The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets

by Sophie Hannah

  She stands in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom and twists the lipstick so that it sticks out as far as it will go. It looks like a small sword with an orange blade. Instantly afraid she will be clumsy and snap it, she winds it back in again so that only the tip protrudes. She starts to put it on, covering her upper lip with colour first, as she always does.

  ‘Very fetching.’ Sol’s voice comes from right behind her. She jumps, makes a high-pitched, startled noise. He steps sideways, and now she sees him in the mirror. How long has he been there? His face is contorted, fluid, as if there is something horrible wriggling underneath the skin and the features. He puts his right arm round her neck and squeezes. She can still breathe, but only just. She cannot speak at all. Sol’s other arm wraps around her waist. He lifts her up. She smells vinegar. In the mirror, she watches her legs kick in the air as her face turns red, almost purple. Then he lowers her so that her feet are on the ground again, but he doesn’t release his grip on her throat. ‘Think I’m some kind of scum, do you?’ he says.

  She does her best to shake her head.

  ‘Yes, you do. Or else you wouldn’t have tried to mock me with your great fucking knowledge. You think I’ve never heard of Hobbes and Leviathan?’

  He releases her, spins her round in his hands, seizes her by both shoulders and slams her against the mirror. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobs. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think that, I was just joking, please, let me go....’

  ‘I’ve read...’ He pulls her towards him. She recoils from the snarl of bared teeth. ‘...Hobbes. And Locke. And Marx. And Rousseau.’ With each political philosopher’s name, he slams her against the mirror, harder every time. She is terrified that it will smash, that he will pick up a pointed wedge of glass from the carpet and cut her throat with it.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she whimpers. ‘Please, just let me go and I’ll never... I promise I’ll...’

  He looks down, notices that she has one fist clenched. It is only when she sees him looking that she remembers the lipstick. Her fingers have fossilized around it. ‘Open your hand,’ he says.

  She does as he tells her. The lipstick is broken. Her arm shakes, and the small orange tube, detached from its base, rocks in her palm.

  Sol grabs it, holds it above her head. She stares up at it as if it is an executioner’s axe, having run out of words that she might say in her defence. Sol moves his left hand from her shoulder to her throat. This time he does not squeeze, but simply holds her neck firmly, in a way that makes it clear that any movement would be dangerous. With his right hand, he brings the lipstick down slowly, until it is level with her nose. It hovers, a small, orange finger, pointing at her. He is smiling, eyes bulging with enthusiasm for whatever he intends to do.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she murmurs.

  Very slowly, he begins to write something on her forehead. A word. An orange word. Or maybe more than one. How many words can one forehead accommodate? As soon as she realises this is what he is doing, she starts to roll her eyes and wag her tongue inside her mouth and strain to get away, even though, with his hand still in place like a choker necklace, it is agony for her already bruised throat. But she would rather feel the pain, even risk unconsciousness, than stand still and allow herself to work out what he is writing.

  He is soon finished. He releases her neck and grips her by the shoulders again. ‘I’m going to go downstairs now and try to get the oil out of your carpet,’ he says, deliberately and obtrusively patient. ‘You are going to stay up here in this room and think about what a patronising bitch you’ve been, and you are not – repeat, not – going to wash this...’ – he jabs her brow with his finger – ‘...off until I come back up here and say you can. Understood?’

  She nods.

  ‘If you leave this room, or wash that off, there’ll be trouble.’

  After he leaves the bedroom, she stays exactly where she is, up against the mirror, with her back to it. She can’t risk moving, can’t risk catching a glimpse of what he has written on her. She knows that as soon as she moves, she will look, and she desperately doesn’t want to know what word or words he chose. So she must keep her back pressed up against the glass.

  It is forty minutes before he comes upstairs again. She knows because she keeps looking at the clock on the bedside table. During these forty minutes, she assures herself, over and over again, that he did not kill or seriously injure her. She is still alive. Definitely. At the moment.

  Also, in the forty minutes, she does other things. She urinates in her underwear. She speculates about what Sol Barber has written above her eyes. She decides that it is the word ‘bitch’. She can cope with that, as he has already said it to her. That is what she will tell herself it is.

