The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets

by Sophie Hannah

‘I got run over at lunchtime,’ said Frank. ‘Big white lorry. Saw me in the road and just ploughed straight into me. I’ve felt a bit dizzy ever since, so I thought I’d better come home and see if I can get an appointment with the doctor.’ He continued to munch on his pear as he wandered over to the fridge. ‘No, not really! I just got bored, so I called it a day.’

  Flora giggled. Frank opened a beer, raised it. ‘Cheers!’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you ladies to talk about Princess Diana’s eyebrows, or whatever it is you talk about.’

  ‘Oh, it’s that,’ said Flora, winking at Erica. ‘See you later, darling.’ The two women listened to his feet as they clattered up the transparent stairs. ‘I’m worried about Frank, actually,’ said Flora. ‘I think he’s feeling a bit insecure. He craves external validation. He was too successful too soon, and you know what it’s like – the maintenance of success begins to feel like failure. Plus everyone assumes he knows how successful he is, so noone tells him.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Erica, wondering if it was worth raising the issue of the work again. TP was leaning against the shed, closer to the house, but, for the time being, not moving.

  ‘He’s started doing that awful mock-modesty thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Erica wasn’t interested in Frank’s possible insecurity – he seemed fine to her – but she wanted to know what the awful mock-modesty thing was, to check it wasn’t something she also did.

  ‘Oh, you know. If Steven Spielberg did it, he’d say, “I made a film in the seventies, about a shark that ate people. It was called Jaws, and....” Etcetera, etcetera. And then the person he’s talking to butts in and goes, “Jaws! Don’t be ridiculous, I’ve heard of Jaws, it’s a world famous movie!” And Spielberg gets to look all surprised. He says “Oh, really? Oh, how kind of you to say so.” He gets the reassurance he was seeking that his film’s as famous as he hopes it is, and at the same time he knows the other person’s going to think Gosh, that Steven Speilberg’s a really modest guy. He didn’t even assume I’d heard of Jaws.’

  ‘Right,’ said Erica. She was fairly certain she didn’t do the mock-modesty thing. She had no achievements that she could pretend she didn’t assume people ought to have heard of.

  ‘Until a few moths ago, when people asked Frank what he did, he used to say, “I’m Frank Gustavina.” Now he says “I run a business, an estate agent’s.” And then, when people drag it out of him, and go, “Oh, wow! Frank Gustavina! I’ve seen your signs outside loads of houses!” he feigns pleasure and surprise – and it’s boosted egos all round.’

  TP knocked at the back door, making a plop-plop sound, as if his knuckles couldn’t quite get it together to land on the wood at the same time. ‘Give him a chance,’ Flora whispered, getting up to let him in. She wore a square-necked jumper which, Erica noticed, appeared to be green from a distance, but when you looked closely you could see that it had bits of brown, yellow, orange, grey and mauve in it.

  ‘Throat Pastille!’ Flora exclaimed. ‘Come in and talk to us.’

  ‘All right.’ It wasn’t clear whether this was a greeting or an expression of agreement. TP slouched into the kitchen. He wore his usual outfit: skin-tight black jeans, a grey sweatshirt, grey fingerless gloves, a puffy blue waistcoat that reminded Erica of an inflatable bed, muddy white trainers. ‘Well, I think the new version’s finally finished,’ he said.

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ said Flora. ‘Come on, then. Let’s hear it.’

  Flora did no work. She had never done any, thanks to, first, rich parents and, second, a rich husband. ‘It would cost Frank money if I worked,’ she often told Erica. ‘I’d need lots of suits, and then there would be the taxis there and back and the lunches. You can’t get through a whole day on a home-made sandwich, can you? It would be too depressing. You’d really need to go to a nice restaurant at lunchtime, to make working in, say, an office bearable. A different restaurant every day, or you’d get into a rut. You know, sometimes when I go to London on the train, I see people getting out horrid little puckered brown rolls, tiny ones – they look like shrivelled conkers. And they’ve been sliced in half and some runny white gunk has been spread in the middle. They’re always wrapped in clingfilm, that’s what I can’t fathom. Somebody prizes the withered brown lump highly enough to wrap it in clingfilm!’

  ‘I never used to have lunch, when I was working at Muzorsgy’s,’ said Erica. ‘I’d just work straight through.’

