Past Secrets

‘How did you hear about that?’ demanded Marco and then slapped his forehead and groaned. ‘You didn’t know, did you? You were just guessing.’

‘Oh, Marco, we knew about the party,’ Amber said, exasperated. ‘We were only guessing about the police, but we found some guy’s coat under Ella’s bed, along with a lot of empty Heineken cans and a condom.’

Marco blanched.

‘It’s not as if Ella put the beer cans there. We never drink beer. We prefer wine or vodka,’ she added, hoping to sound worldly-wise.

‘Can’t you go out with your own friends?’ Marco begged, not even commenting on the wine or vodka remark. It seemed like only last week his sister and her friend had been sobbing their hearts out over guinea pig funerals in the back garden and winning badges for Guides.

‘Think of it as community service for deeds previously unpunished,’ Amber pointed out. ‘We won’t be any trouble. Once we’re in the club, you can forget about us. We can look after ourselves.’

‘OK, you’re nearly eighteen and you know everything, right?’ he said sarcastically.

‘I’ve a yellow belt in karate,’ Amber said, assuming what she hoped was a karate stance, though it was years since she’d set foot on a dojo. Her mother’s insistence on self-defence lessons had been fun when she’d been ten, less so when she hit puberty.

Marco sighed. ‘Close combat is not the answer to all situations in life. The most dangerous guys in the club probably won’t ask you to arm wrestle, Amber. Understand?’ He looked at both girls as sternly as he could. ‘I don’t want to have to come home at two in the morning and tell Mum and Dad that I’ve lost you two. Or worse, tell your mother, Amber. She’d rip me limb from limb.’

Amber’s mother had always made Marco a bit nervous. There was something steely in Mrs Reid’s gaze, as if she was warning him that she had his measure.

‘We’re not kids,’ growled Amber. ‘We’re coming. It’s no skin off your nose. You only have to get us in.’

‘Well, you’ll have to watch your drinks,’ sighed Marco, knowing when he was beaten. ‘There are guys out there who’ll slip a date rape drug in your glass and, well…you don’t have any experience. You don’t know the half of it.’

‘You’re a wonderful brother.’ Ella gave him a hug.

‘This is a one-off deal,’ Marco insisted. ‘OK? And you’ve got to behave yourselves.’

‘Of course,’ said Amber, who had absolutely no intention of behaving herself. She could do that in the football club.

The truly difficult part of the plan was lying to her mother about where she and Ella were going that night. They decided that, because of Faye’s ultra-vigilance, they’d stay at Ella’s that night after their alleged trip to the disco. Having gone through it all before, Ella’s parents were definitely more relaxed about their daughter’s behaviour.

‘Mum will check we’re home, but if I put pillows in the beds, she’ll think we’re there,’ Ella said.

Amber thought of how her mum never slept until Amber was back after an evening out. How many nights had they sat up on Amber’s bed on her return, Mum listening as Amber recounted her triumphs and disasters?

Then, she brushed the feeling of guilt away. It was only because Mum was so protective that she had to lie. She wasn’t a kid any more. She didn’t want to hurt Mum’s feelings but she had to move on and Mum must be made to understand that.

Getting into Highway Seven worked precisely as Ella had predicted, although Amber only felt her breathing come right when they were deep inside the club, far from the stern eye of the doorman. In spite of her outward nonchalance, she was nervous. She and Ella might have sunbathed on the forbidden gym roof and smoked a few illicit cigarettes, but they were strictly homework-on-time girls in other respects. This was breaking into new territory, both exciting and scary at the same time.

Dark, moody and almost vibrating with bass-deep music, the club was crowded with bodies, perfume and a sweet smell that Amber knew was marijuana because even the football club wasn’t trouble-free.

‘Er…what do you want to do now?’ asked Marco, wondering how he’d got lumbered with this situation. Thankfully, the two girls looked old enough to fit in, but hey, they were still his little sister and her friend. He had a bad vibe about the whole thing.

‘We’re fine,’ Amber said airily.

‘Yeah, you go off with your mates. We’re cool,’ Ella added, matching her friend’s unconcerned look.

Marco shrugged, but he looked relieved. ‘If you’re sure…’

‘We’re sure.’ Both girls nodded.

Amber scanned her surroundings idly, her body moving gently to the music. Ella adopted the same laid-back hauteur.

Marco was no match for them. He was fooled.

‘Text me if you need me,’ he said, then turned and was swallowed up by the crowd.

