The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets

by Sophie Hannah

  There were also other inconveniences. Audrey couldn’t drive and had no car, so Tom had to take her everywhere she wanted or needed to go: to the dentist, to the theatre and cinema, to the post office. Once, after a particularly gruelling day at work, he had arrived at the show home and slumped in a yellow chair with a beer, only to be told by Selena that he had to take Audrey to visit the grave of a famous sculptor who was buried in the next town, ten miles away. He’d had to take her immediately. Selena hissed that it couldn’t wait; Audrey had been stuck in the show home all day and needed an outing.

  Clive sometimes told excessively gruesome stories about corpses he’d met that day in front of the children, and gave them nightmares. ‘When we know him a bit better, we’ll ask him to stop,’ said Selena.

  Petra was at college and often needed help with her coursework. Selena had volunteered to oversee her media studies projects, and Clive was helping her with her IT assignments, but the task of supervising and editing all the history essays had been allocated to Tom. ‘But I don’t know anything about the causes of the French Revolution!’ he’d pleaded with Selena.

  ‘Well, find out,’ she’d suggested. ‘Or take an inspired guess. I mean, they’re bound to be pretty much the same as the causes of all revolutions, aren’t they? “Let them eat cake”, “Can you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men”, that sort of thing.’

  ‘But why can’t Petra..?’

  ‘Venice, Tom.’ That was all Selena ever had to say. ‘Venice, Tom’ was synonymous with ‘Shut up’.

  Tom found, to his utter bewilderment, that he didn’t begrudge the extra money and the extra effort nearly as much as he thought he ought to, not only because of Venice but because he genuinely liked having Audrey, Clive and Petra around. He felt bolstered, consolidated. He hurried back from the office to the show home every night, and was greeted with cheers of ‘Hey! Tom’s back!’ And, every time, he felt a proud glow. He doubted very much that Idris Sutherland had complete strangers queuing up to form lifelong bonds with him; for the first time in his life, Tom felt like the lucky one. He had an accessory that noone else had: the Kilkennys, a solid band of voluntary relatives.

  He loaded the shopping into the back of the car and drove to the memorial hall to collect Audrey from an afternoon event that had something to do with the celebrity chef Amy Dennison. Audrey was waiting for him on the steps when he arrived, wearing a sleeveless denim dress, red sandals and a red shawl. She was holding a Tupperware container.

  ‘Amy’s special heart-of-ice biscuits,’ she said, as she climbed into the car. ‘Joe and Lucy will love them. Only after my lentil and okra casserole, of course – they’ve got to eat that first.’

  ‘Oh, they will,’ said Tom. The children ate whatever Audrey put in front of them. ‘So, how was your…thing?’

  ‘Very interesting indeed. I think Amy Dennison must be a lesbian. There was a very pretty young woman in the audience, and Amy kept looking at her.’

  ‘Probably is, then,’ said Tom. Because he was in a good mood, he added, ‘I was really disappointed when I met a lesbian for the first time. I was quite old, really – in my early twenties. You’d think I might have met one before. But I hadn’t. The only lesbians I’d ever seen were in…well, porn films.’ He looked at Audrey out of the corner of his eye. She was grinning. ‘And, you know – well, you probably don’t – but in porn films, lesbians are all slim and blonde and gorgeous and submissive, and only bother sleeping with other women in order to please men. I kind of liked that idea. And then I met Virginia – this real lesbian I mentioned – and she was all butch and self-righteous, and never once offered to bonk a nubile friend in front of me…’

  Audrey began to laugh. She laughed so hard that the biscuits banged against the sides of the Tupperware box on her lap. Tom laughed too, until a frightening thought stopped him: he had said what he honestly thought about something. Surely that wasn’t good. When it all fell apart, this new family charade, when Selena was fired and he was fired and they were all turfed out of the show home, he was bound to regret having let a virtual stranger see any part of his true self, even just a tiny fraction, the minute segment of Tom Foyers that was dedicated to reacting to lesbians.

  ‘I’m gay, you know,’ said Audrey, once she’d stopped laughing.

