The Secrets We Keep

by Jonathan Harvey

  It just feels so weird. The main thing I’ve been trying to protect my mum from all these years, she now has an inkling of.

  ‘D’you wanna meet for a coffee?’ I suggest.

  ‘I’m meant to be seeing Lucy. Why don’t you join us?’

  Because I’ve been knocking off her husband.

  ‘Er, no. I best get on with my work anyway, really.’

  ‘How’s Matty today? Sorry, I should’ve . . .’

  ‘He’s getting there.’

  I hear the post arriving. I head out to the hall. Pick it up.

  ‘Oh well, give him my love. Have you heard from Cally?’

  The top envelope makes my blood freeze. Nan’s handwriting.

  ‘Mum, I’ve had a card from Nan.’

  ‘Chuck it in the bin. Don’t read it. She sent me one the other day.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

  But I don’t.

  ‘Mum, I better go. Give my love to Lucy.’

  You hypocrite, Owen.

  We say goodbye. I head to the kitchen and top up my coffee from the cafetière.

  The card, when I read it, is straight to the point. And although she doesn’t sign it, I know it’s from her.

  I know you killed my Danny. Oh yes. Mickey Joe Hart says you had a gun in your house. We all knew you had a motive. And if your mum can’t see that she is one stupid bitch. He was the brightest light in my world and you have snuffed him out. Is it any wonder I drink? The shame. Oh yes. Your father never liked you never took to you and I’m the same. Maybe its because he realized you were MURDERING BASTARD SCUM. Oh yes. I hope no one kills you one dark night when your out getting fucked in the arse. DIE. SOON.

  My hand’s shaking.

  Mickey Joe Hart. No idea who that is.

  ‘Anything interesting in the post?’ goes Matty as he comes through eating Coco Pops from a bowl. I slide Nan’s card between a pizza delivery card and a locksmith’s flyer. I didn’t even hear him coming down the stairs.

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just freebie crap. I’m tempted to get one of those signs. No junk mail, or whatever they say. Those poor rainforests.’

  And I take the mail to the bin in the kitchen and get rid of the flyers. And fold the card and slip it into my back pocket. I can’t risk Matty finding it. Even though it’s highly unlikely he might upend the bin and go through its contents today, I still can’t take that chance.

  ‘Who were you on the phone to?’ Matty follows me into the kitchen.

  ‘Mum. You?’

  ‘Jen. She’s pregnant.’

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful. Mother Hen really will be a mother finally.’

  Matty beams. ‘She’s already said she wants me to be godfather.’

  ‘Well, she’s got great taste.’

  ‘And she’s not even religious.’

  ‘I know. Fancy.’

  I head back to the lounge. I don’t want him looking at me. I feel I’m shaking so much I must look epileptic.

  ‘Are you OK, bubs? You look really pale,’ he says, following me again.

  ‘Yeah, I just . . . didn’t sleep very well.’

  Plus this card is burning a hole in my back pocket.

  ‘Aww, was I snoring?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  I check in the mirror above the fireplace. And he’s right. I really do look like I’ve seen a ghost.

  Or maybe I’ve been picturing one.

  ‘What you doing today? Oh, you’re working from home, aren’t you?’

  ‘Actually . . . I need to nip out for a bit. Just a few things I’ve got to check with Minty.’

  ‘Why don’t you just call her?’

  ‘I need to give her some books back she lent me. Drive’ll do me good, got a few articles I need to think about.’

  ‘Bubs?’

  ‘Aha?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking. My arm’s a lot better now. And I’m feeling so useless round here.’

  ‘Aha?’

  If he’s going to suggest going back to work he’s got another thing coming. There’s no way Jen will let him serve the paying public with a swollen lip and a black eye.

  ‘I think I might put some of this stuff in the loft.’

  I freeze.

  ‘Owen. I don’t know why you’re scared of going in lofts. And I know you won’t seek help about it. But I’m not scared. And I’m sick of all this shit lying around everywhere . . .’

  ‘I keep it tidy!’