On their own, Amber and Ella clutched each other and shrieked, all pretence at being cool gone. Nobody heard them over the pumping beat. ‘We’re here,’ they screeched and did their own little war dance.

‘Loos,’ gasped Amber, taking Ella by the hand.

In the toilets, they re-adopted adult cool while Amber applied a line of smoky kohl around the rims of her eyes like she’d seen in a magazine. The effect was startling: her beautiful eyes seemed larger and more hypnotic than ever.

‘You really do look twenty-one,’ sighed Ella, pausing in the act of applying another coat of sticky lip gloss.

A woman rinsing her hands at the next basin glanced at them.

‘Thanks!’ said Amber. ‘I’m actually thirty-two but my plastic surgeon is a miracle worker.’

The woman left in a hurry and they creased over laughing again, high on their own daring.

They had enough money to order one drink each, which they’d have to make last all night, and they stood at the bar, nursing their vodkas, trying to look as if they’d been here a million times before and were bored with it all.

Behind her calm façade, Amber was enthralled, watching everyone, envying them the way they all seemed to fit in.

In a corner cordoned off by velvet rope sat a dozen people drinking champagne. All beautiful, having the time of their lives, utterly at home. One slender brunette in faded, sequin-decorated jeans was holding court, talking and laughing, while everyone else watched her with evident fascination. In that one second, Amber longed to be just like her: part of the scene instead of watching enviously from the sidelines.

Then, one of the guys saw her watching them, a guy with dark cropped hair and stubble that was probably five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. His gaze was so intense Amber looked away in embarrassment. Shit, how gauche to be caught staring hungrily like a schoolgirl.

She did her best to stare anywhere else, but she really wanted to look back at the guy and drink him in. She’d never felt that connection before, that instant buzz from another human being, the feeling that she knew him.

But who was she kidding? He was probably only staring at her because it was obvious she and Ella were out of place. She’d thought they looked old enough but perhaps they didn’t and the guy was wondering what a kid was doing there.

‘Nobody’s bothering to chat us up,’ moaned Ella beside her.

‘It’s early yet,’ said Amber with more enthusiasm than she felt. Perhaps Marco had been right and they should have gone out with their own friends, but the football club would seem so tame after this. After him.

‘Are you lost?’ said a low voice.

Amber swivelled round. The dark, crop-haired man stood beside her, staring at her with intense blue eyes. Every nerve in her body quivered into alertness, though she tried to stay calm.

‘Lost? No.’ She shrugged, hopelessly trying to adopt the laid-back aura of the brunette in the VIP section.

‘You weren’t looking for someone?’ he asked. His voice was soft and deep, a man’s voice, not a boy’s.

Amber shook her head.

‘I thought you were looking for me,’ he added, ‘and you’ve found me.’

Amber just stared at him, concentrating on breathing.

Chat-up lines for her usually consisted of the guy asking what class she was in at school. This approach was wildly different. Amber felt her spine lengthen, some new instinct making her stand up straighter, yet slightly closer to him.

‘I wasn’t looking for you,’ she said, nonchalant. How was she doing this? She’d never spoken this way before, like a heroine from a film. ‘I was watching people. I’m an artist: I like watching people.’

‘You draw them, then?’

Amazingly, he didn’t spot that she was making this up as she went along. Buoyed up, Amber lowered her eyelids and gave him a sultry gaze she’d rehearsed in her bedroom in front of the faded line of her childhood teddy bears.

‘If I like the shape of them and the look of them, I might draw them,’ she replied coolly.

‘And me? Do you like the look of me?’ he asked.

It was noisy, so he’d moved till he was very close to her and, despite the gloom of the club, she could see that his face was moulded like a beautiful Renaissance statue: a straight, proud nose, flaring cheekbones, a finely planed forehead and a mouth so sensitive it would take a sculptor months to get right. Tightly cropped brown hair and a filament-thin cotton shirt flattened against his lean body took him into the modern era, but otherwise, he was like the historical princes of art that Amber had grown up admiring.

‘I like the look of you very much,’ she breathed, not bothering to be cool any more.

And he smiled at her, revealing an endearing dimple on one side of his mouth and perfect white teeth. Amber forgot about everything else in the world except this fabulous man. She wanted to touch him, kiss him, feel him wrap his arms around her and press his body against hers for ever. This, she thought, was love at first sight.

Karl was in a band, he told her. She introduced him to Ella and he led them over to the VIP area.

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.’