The Secrets We Keep

by Jonathan Harvey

  We met in a business meeting originally. Natalie was even there for some of it. We were toying with rebranding Milk prior to the franchising business, and she’d come in to pitch for the new logo. Looking back, I’ve sometimes wondered whether she’d invented the graphic design company just to get to meet me. But she always insisted it was just a happy coincidence. And she was a good designer. Mad bitch or not.

  Then we bumped into each other in Ibiza.

  I was being a bit of a bad lad back then and knocking off all sorts, coz Natalie had got into this habit of not coming out there, and I arrogantly thought that gave me a free pass to do what the hell I wanted. Coz I soon discovered, blokes who are on your payroll are pretty good at keeping that zipped when they see stuff they’re not meant to. Then we kept on seeing each other when we got back. Casually, like, on and off. Then it just petered out.

  Lords and ladies

  A club at more than one venue is a headache for anyone. It’s a brand, and it stops being yours. You can fight tooth and nail to hang onto your identity, make the experience identical in whichever venue you go to; but you can’t do it alone. Two become three become blah blah blah, and soon there’s a whole army of faces and you’re the figureheads and it stops being fun. And when fun is what you’re selling, it needs to feel like it at the top. And it wasn’t. And we’d had enough. And we wanted out. So we got out. We got out rich. But Milk was no longer ours. Our Milk had curdled.

  We were lords and ladies of leisure. That’s when the rot really set in for me. Gone were the adrenalin rushes. Gone were the challenges. Gone was everything. And all that was left were the boring shitty bits.

  Yes, we had the big posh house in the country. Yes, we had our kids in private school. But when you’ve lived your life upside down for as long as you can remember . . . out at night, sleeping all day, the cash rolling in . . . well, sometimes, when that’s gone . . . well, I didn’t half feel hollow.

  And that’s when I started being a really bad lad.

  I hooked up with Miriam again. And she was more than happy to come along for the ride. Shameful now when I think of it, but then, I was a cocky fucker. From being the lad who had nothing to being the bloke who if he wanted something, he got it – I didn’t think twice about digging my claws in. Entitlement, that’s what I felt. Selfishness is another way of looking at it.

  I used to tell Natalie I was off out meeting mates. Playing golf. Playing footy. Blimey, she must’ve thought I was training for the frigging Olympics, the amount of ‘sport’ I was doing.

  But I wasn’t. I was round at Mim’s house. I was down the bookies, wasting my hard-earned cash. I even started caning it for the first time in my life. Looking back, I was bored and just thrill-seeking. And slowly but surely, the reserves we’d put aside were chipped away at.

  I didn’t love her. The sex was dirty and the company was easy, back then.

  And then I found her stash of cuttings from newspapers about Tiffany Keith. And that’s when I should’ve run a mile.

  But I didn’t. Coz that’s when she came clean and told me she’d practically been stalking me. And coz I was a knobhead who was chasing them thrills, I lapped it up and stayed with it.

  Like I said. The biggest loser in Loserville.

  The baby she gave away

  Not long after I first met her, Mim had told me that she’d had a baby when she was fifteen. She also said she’d never found her, and didn’t know what had happened to her. This turned out to be a bit of a white lie. Coz now that I’d seen the Tiffany Keith stuff, she came clean. She had tried to find her baby – and when she did, she had recently died of a drug overdose in some crack house down South. Obviously Mim was full of remorse and shame and guilt that she’d given the baby away, and felt she’d had a part in the poor girl’s downfall, yadda yadda yadda. Then when she read about Tiffany Keith dying, it brought it all back to her. And when she read that I had been trying to get the poor girl to hospital . . . she became obsessed by my kindness, because she wished she had been able to do that for her daughter.

  I never had the heart, or the honesty, to tell her that this was all complete bollocks.

  She had a Messiah complex about me. What was I supposed to do? Shatter her illusions?

  Yeah, I know, I know. All along, I was the Bad Samaritan. Well, if the cap fits . . .

