She rolled her eyes. ‘There’s no need to overdo it, Bram, you’re not terminally ill. What is it?’
‘Could I have the boys for Christmas? It would . . . it would mean a lot to me.’
Because it might be the last time. It will be the last time. This time next year, I’ll be on trial like our friend the saint, or in prison or living in a hole in the ground like a terrorist. I hadn’t decided on my current course of action then – that presented itself later in a near-holy moment of revelation – but presumed I would want to carry on living, however pitifully.
Fi didn’t reply at first. I could see her natural response surge through her, about to explode into opposition, my crimes past and present on the tip of her tongue, but then she swallowed it, remembered her renewed commitment to the cause. Maybe it was also the sight of all those other parents with their symmetrical still-married smiles and cashmere-scarf-wrapped togetherness, but suddenly she was saying something wholly unexpected.
‘Look, why don’t we both have them? At the house, like every other Christmas they’ve known?’
‘What?’ I felt myself flush. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. They’d love us all to be together. It’s on a weekend, so why don’t we both just stay in the house for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? On Boxing Day, I was hoping to take them to my parents, so perhaps you could visit your mum with them during the day on Christmas Eve? Does that sound fair?’
Euphoria gushed through me. ‘Yes, more than fair. Thank you.’ The only thing better than spending my last Christmas with my sons was to spend it with my wife and my sons.
‘Let’s walk to Kirsty and Matt’s together,’ she said. ‘You know they’re doing drinks now?’
Another almighty concession; it was understood that as the injured party in our split – as the woman – she had first refusal on neighbourhood social invitations.
‘Harry forgot the words to “We Three Kings”,’ Leo said, when the two of them were released to us by their teachers. ‘It was so obvious.’
‘Not to us,’ Fi said. ‘We could really hear your voices, couldn’t we, Dad?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, helping Harry with his gloves. The end of his left thumb stuck through a tear and I kept that hand in mine, covering the hole.
‘I didn’t forget the words,’ he grumbled, as we headed into the street, and I waited with disproportionate dread for him to snatch away his hand. But he didn’t, he kept it in mine the whole way.
Passing along the Parade, we walked four-abreast where the pavement was wide enough, as we often had when the boys were young.
Them in the middle, one of us on either side.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:32:16
‘We’ve decided to spend Christmas together, for the boys’ sakes,’ I told Polly.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ she said. ‘Whose crazy idea was that? Yours or his?’
‘Mine. He looked so awful, Pol.’ He’d looked, in fact, like a death row inmate being given news of a temporary reprieve when we’d discussed it at the carol concert. (And his horror when he’d thought he’d filmed the kids without permission: the old Bram would have exulted in such small rebellions.) I’d been embarrassed by both the intensity of his gratitude and the melancholy that seemed to underlie it, as if he thought he’d never live to see another festive season. ‘And you know what Christmas would be like at his mum’s.’
‘What, a sincerely religious celebration? How bizarre.’ Polly gave me a warning look. ‘Just so long as your Christmas present to him is a letter from your divorce lawyer.’
Alison was less harsh. ‘I think that’s a really nice thing to do,’ she said. ‘You’re such a kind person, Fi. I know how tempting it must be to punish him by leaving him out.’
‘I’m not sure I need to punish him,’ I said. ‘He seems to be doing that himself.’
VictimFi
@tillybuxton #VictimFi is her own worst enemy, isn’t she? Bit unfair to blame the victim, I suppose.
@femiblog2016 @tillybuxton V unfair, but also v common. It’s called the ‘just world hypothesis’: we get what we deserve.
@IanHopeuk @femiblog2016 @tillybuxton I don’t believe that for a second #lifeisshit
Bram, Word document
As I say, I devoted myself fully to the family those last weeks. No Christmas dos, no work drinks. Tuesday nights at the Two Brewers had fallen by the wayside of late and I saw the Trinity Avenue guys for a drink only once in December, that night after the carol concert at Kirsty and Matt’s. I had to be careful about what I said now. I had to isolate myself from the pack.
