Do You Want to Know a Secret? Read online

  About the Book

  Vicky Harper is still hopelessly single and having to face up to the unpalatable fact that the last time she had a relationship with that highly elusive species, the decent single man, was well before Phantom of the Opera hit Broadway.

  So, having discovered an ancient book which says you can have anything you want from the Universe . . . and that all you need do is ask, she decides to give it a whirl. Turns out all she has to do is focus on thinking her wildest fantasies into reality. Kind of like Pollyanna, except with a Magic 8 Ball, a mortgage and a lot of vodka.

  So, along with her two beyond-fabulous best friends, Vicky decides to put ‘The Law of Attraction’ into action. Trouble is, ‘The Law of Attraction’ doesn’t come with an instruction manual and Vicky soon realizes that you have to be very, very careful what you wish for. . .

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Claudia Carroll

  Copyright

  For Marianne. With love and thanks, always.

  Chapter One

  RIGHT THEN, HERE goes.

  Happy, positive things about turning, ahem . . . Well, let’s just say about ‘getting another year older’ today.

  1. I am finally able to handle my hairdresser.

  2. I have learned to say ‘NO’, simply, clearly, emphatically and without any residue emotional guilt whatsoever. Unless it’s a guy asking me out, that is, in which case, sorry, but at my age, as long as he’s straight and has a job, then, hey, he passes the Vicky test.

  3. I now understand the concept of Sky Plus and am able to work it. Sort of.

  4. At long last, I accept each of the following, in no particular order.

  - I will never carry off a pair of skinny jeans and may as well stop forking out for incredibly pricey gym membership, which invariably I only use the week before I go on holidays and am obliged to shoehorn myself into a bikini.

  I am kidding no one, only myself.

  - Nor will I ever become the effortless cook I once dreamed of, and I hereby vow to stop doing my usual trick of buying ready-made meals from Marks & Spencer, then artfully arranging them in oven-proof dishes, while disposing of the packaging, or hard evidence, if you will, in the outside bin so that none of my more devious friends (Barbara Fox, take a bow) will suspect that I’m a dirty big cheat. This, also, fools no one but me. Particularly as Barbara does most of her shopping in Marks & Spencer too.

  5. I’m now scarily advanced into my thirties and still single. The time has come to accept that, unless I’m prepared to go down the grade-A-gay-sperm-and-a-spatula route, I will never have a child and will end up one of those sad old ladies in retirement homes who no one ever visits at Christmas, except kids from the local school and only then because it’s part of their detention.

  Ouch, ouch, ouch. That last one really hurt.

  6. Furthermore, just while I’m doling out tough love, I will now stop believing that fortune-tellers, palm readers and psychics hold the key to my future. Every year I go to one, every year I’m promised that my future husband is out there for me, and every year he’s a no-show.

  Honest to God, if I ever do meet the poor idiot I’m destined to spend the rest of my life with, the first thing I’ll do is smack him across the face and tell him it serves him right for being so bloody unpunctual.

  7. And while we’re on the subject of monumental let-downs, the time has come for me to come clean and finally accept that feng shui isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. Embarrassment prevents me from recording on these pages how much I forked out for a self-styled ‘lifestyle and home-design guru’ (I am NOT making this up), to call out to my house, make me shift the TV out of the relationship corner, and then place pictures of lovey-dovey couples in my south-west corner with big lumps of rose quartz beside them. She then gave me a daily affirmation (‘love does not conform to schedule’), and told me that I should really stop panic-dating, tell myself I’m a goddess and fully embrace my aloneness.

  And there was me thinking you had to go to a hairdresser for that kind of deep, psychological insight.

  Right, enough’s enough. Decision made. At the grand old age of, ahem, never you mind, I hereby make this, my solemn vow. No more clairvoyants, psychics, mystics, cosmic ordering, on-line tarot readers or spending ages in the office pretending to be working when in actual fact I’m checking out my astrological compatibility with whatever guy I happen to be daydreaming about at the time. Time to act my age and leave my destiny in the very capable hands of the universe.

  Yes, love it, brilliant plan.

  Oh yeah, except that . . . emm . . . maybe I’ll just start tomorrow.

  Well, the Mind, Body, Spirit, Health and Healing Exhibition is on after work tonight, and I can’t very well miss out on that, now can I?

  Birthdays are so fabulous, the one day out of three hundred and sixty-five when you are allowed full emotional leverage over your best friend to drag her along to absolutely anything, against her will, with the promise of a lovely sushi meal afterwards plus as many margaritas as she can handle. My best friend, the aforementioned Barbara Fox, is just fabulous, you’d love her. When I grow up, I want to be her. We’ve been mates ever since primary school, all the way through college; and as Barbara always says, men may come and go, blue eyeliner and the bubble perm may come and go, but true friends are like the Manolo sling-back or the Hermès Birkin bag . . . here to stay whether we like it or not. In all our years of friendship, we really have been through thick and thin together; thick mostly. And, in short, like I always joke with Barbara, my love for her is a bit like my appendix scar. Ugly and permanent.