  ‘Really?’ Tom’s new sense of freedom expanded even further. He was beginning to feel fluffy-headed, the human equivalent of a meringue. He and his wife were pioneers in the field of experimental living. They had created a new family, and it wasn’t the usual conventional model – oh no, there was no danger of that. It included an elderly lesbian. When Nora and Gillian at work found out about this (Tom would make sure they did by telling Ruth the secretary), they would see his letters as evidence not of insolence but of a sort of bohemian sophistication. He couldn’t wait to return to the office.

  4 July 2005

  Dear Tom

  My background is not ‘in catering’, as I am sure you must know. I worked in the pharmaceuticals industry for many years as a distribution manager, and have enough experience in the world of commerce to know when an employee is overstepping the mark. I believe that you are doing so, and have been doing so for some time, and I find the situation unacceptable. Please telephone my secretary at your earliest convenience to arrange a meeting with me. I think we need to have a serious talk about your attitude to our team objectives here at Phelps Corcoran Cummings.

  Best wishes, Nora

  (cc: Gillian Bate, Imrana Kabir, Alastair Hardisty)

  5 July 2005

  Dear Nora

  I tried to ring your secretary to arrange a meeting, as instructed, but she did not answer her telephone. In order to expedite matters, wouldn’t it make more sense for us to make an arrangement ourselves? How about next Sunday, 1.30-ish, in Pizza Hut on Albion Street in town? They’ve still got that great deal on: as much pizza as you can eat for a fiver. I’m sure you’ll beat me hands down, but I’ll give it my best shot!

  Warm and fond wishes, Tom

  (cc: Charles Manson, Kofi Annan, Dame Judi Dench, Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po, Donald Rumsfeld, Donald Trump, the Kilkenny family, that BBC1 newsreader with grey hair and a really boring face – can’t remember his name, Monica Lewinsky, the Gypsy Kings)

  6 July 2005

  Dear Tom

  Please come to my office at nine thirty on Friday morning. Gillian Bate, Imrana Kabir and Alastair Hardisty will also be present.

  Yours sincerely, Nora

  (cc: Gillian Bate, Imrana Kabir, Alastair Hardisty)

  7 July 2005

  Dear Nora

  Okay. All my love, Tom

  (cc: Marco Pierre White, Condoleezza Rice, Hercule Poirot, Jerry Seinfeld, kd lang, Zola Budd, Trinny Woodall, Susannah Constantine, Ike Turner, David Icke, David Irving, David Dimbleby, Jonathan Dimbleby, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Oliver Letwin, Morph from that 1970s kids’ programme Take Hart, that other plasticine creature from Take Hart that looked exactly like Morph apart from being white, Robert Kilroy-Silk)

  Tom stood on the balcony of the show home. Clive and Petra had moved the coffee table to prop open the door and were now sitting side by side on the yellow leather sofa. Selena sat in the big yellow chair. Audrey, Lucy and Joe sat cross-legged on the floor. Even with the door open, it was stifling. There was no breeze, no air, just heavy heat. Other people’s noise was all that blew in from outside.

  ‘Do I have to?’ said Tom.

  ‘Yes,’ said Selena.

  The balcony was his stage. All eyes were on him. Everyone expected a performance. Audrey had made some lumpy pancakes, using one of Amy Dennison’s recipes. Lesbian pancakes, Audrey had called them, winking at Tom. And Petra had poured everybody a glass of Pimms and lemonade, cranberry juice and lemonade for the children.

  ‘All right, then.’ Tom took a deep breath and shuffled the papers in his hand. Then he began to read, starting with Nora’s first letter to him. He read it all aloud, the whole correspo
ndence. He read with no expression on his face and no feeling in his voice. He did this because he was embarrassed, not because he wanted to achieve any particular effect or manipulate his audience into having a certain reaction. But after a while he became aware that to read his and Nora’s injurious memos to one another in this deadpan way made the whole business seem utterly hilarious, almost clownish in its absurdity. Until this moment, until he heard Audrey, Clive and Petra hooting with laughter, he had taken it for granted that the little situation he had brewing at the office was deadly serious: a minefield, a catastrophe waiting to happen, a horror on a par with global dimming and the execution of Derek Bentley for saying something ambiguous to a policeman. Tom had felt rather like Dreyfus (about whom he had read in one of Petra’s history essays), exiled to Devil’s Island for a crime he hadn’t committed. The man who had committed the crime was named Esterhazy. In Tom’s mind, he had been Dreyfus and Nora had been Esterhazy.