By contrast, I was connecting to the neighbourhood like never before, appreciating the details as if I’d just arrived from the slums – standing in the park and closing my eyes and feeling freedom on my face, blank and pure and kind of sheltering. Perhaps it was just the relief of escaping the house I was stealing and the flat that was the HQ for plotting that theft. The siren call of devices on which I might browse articles about the brutality of prison life.
I remember the weather spiked constantly between chafing cold and golden mild, a sense of punishment and reprieve. There were times when I found a weird comfort in this – if you can’t take the good for granted, then you can’t take the bad either. If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same . . . you’ll be a Man, my son!
We learned that at school.
They didn’t tell us that the worst disasters would be those of our own making.
41
Bram, Word document
‘Why are you doing this, Wendy?’
‘What?’ Caught off guard, she gave a half-embarrassed laugh, clutched the tissue in her hand a little tighter.
‘I’m serious. Why are you hitching your wagon to his star like this?’
Normally, on her visits to the flat, I kept social interaction to a minimum, grunting my responses to her attempts at flirtation and evading her eye for fear of the violent hatred she might provoke in me. As a go-between, she liked to present herself as girlish, almost simple, but it would be I who was the simpleton if I allowed myself to forget previous evidence of her guile: that emotionless steel when she phoned the hospital in front of me to test my nerve; the malicious way she had toyed with me after our night together.
But on her last call before Christmas, I found I was in the mood to engage. Maybe it was because she had a cold, sniffing pathetically every ten seconds and kneading sore eyes with her knuckles, or maybe the pills were finally blunting my rage, but I found myself feeling half-sorry for the woman.
She was pouting at me now, her expression querulous. ‘Hitching my wagon? What does that mean?’
‘You know, riding on his coat tails. Trusting he’s right when he says it will work. What the hell does he know? He’s an amateur, like us.’
She shrugged. I sensed I’d hit a nerve, though, because she wasn’t so quick with that fake giggle of hers.
‘This whole idea was his, wasn’t it?’ I pressed. ‘Have you done scams together before? Probably just petty stuff, eh? Nothing like this. This is hard core. More of a long game.’
The very blankness of her gaze confirmed my guesses to be correct. Making her wait for the building regs form the Vaughans’ solicitor had requested (and which I’d found exactly where I’d expected to, in the Trinity Avenue file marked ‘Home Improvements’), I went on, ‘How come you have such faith in him? Are you two married? Going out? You know he’s screwing my wife, don’t you?’
I thought I read a negative message in her eyes, then. She was not wholly approving of his behaviour and yet remained in his thrall, somehow. Did he have something on her too?
‘Don’t you care that you’re destroying my life and my children’s lives?’
She shook her head. ‘No, you’re doing that, not me.’
‘Right. So you’re a monster like him. You take no responsibility for your actions. How admirable.’
She gazed at me, c
learly struggling between the dim-witted act she’d been cultivating and the more complex intelligence she surely realized I knew she possessed. ‘It’s so boring the way you think, Bram.’
Boring? Sorry, love. I’ll try to be more sparkling in my efforts to claw myself from the stinking bowels of hell. ‘I’m just trying to understand why you would get mixed up in blackmail and fraud. They’re really serious offences, you know. Fine, so you don’t give a shit about me and my family, but you must see the risk you’re taking personally? This isn’t nicking a hundred quid from someone’s wallet. You said you had a decent job, don’t you earn enough to get by? You’ll get a promotion, a pay rise. You seem pretty smart to me – other than going along with this, of course.’
She suffered this pitch in silence, other than to cough at me, a natural repellent. Her nostrils were raw from rubbing. No doubt she wondered why I hadn’t researched her and Mike as they had me. Hired a PI to follow them – or even the services of the same underworld scum they’d used themselves. The truth was, I’d considered it a hundred times, but on each occasion allowed the delusion to persist that my ordeal would end before I needed to act myself. The truth was, I was gutless.
