The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets (31 page)

‘It was supposed to be for TP,' she said. ‘I thought the
briefcase
was his. I mistook it for that brown case, with the zip.'

‘My poetry portfolio?' said TP. ‘It's nothing like it.'

‘I just assumed…' Erica blushed. ‘You were the only person in the house at the time, and… I thought Frank's briefcase was black. I didn't know he had a new one.'

‘Understandable.' Frank nodded. ‘Right, well… there's no problem then, is there?' He looked at Flora, as if seeking permission to leave the meeting. She shook her head. Frank stayed put.

Erica tried to work out what she ought to say next. She needed to make it clear, tactfully, that the Valentine had been a prank. ‘Interested? Or just curious?': it was hardly the sort of thing one would write if one were joking. It didn't sound at all light-hearted. Why hadn't this occurred to her before? Had Flora thought of it? Erica felt dizzy. She didn't want to humiliate TP. He annoyed her, but she had no wish to turn him into an object of public ridicule, not in a romantic context. That would be too hurtful; he didn't deserve that. Flora was staring at her with sharp, shiny eyes that urged her to speak up.

‘How could you think I'd be interested in a middle-aged frump like you?' TP looked Erica up and down. ‘I wouldn't touch you if you were the last woman in the world.'

‘There's no need for that, TP,' said Frank. ‘Shouldn't we all just…try to get back to normal?'

‘What's normal?' Flora snapped. ‘Erica, tell him. The card was supposed to be a joke.' Stick to the script, for God's sake, said her eyes.

‘I… I…' Erica stammered.

‘She's a joke,' said TP. ‘She's only interested in me because I'm a poet. If I was just a gardener, she wouldn't look twice at me. But, I mean, how desperate would I have to be?'

‘TP, shut up, for fuck's sake!' said Frank.

‘She's got a moustache!'

Erica turned and left the room as quickly as she could. A loud humming filled her head, like the sound of a large insect becoming agitated. That had not just happened. It had not happened. It couldn't have. She was opening the front door when Flora caught up with her and began to breathe desperate jollity into her ear. ‘Good old Frank! He put TP in his place, didn't he?' She tittered nervously. ‘God, that was excruciating! Are you okay? You haven't taken it to heart, have you? TP's a fool. He doesn't know what he's talking about.'

‘I'm fine,' said Erica.

‘Phew! What an afternoon! Look, let's go and do something nice to cheer ourselves up. Cocktails! I know just the place.'

‘No. I have to go.'

‘Come on, Erica, don't sulk.' Flora lowered her voice. ‘We need to talk about Project Hugh.'

‘No. I've got…things I have to do,' said Erica, edging past Flora and out on to the street.

‘Tomorrow, then? Let's go out for lunch. And then shall we go and buy you a car?' Flora shouted after her.

Erica stopped walking. If she said no, if she left and never came back, Flora and Frank and TP would all think she was
too ashamed, that TP's cruel words had destroyed her. She couldn't let them think that. She had to come back tomorrow and perform, credibly, the role of someone who didn't give a damn what some grubby scrounger thought of her.

‘Tomorrow?' Flora called out again.

Erica turned and gave a small nod.

‘Excellent!'

Erica never wanted to see Flora Gustavina again in her life. She would see her tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

T
HERE OUGHT TO BE A WORD TO DESCRIBE THE PERSON WE
most wish we had never met. I won't invent one – I shudder at the thought – but somebody should, so that we know to expect that person in our lives, even if they haven't arrived yet. Such a word, such a concept, might help us to
recognise
them while there is still time to escape, before they have shattered our calm and orderly existence.

A Devittoris. Wasn't the first Mercedes called after a woman of the same name? I believe it was.

My own orderly existence was shattered on the seventh of May last year, when Maria Devittoris ambushed me outside my house. I had done a satisfying morning's work, eaten my usual lunch of a baked potato with tuna mayonnaise and a rocket and watercress salad, and was setting off on my customary bike ride. I have found cycling to be an excellent way of banishing from my mind the dizzying effects of sustained mental concentration, and I rarely miss a day. In order to be happy and productive, I need exactly the right balance of the indoors and the outdoors, the cerebral and the physical. This was what I was thinking about – how
essential
this mixture was if I were to flourish, how impressive my
determination, daily, to achieve it – as I opened my garage door and emerged into the sunlight with my bike.

I noticed immediately that there was a person standing next to my front garden, on the other side of the hedge. I glanced at the figure out of the corner of my eye. The head and shoulders were all I could see above the neat rectangular wall of privet, and these were covered by a bizarre item of clothing that was a cross between a shawl and a hood. Is such a garment called a snood? I believe it is; I wouldn't have dreamed that word up out of nowhere.

