The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets

by Sophie Hannah

  My brain was reeling from her outburst. Should I rip out her entire belief structure at the roots, I wondered, or content myself with trying to trim around the edges of her insanity? I couldn’t decide, so settled on a mixture of the two approaches. ‘There are no onuses between us, Maria. I barely know you. I’m not going to bicker about the minute detail of something that happened a year ago. I don’t remember any of it. Perhaps the other call was urgent.’

  ‘You barely know me? You knew me pretty well at the Marriott County Hall. And then you lost interest in me immediately afterwards. I know why. You and George and James! You’re mentally straight, but physically gay. You’re so enamoured with the idea of yourself as heterosexual, and it’s enough to get you through the odd encounter with a woman, but you can’t sustain it. The people you want to see again and again are your male friends.’

  I was stunned. I began to have a sense of how much time Maria had devoted, since we’d last met, to formulating theories about my character. She was quite wrong. If I find men, on the whole, more appealing than women, it’s because they talk about interesting things; women talk mainly about themselves. I had lost interest in Maria immediately after the night we spent together for two reasons: first, the chase was over, and second, she had flat nipples. I prefer nipples which jut out even when their owner is not aroused.

  I considered telling Maria this in the hope that it might clear things up once and for all. In the face of the stark truth, surely she would have to submit, abandon her far-fetched hypotheses. I opened my mouth, but she interrupted my first inhalation. ‘You never really wanted to have sex with me, did you? You wanted to invite James and George that night! You didn’t want us to be alone. You didn’t have any condoms! You must have hoped I’d refuse to have unprotected sex.’

  ‘Maria, we’re in the middle of the street.’

  ‘I bet you never make the first move, do you? You’re attractive, so women chase you. Like I did, idiot that I am! Why did you never ring me back?’

  ‘You could have rung me. How was I to know you’d gone off in high dudgeon?’

  Maria screwed up her face. ‘High dudgeon?’ she repeated scornfully. ‘Is that another of your infantile code words?’

  ‘I didn’t invent the term “high dudgeon”, Maria. Ask any educated person.’ She had no business working for a publisher; she didn’t even know the rudiments of the English language.

  ‘Those made-up words were all about me, weren’t they? Insults that you could say in front of me so I wouldn’t know what they meant.’

  I laughed. ‘Nothing I have ever said or done has been about you, Maria.’ My bike wobbled beneath my hand, as if boredom and hopelessness had weakened its vehicular spirit. Enough was enough. I leaped into the saddle and pedalled away with the urgency of a getaway car driver.

  ‘I’ll get you back!’ Maria yelled after me. It was unclear whether she was talking about revenge or retrieval. I didn’t care. I turned the corner of my cul-de-sac and the notion of her began to disperse. She was rather like a cloud of midges: irritating, but easily left behind.

  I returned from my bike ride two hours later. The road outside my house was empty. I closed the front door, savouring the knowledge that Maria Devittoris was on the other side of it, and that was the last thought I had about her until, five months later, my editor at Collegiate sent me an advance copy of the Dictionary of Rhymes, the new edition, with my introduction.

  I turned immediately to the contents page and was proud to find the words I knew I would see: ‘Introduction by William Handysides’. I cannot deny that I love – loved, rather, before Maria ruined everything for me – to see my own words, my name, in print. I don’t see anything wrong with taking pride in one’s achievements. I sat down and re-read my introduction. I was biased, of course, but leaving that aside, I could see that, objectively, my essay was incredibly impressive. I remembered Maria’s sarcastic comment about this piece of work propelling me to stardom. How ironic it would be, I thought, if that were to happen. Maria’s limited imagination would never have been able to conceive of such a thing. It occurred to me that I did not at all like the idea that Maria worked for my publishers. I wondered how successful the Dictionary of Rhymes would need to be in order for me to be able to demand that they get rid of her.