Until now, evidently.
‘Are you scared of him, Wendy? Is that it? He’s intimidating, I know, a big guy. Believe me, I’ve felt how solid he is, no doubt he told you about our little wrestling match at the house? But there are ways of protecting yourself, you know. If we both tell him we’re backing out, we can stand up to a thug like him, don’t you think?’
But I understood I’d made a mistake before I’d finished the sentence. She went rigid with objection, her upper teeth snapping shut like a portcullis. ‘He is not a thug,’ she said through her teeth. ‘That’s my brother you’re slagging off.’
‘Your brother?’ It was the one possibility I’d failed to consider. ‘You look nothing alike.’
‘We’re not twins, for fuck’s sake.’ She gestured to the document in my hand with new belligerence. ‘Can you just give me that? I need to get back.’
To the solicitor or to Mike? Her brother, Jesus. Would she tell him what I’d said? And if she did, would he care? What could he do now that he hadn’t already done?
It wasn’t hard to imagine. After she left, I texted Fi with trembling fingers:
Just reading about an attempted abduction in Crystal Palace, a guy in his thirties in a white car cruising school gates.
Don’t worry, Fi texted back. The boys know how to keep safe. I’ll mention it to the school tomorrow, though. Thanks for alerting me.
You’re welcome, I typed.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:33:36
On the Wednesday evening before Christmas, Bram fetched the stepladder and strung fairy lights in the magnolia, while I hung a hundred silver baubles from its lower branches. We do it – I mean, did it – every year and though I say so myself, it always looks beautiful (people have stopped to film it, seriously). Ideally, there would have been the decorative frosting of snow we’d had earlier in the month, but the second half of December had turned oddly mild, a false spring that had even encouraged daffodils to sprout.
The playhouse lights we’d kept up all year. Bram had built the house the previous Christmas Eve while I took the boys into the West End to see The Snowman at the theatre. After they’d gone to bed, we rigged up icicle lights and put little seats draped with sheepskins on the deck so it looked like a miniature mountain lodge. It was still dark when they got up on Christmas morning and we took them to the window for the big reveal.
‘That is just nauseatingly cute,’ Merle said, when she and Adrian came for drinks on Boxing Day and we presented our new attraction. ‘I almost wish you hadn’t shown me.’
‘You’re funny,’ I said, giving her arm a little squeeze.
Bram, Word document
‘I almost forgot,’ Fi said during my last Wednesday visit to Trinity Avenue before Christmas Day, after we’d pimped up the magnolia tree in time-honoured tradition (there may have been no formal prize but, believe me, there was a competition on the street for the best decorations – and no one understood this better than the woman who worked in homewares). ‘This came for you today. By hand.’
She passed me a white envelope with my name scrawled in slapdash capitals. The flap had not been sealed, only tucked inside. It couldn’t be anything to do with the house sale, I thought. Mike wouldn’t take a risk like that, surely?
‘I didn’t look,’ Fi added, seeing my face.
‘Thank you.’
I opened it as I walked back to the flat. It was from him of course, a reprisal for my overtures to Wendy. There were two items, the first a download from a news site, the Telegraph site no less (I imagined him being pleased with himself about that. I’m not some oik. I read quality news, don’t you know?):
Dangerous driving runs in family, study finds
Young drivers who have witnessed their parents speed or drink-drive are three times more likely to commit the same offence themselves, according to a study published today . . .
The second was a single-page printout from a government website, a dense table of names, my father’s among them. My vision actually blurred: the shock at this display of knowledge was even more breath-stealing than at any of the previous ones. How could he possibly know – and why would he send this? What was going on here? Surely what my father did decades ago could have no bearing on any prosecution of my crimes – could it? Was it admissible at trial as background information?
