The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets Read online

  A few seconds later, or it might even be minutes, she dares to look up. She sees his broad back. He is kissing his children goodbye. She cannot see them clearly because of all the people, but she notices Agnes’s coat. It is brown with a fitted waist, and has a ridiculous collar made of some shaggy, trailing, furry material, as if someone has skinned an animal and draped the scrapings around Agnes’s neck.

  None of the other girls has a coat like that. It will be easy to spot at break, or lunchtime, when Sol isn’t there. She ducks when he turns to leave, keeping one eye half open to check that he doesn’t look in her direction. He doesn’t. Her body feels as if it has been shaken in a hard box.

  Gradually, she recovers her composure. She settles in for the wait, feeling guilty because she could and should be working. She has done nothing, achieved nothing, since Sol attacked her, and she must achieve, substantially and soon. She must prove that she is not worthless. Also, there is something else bothering her. Why are the children called Wilfred and Agnes? What sort of names are those for young, happy, twenty-first-century children?

  Agnes and Wilfred. Exploited worker names, victim names, early-tragic-death names. She pictures a downtrodden Victorian servant girl in an apron, curtseying before a tyrannical master; a tubercular chimney sweep or coal miner with a searing cough, broken shoes and a face black with dust from being forced to crawl into holes noone would choose to enter. Agnes and Wilfred. She knows, absolutely knows beyond all doubt, that Sol chose the names. Tina had nothing to do with it. Poor little Wilfred. Poor brave Agnes.

  Suddenly, she is crying, gulping, struggling for breath. Why couldn’t they be called Francesca and Hugo, or Megan and Josh, or Eleanor and Zachary? It would make killing them so much easier. Sol Barber has ruined everything all over again.

  She needs to see their faces close up. It is possible that they will be vivid, boisterous creatures, capable of peeling away from the names Wilfred and Agnes all connotations of shabby pensioners dying alone in cold houses.

  She wonders about Sol’s real name. Is is bad? Is that why he calls himself after his favourite beer? It occurs to her that she, by chance, shares her first name with that of the lager she usually drinks. She shudders, wanting to have nothing in common with Sol. She will never drink that beer again.

  After what feels like an age, she hears the blare of a tinny bell coming from inside the squat school building, and a few seconds later there is a colourful spurt of children into the playground. Carefully, after having checked that she has not had any kind of embarrassing accident (she checks often, these days) she climbs out of the car and walks over to the railings.

  She sees Wilfred Barber first and is surprised to recognise him. He looks like Sol but in miniature. She wonders if Wilfred is calmer and kinder than his father, if the Barbers are improving with each generation. Wilfred is with four friends and a football. He speaks and smiles occasionally, but he is not one of the main ones; she can see that straight away. She thinks she can also tell that he wishes the others would pay more attention to him, give him more of a chance to shine. She is sure he could and would shine, if a suitable opportunity presented itself.

  Agnes’s coat appears, with Agnes in it. She pulls her collar – which, on second viewing, looks like the torn-off scalp of a witch – around her ears. Agnes is alone, standing with her arms folded by the wall of the school building, looking as if she does not expect anybody to join her any time soon. Her skin has a yellow tinge; she is a little tawny scrap, like a doodle Dr Seuss might have rejected as being not quite up to scratch.

  Oh, my God, those poor children, she thinks, and begins to fantasise about befriending Agnes and Wilfred Barber. She could be their secret confidante and benefactor. They might grow to love her more than they love Sol. She has seen his temper in action. How many times have the children seen it? How many more times will they see it? She pictures Tina hiding behind an armchair while Sol beats Wilfred with a curtain rail, while he drags Agnes round the house by her hair. Oh, yes, the children are bound to prefer her, almost as soon as they meet her, to their brute of a father.

  She closes her eyes, knowing that at some point she will need to draw a line under this sort of behaviour, this sort of thinking. The bell rings again and, when Agnes turns to go back inside, she notices a hearing aid above one of her ears. So, she thinks. So Agnes is partially deaf. That must have made Sol angry, when he first found out. And Tina.

