Woman with a Secret Read online

  “Hello?”

  “Nicki, it’s me.”

  Melissa. My hand, holding the phone, starts to shake. I want to hang up.

  “Nicki? Are you still there?”

  “What do you want?” Yes, I’m still. I’m deathly still, listening to the voice of treachery. Alarmingly, it sounds exactly the same as the voice of my once best friend.

  “I’m sorry I had to talk to the police. I hope you understand that I did have to.”

  First Kate Zilber, now Melissa . . . Who will be the next betrayer to beg me to understand how hard it was for them?

  King Edward, if you let him.

  “Are you calling for a reason?” I ask Melissa.

  She says nothing. I’ve known her long enough to be able to read her mind. She’s weighing up whether to return to the subject of whether I can understand and forgive her. In the end, she decides she might get a better result if she moves on. “Lee and I spent the weekend at your parents’ house.”

  “My condolences.”

  I don’t want to be speaking to Melissa, so I tune out and look at Ethan’s failed test instead. There are five questions on the sheet of paper. The first four are straightforward, almost impossible to get wrong: what is your name? How old are you? Where do you live? When is your birthday? Ethan has answered all these questions correctly. The fifth question isn’t a question; it’s an order followed by a threat. It says, “Do not answer any of the above questions. If you follow this instruction, you will get ten marks. If you do not follow this instruction, you will get zero marks.” At the top of the sheet, there’s another order: “Make sure to read through all the questions before answering them.”

  “Nicki? Are you listening?”

  “Yep.” Not very attentively, no. Something about a reservoir and beautiful scenery. I don’t care that you went walking with my parents and my brother. I don’t care that you had a lovely time.

  Ethan’s failed test I care about. Because it’s not fair that he got no marks. Even if he’d done as he was told and read through all the questions before he started, there is nothing on this sheet to indicate that question five carries more weight than the other four. Nowhere does it say, “The final question is the one you must pay the most attention to.” Faced with four questions that demand answers versus one that isn’t even a question and says, “Ignore all the other questions,” how is a child supposed to know that number five takes precedence? There’s no indication that it does, or should. If anything, the weight of evidence is strongly on the side of answering questions one to four, since they’re in the majority.

  Ridiculous bloody idiot teacher.

  “I . . . I found something.” Melissa sounds nervous. I’ve missed part of what she said. Good.

  “Hmm?” I open a new “Compose Email” box, for the purpose of writing a letter of protest to Miss Stefanowicz. Ethan should get eight out of ten marks—two each for numbers one to four and none for number five—and I’m going to see that he gets them. And an apology. With one hand I start to type, “Dear Miss Stef . . .”

  “At your parents’ house,” Melissa is saying insistently, “I found two books.”

  “Yes, Mum and Dad can read. That’s one thing that can be said in their favor. They like books.”

  A message flashes up on the computer screen, in a box, then disappears before I can read it properly. “Request to the server,” I think it said, or something like that.

  I look over my shoulder, my heart thumping, half expecting to see the man with streaked hair. Mercifully, he’s not here. No one is watching me.

  No one’s watching you in this room. What if someone’s using your computer to watch you?

  “Request to the server”—what could it mean? Nothing like that’s ever happened before. Has Adam hacked into my Yahoo account? Has anyone?

  “No, not published books,” Melissa says. “Two notebooks. Lee’s handwriting. They were with your things, in—”

  “No. Shut up.” Melissa’s words have dragged me from my state of paranoid dread to an even worse horror. “I don’t want to talk about those notebooks.” I can’t bear to remember. I haven’t thought about those notebooks for years.

  I feel as if I might throw up.

  “Nicki, I’m worried. Why—”

  “I’m not discussing those . . . things. If you say another word about them, I’ll hang up.”

  “All right!” Melissa sounds as panicky as I feel. Is she crying? “Nicki, why didn’t you tell me the lunatic asylum story ever? Why did I hear it first from Lee? We were best friends, and you bitched about your parents all the time.”

  “I had a strange premonition you’d one day ask not to be confided in,” I say in a brittle voice.

  “Lee told me it was horrible for him, but . . . well, it must have been pretty horrible for you too. I can understand why you might not have wanted to talk about it.”

  Interesting. For the first time since getting involved with my brother, Melissa cares about how I feel.

  Because she’s seen the notebooks. And she’s wondering . . .

  It’s too late. I’ve wanted to talk to her, about everything, for so long, but not anymore. I can’t.

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” I say, and hang up before she can answer.

  On the computer, I open a new tab and go to my Hushmail account. I’ve still got all the emails I sent to King Edward, and his to me. He’s the only person who knows the lunatic asylum story, the only person I’ve ever felt able to tell—because of the distance between us, probably, and the degree of anonymity. Even then, I sent it to him as a story, and told it through Lee’s eyes, making sure I wasn’t the emotional focus of the story.

  Feeling things is too hard. I’d rather be a body without sensations, without consciousness. Living, dead—who cares?

