The Secrets of Sunshine Read online

  ‘Okay.’ He handed her some money. ‘I’ll be just over here with Liza.’

  At the café counter, he bought two hot dogs and coffees and carried them across. His and Liza’s table had a good view of the rink.

  ‘I should be buying these instead to say sorry for last night,’ she said as she bit into her hot dog. ‘I can’t believe I thought dinner was a good idea. Though that chilli tasted really good.’

  He smiled sympathetically. ‘At least your mum and Naomi now know what’s been going on. Though Naomi looks to be keeping something to herself…’

  ‘She mentioned something about Yvette discovering Victor’s misdemeanours.’ Liza pursed her lips. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’m going to head up to her apartment tomorrow and take another look around. I want to make sure Victor’s not been there and to set my mind at rest. I feel spooked by what Naomi told us.’

  Mitchell imagined Liza on her own with a shadowy figure following her along lonely corridors. He felt an urge to protect her. ‘Maybe I should join you…’

  ‘You’ve done enough. I’m fine doing this on my own.’

  He sipped his coffee, considering what to do. The shame of not being there for Anita had curdled inside him for three years, but he could be here for the Bradfields. He wanted to find Yvette and help make their family whole again, because he could never do it for his own. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he insisted. ‘Poppy starts her activity club tomorrow. I’ve got one last day off before I go back into work.’

  ‘Henry’s accompanied me there a couple of times. But if you don’t mind?’

  That man’s name again. Mitchell didn’t like how it made him feel, and she mentioned him so casually, as if he was part of her family. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said firmly. ‘I want to do it.’

  ‘And now, ladies and gentleman,’ the speaker sounded again. ‘Time for our Skate and Date. Five minutes with each partner, starting now.’

  A whistle sounded. Eleven people stood around the perimeter of the rink and didn’t move.

  ‘I said now,’ the voice repeated grumpily.

  Mitchell watched as a woman, six inches taller than Barry, yanked his hand like a husky dog pulling a sled. She wore Princess Leia-style hair buns and a silver T-shirt. Barry’s jaw dropped, petrified, as she tugged him out onto the ice.

  Liza guffawed into her coffee. ‘I shouldn’t laugh, but…’

  Mitchell’s lips twitched, too, and soon they were both giggling like schoolchildren at the back of a classroom.

  They watched Barry until a whistle sounded again. A girl dressed all in orange approached him and they each skated a couple of steps before falling over. When one was up, the other was down, like the valves on a trumpet.

  By the time Barry was on his fourth date, his eyes were so full of terror that Liza couldn’t look at him any longer. Tears of laughter rolled down her cheeks.

  Mitchell tried to keep a straight face to show solidarity with his friend, but he couldn’t help chortling, too. Whenever he and Liza caught each other’s eyes, they triggered each other even more.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d found something so funny.

  When the fifth whistle blew, Barry stumbled off the ice and hobbled into the café area still wearing his skates. ‘Thanks for your support.’ He grimaced.

  ‘You’re not finished. You have one date left,’ Mitchell said. ‘Unless Amanda has shown up.’

  ‘No, she hasn’t.’ Barry tore the number sticker off his shirt. ‘And I’ve had enough.’

  Couples stop-started, skating hopelessly around the rink. One lady stood at the side, closest to the café, all alone. She was petite with short-cropped blonde hair and wore jeans and a bubblegum-pink T-shirt. Her lips were straight as she looked around for her date.

  ‘You can’t leave her there,’ Mitchell said.

  ‘I said I’ve had enou—’ Barry stopped, and his eyes focused on the lone skater.

  She smiled sadly over at him.

  ‘Barry?’ Mitchell said, but his friend was transfixed.

  Barry edged back towards the rink, as if in a trance. He skated over to the woman and held out his hand. She took it and they set off together, their feet hesitant but in perfect unison.

  Poppy and Rachel joined Mitchell and Liza at their table. ‘Aw,’ the two girls gushed as they watched Barry, too.

  Mitchell’s laughter had subsided, leaving him with glowing cheeks and a sore throat. He glanced over at the fridge behind the café counter, to see what cold drinks were on offer. When he saw a woman standing in the queue, his spine straightened up.