  So anyway, I drag her off to the exhibition, kicking and screaming. I’m not messing. Only my solemn promise that, come her birthday, I’ll be her white slave for the day and will even go to one of her beloved rugby matches with her, should she so decree, shuts her up.

  ‘This is what community service must feel like,’ she whinges as we head into the packed hall, forking out twenty euro just for admission. ‘Deliver us from drivel, that’s all I ask, and if anyone comes near me with a crystal and threatens to cleanse my chakras, I’m so outta here.’

  Barbara, I should point out, is absolutely cynical about anything remotely other-worldly and is probably the only woman I know who doesn’t even bother reading her horoscope. I, on the other hand, will try anything once, and by that, I really do mean anything. I even did a novena to St Clare at one point, a few years back now, which, according to my mum, has never EVER been known to fail. Mum, the polar opposite of Barbara, is staunch Catholic, a daily Mass-goer and so deeply religious that she’s still not over the death of Pope John Paul II.

  ‘I can�
��t take to that new German, Benedict or whatever he calls himself,’ she’s always saying. ‘The eyes are far too close together for my liking.’ Then, with a heartfelt sigh, ‘Ah sure, there’ll only ever be the one Pope.’

  Anyway, I was just so knickers in love with this particular emotionally unavailable guy (invariably the usual type I attract) that even if it meant going down on my hands and knees to Heaven for things to work out, then that’s what I was prepared to do.

  The novena itself was straightforward enough, all you had to do was say nine Hail Marys for nine days and it promised to deliver three favours for you, one personal: ‘Dear St Clare, if he’s the right man for me, then please let things work out with . . . well, let’s just call him Mr X.’ One professional: ‘Please can Barbara get the part she’s up for in that movie with whatshisname, your man who used to be James Bond, she’s a resting actress and hasn’t worked in so long that she’s actually starting to wonder if the profession is any different now, and this would be the big break she really needs, please, St Clare, ah go on, go on, go on.’ And one impossible: ‘Finally, please can I be happily married and pregnant within a year, St Clare . . . well, you did specify impossible, didn’t you?’

  You should have seen me. I was like Aladdin discovering the magic lantern and making my three wishes, but, wouldn’t you know, the success-rate of that particular excursion into Catholicism was zero out of three. Although to be brutally honest, I didn’t really expect it to work anyway, on the principle that life just isn’t like that really, is it? Mum had the last word on the subject, wisely pointing out that God is not a bit impressed with people like me who don’t attend church, don’t do anything they’re supposed to do, and then expect favours to be lavished on them, just because they bothered to ask. Ho hum. Back to the drawing board.

  The exhibition hall is jammers and when we eventually do get inside, we’re immediately approached by this hippy-dippy-looking guy wearing open-toed sandals, at a stand with a sign in front of it saying, ‘Cosmic Orders Accepted Here!’

  Well, actually it would be more correct to say that he approaches Barbara, who’s just one of those women who guys seem to lose their reason over. We all have a Barbara in our lives, you know, those rare, lucky, lucky women who men just fall over themselves to go out with, begging them for dates. Everyone fancies her. Now, she is fabulous-looking, in a tall, lean, leggy, titian, curly-haired way, kind of like Nicole Kidman pre-Tom Cruise and most definitely pre-Botox, but for her part, she does absolutely nothing to encourage this reaction from guys. And I should know, over the years I’ve practically studied her modus operandi in action, on the off chance that I could pick up any dating tips from her. Honestly, at this stage, I could probably write a thesis on her behaviour in bars alone. But Barbara really, truly, genuinely isn’t looking for anyone special and just effortlessly flits from relationship to relationship leaving a trail of broken hearts behind her.

  Theirs, I hasten to add, never, ever hers.

  I don’t know what her gift is, but the best way I can describe it is like this lethal, man-eating pheromone which she exudes from her pores that says: ‘You can ask me out, or not, whatever, frankly I couldn’t be bothered, I’d rather stay home and watch my DVD box set collection of Lost’ . . . and men go bananas over her. The irony is that here’s me dying for a fella I can call my own, and they run a mile from me, whereas all Barbara has to do is be her fabulous, non-committal, nonchalant self and they immediately turn into her slobbering lapdogs.

  I swear, she was a ‘Rules’ girl before they’d even invented the term, but never with marriage as her end goal; she’s just having a laugh and casting her dating net wide, as she calls it, all the while waiting for her big break in showbiz to come along. We often talk about this: I moan about how I’m turning into a human man-repeller and she jokes about how unemployable she feels, and how every single casting she now goes to, the parts invariably go to younger, perter, perkier twenty-somethings, so hungry they’d scratch your eyes out just for a walk-on part in something . . . anything.

  Fab wing-woman that she is though, Barbara invariably points out that while I may be single and whinging, I am doing pretty much my dream job, which I do have to admit is true. I run my own PR company, by the way, and yes, I am very, very lucky. It’s great crack, there’s always loads of lovely invites to launches, and more freebies than I or my pals can sometimes handle. And business is booming so much that I’ve had to take on two extra staff, so no complaints there. In other words, while Barbara has a string of guys practically impaling themselves to ask her out, I, on the other hand, may be on my own, but at least I do have disposable income.

