Georgina Lippiett
Being trusted with other people’s precious pockets of information has always been a serious business for me. The topics have changed over time, of course. When I was younger it was everything from confessions of classroom toy-theft to unspoken family shames. Don’t tell Miss will you, don’t tell Trevor it was me, don’t let on to your mother, she’ll only get upset. Later, the secrets became more about private passions, frustrated hopes and niggling doubts. Almost every single one was passed to me hesitantly, with trepidation and a dash of fear.
I used to think of secrets as pebbles. I’d keep them close to me, turning them over often to remind myself who gave them to me, polishing them with my attention. I felt responsible for keeping them safe and the weight of the responsibility at times has been heavy. If I should fail, worlds would crumble.
But I’ve come to realise they’re not like that at all. Secrets aren’t given wholesale to the secret-keeper in a tidy, self-contained package, they don’t exist in a vacuum. I can diligently guard the given secret but can’t guarantee absolute quarantine. In fact, it strikes me that secrets are far more like the King Alfred’s Cake fungus than pebbles.
Stay with me.
This dark, round fungus needs a host to feed from. It grows quietly and silently, layer after layer of seasonal growth forming in concentric circles. People harvest them, not for food, but for fire-starting. Once properly dried out, the round, black bundles catch light easily and burn slowly but consistently.
If you want to share it, you have first to break a piece off. Which risks releasing spores. Which might then attach to other hosts and grow in new, unexpected places. Once shared, you’ve lost any semblance of control or containment you might have had - or thought you had. If you keep the fungus for long enough it will desiccate and look entirely inert, but given the right spark and the right tinder, you have a potential forest fire on your hands.
Of course, a secret, which when first shared had the power to destroy lives, ruin families and divide friends, given time and distance can lose its potency. It can become a warm glow around which the keepers huddle to warm themselves and connect.
But one person’s warm glow can easily be another person’s conflagration.
So really, is sharing a secret ever worth the risk?