The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets

by Sophie Hannah

  I am debating how much of my reaction to Ian’s hasty departure to include in the introduction when my boss appears. June is in her late forties. She looks like a donkey. Her teeth are too long and her tights are always laddered.

  ‘What’s that?’ She nods at my notebook.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. I let it drop to the floor and quickly resume my work.

  ‘I think we need to talk, Tamsin. Don’t you?’

  ‘No. About what?’

  ‘About your level of commitment to Hathersage hotels, and to your work here.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was work that requires a level of commitment, is it?’

  June frowns, puzzled. ‘A team is only as strong as its weakest member,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, but my point is that, however weak and uncommitted I am, surely all that matters is that I do the work. And I do. By the end of the day, all the mess that has spilled into this room has been sorted into the appropriate piles and is ready to go. Well, isn’t it?’

  My theory is that June would not be so officious if she worked in a better hotel. Being housekeeping manager at the Hathersage, Loughborough, is hardly the most prestigious position. Rocco Forte needn’t look to his laurels, put it that way. Hathersages are the same all over the country: flowery, three-star, unjustifiably content to serve watered-down soup. All too often their exteriors resemble multi-storey car parks, which doesn’t matter because they cater for people who prize cheapness above all else. I try not to think about the Rembrandt, the literature festival’s favoured hotel, with its beautiful Georgian façade, its sleek, modern décor.

  ‘Well, yes, you do seem to work quickly,’ June concedes. ‘But your attitude isn’t quite what I’d want it to be, Tamsin. And I think we both know that.’

  ‘Sometimes I miss my lunch hour,’ I remind her. I do not add that this is usually when I want to plan or make notes about The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets. Lisa has been in York for two months now, and since Debbie left for Cambridge last week I haven’t seen much point in having lunch in the canteen at work. I can manage without it physically, and I’d rather strive to fulfil my literary ambitions than eat cheesy leeks with Dennis and Jimmy the maintenance men. William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in only eight weeks, while he was working night shifts at a petrol station.

  ‘It’s not good for you to go without lunch,’ says June, with her hands on her hips. ‘You’ll make yourself ill. Everybody needs energy triggers.’

  ‘Do you mean food?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m just saying that we have procedures and guidelines in place, Tamsin. Every team member must have an hour’s break. Why don’t you go now?’

  I glare at her, but do as I’m told. I make sure to take my notebook with me.

  3) My mum and dad turned vegetarian when they were in their fifties, and became really self-righteous about it. It drove me mad. I mean, if they’d never cared about animals before, why now, all of a sudden? The worst thing was that I hate vegetarian food, and I had to eat it, not only when I went to their house but I also had to cook it when they came to mine. In other words, every time we got together to eat, we had to have the food they chose, and never the food I chose. They called it vegetarianism, but I called it selfishness. So, I planned a little revenge. Every time I cooked them a meal, I would sneak some bit of a dead creature into it. I started off small – a pureed prawn in a vegetable chilli, that type of thing. But then a prawn started to seem too insignificant. Gradually, I became more daring. I cooked them a chilli using half beef mince, half Quorn. My moment of glory was when I pureed a whole venison steak (I’d diced it first) and put it in a lentil and pasta bake I made for them. They asked me what the strange flavour was and I said fenugreek! Now I love having them round for dinner, because I always play one of my little tricks and they never suspect.

  PS I don’t know if this counts as a secret or not, because I have told one or two of my friends. Some of them have said what I do is really awful, but I’ve never fully got over the immature teenage urge to rebel against my mum, who was very strict and would never let me out, etc.

  PPS Do I get any royalties if this goes in the book?

