An Honest Deceit

by Guy Mankowski

  Phillip nodded. ‘You need to get out, before he finds you. I’ll let you know how the talk goes. We pulled that off pretty well in the end, didn’t we?’ he said, placing his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Thanks to your help.’

  ‘You owe me,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I answered.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I CAREFULLY PLANNED the moment I would play my recording to Kraver down the phone. I made sure my message was left too late on a Friday afternoon for him to pick it up that day. Ensuring he would hear the fuzzy sound of his own confession, captured on a Dictaphone, on an answerphone message early on a Monday morning. Once I had played the recording in full I left my telephone number. ‘Perhaps you should call me,’ I said.

  He phoned me at 9 a.m, on the following Monday. Our conversation was brief and terse. ‘So what do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘I want this job to be your last,’ I said. ‘No more positions outside your role as headmaster. You give all of them up, and you coast straight towards an early retirement. If you don’t, then I will make sure that lots of people get a copy of our conversation. Which would lead not only to you getting sacked, but arrested. You’ll be all over the news, and any position you have held onto will just generate more negative publicity for you.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  It was just one word. But it was said with enough venom, that I knew for once I was a move ahead of him. At last I felt able to let the matter go.

  As time went on I heard various stories about Kraver, slavishly repeated to me by friends and acquaintances. Stories in which people confronted him over his handling of Marine’s case, on many occasions. Something about his lack of remorse, or acceptance, only made people more determined to leave a mark on him. The impression I got was that Kraver grew increasingly defensive and bitter. I realized that people like him had no sincere relationship with the truth. To him honesty, morality and truth were just ideas, ideas that only interested him when they could be used as instruments. It was a mind-set that had given him benefits in the short-term, particularly in our short-term world. But this attitude had cost him in the long-term. Like other corrupt people, he would never realize that his punishment was in missing out on what he didn’t know he could have. I doubt his money was enough of a balm to truly soothe him.

  My encounter with him in the lift had confirmed something to me. People never fully confront their wrongdoing. They are all trying to push for their own ends, and they lack the strength to truly apologise for that. In my heart of hearts, I wondered if I was just the same. However different I thought I was to Kraver, I too was called to account, on regular occasions, for the mistakes I had made.

  The secrets Kraver used to keep himself in power were never revealed. I stopped checking up on him, after a while. I had a new job to focus on, in a new school, where there were no reminders of a painful past.

  None of that means that the loose ends in my head were completely tied up. Or that the liminal, nightly landscape Juliette had found herself marooned in was left behind. I found ways to cope with Marine’s death, even if the world largely seemed to now consider the matter closed. Juliette and I confided in one another, about the mistakes we had made during that time, and we both found ways to draw a line in the sand. In a way, we found a closeness that we had never had before we went through this ordeal together. It gave me the confidence to finally propose to her, and a few months after she accepted we had a small wedding in a local church. On a Spring day when the blossoms mixed with confetti in the warm, enticing air. That day she held my hand more firmly than she ever had, and even though I knew the complications in our relationship would not end there I knew we would at least share them from now on. I even told Juliette about the day, two years after the enquiry concluded, that I bumped into Violet.

  I had not responded to the messages of congratulation Violet texted me after the case hit the papers. I assumed she would understand that I now needed to focus on my relationship, or even that I had suspicions about her having been recruited to damage it. I never was able to quite acknowledge that Violet possibly could have served such a function. I decided that it was a paranoid concern, which did not equate with the Violet I knew. With the young woman, bursting with potential, who had rescued me on the night that I had been ready to throw myself off a bridge.

  I ran into her whilst walking to a squash match at the university sport centre. I spotted her in the distance, a mythical presence at the other end of the plaza. Her downy movements imbued by the distinct fuzz of her consciousness.

  My first assumption was that she had planned for this to happen. But the sheer surprise on her face proved that was not the case.

  ‘Ben,’ she said. ‘How on earth have you been?’

  She seemed more confident, more refined. The bright student colours had been shed, in favour of subtle shades of cream.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘I’ve been well. And you?’

  ‘They’ve given me a couple of modules to teach at the uni,’ she said, ‘so I was finally able to get myself decked out. I’ve gone up in the world like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘That’s brilliant. Listen, I am so sorry that I didn’t reply to your messages.’

  She looked at the floor. ‘I didn’t have a phone for a few months anyway,’ she said, her voice bizarrely taking on a slight Cockney accent. ‘But yeah, I did notice that you didn’t get in touch. I had assumed you needed to re-build things at home. That having me around wouldn’t have been a great help.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, ‘but I still should have thanked you. It’s just that something made me suspicious.’

  I explained about the photos.

  I wasn’t sure how to interpret her expression as I told the story. Violet looked morbidly curious, rather than guilty.

  ‘In that case I can completely understand why you didn’t reply,’ she said, reacting quickly.

  ‘I know it’s stupid. But I couldn’t help but wonder about the final photo in the envelope. Where you seemed to be looking straight at the camera.’

