Tell Me No Secrets by Julie Corbin Read Free Book Online

the back garden, topless. ‘In this country,’ she says, ‘when the sun comes out you should always take advantage of it.’
    I stare at her. Her skin is the colour of caramel and gleams with oil that smells strongly of coconut. She leans forward to kiss me on the cheeks and her nipples brush my arm.
    And she is a Catholic. She wears a black lace mantilla over her head. She reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and when her dark eyes flash my way I feel blessed. Sometimes my mum allows me to go to church with her and I watch her pray like her life depends upon it. She prays in French, murmuring the words in a fast, breathy monotone, her fingers rubbing each pearl in her rosary beads as she moves along the chain and all the way back to the beginning. She lights a candle in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary and crosses herself. Then she turns to me and takes my hand. ‘Ice cream?’ she says and I nod, smiling up into her eyes.
    At home we eat plain food. ‘Get that down you,’ my mother says, passing me a steaming plate of stovies. ‘It’ll bring the colour to your cheeks.’
    Angeline wrinkles up her nose at the mention of corned beef and cabbage or mince and tatties. She says haggis is hardly fit for dogs. She travels to Edinburgh once a week to buy courgettes, aubergines and peppers, olive oil and anchovies. Sometimes they eat in front of the television. Dried fruits, apricots and figs dipped into Camembert melted in its box.
    Orla spends a lot of time ignoring her mother. ‘I’m more of a daddy’s girl,’ she says. By the time we’re both teenagers, they have out-and-out screaming matches. Orla swears and shouts in rapid, hectic French. She throws cups and glasses until her mother grabs her wrists and shakes her. It’s at times like this that Orla turns up at my house, unannounced, just barges in like she lives here. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing: having tea, soaking in the bath, asleep even, she just comes straight in and has hysterics. My mother calms her down, mops her tears, listens to her complaints and feeds her home-baked biscuits and cakes. Then my dad drives her home. If it was me, I’d be told to stop the nonsense, but Orla gets away with it. ‘She’s highly strung,’ my mother pronounces. ‘It’ll be the French blood in her.’
    When I’m fourteen, I’m on a trip to Edinburgh with my grandmother. Gran is in the toilet in Jenners department store and I am waiting for her. I walk a few yards into the lingerie department and run my fingers through a rack of silk nightdresses with elaborate lace around the bodice and sleeves.
    I see Angeline. My heart lifts and as I open my mouth to shout hello, a man walks towards her. It’s Monica’s father. I wonder why he’s there. I watch him as he wraps his arms around her from behind and she leans back into him so that he can kiss her neck. She whispers up into his ear and his arms tighten around her waist.
    She sees me and one of her eyebrows arches just a little. She places a finger vertically over her lips and leaves it there until I raise my own to mimic her. Then she smiles and blows me a kiss.
    I don’t know what to think.

3
    There is no one in the graveyard but me. Windswept trees afford some shelter from the briny air that evaporates up from the sea but still many of the headstones have fallen over and others are faded or covered in moss, succumbing to weather and neglect. But not this one. This one is upright, gold lettering legible on a background of pink marble.
    Rose Adams
    1975–1984
    Safe in God’s hands
    The grave in front is well tended. I have brought some delicate yellow roses, twelve of them, wrapped in a cream silk ribbon. I put them in the vase and pull a few small weeds from the ground. Then I kneel down, clasp my hands together and close my eyes. Guilt, regret, sorrow and remorse: over the last