His Secret Family (ARC)

by Ali Mercer

  ‘I’ll manage,’ I said. ‘Mark, would you like a coffee or something?’

  This was what you were meant to say to visitors; Ava had been neglectful in not offering. Mum might tell her off later, and I could come out of this pretty well, with both the books and the victory of having been a good hostess.

  But Mark shook his head. He brushed his hands against each other as if to say, job well done.

  ‘No, I’d best be off,’ he said. ‘Enjoy the books. Take care, Ava.’

  ‘I’ll show you out,’ I said.

  I followed Mark downstairs to the lobby and let him out of the building, and then, on impulse, trotted along behind him all the way to his car.

  I knew Ava would feel I’d let the side down, and I felt bad about it but not enough to change tack. If Ava was going to be mean to Mark, that was up to her. I was going to be extremely nice to him. After all… why shouldn’t I be? Who was I being disloyal to? Not Dad, who we hadn’t seen for ages. Not Mum, who was in love with Mark and wanted us to get on with him. Only Ava, who seemed to have decided to make things difficult. Like she was testing him. Why did she have to be so weird about it?

  And yet…

  There was something about it I didn’t really understand. Something about him.

  Something he’d done, perhaps, a long time ago? Or something he ought to have done, and hadn’t?

  Whatever it was, it bothered him, and it wasn’t going to go away. I’d felt it that first time we met him, when he took Ava’s hand in the car. And I could feel it now.

  He didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d followed him. He pressed his key fob to unlock the car door and I said, ‘The books are really nice. I think Mum will like them, too. It was very kind of you.’

  He started, and for a moment he looked almost as if I repelled him. Then he smoothed his face into a more appropriate adult-to-child expression – friendly, and slightly patronising – and said, ‘Sorry, Ellie, lost in thought.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s OK. People often forget I’m there.’ Especially when Ava’s there too. And even when she isn’t. ‘I’d probably make a brilliant spy.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ Mark said. Then: ‘Ellie, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how much do you see of your dad?’

  ‘It depends,’ I said. ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘When you do see him, do you get along with him?’

  I hesitated. How to sum up our relationship with Dad in a sentence or two? You couldn’t just say it was awkward and leave it at that. You could say that of any relative you didn’t see very often, and with Dad it was different. It always felt like something big was still unfinished, and maybe always would be.

  It was like the picture that I’d got started on in school last summer, which was going to be of the most beautiful garden in the world. I had a big piece of sugar paper to work on, and I was planning to make it perfect. But I’d only got as far as the beginning of the path and the outline of the borders, and then there’d been no more time and the picture had somehow got lost.

  I shrugged. ‘Yeah, we get along.’

  ‘And Ava? How is she with him?’

  Suddenly I didn’t like this any more. Ava wouldn’t be at all happy that I was even having this conversation. I’d gone against her once already today. I wasn’t about to do it again.

  ‘She’s fine with him, actually. Thanks for the books,’ I said, and turned and walked back towards the flat.

  He’s just going to get in the way. Still, nothing to be done about it. Not yet, anyway.

  Had I imagined it? The words were so clear it was as if he’d just spoken them. He looked startled when I turned back and stared at him, then attempted to smile and wave and got into the car and drove away.

  Upstairs in the kitchen, Ava was looking at one of the books. They seemed somehow ominous – too big, too red, radiating a faint sense of not-quite-right. I remembered the roses Mark had bought Mum, the colour of them, dark and bright like blood.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t do what?’

  ‘Play his game. Whatever it is.’

  She put down the book. It was Great Expectations, which I had heard of, maybe. It seemed like a good idea to have quite a long word in a book’s title, so that people knew to take it seriously.

  ‘You just don’t want to like him,’ I said.

  ‘You want to like him too much,’ she said. ‘You should remember this isn’t that big a deal. He gave us something he could easily afford to give. That doesn’t mean we owe him anything.’

  And she went off to the bedroom and closed the door, leaving me alone with the books.

