The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets by Sophie Hannah Read Free Book Online

years, has been blackened by traffic fumes. There are net curtains in the windows. She hates this place and everything about it. The idea of Sol Barber, the flavour of him, is like a huge, swollen spider, crouching over the part of the country where he lives.
    But eventually she is free; she is on a road that seems to have nothing to do with Sol. His domain has an end, andshe has passed it. She smiles, feeling better than she has for a while. Because it would be wrong to think she has achieved nothing today. She has taken a form of revenge. If she had children, the thought that somebody she knew, somebody she had once wronged, had driven to their school, stood at the railings and watched them in the playground, and fantasised about killing them, would be too terrible to contemplate. What if the person came back a second time to turn the fantasy into a reality? One might live in fear for ever.
    The revenge, she clarifies to herself, is not the killing, therefore , but the thinking about killing. Or the thinking about befriending, poaching. And she can continue to think obsessively about Sol’s children in a way that, were he aware of it, would fill him with the worst kind of dread. But never mind the future; this morning, in isolation, is enough. An unbalanced woman has stood and stared at his children, unsure about whether she wants to harm them or not. That is worse than what happens to most people’s children, in a civilised society. That is sufficient revenge.
    She laughs at herself. So that’s it? Some thoughts she had one morning? Big deal, she can imagine Sol saying. Thoughts? Water off a duck’s back, oil stains off a carpet. Do you really think you could ever seriously harm anyone, you pathetic bitch? 

We All Say What We Want
    T OM F OYERS WAS NOT A STRAIGHTFORWARD MAN. H E WOULD have liked to be. He admired straightforward people, like his wife Selena, and like Idris Sutherland, with whom he now stood in the lift. They had both got on at the ground floor and would both get off at the eighth. ‘How’s life?’ Idris asked.
    â€˜Fine, fine.’ Tom smiled. But it wasn’t. He loathed his job at Phelps Corcoran Cummings, which hogged about two-thirds of his waking time. He resented this lift that took him up to his office every morning, the way it spoke to you as you ascended – ‘floor number three, floor number four’ – in a perky, bodiless voice. He detested the building in which his firm was based. It was shaped like a slice taken out of the middle of a cone, glaring white all over, inside and out, menacing in its blandness. It had always reminded Tom of a spaceship that never quite managed to take off. The work itself was boring, and he was treated as a resource, not as a human being. Nobody appreciated his talents or his personality , so he had stopped using the former and hidden the latter. Top of Tom’s list of hates was his own office, which was the same size as the coat cupboard under his stairs at home, and had no windows – only a long, thin, glass panelin the door that looked out on to a gleaming white corridor. Idris’s office was the same. Inside the building, one was encouraged to believe that there was no outside.
    â€˜How are you?’ Tom asked Idris.
    â€˜Shit. I hate this fucking place. I wish someone’d plant a bomb here. I wish someone would release Sarin gas in the foyer. Sorry, the atrium ,’ Idris added with a sneer.
    I’d love to be as straightforward as Idris, thought Tom. He didn’t pursue the idea, however, because he knew it was pointless . He had never actively decided on the policy of saying the opposite of what he meant; it was simply what happened every time he opened his mouth. This had been the case ever since he was a child. His mother was prone to hysterical outbursts; she did enough unrestrained reacting for the whole family. At a young age, Tom had learned to tailor everything he said and did