The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets

by Sophie Hannah

  I pause here, wondering if I ought to mention that Hathersage have since transferred Debbie, against her will, to their Cambridge hotel. I decide not to. Her move was unexpected and unwelcome, but it is irrelevant. I turn to the back page of my notebook and write a reminder to myself to include Debbie and Lisa in the acknowledgements. At first they both had doubts about collecting secrets for me, but they eventually allowed me to send each of them a box and promised to display it somewhere prominent in their hotels.

  Debbie phoned me one night, clearly upset. I asked her what was wrong. ‘I’m not sure I should tell you,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I should tell anyone.’ From the seriousness of her voice, I assumed something awful had happened, and I wanted to know what it was. As someone who had recently survived a shattering experience, I was interested in, shall we say, the genre of ordeals.

  I pause again. Does it matter that I have hinted at my own secret? I decide not. Readers are bound to be fascinated by the suggestion that the book’s editor is an enigmatic, troubled figure.

  It didn’t take long to persuade Debbie to tell me. She didn’t know what to do, and hoped I would be able to advise her. ‘An anonymous letter came in the post,’ she said. ‘A really nasty one.’

  ‘Someone wrote you a nasty letter?’ I was amazed. Debbie is one of the kindest people I have ever met, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would wish to do such a thing.

  ‘No, it wasn’t to me. It was addressed to someone called Ian Prudhoe. I know what must have happened. His address is 6 Harrow Square, and mine is 6 The Square.’ She sighed. ‘I just wish I hadn’t opened it. I opened it automatically without even looking at the envelope. Now I don’t feel I can send it on to him because he’ll know I’ve read it and…well, I’ll feel I’m the one attacking him, by passing on such a horrible letter.’

  ‘What does it say?’ I asked.

  ‘It makes no sense. It says, “All good criketers cum over each other. Hope you die a slow and painful death.” Cricketers is spelled wrong, and cum is spelled c-u-m.’

  ‘And it’s not signed?’

  ‘It’s signed “M8”. Whatever that means.’

  I told her it could be text message shorthand for ‘mate’. She agreed and said, with a sob in her voice, ‘Oh, Tamsin, you’re so much better at all this than I am.’

  Because it has no place in an introduction to a work of literature, I decide not to describe how I felt at this point in my conversation with Debbie. I remember my feelings clearly, however, and could describe them if I chose to. First, I was flattered by her compliment, even though it was an odd one. What does it mean to say that one person is better than another at receiving and interpreting wrongly delivered hate mail?

  All the same, I knew exactly what Debbie meant, and she was right. It should have been me, I thought. I wished the letter were in my hands, in my house. I wished it were up to me to decide what to do with it. I saw potential in the situation, while Debbie saw only trouble. I was, I freely admit, thrilled and intrigued by the mysterious line about cricketers. What could it possibly mean? I found it tantalising to speculate about what precise context might have provoked those words in a way that Debbie did not.

  There are disadvantages to being the sort of person I am, one who opts for excitement over boredom every time, event over non-event. It can mean trouble. Once, when I was eleven, on holiday, I ignored my parents and sister for three days because they insisted that the car chase I was convinced we’d witnessed was just two unconnected cars driving down the road one after the other.

  Luckily, Debbie seemed keen to delegate responsibility. She had considered several possible courses of action and had rejected all of them. She didn’t want to go to the police in case Ian Prudhoe found out she had done so and thought she was a stirrer. She told me she knew Harrow Square. It was a dump, an underclass ghetto (this wasn’t quite how she put it, but it was the gist), and noone who lived there would be likely to welcome a visit from the law.

  ‘What should I do?’ Debbie asked me. ‘I think I should just throw it away and forget about it, don’t you? I mean, why cause trouble when probably the letter writer’s not going to do anything else? People who write anonymous letters are cowards, aren’t they?’

  She was clearly trying to convince herself, but she failed to convince me. ‘You’ve got to tell this Ian Prudhoe,’ I said. ‘You can’t tear up the letter and pretend it never existed. What if M8 sets fire to his house or something? You’ll always wish you’d warned him. If I were you, I’d go round and see him, explain that you opened the envelope by accident, and give him the letter. Then it’s up to him to decide if he wants to go to the police or not.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ said Debbie. ‘I just can’t. I don’t want him to see me or know who I am. I don’t want anything to do with him.’