  Six

  Ava

  After Mark gave us the books, any time he came near our place, Ellie would start ostentatiously reading. He couldn’t help but notice, and seemed pleased, though I got the impression Ellie’s approval wasn’t crucial to him.

  Maybe that was because it was so easy to get. If he was the kind of guy who liked a challenge, I was currently the only one out of the three of us who was giving him one. I wasn’t hostile, exactly, but I wasn’t falling over myself to make him welcome. He’d have to earn that, and he couldn’t do it just by buying us expensive presents.

  Every now and then it was obvious that Mum wished I’d be a little warmer towards him, but weeks went by without us really talking about it. The only person who seemed to realise that I was out of sorts was Toby Andrews at school, who got up the nerve to approach me and actually asked if I was OK. I wasn’t about to admit how I was feeling to Toby, though. I wasn’t mean to him, I just gave him a discouraging look and told him I was fine. After all, what could he have done about it? I half hoped that Mark would lose interest. But what really bothered me was that part of me really didn’t want him to abandon us.

  Mum went off every now and then for dinner dates: the Jag would pull up outside the flat and off she’d go, smelling of the new perfume Mark had bought her. He bought some for me, too, but it stayed in its packaging. Ellie got some bubble bath and a pencil case, which she was delighted with and carried round as if it was treasure.

  He treated Mum like she was precious and slightly incompetent: opened doors for her, helped her with her coat, all that kind of thing. Mum loved it. She was always looking at him adoringly, and he would look back at her with smug relief, as if she was the one he’d been searching for all these years and had finally found.

  They weren’t all over each other all the time, which was something, but instead they were romantic, which was quite bad enough. The handholding, the pecks on the cheek – it was all vaguely nauseating. Mark in the abstract I could tolerate, even admire, though I wouldn’t have admitted that to anyone. But Mark and Mum being lovey-dovey? There was just something really unsettling about it.

  He took us all to the theatre, to see Romeo and Juliet in the West End. ‘It’ll be good for your studies,’ Mum said. The tickets cost a fortune – I made sure to check out the prices, but didn’t make a big deal of thanking him. Ellie was entranced by the performance; I was begrudging, and didn’t enthuse.

  ‘You’re a hard woman to please,’ Mark told me afterwards, when he was driving us back to the flat. ‘That’s supposed to be one of the best productions in recent years.’

  ‘I just don’t like it when actors declaim their lines like they’re doing you a favour,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’m not all that keen on romance.’

  ‘Well, I thought it was beautiful,’ Mum said brightly.

  She was wearing yet another new dress, pink with a pattern of little white blossoms. It was the kind of thing you’d expect someone to dress up in if she lived in the country and cooked on an Aga. Was that the kind of person Mark wanted her to become? I didn’t know whether he’d got her the dress; she might have chosen it herself. It was getting to the point where it was hard to tell whether her things were gifts from him or attempts to please him.

  ‘Ava’s just heartless,’ Ellie said.

  ‘I’m
sure that’s not true,’ Mark said.

  ‘It is, actually,’ I said. ‘I’m never going to fall in love. Or get married, or have children. I’m going to live on my own my whole life.’

  ‘Surely you’re a little young to decide that,’ Mark said.

  ‘Then I’m too young to decide I want to be a wife and mother, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re too young to decide anything,’ Mum said. ‘You just never know how things are going to turn out. Life is full of surprises.’

  And she gave Mark a special smile, and he reached out and squeezed her hand and I felt like throwing up.

  It was all so fast. A whirlwind romance was probably great if you were in it, but if you were on the sidelines, being spun round and round without the power to stop everything and step off – well, you were much more likely to feel queasy than to enjoy the ride.

  * * *

  Soon after the trip to see Romeo and Juliet, something that was both inevitable and unpredictable happened: Dad got in touch.

