Past Secrets

by Cathy Kelly

  Ella squeezed Amber’s hand in delight as they were ushered past the velvet rope, but Amber was too engrossed in Karl to sense Ella’s message of ‘Wow! Look where we are now!’

  Some of Karl’s as yet unsigned band were among the group. The rest, the ones who’d undoubtedly got everyone into the VIP area in the first place, were a band with an album that had just been released, the ones Marco had come to hear.

  ‘The Kebabs, of course I’ve heard of you! My brother came to hear you play. Tell me, you do, like tours and stuff?’ asked Ella, fascinated, as she was handed a glass of champagne.

  As Ella listened to stories of life on the road, Amber barely heard a word. She was conscious only of Karl sitting beside her, with an arm loosely around the back of her seat, his leg casually close to hers.

  She didn’t want to hear about anyone else, only Karl.

  ‘What do you do in your band?’

  ‘I am the band,’ Karl shrugged as if it was obvious. ‘I write the songs, I sing, I play lead guitar. The band is me.’

  ‘You’re an artist too.’ She smiled and took his hand, tracing the lines on it with sensitive fingers. ‘I could paint you.’

  ‘I could write a song about you,’ Karl said, touching her face with his other hand.

  Their faces were inches apart now, Karl was drinking in every inch of her, his eyes travelling from her tawny hair, past the softness of her jaw down to the firm, high curve of her breasts highlighted in the tight little T-shirt she’d borrowed from Ella.

  ‘You’re so sexy,’ he whispered. His eyes roamed lower, past her waist to the rounded curve of her hips and along her jean-clad legs. For once, Amber didn’t bother trying to lift one thigh up so her leg looked thinner. There was no mistaking the fact that Karl liked her the way she was, and that was headier than any alcohol she could have drunk.

  ‘Get a room!’ shouted someone to them, and everyone creased up laughing.

  Amber and Karl didn’t hear the jest or the insistent throbbing of the club music: they were locked into their own beat, aqua eyes in a lean face staring fiercely into grey-and-amber eyes in a gently rounded one, the red stain on each of Amber’s cheeks owing nothing to her make-up.

  They moved at the same time, Karl’s arms winding around Amber’s waist, her hands spreading out to feel the heat of his torso through the thin shirt. Before her fingers had a chance to revel in the fine muscles of his back, his mouth met hers and they were kissing. It was unlike any kiss Amber had experienced: Karl’s tongue snaked into her mouth with practised ease, banishing the memory of every St Bernard slobber of a French kiss she’d ever had before. They melted against each other, his hands cupping her face, her hands raking through his hair. The heat of their bodies burned through their clothes. And long afterwards, when Amber was again capable of thinking, she realised that this was what love was all about.

  As the morning bus lurched along into the city, Amber sat on the top deck in her finery and thought of how much had changed in the past two weeks. She had been a kid then, but now she was an adult.

  An adult with an adult relationship. Or at least, she’d be properly having an adult relationship soon. Today, she was meeting Karl to take him home where they’d have the place to themselves all day. There was no privacy in the poky flat he shared with five other musicians. In her bedroom on Summer Street, there would be as much privacy as they needed. Briefly, Amber thought of how she’d explain it all to her mother if she arrived home early from work. She could imagine Faye’s horrified face, and how hurt she’d be to have been lied to. But Amber flicked the thought away. She’d worry about that later. Everyone had secrets, didn’t they?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Twice a week for the past six months, Faye Reid had taken an early lunch and walked a mile to the swimming pool complex near her office. The brisk walk past the mirror-windowed buildings of the docklands was soothing. Striding along the pavement, away from the incessant phones and the beehive drone of the busy recruitment company where she worked, she listened to music, watched seagulls swoop and dive towards the river, and relaxed.

  Today, she had Billie Holiday on her portable CD player. Billie’s golden voice told of men who’d left and Faye thought how wonderful it was that, no matter how many times she heard Billie, it always sounded as if the guy had just that second gone, the screen door still banging behind him.