  At 2.43pm, he appears in the doorway of her room. He rubs his thumbnail and doesn’t look at her. ‘Well, I’ve done my best,’ he says. ‘You’d have to be really looking, or there’s no way you’d see anything now.’

  She says nothing. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth.

  Finally, he looks up. He meets her staring eyes, then his slide higher and he flinches. It is as if he has forgotten that he wrote whatever he wrote – the word ‘bitch’ – on her forehead, and is unhappy to have to recall the incident. ‘Okay, you can wash it off now,’ he mutters, sounding embarrassed. She wonders if it is obvious that she has wet herself, tries to remember what trousers she is wearing.

  ‘Look...,’ he begins. It sounds as if he might be about to say something conciliatory. She cannot help him. She is mute with shock and fear. In fact, she can’t imagine ever speaking again.

  Sol Barber sighs and, without saying another word, descends the stairs slowly and heavily. A few minutes later she hears the front door close – not quite a slam, but an unequivocal thud. He has gone. She is alone in the house.

  Now she is truly terrified. She could look at the word if she wanted to. She has the rest of her life to deal with, and she can’t; it is too much for her. Even the smallest decision is too much. What did he write? She could find out, by turning round.

  She runs to the bathroom, twists the hot and cold taps and splashes water on her face. She squirts liquid soap into one hand and massages it into her forehead, rubbing and rubbing until her skin hurts. Then more soap and more water. The word, phrase or sentence cannot possibly have survived such a frenzied attack.

  Eventually, feeling as if she might vomit, she stands in front of the bathroom mirror. Relief floods her when she sees that there is no trace of the orange lipstick left on her forehead, only red, chafed skin. Now she will never know, she will remain blissfully ignorant; it is no longer an issue. It was ‘bitch’, anyway, in all probability.

  She stands back from the mirror to see more of herself. Her trousers are black, thick; they reveal nothing. She winces with relief. Shaking convulsively, she returns to her bedroom and winces again when she spots the large, dark, sodden patch on the carpet in front of the mirror. It is the approximate shape of France. He must have noticed.

  Crying, she takes off all her clothes and puts them in a plastic bag. She twists the neck of the bag and ties it in a knot. Then she has a shower, puts on clean clothes and takes the plastic bag downstairs to the outside bin. I have been assaulted, she thinks. She considers reporting Sol Barber to the police, but knows she never will. She is too afraid of what he might do to her. There would have to be a court case. She imagines him smirking in the witness box, telling a room full of strangers that she pissed herself, saying aloud the word that he wrote on her face.

  She spends the rest of the day bawling like a newborn baby, trying to work out if it is feasible for her to avoid Sol Barber for the rest of her life. She knows only one person who knows him: her friend Olga, for whom Sol made and fitted a wardrobe earlier in the year. It was Olga who recommended Sol to her, as a skilled and reliable worker. She must avoid Olga too, in case the subject of Sol comes up.

  She must get on with her life. She hardly knows him. He is only a joiner. A
violent, vindictive joiner. He’s the unfortunate one, not her.

  Two months pass. In flavour and pitch, they have a lot in common with the forty minutes she spent in her bedroom with her back against the mirror, branded with her own lipstick, while Sol Barber was downstairs rubbing at the oil stains on the carpet. She cannot think properly. She barely eats or sleeps. She is afraid all the time. She feels humiliated all the time. She has lost her grip on herself, all her substance. She feels a crippling loneliness, as if she has floated away and noone has cared enough to follow her. Worst of all is her growing suspicion that she deserved what he did to her. She patronised him and, in doing so, invited him to destroy her.

  She spends her days and evening, staring at her computer screen, but she cannot work, cannot concentrate on her own words. She avoids all her friends and relatives apart from Olga. Olga she sees much more often than she normally would, and Olga’s husband Danny. So far the subject of Sol has not come up. She both wants and doesn’t want it to. She would love it if Olga one day told her that Sol had maimed several of the people he’d done work for. Then she could feel lucky. But she would hate it if Olga complimented him, or said how well she got on with him, how mild-mannered and charming he was.

