His Secret Family (ARC)

by Ali Mercer

  What would my grandma have made of all this, of the choices Mum had made and the way she had deceived us? Would she have disapproved? It seemed quite possible. But anyway, she wouldn’t have been angry with us. None of it was Ava’s fault. Or mine. We were just caught up in the aftermath of what the grown-ups had done.

  It made sense. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I could see it. It wasn’t just the physical resemblance… it was all sorts of smaller, subtler things. Little mannerisms. Reserve. Neatness. That way both Mark and Ava had of looking at you if you asked a question. As if they had an answer ready but weren’t sure you deserved to hear it.

  Would she be even more distant with me, after this?

  Ava had always annoyed me and I had always admired her. She was a giant, and always had been: an unpredictable giant, neither entirely friendly nor an ogre, but always a huge, towering presence, someone who might just as well take you for a ride on her shoulders as shut out the light. She set the standards to aspire to: she was the one I had to either follow or break away from. I could try to do better than her, I could try to be different, but either way, I always needed her. Without her, I didn’t know myself.

  Was that the real reason why Mark had been so keen to be part of our lives – to claim Ava? Once he knew about her, had it really all been about her – not about Mum at all?

  It wasn’t that he’d been horrible to me – he’d always been perfectly nice and kind. But from his point of view, I probably just came along as part of the package. It was like when you were house-hunting, and saw somewhere with a box room that might turn out to be useful but wasn’t much of a draw in itself. I was an extra, but I didn’t matter all that much either way.

  But soon there was going to be a new baby. The baby that was more Ava’s sibling than I was, even though I’d been around so much longer, and had shared a room with her, and put up with her for years. And the baby would barely even get to know Ava, because Ava was so big now and would probably have left home by the time the baby was a toddler.

  That hurt. I wasn’t sure if the hurt was made up of jealousy or sadness, or both. It felt a bit like hate. How could you hate a baby that hadn’t even been born yet? But I did. It was easier than hating Ava or Mum or Mark or Dad. My dad. It wasn’t fair, but that didn’t make a lot of difference.

  Then I pulled myself together and went back up onto the beach to join Mum and Mark, and Mum said we should head off and we left the beach and made our way back to Ava.

  * * *

  It was a beautiful walk, along a promenade and up a path past shuttered white houses with great boughs of brightly coloured flowers spilling over their walls, just like in the pictures of the town in the hotel brochure. I asked Mum what it was called and she said it was bougainvillea. It was all so pretty that it should have been impossible for us to be anything but happy.

  The path rose steeply, and the sun was at our backs. In a minute we’d come out onto the busy main road that led to the hotel, and then we’d have to find Ava, and then we’d probably all have a rather awkward lunch together and begin the business of getting used to each other again.

  It was then that I saw it, on the ground alongside us.

  A fourth shadow. Not so long as mine. The shadow of a girl, a little girl, a girl who wasn’t really there.

  Mum was oblivious. She was looking at the sky, the flowers, the passing buildings – anywhere but at her feet. Mark didn’t look as if he’d seen it, either. He had the focused, uncomfortable expression that I’d seen on other kids’ faces at sports days, when they were tired out but the end of the race was in sight and there was no question of giving up.

  And then the shadow vanished, and there were just the three of us.

  I decided not to mention it. I had a feeling that even if either – or both – of them could have explained what I’d seen, they would pretended to have no idea. They’d have made out I was just being weird. And if they really didn’t know, they’d start to have serious doubts about my grasp on reality.

  * * *

  Ava was by the hotel pool, lying under a sunshade in her bikini. She was wearing her sunglasses and she looked grown up and glamorous, like a film star in disguise who wouldn’t bother about the kinds of things that worried ordinary people.

  Mark went off to get drinks for us and Mum took the sun lounger on one side of Ava and I took the other.

  Ava said to me, ‘Did you swim?’

  ‘I paddled.’