  Music talked to Faye. Sound was the most evocative sense for her and the first few bars of a song on the radio could take her right back to where she’d been when she’d first heard it. She herself had a softly husky singing voice that few people had ever heard and could repeat a melody after only hearing it once. When she’d been Amber’s age, she’d always been singing but she rarely did now.

  For music could be a curse too. There were still some songs she couldn’t listen to, songs that would break her heart because of the memories they brought to life.

  Billie Holiday songs thankfully, for all their pain, didn’t fit into that category.

  ‘It’s lovely and everything, but it’s kind of depressing, Mum,’ Amber had pointed out the previous weekend about her mother’s love of exquisitely melancholy jazz.

  ‘Some of it is,’ Faye agreed, trying to see things from her daughter’s point of view. It was an unseasonably warm Saturday for the end of April and they’d spent the afternoon in the garden, Amber keen to start a dusting of golden tan on her face.

  With the iron discipline Faye brought to every area of her life, the housework in the Reid household was always up to date. But when it came to gardening, she didn’t know weed from plant. Occasionally, she wished she was more like Christie Devlin who’d created an exquisite all-white garden at the front of her house. Faye had never seen Christie’s back garden, had never seen the inside of the Devlins’ house, actually, because they barely knew each other in spite of living mere doors apart for ten years, but she’d have bet that it was just as beautiful, with frothy roses and trailing blooms that flourished under Christie’s magic hands.

  On this particular Saturday, Faye wore a tired pale-pink polo shirt over cheap loose-fit jeans that did nothing for her shape, and was trying to uproot any weeds she could identify. It all looked weedy to her. Surely that big thing that looked strangely like a marijuana plant couldn’t be a flower? Although since she’d thrown those packets of wildflower seeds every which way last year, it was hard to tell. That would be a fine advert for sensible single parenthood, wouldn’t it: a hash plant in Faye Reid’s garden.

  She grinned. If there was any illegal vegetation in her garden, nobody would cast aspersions on the arch-conservative Mrs Reid, the very model of a career-minded widow with an equally model teenage daughter. Faye had worked very hard to reach that place in the local psyche. She’d learned that a single woman bringing up a child needed to be beyond reproach. Nobody would ever have cause to accuse her of trying to steal their husband or of letting her daughter run wild.

  ‘I like songs like “Respect”,’ Amber went on. She was lying on her tummy on a rug on the lawn, her feet in the air and a school book propped up in front of her. ‘Not sad ones where everyone’s depressed, like no guy will ever look at them again ’cos they messed it up the first time.’

  Faye paused in her weeding.

  ‘You’ve got to remember, Amber, that the old jazz and rhythm-and-blues songs are from another age, when life was different and women didn’t have the same opportunities we have today,’ she said, wiping her hands on her jeans so she could clip a few strands of light-brown hair back. Faye didn’t bother with her hair much: shoulder length, wavy and undyed for many years, it got washed, tied back firmly and treated to conditioner when she had the time, which wasn’t often.

  ‘They didn’t have contraception, any hope of equal pay or equal rights in lots of things. So it might sound depressing to you now,’ she explained, ‘but they were brave. I think they were feminists in their own time because they sang when it wasn’t considered a decent job for women. They didn’t
have what we have now. Girl power hadn’t been invented then.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that, but why do all the women hang around waiting for the lover man to turn up?’ Amber wanted to know, abandoning her book with a speed that showed she hadn’t been that engrossed in revising maths equations. ‘The women do all the waiting in these songs and in the old movies. If a guy doesn’t respect you, he’s going to walk all over you. They’re waiting for him to make it right. It’s so passive. You don’t need girl power to see that.’

  ‘You and Ella have got to stop reading the therapist’s sections in women’s magazines,’ Faye groaned, but she was smiling. ‘I thought you were going to study art, not psychotherapy.’

  ‘Ha ha. All I’m saying is that some people want to be rescued and that’s, like, not going to happen.’ Amber’s small face was determined, her chin lifted to signify that life would have to take her on her terms, and not the other way round. Faye felt the familiar clammy grip of a mother’s anxiety on her heart. Amber was full of energy and hope, for all her careful studying of women’s magazines’ problem pages.

