight, he said, ‘I can’t believe I have to waste eight hours sleeping before I can see you again.’ I’m sure I don’t need to explain to readers why I was so dumbfounded when he chose the very next day to disappear without a trace!

  I coped extremely well under the circumstances – everyone said so – and was able to run the festival perfectly adequately (with aplomb, even), despite my unhappiness. As time went on I realised that I could live without him, but not without his reasons. I needed to know why he had deserted me, and he refused to tell me, which left me in a terrible bind.

  Approximately three weeks after he went, I started to get nuisance phone calls. The phone would ring, I would answer, and there would be a brief silence, or sometimes background noise, before the caller hung up. When I dialled 1471, I found that the number had been withheld. After this happened for the twentieth, or perhaps the thirtieth, time, I began to wonder if it was my ex-boyfriend. I recalled what he’d said about having to waste time sleeping before seeing me again, and grew more and more convinced that, whatever happened afterwards, he must have loved me when he said those words. And if he loved me that much the day before he ran away, it wasn’t inconceivable that some of that love survived his hasty departure. I thought it entirely possible that he was torn between his love for me and, perhaps, a fear of commitment, and that, while it was the scared part of him that ran, it was the loving part that kept ringing me and then slamming the phone down.

  I became obsessed. When other men asked me out (even a famous one, a Booker Prize nominee who shall remain nameless), I felt I had to say no. If the nuisance caller was my ex, then in some ways he had not completely gone from my life and I felt I owed him some loyalty. If he was still persistently telephoning me, I concluded, then that had to mean that at least on some level he wanted us to get back together, and was simply having trouble plucking up the courage to say so.

  I stopped going out, apart from to work. My social life came to consist of nothing more than sitting in my lounge, tensely waiting for the next nuisance call. Some evenings I would get nine or ten – that would make me happy. But other nights there might be only one, or, God forbid, none. I was inconsolable when he didn’t phone at all, and prayed that he hadn’t decided to move on and forget me. None of my friends knew about my obsession, and I didn’t dare tell them. I knew exactly what they’d say – ‘you’ve no way of knowing it’s him and it may well not be’ – and I couldn’t have endured that. I wanted it to be him. I needed it to be.

  Earlier in this account I wrote that these calls ‘plagued’ me. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that my uncertainty was the truly pestilential aspect of what was occurring, not the calls themselves. Was it him or wasn’t it? The anonymous caller was depriving me of the means to interpret my own life story and make the choices we all need to make in order to feel wholly human. For as long as I believed it might be him, I was stuck, blocked, doomed.

  So, as a result of my mental imprisonment I was late for Ian McEwan’s event, which was a disaster because I was supposed to be introducing it. As I ran to the Maltings, I feared that they might have started without me, that Ian McEwan might have had to be introduced, in an emergency, by Barry the sound engineer or, worse, by himself. Luckily, I arrived to find that everything was running half an hour late because the writer who had been on before Ian had refused to stop talking.

  I found Ian McEwan waiting in the wings, in the darkness. I introduced myself and apologised for my lateness. He told me not to worry about it. I felt I owed him a fuller explanation, so I said, ‘I’ve been getting nuisance calls. For two years.’ I told him the whole story. He didn’t say much, which I took as an invitation for me to elaborate. I think he intuited that listening without interruption was the best thing he could do for me. I had never spoken about the matter before, and I found that I was suddenly eager to share my turmoil with somebody.

  ‘The thing is,’ I said. ‘I’m always scared to speak, even though part of me wants to say something significant, quickly, before he hangs up. Perhaps he’s waiting for me to make the first move. I want to ask if it’s him, but I can’t risk it, in case it isn’t and the person speaks and says no, and I discover it’s not him after all. But until I’m brave enough to ask, I will always assume it’s him, and there’s a danger in that too. Can you imagine how frustrating it is for me, not knowing whether I’m still having a relationship with him or not? To be forced to listen to silence, in silence, over and over?’ I was proud of that line. I think I even repeated it: ‘to silence, in silence’.