  Framboise lives on

  People used to think we’d made Cally’s name up. We hadn’t. Framboise – the brass who’d been kind to me when I needed it –she once had her mum down, and I overheard her calling her by her real name, Cally. Framboise was murdered in the mid-nineties. Cut up by some pimp, they said, in a Soho back alley. I know it sounds odd naming your daughter after a brass and that, but she was good to me, old Framboise, and I wanted part of her to live on.

  I was never very good with kids. I can’t really say I was much cop with my own kids. Natalie was a natural. I was putting on an act. When Owen was a baby, I was useless with him. Whenever I picked him up he’d start mewling and skriking. As he got older, he got easier. He was eager to please, and he was easily pleased. He looked a bit like me, but with everything put right. And as long as he thought you weren’t hacked off with him, he’d do anything for you.

  Cally was a different kettle of fish altogether. I remember Mammy looking down on her when she’d got back from the hospital. Natalie was asleep. Thank God she couldn’t hear. Coz Mammy said, ‘The alien has landed.’

  I remember the smell of Pernod on her breath as she said it, and I wanted to hit her. But Cally was an odd-looking baby. Otherworldly. She seemed to flinch when Mammy went near her, and bawled her eyes out when she picked her up. But when she passed her to me: silent. Comfort. I knew this one’d be OK. She had instinct, just like me. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  And as she got older I liked her weirdness, her complete lack of desire to conform. It petered out a bit before I left, but the otherworldliness never went. Natalie saw it as sweetness. I saw it as if she had higher powers. Or maybe that was my arrogance, projecting onto her something I thought I’d always had.

  It’s all about me. Jeez.

  Mashed

  How d’you want your spuds doing, Danny? Natalie used to say. And I’d always say, Mashed, like me head.

  Now you might think that for me to be carrying on like a complete bastard behind Natalie’s back meant that I’d fallen out of love with her. And maybe I had. Maybe I’d never been in love with her. But I thought I had, and I thought I was. Like Prince Charles once said, ‘whatever love means’. But in my sphere of experience, Natalie was the love of my life. And nothing had changed between us, really, in all the years of being together. OK, the sex was a bit pedestrian, but there ain’t nothing wrong with walking on the pavement all your life – at least you’re not gonna get run over. In films and telly when someone has an affair it’s always coz everything’s gone tits up at home. And that’s the stupid thing about me. None of that had happened. We were just sailing along, as per. It was just me. And me mashed head. My skewed view of the world that meant I was greedy. Or maybe that’s how it always is for fellas. And they get it wrong on the silver screen.

  Though they do get one thing right. Usually the hero, if he plays away, he ends up choosing a loose fucking cannon. Yeah.

  Dodged a bullet there, lad? No. Took the full force of it. And I may as well have pulled the trigger.

  And that other little lad

  Not so little now, no doubt. But did I ever stop and think about Sam Korniskey? Truth be told, I didn’t really. Not that often. I’d done my bad thing and pushed him to the back of my mind. Taken the money and run a club with it. The police had come knocking at my door all those years ago. Could I back his story? Had I seen anything? Maybe a decent mate would’ve made something up, embellished the truth. But I looked them in the eye and told them the truth. I’d seen nothing, knew nothing. I did it with enough alarm in the voice so that they knew. Subtext was – Sam Korniskey’s a bit mental. Weeks later
, Sam came to see me. All rage and accusations. I lied point-blank and said the coppers hadn’t seen me. That shut him up. And then sent him into a rant about how everyone was out to get him, the system was out to get him, he was a walking, talking conspiracy theory waiting to happen. And I’d lit the touch paper.

  I did try and finish it . . .

  I did try and finish it with Mim a few times. Once it even worked. But the next time I went round to my mum’s, who did I find sitting in her front room? Bleeding Mim! Jesus! And she’s sat there practically feeding my old girl vodka. And Mum’s eyes were all glassy, and she was all, ‘She’s told me everything. I think the way you’ve treated her is something shocking.’

  And again, it trapped me. She was inveigling her way into every part of my life. I had to put a stop to it. I just couldn’t work out how.

  Me, the canny one, who could come up with a solution to everything. I couldn’t work out how to jib the bit on the side. Sounds daft now, I know, but I didn’t want to risk her telling Natalie. Once that little cat was out of the bag, I’d lose everything.

