The Secrets We Keep Read online

  For years he kept a jar of these sweets in the fridge. I used to bicker with him that there was no need, those sweets don’t really go off, but he said he liked the colour they brought to the fridge. They were his sweet of choice and he enjoyed the ritual of opening the door, pulling the nipple shaped lid off the jar in the door, and furtling around inside for a handful of the multicoloured beans. After he disappeared I didn’t dare move them from their home. If that fridge was jelly-bean-free it meant I had given up hope. He would return. He would furtle and eat again.

  Last week I discovered that they do sort of go off. I tried a bit of furtling myself and found that they’d all stuck together. One homogeneous mass of rainbow-coloured coagulation. I threw the jar in the bin and felt lousy about it.

  Today it’s five years, three months and eighteen days since he disappeared, but even now I can describe in minute detail what he was wearing when he left. I had to say it over and over again to the police, in appeals, to the press. I’d seen him gelling his hair in the hall mirror while my bath was running. Evisu jeans, black bomber jacket from Schott, pale pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt, Nike Airs in baby blue. The distinguishing gold tooth, right at the back, so you only caught a glimpse of it when he was throwing his head back and laughing. Which he did often. He liked a laugh, did Danny. And then there was the necklace. The one I’d given him on the night of the millennium. Silver chain with a dog tag on. On the tag four letters were engraved. D N O C. Mine, his and the kids’ initials. On the back it said please return to . . . and our address. It was a little in-joke about Danny’s dreadful sense of direction. Well, he is lost now. And nobody’s bothered to return him.

  I got some smaller versions made for the kids, but I don’t think they wear theirs any more. I don’t like to ask. He never took his off, though.

  Any time I think about Danny, I think three things:

  Where is he?

  How is he?

  And the worst:

  Is he?

  That last question is the hardest. Even if I kind of know the answer.

  And then there’s, jelly beans aside, the life choices I’ve had to make. Something as simple as having a haircut can result in months of agony. In the end Cally told me to ‘stop fucking about and get on with it.’

  Aren’t teenage daughters kind? So I bit the bullet. And now instead of looking quite unusual – middle-aged woman with lots of hair but not the intellectual capacity of Mary Beard – I just look like everybody else. And d’you know what? After being stared at for five years, that feeling is sweet. Although when Cally saw the new cropped look she commented,

  ‘Oh my God, no wonder Dad left, you’re a total lesbian.’

  ‘Good job your brother can’t hear you saying that,’ I said.

  ‘No he can’t. He’s probably off somewhere listening to musicals and bumming lads.’

  My son punches his sister a lot.

  And then last year I had to start wearing glasses. After trying to read the instructions on a microwave curry and having to move it close and then far and then bringing it back halfway, like I was playing an invisible trombone, I thought I’d better get my eyes tested. And now not only do I have to wear glasses just to see normally, I have to wear another pair when I’m reading. So not only do I now look just like every other harassed mother of two, I also have not-so-cool specs into the bargain. Danny really will never recognize me now.

  ‘You look like Velma from Scooby Doo,’ Cally said dully when I returned from the optician, not looking up from her iPad.

  ‘Velma’s cute,’ countered her delightful older brother as I left the room.

  But not before I heard Cally reply, ‘No she’s not, she’s a dog.’

  Cally used to be lovely. She was eleven when Danny went and, hand on heart I’m not just saying this because she’s my daughter, she was so sweet. And I can say this now because she’s my daughter, but these days she’s an out and out cow. I put it down to her missing her dad.

  I’m unpacking boxes in the living room with Owen when Cally comes in with a face pack on.

  ‘Cally. We’re meant to be unpacking. And you’ve done a face pack?’

  Cally folds her arms, mirroring my body language and spits back, ‘Cally. We’re meant to be unpacking. And you’ve done a face pack?’

  One thing she’s good at is mimicking. She can do Cheryl Cole, Ann Widdicombe, Lorraine Kelly, Sharon Osbourne, Kylie Minogue. And me. It never ceases to wind me up, but I’ve stopped rising to the bait. I just glare at her.

  She glares back. Then:

  ‘I just want to point out,’ she unfolds her arms, though thankfully she’s just being herself again. Well, I say ‘thankfully’ – I know what’s coming: ‘that Dad has no chance of finding us now you’ve moved us to this manky old estate.’

  ‘It’s not old,’ tuts Owen.

  ‘It’s not old,’ she mimics him.

  ‘It’s not!’ I back him up. ‘Anyway, we’ve been through all this.’

  ‘We’ve been through all this,’ she mimics.

  ‘Cally, drop it,’ says Owen.

  So she does. Well, she drops the mimicking me bit.

  ‘If he’s had a bump on the head and he comes . . . staggering back to the old place, riddled with amnesia, he doesn’t stand a chance. On your own conscience be it!’

  She runs from the room.

  ‘Take no notice, Mum,’ says Owen.

  But I know she has a point. It’s my second-favourite fantasy: that he’s had a bump on the head and doesn’t remember who he is. We’ll bump into each other in Sainsbury’s and he won’t recognize me. I’ll show him press cuttings about when he went missing, and slowly he’ll start to trust me and fall back in love with me. My favourite fantasy is that he is living in a cottage near Beachy Head, mortified by what he has done, and one day he will work up the courage to phone home and say sorry.