  This puzzled me, and I asked why not. After all, Ian Prudhoe was the recipient of the abuse, not the sender.

  ‘Someone who gets sent a letter like that could easily be – probably is – mixed up in something dodgy. I mean, he obviously knows some bad people, doesn’t he?’

  Seeing that my friend was in a bind, I offered to help. ‘Would you like me to deal with it?’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t at all mind sending the letter on to Ian Prudhoe. He doesn’t need to know it went to your house originally. I’ll just say I came upon it by accident – I won’t say how, he doesn’t need to know that – and that I felt I ought to pass it on, although naturally I’d have preferred to destroy it, so that he could decide if any action needed to be taken.’

  ‘Oh, would you do that?’ Debbie’s voice was full of relief. ‘Oh, yes, please. Thank you!’

  I stop writing and frown. I am dissatisfied with my introduction so far. Is all this information strictly relevant to The Book of Secrets? I may well have to scrap it and start again. But perhaps not. Perhaps I’m wary of it because I know that I am writing it to win Ian over, not for the sake of a wider readership. Still, it’s an interesting anecdote, I think, and it does neatly lead in to the explanation for how the book came into being. And I think it’s quite well-written, so far.

  I wonder, then, if my problem with it is that there is so much I have left out, even at this early stage in the story. My account of events feels dishonest, although I’m not trying to hide anything. I simply want to make the book a pacy read. No, that’s not strictly true. I’m also trying to avoid embarrassment. God knows I’ve had enough of that already, and I don’t want Ian to know how keen I was on the idea of him, even before we’d met. It might make me appear rather pathetic.

  Debbie’s desire to avoid Ian Prudhoe provoked a defensive fervour in me. Because he had received hate mail, she reasoned, he was probably a shifty character. I was astonished when I heard her say this. Yet more evidence, I thought, that one only has to be attacked once – even by a rabid savage, even by a person who can’t spell the word ‘cricketers’ – and other apparently sane, normal people will be queuing up to join in. The moral cowardice of most human beings never ceases to shock me.

  Debbie’s reaction to the letter brought my own sharply into focus. My instincts were the opposite of hers. As soon as I’d heard M8’s letter, I had begun, I realised, to empathise with poor Ian Prudhoe. I wanted to offer him my support. I saw him as the entirely innocent victim of an unhinged persecutor. It also occurred to me that it was not impossible that I might find him attractive. If Debbie hadn’t been so keen to give me the letter to do with as I wished, I would have had to resort to underhand tactics in order to seize control, but luckily she wanted rid of it, and by handing it over to me she satisfied both her conscience and her rather squeamish desire to avoid trouble.

  I mustn’t judge her too harshly, though. She and Lisa are my only friends. They met me here, at the hotel, and liked me in spite of my new, unglamorous job. They also both worked in the housekeeping department, and I miss them now that they’ve been transferred to other Hathersage hotels. I have never told either of them that I used to help run a l
iterature festival, that I was fired. Would Debbie assume I must have been mixed up in some shady or even illegal activity? That would make me laugh. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Debbie is a gluttonous reader, consuming one novel after another, but she never notices the names of the authors. She reads what we at the literature festival would have called clog-and-shawl sagas. Debbie doesn’t call them anything. To her they are simply books, the only kind she is aware of.

  Lisa prefers magazines, though she dips into the occasional celebrity biography, and has recently finished Victoria Beckham’s. Until she did, she often told Debbie and me that the last book she had read ‘all the way through’ was The Twits by Roald Dahl. I can’t tell her, because it would sound patronising, that it amuses me no end to have a close friend who would describe a book in these terms: ‘the last book I read all the way through’.

  In my old life, I had friends who read Ben Okri and Adam Thorpe and Don DeLillo, but they all lost interest in me after I was sacked.