  ‘That’s you, though. You’re sensible with money. But, for most people, working is a false economy.’

  Frank Gustavina also had rich parents, who were friends of Flora’s parents. That was how Frank and Flora met. Frank’s parents gave him the money to start his business, but it was Frank who had made it profitable. ‘I’ve worked for everything I’ve got, apart from what I’ve been given,’ Frank once told Erica. Flora had guffawed, as if it were a hilarious joke. ‘It’s true!’ said Frank indignantly.

  Muzorsgy’s, the health food shop where Erica had worked since she left university, had closed down six months ago. All the staff were made redundant. ‘You’re better off out of it,’ Flora told Erica. ‘Jobs in health food shops are the Jeffrey Archers of the employment world.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Erica had asked eagerly. It sounded as if Flora might be able to make her feel better about having nothing to do with her days.

  ‘They’re dishonest. Though poor Jeffrey Archer, why shouldn’t he lie about sleeping with a prostitute and dodgy bribes and stuff? Anyone would. Anyone who says they wouldn’t is a hypocrite. Either that or lacking in self-knowledge.’

  ‘Why are jobs in health food shops dishonest?’ Erica persisted.

  ‘Jobs are bad for you. Healthy food’s good for you. The latter fact is intended to distract the employee from the former. You’re supposed to think “Oh, wow, this must be so great for me. I’m surrounded by bottles of ginseng and evening primrose oil; I must be getting healthier every day.”’

  Erica laughed. She had thought exactly that. Flora was so right.

  ‘You can work with me instead,’ she’d said. With me, not for me. Flora did not think of Erica in the way that she thought of TP, Vesna the cleaner, Paul the financial adviser, Vicky the personal trainer or Craig the mechanic. Erica was a ‘with’, not a ‘for’. Yet Flora did nothing, no work to speak of. Erica had been trying to get to the bottom of this for some time.

  TP called working for the Gustavinas his ‘day job’. His vocation was performance poetry. His stage name was ‘The Throat Parrot’, though Flora nicknamed him ‘TP’, and ‘Throat Pastille’. ‘He lets me,’ said Flora. ‘He wouldn’t let anyone else.’

  ‘What’s his real name?’ Erica had asked, when she first saw his stooping form in Flora’s garden.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Flora. ‘Everyone calls him ‘The Throat Parrot’. I think he wants to make a complete break with his old identity.’ Erica found it hard to imagine a previous incarnation that was worse than his present one. What could it have been?

  TP had done several gigs, unpaid, in local youth clubs and libraries. For six months he was poet in residence at the head office of Frank Gustavina’s estate agency. Flora laughed whenever Erica denigrated him, but she also frequently came out with some version of the following: ‘Van Gogh led a miserable, poverty-stricken life, you know. He lived and died totally without recognition. People mocked him and thought he was a loser. Except his brother, Theo. He always had faith in... Van Gogh.’

  Erica suspected Flora didn’t know his first name. Both the Gustavinas appeared to have a Van Gogh fixation. They mentioned him a lot, in all sorts of strange contexts, but had no reproductions of his pictures in their house. Erica had often thought this was odd, but Flora insisted that she would only display what she called ‘originals’, and so her walls were covered with black-and-white photos of rusting bed-frames and toothless, shoeless old women, and misshapen chunks of wood and board with netting, tissue and cardboard stuck to them.

  ‘Not everyone who l
ives and dies without recognition is a genius,’ Erica usually replied, though the precise wording varied. ‘Some people who lead miserable, poverty-stricken, losers’ lives are talentless nonentities. Come to think of it, that’s probably the norm, isn’t it? Van Gogh is the exception.’

  ‘No,’ Flora insisted. ‘Loads of geniuses are unappreciated for absolutely yonkers, because the world can’t handle their... vision.’

  ‘Like who else?’

  ‘John Kennedy Toole. Have you read A Confederacy of Dunces?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You must. Loads of publishers rejected it, and he committed suicide. Then his mum persuaded someone to publish it – bit embarrassing, but he was dead, so I don’t suppose it mattered – and now it’s regarded as a great masterpiece. Which it is.’

  ‘But TP’s stuff is no good,’ Erica pointed out. ‘You know it’s awful.’