  Now we’re talking. I feel like singing and dancing for joy when I read this. In the time it took me to eat my lunch, somebody has dropped this into the box and, in doing so, rejuvenated my ardour for the project. That PS says it all; clearly the sneaking of meat into her parents’ food (the author has to be a woman – such finely tuned passive aggression!) is about far more than a disagreement over animal rights. And that maddening ‘etc’, which makes one wonder what else the strict mother would not allow her to do. I have in my hands a potentially (because it needs a bit of tweaking) heart-breaking tale of parental oppression and daughterly retribution. The aspect of the story that I love most is that the revenge is located inside the parents’ digestive systems. They tried to control her, as a teenager living in their house. She goes one better and tries to control them inside their own bodies, by tricking them into eating food they are violently opposed to. It’s fantastic.

  I am also indebted to my third anonymous contributor for reminding me that I need to grapple with the tricky task of defining what exactly a secret is. Must it be something you have told nobody, or can you have told everyone you know apart from one crucial person? Perhaps this issue could be dealt with in the book’s foreword, if the story of me and Ian Prudhoe is the introduction. I could ask an intellectual to write the foreword. He or she could praise both me and the book before getting down to providing a sound definition of the terminology. I turn to the back page of my notebook and write ‘Alain de Botton? A C Grayling? Tom Paulin?’

  I am in a jolly mood after reading the carnivorous submission, and the prospect of returning to my introduction fills me with gloom. I will tackle it again tomorrow morning. This afternoon, I’ll set myself a task that is lighter, more fun. I will write my acknowledgements. The acknowledgements page is a genre I know well. I always read them, and feel cheated if a book does not contain one. One learns so much about how the author wishes to be seen. The crucial things an acknowledgements page should communicate are: a) that the author is sensitive and warm, and has lots of fulfilling personal relationships, b) that the author is on intimate, private-joke terms with some household names, and c) that the author is modest and fully aware that, without the half-hearted, patronising, Sloaney platitudes of a selection of blonde ex-boarding-school girls in London, she could never hope to be anything more than a dinner lady.

  Buoyed up by the ‘energy triggers’ June forced me to consume, I begin to write:

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my bestest, bestest pals Debbie and Lisa, for believing both in this book and in me right from the start, before anybody else did. Words cannot express my gratitude to my two Ians: Ian Prudhoe, for your inspiration, for being you, and for the wonderful challenge, and of course to Ian ‘let’s-not-mention-the-dressing-room-incident’ McEwan. I’m also hugely grateful to Philip ‘Dwekkie’ Dwek – he knows why.

  Philip Dwek is my landlord. I am not grateful to him for anything, but I have just remembered that an acknowledgements page also needs a pointless mysterious allusion. The aim, undoubtedly, is to make the reader feel isolated and inferior. I know it is immature of me to indulge myself, but for once I am on the inside, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t make the most of it.

  Last but not least, my wonderful agents and publishers

  (I leave a gap here, into which I will later insert the names of some blonde, patronising Sloanes who will ring me up infrequently and who, when they do deign to ring, will say simply ‘Tamsin!’, as if I should know who they are instantly, from their posh voices. A famous author who once came to the festival told me her agent did this and it drove her mad.)

  without whose tireless, dedicated and painstaking work on my behalf, I would still be working in the housekeeping department of a hotel in Loughborough. And thanks to June Skelly, my ex-boss at the
hotel, for advice about team spirit and energy triggers that sustained me while I was working on the book!

  I decide at the last minute to mention June, because a lot of authors, I have noticed, also use an acknowledgements page as an opportunity to demonstrate that they have not been spoiled by success and are still on thanking terms with a few genuine proletarians.

  Just after I have written this line about June, she leans into the room, flashing her donkey teeth. ‘Tamsin, I don’t want to have to tell you again,’ she says. ‘Put that bloomin’ notebook down and get on with your work.’

  I sigh heavily. ‘There was an item on You and Yours about bullying at work the other day,’ I tell her. ‘Do you know what counts as bullying? Constant criticism, undermining an employee’s confidence…’

  ‘I’d like to see you in my office first thing tomorrow morning,’ she says.

  ‘Why not now? It’s because you haven’t yet decided what you want to say to me, isn’t it? You’re trying to make yourself feel important by picking on me.’ But I am talking to June’s back as she marches out of the room. She’s lucky I don’t instantly delete my faked gratitude to her from my acknowledgements page.

