Secret Smile

CHAPTER 19

I plucked up courage and rang my own flat, and Brendan answered. My heart plummeted. I was tempted just to put the phone down, but Brendan would have been able to discover who had called and then he would have rung back or thought of something else and it would all have gone wrong. For me, that is. Again. So I said hello.

'Are you all right, Miranda?' he said.

'What do you mean?'

'It must have been painful for you.'

'Whose fault is that?' I said and then cursed myself immediately. I was like a boxer who had deliberately let his guard down. The punch in the face duly arrived.

'Miranda, Miranda, Miranda,' he said in a horrible soothing tone. 'I wasn't the one who betrayed Kerry.'

'You learned that by reading my diary,' I said. 'And then you lied. You said I told you about it.'

'Does it really matter how I learned about it? But maybe it's all for the best, Miranda. Secrets are bad for families. It's cleansing to get them out into the open.'

For a moment I wondered if I was going insane. It wasn't just what Brendan was saying that made me want to gag. I felt as if his voice was physically contaminating me, even over the phone, as if it were something alive and slimy, oozing its way into my ear.

'I was ringing to say I'm coming round tomorrow to pick up some of my stuff.' I paused. 'If that's all right.'

'Do you know what time?'

I was going to ask why it mattered, but I couldn't be bothered. I would just get sucked back into some sort of argument and somehow come off worse.

'I'll come over on my way back from work.'

'Which will be when?' he said.

'I guess about six-thirty,' I said. 'Does it really matter?'

'We always like to have a welcome ready for you, Miranda,' he said.

'Is Kerry there?'

'No.'

'Can you ask her to call me?'

'Of course,' he said affably.

I put the phone down, rather hard, and then looked guiltily up at Laura. Breaking her phone would not be a helpful contribution to the household. She looked at me with a concerned expression. She was being nice to me yet again.

'Are you all right?' she said.

'You don't want to know,' I said. 'It's just that I feel like I virtually have to make an appointment to visit my own house. I'm sorry. You'll notice I said you don't want to know and then told you.' She smiled and gave me a little hug. 'You know, it's important that you and Tony start having children as soon as possible.'

'Why?'

'Because I'll need to do about eight years of babysitting to pay you back for what you've done for me.'

She laughed.

'I'll hold you to that,' she said. 'But don't mention it to Tony for the moment. Whenever the idea of children gets mentioned, his face closes down.'

Laura and Tony were rushing round the flat getting ready to go out. They had obviously had an argument because Laura was being curt and efficient, and Tony sulky. I was going to have a maudlin, self-pitying Sunday evening alone. I had it all planned. A couple of glasses of wine. A sandwich for dinner, made out of avocado and pre-cooked bacon and a jar of mayonnaise that I'd bought on my way home from work. More wine. A bath. Bed. Drunken stupor. Various sobbing and howling at moments yet to be decided.

I must have looked like a child on a poster because I heard some muttering behind me, Laura hissing, and then Tony asked me if I wanted to come with them.

'What me?' I said, feeling embarrassed and pathetic. 'No, no, my gooseberry costume's in the wash. I'll be fine.'

'Don't be stupid,' said Laura. 'We're going to a party. There'll be loads of people. You'll have a good time. You won't be in our way.' This last sentence she said to Tony rather than me. Turning away from her, he raised his eyebrows in a complicit gesture that I tried not to notice.

'It's not right,' I said.

'Shut up,' said Laura. 'It's a friend of mine, Joanna Gergen. Do you know her?'

'No.'

'Well, she knows about you.'

'Have you told her I'm insane?'

'I've told her you're my best friend. She's having a flat warming. It'll be fun.'

They were insistent, and in the end I let myself be persuaded. I had a thirty-second shower and then took another forty-five seconds to throw my black dress on, and then I sat in the back of their car as we drove across London and tried to apply mascara and lipstick in incredibly adverse conditions.

Joanna had a flat off Ladbroke Grove that must have cost… Well, I made myself not think about how much it cost. I was not at work. I was going to have an evening that was an escape from my wretched normal life. Joanna, who had expensive blonde hair and a shamefully lascivious scarlet dress, looked a little surprised when she opened the door and saw me standing behind Laura and Tony like someone who had come to a fancy dress party as a fifth wheel.