  And she’s right. He won’t be able to find me. And when he does, he’ll take one look at me and go, What happened to your hair, Nat?

  Age happened to my hair.

  Why are you living in a suburban cul-de-sac that looks like something out of a No-Frills Desperate Housewives?

  Because we brought the kids up in a big posh house in the country and it was too big for just me and Cally and it made financial sense to sell and save the profit to live off. And we were going to downsize anyway, it’s just that you buggered off without so much as a by your leave . . .

  What is a by your leave?

  I don’t know, stop interrupting me. And then when you went I kind of froze and didn’t do anything apart from look for you and campaign for missing people, and I stayed put. And then last year I thought, you might never be coming home and so what did it matter if we moved? And there were so many memories of you there. This is part of my new life.

  Thanks.

  Yeah, well, thanks for sodding off and never coming back. Really appreciate that, Danny. Nice one.

  I realize Owen is talking and I can’t hear him.

  ‘Sorry, dear?’

  Dear? What am I? Ninety?

  ‘I was just saying. It’s obvious Cally’s winding you up at the moment. Me and Matt are going to Birmingham tomorrow. Why don’t we take her with us?’

  ‘Birmingham?’ I say incredulously. ‘Why are you going to Birmingham?’

  ‘Clothes Show Live. Matt got tickets through work.’

  ‘She doesn’t really like clothes.’

  ‘I know, but it’s a day out. And that designer from Kings Road’s gonna be there.’

  Cally loves Kings Road, the fly on the wall soapy documentary thing about a load of spoilt brats. I hate it, but at forty I don’t think I’m particularly the target demographic.

  ‘Or d’you need her here helping unpack?’

  ‘She’ll be neither use nor ornament, Owen; if you can get her to go, do it. Might cheer her up.’

  ‘I’ll go and get us some of that cake.’

  Owen heads out to the kitchen and I pull two framed
photos from a tea chest. The first shows Owen, aged thirteen, winning a tennis tournament in Cheshire somewhere, I don’t remember where now. His sunny face beams out at me, light hitting his cheeks from the gold cup that’s almost as big as his head. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile like that since his dad went. The other is a photo of me and Danny taken from the pages of Dazed and Confused with a headline: ‘Milking It’. We felt we were so cool back then, having our pictures in this hipster’s bible. The thing I think when I look at it now is a) how badly dressed we were (it might have been the Nineties, but platform trainers were never a good look) and b) how bloody young we look. I also appear to have about three different hairstyles on the one head.

  Youth. Platform trainers. What did we know?

  I look at Danny. He’s wearing a sort of satin dungaree suit. The stylist for the shoot provided it, he would never normally have worn anything like that. I look at his twenty-something face and feel a stab of pain in my chest when I take in how handsome he was. It’s like I’ve never seen him before and it’s my first time, and yet rolled into that sensation is the realization that one day he won’t be around any more. And he might be dead, he might be alive, but I just don’t know.

  I used to have this picture on the wall of the little toilet in the old house. I’m not sure I’ll hang it anywhere now. Too painful.

  A huge cube of boxes almost fills the smallest bedroom. They contain all the lever arch files that contain all the accounts and files to do with Milk up until we sold it. I’ve been nervous about throwing it all away because I can’t remember how many years my accountant said I had to hang onto it for. I’m probably safe to chuck it now, but for some reason I packed it all for the move anyway. I make a mental note to email the accountant later.

  As I put the frame back in the box I hear a weird slicing noise coming from outside. I look through the window to see an odd sight. A rake of a woman is gliding across the cul-de-sac on a pair of skates, an envelope in her hand. She stops at the gate to our drive and then daintily walks the final few feet to the front door. The bell rings. I go to answer.

  ‘Hi! I’m Harmony Frayn!’ She does a double take. ‘Oh. You changed your hair.’

  I want to punch her. How dare she be so over-familiar.

  ‘How can I help you, Harmony?’

  Harmony has got to be anorexic. And the skating has made her very red of face. What face there is. Mind you, even though she is the size she is, it doesn’t stop her wearing skin-tight jeans that, let’s just say, leave very little to the imagination. She has a topknot and freckles and is wearing a jumper with a treble clef on it. She looks like one of those skeletons medical students have in their halls of residence bedrooms, dressed by Primark.

  ‘I bought you this!’

  She hands me the envelope. It has quite childish, swirly writing on the front which says:

  Natalie Bioletti VIP

  and then some love hearts.

  ‘I’m not a VIP,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, but you are.’

  The urge to punch her is even stronger now. Even if she does look days from death.

  ‘Everyone who moves into Dominic Close . . . we like to make them feel special! Can I come in and look round? This house has been empty so long I’ve forgotten what it’s like inside.’

  She is practically pushing me out of the way but I block the door with an iron arm.

  ‘I’m sorry. No. It’s . . . all a bit of a mess at the moment.’

  ‘I don’t mind mess.’

  ‘Why don’t you wait till we have a housewarming?’

