His Secret Family (ARC)

by Ali Mercer

  We sat down and looked at menus. Mum was nervous too: she was holding her menu in a weird way, as if she was trying to be ladylike. In a minute she’d be taking tiny little sips of tea, so as not to slurp, and picking like a bird at a few crumbs of cake, because when it came down to it there was something inelegant about eating, too.

  It struck me as a drawback of going to that kind of place – you were never going to be relaxed enough to really enjoy it. But then I caught Mark’s eye and he looked anxious, as if this was a treat that he really wanted us to like and he was worried that we wouldn’t, and that made me feel bad and resolve to make the most of it.

  In the end we decided to order afternoon tea for four and Mark said, not to any one of us in particular, ‘Well, I hope you’re hungry.’

  ‘Starving,’ Ellie said. I could see that she was going to get over the awkwardness of all this pretty quickly once something nice to eat was put in front of her.

  Actually, I was starting to feel peckish too. It’ll sound like boasting to say I could eat more or less what I liked without it making much difference to my figure, but it was true. Mum sometimes made melancholy little comments about it. Every now and then she’d go on diets that made her very bad-tempered; she wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t exactly trim either. She was mum-shaped, basically: she’d softened up and fleshed out after having us, and didn’t have the time or energy to go to the gym and turn the clock back.

  Mark cleared his throat and asked what our days at school had been like. I didn’t say much because it didn’t seem likely that he was seriously interested in my History test, and I wasn’t exactly about to start telling him about spotty Toby Andrews having a crush on me, or my friend Jasmine being caught smoking outside school. But Ellie took the question and tried to run with it. Then she lost her thread halfway through, broke off and gazed into the middle distance as if waiting for inspiration to return to her.

  Mum and I were used to Ellie’s long-windedness: Mark wasn’t. He didn’t show any signs of impatience, though. He definitely didn’t seem to be a total bastard, though that might just have been a cunning pretence.

  ‘… and then we’re going to have to do it all over again next week,’ Ellie said, finishing her complaint about being made to go cross-country running that morning.

  ‘Cross-country’s no big deal,’ I said. ‘You can usually get away with walking most of it if you run at the start.’

  Mark frowned. ‘I’m not sure that’s the right attitude. Out in the real world, you have to compete if you want to win.’

  I shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, at my school, nobody takes that stuff very seriously. Anyway, I’d rather hang out with my friends at the back than get all sweaty.’

  My friend Jasmine was worse than me at absolutely everything, including PE, and couldn’t run ten metres without getting out of breath. But people liked her, which meant I got the reflected glow of her popularity and she got to copy my homework. It was a calculating friendship, but then, relationships at school were calculating, if you had any sense. It was like the Serengeti with a herd of impala crossing it; you didn’t want to be one of the unlucky ones who ended up isolated and got picked off. Heaven only knew how Ellie was going to cope when she moved up from the little primary school where she was now.

  ‘The other thing that happened was, Bella Montie went round telling everyone there’s a ghost in the girls’ toilets,’ Ellie went on. ‘She got them all worked up about it. Girls were coming out of there and crying and Jessica Thomas nearly fainted. But I know for a fact that there isn’t anything to be afraid of.’

  ‘Well, no, because there’s no such thing as ghosts,’ Mark said.

  Ellie gave him a slightly pitying look. ‘Definitely not in the girls’ toilets at my school,’ she said.

  Mark said, ‘Or anywhere.’

  Mum gave him a slightly panicked look, as if to say Don’t go there. Mark frowned. He said, ‘You’re not seriously telling me you’ve seen a ghost somewhere else, are you, Ellie?’

  ‘You don’t see ghosts. You feel them,’ Ellie said, blushing slightly but clearly delighted to have the chance to explain. That was Ellie all over. She had no idea when to hold back. ‘Bella doesn’t really know anything about ghosts. They were all just scaring each other. You don’t need an actual ghost to do that. Most people scare pretty easily. All you need is one thing they don’t understand and they’re spooked.’