'This is Miranda,' said Laura.

Joanna's face broke into a smile.

'You're the woman who's been kicked out of her own flat?' she said.

Laura looked apologetic.

'I just said that you were my best friend and that you'd had one or two problems,' she said.

It didn't seem to matter and it broke the ice. Joanna escorted me in and started telling me in too much detail about what she'd done to the house and how long it had taken. She obviously knew other things about me as well.

It was an improbably good party, though. It was a large flat with a garden you could walk out to through French windows in the kitchen. The garden was flickering with candles in jam jars. There was a salsa band, a real-life salsa band, in the living room and the bath was full of ice and bottles of beer. Apart from Laura and Tony, there was nobody at all I knew, which I've always found kind of fun. A party crammed with strangers is like going to another planet for the evening. I was struggling with the top of a bottle when a man next to me took it, used his lighter to get the top off and handed it back to me.

'There,' he said.

'You're looking a bit too proud of yourself,' I said.

'I'm Callum,' he said.

I looked at him suspiciously. He was tall, with dark frizzy hair and with that funny form of hair growth about the size of a postage stamp just under the bottom lip. He caught me looking at it.

'You can touch it, if you want,' he said.

'Is there a word for it?' I asked.

'I don't know.'

'Is it difficult to do?'

'Compared with what?' he asked. 'Brain surgery?'

'A beard.'

'It doesn't seem that hard.'

'My name's Miranda,' I said.

'I know,' he said. 'You're the woman who's moved out of her own flat.'

'It's not that big a deal. It's just a pathetic, sad tale.'

'It sounded pretty funny the way I heard it,' said Callum.

'Well, it isn't,' I said. 'It's sad.'

I went into my Ancient Mariner mode, telling him the full story. While I was talking, he steered me towards the food table and loaded up a plate for me with a slice of pork pie and two kinds of salad. I'd told the story to numerous people, but the odd thing was that this time it did come out funny. Partly it was because Callum was about five inches taller than me and was looking down at me with a quizzical expression, his hair drooping over his forehead. Also, it's hard to remain dignified and solemn while simultaneously telling a story, drinking from a bottle of beer, holding a plate and trying to eat from it.

'What you should do,' said Callum when I had finished, 'is chuck them out.'

'I can't do that,' I said instantly.

'Then treat this like a holiday, except that it's in the place where you already live. You've got housesitters, so you can go out and have fun in London.'

The conversation meandered on to other areas. He already knew what I worked at and, like most people, he was too impressed by the fact that I went up ladders and sawed pieces of wood for a living. In the end he asked me for my phone number and I told him I didn't have a phone number, that was the whole point, hadn't he been listening? He laughed and said that he was a friend of Tony's and he would ring me there.

I felt a bit ashamed when I saw Laura and Tony hovering, obviously wanting to be on their way. I was meant to be the depressed one and I'd apparently had a better evening at their friend's party than they had. In the car on the drive back I remembered what Callum had said.

'I'm going to chuck them out,' I said.

Laura looked round with a puzzled expression.

'What?' she said.

'I've got too caught up in all of this,' I said. 'I haven't been thinking straight. Now I'm going to act like a normal person. I'll find somewhere for Kerry and whatsisname to stay, even if I have to put them up in a hotel.'

'You can still stay with us, you know,' said Laura. 'Can't she, Tony?'

'What?'

'Can't she stay with us?'

'You're the boss.'

'Oh, for God's sake.'

I intervened.

'No. You've been lovely. I feel like I've been trapped in a room with the heating on and the curtains closed and something rotting somewhere. I'm going to pull back the curtains and open the window.'

'What about the thing that's rotting?' asked Laura.

'I think that was just in my imagination. You know, if other people want to be weird, that's their problem. I'm going to get on with my own life.'

'It's good to hear you talk like that. Why the sudden change?'

I laughed.

'Maybe it was talking to Callum. I'd been thinking I was in a Greek tragedy. Maybe I'm just in a situation comedy.'