  Stop it, Nicki. Be strong. You have a husband and two children downstairs who need you. And—

  I cut off the thought in my mind, but it springs back: it’s not only my family who need me. Damon Blundy needs me too. For a while, I thought I loved him. I thought the man I loved was him. Is that a good enough reason for me to be determined to do all I can to bring his killer to justice?

  I don’t care. I’m determined, whether I should be or not. Whoever murdered Damon will pay—I’m going to make sure of that.

  I find the old email I sent King Edward and open the attachment: my story, the one I wrote specially for him before I knew he was lying to me about his identity. I wrote it, but I’ve never read it—not even before I sent it. Writing it was hard enough.

  If I can make it all the way through to the end, I can handle anything.

  I start to read.

  Once upon a time, there was a twelve-year-old boy who had a seventeen-year-old sister. The sister lied to their parents all the time, about almost everything. If she hadn’t, they would have allowed her no privacy. They’d have forced their way into her soul, and whatever they found in there, they’d have torn it to shreds in their determination to improve her character.

  Despite her best efforts to deceive her parents, the boy’s sister usually ended up getting caught in her various lies. This resulted in daily rows that the boy had to listen to whether he wanted to or not. Even if he went into his bedroom and closed the door, he could hear his father yelling, sometimes for hours, and his sister crying. The noise always came from the same place: his father’s games room, in which he played snooker and table football and darts. The games room was across the hall from the boy’s bedroom, no more than a few feet away. His father always made sure to close the games room door, but, at that distance, even twenty closed doors wouldn’t have protected the boy from the sound of the fighting.

  His sister would always cry and say sorry to her father for lying, but she didn’t mean it, because she would then lie again the next day, and get found out, and then there would be another row, and more yelling and weeping. After a few years of listening to these episodes, the boy decided that his sister’s distress was genu
ine, but had nothing to do with contrition. Rather, it was that she found it unpleasant to be shouted at for hours at a time about how she’d let herself and her family down. Her father didn’t restrict his shouting to the subject of his daughter’s lies. He also yelled at her for wearing too much makeup, not spending enough time on her homework, making too many phone calls, getting up too late at weekends, liking the wrong music, having the wrong opinion about every subject, wearing the wrong jewelry, choosing the wrong boyfriends, the wrong clothes, the wrong friends, putting the wrong posters on her walls and many other things. Every choice the daughter made was the wrong choice, and every opinion she expressed was the wrong opinion.

  The boy found his father’s tirades distressing to listen to. They made him shake. Sometimes he would press himself against the far wall of his bedroom, beneath the window. Sometimes, though he was always terrified to open his door while an episode was in progress, he would force himself to do it so that he could escape downstairs. His father’s shouting and his sister’s crying could still be heard clearly from downstairs, but it wasn’t quite as deafening. However, downstairs there was other crying to contend with: the boy’s mother’s crying, which usually took place in the kitchen.

  The boy couldn’t understand why his mother always stayed as far away from the trouble as possible. Surely as a grown-up she could do something to make the noise stop? Yet she never did. As soon as the shouting started, she behaved as if her husband and daughter were members of a different family. She wouldn’t even go upstairs if she needed something from her bedroom, not until the yelling had stopped and her husband had finally accepted her daughter’s ninety-seventh apology. Then and only then would she wash her face at the kitchen sink, dry it with a tea towel, put on a bright smile and wade back into family life as if nothing had happened.

  The boy tried not to blame his mother because he could see that she was weak like him, and scared like him. He didn’t blame his father either, because his father, as he kept telling the rest of the family, was a man of high principle who couldn’t help it if lies made him angry. The boy learned that lying was the worst thing ever. It made sense to blame his sister, who couldn’t possibly have failed to notice that she rarely got away with her attempted deceptions. Why did she bother? Why didn’t she admit defeat and start telling the truth?

  One day, the boy plucked up the courage to ask her. He was beginning to wonder if she secretly enjoyed the fights with her father. She smiled and said, “Of course I don’t enjoy them. Would you enjoy being screamed at for three hours a day about what a terrible person you are?” The boy said he wouldn’t, and that therefore he would resolve never to lie again. “Often you lie when there’s no need,” he told his sister. “Mum and Dad would have let you go to that concert if you’d asked them. You didn’t need to pretend it was a school trip.” His sister laughed. “‘Let’ me?” she said. “Maybe they would have. I lie to them because they deserve to be lied to. They don’t deserve to have power over me. They’ve persecuted me since the day I was born.”

  “No, they haven’t,” said the boy, because, like most people, he didn’t recognize persecution that wore a mask of loving parental concern.

  The fights continued. The boy grew more anxious and withdrawn. His sister stopped crying during her father’s tirades, and instead turned herself to stone. She taught the boy how to make earplugs out of tissue paper, so that he wouldn’t have to listen if he didn’t want to when the trouble started.

  Sometimes a glimmer of hope was offered by a visiting relative from a different part of the country. Whenever this happened, the boy prayed that there would be a terrible eruption while the relative was in the house and that the relative would leap up and declare, “This is intolerable! Something must be done! No one can be expected to live like this!” Instead what happened was that extended family members turned into versions of the little boy’s mother, perching tensely on the edges of chairs, waiting in silence for the trouble to subside. Sometimes bright, false conversations were had, as the boy’s mother and the visiting relatives conspired to cover up the noise.