I took in that the figure was wearing a snood, then – a woolly, emerald green thing that was quite extraordinarily ugly. I wondered what sort of idiot would choose to wear knitted headgear in early May and, even more worryingly, to waste his or her afternoon dawdling on a pavement. Merloncing: now there's a word I did make up, as a schoolboy. My friends and I use it to this day. To merlonce: to loiter idly, deliberately, or be unoccupied in a subtly obtrusive way, while somebody else is busy right next to you, making it impossible for that person to concentrate on what they're doing. Did the green-topped merloncer have no work or hobbies to pursue? I've always loathed time-wasters, and, when I saw the figure begin to turn to face me, I averted my eyes, keen to avoid any contact that would cut into my cycling time.

Head down, I pushed my bike out on to the road and steered it away from the snood-wearer. I had one foot on a pedal when I heard a woman's voice call out, ‘William!' I was considering pretending I hadn't heard when I felt a sharp tapping on my back and heard laboured breathing that sounded as if its source were adjacent to my left ear. Whoever she was, she had hurried over in order to draw herself to my attention. That was sufficient to make me dislike her.

I had no choice but to turn. Inside the green snood's
oval-shaped
aperture I saw a slender nose with a moist red tip, waterlogged eyes, two blotchy expanses of cheek, a small
flexing mouth. I noticed these features individually before I saw them as a whole and realised, with immense frustration, that the hooded dawdler was Maria Devittoris. I had forgotten her almost entirely, but there was no denying that we knew one another. Therefore, I deduced, she was not standing here by chance. She intended to speak to me, perhaps at length.

‘Maria. I was just on my way out. I can't talk now, I'm afraid.'

‘When can you?' Her tone was knowing and bitter, her question confusing and unanswerable. I was trying to work out what to say next when she said, ‘Why do you think I'm standing outside your house in disguise?' With her right hand, she yanked off her hood. The action was savagely abrupt. I had the impression that she was trying to blame me for subjecting her to the indignity of wearing the green snood, when in fact neither her presence nor her attire had anything to do with me.

Nor did her two questions, both of which were designed to suggest that she and I were jointly involved in an ongoing situation. She had the look of a woman who thought she knew all about me – a look I have seen on several female faces over the years. I was particularly alarmed by Maria's second question – ‘Why do you think I'm standing outside your house in disguise?' – which was surely based upon a conviction that her motivation ought to be of interest to me. I cared not one jot.

I will not go into detail about my history with Maria. I would find that too tedious – as dull, in fact, as the party at which we met. Maria works for Collegiate Press, who have published all my work. They are excellent publishers of scholarly books, but hopeless party hosts. All this is irrelevant, however. The only salient point is that I had spent some time with Maria a year or so previously and then lost touch with her.

‘I have no idea why you're standing outside my house in disguise,' I said honestly. If I'd put my mind to it, I'm sure
I could have come up with a workable theory, but as I had nothing to gain by doing so, I didn't bother. I pushed my bike back and forth, listening to the tempting click and whir of its wheels, wishing Maria would disappear. Then it occurred to me that appearing to cooperate might be a more efficient way to get rid of her. So I applied myself, and tried to think about why she might, a year after we'd last spoken, be lurking outside my house with her head and shoulders encased in a knitted green tube.

The effort took all my willpower. My brain vigorously resisted any sort of imaginative speculation about Maria's actions. My focus slid away from her into abstraction. I issued an order to myself: ‘Think about Maria Devittoris.'
Obediently
, my thoughts struggled to latch on to her, but they were dragged away each time they got close, like feeble swimmers in the strong current of my attention and enthusiasm, which pulled in the opposite direction, towards the hills, solitude.

‘I've no idea,' I said again, and shrugged.

‘I've been watching you for a while,' said Maria. ‘I didn't want you to see me until I was ready.'

‘Oh. Well, I didn't see you,' I said, swallowing a yawn.

A tear rolled from the outer corner of her right eye. ‘Aren't you going to ask me, ready for what?'

I felt exhausted by the unfeasibly high level of
involvement
she expected from me. If she wanted to tell me what she was ready for, she was free to do so, though God knows I was keen to preserve my ignorance on this score. By now it was clear to me that my plans for the afternoon were an endangered species. I wanted to lie down in the middle of the road and hug my knees to my chest. I pictured myself in bed, cocooned in my duck-down duvet. Maria's demands were making me feel nooberly. This word is another one I invented while at school. My friends and I couldn't have managed without it over the years, so perfectly does it describe a particular state. Nooberly: tired, sensitive,
vulnerable, shivery, or otherwise in need of curling up under a quilt.

If only Maria had known how difficult it was for me to stand there and converse with her, I was sure she'd have granted me a sympathetic release. I was so bored by the whole idea of her that I found I was having to remind myself every three seconds that she was still in front of me, that
convention
and politeness required me to respond to her nonsense. The concept of Maria Devittoris drained from my mind even as I looked at her; I kept having to gather it up and drop it back in, pat it into a more solid shape.

She sighed. Did that mean she had given up on me? I was cautiously optimistic.

‘How's the phonetics business?' she said.

‘Don't call it a business.'

Her mouth twitched. ‘Still the same old William. How's work, then?' She moved closer. Her lips were brown, glossy, ribbed with vertical lines, like two worms.

‘Fine.'

