The Secrets We Keep Read online

  For Paul Hunt

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: Danny, 2009

  PART ONE

  Natalie, 2014

  Cally

  Owen

  Natalie

  Cally

  Owen

  Natalie

  Cally

  Owen

  Natalie

  Cally

  Owen

  Natalie

  Cally

  Owen

  Natalie

  Cally

  Owen

  PART TWO

  Danny, 2014

  Danny: The Eighties

  Natalie, 2014

  Danny: The Nineties

  Cally, 2014

  Danny: The Noughties

  Owen, 2014

  Danny

  Natalie

  Danny

  Natalie

  All She Wants

  The Confusion of Karen Carpenter

  The Girl Who Just Appeared

  PROLOGUE

  Danny, 2009

  The cliff face is a cut rock of cocaine. Not that I can see the cliff now, but I’ve seen it in images online, in the planning of this moment. I feel like I’m floating. That’s how high up I feel. Green grass, stone sky, clear today, coastline as far as the eye can see. There were images where a fog had come in. Thick as cotton wool. People stood on top of the cliff as if perching on skyscrapers. Yet this is natural beauty. Though nothing feels natural or beautiful about what I have planned for today.

  Mine’s the only car here. Good. I don’t want witnesses to my cowardly behaviour. I see a phone box. Beside it, a sign.

  The Samaritans.

  Always there day or night.

  Then a phone number. A bus stop. I imagine a bus arriving. People stumbling off, nearing the cliff’s edge. A ring of the bell and the bus drives on as the lemmings drop.

  Not everyone’s idea of a good day out.

  It’s cold. For May. Mind you, it’s early, I wanted to be here before any other contenders got here. I pull the zip up on my jacket so it grazes my Adam’s apple. And not for the first time wonder how it came to this. And yet, there’s a dreaded inevitability to it as well.

  I see a wooden floor. Ill-fitting chunks of carpet. The wood looking like ripped-edged lakes between them. Mam with her beehive disappearing behind clouds of smoke as she watches her soaps. Murmuring to the women on the black and white screen. Shouting out sometimes. Topping up her glass from the jug as regularly as she lights her fags.

  The bell ringing in the playground as we’re called back in from break. A lad in calipers not making it to the toilets on time. A pissy puddle that lasts for days. He has a week off school coz of the ribbing.

  The prefabs. The courtyard. Standing in line like soldiers when all we’d been were bad lads. A mixed-race lad getting in the back of a Rolls-Royce. The windows steaming as it drives off.

  The euphoria of my first time on a dance floor. My first clubbing experience. Wanting more. And more. Till that was my life. The highs. The money. The laughs. The lows.

  Natalie. Fresh as a daisy the morning after our wedding. In the First Class Lounge. Looking at me blinking, going, ‘Did yesterday really happen?’ Yes, my sweet, it did. But look at us now.

  Us and the kids. A beach club in Ibiza. Cold beer and warm heads. Greek salads in the Spanish sun. Cally’s giggles. Owen’s serious face. Me desperate to get him to break a smile. Clown, that’s me. Always the clown. Never really wanted a family. Got one and look what I did to it.

  And look at me now.

  I know what I do next is going to cause them pain.

  Why didn’t I stick to my motto? Look after number one. Just worry about yourself. Don’t get involved with other people and . . .

  I’m a coward and I can’t go back.

  And no matter how much they might end up hating me, it won’t be as much as I hate myself right now.

  And her. The pressure. And the things I’ve done. What I did to Owen. What Cally knows. What they don’t know. What I know. What I’ve seen. Who I’ve let down. It’s too much. It’s time to go. It’s time to make amends.

  I hear the crack of tyres on gravel. A car has pulled in next to me. I don’t want to look, to see their face. The engine stays running.

  Redemption time.

  PART ONE

  Natalie, 2014

  ‘Welcome to suburbia, kids,’ I say brightly as we watch the removal men unloading the last of our possessions from the back of the van. They hoist it aloft and carry it solemnly towards the house on their shoulders, like pallbearers bearing a coffin. I hear Cally tut loudly. At sixteen she hates being called a kid, even when I say it ironically.

  ‘I can’t believe they got so many things out of that tiny space,’ Owen says.