  Agnes is deaf. It is a new detail. It is too much; she doesn’t want to know any more about Sol’s family. Already, she is too close, close enough to feel involved, confused. She must get away. She cannot, after all, kill Sol’s children. She runs across the road, fumbles with her car door, slams it shut once she is inside and speeds off, feeling chilly, sad and empty.

  It takes her two minutes to drive out of his village. It is a nothing sort of place, with an A road running through it, robbing it of any charm it might otherwise have had. The green, a triangle with one curved side, is scruffy and patchy, littered with empty crisp and cigarette packets. Behind it, a sign saying ‘Mary’s Tea Rooms’ is fixed above the door of a detached stone house that, over the years, has been blackened by traffic fumes. There are net curtains in the windows. She hates this place and everything about it. The idea of Sol Barber, the flavour of him, is like a huge, swollen spider, crouching over the part of the country where he lives.

  But eventually she is free; she is on a road that seems to have nothing to do with Sol. His domain has an end, and she has passed it. She smiles, feeling better than she has for a while. Because it would be wrong to think she has achieved nothing today. She has taken a form of revenge. If she had children, the thought that somebody she knew, somebody she had once wronged, had driven to their school, stood at the railings and watched them in the playground, and fantasised about killing them, would be too terrible to contemplate. What if the person came back a second time to turn the fantasy into a reality? One might live in fear for ever.

  The revenge, she clarifies to herself, is not the killing, therefore, but the thinking about killing. Or the thinking about befriending, poaching. And she can continue to think obsessively about Sol’s children in a way that, were he aware of it, would fill him with the worst kind of dread. But never mind the future; this morning, in isolation, is enough. An unbalanced woman has stood and stared at his children, unsure about whether she wants to harm them or not. That is worse than what happens to most people’s children, in a civilised society. That is sufficient revenge.

  She laughs at herself. So that’s it? Some thoughts she had one morning? Big deal, she can imagine Sol saying. Thoughts? Water off a duck’s back, oil stains off a carpet. Do you really think you could ever seriously harm anyone, you pathetic bitch?

  We All Say What We Want

  TOM FOYERS WAS NOT A STRAIGHTFORWARD MAN. HE WOULD have liked to be. He admired straightforward people, like his wife Selena, and like Idris Sutherland, with whom he now stood in the lift. They had both got on at the ground floor and would both get off at the eighth. ‘How’s life?’ Idris asked.

  ‘Fine, fine.’ Tom smiled. But it wasn’t. He loathed his job at Phelps Corcoran Cummings, which hogged about two-thirds of his waking time. He resented this lift that took him up to his office every morning, the way it spoke to you as you ascended – ‘floor number three, floor number four’ – in a perky, bodiless voice. He detested the building in which his firm was based. It was shaped like a slice taken out of the middle of a cone, glaring white all over, inside and out, menacing in its blandness. It had always reminded Tom of a spaceship that never quite managed to take off. The work itself was boring, and he was treated as a resource, not as a human being. Nobody appreciated his talents or his personality, so he had stopped using the former and hidden the latter. Top of Tom’s list of hates was his own office, which was the same size as the coat cupboard under his stairs at home, and had no windows – only a long, thin, glass panel in the door that looked out on to a gleaming white corridor.
Idris’s office was the same. Inside the building, one was encouraged to believe that there was no outside.

  ‘How are you?’ Tom asked Idris.

  ‘Shit. I hate this fucking place. I wish someone’d plant a bomb here. I wish someone would release Sarin gas in the foyer. Sorry, the atrium,’ Idris added with a sneer.

  I’d love to be as straightforward as Idris, thought Tom. He didn’t pursue the idea, however, because he knew it was pointless. He had never actively decided on the policy of saying the opposite of what he meant; it was simply what happened every time he opened his mouth. This had been the case ever since he was a child. His mother was prone to hysterical outbursts; she did enough unrestrained reacting for the whole family. At a young age, Tom had learned to tailor everything he said and did to pacify her. As for his own responses to life and the world, these he inspected under the microscope of privacy, like a secret, valuable stamp collection.

  Idris was grinning as the lift announced that they had reached floor number eight. He feels better, Tom thought glumly, now that he’s got a bit of the poisonous discontent out of his system. ‘Have you met our new line manager?’ asked Idris.

