The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Aaah!’ Kay tilted her head to one side as she often did, indulgent and sympathetic. ‘The girls both fell asleep in the car, and…’

  ‘…We didn’t want to wake them when we got home,’ Mark took over.

  ‘You’ll probably think we’re silly, but…’

  ‘…Kay and I were pretty exhausted ourselves, so we thought we might as well have a little siesta in the car.’

  Celia stuck her thumb in her mouth and stared impatiently at her own house as if keen to be inside it, resentful of being outside mine.

  ‘Right,’ I said. When Emmy was a baby and Matthew was going through his wakeful-at-night phase, I had once fallen asleep on my feet in the supermarket, leaning on my trolley.

  I felt horribly and visibly foolish. There had been no disaster after all. Embarrassment was all over my skin like a rash, making me hot and uncomfortable. My head was still jangling, my nerves clenched. How long would it take my body to realise that everything was all right? Because it was all right, however humiliated I was; the Devines were alive.

  I felt angry with Mark and Kay, newly suspicious of them, though I knew this was irrational. Did it make sense to say that you were suspicious of someone unless you suspected them of a specific thing? And what could that be, in this case? I had suspected them of one thing and one thing only – being dead in their car – and now they had proved quite adequately that they were not. That should have been the end of the matter. So why did I feel that Mark and Kay had outwitted me? Kay was wearing an identical skirt to one I owned. I decided never to buy anything from Next again.

  Mark was generously telling the police officers and ambulance men that they should not resent the waste of their time, that mine was an easy mistake to make, anyone might have done so, that his family and mine were not merely nextdoor neighbours but good friends as well, that I was a writer and therefore could be expected to have a vivid imagination (I write user manuals for food processors and other kitchen equipment). Kay nodded her agreement to all of this.

  ‘Shall we all come in and have a cup of tea?’ Mark suggested, looking past me into my hall. ‘It’s quite funny, really, isn’t it, when you think about it?’ Anya sighed and wrinkled her nose, as if the whole matter were beneath her. I had always found Anya a little frightening, I suddenly realised. She was only nine, but that didn’t stop her from exuding dismissive authority with all the complacency of a Tudor monarch.

  I was beginning to feel more normal, my mind cooling down after the hot panic.

  ‘Milk. Milky!’ Celia whined.

  I wondered if it was natural that Mark and Kay weren’t at all cross with me, given what I’d done, that they were being so good-humoured about it. What would Mark expect in return for his leniency? A cup of tea, to start with. ‘Now’s not really a convenient time,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ I needed to be alone, to compose myself. I still felt horribly embarrassed, and couldn’t bear to be observed by anybody.

  The police and ambulance staff looked relieved. They didn’t want tea, didn’t want to extend this pantomime. Perhaps they had never before encountered an obsessive socialiser like Mark, someone who makes you feel that ending a phone call with him, a chat, an evening together, is something you need to prepare for and rehearse, otherwise you will never achieve it. Whatever the occasion, Mark always wanted it to go on and on. ‘Because he always has more to say,’ said John. ‘He loves the sound of his own voice. And he’s not happy. You can’t tell me he’s happy, a guy like that. His ho-ho-ho act’s a sham. He can’t stand silence, or his own company. Or his own house, come to think of it. He prefers our house! It’s like a stage for him. That’s what it is: he needs to be performing all the time.’

  The last time the Devines were due to come round for dinner, John issued me with a warning: ‘I really mean it this time. If that guy’s not gone by half eleven, I’m bringing my pyjamas down to the lounge and changing into them right in front of him. Maybe then he’ll get the hint!’

  Both policemen looked bored and anxious to get away – after all, crimes were no doubt being committed – and it was only this that enabled me, finally, to close my front door with Mark and Kay Devine on the optimum side of it. I couldn’t have explained why, exactly, but I knew that, without the officers’ presence, I would not have succeeded in fending off Mark’s suggestion that I should offer refreshments to him and his family.