  For two months, nothing is said that is of any interest to her, either positive or negative. Then one day she is at Olga’s house at the same time as Olga’s sister Eve. Eve is leafing through a hard-covered notebook, laughing. Olga and Danny are talking about the company that has been given a government mandate to manufacture the smallpox vaccine; they are debating its competence. Eve interrupts with a question: ‘Who’s Sol Barber?’

  Her heart bucks, like a horse before a wall of flame. ‘Sol?’ she says casually.

  ‘Our joiner,’ says Olga, gesturing around the room. ‘All of ours. Why? Oh!’

  ‘He wasn’t at your wedding, was he?’ says Eve.

  ‘No,’ says Olga. ‘He must have found that once when he was working here, and added his own contribution.’

  Eve frowns. ‘Isn’t that a bit odd?’

  ‘I suppose. Still, he obviously meant well. It’s a nice thing to write.’

  ‘Can I see?’ she asks, extending her hand.

  Eve shrugs and hands her the notebook. She recognises it as the one that was circulated at Olga and Danny’s wedding reception, for well-wishers to write messages in. She remembers that she wrote, ‘It’s a grand life if you don’t weaken’ – one of her grandfather’s favourite mottos. Not very suitable for a wedding, but she isn’t good at gushing exclamations. She told Olga so at the time and Olga said she understood, that it was a good slogan.

  She turns to the last page. Sol has signed and dated his addition. The date is six years after the day of the wedding. Above his spiky signature, he has written,

  Here in the world, anger is never pacified by anger.

  It is pacified by love. This is the eternal truth.

  Happy indeed we live, friendly amid the haters.

  Among men who hate, we dwell free from hate.

  (Dhammapada, ‘The Way of Truth’)

  ‘I call that vandalising our private property,’ says Danny. ‘I wanted to sack him, but...’

  ‘...but we’d have been left with only half a wardrobe.’ Olga laughs. ‘Anyway, I think it’s sweet.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was a Buddhist,’ she says. Her mind struggles with the impossibility of it. Four months before he attacked her, this was what he chose to write. How can the inconsistency not have occurred to him?

  ‘He isn’t, as far as I know,’ says Olga. ‘Maybe he just thought it was a nice idea. Which it is. He’s done pretty well, considering.’

  ‘Considering what?’ she says. This is why she has been skulking at Olga’s house for the past two months, for this moment.

  ‘Well, you know. His background.’

  ‘What about it?’

  Olga’s eyes widen. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Another good reason to sack the bugger, far as I was concerned,’ Danny grumbles.

  ‘His father’s in prison for manslaughter.’

  ‘Really?’ says Eve. She smiles in a detached sort of way.

  ‘Yup. He was a…what do you call it? Bailiff? He frightened money out of people for a living.’

  ‘A debt collector,’ says Eve.

  ‘Beat them up if they couldn’t pay. One of his beatings went a bit too far – the bloke died.’

  ‘That’s one way to avoid paying your debts,’ Danny quips. No one laughs.

  ‘Sol spent most of his childhood in refuges,’ Olga tells Eve. ‘He was in a young offenders’ institute for a while.’

  ‘And this is the guy we gave a key to our house,’ says Danny.

  ‘But that’s my point,’ says Olga. ‘Sol’s not like that. He’s left that world behind. He’s a brilliant craftsman, he’s got a successful business, a happy family. He’s done really well. From what he’s told me, his two brothers seem to be going the same way as his dad, but Sol’s different. Maybe it’s his little... Buddhist words of wisdom that keep him on the straight and narrow.’

  She has heard enough. She makes her excuses and leaves.

  Her father is the director of the British Council office in Venezuela. Her mother was a ballet dancer and now teaches dance. One of her two sisters is a cellist and the other is an editor at Faber and Faber. Her brother is an immunologist. They are a happy family; she has always felt loved and looked after.

  Sol Barber’s father is hired muscle: a debt collector, a killer. And his brothers are ‘going the same way’, whatever that means. She thinks it means that, in all likelihood, Sol is entirely to blame for what he did to her on that day, and she is not at all to blame. One only has to look at the two families, at the respective track records.