  ‘Chicken,’ Ava said. ‘You had the chance to swim in a sea that’s actually warm, and you didn’t take it?’

  ‘I didn’t feel like it.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Ava,’ Mum said, ‘don’t tease her. Have you been for a swim?’

  ‘No, I’ve just been sunbathing.’

  ‘Well then,’ Mum said.

  ‘I didn’t realise it was compulsory,’ Ava said.

  I understood what she was trying to do – to show that we didn’t have to talk about the dad stuff, and have some kind of big embarrassing heart-to-heart. We could just carry on as before, as if nothing really fundamental had changed.

  But it had. I knew it had. Up close, I could see that her face was puffy where she’d been crying. I could feel the shock coming off her, and the woundedness.

  She didn’t feel safe any more – how could she? She didn’t trust Mark, and she couldn’t really trust Mum in the same way as before, however much she might want to. And we’d all learned not to trust Sean long ago. But she would never want to talk about it – or at least, not to me.

  The very worst of it was I had absolutely no idea how to console her, or to help. I couldn’t tell her what I’d seen. And I didn’t feel safe either.

  Fourteen

  Ava

  If we had been at home I could have retreated to our room and kicked Ellie out; I would have had my books and all my stuff around me, and I could have got on with my revision and forgotten all about my family, at least for some of the time.

  As it was, though, it was hard to escape. We had the sunshine and the beach and the three-course meals every night and the drinks in the hotel bar, and at the same time we were all stuck with each other and there was nothing I could do but wait it out.

  The morning after the night of revelations, when Mum had come in to talk to me and I’d completely embarrassed myself by crying, I’d asked her whose idea it had been to break the news this way. On holiday! I’d think twice before I ever went on holiday with them again. It was Mark, of course. Left to herself, Mum would have had more common sense. She would have understood that I needed space, that I couldn’t be rushed into accepting him, let alone loving him. He must have steamrollered her into it, otherwise surely she would have at least tried to raise a few objections. But maybe she was just too preoccupied with the new baby to have any energy to spare.

  She wasn’t the greatest advertisement for pregnancy. Miracle of new life and all that, yes, but she did seem pretty tired and she wasn’t exactly glowing. Maybe that was just a myth that had been put about to con women into keeping on having babies. Like telling kids that if they ate their carrots, they’d end up being able to see in the dark. Mum had told me that and I’d always eaten my carrots and the dark still looked like dark to me.

  After that morning, we didn’t really talk about it. We didn’t really talk about anything, other than the kind of things you talk about on holiday; where we would go next, what we would do, what we would eat. I didn’t want to talk. What more was there to say? It wasn’t like anyone had asked for my opinion – just my blessing, after the event.

  All that remained was for me to get my head round it. I was no longer the daughter of an unreliable alcoholic who had walked out on us when my little sister was a baby. I was now the daughter of a control freak who’d had a one-night stand with my mother when he was married to someone else, and who’d looked her up when he finally got divorced, then got her pregnant once again. They certainly had a good hit rate where conception was c
oncerned. Maybe they’d just keep going, like one of those Victorian couples with a dozen kids: one for every year they were together, but with a sixteen-year-gap between me and Junior.

  I carried on calling him Mark. I thought I’d probably start calling Dad Sean. If we ever saw him again. If Mark hadn’t scared him off for good. How much did I really need a dad, anyway? I was sixteen years old, not far off adulthood. But all of a sudden I had two of them: the returning sperm donor and the distant drunk. Two dads too many. I wasn’t sure that either of them really deserved to be called Dad, however much they would have liked it.

  How could Mum and Sean have lied to me for so long, and so convincingly? It was a lesson well learned. I’d always remember it: it was almost impossible to know whether other people, even the ones closest to you, were telling the truth or not.

  I didn’t know what to say to Mark, and he didn’t really know what to say to me: our every conversation was a misfire, an anti-climax. There was no way of reclaiming all the years we’d lost. Whatever we had would always buckle under the weight of what it wasn’t, and could have been.