  I shuddered and groaned in the hall for a while after they had all gone, cringing at the huge obviousness of my mistake. I wished it hadn’t happened with a pointless desperation that made me feel faint. I should have listened to John last year and been more reserved, instead of rushing into a friendship with our new neighbours. John had never been keen on the Devines. Even before we knew them, he was not comfortable with them as a concept. ‘It’s embarrassing,’ he said. ‘There’s four of us, and there’s four of them. Their eldest goes to Matthew’s school, their youngest goes to Emmy’s nursery. Mark leaves the house every morning in a suit, like I do. They probably get the same bloody newspaper as us. Don’t invite them round for any drinks or meals! I’m not socialising with them!’

  John had never liked people who reminded him of any respect in which he was not unique. He refused even to read about people like himself. I was the one who read about the domestic and romantic lives of the English professional classes; I liked the familiar, the easily recognisable. John read about driven fools with spikes sticking out of the front of their boots who were obsessed with reaching summits (but only if they were summits not previously reached by other driven fools) and who invariably ended up clinging to fraying ropes with their frost-bitten teeth, wondering which of their legs to cut off with a pocket knife and eat raw first. That’s what’s wrong with the Devines, I thought, as I leaned against my front door, feeling as if there was something I needed to work out: they’re not familiar, but they think they are. They try to be.

  I had ignored John’s insane embargo, as he always expects (and secretly hopes, even as he rants) that I will, and within a few weeks of them moving in our two families were on friendly terms and saw each other socially once every couple of weeks. Mark Devine irritated John profusely by beginning too many of his sentences with the words ‘If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s…’

  ‘It’s so dishonest!’ John fumed. ‘It’s the double-bluff aspect that pisses me off. You know, the upfront boast, but it’s not really a boast, because it’s as if he’s saying, “Look, I might be an essentially talentless underachiever but I do have this one small area of prowess”, but actually it is outrageously fucking boastful, because he says it every five seconds about every single topic that arises. It isn’t one thing he’s good at, it’s five hundred things: chess, fixing cars, DIY, maths, running – everything!’

  It was true, I had to admit. Mark Devine thought he was ‘the donkey’s bollocks’ – another of his favourite phrases, though he was careful never to say this directly about himself. He merely reported it when other people said so. So, we discovered that, whereas Mark thought his boss, his firm, his chess teacher as a child, his personal trainer at the gym, were the donkey’s bollocks, they (trainer, chess teacher, boss and firm) thought Mark was the donkey’s bollocks. ‘And, of course, as the most donkey’s-bollocksy people Mark’s ever met, they must be right!’ said John.

  I half smiled as I remembered this; I was so used to thinking of the Devines as comic extras in our lives. Mark wasn’t the only member of the family with funny behavioural tics; Kay Devine had a habit of saying ‘Aaaah’ all the time, in the tone of voice people adopt when they say, ‘Bless!’, as if whoever she happened to be talking to had just said or done something impossibly cute. So a typical conversation with Kay might go like this:

  Me: Hi, Kay. I was just about to take Emmy to the park, but it’s started raining.

  Kay: Aaaah! We’re on our way to the Wacky Warehouse, if you want to come.

  Me: I don’t know. I might take the opportunity to nip to Sainsbury’s, actually.
>
  Kay: Aaaaah! All right, then. See you soon.

  And I would walk away puzzled, wondering if, without being aware of it, what I had actually said was, ‘Two little black kittens with white paws and pink ribbons round their necks.’

  I’d always felt sorry for Kay, mainly because when Mark was around she didn’t get to speak. Her brief, it seemed, was to listen proudly to her husband, which she did with gusto, even when he was talking the most puerile nonsense, as he often was. If Kay got carried away and attempted to speak while Mark was speaking (which was all the time), she rarely got further than ‘Aaaah’ before being cut off by his rising voice.

  How John and I laughed, delighted that our new neighbours had provided us with so many snide giggling opportunities. First there was their fear of the sun, and their insistence that Anya and Celia wear factor fifty sunblock all year round (‘because cloud cover isn’t infallible’ – Mark). Then there was the best lounge, with its curtains that were always closed. When I was feeling mischievous and wanted to bitch, I mentioned the lounge to John. It always got him going.