  I needn’t have moved to Loughborough. I’m sure I could have got a job in the housekeeping department of the hotel I used to telephone almost daily to arrange accommodation for guests of the festival, but I didn’t want to be perceived as clinging on in an undignified way to the life I had lost. I couldn’t stand to be seen by anyone who knew what had happened to me. I felt miserable, rejected and ruined, and I wanted to move to a place where, I assumed, many people felt that way. I knew nothing about Loughborough, but it sounded uninspiring and characterless so I chose it, and I haven’t been disappointed. It’s a horrible town. On some level, I wonder if I am trying to pacify the fates by volunteering to live here. ‘You see,’ I am saying to them, ‘I have no pride left. I have nothing. Look where I live. Look what I do. I cannot sink any lower, so you’d be wasting your time arranging for me to do so.’

  When I tried to discuss with Debbie some possible interpretations of the cryptic part of M8’s note (I wasn’t interested in the second bit – everyone knows what ‘Hope you die a slow and painful death’ means), I was reminded once again of the differences between us. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It makes no sense.’ She was content to leave it at that. Had I endorsed her plan to destroy the letter and forget about it, Debbie would have resigned herself, happily, to permanent ignorance. She would have got on with her day-to-day existence and I don’t think she would ever have given a thought to M8, let alone driven herself crazy wondering who he or she was, or about the precise nature of his or her relationship to Ian Prudhoe. Debbie had no burning need to know what the line ‘All good criketers cum over each other’ meant; she had no inclination to speculate, in the absence of knowledge.

  I knew Lisa would be equally indifferent, unless I could prove to her that either Ian Prudhoe or M8 had slept with one of the Beckhams or showed off his (or her) new conservatory in the pages of Hello! magazine, so I speculated alone. My best guess was that Ian Prudhoe played cricket and had had some kind of dalliance with another cricketer. M8 was bound to be the wife or girlfriend of this character, the second cricketer, or, if it was an entirely homosexual scenario rather than a bisexual one, his jealous male lover.

  I was desperate to have my suspicions confirmed, to discuss with Ian Prudhoe the pros and cons of having an affair with a fellow team member, an attached one at that. I looked forward to demonstrating that I did not belong to the moral majority. I already knew that I would advise Ian to follow his heart rather than submit to the tyranny of M8’s emotional blackmail. Marriage is only a piece of paper, I would say. M8 cannot expect to own the second cricketer, and it is impossible to steal someone from somebody else unless that person wishes to be stolen. Ian would, of course, be impressed by my sophisticated approach to matters of the heart.

  I turn back to my introduction, intending to carry on with the story, but am immediately distracted again by the memory of another feature of the situation that appealed to me, at this early stage of my involvement in Ian Prudhoe’s life. My downfall, at the literature festival, in the town where I used to live, was brought about by excessive self-absorption. I don’t think anybody would deny that. The festival board, the sponsors, the audience who turned up that night to see Ian McEwan – they would all agree that I was obsessed, in those days, with my own selfish concerns. Not so now, in my new Loughborough life. By focusing so avidly on Ian Prudhoe’s predicament, by really immersing myself in it, I believed I would demonstrate to whatever authority was watching (I hesitate to say God, but I suppose I had in mind someone along those lines) that I had learned my lesson and now took a whole-hearted interest in other people’s problems.

  It strikes me, as I sit in the dimly lit, windowless basement of the hotel, that I have failed to convey, in my book’s title, my own enthusiasm for the project. Problems, secrets – whatever you want to call them – they amount to the same thing: other people’s private business. My working title, The Book of Secrets, does not communicate the allure, the enticement, that I need readers to feel if they are going to buy the book in their millions. I, as the editor, have to make contagious my desire to know those very facts and stories people most want to hide. I decide, impulsively, to change the title to The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets. I am aware that it is risky to make such an overblown claim, but I think I can get away with it. A few years ago, Tibor Fisher published a collection of short stories called Don’t Read This Book if You’re Stupid and noone thought badly of him. On the contrary, we invited him to the festival.

  But I must get on.