  What made life even more confusing for the boy was that his mum and dad were always scrupulously kind and fair to him, because he was always honest and obedient. That’s how he knew they were good parents. He wondered why they never acknowledged that it must be difficult for him, growing up in a war zone. Why didn’t it cross his father’s mind, or his mother’s, that all the shouting was as frightening and unpleasant for him, the blameless child, as it was for his sister?

  One weekend morning, his mother shook him awake while it was still dark outside. She was fully dressed and crying. “Get up,” she whispered. “We have to go out. You can’t stay here on your own.” The boy asked where they were going, but his mother didn’t answer. “Just get dressed,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what you wear: no one’s going to see you. Go and sit in the car, as quickly as you can.” The little boy understood that he was to have no breakfast, and that to ask would be a mistake. His mother didn’t care about feeding him this morning, or about making sure he brushed his teeth. Something awful was about to happen, if it wasn’t happening already—something worse than what the boy was used to.

  He dressed and went downstairs. His mother was waiting for him by the front door. She opened it when she saw him coming, and gestured for him to go outside. He stepped out onto the drive and saw that his father and sister were already in the car: his father at the wheel and his sister behind him, in the back. He climbed in and sat beside his sister. His mother got in too, and his father started the engine. They set off. No one spoke, and the little boy’s sister didn’t look at him, not even when he started to cry. She kept staring straight ahead, at the back of the driver’s seat. This frightened the boy more than anything else. His sister had always been kind to him—always. Most people in her situation would detest a brother like him—the favored good child who never put a foot wrong as far as his parents were concerned—but not his sister; she had never allowed herself to fall into that trap. So why wasn’t she comforting him now, as they drove along in silence, in the only-just-dawning daylight, with him crying? Why was she staring straight ahead as if she were in a coma?

  The boy eventually asked where they were going, because the dread that was welling up inside him had grown too large and needed to escape. His father replied, “We’re going to a lunatic asylum, where your sister will be staying for a while.”

  The boy’s sister didn’t flinch; the news hadn’t come as a shock to her as it had to him. Evidently she had been told where she was going before setting off.

  “Someone who keeps lying in the way that your sister lies must be sick in the head,” said the boy’s father. “Your mum and I have tried as hard as we can to make her see the error of her ways, but we’re not experts when it comes to mental illness. And that’s what a compulsion to deceive is—it’s a mental illness. So we’ve decided to let the doctors at the lunatic asylum deal with it. They have all kinds of techniques and special methods that are meant to be very effective. Like electric shock treatment—where they strap you to a table, tie you down and give you electric shocks that make your whole body light up. It’s very painful, but it works, apparently, when it comes to curing sick minds. That’s if the patient strapped to the table doesn’t catch fire—that happens sometimes, if the electricity current isn’t carefully monitored. I’m assured it’s never happened at this asylum, though, so we don’t need to worry about that.”

  The boy was crying hysterically by this point. “Can you see what you’re doing to your brother?” his father said to his sister.

  “I can see what you’re doing to him,” she replied.

  “Can you see that you’re ruining his life? That’s why we have to put you in the asylum.”

  The boy’s sister rolled her eyes and said, “I’ll escape. I’ll fuck whoever’s in charge and persuade them to let me out.” She was seventeen and had been sexually active for a year or so. Her brother kne
w this because it had been the subject of many of the closed-door rows in his father’s games room recently. His sister had been caught with boyfriends—sometimes in her bedroom, after she’d snuck them in when her parents were asleep; once at a friend’s house.

  “Be facetious if you want to,” her father told her, “but you’ll soon see. No one escapes from places like the one we’re taking you to. You’ll be handcuffed for most of the time. Your legs will be chained together so you won’t be able to walk.”

  The boy whimpered at the thought of this happening to his sister. She turned to him then and put her hand on his arm. He looked at her and she shook her head. “It’s not true,” she mouthed at him. “It’s a lie. Don’t worry.”

  Their mother, watching her daughter in the rearview mirror, said, “She’s telling him it’s not true, it’s a lie.” She sounded terrified. The boy understood why she felt compelled to inform on her daughter so quickly and efficiently; he understood that he would have done the same in her position.

  “Oh, I promise you it’s true,” his father said, sounding gleeful about the prospect of incarcerating his only daughter in a lunatic asylum.

  After an amount of time that the boy couldn’t measure, the car turned off the main road and onto a lane that was straight and wide at first, but soon started to narrow and bend. There were thick hedges on both sides. From this point onward, the boy saw no cars apart from the one that contained his unhappy family. The lane straightened out again. Daylight had dawned by now, and the boy could see that there was a large house with shuttered windows coming up on the left, behind a stone wall. The shutters were a sickly shade of green.

  “Here we are,” said his father, stopping the car in front of two large stone gateposts. Carved into one of them was the name “Bardolph House.” The boy felt ill. He couldn’t bear the idea of leaving his sister in this place.