  ‘Mm,’ said Ian McEwan.

  ‘I mean, it must be him, mustn’t it? Who else could it be? Evidently it’s not just some random sex pest, because there are never any questions about what colour knickers I’m wearing or anything. There isn’t even heavy breathing. And the timing is too much of a coincidence. As I said, the calls started three weeks after he disappeared. I suppose you think I ought to forget about him, don’t you? Put the past behind me?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Or contact the police. But, if it is him, I don’t want to get him into trouble. I have a really strong sense, you see, that it’s him, and that has to mean something. Do you believe in non-verbal communication? In telepathy?’

  ‘Well…’ McEwan mumbled.

  ‘I never used to, but I think when two people love each other enough, a form of psychic communion might be possible, don’t you? And there’s another weird thing. His name is Ian. And here I am talking to you, and I’ve got this really strong, strange feeling of rightness, of everything fitting together.’

  ‘I see,’ said McEwan.

  ‘Do you think it is him that’s phoning me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But if you had to make an educated guess?’

  ‘I really don’t know. Shouldn’t we…?’ He pointed towards the empty stage.

  It was probably selfish of me, but I wasn’t yet ready to share him with an audience of three hundred people. I decided to approach the matter in what I thought was a tactful way. ‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you to one of the dressing rooms, and then I’ll go and find out what’s holding things up.’ Ian McEwan seemed to be satisfied with this suggestion, and followed me to the theatre’s smallest, most inaccessible dressing room. Noone would think to look for us here. The room contained only a mirror, a table and two chairs, and was a little chilly. ‘Have a seat,’ I told McEwan confidently. ‘I’ll go and investigate, and I’ll find you a drink while I’m at it.’ I closed the door, and made my way as quickly as I could to the stage. I wasn’t nervous, that was the strange thing; I was simply doing what was necessary. It didn’t feel wrong.

  I strode towards the microphone. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid there will be a delay to the start of this evening’s performance. Ian McEwan is feeling slightly unwell, though he assures me he will be fine in due course, if he is allowed to rest for a while. So, can I suggest that you go and have a drink at the bar, and we’ll reconvene in exactly an hour? Thank you very much for your patience, and I’m sorry for the inconvenience.’

  I raced back to the little dressing room. Thankfully, Ian McEwan was still there. He looked concerned when I told him that the event had been put back an hour. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘The sound engineers are sorting out a few technical problems. So, where were we? Oh, yes. One thing that I keep coming back to is the contradiction between him �
�� my ex – saying that he didn’t want to waste eight hours sleeping before he saw me again, and him disappearing the very next day. When a person’s words and actions can’t be reconciled, what do you do? Which do you believe – the words or the actions? Presumably you, as a writer, would plump for the words, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Erm…you mentioned a drink,’ said Ian McEwan.

  We got no further than that. Ruth, the festival director (in name only, I should point out), burst into the room, followed by McEwan’s agent and his wife, and of course my little white lie was exposed. I hadn’t adequately thought it through; I can see that now. I suppose I assumed that, once Ian McEwan’s event had been a roaring success, as it was sure to be, noone would have any interest in discussing the late start to the evening, let alone its causes.

  I have to say, though I still love his books, McEwan’s lack of support shocked me. I expected him to write to the board and insist that I be reinstated, but he didn’t. Neither did his agent or his editor, with whom I had always been on excellent terms. They all betrayed me. My parents, who read about my disgrace in Private Eye, wrote to Ian McEwan and apologised on my behalf. My mother sent me a copy of the letter, in which she told McEwan that she was ‘thoroughly ashamed’ of me. I haven’t spoken to my family since.

  I moved away, far away, shortly afterwards. Now nobody telephones me and I’m grateful. I’m glad I have no friends. I couldn’t stand to pick up a ringing phone and hear a voice on the other end instead of silence. I mourn the loss of my mute caller every second of every minute of every hour. It is only now that I realise – way, way too late – that I loved him. It no longer matters whether he was my ex-boyfriend or not. I miss him in his own right. What we shared was beyond words.