  What if one day, despite all Faye’s efforts at protecting her daughter, someone or something destroyed that energy and hope?

  ‘My little suffragette.’

  Amber looked pleased. ‘I like to think so,’ she said, ‘only I’m the modern version. No chaining yourself to the railings involved. I’m glad it’s different now.’

  Faye said nothing. It was hard to tell a seventeen-year-old with her whole life ahead of her that heartache and loss crossed every century, women’s rights notwithstanding. She sat back on her heels, tired from gardening. If only she could wave a wand and conjure up a lovely garden: then she’d take care of it. But creating it was another matter.

  Her house was one of the smallest on Summer Street, the first of the eight railway cottages lined up in a terrace like an illustration in a Victorian picturebook. The painted front doors – theirs was teal blue – carved fascia boards and perfectly square windows were like something a child would draw.

  Most of the cottages had been extended at the back. Faye’s extension had made the kitchen bigger, creating a T-shaped upstairs attic bedroom for Amber, and taking the already tiny garden down to shoebox size. It had a small block of mossy lawn, flower beds on either side and a rackety garden shed at the bottom.

  ‘I can’t imagine Gran waiting for a man to fix what was wrong,’ Amber added, ‘and she grew up when it was different. I mean, she takes the car to get it fixed, not Stan. She’s a real role model. I tell all the girls in school about her and they think she’s amazing. They think you’re amazing too, Mum, because you don’t take crap from anyone.’

  ‘No,’ said Faye, ignoring the use of the word crap and wondering if that would be her only epitaph. Here lies Faye Reid, who never took crap from anyone. It wasn’t what she’d hoped she’d be remembered for when she was younger, but it certainly fitted now. When she’d been Amber’s age, she’d wanted to be thought of as exciting and glamorous, a mysterious woman loved by many men. Teenage dreams were funny in retrospect, weren’t they? She’d bet that Amber would never imagine that her mother could think like that. Before Amber had been born, Faye had been a very different person altogether, not the cautious, dowdy mother she’d become.

  ‘Nor does Gran,’ Amber went on. ‘And not everyone her age is like that. Ella’s grandmother makes them all run round after her like headless chickens since she had her heart operation. Ella’s terrified her grandmother is going to end up living with them. She says they’ll all have to be on drugs to cope. I’m glad Gran’s not like that.’

  Faye’s widowed mother, Josie, had got married again a few years previously to a widower who understood that his new wife had got too used to the independence of almost twenty years of being on her own to ever be under a man’s thumb again. A retired teacher with boundless patience, Stan was a calm breeze to Josie’s cyclone of activity. Josie ran her local meals on wheels, while Stan was the Martha to her Mary.

  ‘Your gran was on her own for a long time so she had to learn to take care of herself,’ Faye said absently.

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘Yes, like me.’

  ‘I was thinking.’ Amber swung her legs back and forth. ‘About Dad being dead and Granddad being dead, and now Gran is married to Stan and, well…When you go to heaven, how do they work it out if you’ve had more than one husband? I mean, if Stan dies and then Gran dies, who does she live with in heaven – Granddad or Stan? It’s a problem, isn’t it? They never talked about that in religion classes. Just that we’d all be happy but how?’

  ‘Your gran’s probably not planning on shuffling off to meet her maker just yet,’ Faye said, startled.

  ‘I know, I can’t stand the thought of her not being here.’ Amber shuddered. She was very close to her grandmother. ‘But how does it work? Like if you met someone and Dad’s up there waiting for you. He’s still only in his late twenties, and then you come and you’re this old lady, but you’ve got another husband who’s waiting too, because women live longer than men, so he’s there first. Do you see what I mean? Reincarnation sounds better,’ she added, ‘because then you’re not all going to be in heaven at the same time. It makes more sense.’

  Faye had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, the same feeling she always had when Amber talked about her father. The long-dead and beloved dad who was reduced to a photo in a frame, a misty figure who never did anything wrong, never shouted or discussed tidying up her bedroom. Never said no to a mobile phone or the purchase of a miniskirt of belt-like proportions. The dead could do no wrong.