  My cheerful mood is ruined, so I decide I might as well turn my attention back to my introduction – the difficult and, at times, agonising story of my relationship with Ian Prudhoe.

  After Ian walked out of Da Tonino’s, leaving me alone with all my unanswered questions, I went home and tried to forget about him, M8, the second cricketer, and the whole nasty business. I found that I couldn’t. Whether he realised it or not, Ian needed my help. Our uncaring society encourages us to feel that we can manage on our own, when the truth is that for most of us this is simply not the case. Ian was embarrassed to fill me in on what had been going on in his life because it is not the done thing to talk about such personal matters with a stranger. I reflected upon the sadness of this social convention, for how can a stranger ever become a friend unless secrets are shared?

  The following evening, I called round at Ian’s house, a small terrace with rotten, splintering window frames. (Ian is refreshingly unmaterialistic.) I also noticed what could only be slug trails in the hall, behind him. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ he said when he saw me. I suspect that, like many men, he is afraid of intimacy.

  ‘Come for a drink with me. Please,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something really important to tell you.’

  ‘Another letter?’ he growled.

  I didn’t contradict him, and eventually we went to Mad Ma Jones, the pub at the bottom of Harrow Square, where he lives. I’d never been inside it before and hoped not to have to again. It’s the sort of pub inside which life seems thinner, quieter, darker than it does outside. Even the pool table wasn’t a properly vibrant shade of green. I bought a glass of dry white wine for myself and a pint of bitter and a whisky for Ian – he asked for both.

  ‘Well? Has she sent another letter?’ he demanded, as we stood at the sopping wet bar.

  She. So M8 was a woman. ‘Who is she?’ I asked.

  ‘Mind your own fucking business! Just tell me: is there another letter?’

  ‘Ian, let me tell you something about me, something I haven’t told anyone before,’ I said. I realised that my mistake up to this point had been to expect Ian to confide in me without indicating that I was willing to give anything in return. ‘I used to be the assistant director of a famous literature festival,’ I told him. ‘I lost my job, in extremely humiliating circumstances, and I now work in the housekeeping department of the Hathersage Hotel.’

  ‘That’s got a twenty-five-metre pool, hasn’t it?’ Ian asked.

  ‘Yes. It’s a bit grubby around the edges, though. It’s only a three-star hotel.’

  ‘Do you get to swim in it for free?’

  ‘I could if I wanted to, but I can’t swim.’

  ‘Still. That’s pretty good.’

  I was stunned. Ian was impressed by the job that had always been a source of shame to me. It still was, but I felt slightly happier about it after he said that, because I realised that, however awful it was, it did at least have a perk. I was allowed to use the grimy pool. My inability to swim was neither here nor there; the only salient point was that the perk existed. ‘I work in laundry, specifically,’ I told Ian. I was narrowing it down, zooming in, getting perilously close to telling him what I did.

  He looked interested. ‘What do you mean, “specifically”?’ he said. Looking back, I suspect he didn’t understand what the word ‘specifically’ meant, but given my own embarrassment about my job, I interpreted it as an enquiry about the exact nature of my work. I decided to trust him and hope that fate would reward me by making him trust me. ‘I work in the towel room, in the basement,’ I told him. ‘All the used towels from the hotel and the health club get brought to me, and I have to…sort them out.’

  Ian shrugged and sniffed. I had been evasive, half hoping I would get away with it, half wanting him to force the whole truth out of me. ‘I’d better go,’ he said again. He had dealt swiftly with his two drinks; each one disappeared in a gulp. ‘Have you got another letter for me or what? If not, I’m going.’

  I blurted out the truth then, desperate to maintain the tenuous closeness between Ian and myself. ‘I have to sort them all into two piles,’ I shouted at him. ‘Those that can go straight into the wash, and those that need to be treated for stains. And the ones that need treating, I have to treat. That’s my job. I used to virtually run a world-renowned literature festival and now I’m director of the blood- and shit-stained towels department of the Hathersage Hotel! So…’ I shrugged at him.