  There were other people at school who had parents who were separated or divorced, and they all seemed to have these set-ups where they saw the parent they didn’t live with every weekend. When I’d first realised that was usually how it worked, I had been absolutely astonished. Then I’d felt cheated. Then I’d figured out that spending more time with Dad wouldn’t actually have made anything any better. Anyway, if he didn’t want to see us, I didn’t want to see him.

  There was a small chance that seeing Dad more often would have changed our relationship with him – made it more regular, part of the routine world of cornflakes in the morning and homework in the evening and a fixed, sensible bedtime. But Dad wasn’t fixed or regular or routine or sensible. He lived for the moment and the moment blew him around all over the place, and when he came to see us our lives became unpredictable too.

  I resented him for that and secretly loved him for it too, because what child doesn’t want to see the usual order of things undermined? He was dangerous, though. He couldn’t be trusted; he was unreliable. He’d say he’d come at six and rock up at nine; he’d forget birthdays and compensate by sending huge, extravagant gifts that weren’t quite right – dolls for Ellie that might have been suitable for a much younger child, clothes for me that were expensive but not the kind of thing I’d ever wear. He was dangerous because if you just let yourself love him, if you ever forgot to brace yourself for disappointment, you’d be crushed.

  Compared to Mark, though, he was a known quantity. So when Mum rapped on our bedroom door and said he’d been in touch, I was pleased. More than that, I was relieved.

  I don’t know what I was hoping for, really. Maybe I had some vague idea that Dad was going to help me get my bearings on Mark. Like he might be able to reassure me: Oh, don’t worry, it’s bound to fizzle out. Or well, I always knew this was going to happen, Ava, but don’t worry, I’ll always be a part of your lives, and I’m going to be a changed man from now on and come see you both every weekend, like all those other divorced fathers.

  Maybe what I really wanted was some push-back. Who is this creep? I don’t like the sound of him at all. Don’t you worry, Ava, I’m going to see him off.

  Fat chance.

  Still, I did get something out of it his visit. Consistency. Dad behaved exactly as I would have anticipated, if I hadn’t allowed myself to hope for something more. In the end, the wild card was Mark. It was the first time I saw how ruthless he could be, and how much he liked to win.

  * * *

  The evening with Dad started badly. Surprise, surprise, he was late. The worst thing about that was how patiently and uncomplainingly Ellie waited for him, sitting right by the kitchen window where she could keep an eye on the street and getting paler and sadder as time went by. I sat it out in our bedroom, where at least she wasn’t right under my nose. It wound me up too much to see her like that, all the more so because it was just something else I couldn’t do anything about.

  When it got to half-seven I couldn’t wait any longer. I went into the kitchen, where Mum was washing up her dinner for one and slapping plates in the drainer as if she didn’t care if they broke. Ellie was still sitting by the window with one of the red-backed books open in her lap, looking as forlorn and starved as an orphan.

  I put a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster. ‘Have a bit of this, if you want, Ellie. You look as if you’re about to pass out.’

  ‘You’ll spoil your appetite,’ she said primly.

  And then we all heard a car outside.

  Ellie got up straight away and dashed over to the window and looked down, and said – as if this was a triumph – ‘It’s him!’

  Mum and I exchanged glances. Mum grimaced. I rolled my eyes. Ellie had already gone, hurrying down to get into the taxi – Dad never drove us any more, Mum had put a stop to that.

  ‘Some toast there if you want it,’ I said to Mum.

  ‘Take care,’ she said. ‘Remember what we talked about.’

  ‘He won’t make any trouble,’ I said. ‘Or at least no more than usual.’ And then I hurried downstairs too.

  * * *

  We went to a Portuguese place in Kingston. It wasn’t as posh as the hotel Mark had taken us to, but it was nice – probably nicer than Dad could really afford. He always tried to take us somewhere different; Thai, Chinese, Indian, whatever. This place specialised in steak, which Dad liked. He was a red-meat, red-wine kind of guy. Actually, he was a beer and whisky kind of guy, too. He didn’t discriminate.