  ‘I hope Dad’s waiting for you in heaven, though. That’s nice. I like to think of that.’ Amber smiled. ‘For your sake, really. So you can be together again, like in Titanic. Although the woman in that was really old at the end, and then when she joined them all on the ship, she was young and back being Kate Winslet. Which was a bit convenient, wasn’t it? Does that mean you get to be at your best in heaven, like twenty-one, even if you’re very ancient and falling apart when you die? I think it’s a bit too convenient.’

  Faye breathed an inward sigh of relief at this rapid turn in the conversation. It meant she didn’t need to discuss the concept of Amber’s father waiting patiently for her in heaven. Not that he’d have waited. Patience had never been one of his virtues.

  It was because saying he was there already would be a lie and now that Amber was older, it was getting harder and harder to lie. Adults lied to children all the time, little white ones for their own good. But time had turned Faye’s white lie into a giant black one and now she couldn’t stomach repeating it any more.

  ‘I think the whole problem with heaven is that nobody really knows anything about it,’ she said, copping out. ‘You’re supposed to believe even though you don’t know.’

  Amber grimaced.

  ‘That’s what the whole faith thing is about,’ Faye added, feeling she was on shaky ground here. ‘Believing when you don’t know for sure.’ Like you’ve always believed me, she thought guiltily. ‘You could ask Stan. He studied theology.’

  ‘The thing is, you have one person who’s right for you, your soul mate, the one who’s waiting for you,’ Amber said. ‘But if they die, how can you meet another soul mate? There’s only going to be one person who makes you feel complete, who you can’t wait to see and talk to, right? Isn’t there? People say that, anyway,’ Amber added hurriedly. She bent her head to her book again.

  A few more minutes passed by and Faye tugged listlessly at a couple of weedy plants, obsessing over her daughter’s vision of her dad happily waiting in heaven for Faye to turn up. Amber never needed to know, did she?

  ‘Ella said something totally crazy the other day, Mum.’ Amber broke the silence.

  ‘She said that maybe you have to pretend not to be independent and that’s what men like. That’s crap, isn’t it? Why should you pretend? I told her, Ella, you have to be you.’ Amber was earnest, sounding
like a much-married matron explaining the ways of the world to a teenage bride.

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Ella.’ Faye knew her daughter’s best friend as if she were her own daughter. Like Amber, Ella was clever, sweet, responsible and had never caused a moment’s trouble in her life. ‘What’s come over her?’

  ‘Giovanni’s new girlfriend, that’s who,’ Amber went on. ‘Dannii. With two i’s and little hearts over each of them. The hearts are very important. She’s messing up Ella’s head and saying that the reason Ella and me don’t have boyfriends is because we’re too clever and too independent and guys don’t like that.’ Amber snorted dismissively.

  Giovanni was Ella’s youngest brother and Faye had heard about this new girlfriend enough times for alarm bells to tinkle gently. Giovanni was in his second year in college, handsome like all Ella’s half-Italian family, and Faye knew Amber had a mild crush on him, despite the fact that she said he was boring. The appearance of an actual steady girlfriend was certainly a catalyst for Amber to realise this. Faye wouldn’t have minded if her daughter’s first serious boyfriend was someone like Giovanni: someone she knew all about and approved of.

  ‘Dannii’s OK-looking, I suppose,’ Amber conceded, grudgingly, ‘but she’s a pain and she’s round Ella’s house all the time talking this crap. She’s doing business studies, Mum, right, and when she’s with Giovanni, she behaves like she’s had her brain sucked out. You don’t get into business studies in college if you’re a moron, so I don’t know who she’s kidding. Well,’ she added gloomily, ‘Giovanni appears to be falling for it. Big dope. Dannii told Ella that Giovanni’s a really hot guy. You can’t say that to your boyfriend’s little sister! Your brother is so sexy. Yeuch. That’s disgusting. I can’t stand her. She hasn’t a clue about anything.’

  Faye said nothing for a while. She gazed at her work so far. She’d definitely pulled up some genuine flowers along with the weeds. How was it that carefully planted flowers could be ripped up easily, while unwanted weeds needed incredible force to shift them?