Not for the first time, it crossed my mind that he might be with the police and only posing as a fraudster. But wouldn’t his actions to date constitute entrapment? Not a defensible practice, everyone knew that. No, what other purpose could there be for goading and intimidating me in this way if not for financial gain?
What this was was a turning of the screw, a declaration that I could go on resisting, I could attempt to groom Wendy till the cows came home, but he had no intention of letting me go.
I threw the Telegraph printout in the bin by the park gates, but kept the second sheet, folding it into my wallet. I couldn’t just toss it in the bin and see it on the pavement the next day, scavenged by a fox or maybe the wind.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:35:10
Christmas was a big compromise, yes. Did my sympathy for him have anything to do with his father? All those Christmases Bram spent without him? The delight he’d always taken in ours?
I don’t know. Maybe. It was always there in my feelings for him, a complexity, a nuance, that had to be considered.
I wasn’t going to reveal this, but now we’ve come this far I think it’s relevant to mention that Bram’s father served a prison sentence for drink-driving. He hit a pedestrian, an elderly man – no, he wasn’t badly injured, nothing like that, but this was the 1970s and society was just starting to understand how frequent a factor alcohol was in road fatalities. As part of a crackdown, Bram’s father was made an example of and given a custodial sentence.
Talking about prison, or watching a news item about overcrowding and violence in our jails, was probably the only thing that truly unnerved Bram, it seemed to me. I remember we took the boys to the Clink Prison Museum once, you know, the medieval jail by the river? You can see the old cells and instruments of torture, that sort of thing – the boys loved it. Anyway, Bram wouldn’t go in. Seriously, he had to wait outside. They call it carcerophobia, someone told me.
His father died not long after that and so it’s possible his prison stories were the last Bram remembers him telling. Such a sad thought.
The reason I’m sharing this is to show that there’s a context to all this: Bram learned his lawbreaking from the back seat. (Actually, in those days, small kids were allowed in the front and weren’t even made to wear a seatbelt. Bram was playing with his Action Man when his father was pulled over by the police.)
I remember him saying to me before we got married, ‘Are you sure you want to take on someone from criminal stock?’
‘Oh, I imagine we’re all from criminal stock if you go back far enough,’ I said.
‘Good answer,’ he said, as pleased with me as I was with myself. Back then, I wanted him as much for his edge as in spite of it.
But we grow out of those sorts of tastes, don’t we?
At least some of us do.
VictimFi
@deadheadmel So is #VictimFi saying Bram WAS in that car crash and he was wasted at the time?
@lexie1981 @deadheadmel Sounds like it. Prison’s not that bad, is it? Don’t they watch TV all day and smoke crack?
@deadheadmel @lexie1981 Sounds a whole lot better than my day LOL.
42
Bram, Word document
And then finally, finally, the pharmaceuticals took effect. Oh my God, the beautiful mood-influencing neurotransmitter that is our friend serotonin, and not a moment too soon, either – it felt like a Christmas miracle. Gone was the perpetual agonizing, the cartoon pumping of my heart, forceful enough to move the shirt on my chest, whenever the buzzer or the doorbell went. The twisting pain of panic when I weighed up my options (give myself up for one crime or persist with a second that I hoped – but had no guarantee – would camouflage the first?).
No, now I was quiet, optimistic, back to my short-termist, compartmentalizing best.
Thank you, Father Christmas.
Thank you for the hours spent making a Star Wars Clone Turbo Tank out of Lego; playing ‘retro’ Pokémon games on the Nintendo and having a heart light enough to joke that I was more vintage than they were; eating sweets from a glass jar of old-fashioned pick ’n’ mix the size of Harry’s torso. Thank you for Fi smiling constantly – even at me, because I was pleasing her in my own right, not just as her sons’ father.
‘It’s like Richard Curtis is directing us,’ I said, as all four of us assembled in the kitchen to peel sprouts, baste the turkey and stir gravy, though we all knew it was Fi who was directing us, that this slice of old times was her Christmas gift to me.
Our House Page 24