‘What are you working on at the moment? This morning? You still work in the mornings, don't you? From eight until twelve.'

‘Why do you want to know?'

She let out an abrasive snigger. ‘Only you could ask that. How are James and George? Do you all still go to the Lord Nelson every night?'

‘Not every night, no.'

‘Do you still speak in that silly code the three of you made up at your public school, with its many helipads?' I found her inaccuracies tiresome. Our school had possessed only one helipad. The silly code, as Maria called it, was something I'd devised alone. James and George merely used it.

I vaguely remembered that Maria had always resented the private language I shared with my two oldest friends. Hadn't she once insisted that she ‘deserved' to know what
all the words meant? Yes, that's right: there was some tearful nonsense about her feeling excluded. She'd assumed she had the right to know everything about me. Now, over a year later, it seemed that assumption remained in place.

I refused to discuss James and George with Maria, so decided to deflect her attention by answering the question about my work. ‘If you must know, this morning I was
proofreading
my introduction to Collegiate's new
Dictionary of
Rhymes
.' I announced the title proudly; it was my suggestion. When I'd first seen the proposal, the book had
provisionally
been called
The Rhymer's Dictionary
. I had successfully persuaded Rachel, the language reference editor, that this sounded twee and amateurish.

‘We need a new one?' Maria sneered. It had always
infuriated
me that she referred to Collegiate Press as ‘we'. Her job there was a menial, manual one – she fiddled with commas and semicolons once all the serious editorial work had been done – yet she spoke as if she were to Collegiate Press what TS Eliot was to Faber and Faber. ‘What's wrong with the old one? I assume cat still rhymes with hat.'

And with fat, I nearly said. There was a bulge around Maria's middle that had not been there the last time I saw her. ‘Among other things, the introduction is what's wrong with the old one,' I said impatiently. ‘Naunton Ralph wrote it.'

‘Who?'

‘He's a professor of English Literature at Oxford, an
intellectual
casualty of the sixties and seventies. He knows nothing about linguistics. His introduction's all about the politics of rhyme, its cultural significance.' This was one of my favourite rants, but even so I soon ran out of steam. It is impossible to find anything interesting, or to be interesting oneself, in the presence of somebody one finds wholly boring. Just as I would have been unable to eat a baked potato if there were a cowpat on the plate beside it, I had no desire to disparage Naunton Ralph with Maria as my audience.

‘Words mean things to people,' said Maria. ‘Some people, anyway.'

My fingers were starting to hurt. I loosened my grip on the handles of my bike. ‘Maria, I have to go. Is there something specific that you want from me?'

‘What do
you
want, William?' she said in a flirtatious voice. ‘Apart from to be immortal. Poor William! Let's face it, noone's ever going to pay much attention to your work.'

‘This is… Get out of my way!' I pushed her and she staggered backwards. In the history of my paltry acquaintance with Maria, I had said not one word to her about wanting to be immortal. How dared she invent random wishes and attribute them to me without my permission?

She bobbed back up, like a rubber duck in the bath. ‘Perhaps your introduction to the rhymer's dictionary will be the one, the piece of work that propels you towards stardom.' She sniggered. ‘If it doesn't, you can always become a rapper. Or a gigolo, I
don't
think!'

‘Maria, I've listened to enough of your inanity. Now, I've got the rest of my life to get on with, and I'm rather hoping you won't be in it, so if you'll excuse me…'

‘Ah!' she said, clapping her hands together, as if she had coaxed from me a crucial revelation. ‘So you did lie about call waiting.'

‘
What
?' I was beginning to despair. Would I ever get rid of the woman? Not this afternoon – I had kissed goodbye to this afternoon a long while ago; indeed, my grieving process for the hours between two and five was already well under way. But now I was beginning to fear for the evening, for tomorrow, next month, next year. In order to persuade Maria to leave me alone, I would have to work out what she meant and respond to it in a way that would satisfy her. Call waiting? I had no idea what she was referring to.

‘Our last phone conversation. There was that bleeping noise on the line, your call waiting signal. You said, “I'd
better go and see who it is. Ring me again.” Those were your exact words.' I wished that I could confidently have accused her of lying, but I had no memory of any of it. And even if it were true, so what? I'd taken another call; it was hardly a momentous event. ‘But I didn't call you again, did I? And you didn't call me. And that was that.' Maria's voice vibrated with menace and misery. Her oral portrayal of that being that was a bleak, apocalyptic one.

‘And that was that,' I enthused, in a far jollier tone. ‘So why are you here?'

‘
I
phoned
you
. I always did. If you had a call waiting and had to go, you should have said
you'd
phone
me
back, not “ring me again” in that presumptuous, offhand way!'

I felt a creeping sense of alarm.

Maria straightened her back. ‘I think most reasonable people would agree that the onus is on the callee, not the caller, to phone back if the original call is interrupted by the callee's call waiting noise. And you could easily have ignored those bleeps and carried on talking to me! The other person would have been diverted to your voicemail. They'd have left a message. Why couldn't they be the one to wait for
ever
for you to ring them back?'