Nicci French - Secret Smile

'You mean me,' said my mother. 'I'm the one who fusses. I know I fuss. I try to stop myself and stand back, but I can't help it. I feel if I could just help push you back on to the tracks, everything would be all right for you.'

'You should trust me.'

'How can we trust you,' asked my father, 'when you skip lessons and lie to us?'

'It's my life,' said Troy mutinously. 'I'm seventeen. If I want to skip lessons, that's my choice. If I fuck up, it's my fuck-up, not yours. You treat me like a little child.'

'Oh,' said my mother. It sounded like a moan.

'If you want to be treated like an adult, you've got to behave like one,' said my father. He rubbed his forehead, then added, 'It's because we love you, Troy.'

My father never says things like that.

'I'll make us those sandwiches,' I said, backing into the windy, half-wrecked kitchen.

When I came back in, carrying a tray loaded with toasted sandwiches oozing melted cheese, and four mugs of tea, my mother had red eyes and had clearly been crying. She said, ' Troy says he'd like to stay with you for a while.'

'Oh,' I said. 'Well, I'd love that, Troy. It'd be great. The snag is, I'm not living there at the moment, Brendan and Kerry are.'

'Not for long, though,' said Troy. 'I can stay there with them for a couple of weeks or so, and then you'll be back. Right?'

'You know how much I want you to stay,' I said, 'but can't you wait just for a week or so?'

'Why?'

I stared at him helplessly. 'Are you sure you'll be all right with Kerry and Brendan?'

He shrugged. 'They'll fuss too much as well. It'll be better with you.'

'So wait.'

'I need to move now.'

'I'll be around,' I said. 'Just call me when you need me, OK?'

'OK.'

The following day I took time off work and went with Troy to the Aquarium. We spent two hours there, noses pressed against the glass. Troy loved the tropical fish, glinting like shards of coloured glass, but my favourite were the great flat fish with their stitched upside-down faces. They looked friendly and puzzled as they floated through the water with their bodies waving. Afterwards I drove him to my parents' house to pack his stuff. Brendan and Kerry were going to collect him in a few hours' time. I hugged him hard.

'I'll come and see you there very soon,' I said. 'A day or two.'

In fact, hardly an hour passed without me discovering something that I'd forgotten. I actually had to carry a piece of paper and a pen around with me so that I could keep a list. I could buy more knickers, but I couldn't buy everything. Three more T-shirts. Nail clippers. Conditioner. Woolly hat. Chequebook. Street map. It was just ridiculous, so after work the next day I went to my flat with the shopping list. Inside, I found Brendan and Troy playing cards in the main room. They looked over at me in some surprise. Brendan said something, but I couldn't hear him over the music. I marched across the room and turned it down.

'I can hardly hear it,' said Troy. 'You'd have to put a stethoscope against the speaker to hear that.'

'I just popped in to collect some stuff,' I said.

'That's fine,' said Brendan. 'Go ahead.'

The very idea of Brendan airily telling me to go ahead in my own flat made me want to boil a kettle of water and pour it over his head. I couldn't speak. But then I did speak.

'How are you doing, Troy?'

'Pretty well, aren't we?' said Brendan. Troy smiled at me and raised his eyebrows.

I went into my bedroom. Unsurprisingly, this was where Troy was sleeping, and in only a day my room had started to look the way that his bedroom always looked. The bed was unmade, there were clothes on the floor, books lying open, a funny sweaty smell. I was as quick as I could possibly be. I threw some things into a carrier bag I'd brought with me. I pushed the door gently to and climbed up and reached for the book where I had hidden the money. I counted it and felt my skin crawl as I did so. Sixty pounds. I counted it again. Sixty. Couldn't he just have taken it all? What was he doing with me? I put the rest of the money in my purse. I went back out into the main room.

'I had some money in my bedroom,' I said.

Brendan looked round cheerfully.

'Yes?'

'Some of it's gone. I wondered if anybody had borrowed it.'

Brendan shrugged.

'Not guilty,' he said. 'Where was it?'

'What does that matter?'

'It might have got lost or fallen down the back of something.'

'It doesn't matter,' I said. 'Also, I can't find my Tampax.'

'Kerry may have borrowed it,' Brendan said. 'She's having her period.'

'Borrowed it?'

'Yes,' said Brendan. 'It's anal sex only at the moment.'

I couldn't quite believe what I'd heard. I felt bile rise, sour and sharp, in the back of my throat.

'Sorry?' I said.

'Only joking,' said Brendan, grinning at Troy, whose face had gone as blank as a stone. 'Miranda likes it when I tease her. At least I think she does. It's your deal.'

I started going over it all in my head, and I tried to explain it to Nick. I told him how I'd put the slip of paper in the door and how it had been in a different place when I checked it. I took a sip of wine. We were sitting in a wine bar on Tottenham Court Road, just round the corner from his flat.

'I'm finding it rather complicated,' I said. 'You know in films where they leave a slip of paper and then they see it lying on the floor and they know someone's been there?'

'Yes,' said Nick. 'It happened in The Sting. Robert Redford did it because these gangsters were after him.'

'Really?' I said. 'I think I saw it on TV years ago. I can't remember that bit. I'm terrible about films. I forget them completely.' I took another gulp of wine. It felt like I was drinking more than Nick was. He was sitting there, being all calm and sober, and I was talking and drinking. 'The difficult thing for me was the slip of paper being back but in an obviously different place. Do you see what I mean?'

'No,' said Nick.

I found it hard to work out myself. I really had to stop to think about it. It hurt my brain.

'The thing is,' I said, 'most people wouldn't notice the piece of paper at all. And maybe, like five per cent of people would spot the paper and they would make a huge effort to put it back exactly where it had been left in order to disguise that they'd opened the door. But of that five per cent about five per cent – do you see that? Five per cent of the five per cent – a tiny Machiavellian group – would deliberately put the piece of paper in an obviously different place. They're calling your bluff, do you see?'

'Not really,' said Nick.

I could see that Nick's attention was wandering, that he was becoming impatient, but I couldn't stop myself. I didn't want to stop myself. In a way I wanted to test him. If you like someone – or love them – you don't mind them being obsessed with something. You don't even mind them being boring. Perhaps I wanted to see how tolerant he could be towards me.

'Brendan is playing with me. He put that piece of paper there deliberately so that I knew that it had been put back. But also so that I knew that he had put it back so that I would know that he had not tried to conceal that he had been in my room.' I took another sip of wine. 'He was sending me a message. He was saying: "You were suspecting that I was looking in your room; I know that you were suspecting me; I want to show you that I know; I also want to show you that I don't care that you know; also, I have been in your room and you don't know what I've actually been up to." That's another thing. I left seventy-five pounds hidden in a book. It's my secret stash.'

'Can't you just go to the bank machine like other people?' Nick asked.

'That's no good,' I said. 'Sometimes the bank machines run out of money. You should always have some cash hidden somewhere. Now, any normal thief would have taken all the money. But Brendan just took fifteen pounds. He was teasing me. He's trying to get into my head.'