  ‘Now that’s magic!’ I say, trying to sound like Paul Daniels. I hear Cally tut even louder. I don’t have to look. I know she’s rolling her eyes.

  ‘It’s like Mary Poppins’ handbag.’ Owen giggles.

  ‘Oh shut UP, bumder!’ Cally snaps, then she turns her anger to me. ‘I can’t believe you’ve brought us here. It’s embarrassing.’

  Every time she emphasizes a word like that she means to puncture me. I should be used to it by now, but today my guard must be down – they say moving house is as stressful as bereavement – so it’s like a roundhouse kick to the guts.

  ‘You didn’t seem to mind when we came to view the house three times.’

  ‘I must’ve been on drugs.’

  ‘It’s nice.’ Owen tries to compensate for his sister’s rudeness.

  ‘That’s easy for you to say, you don’t have to live here,’ she spits.

  ‘You know I can’t keep away from you, Cally.’

  ‘Oh shut UP, bumder!’ and she flounces off towards the house. She does a good line in flouncing, my daughter.

  ‘It’s your cheery disposition at all times!’ he calls after her. ‘It’s infectious!’

  ‘Piss . . . OFF!’

  I look to Owen and grimace as we hear the new front door slam.

  ‘Well. She’s gone inside. That’s a start,’ he says, a little act of encouragement, then links my arm and drags me along to follow her. Have I made a mistake? OK, so the cul-de-sac is a step down from our last place; well, several steps down, but that wouldn’t be hard. This circle of individually designed Eighties mock-Georgian houses has its own bucolic charm.

  Or does bucolic mean it gives you the plague? God, I hope not.

  As we reach the garden gate a woman appears from nowhere, scuttling towards us. She’s tiny, like a munchkin, and wears Fifties winged glasses. She is carrying a vast Tupperware container, the transparent sides revealing a lumpy cake within.

  ‘Mrs Bioletti?’ she chirps, all smiles and flicky eyes, sussing out myself and Owen very quickly, the smile never once leaving her lips. Only problem is, because of her height it’s like she’s checking out our nipples.

  I smile back. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Welcome to Dominic Close. I’m Betty Caligary. Number seven. I’ve been here since the estate was built.’

  She says ‘estate’ oddly. Like it’s a French word. Éstat. Presumably this is to differentiate between the sort of the place this area wants to be – smart, swanky, aspirational, like a country estate, rather than a common or garden council estate. It makes me laugh.

  ‘Original cast, you might say. I made you a carrot cake. It’s just a little thing I do. To say hello and I hope you’ll be very happy here. We’re a tight-knit bunch.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ I say warmly as she passes me the incredibly heavy box. ‘It’s really . . .’

  But she cuts in, ‘And you must be Owen.’

  ‘I am,’ says Owen. I hear the defeat i
n his voice. My heart sinks.

  ‘So sorry for all your troubles. Nasty business.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. How does she know? How?

  ‘I Googled you,’ she says conspiratorially, as if reading my mind. She pinches my arm, then turns on her heel and retreats. As she does she calls back, ‘My phone number’s on a piece of paper in there. Anything you need, just give me a tinkle!’

  ‘Thank you so much!’ I call after her.

  I look to Owen.

  ‘She Googled you, Mum.’

  I nod. So that’s it. My identity is out there in Dominic Close.

  ‘She Googled me,’ I agree, unnerved.

  ‘Oh well. It’s good they know,’ says Owen. ‘Means you don’t have to keep explaining yourself.’

  How did I produce such a lovely, charming, rational young man?

  ‘Come on. Let’s get inside and have some of that cake,’ he says with a wink.

  And in we go.

  When I was a little girl I used to have this silly dream of being famous. I wasn’t sure how this was going to happen; sometimes I thought maybe I’d be a pop star, sometimes an Oscar-winning screen idol, possibly even an Olympic gymnast (but a pretty one, not one with a face like a bag of spanners). Other times I considered becoming Prime Minister (again, a pretty one, bow on the blouse collar possibly. I felt there was an opening in the market for that). For most people these childhood fantasies never come to fruition, so it was ultimately quite the surprise that in my mid-thirties I became – sort of – famous. And by none of the above routes.