  She had her back to him and her coppery curls bobbed as she chatted to a friend. Her jacket was tomato red.

  Mitchell’s surroundings and everyone around him vanished, until he could see only her.

  Surely, it’s not…

  He wondered if she had seen him laughing with another woman, and an urge to explain to her who he was with and what he was doing here surged inside him.

  He stood up and banged his leg against the table. A pepper pot toppled over, but he didn’t notice.

  He was vaguely aware of Poppy saying, ‘Dad?’ and Liza uttering his name, as he stepped blindly away from them.

  He could hardly swallow as he got closer to her. What was she doing here? Why now?

  As he drew nearer, her hair was coarser than he remembered, and she was shorter. He tried to breathe in her violet scent, but could only smell strawberry slushies.

  But he still reached out a hand anyway and laid it gently on her shoulder. ‘Anita?’ he said.

  She turned and a woman he didn’t recognize, a stranger, gave him a bewildered smile. She was in her fifties and suddenly bore no resemblance to Anita at all.

  Mitchell snatched his hand away, as if burned. ‘Sorry, I thought you were someone else.’

  ‘S’okay.’ She shrugged, before returning to talk to her friend.

  And smack, Mitchell was suddenly back in the ice rink café, fully aware of what he was doing and who he was really with. His vision of Anita shot away.

  His face shone crimson as he excused himself away from the café counter, and he returned to Liza and the girls.

  ‘Dad?’ Poppy said. Her eyes flicked over to the red-coated woman. ‘Did you think that—’

  ‘No,’ he replied too quickly. ‘I thought it was someone from work. That’s all.’

  She looked at him with questioning eyes.

  Liza bit her lip. ‘Perhaps I should head off home… Do you still want to join me tomorrow?’

  ‘Um, tomorrow?’ Mitchell frowned.

  ‘Yes, to go to Yvette’s place. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to…’ she said cautiously.

  Mitchell glanced over at the vacant spot in front of the café counter where he thought he had seen Anita. Sadness washed over him. ‘It’s fine. I’ll still join you.’

  Liza smiled and tugged on Poppy’s plait. ‘Great, I’m pleased,’ she said, and then was gone.

  Poppy stared after her before she spoke to Rachel. ‘Shall we go home, too? I’m fed up now.’

  Mitchell sloped after the two girls towards the locker area. As he waited for them to collect their belongings, his phone pinged with a text. He thought it might be from Liza, but the number was withheld.

  I think my brother has your toolbox. If you want it back come to 23 Somerset House, Whitby Street, on Wednesday at 11.00 a.m.

  Mitchell knew he should feel heartened by the news that he might get his tools back, even though it was a strange message. But as he left the rink and walked out into the blinding sunshine, he felt himself reeling at his confused feelings.

  Anita’s imagined presence was often a comfort to him, but today, it had felt like an intrusion.

  That night, after Mitchell had changed out of his clothes and cleaned his teeth, thoughts of Anita still nagged his brain and he lay down in bed holding on to her lilac envelope. He wondered if seeing her at the ice rink was a sign for him
to finally open it, but he couldn’t bring himself to break its seal.

  Instead, Mitchell took the pad of Basildon Bond notepaper out from under his bed. It had been over a week since he last wrote to Anita, and he had the urge to do it now.

  Dearest Anita,

  So much has happened over the last nine days, I feel guilty for not writing to you sooner. A woman fell into a river and I jumped in to help her. (You know I don’t usually do anything without a plan.) Her name is Yvette and she’s been missing from her family for a year. I understand how they must feel, because you’re gone from my life, too. I’m helping Yvette’s sister Liza to find her.

  Poppy has taken a shine to Liza and the two of them have formed quite a bond. They went out shopping for clothes, which Poppy will wear to Graham’s wedding (yes, he’s really getting married).

