The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Here we are!’ says Edwin proudly. The computer screen fills with a picture of a sweaty, naked couple having sex.

  ‘What about it?’ I ask, not understanding, wondering if I’m supposed to recognise one of the people.

  Edwin tuts. ‘It’s meant to make you feel horny. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Well, it does me.’

  ‘That’s probably because you can see everything the woman has to offer and very little of the man. As with most pornography.’ I fall silent, cringing at my own words. I sound like a prig, or a feminist.

  ‘Right. Close your eyes,’ says Edwin. ‘Avert thy gaze.’ I have heard him do this before, call people ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, so I don’t worry unduly or take it personally. I think he does it so that everybody remembers he works in a library. ‘Okay, you can look now. This’ll be more up your street.’

  I turn to face the computer screen. The big picture of the copulating couple has gone, and in its place are six smaller photographs, laid out neatly in three rows of two. I inspect them carefully, one by one. The first is of an erect penis poking out of a pair of blue checked boxer shorts. The penis itself is orangey-brown, the colour of fake tan. I raise my eyebrows; time to move on, I think. The next photo is much the same, except this time the penis is paler and has one or two pimples around its base. Beside me, Edwin rocks back and forth in his chair, impatient for me to show signs of enthusiasm. ‘Well?’ he says.

  ‘Er…yeah!’ I try to sound appreciative. All the pictures belong to, shall we say, the same genre, though the details vary. One phallus has a peculiarly jaunty-looking head. Another nestles in an absurdly large, purple scrotum. In one photograph, the pubic hair looks tired and colourless, like grass around the central reservation of a motorway.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ says Edwin.

  ‘Well…they’re a bit gross.’ I laugh, to soften my criticism.

  ‘There’s no pleasing some people,’ he mutters. ‘You’re not into porn?’

  ‘Er… no, not really. But… I mean, I’ve got nothing against it.’

  ‘Look, I thought some dirty pictures might help us get in the mood, that’s all. Forget it.’ He sounds irritated. He switches off the computer with a sudden poke of his finger. The room is even darker now, and I am relieved. Edwin takes his coffee over to the sofa and sits down. ‘So. You’re not into porn,’ he repeats.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yeah. Course. I’m a pervert,’ he announces cheerfully. I note his quick recovery from disappointment, his ability to switch back to a good mood as if the bad one never happened, and am pleased, once again, by his oppositeness, his symbolic value. ‘All men are.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Why not, anyway?’

  ‘Why aren’t I into porn?’

  ‘Yeah. Do you think it’s sordid, or something?’

  ‘Erm…’ I do, but I don’t want to say so in case it damages my credibility. I couldn’t stand it if Edwin laughed at me or thought I was silly. I am also aware that it is absurd for me to be worrying about this. After all, Edwin has just, out of the blue, presented to me six photographs of hard, veiny erections, so strictly speaking, and by any objective assessment, I am by far the least ridiculous person in the room. ‘I think men tend to be more into pictures than women,’ I say. Women prefer to know and, ideally, like the man whose pimply prick they’re looking at, I don’t add.

  ‘I know lots of women who are into porn,’ says Edwin.

  ‘Not me. Sorry.’ Things mustn’t go wrong. ‘But…I don’t need anything to get me in the mood, so don’t worry. If I wasn’t in the mood, I wouldn’t be here, would I?’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He grins and slurps his coffee.

  The truth is, my head is in the mood, and on this occasion I am allowing it to ride roughshod over my body, which is lagging behind by some considerable distance. When I bumped into Edwin in the pub this evening, I was filled not with desire but with a different sort of urgent need.

  I was with my two best friends, both of whom are called Susan. Edwin was alone. Drinking on his own on a Friday night. I began to wonder if his unpopularity went further than I’d suspected. Perhaps he wasn’t even locally or narrowly liked. I introduced him to Susan and Susan, and, with great energy, he set about ridiculing them for having the same name. When I told him the three of us had just been out for a Chinese meal to celebrate Susan’s birthday, he put on a stupid mock-oriental accent and said, ‘Sucky fucky Yankee dollar.’ He kept saying it.