  ‘In piles . . . and if I can just put a lot of it up in the loft. Well. Think of how much more space we’ll have.’

  ‘Not that much more.’

  ‘I’m bored, Owen.’

  ‘Then read a fucking book!’

  ‘It’s not normal, Owen!’

  ‘Oh, do what you fucking like!’

  I storm out. I slam the door. I rush down the path and practically hurl myself into my car. I know better than to drive when I’m so angry. And I know better than to shout at Matty when he’s not in the wrong. I am.

  It’s just. When I think of the loft. I think of that loft. And what was up there. And what I had to bury. I feel the familiar sensations of a panic attack. Heat rising through me like a geyser. Sweaty palms, shortness of breath. I want to get out of the car and run.

  I ran that night. I ran in the pouring rain. I ran so fast I skidded, my trainers unable to grip on the paving stones. That was the first time I had a panic attack.

  When I found what I found, I panicked. And ran. I ran all the way to where they were building the Oaktree Estate, scaled a perimeter fence, and went in.

  I start the car up. I head for the Oaktree. The place where my mum now lives. How weird is that? The place of my worst nightmares. Now the respectable housing estate.

  But back then. What was it? A shallow grave?

  We call it the estate; the residents like to call it a gated community. When I watch Question Time they always talk of the country’s housing crisis. Sometimes it feels like the only place built in the last ten years was Oaktree. And it shows. It still looks shiny as a new pin, like it’s had a fresh fall of rain, but the dry ground betrays this illusion. I drive around the edges of the estate, trying to work out where I was that night. I stop where I think it was. It’s the entrance to a street, not unlike my mum’s. But really it could be anywhere in this maze of branch-like roads and houses. I sit in the car and stare.

  A knock at the window. I jump out of my skin.

  I half expect it to be a ghost.

  WELCOME BACK, OWEN!

  But instead I see a bespectacled woman smiling down on me.

  I wind the window down. The woman speaks.

  ‘Owen? I’m a friend of your mother’s. Betty Caligary. We met briefly at that dreadful housewarming. What are you doing round these parts?’

  Do people use that phrase? Round these parts? Really?

  She clearly sees me hesitate. ‘Are you lost? Do you want your mum?’

  What am I, nine?

  ‘No, I . . . was just finishing off a phone call. Pulled over.’

  ‘Oh. Modern technology.’ I see her eyes dart about the car, looking for the non-existent phone. I left in such a rush, I didn’t pick it up.

  Suddenly her nosiness angers me.

  ‘Are you the psychic one, Betty?’

  ‘Aye. I have been known to . . . have the gift. When Margaret Frayn’s pussy went missing, let’s just say. I was very hands-on in getting her back. She spoke to me.’

  ‘The cat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Cats can’t speak, Betty.’

  ‘They can send messages. All animals can. And she showed me a mural of the Manchester tram system. There’s only one person round here with that on their splashbacks.’

  ‘You’re talking bollocks, Betty.’

  ‘I took them straight to Enid Duncan’s. She was away for the fortnight. Silly woman had gone and left her cat flap switched to ‘in only’. Poor pussy was trapped inside.’

  �
�Listen to me, Betty, and listen good.’

  Oh dear, I was starting to sound like I was in West Side Story.

  ‘My dad is not lying on some beach in the heat, and you know it. Stop filling me mam’s head with shite. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  I don’t answer. I switch the ignition on, zap the window up and pull off. I don’t even look to see her face. Charlatans, liars, fraudsters – the world is full of them, and they circle like flies round dung when someone goes missing.

  I know what I have to do. I know the way to go. I drive away from the estate, straight to my nan’s house. The street’s full. The problem with these tiny little terraced cottages is that people now have cars, big cars, and you only have to put three Land Rovers on her street and the place is packed. I zoom round to a parallel street and park up there. My back wheel’s on a double yellow, but as my anger hasn’t abated, I don’t particularly care.

  I lift my arse off the seat and slip the card out of my back pocket. I unfold it and read it again.