  I don’t know quite what I was hoping he’d say. Whatever it was, he didn’t say it. All he said was, ‘Right, then. I’m off.’

  ‘Wait!’ I begged him. ‘Who’s M8? You have to tell me!’

  He sneered. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘But you do know who it is?’

  ‘I reckon so, yeah.’

  ‘What, you mean there’s more than one candidate?’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘More than one person it could be.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But surely for the line about cricketers to make sense, you must know who wrote it.’

  ‘I don’t know what that cricketers shit’s about.’ He scratched his ear with his index finger, which he then put in his mouth. He seemed to be telling the truth. After all, he could easily have admitted that he knew and still refused to tell me.

  ‘What? What do you mean, you don’t know? “All good criketers cum over each other” – come on, it’s pretty specific. It must mean something to you.’

  He shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said.

  ‘But…well, surely you should contact whoever you think wrote the letter and ask them what they meant.’

  ‘Nah, I’ll probably just leave it,’ said Ian. ‘Get the fuck off my case, will you?’

  ‘Wait, come back!’ I yelled after him. ‘I have to tell you why I got fired!’

  ‘Fuck off!’

  I am crying again as I remember all this. I wipe my eyes and am startled to realise that I somehow imagined I was still writing when in fact I have stopped. How much of what I have just recounted in my head should I put in the introduction?, I wonder. I definitely don’t want readers to know what I do for a living. I know Faulkner worked nights in a petrol station, but hunting for patches of blood and shit in a pile of white towels and then scrubbing at the stains, day in, day out, is, let’s face it, a bit worse.

  To cheer myself up, I decide to leap ahead and start writing the part of the introduction where I describe how I came to have the idea for The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets. I can always fill in later the many failed attempts I made to persuade Ian to talk and listen to me.

  After a lot of soul-searching, I had to stop and ask myself why Ian was so determined to resist my help and friendship, why he often appeared almost repelled by me. Eventually I worked it out. My attempts to tell him my secret al
armed him. Not many people are as brave as I am about confronting and sharing the aspects of my life that show me in a less-than-favourable light. I am a sufficiently evolved creature to know that secrecy, in the end, equals loneliness, and my efforts to reach out to Ian were a very positive step for me. I wanted the same positive development for Ian, but I could see that that would never happen, because he was utterly unwilling to take me into his confidence. His reluctance to ‘own’ , to own up to, certain facts of his life, was preventing him from expressing himself, and therefore impeding his recovery. And then I had a brilliant, compelling idea. What if there were to be a book of secrets, I thought. What if I were to edit such a book, and ask for anonymous submissions. That would enable people to unburden themselves entirely, to burst a hole in the dam built from years of restraint and repression, without having to put their names to what they had written and risk unwelcome consequences. If I were to edit a book like that, I realised, Ian and I could both purge ourselves of all the things we had bottled up for too long. And so could hundreds of other people, perhaps thousands. And so, without further ado…

  How does one end an introduction: without further ado, here’s the book? No, that sounds absurd. I read mainly novels for pleasure, and most don’t have introductions. Never mind. Perhaps I’ll wait until I have a contract before I worry about the more difficult details. Maybe for the time being I’ll just copy-edit the carnivore’s confession, secret number three.

  What June doesn’t realise, what the festival board, the sponsors and Ian McEwan never realised, is that I am a pretty shrewd character. I have my setbacks like everybody else, but I always bounce back. You see, I knew (the knowledge was hard to avoid after Ian Prudhoe had told me to fuck off for the tenth time) that I had made a bit of a fool of myself by pursuing him so fervently. I needed to save face, and to make him see that I was not someone to be dismissed lightly. The one time he had looked at me with something akin to respect had been when I told him I was allowed to use the hotel’s pool without paying. Surely, I reasoned, editing a prestigious book is even more impressive than free use of a malodorous leisure facility.