  ‘They say it’s just the children who aren’t allowed in, but when they had us for dinner that time, Mark kept making excuses to keep us in the kitchen! I don’t reckon they even let themselves go into that room. I bet it’s like a museum, the museum of their own lives, all their best stuff locked away in glass-fronted cabinets…’

  ‘…huge, hideous studio photographs of themselves in their smartest clothes on the walls,’ I contributed.

  ‘…immaculate carpets that no foot has ever touched. It’s pathetic! And, I mean, their house is an exact copy of ours, so we know they can’t spare a room. I tell you, it’s typical of Mark Devine, to want his own museum…’

  ‘You don’t know it’s that,’ I said, laughing. ‘You just made that up!’

  ‘…like the fucking Brontë parsonage! I bet he imagines that in years to come people will travel from miles around to look at Mark Devine memorabilia, except – oh, sorry, Mark, didn’t anyone tell you? – noone does that with accountants, irrespective of whether they’re the donkey’s bollocks or not! And I’ll tell you another thing: noone would be remotely interested in that guy if his name wasn’t Mark Devine!’

  I stared at him, puzzled. ‘What do you mean? Noone is interested in him, are they? Except us, when we want to have a bitch.’

  ‘If his name was...’ John wagged his finger in the air.

  ‘Duncan Pilkington,’ I suggested.

  ‘Exactly! Noone would give him a second thought!’

  ‘Noone does give him a second thought. Anyway, I think you’re wrong about the best lounge,’ I told him. ‘I reckon they use it, Mark and Kay. But only them. I don’t reckon they ever take friends in there, or family. Maybe it’s their special bonking room, full of sex toys. That’d explain why the curtains are always shut.’

  ‘They’re shut because of Mark’s sun phobia. Even so, he probably sits in there with whale blubber smeared all over his face, just in case cloud cover and curtain cover aren’t infallible!’

  And then another memory. Not a funny one this time: Kay telling me how pleased I must have been to have a girl, finally, when Emily was born. Matty standing next to me, hearing every word she said. Me saying, ‘I was happy to have both my children.’ Her saying, ‘Aaaah. But girls are much better. I only ever wanted girls. Girls are nice and clean!’ Matty unusually subdued that evening, despite my reassurances.

  Emily appeared in the hall. The sight of her, with tears still visible on her cheeks, broke my train of thought. ‘Ganny Bapa?’ she said hopefully.

  ‘No, darling, not today.’ I bent down to hug her. ‘We’ll see Granny and Bapa at the weekend.’

  ‘Good boy, Mummy,’ she said, wriggling free, running back to the lounge.

  I rubbed my forehead and sighed, knowing my ordeal was far from over. I would have to tell John about my hideous error. Mark would certainly mention it, and if John hadn’t heard about it from me first, he would be understandably puzzled and perhaps even angry. My marriage to John – its success – was based to a large extent upon our ability and desire to keep one another fully informed of everything we needed to know and an awful lot of things we didn’t strictly need but would undoubtedly prefer to know. The efficient and enthusiastic transferral of vast amounts of necessary and unnecessary information was our strength.

  This was the first thing I had ever wanted not to tell my husband, the first story I would have to relay to him that showed me in an unflattering light. How sane and sensible I usually am, I thought. It made this one lapse all the more humiliating. I told John about it as soon as he walked through the door, to get it over with. I’d been dreading his reaction, imagining the baffled, concerned look in his eye as, privately, he questioned my sanity. I needn’t have worried, since he opted to question it in a more public, overt manner.

  ‘Is there something wrong with you, mentally?’ he demanded. ‘You see them in their car and assume they’re dead?’

  ‘There was a hosepipe on the ground behind the car,’ I said wearily. I had no energy for an argument I couldn’t win. Clearly I was not going to succeed in proving that I was right to think the Devines were dead, so what was the point of saying anything?

  ‘It’s often there, if Mark’s been cleaning the drive. Haven’t you ever noticed it before?’

  ‘No. I don’t know… They looked dead, John. You didn’t see them. Mark and Kay had their eyes closed, Anya’s head had fallen forward. Celia’s eyes were open but just sort of staring emptily…’

  ‘She’s a toddler! What do you expect to see in her eyes: anxiety about the world’s dwindling oil reserves? She was probably daydreaming!’