  I need to lighten up a bit, thought Tom. I need to lighten up quite a lot.

  Selena wasn’t laughing. When Tom had finished his recital, she snapped, ‘I wish you’d told me about this earlier.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘All that stuff you wrote – I mean, it’s all very entertaining, but presumably you didn’t really send copies to Condoleezza Rice and the Gipsy Kings.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’

  ‘So it’s just a joke. That’s her come-uppance, a joke. It hardly hits her where it hurts, does it? And what a waste, when it’s such a brilliant idea!’

  Tom, Audrey, Clive, Petra, Joseph and Lucy all looked confused.

  ‘She’s obviously a total wimp, desperate to have everybody’s approval. What better way to get her back than to do properly what you’ve only pretended to do!’

  ‘What, send all these to Ike Turner and Morph from Take Hart?’ Tom waved the bundle of papers in the air.

  ‘No. Don’t be facetious!’ Selena snapped. Tom didn’t like the sound of that. Over the past few weeks, he had come to believe that he had a unique talent for being facetious, a talent he’d planned and hoped to nurture, whether he stayed at Phelps Corcoran Cummings or not. He no longer wished he were a straightforward person. Facetiousness was infinitely preferable to straightforwardness.

  ‘What does she care what Morph and Ike Turner think of her?’ Selena addressed the room. ‘She doesn’t know them. Think about it. Would you care if Ike Turner disapproved of you?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom. Audrey, Clive and Petra also said that they would not.

  ‘But are we saying that because we don’t know him, or because he beat up Tina?’ asked Petra.

  ‘Look, my point is: Nora would care an awful lot more if Tom wrote a letter that made clear what a complete fucker she is and sent copies to all her friends, her colleagues, her family – the people she knows and cares about. Imagine how embarrassing it’d be for her to have to explain to all of them. And they might pretend to take her side because they’re her people, but privately they’d all wonder, wouldn’t they? How awful a boss must she be, they’d think, for one of her team to write this about her and send copies to all of them? They’d always wonder. She’d be tarnished for ever.’

  Tom liked the idea of Nora Connaughton being tarnished for ever. He liked it very much indeed.

  ‘You’ve got to steal her address book,’ said Selena.

  ‘When, exactly? I’m going to be sacked tomorrow morning,’ Tom pointed out.

  ‘Then we’ll hire a private detective.’

  ‘Wow!’ yelled Joseph.

  ‘That would be quite an adventure,’ said Audrey.

  ‘It’ll be no problem for a detective to get us a list of everyone who’s important to Nora…’

  ‘But what would Tom write, to be sent to all of them?’ asked Clive.

  ‘We’ll worry about the details later,’ said Selena.

  ‘Can we all write it? Can we write it together?’ Petra shrieked.

  Tom shook his head in mild exasperation. He turned his back on the glee that had broken out in the lounge and stared out over the river towards the hills in the distance. For the first time, he noticed a wind farm. It looked like a group of people, far away, waving. He had only stood on this balcony once before, and on that occasion he’d looked mainly at his feet on the bumpy metal, wondering how secure any such contraption could be; what was to stop a balcony from snapping off the side of the house and plummeting to the hard earth beneath?

  Something: that was the answer. There was something in place to prevent that from happening. He didn’t know what, but then he wasn’t a builder or an architect.

  Let other people worry about it.

  At exactly nine thirty the next morning, Tom walked into Nora’s office. Nora sat behind her desk, her hands folded in front of her. She wore the expression of a mortuary assistant, about to open a metal drawer and show somebody their deceased beloved. ‘Come in, please, Tom,’ she said. But he was already in.

  On either side of Nora were Gillian Bate and Imrana Kabir. Tom nearly laughed when he saw their faces, which were even grimmer than Nora’s; they looked like two reluctant spectators at a cult slaying. Frankly, it wasn’t convincing. Tom was certain that, secretly, they felt as merry and rejuvenated as he did. He noticed that Alastair Hardisty was not present. Why not? Tom had been promised Alastair Hardisty. Where was he? Had Nora made him up? Perhaps he was a tiny plasticine man from an ancient television programme, one Tom had never seen.