  We’re always telling each other, if we could just somehow trade life problems, we’d be grand.

  Anyway, back to the exhibition.

  ‘Peace be with you, ladies, would you care to place an order with the cosmos?’ asks Sandal Man, and I’m not joking, the combined whiff of garlic, incense and stale BO from him is making my tummy churn a bit. Talk about taking a holiday from hygiene . . .

  ‘What did you just ask me?’ Barbara practically snarls back at him, reacting as if he’d asked her for the loan of a kidney. I decide the best thing is to exercise extreme tact and diplomacy here, and gently steer her away.

  ‘This way, honey, you’re not ready for cosmic ordering,’ I say firmly. ‘But it was worth the admission price alone just to see the look on your face.’

  ‘Cosmic ordering? Explain please, in words of one syllable.’

  ‘Well, the theory is, instead of asking the universe for what you want, you order it, with a set delivery date and all, then you relax and forget about it and just wait for it to happen.’

  ‘So, let me get this straight, it’s a bit like the way you used to write into Jim’ll Fix It when you were ten.’

  ‘Sort of, yeah.’

  ‘And has this cosmic whaddya call it ever actually worked for you?’

  ‘Emm . . . well, you see . . .’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘OK, not really, no, but then I worried and stressed about things NOT happening fast enough for me, and that just delays delivery, apparently. When you order something and let it go, it acts like an express order on the universe. At least that’s what the book says.’

  ‘God, you sound like such a prescription-pad job. Lucky for you I’m your friend and therefore non-judgemental at the amount of money you waste on this crap.’

  ‘It is NOT crap, and what’s more, I’m going to prove it to you.’

  I take a glance around at the aura consultants (no, Barbara would run a mile), channellers (ditto), and face-readers (let’s not even go there), before I hit on something.

  ‘Right, come on then, whether you like it or not you are having your tarot cards read. You have no choice, it’s my birthday.’

  ‘OK then, but I’m telling you now, you’re only allowed to use that once today.’

  ‘And it goes without saying, as a trade-off, I’ll do anything you want come your birthday. Anything.’

  ‘Oh birthdays, please. What’s to celebrate? My bum dropping another inch?’

  There’s a fortune-teller sitting behind a very official-looking desk, so I steer Barbara over. She’s doesn’t look anything like those Mystic Meg types you see in magazines, you know, all dressed in black with beaded headscarves, beads hanging out of them and with three teeth in their head, saying, ‘Cross my palm with silver, lovie.’

  No, this one almost looks like she might work in the passport office; she’s even wearing a suit, which I feel might appeal to Barbara’s, ahem, no-nonsense nature. I plonk her down, fork out fifty euro for the reading and tell her I’ll be back in ten minutes and that on no account is she to make a bolt for the exit when I’m not looking.

  Then I spot another fortune-teller just across the hall, oooh, yes . . . now we’re talking. This woman looks right up my alley, she has a crystal ball in front of her and a sign that says SHARON, SPIRITUALIST, SHAMAN AND SAGE TO THE STARS. Th
ere’s even a photo of her standing beside Oprah Winfrey, so that proves she must really be good, mustn’t it? I mean, everyone knows Oprah is like this total entrepreneurial genius on top of everything else, so she’d hardly waste her time with a complete messer/chancer/con-artist, now would she?

  All excited, I sit down, hand over another fifty euro, shuffle the tarot cards that Sharon the Shaman hands me, then give her back ten, exactly like she asks. There’s a long pause as she looks at the layout in front of her, but I’m supremely confident, full-sure that she’ll predict that a soulmate will enter my life any day now, whisk me off my feet, and plonk an engagement ring on my finger quicker than you can say ‘Boodle me, Baby’.

  Oh yes, and then, I’ll ask Barbara to be my bridesmaid and my friend Laura to be matron of honour, and I’ll definitely have to try on a few of those empire-line dresses that you see in all the Jane Austen adaptations, and I might even get a wedding planner because I’ve just waited so bloody long for this that I want it to be bigger, longer and costlier than all of Liz Hurley’s put together . . .

  ‘Mmmm, all right then, love,’ says Sharon the Shaman, ‘just by looking at your cards here, I can tell that you’re a nurse.’

  ‘Emm, no.’

  ‘A doctor?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘But you definitely work around hospitals, love.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But you’ve . . . been in a hospital. No doubt about it. Recently, too.’

  ‘Well . . . only to visit my dad when he had his cataracts done, but that was, like, over two years ago.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it, that’s what I’m seeing here. Hundred per cent. The cards never lie, lovie. Oh, here we go, now I see what you do for a living, you’re a teacher, then. Primary school.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘But there’s no doubt you work with small children. I see you mopping up a lot of pee.’

  Bloody hell. I wonder if Barbara’s getting on a bit better than this.

  And if the fifty euro is refundable.

  ‘For the love of God, can we please leave now?’ Barbara says, when we meet up, precisely ten minutes later. (Considering these people work in an esoteric field, the length of time they dole out to you is incredibly precise.) ‘I need a margarita and a cigarette, in that order.’