  But what was everything? Everything wasn’t fine, not really.

  So what was I scared of?

  Chi-chi

  Big posh house in the country. Kids at private school. Electric gates. A swimming pool. A gardener. Well, a gardener once a week, but it was still a gardener. Cleaner. Our life had gone ever so, ever so . . . chi-chi, that’s how I saw it. Natalie hated it when I called it that – she was so protective of her new life. Even though we were sinking money faster than an alkie with the beers. Oh, and then there was Lucy and Dylan, who she thought the sun shone out of. Look, don’t get me wrong, Lucy was all right, if a bit right-on since her days at Milk: wandering around in her hot pants, loving all the lads trying to get a glimpse up her jaxie every time she bent over. But him? Never took to him. Always had to be wearing the latest fashion, always had to have the latest gadget. It was all surface with him, and despite that, I always felt him looking down his nose at me while pretending to blow smoke up my arse. Yeah, a contortionist. And a bit of a prick. But I smiled and nodded and laughed at his crap jokes every time they came over for dinner, and every time we went over to theirs and ‘just had to try this latest cheese’, and all that shite. Dylan was in a cheese club. They met once a fortnight and tried different cheeses and, I dunno, wanked over them or something. Natalie even suggested I join at one point. I told her where to get off. Right there, mate!

  It dawned on me that I’d been a bit of an adrenalin junkie all my life, though not through choice. Living on my wits on the streets of St Helens, making ends meet while Mammy was busy with her tea. Punching the boss at Hansbury. Escaping. The Meat Rack. The streets. Then the dealing. The promoting. The clubs. Then nothing. Electric gates and wall-to-wall leisure. No adrenalin. It’s like I’d had the gland removed. I know it’s daft, but I missed those days. I missed the buzz. That’s probably why I indulged in so many mad things. I was starting to feel more and more cut off from everything around me, craving something from the past, even though the past was far from perfect. Biggest loser, indeed. Never happy. Maybe I’d never been happy. Whatever happy was, or is.

  Mammy was back on the sauce

  ’Nuff said, really. She was an effing nightmare. And now she had her new best friend. Mim. And every time she saw me she’d tap her nose and go, Nat’ll never know. Stuck-up bitch.

  Bye-bye, Benedict Bishop

  It was New Year’s Day 2009 – I’ll never forget it – when I opened up the paper and saw the words MP and SUICIDE in the headline. It was Sir Benedict Bishop, and he’d killed himself, throwing himself from some cliffs on the coastline of North Wales. My stomach flipped. It felt like a jellyfish, squeezing itself in and up inside me. There was a picture of him. Same as I’d remembered him, but balder and uglier; and, of course, twenty years older. Reading down the article, it said several allegations of historical child abuse were about to be revealed and he had been wanted for questioning.

  I felt so many things, all at the same time. I felt a tiny beesting of triumph that he had gone, that whatever evil things he’d done in the past could never be done again and there’d been some sort of retribution. But the major feeling that consumed me was guilt.

  Several allegations.

  Several.

  That meant . . . not just Sam. Maybe Sam wasn’t even one of them.

  Shit.

  Had me not standing up for Sam all those years ago meant that he’d got away scot-free to carry on doing what he’d always done? Had the money he’d bought my silence with ultimately been blood money? The blood of all the lads he’d interfered with? I looked around the kitchen I was sat in. The stainless-steel units. The Fired Earth floor tiles. The coffee machine the size of a bungalow. Had they all been paid for by his abuse?

  I’d never told Natalie at the time how I’d met the contact in the suit who was so eager to offer advice and hand over sixty thousand quid in investment. Admittedly we’d paid him back within the year, so obviously our success was our own doing. But without it, where would we be now?

  I couldn’t sit still. I got up and grabbed my coat. Shoved on Owen’s bobble hat and shouted, to no-one in particular, ‘I’m going for a walk!’

  And no-one in particular called back.