  ‘Now you mention it,’ she said, pushing a strand of hair from her face, ‘I know this sounds really strange, but I did think I saw someone in the bushes that night.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘I said something to you about it, don’t you remember? I’m wondering now if that was the moment the photo was taken. As we opened the door. You have to believe me- if I was looking right at the camera it is purely by accident.’

  I took her elbow and for a moment that familiar pulse of blood, whenever we made contact, dizzied me. ‘Of course I believe you,’ I said. ‘You came into my life when I was at my very lowest ebb and you saved me from…I don’t know what. Oblivion!’

  She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Oblivion!’ she said. ‘I’m sure that’s not the case, Ben.’

  ‘I don’t know how I ever doubted you. You gave me inspiration when I most needed it. And those tweets you wrote on my behalf - I hear they were Favourited a thousand times.’

  ‘That is true,’ she said, nodding. ‘I’m glad that in some ways I helped. Although, there is something that I would like to tell you.’

  I waited, as a couple of students in tie-died shirts lingered behind us, exchanging phone numbers.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘You’ve got me worried now.’

  ‘I didn’t tell you, because it was the night before your enquiry. But I did get a very strange phone call. From someone claiming to be a detective.’

  ‘Did he give a name?’

  ‘No. And that made it hard to get the conversation off the ground! But he did tell me he was working for a very powerful ‘organisation’- that was his word- and that he had a business proposition for me. I thought it was some dodgy overseas college wanting cheap lecturers!’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, he said he knew I was close to you, and that they had reason to believe I could offer them some valuable information. Mentioned some
thing about how it would be ‘for the greater good’. The guy just said how I could ‘surely do with the money’, and he seemed to know how little I was earning. Obviously, I turned him down. But I was genuinely worried for a few days that they were going to exhort me. Or have me expelled from the university.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, rubbing her face. ‘I had a few sleepless nights, wondering if all the work I’d done to make something of myself would be for nothing if they decided to make something up.’

  I saw remembered pain etch onto her face.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Violet. So what exactly did you say to them?’

  ‘I just told them I couldn’t do it, and then I threw away my phone!’

  ‘And they never bothered you again?’

  ‘How could they?’ she said, with a small smile.

  ‘I should go,’ I said. ‘It won’t do my relationship any good if more photos come through of me touching your arm.’

  ‘Ben, no one is going to be following you now,’ she said. ‘You do know that?’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s just that whole fight…it sometimes makes me paranoid.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ she said, looking past me.

  Just before I go …’ I stopped myself.

  ‘What is it Ben?’

  I winced.

  ‘Come on, you must know you can tell me. I kept everything else to myself!’

  ‘Of course. I know it’s possibly borderline weird, as I was attached, with a child and you’re, well, much younger than I am ...’

  ‘Not that much younger,’ she said, cocking her head to one side.

  ‘Sure. It’s just - whatever we had, it was important to me. More than I can say.’

  ‘It’s amazing to hear you say that,’ she said. She looked around her, before dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘The period of time, when we were in each other’s lives, really shaped me. I learnt so much from how you handled it.’

  ‘Take care, Violet,’ I said.

  I took in the small smile, the hunched shoulders, and that distinct, elusive scent, one last time.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  DESPITE JULIETTE and I rediscovering our sense of intimacy, my grief did harden into a personal ritual. A ritual that I entered into on occasional, solitary weekends on the coast. At the beach that I had once taken my new family to, during our first weekend away.

  To my mind, everything that surrounds that hallowed beach is a kind of magical apparatus.

  On the journey there I was struck by how mundane objects-from the steel gantry leading onto the ferry, to the salt-encrusted windows revealing the glacial sea on-board, were each instilled with a cool potency. It made me shiver in anticipation to walk through the process of finding that beach. During that trip it occurred to me that by savouring these rituals, which took me to the place where I saw Marine flourish, I was stepping through my own phantasmagoria. Into the crystalline world of my own psyche, whose architecture was enshrined in permanence, no matter how much the real world changed.

  I sleepwalked onto the ferry, down the pier on the other side to the shore, into the taxi to the bed and breakfast. Once there I found a temporary home in a sparsely decorated, sunlit room high above the sea, and then on that beach. In this place I was finally able to use the mystical, shifting matter of my own memory to convince myself that Marine still existed in a loop of time. On a slip of beautiful, private, ribbon. At once so fragile and so strong that no nightmarish events could ever damage that spool.

  Throughout the preparatory rituals to get to that beach, I acted like a normal man. At the bed and breakfast, my friendliness seemed slightly laced with a desperation to please. Whilst devouring a hearty breakfast. I did my very best to let the signals of my body language say ‘all is normal’. Even as I stepped outside, approaching where my delicate, milk-skinned Marine once played, I looked to all the world like a normal, middle-aged man- lonely perhaps, but certainly curious. But, like a guardian of my own mythology, I knew that at every step I would keep the importance, the hunger, the almost religious quality of this inner ceremony a secret. I was stepping into my own internal landscape, and the act itself was too potent for me to even fear being disturbed. I needed it; it revived and invigorated me.

