Past Secrets

Amber could capture anyone or anything with her pencil, although her particular gift was for buttery oil landscapes, wild moody places with strange houses that looked like no houses on earth. Even in a large class, Amber stood out because she was so sparky and alive.

An unfashionable pocket Venus shape, with softly curved limbs and a small, plumply rounded face, her only truly beautiful feature was that pair of magnetic pewter eyes, with the ring of deepest amber around the pupils. She’d never have been picked as one of the school’s beauties, the languorous leggy girls with chiselled cheekbones. Yet Amber’s vivaciousness and the intelligence of those eyes gave her an attractiveness that few of the teenage beauty queens could match. And the artist in Christie could see the girl’s sex appeal, an intangible charm that a photographer might not capture but an artist would.

Christie knew that unless St Ursula’s had been evacuated for some strange reason that morning, Amber should be in school. And yet here she was, trip-trapping along in achingly high heels and a colourful flippy skirt that flowed out over her hips – unlike the institutional grey school uniform skirt that jutted out in an unflattering A-line. Amber was holding a mobile phone to her ear and Christie could just overhear.

‘I’m just leaving now. Has anyone noticed I’m not there? MacVitie’s not got her knickers in a twist over the absence of her best student?’

Mrs MacVitie was the maths teacher and Christie doubted that Amber, who was typically left-brained and hopeless at maths, was her best student. Favourite, perhaps, because it was hard to resist Amber, who always paid attention in class and was a polite, diligent student. But not best.

She must be speaking to Ella O’Brien, to whom she was joined at the hip, and Ella obviously told her that no, the St Ursula’s bloodhounds had not been alerted.

‘Sweet. If anyone asks, you think I was sick yesterday and it must have got worse. I phoned in earlier and told the school secretary I was sick but, just in case, you back me up and say I’m puking like mad. It’s true,’ Amber laughed. ‘I’m sick of school, right?’

Christie wondered if Faye, Amber’s mother, knew what her daughter was up to.

Faye Reid was a widow, a quiet, businesslike figure who’d never missed a school meeting and was utterly involved in her daughter’s life. Even though they lived on the same street, Christie didn’t see much of Faye. She kept herself to herself, head down, rushing everywhere, clad in conservative navy suits and low-heeled shoes, with a briefcase by her side. There was such a contrast between the butterfly beauty of Amber who had the best of everything and caught people’s eyes, and her mother, who always appeared to be rushing to or from work, trying hard to keep the mortgage paid and food on the table. A person didn’t need Christie’s gift of intuition to see that Faye’s life had been one of sacrifices.

‘She’s one of the most gifted students I’ve ever taught,’ Christie had told Faye two years before, shortly after Amber arrived in her class. ‘Any art college in the world would love to have her.’

And Faye’s face had lit up. Christie had never seen a smile transform a person so much. Faye was defiantly plain beside her daughter, overweight to Amber’s curved sexiness and with her brown hair pulled severely back into a knot that only someone with the bones of a supermodel could get away with. Faye Reid didn’t have the supermodel bones. But when she smiled that rare smile, she suddenly had all the charm of her daughter and Christie caught herself wondering why a woman like Faye, who could only be forty, lived such a quiet life. No man had ever been seen kissing Faye a wistful goodbye on the doorstep. Her clothes, the discreet earrings and low shoes that screamed comfort – they were like armour. It was as if Faye had deliberately turned her back on youthful sexiness and hidden behind a façade of plain clothes.

Christie wondered if she could see more…but suddenly, it was as if Faye Reid had abruptly closed herself off and Christie could see nothing but the woman in front of her.

‘Thanks, Mrs Devlin,’ Faye said. ‘That’s what I think too, but I love her so much, I thought I was totally biased. Every parent thinks their kid is Mozart or Picasso, don’t they?’

‘Not all,’ replied Christie grimly, thinking of some of the parents she’d met over the years with no belief in their kids whatsoever.

Her comment apparently touched a chord with Faye and the smile vanished to be replaced by her more usual, sombre expression. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she said, nodding. ‘There are always a few who don’t appreciate their kids. Nothing that twenty years of psychotherapy wouldn’t cure.’

Up ahead, Amber said a cheery ‘byee’ into her phone. Christie knew that the correct teacher response at this point would be to catch up with her and ask what she was doing out of school. But suddenly Amber broke into a run, high heels notwithstanding, and was gone down the street before Christie could move.

Christie shrugged. Amber was a good student, hardly a serial absentee. She and Ella had never been part of the school’s wilder cliques and had both managed to move from adolescence to young womanhood without any noticeable bursts of rebellious behaviour.

There might be a perfectly good reason for her absence today. And Christie herself knew that you could learn plenty of things outside school as well as in.

When she’d been young, she hadn’t done everything by the book either.

Yet again, Christie thought about the past and the places she’d lived. The house in Kilshandra with bitterness and misery engrained into the wallpaper so that she’d barely been able to wait till she was old enough to leave. The bedsit on Dunville Avenue where she’d met so many friends and learned that she didn’t have to hide her gift. And Summer Street, where all the best things in her life had happened.