  This time it doesn’t make me angry. It makes me scared. What if she goes round saying this to people? Telling them I had a gun in my house. Any fool can see these are the ramblings of a madwoman when they’re written down like this, but a word in the wrong ear . . . maybe she’ll be taken seriously. And aren’t grandmothers supposed to know their grandkids inside out? Love them? Always see the good in them?

  I’ve never told Mum the truth about what happened when Dad went missing. What I did. What I hid. But maybe I should tell Nan to keep her mouth shut. If she was pissed when she wrote this bile, maybe she’ll be hung over today. Maybe she’ll listen.

  I get out of the car and walk round. As I approach her cottage the sun is high in the sky and dazzling all the windows. But I hear the telly is on. She always has it so loud. So she must be in. I decide the friendliest approach is best, as if nothing is wrong.

  I lean in to the window, cupping my hand above my eyes, readying to tap on the glass and call, ‘Only me!’

  But I don’t tap.

  I freeze.

  I don’t see Nan sat on the settee watching daytime telly.

  I see a man.

  He looks a bit different. The years haven’t been kind to him. His hair’s all long and straggly like never before. He doesn’t see me. I stare. It’s definitely him.

  It’s my dad.

  PART TWO

  Danny, 2014

  I need to explain, to myself more than anyone else, why I did what I did. I might go off at tangents sometimes but that’s the way my mind works. I’ve never been good at writing stuff down so I’ve always kept stuff in my head all these years, a jumble of information. But the problem is, as you get older, the more and more stuff you wanna keep in there. And there’s just not the room. So where does it all go?

  My life feels like a mass of memories. Some brief and fleeting. Others lingering longer. They’re all bubbling around. Some crystal-clear. Others tired and jaded, coz I don’t remember so good, or I’ve remembered them too much and worn them out.

  But they’re there, somewhere.

  And if I can string these memories together I might get a sense of why I did these mad things. Coz sometimes I get so wrapped up in the here and now that I can’t remember why I had to make the change.

  And it was a pretty big fucking change all right.

  And why I’m about to make the even bigger change. The final change.

  Danny: The Eighties

  Class

  I was born and bred in St Helens, it’s an industrial town in the North West, keep up. Equidistant between Liverpool and Manchester, it’s like their bastard child. And the accent, a mish-mash of the two, is hardly poetry in motion so, you know, forgive me and all that.

  Manchester people are all right about folk from St Helens. But Scousers, folk from Liverpool, they call us ‘woolly backs’. I’ve no idea why this is; someone at school said it was coz in the olden days everyone in St Helens wore sheepskin coats and they saw us all as sheepshaggers, but I don’t know.

  What I do know is the Scousers had a song about us (to the tune of ‘Tavern in the Town’. I thank you):

  There’s a woolly over there, over there

  Baggy kecks and feathered hair, feathered hair

  With a three-star jumper halfway up his back

  There’s a woolly over there. Woolly back.

  The biggest employer when I was growing up was the local double glazing factory, St Helens Glass. Whenever the advert came on the radio or the telly we would stop whatever we were doing and join in with the jingle.

  ‘St Helens Glass . . . BOOM BOOM . . . has the class!’

  The BOOM BOOM bits were like big bass drum beats, and I used to whack whatever was nearest in time with them. We liked that song. We liked that glass. It was the reason there was food on the table.

  Sometimes my dad would do a stupid voice and sing it posh, so it went ‘St Helens Glarse . . . BOOM BOOM . . . has the clarse!’ and then he’d add out the corner of his mouth, just for my benefit, ‘Stick it up yer arse.’ Which could reduce me to hysterics. It’s the one of the few times I remember him having a sense of humour, actually.

  But that makes it sound like we were an all-singing, all-dancing happy-go-lucky family that smiled a lot and had a soundtrack to our lives.

  We weren’t.

  We lived in a tiny two-up, two-down terraced house on a street called Perseverance Street. Me, my mum, my dad, and my gerbil called Pig.

  I did think I was very clever and very funny to call my gerbil Pig.