  And yet there we were. Eating together. Walking to the beach together. Lying on the same stretch of sand. Swimming in the same sea.

  When I actually saw him, it was hard to carry on hating him. He was just a man, after all. A man who’d done something he’d regretted, and had tried to put it behind him… and had finally decided to face it.

  No wonder he’d been up for having another baby. This way he got both the hostile teenager and the chance to start over.

  Thankfully, he seemed to understand how I felt. I realised he wasn’t going to try and make me talk. He was putting up with me because I was testing him and if I was ever to begin to trust him, he’d have to earn it.

  And there was a physical rapport between us that underlay everything else, that seemed unbroken: a kind of recognition. Even though we’d never had a chance to bond, even though the chances were we would never be close – not unless I had a complete personality transplant, and he did too – the tie was still there. I could see him in me, and even though I still wasn’t sure how much I liked him, it was shocking how right it felt to have him around.

  Over the last dinner of the holiday he laid out a few more details of their plans for us. Top of the list was moving. Well, I’d known that was coming. But Mark confirmed my worst fears: his big idea was for all of us to move out of London and into his house in the country.

  ‘But what would I do there?’ I protested. ‘I’ve already applied to sixth form college. It’s all decided.’ I knew other people who were going – Molly, Jasmine, Toby Andrews, Brian Johnson. Not that I was bothered about Toby, but I’d kind of got used to having a boy with a long-suffering crush on me moping about the place.

  ‘I know it’s a big change for you,’ Mark said. ‘But there are lots of good sixth forms in Oxfordshire, too. I know you’re going to be busy with your exams when we get back, but I’ll get some information sent to you and you can look through it with your mum and we can go on some visits.’

  Ellie was sitting there giving him her best hangdog glance, like, Remember me? Mark glanced at her and threw her a bone: ‘We’ll need to get a move on to secure decent school places for both of you.’

  Ellie instantly perked up. ‘Will I be able to go on some visits, too?’

  ‘I should think so. We’ll have to see what we can do, in the time available,’ Mark said tightly.

  ‘Will we go to the same school?’ Ellie said with a slightly frightened look in my direction, as if even I would be better than nothing in a school that was otherwise filled with strangers.

  ‘That will depend on what we can sort out and what’s best for both of you. The whole thing’s actually a little bit more critical for Ava,’ Mark said. Ellie’s face fell. ‘I mean, in the sense that she’s got important exams coming up,’ he explained.

  The waiter arrived to take our orders for dessert and coffee. As usual, Mark passed on pudding. Too proud of his washboard stomach. Mum abstained too, probably trying to avoid piling on the pounds before the wedding. Mark of the washboard stomach wouldn’t want a bride who was fifty inches wide. He didn’t order Armagnac with his coffee this time. As far as he was concerned, the need for Dutch courage seemed to have passed.

  I had something with strawberries in to try to be healthy, but Ellie went for chocolate mousse, as she always did. It was served in a little glass pot, and she scraped it completely clean. Like always.

  Seeing that gave me a pang of something – I don’t know what. Like I’d been somewhere else, these last few days. Like I’d begun to miss her – my serious, intense, goofy little sister, who always ate her chocolate mousse right up.

  I gave the complimentary chocolate that came with my coffee to Ellie without her asking, and she took it with a little smile that was almost teary.

  She definitely must be finding all this overwhelming. But then, she was still pretty young, and she took things to heart. In spite of everything – the lack of money and Sean’s unreliability and the moving around – Mum had somehow managed to provide us with stability. That had gone, now. Everything was shifting, and it wasn’t so surprising for Ellie to be stressed out by that.

  Suddenly Ellie came out with a question that she must have been mulling over for some time: ‘So are you going to get married in church?’