  It’s good to see her smiling, but I worry about her getting too attached. I’m ashamed to admit it but I’ve had certain feelings for Liza. She’s nothing like you, though. She talks too much, and wears garish clothes, and I sometimes feel like I’ve stumbled out of a nightclub, woozy in the early hours of the morning, after I spend time with her. She’s not calm and together, like you. I’m not sure I can ever move on. Being with anyone other than you would just be a compromise too far.

  Love always,

  Mitchell x

  He stared at his words, noticing how, this time, they had slipped out. When he read over them, they stated exactly what he wanted to say. He had managed to share moments in his life with Anita, without his usual feeling of remorse and regret.

  After folding his letter once, he searched inside his nightstand drawer for a spare envelope, but they were all used up. So, he placed it on top of the stand with the others Susan had given him, and he settled down to sleep.

  19

  Ghosts

  Mitchell sat stiffly in Liza’s car as she played a series of classical tunes. The atmosphere between them was uncomfortable after their awkward goodbye at the ice rink the day before. Both their moods only lifted when Liza inserted a Crowded House CD instead.

  ‘You thought you saw Anita yesterday, didn’t you?’ she said as she drove onto the motorway. ‘I saw you go pale, like you’d seen a ghost.’

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he replied quickly.

  ‘That’s not what I asked. You’ve evaded my question.’

  He thought about denying it, but felt he owed her better than that. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I see her sometimes, in crowds or walking down the street. She’s usually out of reach, so I can’t call to her. But I thought I saw her at the café yesterday, right in front of me. I know it’s not her, but it’s like my brain doesn’t accept that.’

  ‘Because you want her to be real?’

  ‘What I want doesn’t really matter, because it can’t actually be.’ He felt prickly at this conversation.

  Liza thought for a while. ‘A lot of people think ghosts are these see-through things, or covered in a white sheet with eyeholes cut out, but I think they’re sometimes glimpses of the past to reassure us in the future.’

  He didn’t reply, not sure if his sightings of Anita particularly comforted him. Contradictory feelings of anticipation and sadness overwhelmed him, that she wasn’t really there.

  ‘When my dad died, I used to pretend it hadn’t happened,’ Liza explained. ‘He loved his shed, used to sit inside it and practise his clarinet for hours. I sometimes find his favourite pieces on my iPad and let them play in a different room, so I think he’s still here. Even after five years, it’s hard to accept he’s gone. Do you think that sounds stupid?’

  ‘No. I can understand it, and I’m sorry about yesterday,’ Mitchell said eventually, during the track ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over.’ ‘I wasn’t thinking straight.’

  Liza fixed her eyes on the road. ‘Things must have been difficult after, you know… for Poppy especially.’

  Mitchell felt something shutting down inside him, a portcullis of privacy that often appeared to cut himself from other people’s words. He could leave it there as a barrier against Liza, but there was something telling him to try to let her through. He just wasn’t sure how.

  ‘Did Poppy have any counselling?’ Liza asked when he didn’t respond. ‘It’s good to talk things through so they’re not going around in your head like a hamster wheel all the time.’

  Mitchell couldn’t stop himself from thinking back to those days.

  After Anita died, Poppy had weekly sessions at school. He’d attended a couple of them with her. Katerina the therapist wore lizard earrings and had a pierced nose. She had advised him to ‘just keep talking’ to Poppy.

  He had hooked on this, too vigorously, for months. Whenever the apartment was quiet, he punctured it with a stream of chatter about school, the weather, packed lunches, whatever he could think of, to break the silence. Until one day, Poppy had clapped her hands to her ears.

  ‘Just shut up, Dad. I can’t think straight.’

  And then he hadn’t known how much to say, and how much not to.

  He focused on answering Liza’s question. ‘She saw someone for a while, but said it wouldn’t bring her mum back. She’s pragmatic like that, and I told her she can always pick it back up. I left my architect job to be there for her more, though nothing can replace her mother. I concentrated on keeping busy, making lots of plans for the two of us.’ He thought of the papers fluttering on corkboards in his hallway. ‘I may have taken it too far.’

  ‘Hmm, they did look rather regimented,’ she said softly. ‘Most people use a diary or their phone these days. Just a thought.’

