"Secret Smile" - читать интересную книгу автора (French Nicci)

CHAPTER 4

As I drove home from work the following day, the buildings wavered in the drizzle, the skyline was soft and blurred. If it were this time in summer, then it would be light for hours more, but now people were drawing their curtains, turning lights on. In my flat, I pulled off my overalls and stood under a tepid shower for thirty seconds before dressing in a baggy pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. I stood in front of the mirror and pulled in my stomach. What had Brendan said about my weight? I turned sideways to the glass and gazed at myself, dissatisfied. Maybe I should start running. Every morning before going out to work, perhaps. What a horrible idea.

The phone rang as I was leaving to meet Laura.

'Miranda?'

'Hi, Mum.'

'I tried calling before, but there was never any reply.'

'My answering machine's packed up.'

'How are you? Are you all right?'

'Fine.'

'Sure?'

I wasn't going to help her.

'I'm fine, Mum. Just a bit tired. I've been busy at work, now Bill's away. How are you and Dad?'

'I spoke to Kerry. She said you'd had a lovely dinner together.'

'It was nice to see her.' I paused and then relented. 'And Brendan.'

'Miranda, you're being very good about this. Don't think we don't realize the effort. I just wish you'd told us when it all happened. I hate to think of you being miserable and not telling me.'

'There wasn't anything to tell. Everyone's got the wrong idea.'

'If it's any consolation, Kerry is transformed. You saw what she looked like yourself. She's like a different person. I'm happy. But I'm almost frightened as well.'

'You mean because Brendan might leave her?'

'Oh, don't say that! Anyway, he seems to adore her too.' I was silent for a second too long and she said sharply, 'Miranda? Don't you think so?'

'They both seem very happy,' I said.

'So are you really all right?'

'Really. But I'm running a bit late.'

'Yes, but before you dash off, will you come over at the weekend? How about Sunday lunch? Then we can all get together.'

'You mean, with Brendan too?'

'With Kerry and Brendan, yes.'

My stomach clenched.

'I'm not sure I'm free then.'

'I know it's hard for you, Miranda, but I feel this is important. For Kerry, I mean.'

'It's not hard for me. At all. I just don't know if I'm free, that's all.'

'We could make it Saturday lunch. Or even the evening if that suited you better. Or are you going away for the whole weekend?'

'All right. Sunday,' I said, defeated.

'It'll be very casual. You'll be fine.'

'I know I'll be fine. I'm not anxious. Not in the least. Everyone's got the wrong idea.'

'Maybe you can bring someone with you.'

'What?'

'Someone. You know. If there's anyone…'

'There isn't anyone at the moment, Mum.'

'I suppose it's still early days.'

'I've got to go now.'

'Miranda?'

'Yes.'

'Oh, I don't know. It's just… well, you've always been the lucky one. Let Kerry have her turn. Don't stand in her way.'

'This is stupid.'

'Please.'

I imagined her fist clenched tightly round the receiver, her frowning, intense face, the strand of hair that always hung loose over one eye.

'It'll all be fine,' I said, just to stop her. 'I promise I won't do anything to stand in Kerry's way. Now I really do have to go. I'll see you tomorrow when I pick up Troy, though.'

'Thank you, dear Miranda,' she said emotionally. 'Thank you.'

'I never met him, did I?'

We were sitting cross-legged on the floor, backs against the sofa, eating jacket potatoes. Laura had dotted sour cream on hers, but I'd split mine open and mashed several large knobs of butter into it, then sprinkled grated cheese over the top. It was very comforting. Outside it was dark and wet.

'No, it was so brief. When you went to Barcelona it was before the beginning, and when you came back it was after the end.'

'You finished it with him?'

'That's right.'

'So why do you mind?'

'I don't,' I said before all the words were out of her mouth.

'You do. I can tell you do.'

I thought for a moment.

'Yes, I do. Because it's creepy. It feels incestuous. And the way my mum and presumably everybody else thinks I'm heartbroken. It makes me want to smash things.'

'I can see it must be irritating, but it's quite funny too.'

'No,' I said. 'Not in any way at all. She calls him "Bren".'

'Well

'And he called me "Mirrie".'

'Families,' said Laura vaguely. She wiped her chin.

'Mirrie,' I repeated. Then, 'Am I overreacting?'

'Maybe.'

'You're right. I'm overreacting.'

I'd eaten all the potato and only the crisped skin was left. I put a bit more butter on it and bit off a piece. Then I took a large swallow of wine. I didn't want to move; it was warm in here and I was full up and pleasantly tired, while outside the wind rustled in the trees and cars drove through puddles.

'How are things with Tony?' I asked after a while.

'Oh. All right. I suppose.'

I looked at her. She'd pushed her glossy dark hair behind her ears, and her face looked very young.

'You suppose? What does that mean?'

'They're OK. You know. It's just sometimes…' She stopped.

'Sometimes?'