  After I’d spent a couple of hours admiring my introduction, I leafed randomly through the pages, savouring the feel of them. Collegiate use good-quality paper, which is something most publishers don’t seem to bother with any more. Idly, I began to read lists of rhymes, lulling myself almost into a trance. ‘Bill, dill, drill, fill, gill, hill. Fetch, gretch, sketch, wretch.’ Something bristled at the back of my mind. ‘Fetch, gretch…’ I gasped. My brain juddered back into focus. ‘Gretch’ was one of my creations. To gretch: to whine or complain loudly in an attention-seeking, self-indulgent and unwarranted manner. I swallowed a mouthful of bile. How could this be happening? It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. Nobody knew that word apart from James, George and me.

  I think I might have blacked out for a while, but if I did I came to almost immediately. I pushed the pages frantically, not caring if I creased them. I searched for the word ‘merlonce’. There it was, alongside ‘ponce’, ‘bonce’ and ‘ensconce’. With panic simmering inside me, I looked for and found all my own words: ‘mawmby’, ‘stidge’, ‘grolph’, ‘nooberly’, ‘swoggle’, ‘ponk’. What sick joke was this?

  After a few seconds, panic gave way to rational thought. My stomach churned and my gullet quivered. I could hear my digestive juices squelching inside me. One other person knew all those words, aside from me and my friends: Maria. She’d heard them all, every single one. James, George and I had made a point of including them in every conversation after Maria had blubbed that it made her feel left out.

  I marched round my study in small circles, muttering, clenching my fists and threatening inanimate objects with all manner of violence. Working was out of the question, as were cycling, sitting down, eating and sleeping. I paced the floor for most of that night, and by the time morning came I was a red-eyed desperado.

  Maria had done this. Commas and semicolons hadn’t been enough for her this time. She’d sabotaged the dictionary; it was her pathetic, cowardly revenge, and for what? I owed her nothing. We’d had sex once. End of story. At five in the morning, I crawled round the house on my hands and knees, hunting in old notebooks and diaries for Maria’s number. I thought I would never need or want it again, so I had not taken care of it. I yelped with savage satisfaction when I found it scribbled on the back of an old Collegiate Press catalogue. The handwriting was Maria’s. I made a mental note to burn the catalogue later, as soon as I’d dialled that repugnant number for the last time.

  Maria answered after only three rings. Despite the hour, she did not sound as if I had woken her up. ‘Maria!’ I breathed into the receiver. ‘It’s William. You’re going to fucking regret this!’

  ‘I thought you hated split infinitives,’ she said merrily.

  ‘As soon as I tell my editor, you’ll be looking for a new job.’

  ‘Rachel? Tell her what, precisely?’

  ‘That you fucking went and put all the words I invented into the dictionary.’

  ‘What words?’

  I fell silent. I couldn’t list them; it would have been too humiliating.

  ‘William, what have you done?’ Maria’s voice was slow and emphatic as she feigned shock. ‘You haven’t…you haven’t gone and put your silly made-up code words in the new dictionary, have you? Oh, my God. Rachel’ll go mad when she finds out. You’ll be lucky if she publishes you again after this. William, how could you be so immature?’

  ‘But…’ I bent my body into painful shapes, tangling the telephone wire in a mess of limbs. She was right. How could I say anything to Rachel? How could I prove that Maria had done it, not me? They were my words. I’d invented them. Maria could prove it; she could tell Rachel to ask James and George. I pictured myself explaining to Rac
hel how this act of vandalism had come about. I didn’t think I could bear to tell her such a ridiculous tale, even if there were a chance she might believe me. It was so undignified, so unprofessional. I would have to direct her attention towards the relevant words. No, it was unthinkable.

  ‘You and your public school pranks,’ said Maria fondly. ‘Don’t worry, William. I won’t breathe a word!’

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you, you fat nonentity!’

  There was a silence, after which she said nasally, ‘I don’t know why you’re so angry, anyway. I thought you loved to see your own words in print. And these ones are yours in every sense. You should be delighted. Immortality, William, remember?’ There was a loud click. She had slammed down the phone.

  I stood in the middle of my living room, arms by my sides, feeling as if I were about to choke or suffocate. What ought I to do now? I forced myself to walk towards the dictionary, but couldn’t even contemplate opening it. If I’d been able to bring myself to touch it, I would have taken it outside and put it in the dustbin. Instead, I closed my study door, trapping the dictionary inside. That door has remained closed ever since.