  ‘You’re having a housewarming? Awesome! Do you want me to sing? Me and Melody? My twin sister? We sing, we’re really good, we’ve been on X Factors three times with our group Mirror Image. Simon Cowell said we were a bit karaoke but Melody said he was just hacked off coz he wasn’t sure how to market us.’

  ‘I’ll see,’ I say, when what I really want to say is, it’s X Factor, not X Factors.

  I have no plans to have a housewarming. Even less so now.

  ‘Anyway, thanks for the card, Harmony.’

  She sees me looking suspiciously at her feet.

  ‘They’re skates!’ she beams.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Did Betty from number seven bring you one of her carrot cakes?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Awesome!’

  And then she lifts up her hand and I think she is going to punch me. I flinch but she screams, ‘High five for Dominic Close!’

  So I high five her limply, then, rather rudely, I step back and shut the front door. I listen to the slicing sound of her pushing herself home across the cul-de-sac.

  ‘Who the FUCK was that?’ Cally says when I turn around. She’s standing at the top of the stairs with a face like thunder.

  ‘Harmony Frayn,’ I say perkily, as if that explains everything. And from the look on Cally’s face, it does.

  ‘Oh GOD. I want to kill myself.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Cally,’ I say, moving back into the living room. And then, as an afterthought, ‘And don’t say fuck.’

  An hour or so later I head upstairs and my heart stops beating for a second. It looks like Danny is stood in the bedroom, his back to me, wearing one of his favourite coats. He’s staring out of the window, looking out across the Oaktree Estate, so-called because if you view it from the sky, the main roads and cul-de-sacs off it form the outline of a many-branched oak tree. IS Danny weighing up whether he approves of this new setting? Or . . .

  But then he turns and it is of course Owen. He looks embarrassed to have been caught trying it on.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. D’you like it?’

  ‘Course I like it, it’s Barbour.’

  I never threw Danny’s clothes out. I’ve been meaning to, but . . .

  ‘You can have it.’

  It’s been so hard. What if he comes back? What will he wear?

  ‘I’m not sure the biker look’s really me.’

  ‘Oh, stop with the false modesty, you look great.’

  ‘I look butch.’

  ‘You are butch,’ I say, and go into the bathroom. I put the loo seat down and sit to regain my composure. It’s then that I hear the doorbell ring again. A few seconds later I hear heavy footsteps descending the stairs, then I hear Owen talking to someone on the doorstep. When I hear the front door closing I brave it and head out.

  ‘Who was it?’ I call. He looks up from the hall.

  ‘Harmony Frayn.’

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘She says don’t worry about a housewarming. Her Mum’s going to do a party in our honour on Sunday afternoon.’

  As my daughter would say: WTF?

  I’m beginning to think Cally was right. It was a mistake moving here. I’ve been here five minutes and already the neighbours are taking over my life.

  Cally

  My mother is SO embarrassing. Owen is taking me on a day out to the NEC where there will be fast food outlets and really cute eating places and street food stalls probably, and what has she done? She has made us a PICNIC.

  I really wish she would die.

  I know she’s like an ORPHAN. And never really had her OWN mum. And so didn’t have a role model to work out how you do this family shiz but c’mon guys! A packed lunch? SERIOUSLY?

  Normally the idea of being cooped up with Owen and his so called boyfriend Matt the Prat all day would drive me literally mental but:

  One. They’re taking me to Clothes Show Live.

  Which is amazing because apparently you just walk round the NEC and see loads of famous people and fashion shows and there are stalls with loads of freebies on them and you get hundreds and hundreds of goody bags with amazing things in them like hair straighteners and foundation and breast implants and it’s really really cool and I’ll be able to use the bags as school bags for like the next a million years. Result. Bags for life or what?

 
Two. Them taking me out gets me out of the hideous Oaktree Estate.

  As I said to Mum, they can’t even spell. Oak tree is two words for puck’s sake. I really don’t like it. Every road looks the same. Poo-brown box houses. They are, they are literally like shoe boxes propped up on one end. And the colour of poo. Well. Poo if you’ve not been eating too healthily and they’ve gone a sort of milky coffee colour. OK, they’re cappuccino-coloured houses. And they don’t all look like shoe boxes, I suppose. But my point still stands, like I said to Mum when we moved. How will Dad find us now? He won’t. And this is why I officially hate the Oaktree Estate and everyone who lives there. I want to go back to our old house. Not coz I’m a ridonculous snob or anything, because that house was AMAZEBALLS compared to the current one, but just because DAD WOULD BE ABLE TO FIND IT. I am amazed Mum hasn’t taken this into consideration. She is worse than the Gestapo.

  Four. OK, she’s not worse than the Gestapo.

  I know she couldn’t afford to keep us in the big house. But I have left a letter for the new owners telling them to look out for Dad and to give him my new mobile number if he ever turns up unannounced. Seeing them might throw him. And I included a photo of him just so they’d know what he looked like. I didn’t tell Mum I was doing this. Not that she’d be cross or anything. It’s just. Well, you never know how she’s going to react. And I’m sure she thinks I should just pull myself together or something. I have tried, but it’s harder than you’d think sometimes.