Our Little Secret

by Jenna Ellis

  There are rooms along the right-hand wall and I turn each door handle in turn, but each one is locked. I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for – I’m just curious, I guess.

  The corridor stops at a T-junction, and another corridor snakes off left and right. I turn to the right, figuring that I’m probably below my room here, which is on the floor above. This house must have twenty bedrooms at least, I reckon.

  There’s antique furniture in this corridor. A dark wooden armoire and a couple of intricately carved chairs.

  Again, I try the door handles. They’re all locked. I see a window and glance out of it, down to the back of the house. There’s a garage part that I haven’t noticed before, but no sign of the limo or the Aston Martin. Where is everyone?

  I retrace my steps and decide on a whim to go and look out of the furthest window, back along the corridor the other way. My tread is silent along the carpet. This corridor has modern art on its walls: a long, splodgy glass piece going along the entire length of the corridor. I want to touch it, but it looks fragile.

  At the end of the corridor there’s a bay window with a small, empty bookcase in it. I stare down onto the lawn. I see a shadow on it. It must be coming from the room on my right. I reach out my hand for the handle and it turns. I push the door handle and peep around the door.

  32

  Mamie Parker is standing inside, on the other side of the bedroom, her back to me.

  Oh God, I’ve accidentally found her bedroom. And she’s in it!

  For a second I freeze with shock. Then she turns around, but she doesn’t see me. She’s wearing a pair of large black headphones and has her eyes closed. She looks like she’s enjoying some intense music. She’s wearing a floppy silk, red kimono, which gapes open at the front as she sways her body in the silence. I stare at her for a second, deliberating whether to back out.

  I had no idea she was in the house. I feel a childish stab of disappointment that she hasn’t sought me out. That I’ve been wandering around like Billy No Mates and she was here all along.

  Suddenly, she opens her eyes and sees me. Her eyebrows knit together. She’s obviously confused that I’m standing in her doorway. I feel caught out. I’m snooping. She knows it, and I know it.

  I don’t need to even ask: this is definitely a red room.

  But then her face lights up into a smile, flooding me with relief.

  ‘Hey, speed-freak,’ she shouts, like she’s delighted to see me. She gestures me towards her with a big arm movement, which makes her kimono sleeve flap around, like she’s a matador. Is she drunk?

  I walk into the room and shut the door and, as soon as I do, I feel like I’ve been sealed into an inner sanctum. No wonder I didn’t hear her. The whole room feels cut off from the rest of the house.

  The walls are decorated in a swirly dark-green wallpaper, which would be revolting anywhere else, but makes the whole room have this louche, chic designer vibe. There’s lots of low silk furniture and fluffy rugs, and a row of scented candles on a recessed shelf in the wall. Those expensive ones you get in glass jars, which fill the air with a musky smell and cast shadows up to the ceiling.

  The huge bed to my left is on a raised area and has shallow cream-carpeted steps leading down into the room. The bed is one of those teak Indonesian carved ones and has a deep bottle-green silk eiderdown on it and lots of embroidered cushions. It makes me want to flop down face-first on it.

  Marnie is on the other side of the room in the corner, by a carved arched doorway, which looks like it leads into a brightly lit dressing room beyond. The door is partially blocked by a large wooden packing crate. I can see an ornate Chinese-style lacquered chest of drawers, the top of which is open.

  Along one wall, just like in my room, there’s a line of windows with a window seat below them, and padded cushions in pretty Chinese silk. On the other side of the room, in the opposite corner, is a silk chaise longue and an armchair. It’s like the kind of ridiculously cool apartment I imagine you’d find in Shanghai. Somehow, though, it fits Marnie.

  I could be wrong, but it feels like this is just her room. There’s no sign of Edward or any of his stuff.

  ‘Listen, listen,’ Marnie says, smiling at me as I approach nervously across the cream carpet, waving her arm again for me to hurry up. She takes the headphones and puts them on my head. Her eyes are wide and excited.

  I’m assaulted by music. The beat somehow transports me straight into an imaginary club. It’s got a sexy, cool kind of vibe. It makes me want to shut my eyes and wave my arms around, just like she was earlier.