  ‘Nora?’ said Tom. The two men stepped out of the lift and walked along the corridor, swinging their briefcases. Idris swung his higher.

  ‘Yes. She’s just like a Nora. A dowdy, mumsy cow. In a meeting last week she showed me photos of her kids. Jesus! Nathan got a look at her CV – she’s a complete nonentity.’

  ‘She seems friendly enough,’ said Tom, though what he would have liked to say was this: ‘She called me into her office last week and introduced herself. She made a point of being very, very nice to me. Instantly, I recognised a fellow non-straightforward person. There must have been an ulterior motive behind her pleasant and confiding manner. She cannot possibly think I’m a good thing, because she’s in Gillian Bate’s pocket, and Gillian can’t stand me because she knows I know that she’s a lightweight who doesn’t deserve to be high up in any organisation. A suitable job for Gillian Bate would be circus accessory. To be tied to a revolving wheel and have knives thrown at her by a man with an impractical moustache – that would be about the right level for Gillian, given her intellect.’ Tom wanted to say all this to Idris, but couldn’t, even though he knew Idris would probably have become his best friend on the spot if he had. Tom would have found it easier to do the can-can naked in the atrium than to say what he really thought. Honesty, openness, the direct approach – Tom felt about these the way most people felt about hand grenades.

  ‘She only got the job because she’s Gillian’s lapdog,’ said Idris. ‘As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, “Mediocrity only recognises itself. It takes talent to recognise genius.” Later, alligator.’ Idris unlocked his office and swung into it in one fluid movement.

  Tom sighed and carried on walking. Did that mean that Idris was a genius? Or that he thought he was? One advantage of Tom’s reveal-nothing approach was that he had an invigorating inner life. He conducted with himself all the stimulating conversations he failed to have with other people.

  He emptied his pigeonhole and took the contents to his office to read. He had six letters – two in internal mail envelopes – and two faxes. If he’d had seven letters, or three faxes, there would not have been room for him and all his correspondence in his airless cubicle. As it was, he and his mail fitted snugly.

  He tackled the two sky-blue envelopes first. Internal communications were always the deadliest and it was as well to get them out of the way. One was from Imrana Kabir in Human Resources. It told Tom that he was entitled to free eye tests and that he should contact her to arrange one. He balled it up and threw it in the bin. The second was from Nora Connaughton, the new manager. It read as follows:

  Dear Tom,

  Ruth tells me that you were unable to come into the office last Thursday to collect the Burns Gimblett files and that you asked her to post them to you at home. I do hope you are not unwell. Please let me know if you are, and if there is anything I can do.

  Best wishes, Nora Connaughton (cc Gillian Bate)

  Tom seethed. Here it was, the first subtle attack. Oh, yes, there was no doubt that Nora was a fellow indirect communicator, an experienced passive aggressor. He knew what she must have wanted to say to him: ‘Why weren’t you in the office last Thursday? You didn’t ask my permission to work from home. Remember, I’m the new boss. Frankly, I doubt you were working at all. I bet you were in the pub playing darts, or having mud and seaweed rubbed into your back as part of a spa day, cheating the company, you lazy bastard. And, look, I’m telling on you. I’m telling the even bigger boss.’

  The inclusion of ‘cc Gillian Bate’ was the proof. If Nora trusted him, was genuinely concerned for his wellbeing and had no doubt he’d spent last Thursday working, she wouldn’t have felt the need to send a copy of the letter to Gillian. Nor would she have done something so formal as send a letter; she’d simply have emailed him. What did ‘cc’ mean, anyway? Complete cunt, thought Tom. The company email template offered one the option of ‘bcc’ as well. Both complete cunts: Nora and Gillian.

  The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up, said ‘Tom Foyers,’ hoping, as he always did, that Jonathan Ross would be on the other end. Jonathan would be phoning from Barry Norman’s house. ‘Look, Tom, if I don’t have a few months off I’m going to go crazy. Barry and I have been having a chat, and we’ve decided you’d be ideal to present Film 2005. You wouldn’t, by any chance, fancy it, would you? All you need is a reassuring smile and a stylish yet comfortable jumper to wear.’