  ‘He is getting better. And I want to be like Theo... Gogh.’ Flora’s eyes shone when she said this. Erica realised that Flora thought the surname was ‘Gogh’, that Vincent’s first name was ‘Van’, like Van Morrison’s. Erica had noticed that Flora was extremely knowledgeable in some areas – literature, cinema, celebrity gossip and clothes – and utterly ignorant in others, such as geography, history and science. A conversation the two women had shortly after they met had revealed that Flora did not know the difference between the Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight and the Scilly Isles.

  On the matter of TP’s poetic abilities, neither Flora nor Erica was ever persuaded by the other’s point of view. Once – only once – Erica was nearly convinced. Flora produced a new argument. She leaned her colour-flecked woollen elbows on the table and said, ‘You know in books and films, where there’s someone who noone has faith in? And everyone says, “You can’t do it, you’ll never do it, you haven’t got what it takes”? Everyone says it, apart from the person themselves. Everyone underestimates them. You know the sort of book and movie I mean?’

  Erica nodded.

  ‘The maverick loser always succeeds in the end, and the people who didn’t have faith end up looking like total dorks. That’s their only role, in fact – to be the dorks who got it wrong. Well, not me! And TP is getting better.’

  ‘Not at gardening,’ said Erica, who hated to hear Flora defend him. ‘Why does he never do any gardening? Why don’t you mind?’

  Flora didn’t seem to mind anything. Erica minded lots of things: being unemployed, having no money, being single, sharing Flora with all her servants and with Frank – those were the big four, her main objections to her current situation. And there were subsidiary niggles: the black edges of the beige carpet in her flat, her inability to give up smoking, her parents’ refusal to acknowledge that Erica was not a Christian, that she was different from them in this one significant respect.

  ‘Okay,’ said TP. He sat cross-legged on the granite-topped breakfast bar. ‘It’s called “Echelons”.’

  ‘Great title,’ said Flora. Erica disagreed, but said nothing.

  The first two words of TP’s poem were the first name and surname of a well-known political leader. These were followed by ‘...you fucking lump of shit/Strangling children with your mitts’.

  ‘Stop!’ Flora held up her hand. ‘Does he strangle children?’

  ‘As good as,’ said TP, a defensive edge to his voice.

  ‘You mean, his policies are detrimental to children,’ said Flora.

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘His policies harm children,’ Erica clarified.

  ‘Yeah.’ TP didn’t know what to make of Erica. She suspected he didn’t know what she was doing in Flora’s house all the time. She felt the same way about him.

  ‘But to say “Strangling children with your mitts” – it’s a very physical image,’ said Flora. ‘Mitts means hands – strangling children with your bare hands. I don’t think you should say that if he doesn’t. It’s not a political objection. I just think you need to be precise.’

  ‘Mitts makes me think of woolly gloves,’ said Erica.

  ‘Yes, which is another association you don’t need. It’s too cosy,’ said Flora. ‘Anyway, read the rest. I mean, perform the rest.’ TP recited all his poems from memory. He was opposed to words on paper.

  He started again from the beginning. After the ‘mitts’ line came a long, non-specific ramble about the uncaring and ruthless nature of the politician in question. Erica thought TP was making the same point, clumsily, over and over again, but Flora allowed him to finish the poem without further interruption. His voice deepened as he delivered the final couplet: ‘No compassion for the kids/No tin-openers for the lids.’ He flicked his pony-tail over his shoulder and tried to look nonchalant, but Erica knew he was desperate to hear Flora’s reaction.

  ‘I loved it!’ she said after a while. ‘It’s got real passion.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ TP was delighted. He hopped down off the breakfast bar. He looked as if he might run over to Flora and embrace her.

  ‘I do. One query, though. Why “No tin-openers for the lids”? What lids? It seems an odd line to end with.’

  ‘It’s deliberately ambiguous,’ said TP. ‘I needed a rhyme for “kids”.’

  ‘But what tins and lids are you talking about?’

  ‘No tins. No lids,’ said TP impatiently. ‘“Lids” rhymes with “kids”.’

  ‘You can’t put a line in a poem just because it rhymes,’ Erica took great pleasure in telling him.

  ‘Yes, you can! “Now and in times to be/Wherever green is worn/All changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born.” WB Yeats.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have chosen those words purely because they rhymed,’ said Erica.