  On the 18th of May 2009, my husband Danny left our old house to go for a pint of milk and never came back. I’d like to be able to say that the last time he spoke to me was significant, that as he left the house he turned one final time and told me how much he loved me, how much I meant to him, how I had been the peaty soil from which his petals flourished. In fact, I was in the bath at the time listening to Popmaster on Radio 2. I heard him calling goodbye and, this is the embarrassing bit, I didn’t even reply. I’ve never told anyone that. When I described it to the police I said I’d called back, ‘See you, Danny!’ but the truth was I’d been concentrating on the radio quiz, trying to remember if Haysi Fantayzee had had their top ten hit in 1983 or 1984. Either way I’d been wrong – it was 1982. By the time I realized Danny had been calling, the front door had slammed and the moment had passed.

  Don’t worry. That’s the only thing I lied to the police about. I didn’t omit any gruesome facts like I’d actually killed him, chopped him in a mincer and served him in a lasagne for dinner. And I’d only twisted the truth in that tiny way so I didn’t look like a complete cow, ignoring my husband, and therefore forcing him to run away. Well, Natalie, who wouldn’t want to disappear when his wife snubbed him for a slightly dodgy Eighties pop song, hmm? I could hear the police saying.

  There is one thing that plays on my mind. Something I never mentioned to the police at the time because it seemed so minor, and I thought I’d got it wrong. The night before he disappeared Danny had said with a sense of urgency, ‘Nat? I’ve got to tell you something.’

  We were in the kitchen. I was cooking. I forget what. I turned to look at him. For a second he wavered, and I worried he was going to say something bad.

  Then he burst out laughing and said, ‘Ha, got you!’

  And we both laughed. But I couldn’t help but worry for a very long time that maybe he’d been about to unburden himself of some grisly secret.

  But he hadn’t been. He’d been winding me up.

  These days I don’t like to dwell on the pain of those first few hours, days, then months after we realized he was missing. It’s too painful, still. One minute Danny was there, next minute he was not. He left the house and didn’t come home. He didn’t take his phone, his cash point card and credit cards were never subsequently used, and a few days later his car was found hundreds of miles away near Beachy Head, a beauty spot popular with people who want to commit suicide. The police naturally assumed this meant he had killed himself and every time they called they needn’t have said anything, just played a sound effect of a massive hardback book slamming shut – case closed.

  But by then I had become a reluctant media sensation. Danny and I had, back in the day, run a club in Manchester called Milk that had been franchised round the country. We had made a bit of money. There was a touch of glamour to the story. My children were photogenic, and we looked good on newspaper pages, despite having piggy red eyes from crying. I went on This Morning and begged Danny to come home; they kept asking me back even after the discovery of the car, ‘for an update’ or ‘to review the papers’. I turned them down, but by then it was too late – I was recognized wherever I went.

  Oh look, it’s her. The one whose husband disappeared. The nightclub one.

  There she is. With the kids. Poor thing.

  It was a very strange feeling to walk into your local gastropub because you couldn’t be bothered cooking and feel everybody’s eyes upon you. And why? Because they felt sorry for you. Or worse, they disapproved of you.

  Why isn’t she stopping in like a proper widow?

  If he is still alive, as she claims, why isn’t she out there looking for him instead of ordering deep fried camembert?

  I bet she killed him.

  Everywhere I went I was judged. Or I felt I was. If one of the kids was playing up, it was evidence of my dreadful parenting skills – no wonder my husband left me. Or if I dared to smile, I was getting over this disappearance thing far too quickly and therefore a bit of a psychopath – and again, no wonder he buggered off.

  The papers kept reporting the story, which I was grateful for. Something told me that yes, Danny might have got out of his car and thrown himself off that high cliff. But another part of me saw him parking there and catching a bus to . . . who knew where? According to the papers he was ‘severely depressed’ and our family was experiencing financial difficulties – on the verge of bankruptcy, they actually said – and this was why he’d gone missing, and the story kept running. People felt an affinity with us and the all-too-common despair felt in austerity Britain. The only problem was, none of it was true. I’d made the mistake of saying to one reporter that Danny was ‘a bit fed up’ the week before he went. But this was only because he’d smashed the screen on his mobile phone and had had to cough up a hundred quid to get it fixed. By the time he went missing, the phone was fine. But why spend all that money on something you weren’t going to use? That didn’t make sense. And as for our finances, they were flourishing really. When we sold Milk we had made enough that neither of us had to work again. Not bad for a couple approaching forty.