'Sometimes I wonder what happens next.' She frowned and poured the last of the wine into our two glasses. 'I mean, we've been together for nearly three years. Do we just continue like this? I think that's what Tony would like, just to go on year after year, being comfortable together, as if we were already married – except with separate houses. Or do we start living together – properly, I mean. Buy a place together. A fridge. Plates. Put our books and CDs together. You know. And if we don't, then what are we doing together now? You have to keep moving forwards, don't you?'

'I don't know. I've never been in a relationship that long.'

'That's the thing. You have all these dramas and excitements in your life.'

'Me?'

'Things beginning and things ending.'

'And things not happening at all.'

'Yes,' she said doubtfully. 'But I'm only twenty-six. Is that part of my life all over? Is this it?'

'Do you want to move in together?'

'Well, sometimes I think it'd be…'

But then there was the sound of a key in the lock and the door swung open.

'Hello,' Tony called cheerfully, dropping his bag on the hall floor with a thump, kicking first one shoe then the other off" his feet, so his shoes skidded over the wooden boards. He came into the room, hair damp on his forehead, cheeks reddened from the air. 'Oh, hi, Miranda. How are you?'

He bent down and kissed Laura, and she put one hand up to his cheek and smiled at him. It looked all right to me.

He was out of the door before I'd even parked the van, and running down the garden path. He couldn't wave because he had a bulging plastic bag in one hand and was holding his backpack by the other, but his pale face was shining, and he was grinning and saying something to me that I couldn't hear. He tripped over something on the path and half stumbled. His backpack swung against his legs, but he kept on smiling and mouthing words. Sometimes it is more painful to see Troy happy than to see him low.

'Hi there,' I said as he pulled open the door and clambered into the passenger seat, his bag getting tangled up with his angular body in the process. 'How's it going?'

'Fine. Good. Really good.' He wrapped the safety belt round himself and his baggage. 'I've been teaching myself to play the guitar, you know. Do you remember your old guitar? I found it in the junk room. It's a bit clapped out, but I don't suppose that matters much at the moment. Anyway, I thought I'd cook us supper tonight, all right? I brought the stuff with me. You haven't got any other plans, have you?'

'No,' I said. 'No other plans. What are we having?'

'Savoury profiteroles first of all,' he said. 'I saw them in this recipe book of Mum's and it says they're really simple. I haven't got any filling for them, but you must have something I can put in. Cheese, maybe? Or tuna fish. Even you must have a tin of tuna in a cupboard somewhere. Then kebabs. I have to marinade them first, though, so it might take a bit of time. I'll start when we get to your flat. I haven't thought about pudding. Do you actually want pudding? I thought we could just have the starter and the kebabs and that would be enough. I could make rice pudding. But hang on, we're having rice with kebabs, so it's probably not a good idea.'

'No pudding,' I said. I could already picture the chaos that lay ahead.

Every Thursday I see Troy. It's been a pretty constant arrangement for the past two years, when he was fifteen and in trouble. I collect him from Mum and Dad's after work, and I bring him back later in the evening, or else put him up for the night on my sagging sofa bed. Sometimes we go to the movies or to a concert. Occasionally he meets some of my friends. Last Thursday I took him to the pub with Laura and Tony, and a couple of others, but he was in one of his lethargic moods and simply put his head on the table after his first sip of beer and went to sleep. Sometimes he seems paralysingly shy, at other times he just doesn't bother. He'll pick up a book in the middle of a conversation, wander off when he feels like it.

Quite often we just go back to my flat and do stuff together. In the past few weeks he's become keen on cooking, with varying results. His enthusiasms flare up and then they die away again. He went through a phase of playing games of patience. He would have to complete the game before he did anything else. If he managed to get it out, it was a good omen, but he hardly ever managed it. In the summer he was fanatical about jigsaw puzzles: he brought one to my flat that was called 'The World's Most Difficult Jigsaw'. It had thousands of tiny pieces with pictures on both sides. And you didn't know what the final image was meant to look like. For weeks, I couldn't use my table because bits were scattered over it, straight sides at one end and in the middle the gradually emerging picture of a street scene. Suddenly he became bored. 'What actually is the point of doing jigsaw puzzles?' he said to me. 'You work for hours and hours, and then when you complete it you break it up and put it back in the box.' He worked for hours and hours, but he never completed it and it's now in a box under my bed.

Where did it go wrong? That's what my mother says sometimes, especially when Troy is silent and withdrawn, skulking in his bedroom, his face a sullen mask. He was always clever, sometimes bafflingly, dizzyingly clever, talking at one, reading at three, dazzling teachers with his aptitude, shown off to my parents' friends, paraded in assemblies, showered with school prizes, written about in the local paper, put into classes with children who were one, two years older than him – and two feet taller than him as well because he never seemed to grow. He was tiny, with bony knees and sticking-out ears.