  I limped through to my lounge. There were books there too, books which were not the Collegiate Dictionary of Rhymes and which had not been vandalised by Maria, but my fingers scrunched into a tight ball every time I tried to open one. Over a period of weeks, I tried every day, with a range of volumes – novels, atlases, recipe books – but it was no use. Every time I even thought about lifting a cover or turning a page, my mind zoomed back to that awful moment when I had first seen the word ‘gretch’ in the dictionary and my brain had been crushed by an avalanche of fast-falling horror.

  I was, it seemed, allergic to books, the thing I had always loved most in the world. I became somewhat of a hermit, and for months I did little but lie in bed and drink bottles of absinthe, which I ordered on the internet (I used the local library’s computer; I would have done without rather than venture into my study). Pretty soon my income dried up, and I had no choice but to plunder my trust fund.

  I was forced to avoid James and George, since the prospect of confiding in them was abhorrent to me. Maria had been a joke to us, insofar as she was anything at all; I couldn’t bear to confess to them that I had been felled by a joke. I refused to be thought of as the man whose made-up childhood words found their way into an important book he was working on, via his deranged ex-lover. Also, I began to suspect that my book phobia was too extreme a reaction to what Maria had done, and was filled with an even greater dread than my dread of books when I considered what this might indicate about my mental health. Surely a sane, well-adjusted man would have shrugged it off, perhaps even laughed about it in time. I became convinced that I was some kind of pathetic wimp, which drove me to hide myself from the outside world even more comprehensively.

  A few weeks after the day of the dictionary’s arrival and my abusive phone call to Maria, I received a postcard from her. I was going through a particularly bad patch, spending whole days and nights lying on the floor sobbing and chewing my hands, when it arrived. It said, ‘Moofmips are red, nooglips are blue, you are a gongedip, and I grax you.’ I read it once, then tore it up immediately, but it was too late: I knew the words by heart. Her aim was clear: to make me feel left out in the way she had, because I didn’t understand the stupid words she’d made up. No doubt she wanted me to wonder what they meant, but I wasn’t going to fall for that trick. It was obvious to me that they meant nothing whatsoever. They were pure gibberish. Maria wasn’t interested in inventing new words; all she cared about was upsetting me. And her words sounded so stupid: what on earth could a ‘moofmip’ be? Anyway, I absolutely refused to speculate. There was no such thing as a ‘gongedip’, not in the world and not even in Maria’s mind.

  I am slightly better now, though it has taken nearly a year. I go out occasionally. James and George have been very understanding; they took me at my word when I told them that it was stomach problems that had laid me low. I still get palpitations when I think about opening a book, although I am now – finally, thank God – able to open newspapers, journals and magazines without suffering any adverse effects. And I will never give up on books; I am absolutely determined to beat whatever psychological syndrome I have acquired. Last night, for example, I was able to sit for two hours with Halldor Laxness’s Independent People on my knee. Closed, of course.

  If only the dreams would leave me alone, I think I would recover more speedily. After many months of sleeping for about eighteen hours a day, I now hardly sleep at all. Oddly, it is not the corrupted dictionary that haunts me in the night; it is Maria’s postcard. My recurring nightmare is that I receive another card from her, exactly the same as the last one: ‘Moofmips are red, nooglips are blue, you are a gondedip, and I grax you’. I see myself reading the card, hear the words inside my head, just as if the scene were real. I jolt awake, soaked in sweat. I don’t know why I am so afraid of it happening, since it has already happened.

  The Most Enlightened Person I’ve Ever Met

  I AM NOT AN ENLIGHTENED PERSON. I DON’T ENTIRELY understand what it means to be enlightened, but I understand enough to know that I’m not. Even my psychotherapist, who is more enlightened than I am, does not regard herself as fully enlightened. She once described someone she met on a spiritual retreat as ‘the most enlightened person I’ve ever met’, and said that, compared to him, she still had a long way to go.