  Yes, we had debts. Big debts. With no income coming in, we had continued to spend, and we’d decided that the time had come to downsize. But it hadn’t caused us any pain. We had enjoyed the ten years we’d had in the posh house with the massive garden, we had enjoyed being profligate and getting the weekly shop from the better class of supermarkets. Now it was time to tighten our belts and buckle down and be sensible. But it didn’t worry us. We had come from nothing, and we would return to nothing; we’d be returning to a very comfortable form of normality.

  Except that ‘we’ used to be four. And now ‘we’ are three. And since Owen left home to move in with his boyfriend Matt, ‘we’ are really only two.

  Some days I wish I had my mum to speak to. To tell her how I feel. To tell her I miss her almost as much as I miss him. My mum’s name was Sheila, and after my dad walked out on us when I was still in nappies (she subsequently usually only referred to him as ‘that knobhead’; his name, in fact, was Derek) she brought me up in a very ordinary low-rise block of council flats in Stockport. She did a succession of bar jobs when I was at primary school, which meant that she was often out in the evenings, when I would be looked after by a variety of her mates from the local amateur dramatic company, of which she was a leading light. It was a colourful childhood, as Mum loved eccentric people and anything t
hat went against the grain. Ours was a world of Easter eggs for breakfast and impromptu discos with my dolls at midnight. When I started secondary school, her gift of the gab and self-confidence led her to abandon the pubs and take a job doing telesales for Yellow Pages, which was then based in Stockport. She made an efficient saleswoman, apparently, with her warm, friendly manner and good sense of humour. She also never took any shit. She called a spade a spade. These days people might say she ‘told it how it was’ – if that didn’t have overtones of reactionary mouthing-off about nothing. She was wonderful. She was all I had.

  I started going to bars and clubs in Stockport and then Manchester from around the age of fifteen. I loved not necessarily to drink but to dance, and could spend all night up on a podium shaping it out to 128 beats per minute. Mum didn’t mind, as long as I always came back when I said I would and told her who I was going to be with.

  Then when I was seventeen, Mum got ill. Ovarian cancer. She lost all her hair and started wearing a succession of outrageous wigs. She was like Mum, but fainter. Towards the end, a neighbour called the local priest out. Mum wasn’t religious but she also wasn’t rude, so she humoured him for twenty minutes before he asked if he could say a prayer for her. She was wearing her bobbed wig that day, and gave the impression of being quite prim and proper. It was one of her more convincing hairpieces, even if the impression was less convincing.

  The priest took my hand. And her hand. And then dragged them together as if we were about to play ‘One potato, two potato’ and then he broke into his rather long-winded prayer. It felt like we were there for half an hour. I could feel Mum’s hand shaking. I think he took this for tiredness, because he gripped on tighter and prayed more vehemently. I knew her better. She was trying desperately not to laugh.

  And when the priest came out with ‘And dear Lord, bless every hair on Sheila’s head . . .’ she could stem the flow no longer, and she snorted an involuntary guffaw which startled the priest into silence. Before winding the proceedings up with a rapid ‘in the name of the Father’ and so on.

  After Mum died I lost the flat I’d been brought up in as although it was a council flat, Mum sublet it from someone from the am-dram group and they wanted it back. I took solace in my other family, the people I’d met through the clubs. I lived in a succession of squats in central Manchester before making the brave move South to London with a couple of club kids who’d heard of a squat in a beautiful block of flats in West London going begging. It was the late eighties, and lots of loft apartments and offices lay empty. And it was at a party in one of these that I met a gorgeous guy just a year or two younger than me who was addicted to jelly bean sweets. This was Danny. He claimed he’d seen me out and about around London, working the door of a club near Piccadilly Circus. I had no recollection of him. But before I could say so he’d offered me a sweet. The rest, as they say, is history.