  In the ladies’ toilets, where we went at one point to get away from him, I told Susan and Susan that Edwin wasn’t racist, but that he did like to annoy people. As the evening progressed, Edwin began to flirt with me more and more, probably because I was the only person at the table who wasn’t staring at him as if he were a seeping boil. At one point he said to me, ‘I bet you taste nice. I can tell from your colouring. I could go into more detail, but I don’t want to embarrass Sue One and Sue Two.’ He guffawed at his own joke. ‘You know, as in The Cat in the Hat – Thing One and Thing Two.’

  Edwin invited me back to his parents’ house for coffee. Only me, not Susan and Susan. Not that they would have wanted to go. ‘I won’t bother inviting you two,’ he said. ‘We aren’t exactly hitting it off, are we? And me and Joanna have got a lot of catching up to do, haven’t we, Jo? We go back a long way. We have a shared past.’ He mimed inverted commas as he said these last two words.

  Susan and Susan looked at me as if I too were a pustule. A shared history, their eyes said, with this specimen? I shrugged at them apologetically and went home with Edwin.

  I don’t know what I’m going to say to them tomorrow. I would have no objection, in theory, to telling the truth, but I know that they would find it implausible. Then, once I had persuaded them to believe me (for why would I pretend to be as reckless and unhinged as I, in fact, am?), I would have to devote almost as much time to comforting them, like children after a night terror, because they would surely be unsettled by their brief foray into my thought process, which, I freely admit, is a strange land by any ordinary person’s standards.

  Susan and Susan are nice, normal people. I fear that they are friends with me because they believe I am too. I’m very convincing, most of the time. I am usually smart, fragrant and articulate. I am frequently funny. They are entertained by me, which is gratifying. I enjoy their company, and only occasionally come away from our evenings together feeling like a sociopath who has successfully deceived her host group, whom she needs for camouflage purposes.

  ‘Your friends are prudes. Dullards!’ Edwin said, on the way back to his parents’ house. I smiled and said nothing. He was rude – deliberately, in a premeditated way – and I made a point of not taking offence. I relished the opportunity to embrace his unappealing qualities. It was all symbolic, all meant to be, all totally the opposite of the other business, the one I wasn’t thinking about because it was my night off suffering.

  And even if I weren’t determined to like Edwin, however unlikable he is, I would be forced to acknowledge that his impoliteness is intended at least partly, at least some of the time, to make others laugh. He is one of those people who confuses rudeness with a sense of humour. You hear men in pubs doing it all the time. One says, ‘You fucking cunt’, and the other laughs uproariously and replies, ‘Suck my dick, shithead’, and then they both laugh until they cry. I think that is the sort of thing Edwin is aiming for, except he makes two fatal mistakes: he chooses the wrong audience (middle class women instead of working class men) and he sometimes inserts a little too much erudition into his foul-mouthed-thug behaviour. In doing so, he reminds listeners that he is a chartered librarian with several degrees and not at all the sort of man people have in mind when they talk about ‘widening participation’. Therefore, everyone imagines, he should know better.

  ‘So, if you aren’t into porn, what are you into?’ he says now.

  I am standing in the middle of the room, sipping my drin
k like a mayor at a civic function. Edwin hasn’t asked me to sit down. It dawns on me that that isn’t all he hasn’t done. Oh no, I cry inside my head. Things are terribly amiss. Things are going wrong already. He hasn’t even kissed me. We are on opposite sides of the room, and he is chairing a panel discussion on my sexual preferences. That’s how it feels to me, at any rate. ‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

  He sighs. ‘You must be into something.’

  ‘Well…like what?’ I have no idea what he expects me to say. Does he want me to name my favourite position, or my preferred type of man? Or would either do?

  ‘I don’t know. Oral, anal, girl-on-girl?’ he suggests. ‘Whips and leather? Something must turn you on!’

  I panic. Clearly, a response is required. I wonder if he has asked anybody else the same question. Have other women stood here, exactly where I’m standing now, and, in reply to interrogation by an impatient Edwin, come out with lines such as ‘I like to have my breasts stroked’ or ‘Well, actually, I’m rather partial to having my clitoris rubbed’? I conclude that it is an indication of my sexual unadventurousness that these are the hypothetical answers that spring to mind. Perhaps Edwin is right to be disappointed in me.