  ‘You sound very sure of yourself,’ Mark said. ‘How do you know Bella didn’t feel something?’

  She looked at me blankly. ‘Because there was nothing there.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Ellie shrugged. Mum cleared her throat. ‘I don’t think now’s the time to get into all of that. Have we all decided what we’re having?’

  Ellie hunched her shoulders and pulled a face. ‘I wasn’t getting into anything.’

  Mark said, ‘Do you think there’s anything to feel here?’

  Ellie relaxed her shoulders and looked around and sniffed the air, the way somebody might do if they’d picked up a faint smell of burning.

  ‘Not much,’ she admitted. ‘Right now, it just all seems a bit closed off.’

  ‘I think that’s reassuring,’ Mark said. ‘Do you feel ghosts too, Ava?’

  ‘I don’t feel anything if I can help it,’ I told him, and then the waiter arrived to take our order.

  I’d wanted to warn Mark off. Don’t think you can get to know me just like that. But it didn’t work. He looked as if he felt sorry for me. As if it was a shame that I’d become someone who could say, I don’t feel anything if I can help it.

  Usually the idea of anyone being sympathetic like that – especially a stranger, especially someone who was dating my mother! – would have driven me mad. But with Mark it didn’t. Even though I would have thought that was the last thing I wanted, it turned out to be another thing I liked about him.

  I didn’t particularly want to like him. I didn’t feel like I needed to like him. Maybe like isn’t even quite the right word. There was something about him I recognised because it was how I secretly wanted to be myself: in control, with the money and the car and everybody’s respect. I admired him. I was very relieved, and not a little amazed, that this time round Mum had managed to fall for someone who wasn’t a total loser.

  Not that Dad was a loser, exactly. He just didn’t help himself. Or us. And he was very different to Mark.

  * * *

  Tea arrived, and it was just as fancy as you’d expect: a three-tiered silver cake stand loaded up with mouthful-size treats, tiny eclairs and choux buns and a selection of patisserie adorned with swirls of piped cream, slivers of strawberry, chocolate curls and fondant icing in shades of pastel pink.

  Mum got out her phone and took photos, which bothered me – nobody else was doing it. And who was she going to say she was with? Was she going to tag Mark? However much her friends might hit the like button… what would they really think? Take her friend Karen, the divorcee with the dodgy ex-boyfriend who’d made a pass at her teenage daughter. Wouldn’t it be rubbing Karen’s nose in it?

  Then I thought, Oh, who cares and got my phone out, too.

  It wasn’t like I was going to put the pictures anywhere – I was a lurker, not a sharer. I never posted anything. I didn’t want people at school knowing things about me, not even something quite harmless like my mum dating someone new who’d taken us to a posh hotel for tea.

  Mum was much less guarded than I was, but even so, she hadn’t yet put anything on Facebook about her hot new romance. I knew, because I kept an eye on her. These days she was forbidden to mention me unless I’d agreed, which I never did. But I liked to be sure.

  Maybe she was worried about jinxing her new romance. Or maybe she and Mark had talked about this, and he wasn’t keen on being electronically introduced to a bunch of people he didn’t know.

  Once I’d got his surname out of her – it was Walsh – I’d found his Facebook profile, which gave away the bare minimum
and had a profile picture of a pair of feet in flippers. It was about as impersonal as you could get, a bit like mine, which was a picture of some rhubarb that I’d taken ages ago after Mum randomly brought it home one day. Apart from that, Mark barely seemed to exist online. All I’d found, buried among the stuff about all the other Mark Walshes, was a boring LinkedIn profile that wasn’t even public.

  I put my phone away and Ellie and I tucked in. Mum didn’t eat all that much. Probably watching her figure. I wondered if she’d had sex with him yet. Almost certainly – why would you meet someone’s daughters unless you’d established that you had at least some kind of basic physical compatibility?