  He considered the simplicity of this and decided it might be less restrictive. ‘Maybe I’ll start,’ he said.

  ‘There’s hope for you yet.’

  When they arrived at Yvette’s place, Liza led the way. An old warehouse at the side of a canal had been converted into luxury apartments and the sun glinted off their glass balconies. The building was double the height of Angel House, ten stories tall.

  Liza took out a key. ‘Here we are, where the beautiful people live. All together in one place.’ She smiled wryly.

  He heard the hint of something sad in her words and wanted to tell her she was a beautiful person, too, but he didn’t say anything. When she put her shoulder against the door and held it open for him, he swallowed his thoughts and walked through.

  The lobby looked like a posh waiting room, all brilliant white walls and marble flooring.

  Liza headed to a row of mailboxes and took out a key for number thirty-six. ‘Yvette bought this place a couple of years ago. I pay the management company to collect and send Yvette’s post to me,’ she said. ‘Sometimes they miss stuff.’ She picked out a few pieces of mail from the metal box, a couple of pizza menus among them. ‘See?’

  She stuffed them into her bag and they took a lift up three floors. The stretch of blue carpet along a hallway reminded him of a hotel. When Liza unlocked Yvette’s door, the apartment smelled of lemon air freshener and musty cardboard. The room was bright but soulless, with a designer leather sofa and interior design books on a low coffee table. He had expected it to be bursting with colour, like Yvette’s yellow dress.

  ‘I’d offer you a coffee, but there’s no milk,’ Liza said. ‘The tap water doesn’t taste good. If I were you, I’d skip having a drink completely.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Maybe we could get one later?’

  Mitchell paused, not sure if she meant going to a pub together or not. ‘Sure, if we have time. I need to be home for Poppy when she returns from school.’

  ‘Right,’ Liza said briskly. She took the mail from her bag and dropped it onto the coffee table. ‘I’ll take another look around, probably my tenth time here. Feel free to browse, too. I keep thinking I might have missed something – a letter or a note, anything, really. I want to make sure there are no signs Victor has been here.’

  She walked into Yvette’s bedroom and he felt awkward about followin
g her. ‘God knows I’ve done this so many times already,’ she called to him. ‘Luckily, Yvette’s the neatest person I know – can’t stand any clutter. Not like Naomi’s place. That resembles a fight in a toy shop.’

  Mitchell circled the room and spotted a year-old copy of Vogue on the coffee table. He loosely flicked through it and set it down again. The leather sofa squeaked as he sat down and picked up another magazine. He could hear Liza opening and shutting drawers and the wardrobe doors in the other room, but he felt uncomfortable about searching around, too.

  After a while, Liza re-entered the sitting room and flopped down on the sofa beside him. ‘There’s nothing,’ she said, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘There never is. How could she just leave all this behind? She had everything going for her.’

  ‘Her place is beautiful,’ he agreed. ‘She must have a good job to live here.’

  Liza nodded. ‘There was only one year at secondary school, when all three of us overlapped. Yvette in the last year, Naomi in the first, and me in the middle. The older lads loved Yvette, with her high cheekbones and pencil skirts. She bought sweets and chocolates to sell at school, always business-minded. When she was sixteen, she could already afford to buy designer perfume and dated this divorced businessman in his thirties. He had two kids and Mum was not happy. Yvette never wanted kids, though, and dumped him pretty quickly. She loves her single life.

  ‘Naomi had these gorgeous puppy-dog eyes and men always wanted to protect her. All she ever wanted was to have her own family.’

  ‘You must have had a lot of attention, too,’ he said.

  ‘Well, thank you, kind sir,’ she said, then shook her head. ‘No, not really. I was the one in the middle, cursed by the greasy-hair fairy and generally invisible. Boys only spoke to me to ask about Naomi or Yvette. I could play the guitar, though, joined a rock band when I was fourteen, to Mum’s dismay. Not one of those band members ever hit on me. Saw me as one of them. I had snogs at parties, but no one ever asked me to dance with them. That’s all I ever wanted, to feel good enough for some guy to ask me… What about you? Did you have girls lining up for you?’