  I felt it was important to act quickly, for who knew what further assaults M8 had planned, so I wrote Ian Prudhoe a note saying that I had something that belonged to him, and asking him to meet me. I gave him my phone number and he called me straight away. At first he was angry that I refused to tell him any more over the telephone, but I felt that, given the gravity of the matter we had to discuss, a face-to-face meeting was necessary. He suggested McDonald’s, but I told him Da Tonino’s would be better – it’s a nice little Italian, the kind I love, with dark wooden booths, red and white checked tablecloths, candles weeping wax down the necks of plump-bellied wine bottles in straw holders. Ian wasn’t keen, because Da Tonino’s is pretty pricey, but I assured him I would pay. He had no choice but to agree. I was determined that everything should be pleasant that could be; everything, in other words, apart from M8’s horrible letter.

  Ian turned up ten minutes late. He was not at all physically attractive, as I had imagined he

  Oh dear. I can’t say that, can I? I cross it out, scribble on it until the words are no longer visible. It’s a pity people are so sensitive, because I was going to go on to say that I felt drawn to Ian despite what many people would describe as his startling ugliness. My first thought, on seeing his face, was that it must have been reconstructed after an accident. Perhaps M8 had already struck. I wondered if it was acid, broken glass, fire. Ian’s lips, nose and eyelids looked too large for his face, as if they were swollen. Or rather his face, because of its rough texture, looked like a weathered stone likeness of a swollen face.

  I inspected him more closely and decided that perhaps the reconstructed effect was a result of bad acne scarring. Either way – and I know this would make no sense to a lot of readers, so I will leave it out because I want the book to be a commercial success – I was instantly drawn to Ian, far more than I would have been if he’d been conventionally handsome. His face told me that he had suffered horribly and survived. I wanted to stroke his bumpy cheeks and tell him everything would be all right.

  Ian turned up ten minutes late. Very cool, I thought. No woman likes a man who tries too hard, and he hadn’t. His fraying jeans were muddy from the knees down, which caused a few noses to twitch in Da Tonino’s. Noone said anything, but I suspect they might have done had I not been a regular customer. Lisa, Debbie and I used to eat there every Friday night. Now that they have both deserted me, I continue the tradition alone.

  Ian had an interesting fac
e and I warmed to him instantly. He asked me, fairly brusquely, what I had that was his. I told him to relax and sit down, look at a menu. I was going to buy him lunch, after all. I refused to give him any information until we had ordered. I feared that if I launched into the unwholesomeness of M8’s letter straight away, the shock might be too much for Ian. Eventually, under duress, he ordered some garlic mushrooms, claiming he only wanted a starter, and I asked him, ‘Do you play cricket?’

  ‘No,’ he said, as if I was mad. ‘Why? What the fuck do you want with me? Just give me whatever it is you’ve got.’ I attributed his hostility to all the suffering he had been through. I could see that underneath the thin veneer of aggression, he was a kind, decent person.

  At that point I handed over the note. Ian read it expressionlessly. (Stoicism is another of his virtues, as is the ability to keep a cool head in a crisis. How I envy him that!) He said nothing. I explained that the letter had been delivered to my house by mistake, and that I was sorry to have to pass on such a nefarious communication. Still he did not speak. Holding his hate mail, he stood up as if to leave.

  ‘Hang on a second,’ I said. ‘You can’t just go.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Aren’t you worried? Is this M8 person a risk? Might he or she try to hurt you in some way? I mean…we need to discuss what to do.’

  Ian shook his head and stuffed the letter in his pocket. ‘I’d better go,’ he said.

  ‘But do you know who M8 is? You must do!’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Well? Who is it? Look, sit down. Your mushrooms’ll be here soon.’

  ‘No, I’m all right,’ he said, and walked out of the restaurant.

  I pause to wipe away tears. It is impossible to convey how panicky I felt as he left and I realised there was nothing I could do. Never in my wildest dreams, in my vilest nightmares, had I envisaged that Ian might not want to confide in me. I felt like a total failure. I knew no more than I had before our meeting. I didn’t even know Ian’s sexual orientation. I told myself that he was sure to be straight, given how surly-verging-on-rude he was. I hoped so. I didn’t like the thought of him in the arms of the second cricketer. And perhaps he never had been; perhaps the line about cricketers meant something quite different.