Past Secrets. Cathy Kelly

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.’

      Faye breathed an inward sigh of relief at this rapid turn in the conversation. It meant she didn’t need to discuss the concept of Amber’s father waiting patiently for her in heaven. Not that he’d have waited. Patience had never been one of his virtues.

      It was because saying he was there already would be a lie and now that Amber was older, it was getting harder and harder to lie. Adults lied to children all the time, little white ones for their own good. But time had turned Faye’s white lie into a giant black one and now she couldn’t stomach repeating it any more.

      ‘I think the whole problem with heaven is that nobody really knows anything about it,’ she said, copping out. ‘You’re supposed to believe even though you don’t know.’

      Amber grimaced.

      ‘That’s what the whole faith thing is about,’ Faye added, feeling she was on shaky ground here. ‘Believing when you don’t know for sure.’ Like you’ve always believed me, she thought guiltily. ‘You could ask Stan. He studied theology.’

      ‘The thing is, you have one person who’s right for you, your soul mate, the one who’s waiting for you,’ Amber said. ‘But if they die, how can you meet another soul mate? There’s only going to be one person who makes you feel complete, who you can’t wait to see and talk to, right? Isn’t there? People say that, anyway,’ Amber added hurriedly. She bent her head to her book again.

      A few more minutes passed by and Faye tugged listlessly at a couple of weedy plants, obsessing over her daughter’s vision of her dad happily waiting in heaven for Faye to turn up. Amber never needed to know, did she?

      ‘Ella said something totally crazy the other day, Mum.’ Amber broke the silence.

      ‘She said that maybe you have to pretend not to be independent and that’s what men like. That’s crap, isn’t it? Why should you pretend? I told her, Ella, you have to be you.’ Amber was earnest, sounding like a much-married matron explaining the ways of the world to a teenage bride.

      ‘That doesn’t sound like Ella.’ Faye knew her daughter’s best friend as if she were her own daughter. Like Amber, Ella was clever, sweet, responsible and had never caused a moment’s trouble in her life. ‘What’s come over her?’

      ‘Giovanni’s new girlfriend, that’s who,’ Amber went on. ‘Dannii. With two i’s and little hearts over each of them. The hearts are very important. She’s messing up Ella’s head and saying that the reason Ella and me don’t have boyfriends is because we’re too clever and too independent and guys don’t like that.’ Amber snorted dismissively.

      Giovanni was Ella’s youngest brother and Faye had heard about this new girlfriend enough times for alarm bells to tinkle gently. Giovanni was in his second year in college, handsome like all Ella’s half-Italian family, and Faye knew Amber had a mild crush on him, despite the fact that she said he was boring. The appearance of an