  More panic. No, he can’t be disappointed – that can’t happen. It would ruin the oppositeness of everything, if disappointment were to be involved. (On his side, I mean – it’s fine for me to be disappointed. Which, as long as Edwin isn’t, I won’t be. What matters to me is not that I should enjoy this but that he should. I am desperate to make Edwin Toseland happy. I am the only person in the world who is. Mine is, indeed, a minority position.)

  ‘Golden showers, master-slave, swinging, cross-dressing…’ Edwin continues to list sexual practices in the hope that I will plump for one of them.

  I ransack my mind for something impressive to say, but can think of nothing with enough sparkle or wit. Total honesty is my only option. ‘Individual people,’ I say eventually.

  ‘Hey?’ He looks puzzled.

  ‘I just like to have…well, relatively normal sex, I suppose, with people I fancy. There, will that do?’ I cannot help the confrontational edge that creeps into my voice. ‘And something I don’t like is too much talking, too much analysis. I’ve always thought that if you’re going to talk during sex, it has to be pretty good, exactly right, or it’s better to keep quiet.’ I regret this as soon as I’ve said it. I don’t want to fight back, I want to please Edwin, and appease him, as a symbol, place offerings at his pointy-booted feet.

  To my amazement, he grins. ‘That’s more like it. That’s the Jo I know.’

  He is referring to our shared past (mimed inverted commas). The way he said this to Susan and Susan made it sound darkly intriguing, whereas in fact our history, our back-story, such as it is, is rather silly. Four years ago, Edwin accused me of stealing a book from the library. I had done no such thing, and took exception to being branded a thief on the basis of no evidence. Edwin responded by calling me a ‘shrew-bag’. When he found the book in question, he thought it was hilarious, and rang me to tell me. He giggled a lot, didn’t apologise, and used the word ‘misunderstanding’ rather too many times for my liking.

  For three years, I ignored Edwin. I made a point of going to the library and cutting him dead whenever I could spare the time. Then, one day last year, as he was stamping my book and we were not speaking to each other as usual, something strange came over me. Edwin was shooting regular hopeful glances at me, as he had taken to doing, and I heard myself say, ‘Edwin, this is daft. It was ages ago. Shall we call a truce?’

  His smile appeared straight away, as if he’d had it ready and waiting just in case. ‘An end to hostilities!’ he said. ‘Yes, why not? Long as you promise not to purloin any more vols.’

  And that was that. Friends. I even laughed at his little joke, irritating though it was. As I left the library that day, I felt a calm, happy feeling spread through my whole being. I had taken something horrible and destructive and extracted an upbeat outcome from it. I was not the stubborn, harsh, unforgiving judge I’d always thought I was; I was a peacemaker. It sounds absurd to say it – which is why I never have, not to anyone – but it was my relationship with Edwin Toseland, its trajectory, that made me think things could improve, wounds and scars could disappear, the world was not necessarily past its peak. Previously, I had been a sort of cheerful cynic, nonchalantly and wittily expecting the worst, and not really caring either.

  Every time I saw Edwin after the day we cemented our entente cordiale, I felt a warm glow deep inside me. Redemption suffused me, and my thoughts invariably turned to hope and salvation and mercy and kindness and innocence and essential goodness. I was full to the brim of benevolent abstract nouns, quite the most jolly person in the library. As the only adversary, in my long history of bickering and brawling, with whom I had ever sorted things out, Edwin had come to symbolise the possibility of a better future.

  Oddly enough, I wasn’t tempted to try to make peace with anyone else I had fought with over the years. That wouldn’t have been at all appropriate. The decision was made, in the control room of my being, that Edwin was to be the only one. Of this I was convinced, and my certainty was unflagging. There could be only one Edwin, just as there could be only one God (whether one believed in Him or not).

  It’s no surprise, really, that when the thing I prized most in my life turned to sludge and slid away greyly, decomposing as it went, Edwin sprang to mind in a consolatory capacity. I started to go to the library more often, to be close to my symbol of redemption, but for the first time it didn’t make me feel better. I thought nothing would, because of the severity of the problem. Until this evening in the pub, when he started to flirt with me, and it occurred to me that perhaps what I needed was greater proximity – greater sexual proximity, to be specific – to my salvation icon. I needed more than Edwin’s smile and blithely offensive banter over a library book. I felt driven to internalise his essence, which would then cure me from within. This is not, of course, compatible with safe sex, but one has to prioritise.

