A Scandalous Secret Read Free Page A

as she squeezed toothpaste onto the bristles and started to brush.
    The trip to India was nearly upon them now but, strangely, Sonya hadn’t got around to doing her packing yet. She, who was usually so OCD her packing was done weeks before a holiday. It was two weeks before their departure for Lanzarote a few summers ago that her dad had discovered Sonya was getting her toothbrush out of her suitcase every morning. She wasn’t that bad anymore, but, with only a few days to go now for India, she had not even got her case out of the loft. She wasn’t sure she could explain it but a strange kind of malaise had crept over her a few weeks ago. Perhaps she could blame Mum and Dad for being so negative about her going off to India. Or perhaps it was that at some level Sonya was herself terrified of what she would find when she got there. But she really ought to get packed today, given that she and Estella were due to fly next week …
    Sonya wandered back into her bedroom and sat with a thump on her cushioned window seat instead. She looked out of the bay window and saw a clutch of childrenwearing uniforms at the bus stop down the road while an empty milk float trundled past her gate. It was obviously much earlier than she’d thought, and so Sonya lay back against the cushions and put her feet up, enjoying the feel of the sun on her toes. Distractions were aplenty as most of the clutter that was visible from Sonya’s present perch held – as her mum sometimes said – ‘a memory or three’. Half the things in the room were presents from Mum and Dad anyway, all kinds of mementos and photographs that marked birthdays and special events. But that clay cat, grinning from atop the dresser, was a present from Estella given to mark the day they left junior school. And around its neck were two pendants: one a red plastic heart that Tim had given her on Valentine’s Day along with a bronze skull pendant that Sonya had bought at a Limp Bizkit heavy metal concert last year. Nestled between the cat’s legs was a glass vial filled with various different types of sand, a memento from their family holiday in Lanzarote five years ago. Being a sentimental sort, Sonya found it hard to throw anything away and, among the vast collection of hairbands that hung colourfully from a mug-tree, were a few tiny ones decorated with plastic flowers that dated all the way back to her childhood when she had first heard of art collections and declared herself to be a Hairband Collector instead.
    All in all, the style of her room was what Estella – who had herself gone all Scandinavian minimalist in design taste – once tartly described as ‘Terence Conran’s worst nightmare’. It was true that, every time the look and style of her room was revamped, Sonya had determinedly hung on to some of its previous features – her ‘Higgledy-Piggledy House’ Mum had called it, but she wasn’t going to have it any other way.
    Sonya grinned, remembering shooing Dad away when he had got into one of his redecorating fits recently, demanding that her room be kept exactly as it was when she left for uni. It had taken some convincing because there had been six rolls of expensive Farrow & Ball wallpaper left over from the study room – smart stripes in maroon and gold – that Dad was convinced would be a centre piece if used on the eastern wall, while the rest of her bedroom remained its existing plummy purple. But she couldn’t get rid of her purple walls – this grown-up look had been carefully chosen as a treat for her sixteenth birthday two years ago. She’d gone with her father to the huge out-of-town B&Q to choose the colour and they had come back with not just brushes and cans of paint, but a set of mirrored black wardrobes that Dad had spent the whole weekend putting together just so that it would be ready for her party. And what a party that had been; with a marquee erected