  Reluctantly, I take the cans off and hand them back, smiling. ‘Cool,’ I say, immediately regretting it. It sounds pretty lame.

  ‘We’ll both enjoy it,’ she tells me, grabbing a remote control from the window seat. She presses a button and soon the same music fills the bedroom with sound. She turns it down a little. ‘I like it loud,’ she says, swaying her hips to the music. Her robe gapes more. I see the full swell of her breast, but Marnie hasn’t noticed. ‘It’s my latest mix,’ she says, chucking the cans down on the window seat.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I DJ sometimes,’ she says. ‘I used to be serious about it, but now it’s just a hobby.’

  Motor racing, DJ’ing, modelling, designing . . . is there anything she can’t do? She can also magically transport herself without a car, so it seems. How comes she’s here? Does that mean Edward is here, too?

  ‘I like it,’ I tell her, smiling and nodding to the music. I feel like I should move – dance a bit – but I feel awkward and geekish.

  ‘That’s how Edward and I met. In a club. Years ago. I still do a set occasionally, when I’m asked to, but I don’t know . . . It’s not really an old lady’s game.’

  ‘You’re not an old lady,’ I reply with a laugh. Because she’s not. She’s impossible to place. She’s at once wise and girlish. And she’s just cool. I’ve never met anyone so cool. I can’t stop staring at her.

  I feel relief, too. She seems so friendly. Edward can’t possibly have told her about what happened when we danced. As the day has gone on, the horror I felt first thing has changed into something else – a kind of euphoria that I might have got away with it, which is only confirmed now by how nice she’s being.

  Marnie grins at me and goes to the window seat and I notice that the diamond-leaded window is open. As she sits, she crosses her legs and stares at me, the robe falling open to reveal the length of her very smooth, toned legs, but she seems entirely unselfconscious. Her toenails have changed from this morning and are now painted in green glitter paint. What has she been doing all day, I wonder? Where has she been?

  ‘What have you been up to?’ she asks me.

  ‘Nothing,’ I lie. ‘Well, just a bit of exploring.’

  ‘Find anything?’ she asks. She doesn’t look at me. She knows I’ve been snooping. Is she going to tell me off about the red rooms? Does she know about me discovering the porn movie?

  She can’t possibly.

  ‘No,’ I say, putting my hands into the front pockets of my jeans and shrugging. ‘Only you.’

  I’ve found her by accident, but she’s making me feel like I’ve come here on purpose. Perhaps I have. Perhaps I’ve been looking for her all this time. I can’t deny how good it feels to have found her and not be on my own. I can’t read her mind, but I see her leaning back and pushing open the window a bit further. What is she doing?

  ‘It’s such an amazing house.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘I’m just curious, though,’ I ask, stuffing my hands into my pockets. ‘Why are there no photos of the kids?’ I say photos, but I mean signs. Of any kind. Because there haven’t been – in this whole search.

  The moment I say it, I realize how peculiar – and yes, offensive – it sounds. She looks at me, her eyebrows knitting.

  ‘What an odd thing to say,’ she remarks.

  ‘Sorry. It’s just . . . I’m so desperate to meet the
m. I saw the lake today and thought how wonderful it would be to see them on the rope swing.’

  ‘I know, darling. I’m sorry about this, and all the delay.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘You must be tearing your hair out, but believe me, this move has been hellish. They lost all our stuff. Can you believe that? I mean, they lost two containers. Big ones. How do they do that?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘You can’t imagine the stress of it. And the chaos, when we’ve both got so much on. We had to send the boys away to this amazing adventure-camp in Canada, which they’d been begging to go to. I don’t want them coming here until it feels like a home, you know. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Of course,’ I stutter, feeling like an idiot. I’m just a minute cog in the giant juggernaut of their lives, I remind myself. I have no right to demand any special attention when they’re in the middle of moving. The timing of my arrival was probably the last thing on their minds.

  ‘Anyway,’ she says, shaking her head, ‘please don’t remind me of the kids. Not right now. I can’t do this when they’re here, can I?’ she says, and I see now that on the windowsill is a long joint, which she now retrieves and brings inside the room. She takes a deep drag of it.