  ‘You say it’s better to keep quiet during sex,’ he says now. ‘But we’re not actually having sex yet, are we?’

  ‘No. Your pedantic questions are holding us up, that’s why.’

  Edwin squawks with laughter and sounds like a parrot. I am relieved to see that I judged the situation correctly. He prefers it when I give as good as I get. It’s that rudeness-as-sense-of-humour thing again, and I am heartened to discover that Edwin does not have a double standard about this; it is not one law for him and another for me. In this respect too, he is the opposite. He sees us as equals. I am pleased and offended.

  ‘I’ve noticed an interesting thing over the years,’ says Edwin. ‘All the women I’ve ever done the deed of darkness with, without exception, have made a hell of a noise. Screaming, moaning, wailing. All faked, of course. Do you think it’s true in general that women make more noise in bed than men?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say at once. It is true, although it has never occurred to me before.

  ‘So what is it with you women, then? Why do you all make such a bloody racket?’

  I laugh. I cannot answer, because I am experiencing a moment of pure joy. Everything is totally fine between Edwin and me, as good as new, couldn’t be better. We are sharing new insights. We can say anything to one another.

  ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘I was just thinking, it’s weird that we fell out and now everything’s really good between us. That hardly ever happens, does it? I mean, normally, even after you’ve patched things up with someone, that’s all they ever are – patched. It’s almost impossible to be as fallen out as we were, and then make up again so…properly, so that no lasting damage has been done.’

  Edwin shrugs. ‘I don’t know. What’s the point in making up if you don’t do it properly? I never hold grudges.’

  ‘It’s different with members of your immediate family: husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings. Bu
t there are very few people you can have a full-scale fight with, knowing everything will definitely be fine again soon.’

  ‘Stop banging on and take your clothes off,’ says Edwin. ‘Some of us are yearning to ogle thy bod. Come on.’ He stands up and taps his hand against his thigh. ‘The bedroom’s through here.’

  I follow him, thinking about what I’ve just said. I’m right. But why should it be the case? Why shouldn’t friends – lovers – be the same as family in this respect? Why is it so hard to put unhappy, troublesome shared experiences behind us, even when all the right words are said, the correct procedure followed? Even after apologies and acceptances of apologies. ‘If I knew that…’ I whisper to myself.

  ‘Stop mumbling, loon,’ says Edwin. We are in a bedroom. The smell of rabbit cage is stronger here. There are two white fitted wardrobes, with pink lines around their edges. They look like wedding cakes stuck to the wall. On a matching white-and-pink bedside table there is a ball of cotton wool, a brown scratched glasses case and a bandage that might be used or unused. ‘This is my mum’s room,’ says Edwin. ‘She’s had to go in with my dad tonight, because I’m here. His lucky night!’ He chuckles.

  Somehow, we end up standing on either side of the bed, which slots neatly into the space between the two wardrobes. Everything is covered in white hairs about an inch long: the flowery duvet cover, the pillows, the pink carpet. I remember Edwin mentioning cat-sitting. I haven’t seen a cat, but there must be one around somewhere. As I arrived, I pulled a similar short white hair out of my mouth, unsure how it got in. I was still only in the porch at that stage.

  ‘Go on,’ says Edwin. ‘Get undressed.’

  He still hasn’t kissed me. If my flesh had a mind of its own, I would suspect individual skin cells of trying to slide towards the door, desperate to escape. I feel awkward and self-conscious but I do as I am told. Edwin watches carefully. I have no idea whether he approves of my body or not. ‘Lie down on the bed,’ he says. I obey. It is easier to follow instructions. As long as Edwin is happy, I’m happy. Once I am lying down, Edwin removes his clothes (thank God – that awful furry suit) and climbs on to the bed. I find that his appearance is less disturbing when he is nude. His legs and arms are muscly, tubular. I am fairly sure that none of the six pictures he showed me earlier was of him, and am relieved that blatant self-promotion is not among his flaws.