He was bullied. I don't just mean pushed around in the playground or jeered at for being a swot. He was systematically tormented by a group of boys and excluded by everyone else. The bullies called him 'Troy Boy', locked him in the school toilets, tied him to a tree behind the bike shed, threw his books in the mud and stamped on them, passed notes around the classroom about him being a sissy and a gay. They punched him in the stomach, ran after him at the end of the day. He never told anyone – and by this time Kerry and I were so much older than him that we occupied entirely different worlds. He didn't complain to the teachers or to my parents, who just knew that he was quiet and 'different' from the other boys in his class. He just worked harder than ever and acquired a pedantic and slightly sarcastic manner that of course isolated him further.

Finally, when he was thirteen, my parents were summoned to the school because he'd been discovered throwing firecrackers at boys in the playground. He was wild with rage, weeping and swearing at anyone who came near him, as if the results of eight years of abuse had surfaced all at once. He was suspended for a week, during which time he broke down and 'confessed' to Mum, who stormed round to the school making a fuss. Boys were hauled in front of the head, given detentions. But how can you tell children that they have to like someone and be their friend, particularly when that someone is like my little brother: shy, scared, socially dysfunctional, crippled by his own particular brand of intelligence? And how do you undo damage that's been built into the foundations? With houses, it's easier to pull the whole thing down and start again. You can't do that with people.

I had left college by this time. I didn't understand how serious it was until Troy did his GCSEs. Maybe I didn't want to understand. He was expected to do well. He said the exams had gone fine, but he was vague about them. It turned out he hadn't done a single one. He'd sat in the park near his school, throwing bread to the ducks, staring at the litter on the banks of the pond, looking at his watch. When my parents discovered this, they were stunned. I remember being with them one afternoon when all Mum did was cry and ask him what she'd done wrong, was she such a bad mother, and Troy just sat there, not talking, but on his face an expression of triumph and shame that terrified me. The counsellor said it was his cry for help. A few months later he said that Troy 's cutting himself – dozens of shallow abrasions across his forearms – was a cry for help. And the way he sometimes didn't get out of bed in the mornings – that was a cry for help too.

He didn't go back to school. There was a private tutor and more therapy. He goes three times a week to a woman with letters after her name to talk about his problems. Every so often I ask him what goes on in these forty-five-minute sessions, but he just grins and shrugs. 'Often I just sleep,' he says. 'I lie down on the couch and close my eyes and then suddenly there's a voice telling me my session is over.'

'How's it all going?' I asked as I made us a pot of tea and he cut red peppers into strips. Already the kitchen was a mess. Rice bubbled ferociously in a pan, making its lid bump and water splash over the sides. Eggshells littered the table. Bowls and spoons stacked up in the sink. There was flour on the lino, as if there had been a light snowfall.

'Have you noticed,' he asked, 'that people always ask me how I am, in that careful, tactful kind of voice?'

'Sorry,' I said.

'I'm bored to death with talking about me. How's it going with you?'

'OK.'

'No, you're supposed to really tell me. That's the deal. I tell you, you tell me.'

'Actually, "OK" is about the right word. There's nothing much to report.'

He nodded. 'Brendan's going to teach me to fish,' he said.

'I didn't know you liked fishing.'

'I don't. I've never done it. But he says one day we can go to the sea where a friend of his has this boat, and fish for mackerel. He says you just haul them out of the water, one after the other, and then cook them at once over a fire.'

'Sounds good.'

'He says even if it's raining, it's nice to sit in a boat waiting for a tug on the line.'

'Have you seen him much, then?'

'A couple of times.'

'And you like him?'

'Yes. Can't imagine you with him, though.'

'Why not?'

He shrugged. 'He's not your style.'

'What's my style?'

'You're more of a cat person than a dog person.'

'I don't have a clue what you're on about.'

'He's more like a dog than a cat, don't you reckon? Eager, wanting to be noticed. Cats are more independent and aloof

'Am I independent and aloof, then?'

'Not with me you're not. But with people who you don't know so well.'

'What are you, then?'

'An otter,' he said immediately.

'You've really thought about this.'

'And Mum's a kangaroo.'

'Kangaroo?!'

'And she can't quite get used to the fact we're no longer in her pouch. Except that I crawl in and out occasionally.'

'What's Dad?'

'Brendan once had a kind of breakdown as well,' said Troy. He started threading alternating chunks of lamb and pepper on to skewers.

'Did he? I didn't know that.'

'He said he never tells anyone. But he told me because he wanted me to know that pain can be like a curse and like a gift, and that it's possible to turn it into a gift.'

'He said that?'

'Yes. He's a bit of a hippy, really.'

'I'm going to have a beer, I think.'

'Dad's a duck.'

'I don't think he'd like that.'

'Ducks are all right. They're optimists.'

'And Kerry?'

'What about gazelle?'

'Has Brendan said anything to you about me?' I tried to keep my voice casual.

'He said he hurt you.'

'Ah.'

'Did he?'

'No.'

'And he said you were too proud to admit it.'