  ‘I’m thinking of going vegan,’ I told Dad as we studied the menus.

  Dad raised an eyebrow and looked at me pretty much the way the snake might have looked at Eve in the garden of Eden if the snake was a middle-aged alcoholic and Eve was his teenage daughter. Like, Who are you trying to kid, coming over all virtuous? Who do you think you are?

  ‘What does your mother think of that?’

  ‘She says it’s OK as long as she doesn’t have to fiddle around with pulses and I cook for myself.’

  ‘Fair enough. What’s it going to be today? A nice bit of T-bone?’

  Again, that look. You think you’re above temptation now, do you? He was steaming drunk – you could tell just by looking at him: his eyes were too bright, his face was too red, and his hands had stopped shaking. But also, he was at the manageable stage, where he was still perfectly capable of holding a conversation. The conversation might get a bit more obsessive or repetitive as the evening wore on, but we were a long way away from the ranty/obsessive stage, which didn’t usually set in till two or three in the morning. Now Dad didn’t live with us I never really saw that side of him any more, and Ellie had pretty much never seen it, which made it nice and easy for her to pretend it didn’t exist.

  ‘I’ll have the rump steak and chips,’ I conceded, and Dad grinned at me.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to have the same,’ Ellie said.

  ‘Good for you,’ Dad said, not really paying her that much attention.

  The waiter arrived with the wine – Dad had ordered a bottle of red as soon as we’d sat down. Dad tasted it – he loved that little ritual, though I’d never seen him send wine back. Then he poured a bit into my glass. He always preferred to drink in company. I’d learned quickly to watch it with him; his hand would slip a bit, the wine would splash in and the look of temptation would come out. Before I knew it I’d be feeling all the emotions I never usually let myself feel and talking about all the things I never usually let myself talk about, and Dad would be looking at me in delight.

  Well, it wasn’t going to happen this time. Mum trusted me to keep an eye on Ellie and come home sober, and that was what I was going to do.

  I sipped my water. Suddenly I felt really nervous, which was stupid because nothing bad was going to happen to us here, in public, and Dad wasn’t that drunk, anyway.

  Dad raised his glass and proposed a toast. ‘To being together,’ he said, and we all chinked glasses.
/>   Then he swigged some wine and gave me that wicked look, the look that meant he was about to attempt to induce me to do something I maybe shouldn’t do, or might be reluctant to go along with.

  ‘What’s all this I hear about your mum having a new boyfriend?’

  Totally predictable: he wanted me to dish the dirt on Mark. Mum had warned me he’d do this, and I’d promised her I’d steer as far clear of the subject as possible.

  ‘She mentioned she’d told you about him,’ I said, playing for time.

  ‘What I wondered was, what do you think of him?’

  ‘I think he’s quite nice,’ Ellie piped up.

  We both stared at her. ‘He gave us some books,’ Ellie explained defiantly.

  ‘I wasn’t going to accept them. I thought it was too much,’ I said. ‘But Ellie was keen.’

  ‘They’re lovely books. All classics. But I would still think he was nice, even if he didn’t give us anything,’ Ellie said.

  I kicked her under the table, and she reddened and quickly changed tack.

  ‘Not as nice as you, Daddy, obviously. But I think he’s making Mummy happy and it’s only fair, isn’t it? I mean, she should have her chance to be happy.’

  Dad’s bonhomie vanished – it was remarkable how quickly that could happen – and he glared at her.

  ‘Fair has got nothing to do with it. He’s just come crawling out of the woodwork because he’s free.’

  I said, ‘What do you mean, free? Was he married?’

  Dad narrowed his eyes. This was the next stage on from the Face of Temptation: the Face of Compulsion, which said, I really need you to do what I want you to do next or I won’t be answerable for the consequences.

  ‘Ask your mother,’ he said. ‘What do you think of him?’

  I hesitated. I could tell this really mattered to him, and that made it impossible to know what to say.

  I could have said, He treats Mum well and he’s making an effort, so what’s not to like?