  ‘Don’t look so shocked, Miss Henshaw,’ she laughs, pointing her fingers at me and exhaling the smoke. ‘You’re young. I’ve heard of that Manchester-scene thing. Don’t tell me Miss Prim-and-Proper has never had spliff?’

  She thinks I’m prim and proper? I feel my cheeks flush.

  Of course I’ve tried a spliff. I’ve had a few Ecstasy pills, too, but I went off the whole idea of getting off my head when Mum died. Besides, Scott has a mate, Derry, who smokes weed all the time and he’s such a loser, we both agreed that we’d never smoke with him.

  ‘I don’t, I mean . . .’ I stutter. She’s still staring at me. I can’t believe she thinks I’m such a bore. She wouldn’t, if she knew what a fool I made of myself with her husband last night.

  ‘Here,’ she says, handing it to me. ‘Have it. You’ll like it. It’s not that strong stuff. I just use it to help me relax. Although Edward hates the stuff. I told him I’d given up, so don’t tell him, OK?’

  Another secret.

  I nod and take the joint from her, and take a drag and cough. It’s strong and tastes different from anything I’ve smoked before.

  Marnie takes the joint back and has another luxurious puff, as if I’ve offered it to her. As if this bonds us somehow. She watches me, amused, through narrow eyes.

  ‘So now you’re here, you can make yourself useful,’ she says, suddenly grabbing my arms, like we’re about to have a big adventure.

  33

  Making myself useful, it turns out, means helping Marnie to unpack the crate. The top part is full of clothes, and I stand in her dressing room, which has mirrors all along one side and hanging rails and built-in compartments along the other.

  I feel stoned, in a slightly giggly, fun way, and I can’t help dancing a bit along with her as she passes me each tissue-wrapped package from the crate. Soon it feels like Christmas, to be carefully ripping off the tissue paper, until I’m ankle-deep in it, like it’s snow. As she speaks and I hang up the sculptured jackets and smart pencil skirts she passes me, I can’t help marvelling at the quality of each piece. I’ve never been around designer clothes, and yet she has a shopload for her wardrobe. And this is only a fraction of her stuff, she assures me. No wonder she found moving stressful.

  It feels thrillingly intimate to be handling her clothes. To be chosen to help out. And it feels great to have a purpose at last. To actually be doing something in return for all this money they’re paying me.

  ‘That I wore to Sydney Opera House at the Millennium,’ she says, sighing as I unfurl a long midnight-blue velvet number on a hanger. ‘I was going to give it away. Auction it. But then I changed my mind, right at the last minute.’ She takes another drag of the joint. If she’s worried about the smell, or Edward catching us out, she seems to have forgotten all about it. Even so, the windows are wide open. ‘It’s been hell moving. But great to clear everything out, you know.’

  I nod, but I don’t know. I have the same tiny wardrobe in my bedroom in the flat at home that I’ve had since I was eleven. I cannot imagine owning a walk-in closet, let alone all the clothes to put in it. Clothes that I’ve chosen to wear in places all round the globe.

  ‘Oh, right,’ she laughs after a while, when the rail is half-full. ‘That’s where it all went.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Check out this baby,’ she says, pulling out a black silk corset from the bottom of the crate. She laughs. ‘That was one of my first designs. Still cute, though, huh?’

  She puts the strapless corset up against herself and shimmies her hips, so that the beading-loops on the bottom of it jiggle.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I gasp, unable to stop myself running my fingers over the silk panels. ‘I’ve never worn a corset.’

  ‘What?’ Marnie’s laugh is shrill. ‘Are you serious?’

  I feel myself blushing.

  ‘I know people who do,’ I say, thinking of Tiff and that Ann Summers corset she wore to a hen-do, ‘but it’s not the same. We just have tacky underwear shops where I live.’

  I don’t tell her about Scott. That he says he likes me best naked.

  ‘Well, believe me, honey, this stuff isn’t tacky. Between you and me, my intimate collection and lingerie line are what keeps this whole ship afloat.’