  Mum and Mark exchanged glances. ‘Neither of us is particularly religious,’ Mark said. ‘We’re planning a very small registry office ceremony, with dinner at a really good restaurant afterwards.’

  Ellie’s face fell again. None of this was panning out in line with her most dearly held dreams. ‘So… how many people?’

  Another exchange of glances. They might not have been together for long, but Mum and Mark definitely had the non-verbal communication thing down pat.

  The upshot seemed to be that it was down to Mum to handle this one. ‘We were thinking we’d keep it small,’ she said. ‘After all, the really important thing is to make it a special day for the four of us. Five of us.’

  ‘How small?’ Ellie wanted to know.

  ‘Well, just family.’

  ‘But we don’t have any family,’ I objected. ‘You’re not about to invite long-lost Aunt Amanda, are you?’

  ‘No, but there’s Mark’s mother, who we’re all going to meet really soon, hopefully. Mark’s house is quite near her flat, so we’ll almost be neighbours.’

  Mum said this with a smile that was meant to broadcast how much she was looking forward to this meeting, but only succeeded in showing how nervous she was about it.

  I said, ‘So it’s going to be us and Mark’s mother… and that’s it?’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m afraid she’s the only living relative that Mark and I can summon up between us. That we’re still speaking to, I mean.’

  I glanced at Ellie, expecting her to be tragically disappointed. But she was looking at something on the other side of the room. Then she screwed her eyes tight shut and opened them, and blinked a couple of times as if she’d got something in her eye and was trying to clear it out.

  ‘Ellie,’ I said, ‘are you OK?’

  ‘Oh… yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,’ Ellie said.

  I found myself wishing, not for the first time, that she wasn’t quite so jumpy and highly-strung. If anything, she’d got worse since Mark had come on the scene. Most of the time she seemed to be either spaced out or apprehensive, as if she was anticipating some kind of disaster but didn’t think there was anything she could do to head it off.

  ‘The thing is, it’s second time round for both of us,’ Mum said. ‘It seems like the best way to do it is to keep it really low-key.’

  ‘But didn’t you have a really tiny wedding when you got married to Dad?’ I said. ‘I thought it was you and him and Grandma and Aunt Amanda, and that was it.’

  ‘Well, yes. And you were there, too, Ava. And you cried and Grandma had to take you out.’

  ‘Yeah. You told me. But a
nyway, it’s not like you had a massive celebration when you got married to Dad, I mean, Sean. This isn’t a contrast. It’s just more of the same.’

  Mark said, ‘Did Sean take you to one of the best restaurants in London afterwards?’ I shook my head. ‘You see? It is different.’

  I said, ‘But what about your friends? Like Karen, and all those other people you keep in touch with on Facebook. Wouldn’t some of them like to come?’

  Mark and Mum did the conferring-look thing again. It was Mark’s turn to respond this time. He said, ‘The thing is, Ava, I know that at your age friendships seem very important, but as you get older that may change. If you’re busy with work and family life, you may not see your friends so often. And that’s just a natural part of getting older. Then sometimes things happen. Significant life events that may have a bearing on some of your friendships. Like getting divorced, for example.’

  ‘But none of Mum’s friends care that she’s divorced. I mean, they’re her friends, not Dad’s. I mean Sean’s.’ I stopped in my tracks. ‘Oh, I see. You’re talking about your friends. What happened? Did they all take your ex’s side when you split up or something? I thought that kind of thing only happened in school.’

  ‘Ava,’ Mum said warningly.

  ‘OK, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise it would be such a sensitive subject. Just trying to find out why you don’t want any guests at your wedding. Didn’t realise that would be offensive.’

  Mum had gone very pink. She looked at me as though she might cry. ‘Please don’t spoil things, Ava,’ she said.

  Ellie piped up, ‘But I can still be a bridesmaid, can’t I, Mum? You did say I could.’

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ Mum said.

  ‘Well, don’t look at me,’ I told them. ‘I don’t want to be one.’