  Tom sat down on the chair that had been put out for him, opposite Nora’s desk. ‘Right,’ he said, rubbing his hands together to convey enthusiasm. ‘What’s all this about?’

  The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets

  1) SOMETIMES I DREAM ABOUT KILLING MYSELF, just to make people like me more.

  2) One afternoon I went to the loo at work. I’m a Business Studies teacher at a grammar school (well, it’s not really a grammar school, it’s actually a comp but it used to be a proper grammar and it’s still called that). Anyway, I knew I was going to be in there for a while, if you get my drift, so I remembered what I learned about what they call ‘critical path analysis’ when I did my teacher training (basically this means being as efficient as possible by combining more than one task wherever you can – the example most often used is putting the coffee and milk and sugar in the cup while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil). So I thought, I’m going to be on the bog for a while, so I’ll take some work with me to mark. I took Helen Pritchard’s essay, and managed to read the whole thing and mark it before I’d finished crapping. It was pretty good, and I gave it 68 percent. Anyway, then when I reached for the loo roll, there was none. I hadn’t noticed! I didn’t have any tissues or anything in my pocket, and the bin (which could well have contained some old bits of toilet paper) was right on the other side of the room. So was the sink. It’s a disabled toilet, so it’s not small. I couldn’t hop across the floor without risking getting my trousers and boxers dirty, so I had no choice but to wipe my arse with Helen’s essay! I had to pretend I’d lost it and ask her for another copy, which didn’t go down very well, but I did bump her mark up by a couple of per cent, to make up for the inconvenience! I never told anyone, because I was worried I might get sacked!

  I am the editor of The Book of Secrets. Or I would be, if I had any decent contributions. These two disheartening offerings are all I’ve received so far. The first is intriguing, but too short. It lacks narrative drive and does not contain enough psychological detail to bring it to life. The second has detail, but it’s crass and essentially boring. It is early days, however, so I will try not to be too disappointed. And my box isn’t the only one. Perhaps when I speak to Debbie and Lisa, they will tell me that they have had more promising deposits. You’re bound to get a better class of secret in cultured places such as Cambridge and York than in Loughborough. People will write better and be generally more insightful.

  I don’t yet have a publisher, let alone an advance, so at the moment I’m wo
rking on the book for free. I’m not too worried about this. It’s such an interesting project that I can’t see how anyone could resist it. Who wouldn’t want to buy it? Eventually there will be plenty of money. Enough for me to give up my job, hopefully. The great thing is, if it works, it will continue to work. There will always be new people, new secrets. The Book of Secrets can be followed by The Book of Secrets 2. I am hoping that the series will become a talking point, a cultural phenomenon, and the contributions will come flooding in.

  Noone is watching me at the moment, so I have stopped working. I am obsessed with getting on with the book and I don’t care if I’m caught and sacked. This isn’t a job anyone in her right mind would fear losing. I used to have one of those. I was the assistant director of a literature festival. Not in Loughborough; I used to live somewhere superior, the sort of place where, I imagine, the secrets dropped into any box such as mine would be exceptionally entertaining as well as wittily presented.

  I’m not sure I’m even going to use the two secrets I’ve been given so far. I can’t work up any enthusiasm for editing the second, and the first is so short that it would need extending, if anything. Since I don’t know the situation behind that odd sentence, I am in no position to add to it. Still, there is work I can be getting on with – creative work, I mean, not the demeaning kind the hotel pays me to do. Until now I haven’t felt ready to start the introduction, but today, at last, I think I do. I get out my notebook with the soft black leather covers and begin to write:

  This book would not exist if I had not met Ian Prudhoe.

  I stop and smile. Ian will like that. Who wouldn’t? What man could resist the idea that a book existed – a successful, much-discussed book – solely because of him? I chew my pen for a few seconds. I must be careful not to mix up my introduction with my own secret, which of course I am planning to include. There can’t be any overlap between these two pieces.

  The story of how I met Ian is a peculiar one. It started with a phone call from my friend Debbie. She and I used to work together at the Hathersage Hotel in Loughborough.