  ‘What?’ TP looked at Flora, appealing with his eyes. Flora was the judge. She had the final say. ‘Oh, so I suppose it’s just a coincidence that “born” rhymes with “worn”, and “be” rhymes with “utterly”?’

  Flora had missed the entire debate. ‘Sorry, I’m still worried about these tins.’

  ‘There are no tins, not in the way you mean. There are no literal, actual tins.’ Erica thought she detected an edge of panic in TP’s voice. She also felt edgy; how long would this nonsensical, irritating and entirely pointless discussion go on for?

  Flora frowned, shaking her head. ‘Yes, but if there are any tins at all, even poetic, metaphorical ones, they have to make sense. You need to clarify your symbolism. “No tin-openers for the lids” comes straight after “No compassion for the kids”. It sounds as if you’re suggesting that his lack of tin-openers is as damning as his lack of compassion. That’s what doesn’t work – because why should he have tin-openers? Are they his tins? If they’re not his tins, why should he have openers for them?’

  ‘There are no tins,’ said Erica, in order to make sure she wasn’t left out.

  ‘He deprives needy children of food, that’s the point,’ said TP sullenly.

  ‘Ah!’ Flora threw both her hands up in the air. ‘Why didn’t you say so? I see! Oh, yes, that’s good. Yes, I can see that it works, I can see it now.’

  ‘I don’t think it works,’ said Erica, irritated. She glared at TP, who was smiling complacently. ‘You said you only put it in for the rhyme. Now you’re claiming it’s an image of him starving the children. Which is it?’

  ‘Both,’ said TP.

  ‘Perhaps there’s something about the word “tin-openers”, a certain clumsiness or... comic ordinariness...’ Flora mused.

  ‘You said it was good! You said it works!’

  ‘Yes, well... maybe a clumsy image is a good way of unsettling people,’ she concluded. ‘Let’s face it, you want your audience to feel uncomfortable, don’t you, while they contemplate the deprivation of the have-nots?’

  Erica was determined that TP should not get away with it. ‘Even if you didn’t only include that line for the sake of the rhyme, it sounds as if you did, and that’s bad,’ she said.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ TP snapped. ‘What do you know?’
r />   ‘Who fancies a latte? Or a mocha?’ said Flora.

  Erica looked out of the window, at the uncut grass and unraked leaves. She was in danger of bursting into tears. She blinked hard. TP had broken the rules. The discussion was not supposed to turn personal.

  What did Erica know? She had known a lot once, at university. She had got her degree, a good upper second, and then taken the first job that had come up. Muzorsgy’s. The manager was the wife of one of her university tutors. It was only supposed to be temporary, but Erica had liked her boss and her colleagues; she would have felt disloyal if she’d left.

  Flora made no attempt to discipline TP for his rudeness. She was busy putting drinks into the rotund, bumpy mugs she’d bought from a potter friend of hers. ‘I don’t want one,’ said Erica, frostily enough to satisfy herself that she had struck back, but not so overtly that Flora would notice anything amiss. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘Okay.’ Flora stretched out a hand behind her and waved.

  Two days later, Erica’s mobile phone rang while she was in the supermarket. ‘Erica!’ It was Flora. ‘Is everything okay? Is there something wrong with your phone at home?’

  ‘It’s been cut off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I didn’t pay the bill.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Flora chuckled. ‘I love your rebellious streak. I was expecting you hours ago. Why didn’t you ring?’

  Erica was thrilled. Flora had missed her. Her whole body was enlivened by the idea; her skin tingled. ‘I can’t make calls on my mobile any more,’ she said. ‘I’ve had it changed to incoming calls only.’

  ‘I’ve got so much I want to talk to you about,’ said Flora. ‘And Frank’s making a full day of it in the office, so come round as quickly as you can. Where are you? What are you doing?’

  Before Flora phoned, Erica had been wondering if she ought to risk stealing some food that she couldn’t afford. If she did it at the same time as buying what food she could afford, surely noone would suspect her. ‘Shopping,’ she said, though she was already taking items out of her basket, depositing them on random shelves. She knew she wouldn’t now have the patience to wait in the queue for the till. What could Flora want to talk to her about? It had to be the work.