  Our house – if you could call it that, it was more like frigging Southfork, I swear, every corner I turned I expected to see Sue-Ellen shaking with a G and T in her sweaty mitts – was in the middle of nowhere, in Cheshire. A county I now hated with a vengeance. Whoever invented snooty, they must’ve been from Cheshire. The neighbours – if you could call them that, the nearest house was half a mile away – hated us with a passion. New money. No class. Cheeky fuckers. They were the epitome of snoot. Yeah, they were impressed by the Range Rover Sport, the schools the kids went to, where Nat got her hair done. Yes, they were impressed that we could afford to live there. But you could see it in their dead eyes every time they looked at us. Disdain. Disgust. De nada.

  And the bad thing about the area, and them – we were near a little village called Swettenham – was that if you went for a walk and just walked across fields, those fields were owned by one of the snooty bastards, and the next thing you knew you’d have some old sap in a hat shouting, GET OFF MY LAND. Or worse, they’d send a bull after you. It made just walking out and going for a stroll a bit of a bugger really, coz you were in the middle of all this really beautiful English countryside, fields, fields, rape as far as your eye could see, in the summer, bluebell woods; but you had to walk down the lanes, not in the middle of the beauty. So walk down the lanes I did. All the time thinking, all the time hating. Hating what I’d done.

  I’d contributed in some way. I knew I had. I couldn’t quite articulate how but I had. The words weren’t there, the description wasn’t, but it was just on the tip of my tongue, patched onto the next bit of brain and I couldn’t get to it.

  A four-by-four drove past as if it didn’t see me, the wheels sluicing up a spray of mud that hit me like bullets. And as it did, a new revelation hit me.

  What if he didn’t kill himself? What if Sam actually pushed him off that cliff?

  Right there, right then, it seemed completely plausible. Sam, denied his moment in court, denied the chance to see the man who abused him punished for what he did, eats himself up with bitterness, tracks him down, sweet-talks him into a cliff-top walk, pushes him off. QED. Whatever QED meant.

  Oh yeah. Quite easily done.

  Well, not that easily. But doable.

  I passed the opening to the track that led down to the courtyard of barn conversions. A family were in their garden having a barbecue. A barbecue. At ten in the morning on New Year’s Day. A breakfast barbie? If that was plausible – and there it was, right before my eyes – then so was the situation with Sam.

  I carried on walking towards the village, soaked to the skin. Another realization. All those years, all that time, the memories. I remembered being in the car with Bishop and Sam,
Sam chattering away. The months after, when Sam defended him, liked him, wanted to spend time with him. Part of me always hated Sam because I thought he was flirting with Bishop, complicit in whatever was about to happen. Sam wanted to spend time with him. And then, after he returned to Hansbury after the London days, it happened. And part of me assumed Sam had seduced him.

  Again I felt nauseous. Sam had been younger than Owen was now. Sam didn’t seduce him. And if he felt he did, or I felt he did, it was because the bastard had bloody well groomed him. I’d seen it with my own eyes. Seen how all those bastards at Hansbury did it. The gifts. The treats. The compliments. The privileges. Grooming. It was going on right before my eyes, but I’d not been able to give it a name. Just thought the lads were playing along, Sam was playing along, and enjoying it. Part of it. All of it. And now I was a grown-up, it was crystal clear.

  And I could have done something about it. But I didn’t. In fact, I did the opposite. I chose to actively condone it, in a way.

  When I got to the village, it was like a ghost town. Like those villages you see that were abandoned in the Second World War, then no-one returned. The places armies practise their killing sprees on. The pub was shut. The shop was shut. The world was shut. The place felt like it was rotting.

  I felt stupid. I felt humiliated. I felt angry. Not even angry with Bishop – I felt angry with myself.

  That was when the rot truly set in. And really, there was no coming back.

  But what d’you do when you’re consumed with terror? Terror that your whole life is built upon someone else’s pain? Even if there’s an outside chance that you’re just bigging your part up; making out you were the centre of the drama when actually you weren’t, you were just a bit-part player. What do you do with all those feelings? When you know you’ve shat on someone from a great height, someone you promised you’d always be there for? Even if that was a promise from childhood. I still made the promise, and I thought I was a man of my word. What d’you do when you’ve been so selfish that you thought you’d stopped to think how your actions might affect others – when all along, all you’d cared about was yourself?