  As I walked towards the cool beach on that quiet day I realized that Juliette had been undertaking a similar ritual whilst singing ‘La Clare De La Lune’ to herself. Juliette had, in fact, entered her own crepuscular world earlier than me, and its topography was very different. Where mine was sandy, with a hint of salt in the air, and the churn of the sea in the background, hers was luminescent, and based around the idea of a beautiful moon being. Juliette’s inner world was accessed through music, melody, and memory. Mine required the subtle hoots of early morning hours, the crisp walk down to the deserted sand, the long canvas of a distant horizon on which my imagination could draw. I needed space to unfurl this ritual, and enough peace to discipline my mind as it required.

  I walked, on a beautiful and solitary morning, out of the bed and breakfast, and across its gravelled driveway. I looked back at the hunched, grey stone building, set in a small copse. I stepped up a sparsely grassed mount, the ascent of which led me to a row of trees silhouetted against a white morning sea. I walked down to the shingle, where the sea rose to me like a strong friend, with shoulders too broad for the embrace it deserved. My landscape became musical too, as I recalled the saccharine, haunting melody of the Celine Dion song that Juliette hummed that weekend. Even the concrete slope down to the gold slip of the beach was magical turf. I walked to the rowing boat, powder blue, slightly too small for a man of my age, that the proprietor of the bed and breakfast owned. I tugged it down to the surf, the seas lachrymose lap a tender embrace at my too-white feet. I pushed the vessel onto the bobbing waves, and kicked my shoes into the sandy hull. The eggshell interior, and the white sun overhead, all delicately welcomed me. The sun cleansed the world.

  I slipped the sandy oars into the rowlocks, assumed the position on the seat. I squinted at the exquisite pain of the early morning sun. As the oars splashed in the sea I was splashing into paradise. Not because I had, through any sense of discipline, absorbed the psychic landscape in which I intended to seek Marine. But because I was staving off that moment, like a connoisseur, so I could open it at my own choosing. I knew that this scene, and my mind, would allow that moment to occur in time, and that when it happened it would be exquisite.

  For now, I pushed the oars into the clear, splashing aqua, and I pointed my little boat out towards a distant horizon. I knew I would never reach it, and the thought was as romantic as Marine’s thoughts might have been as she sat, enchanted by the possibilities of an open sea. When I was far enough out I pulled the oars back into the hull and I kicked back, and laid my body taut between the two seating panels. I placed my hands carefully behind my head. The boat took on every nuance and contour of the sea, and I let its motions dissolve through me.

  The sunlight overhead was so white, so heavenly, that its caress almost forced my eyes open. When it did, I turned to the water. It was clear, and blue, and like a child’s submerged hair seaweed splayed on the sunlit surface. I let my hand roll in the cool water. I felt the chill of expectation, the soothing effect of the calm waves. The pleasure that came with the promise of a never-ending horizon I was perpetually floating towards.

  I eventually did return to the sand. I pulled the little boat back into its place, and made my way up the beach, to the sea wall. When I turned, I saw that there was a dinghy by the shore, just like the one Marine had hidden behind all those years ago. I sat fifteen yards from it, so it was directly in front of me, barely daring to catch my breath. I closed my eyes. The moment was coming. I savoured it, and let it roll. Soon, wonderfully soon, I was ready. I listened to the sea. When I opened me eyes, sure enough, Marine was there. Peeking round at me from behind that little boat, her little nose decorated with freckles.

  ‘Daddy,’ she was sa
ying. ‘Daddy. Where do fish go in the winter?’

  I didn’t hurry to close my eyes. I took her in. Soft, full of promise, her hair full of sunlight. My daughter.

  When I closed my eyes I realized my face was wet with tears.

  Acknowledgements

  THIS NOVEL WAS researched using a Grant for the Arts which was offered by the Arts Council UK. I’d like to thank the team at the Arts Council who were helpful and accommodating at every turn. Their funding allowed me to interview experts on corruption, such as Andrew Jennings, who offered me compelling insights into the practices at FIFA in the months before that scandal broke.

  This book also benefited from the insights into corruption offered by other high-profile whistle-blowers, Paul Moore and David Drew.

  Special thanks to Jonathan Smith. As a legal advisor, second to none, and one of the few friends who insist on giving more than they take.

  I would like to thank Matthew at Urbane Publications for taking this novel on. This novel has evolved a lot in the five years since it was conceived and it was good to finally find a home for it with Urbane.

  GUY MANKOWSKI is a journalist, academic and author. His debut novel, The Intimates, was a New Writing North Recommended Read in 2011. His second novel, Letters from Yelena, was adapted for the stage and Osiris Educational used an extract of it in GCSE training material. His third novel, How I Left The National Grid, was written as part of a PhD in Creative Writing at Northumbria University.

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