  The thought was almost enough to put me off the patisserie. Sex was either embarrassing or disgusting, or both: it was putting condoms on dildos in personal, social and health education class, or the really dirty stuff you found out about as soon as you moved up into secondary school, the stuff it was hard to believe anybody would actually want to do. Sex was what the popular girls got up to – girls like Tasha Evans and Janette Crosby, sullen-faced and heavily made-up and awash with likes on social media. I couldn’t be bothered with all that. I couldn’t begin to see what might be in it for me.

  I could see what might be in it for Mum, though, with Mark with the Jag and the bank balance, who could spend on an afternoon tea what we would have paid for food for a fortnight.

  And anyway, why shouldn’t she like him? He was almost too good to be true.

  * * *

  After she’d eaten Ellie started prattling away about what she was reading. Mark listened politely but his eyes began to glaze over. Then he said to me, ‘So what do you like to read, Ava?’

  ‘I don’t read,’ I said. ‘It takes too long.’

  Mum looked concerned. ‘But Ava, your English marks are so good—’

  ‘English is pointless,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t agree with you there,’ Mark said.

  ‘Mark studied English,’ Mum said. ‘At university.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I couldn’t help myself; I was curious. How had he made all his money – if he had made it, rather than just coming from a rich family? ‘What do you do now?’

  ‘I work for a big IT company,’ Mark said. ‘Probably the best way to explain what I do is to say I’m in customer relations. I help people work out what they want and then check they’re happy when they’ve bought it.’

  ‘Your English degree turned out useful, then,’ I said.

  Mark looked stung, and Mum frowned at me. I could feel her willing me to behave. Mark said, ‘You’re doing your GCSEs, aren’t you? What are you studying?’

  ‘Macbeth, An Inspector Calls, Jane Eyre, a bunch of poems.’

  ‘What do you think of them?’

  I shrugged. ‘What is this, some kind of exam?’

  ‘Just making conversation,’ Mark said.

  ‘We’re reading War Horse,’ Ellie piped up.

  ‘Your mum tells me you’re very ambitious,’ Mark said to me, ignoring Ellie completely. ‘If you want to get ahead, don’t you think you’ll need to be able to express yourself?’

  ‘I can talk fine, thank you,’ I said. ‘And you shouldn’t just ignore Ellie like that. Maybe you need to learn to listen.’

  I tried to swallow a mouthful of tea and nearly choked. Then I pushed back my chair and walked off, and it seemed like everyone in the restaurant was watching me as I went.

  * * *

  Mum was waiting in the ladies’ when I came out of the stall. She said, ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘What was what all about?’

  I started washing my hands. I could have done with running a comb through my hair, but I didn’t look too bad, even in my school uniform, which wasn’t the most flattering get-up: bottle-green V-neck jumper, white shirt, green and black tie, black skirt. We were meant to wear skirts down to our knees, but literally no one did. I had to be careful about bending over in mine, and plenty of other girls wore them even shorter.

  Mum sighed. ‘You know what I mean. You biting Mark’s head off like that. In public. He may not be handling this absolutely perfectly, but he’s trying. He’s not particularly used to kids. And right now, he’s absolutely mortified. You need to cut him a bit of slack, OK? You don’t have to be quite so hostile. Or defensive.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Look, I know you haven’t got any particular reason to trust him. Or to trust any man, after what we’ve been through. And I blame myself for that. I should have protected you both better.’

  ‘It’s not your fault that Dad is the way he is. You tried to stop him.’

  She shrugged. Her face was bleak and I knew she was remembering the rows she’d tried to shelter me from before he’d left. Then she gave herself a little shake. ‘What’s done can’t be undone,’ she said. ‘But I promise you, Mark has only the best intentions. He may not get everything right, but he’s willing to learn. Just give him a chance.’

  That was when I realised how serious she was. That it wasn’t going to be a case of ‘If you don’t like him, I’ll get shot of him’. It was like he was already part of our lives whether Ellie and I wanted him there or not. Like he was suddenly just as important as we were.