  I have even further to go, though I have made progress since last year. And although enlightenment is not the same as knowledge, I am also more knowledgeable than I was. I now know that there are six Betty’s Tearooms: one in Ilkley, two in York, one in Northallerton, one in Harrogate and one just outside Harrogate, at Harlow Carr. When I phoned Nathan to confirm today’s meeting, I made a point of saying ‘Don’t forget, it’s the Betty’s at Harlow Carr, not the one in Harrogate.’

  He said, ‘I haven’t forgotten. Was that a dig?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I just want to make sure we’ll both be in the same place: Betty’s at RHS Harlow Carr.’ I didn’t know before I discovered Harlow Carr that RHS stands for Royal Horticultural Society.

  It is likely that many people are aware of these facts that I’m boasting about having in my possession – I am not the only one. However, I like to think that I know them in a more fundamental way. The knowing of them is at the core of my being, because of the injuries I sustained in the process of acquiring the knowledge. Let’s just say they’ve been burned into me.

  I have been to all six Betty’s Tearooms, several times each in the past year. It helps to be thorough. I have had a process to complete, and each stage is crucial. Today should be the last. Perhaps it’s fate that the Betty’s at Harlow Carr is my favourite. It’s a lovely shape, spacious, and there are beautiful views from all the windows. After I gave up my job – after it gave me up, rather – I started to come here every day: a long walk round the gardens in the morning, then a Betty’s Yorkshire rarebit for lunch, with a dollop of apple chutney and a dollop of tomato chutney on the side.

  I am early for my meeting with Nathan. I sit by the window, as I have promised Greg I will. Five minutes before Nathan is due to arrive, I see Greg outside, near the trees. He is wearing his green overalls and gives me a thumbs-up. He is smoking a cigarette, holding it backwards, inside his palm, so that it’s not obvious. If his boss caught him, he would lose his job.

  Greg is one of nineteen full-time gardeners at Harlow Carr. I first met him when I started to come every day. He wants us to live together, but I’ve told him I can’t think about that until my business with Nathan is concluded. I think he understands.

  When Nathan arrives, he doesn’t look older, fatter, sicker or in any way worse than he did last year. Because I am not enlightened, I resent this so deeply that my head starts to ache. Still, at least I know how I ought to feel, so I suppose that’s progress. I ought to realise that even if Nathan is well and happy, that doesn’t detract
from my own wellbeing. It isn’t as if miseries and deteriorations heaped upon him would make my good luck stocks rocket sky-high, as if he and I are on some kind of fortune see-saw.

  I talk over his ‘hello’. I can’t help it. ‘Look around you,’ I say. ‘Do you see the shops of Harrogate? No. Do you see the famous Victorian Turkish Baths? No.’

  ‘What?’ He looks baffled.

  ‘Harlow Carr might have Harrogate in its address, but any sensible person would agree that we’re outside Harrogate, not in it. Ask the waitress what she thinks, when she comes to take our order.’

  He groans. ‘Not this rigmarole again. Is this why you wanted to meet?’

  ‘No. I wanted to get it out of the way, that’s all.’

  ‘It is out of the way,’ he snaps. ‘It’s a year out of the bloody way, a year past its sell-by date!’

  Greg is waiting outside for me to give him the signal. When I touch the bottom of my ear, he starts to move. ‘Someone’s got something to tell you,’ I say to Nathan.

  ‘What?’ His face wrinkles in bewilderment. ‘Who?’

  ‘He’s called Greg Massarano.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘A gardener. He works here.’

  ‘And this affects me how?’

  ‘Wait and see,’ I say. He might have said ‘us’: ‘And this affects us how?’ He never wanted there to be an ‘us’.

  Greg arrives at our table. ‘Go on,’ I say.

  He clears his throat. ‘On the twenty-fifth of August last year, Lindsay was sat at that table there from about three until closing.’ He points. ‘She was crying. I saw her, watched her the whole time.’ Word-perfect. I nod at Greg, smile. He makes himself scarce.

  ‘You see?’ I say to Nathan. ‘I wasn’t lying. I wouldn’t lie about something so important.’