  She remembers, often, Sol’s shamefaced expression when he said, ‘Look...’ just before he left her bedroom. Because human beings are basically selfish and self-absorbed, she decides that she can safely assume Sol’s thoughts over the past two months have not centred on her fear and defeat and disgrace, but on his own failure to stick to the resolution he must surely have made a long time ago: to prove, with his every word and deed, that he has escaped his miserable, brutal origins, that he is a more enlightened man than his father.

  Less comforting is the idea that, in the Barber family, all one needs to do in order to be impressive – a high achiever – is not kill somebody. Among her own relatives, not killing anybody is taken for granted; it is not a matter for pride or congratulations. Not so for the Barbers. How much does it matter that Sol once, when provoked, wrote something in lipstick on a woman’s forehead and, all right, got a bit rough with her? He didn’t do her any serious harm, did he? And he could have done, he easily could. He restrained himself. For Sol, given his background, this could constitute a significant accomplishment.

  Either that or he barely remembers the incident. Most of his relatives probably do more damage daily than he did that one time. He might expect her to be over it by now. If he hadn’t mentioned Locke and Rousseau (Marx doesn’t count – everyone’s heard of Marx), maybe she would be. But he did, and so she cannot dismiss him. The wardrobe he made for Olga and Danny is beautiful, a work of art. She has been attacked by a clever and talented man. This is what she cannot bear. This is why she decides to kill his children.

  Because it would be pointless to kill him, wouldn’t it? To murder an enemy is a dimwit’s revenge. If he is dead, he cannot suffer, and if he is not suffering, you’ve failed. Even if you arrange for him to die slowly and painfully, you know (assuming you do not believe in an afterlife) that his agony will end, he will escape into blissful nonexistence.

  She wants Sol Barber to live until he is a hundred and fifty.

  She knows where his children go to school: St Anne’s Primary, on Glasshouse Lane, in a village that she always suspects will disappear as soon as she has driven through it. Agnes is seven. Wilfred is five. She does not know what they look like but she has seen the
ir mother. Twice while Sol was working in her house Tina Barber brought him things: once some sandwiches and once some jump leads, when his van broke down. Tina is a thin, mousy woman with bandy legs, no waist, and a face like a collie dog.

  It is that face that she hunts for in the crowd, sitting in her car on Glasshouse Lane at five past eight in the morning. She has got up especially early to be here on time. Dishevelled mothers, their messy hair stuffed into hoods, haul their offspring around as if they are sacks of soil. Grooves of exhaustion carve the women’s faces into defeated chunks. And these are the lucky ones, she thinks. These are the ones whose children will not be killed. Tina has not arrived yet.

  She contemplates what she intends to do, the effect it will have. Sol’s life will be ruined, which is what she wants, so there is no problem there. But when she thinks about Tina, or the children themselves, she is surprised to find that she feels no anguish, no empathy. Even when she puts the matter to herself in a deliberately emotive way (which she does often, as an experiment), she is unmoved. All she has is a cold sense of necessity. This is what has to happen. She must harm Sol more than he has harmed her. Her heart is a brick; therefore, in order to win, she must turn his into a vast purple lesion, a pulsating carnivorous tumour.

  And she can do it, that’s the beauty of the scheme. She has the ability. Anyone can harm another person, if they don’t care what happens afterwards. She might not be able to fit a kitchen or a carpet, rehang a door or remove an oil stain, but she is confident that she can kill Sol Barber’s children.

  Not today, though. She will not murder Agnes and Wilfred today. She doesn’t even know what they look like, and she hasn’t brought an implement with her. As yet, she has given no thought to the practicalities of ending two lives. All she wants, at this stage, is to see the children’s faces.

  She yelps when she spots Sol walking down the road towards her car. Although there are a few other men in the playground, it didn’t occur to her that Sol might bring his children to school. Agnes and Wilfred are on either side of him, holding his hands. He is talking to them, smiling. She draws her knees up to her chest and buries her face in them. A moment ago she was a woman; now she is a ball of fear, rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat of her car. What if he sees her? Instinctively, she knows that it would be worse than last time.