  ‘Look, it’s embarrassing enough without you going on about it!’

  ‘Are you cracking up? Okay, let me try to put myself in your position. No, I still don’t get how you could look at our neighbours, asleep, and assume they were dead.’

  ‘Because it’s not normal for an entire family to have a nap in their car, right outside their house!’

  ‘Oh, and I suppose it’s much more normal for them to gas themselves with a hosepipe. That’s an everyday occurrence in our neck of the woods, isn’t it? You’re losing your grip on reality! You’ll end up one of those fragile housewives, the kind everyone tactfully refers to as ‘sensitive’, monged out on Valium, with lipstick the colour of dried blood running into the wrinkles around your mouth, shuffling around in a houseoat!’ John had never been one to shy away from a potential problem.

  I changed the subject as soon as he allowed me to. I hoped I had concealed from him the extent to which the incident had crushed my confidence. It was stupid and embarrassing, yes, but it was more than that. When, one by one, the Devines had stepped out of their car, loud and full of life, I had been genuinely frightened.

  Absurdly, over the next few days, a faint trace of that fear lingered. Every time I saw Mark leave the house with his briefcase in his hand, every time I saw Kay drop a bulging white bin liner into the green wheelie bin outside their house, I shivered as if I were looking at the undead. A stubborn part of my brain still refused to accept that I had been wrong. Alongside my mild dread was an equally mild irritation. Mark’s smile now looked to me like the smile of a man who dared to defy the most fundamental natural law, knowing he would get away with it.

  I shared none of these thoughts with John. For the first time in our marriage, there was an obstacle to the effective flow of information both relevant and irrelevant.

  The following week, the doorbell rang one day while I was alone in the house. It was Kay. ‘Aaah!’ she said. ‘I just popped round to check Matthew and Emmy are still coming to Anya’s birthday party on Saturday.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, thinking again about Kay’s bizarre opinions on boys and girls. She always abbreviated my daughter’s name – to Em or Emmy – but never my son’s. He was always Matthew. His birthday card had been six days late. Em’s birthday was a month before Matty
’s. Her card had arrived on time, with a present attached to it.

  ‘Aaaah,’ said Kay. ‘And obviously you and John must come, too. There’ll be plenty of grown-ups there.’ She was still wearing my Next skirt.

  ‘Great,’ I said. The prospect of the party made me feel tired in advance, and I couldn’t even rouse myself to pronounce my consonants properly. My words slurred into each other as I murmured, ‘I’ll mention it to John.’

  Foolishly, I did. ‘In the old days,’ he ranted, ‘parents used to drop their kids off at parties and pick them up, along with a bag of goodies, at the end. Now, though, we’re not allowed to make any distinction between children and adults, are we? Oh, no – because that wouldn’t be politically correct. Now grown men like me are expected to want nothing more than to spend our precious Saturday afternoons pinning the tail on the donkey with the chocolate-smeared offspring of people we don’t even like!’

  I also didn’t want to go to the party, but I felt that I had to, to make up for my faux-pas. Just this once, I said to myself, just this one concession, to atone for my mistake, and then no more. I would not socialise with the Devines again. They made me feel uneasy; I wasn’t even sure that the horrendous episode with the car and the hosepipe had been the beginning of it.

  On the relevant day, at the appropriate time, I left the house with Matthew, Emily, and a card and present for Anya, feeling that a messy and disturbing chapter in my life was about to close. ‘Aaah!’ said Kay. ‘You didn’t need to bring a pressie! Just having you all here is enough.’ She’s probably a very nice, friendly woman, I thought. She’s probably got nothing against Matthew; I’m bound to have imagined the whole thing. I should like her. At the same time, I realised I never had. Certainly I had never warmed to her pompous, loud-mouthed husband. I had maintained our friendship with the Devines first out of curiosity, a desire to investigate the new neighbours, and later because it was satisfying to watch them acting so much like themselves.

  ‘Girls’ toilet upstairs, boys’ downstairs,’ said Kay, shaking her finger at Matthew, mock-strict. ‘Don’t forget, Matthew.’