  My dad was from Italian stock but had a Birmingham accent you could break your teeth on. If that sounds contradictory, don’t worry, he was a stereotypical bloke in other ways. Friday night was boozer night. And whether Mammy liked it or not, and of course she didn’t, he’d come home after and knock ten bells out of her.

  Ah, the stereotypical working class of yesteryear. Don’t you just love ’em?

  He must’ve loved her at some point, the Brummie bastard, but evidence was pretty thin on the ground by the time I was out of Pampers. She’d come over from Ireland when she was seventeen and met him in a bar, and they were married within the month.

  ‘Worst mistake of my life,’ she’d always say.

  ‘You wanna try looking at it from where I’m standing,’ he’d always snap back, like it was banter, but the menace was constantly there.

  Although her name was Barbara and I called her Mum, he always referred to her as ‘Mammy’, as though because she was Irish that’s what she should be called. Again, there was an element of threat in his use of the name, like it was ironic, like he didn’t think much of her as a mother. Maybe she wasn’t brilliant. She was useless round the house, the place was a shithole, and her idea of cooking was sticking a tin of soup in the oven and switching on. But looking back it’s coz she was Mogadonned up to the eyeballs, probably as a result of having to live with him. She could spend countless hours staring at the wallpaper or looking out the window, her eyes glassy, like there were tears there but they were frozen and couldn’t come. She’d had a job at the glass factory before I was born, but she’d given it up when she found out she was pregnant with twins. My twin brother died when we were born. And I just knew that my dad thought the one that went to heaven would have been a better son than I was making out to be.

  He rarely called me by my name either. I was always ‘the lad’. ‘The lad’s a Mammy’s boy,’ he’d always say, even though I wasn’t. It’s just I preferred her company to his. There wasn’t much competition. I knew where I stood with her; he was more unpredictable, and even though he’d never hit me, you never knew when that sort of stuff might start. So best to avoid in the first place.

  Oh yeah, there was my method in my madness back then, all right. Or so I thought.

  Some of the kids at school called me Bio. Or Eye-Tie (that was my nickname, short for Italian). But most of them called me ‘the nip’. On account of the fact that with my
jet-black hair I also had eyes that they reckoned made me look Japanese or Chinese or something.

  Here he comes, the nip.

  Hey. Nippy. Fuck off.

  Or they’d slant their eyes with their hands and go, Sweet and sour prawn balls please.

  It was quite frustrating, really.

  My happiest time back then was lying on the living room floor looking up at the Artexed ceiling, radio going full pelt. For no-one in particular I used to mimic all the voices on it. Sometimes Mum would hear me and laugh. Other times Dad’d hear me and go, ‘The lad’s a basket case.’

  ‘Yeah, but he’s good though,’ Mum’d counter.

  And both of them agreed, I’d give Mike Yarwood a run for his money.

  I learned a lot listening to that wireless. I remember hearing the word Nefertiti for the first time and thinking it was the most amazing word in the English language. Not realizing, like, that it wasn’t actually English. I didn’t really know what it meant. But just lying there. And saying it.

  Nefertiti.

  That could make me happy, too. And I could say it like a proper posh person!

  There was one night when I was about ten when my mum sent me the pub to get my dad and bring him home. I forget the reason why. My dad was quite far gone by the time I got there, and in one of those moods where the drink turns you happy and back-slappy. And he started telling the barmaid, and then the other punters, about all the impressions I could do. Except I didn’t really do anyone famous, I just did the people I heard on the radio, the DJs, the adverts, stuff like that. For some reason I preferred the radio to the telly. Probably coz I could just lie there staring at the ceiling and the radio was like a voice in my head. Anyway, he made me do all these different voices for people and I noticed as I was doing it he was passing round his empty pint pot and folk were sticking coins in it. And coz he was being so friendly and warm and chuckly, I carried on till the glass was half full. Then he bought himself a pint of bitter and told me to run home and tell the Mammy he’d be ten minutes.

  Oh yeah. I remember now. The Mammy was boiling a ham. And she’d had her hair ‘done nice’. It was their wedding anniversary.

  He rolled in at midnight.

  The skill