  It was not Jonathan Ross. It was Selena, Tom’s wife. Still, he was reasonably happy to hear from her. Selena was the only person with whom Tom shared some (though by no means all) of his real thoughts. He didn’t quite know how this had come about, but he knew that Selena had arranged it. She had constructed a supervised area in which Tom could safely say anything. So could their two children, Joseph and Lucy. Lucy, who was two, had taken to saying, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ every time she encountered a practical difficulty. She said it when she couldn’t slot the Piglet piece into her Winnie the Pooh jigsaw, and when her Baby Annabel doll rolled off the changing mat. She’d learned the phrase from Selena, who laughed every time Lucy parroted it. ‘That’ll give the girls at nursery a shock,’ she said. Joseph, who was four, screamed, ‘I hate you, Mummy! I hate you, Daddy!’ every time he was told that he couldn’t have chocolate mousse for dinner and then again for pudding.

  ‘How are you?’ Tom asked his wife.

  ‘Extremely pissed off,’ said Selena. ‘Furious, in fact. Can you come and meet me, now?’

  ‘Not really.’ What Tom meant was, ‘Not at all.’ Selena’s current job was to sell eighteen townhouses for Beddford Homes. She worked alone in the sales office, which was the double garage of the show home. This was at least ten times the size of Tom’s office, and her bosses, Andrew Beddington and Brian Ford, had installed a fully equipped little kitchen for her at the back. They’d also judged Selena worthy of a carpet, three armchairs, a fan to cool the stifling summer air, and a television. She had already sold four of the houses for them, and they liked and trusted her. They knew she could and would sell the lot. Selena was an extremely persuasive woman. Andrew and Brian didn’t even mind that on quiet days she closed the office and went shopping or to get a manicure.

  Selena sometimes had trouble understanding the constraints of Tom’s working life. ‘Why not?’ she said crossly.

  ‘Because it’s not up to me when I come and go from the office,’ said Tom, running amok in this rare opportunity for honesty like a toddler in a Wacky Warehouse ball pit. ‘It’s up to a fat, snide, glorified tealady called Nora Connaughton.’ Last Thursday, Tom had worked at home from seven in the morning until eight in the evening. He had asked Ruth, one of the secretaries, to send the Burns Gimblett files to his house because he hadn’t wanted to lose an hour and a half of work time. ‘Why, has something happened?’

  ‘Not yet,’ s
aid Selena viciously. ‘But it will.’

  ‘What? What will happen?’

  ‘Do you remember that…oh, no. There are some people coming in. No, they’re not. Yes, they are. I’m going to have to take them round the show home. Just meet me here as soon as you can.’

  Tom put the phone down. He turned on his computer and began to draft an email to Nora. What would Selena write? What would Idris write?

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Dear Nora, I was not unwell last Thursday. I was at home with an awful lot of work that I was anxious to get through. It seemed sensible to ask Ruth to put the files I needed in the post, as Ruth was already in the office, right next to the post room, in fact. Surely you would agree that for me to drive forty-five minutes each way to collect the files myself would have been an unwise use of my time and therefore the company’s time and money. It would also have been ecologically irresponsible. Think of the car exhaust fumes and unnecessary petrol consumption.

  Selena or Idris would then almost definitely add, ‘I infer, from your cc-ing of Gillian Bate, that you intended your letter as a criticism at best or, at worst, a threat. If you have any reservations about the way I work, please could I ask you to be more direct in future?’

  Tom smiled. If only. Then he deleted everything he had typed apart from ‘From: [email protected], To: [email protected]’. He kept the ‘Compose message’ box open, but reduced it to a small square in the corner of his screen so that he could also read his new emails. As soon as he looked at his in-box, he spotted the words ‘Staff circular – Idris Sutherland’. He opened this message immediately, half expecting it to be from Gilbert Sparling, the managing director of Phelps Corcoran Cummings, and to say, ‘Have all colleagues noticed that Idris Sutherland is much more straightforward, and as a result happier, than Tom Foyers?’ But no, the email was from Ruth, informing all colleagues that Idris was to take six months of unpaid leave, starting next Monday, in order to spend some time with his new baby, Oliver.