  This nugget of information surprises me. I thought Edward made a fortune. That they even need to keep anything ‘afloat’ astounds me. But perhaps I haven’t grasped her meaning. What is an intimate collection, I wonder?

  ‘I had no idea you designed lingerie,’ I tell her, thinking of the picture of the shop on the Internet. So that’s what it sells. Of course someone as brazen and clearly shameless as Marnie would front a high-end business like that. It makes perfect sense.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ she asks, surprised, but I don’t really know anything about her, except that she’s constantly surprising me. ‘I designed a whole bunch of costumes for Dita. That’s how I got into it.’

  ‘Dita?’

  She explains about the famous burlesque star, and a distant light bulb clicks on. I’ve read about her in Hello! magazine. I picture her dark hair and red lips.

  ‘Here,’ Marnie says, pressing the corset towards me. ‘Try it on. I’m sure it’ll fit. That’s the great thing about these corsets. They’re adjustable.’

  ‘Oh no, honestly, I couldn’t,’ I gasp, stepping away, laughing.

  ‘Why not?’ she says, genuinely surprised.

  There are so many reasons why not. I’m not going to get half-naked in her bedroom. She’s my boss. But her eyes say differently. She challenges me. Just like she did in the car this morning.

  ‘Go on, it’ll be fun. In fact, do the whole lot,’ she says, suddenly lighting up and throwing up her hands, as if she’s just had the best idea of her life.

  34

  The whole lot, in Marnie-speak, is the full burlesque get-up. Before I know it, she’s rooting around in the crate and handing me items to lay out on the bed.

  I laugh as she produces each new piece, retrieving more and more outrageous items from the depths of the packing crate. Soon there’s crispy tissue paper flying through the air. She’s completely thrilled with the idea of me dressing up, and I can’t help catching her infectious enthusiasm. We’re giggling like kids, but that must be the joint. I’ve never felt this stoned.

  The underwear is simply, well . . . astonishing. I take it in armfuls to lay out on the bed. Getting to look at everything, and touch it all, feels so deliciously illicit. It’s like when I was little and I used to watch my mum put on her make-up, copying the way she smudged her lipstick against her lips, feeling the buzz of her dressing up to go out.

  Even now, quite often dressing up to go out is still the best bit of the night for me. But this is that feeli
ng times one hundred. It’s the feeling of being in a boutique full of silk and lace, all wrapped up with the knowledge that it’s just me and Marnie in her inner sanctum. It feels so deliciously feminine. I don’t give Edward a second thought.

  I gorge my eyes on all the pieces. There’s a headdress with a huge, fluffy black feather on it. The first black silk corset has flesh-coloured lace panels and sparkly fringing, then there’s a red one with black ribbons, a pretty cream-and-pink one and a bawdy purple one. They are each a work of art. There are also long, black silk gloves to match each of them, and seamed silk stockings with lace garter tops.

  It’s impossible to choose between them, but I opt for the first one – the black one.

  ‘So, you have to put it all on in order,’ Marnie instructs matter-of-factly, but there’s a childish sparkle in her eyes. ‘Starting with these.’ She flicks a tiny triangle of silk at me and I realize it’s a thong. She grins. ‘Go on,’ she urges.

  I swallow hard. I feel stoned and embarrassed when I realize just how small the thong is and that she’s expecting me to put it on. Right now. In front of her.

  ‘You don’t think I’ve seen it all before?’ she drawls, with a throaty guffaw.

  Of course she’s seen it all before. She’s a model. She designs underwear. Besides, I don’t want her to call me Miss Prim-and-Proper again. I can do this, can’t I? I’m not a prude. If she doesn’t care, then neither should I.

  She turns away, to collect the joint from the ashtray on the windowsill, and I strip off out of my new jeans. I fold them quickly and put them on a low velvet chair near the end of the bed. I feel embarrassed by my white knickers and cheap T-shirt bra. I feel like a schoolgirl and I bite my lip.

  I turn away, with my back to Marnie – even though she’s staring out into the night – to put on the thong. The contrast between it and my nasty bra couldn’t be greater. Thank God I had a proper wax before I came here.