  ‘Look, I didn’t particularly want to meet him,’ I said. ‘But I’m here, aren’t I? Are we going to go soon?’

  She looked at my reflection in the mirror like there was something she wanted to explain but couldn’t. Then she said, ‘Please, Ava, for once in your life, just try to be nice,’ and banged the door on her way out.

  I checked my phone. Sure enough, she’d posted an update with a picture of the spread we’d just tucked into, and a slightly cryptic caption: A nice cup of tea… and the rest. Poor old Karen had already liked it. I only hesitated for an instant before liking it too. A guilt like. Dad wasn’t on Facebook, didn’t believe in it, so he’d never see it.

  How was he going to feel about this? He could probably have coped with Mum dating someone who ticked all of the boxes, who was well-off and had a good job and so on. He could have just been cynical about it. But if Mum was properly serious about it… and if we didn’t think Mark was all bad, apart from the situation taking some getting used to… how would he deal with it then?

  Back at our table I made a bit more of an effort, but it didn’t come naturally. I felt exhausted by the whole thing. It was a relief when Mark paid the bill and we left. I wondered how much it had all come to, but didn’t get the chance to see.

  * * *

  He took us all the way back to our flat. You didn’t see many Jags on our road – even our landlady only drove a Ford – so we were pretty conspicuous. It felt good, and at the same time I felt uneasy about it.

  It reminded me of when we’d lived in a part of south London that was notorious for kerb-crawling, and one evening, not even that late – I’d been walking home from the supermarket or something – I’d seen a young woman, scantily dressed despite the cold, getting into a car. I had felt awful about it, about what was going to happen between that girl and the driver next, and furious: not with her, but with him. It was frightening how vulnerable she was, and maddening how easy it was for him to exploit her.

  It wasn’t like Mark was exploiting us, and we weren’t in any danger from him as far as I could see. But mixed in with everything else, I still felt a bit of the same kind of resentment towards him. It wasn’t even really a personal thing. It was because he was a man and he had money and that gave him power, and I couldn’t hide from that and I didn’t know how else to deal with it.

  Should I be grateful? It was all right for Mum – she was clearly smitten, and that let her off the hook. She could accept all of this almost as if she’d earned it. But what about me and Ellie?

  He pulled up outside our flat and leaned across to kiss Mum goodbye on the cheek as if they were an old married couple or even brother and sister, not a hot young-ish couple in the first flush of romance. It could hardly have been a more a dem
ure sort of farewell, and I guessed he was trying not to make us uncomfortable. Another point in his favour. Then we said our final thank-yous and got out of the car and Mark drove away.

  Mum rummaged in her handbag for her keys and let us in. She looked more flushed and brighter in the eyes than usual.

  ‘So that was all right, wasn’t it?’ she said as we went into the downstairs lobby.

  Neither Ellie nor I said anything. Mum closed the door to the block behind us. ‘Don’t fall over yourselves rushing to tell me what you think of him.’

  ‘He’s nice,’ Ellie said. ‘Also, he really likes you.’

  ‘Why do I hear a “but” underlying that sentence?’ Mum said. She looked on the verge of being upset.

  ‘No buts,’ Ellie said diplomatically. ‘The only problem is what he thinks of us.’

  ‘Not so much of a problem,’ Mum said. ‘He thinks you’re both great. What did you think of him, Ava?’

  ‘Why does it matter what we think? He’s your boyfriend.’

  ‘Ava, of course it matters.’

  We made our way up the stairs to our flat. Mum unlocked our front door and we went in. I said, ‘Does Dad know about him?’

  Mum stepped out of her shoes. She’d put on her best high heels for the occasion. ‘It’s nothing to do with him.’

  ‘So I shouldn’t mention it?’

  ‘When are you going to get the chance? We haven’t heard from him for months.’

  ‘Which means we’re probably about due,’ I said. ‘If you’re really sure about this, if you think Mark’s going a big part of our lives, sooner or later one of us is going to have to tell him.’