She could remember what the young Christie had looked like when she’d moved to Summer Street – long dark hair drawn back in a loose ponytail, always in jeans and T-shirts – and she could remember how lucky she’d been, with a kind husband, enough money so they weren’t in debt, with one beautiful, healthy child and another on the way. Yes, the years on Summer Street were the ones she liked to remember.

But there were other times she’d like to forget.

The strange feeling came through her again and despite the warmth of the morning, Christie shivered.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_a1625e1c-681b-5e6a-a250-ae8a5091fcda)

Amber Reid was concentrating so fiercely on getting to the bus stop in time that she hadn’t noticed Mrs Devlin walking along Summer Street behind her. This was despite her intention to watch out for anyone who might sneak to her mother about her appearance out of uniform on a school day.

‘We’re going on a field trip,’ Amber had planned to say blithely should the need arise, though the final-year students at St Ursula’s didn’t have time for field trips this close to the all-important state exams. And even if they did, what sort of field trip would require her best high heels – Oxfam spindly sandals revitalised with bronze paint – a sliver of a silk camisole and a flippy skirt, all topped off with the curious and fabulous silver tiger’s-eye pendant she’d recently found buried in her mother’s bottom drawer? The pendant was a mystery. She’d never seen her mum wear it. Faye dressed in boring suits and was resolutely against making the best of herself, no matter what Amber said. The pendant was so not ‘her’. Amber was still wondering where her mother had come by such a thing. She didn’t like to ask, because Mum would be hurt that she had been snooping. But it was odd of her to keep it hidden because they shared everything.

Well, not everything. Amber felt a splinter of guilt pierce her happy little cocoon. Today was a secret she couldn’t share with her mother. It wasn’t the first time she had concealed something. Mum was so square, so protective, that on the rare occasion that Amber had done anything outside her mother’s rigid code of what was acceptable, she’d had to fib a little. But the current secret was certainly the biggest.

Ella had phoned just as Amber slammed the front door behind her.

‘Ring me later and tell me how you got on, won’t you?’ Ella begged.

‘Promise.’

‘Wish I was bunking off,’ Ella grumbled. ‘I’ve history in ten minutes and I haven’t finished my bloody essay on the Civil War.’

‘Sorry, I did mine and I could have lent it to you so you could use some of my ideas,’ Amber apologised. She loved history and the words flowed effortlessly from her pen to the page. Although how she’d written her essay last night was largely a mystery, as she’d been consumed with excitement thinking about today.

When she’d said goodbye to Ella, she broke into a run so as to race past the Summer Street Café in case of neighbours lurking within.

A minute later, she was at the bus stop on Jasmine Row, just in time to catch the 10.05 bus into the city, and Karl.

Karl. She whispered his name to herself as she gazed dreamily out of the windows on the top deck. Karl and Amber. Amber and Karl.

It sounded just right, like they were destined to be together.

Destiny had never been a concept Amber had held much faith in up to now. Just a few weeks away from her eighteenth birthday, and a month from the hated exams, she felt that she was in charge of her own life.

So she’d only been half paying attention when Ella read their horoscopes that fateful Friday at lunch. Horoscopes were fun but hardly to be relied on. Mum always insisted that Amber was responsible for herself and that life should not be lived on the word of what some astrologer had dreamed up for that day.

Mum was firm that Amber should never follow the crowd or do anything just because of someone else’s opinion or because ‘everyone else is doing it’. It was a lesson Amber had followed very well up to now.

‘Crap for Aries, as usual,’ muttered Ella, reading hers quickly. ‘“Rethink your options but don’t let your enthusiasm wane.” What does that mean? Why doesn’t it ever give us hints on what’s coming up in the maths paper? Now that would really be seeing the future.’

They were eating lunch on the gym roof – strictly forbidden but the current cool spot for sixth years – plotting their weekend and how to fit exam study in around at least one trip to the shopping centre to flip through rails of clothes they couldn’t afford. All study and no play made you go mad, Ella insisted.

‘Yours is better. “Single Taureans are going to find love and passion. Expect sparks to fly this weekend.”’

‘Sparks at the football club disco?’ Amber roared with laughter at the very ridiculousness of this idea. It was the same big gang of people she’d known all her life and you couldn’t get excited about a bunch of guys you’d watched grow up. Where was the mystique or the romance of that?

‘Patrick?’

‘Too nice. He’d want to walk along with his hand in your jeans pocket and yours in his and discuss the engagement party. Gross.’

‘Greg’s cute.’

‘He called me Chubby Face once. No way.’ Growing three inches taller in the past year meant Amber had gone from being childishly plump to womanly and voluptuous. The addition of honeyed streaks in her rich brown hair meant that all the boys who’d previously talked to her like a clever younger sister suddenly sat up and took notice.

This new power over guys was heady and Amber was still testing it, gently. But she wanted to go somewhere more exciting than the football club disco to do so. Somewhere, beyond the confines of Summer Street, the football club disco and St Ursula’s was Life with a capital L: pulsing, exciting, waiting for her.

‘You’re getting so choosy,’ said Ella. ‘You fancied Greg last year.’

‘That was last year.’