by Bella Mackie
After he’d done the bank transfer (from his accountant to mine, complete with an NDA so tight it’d make your eyes water), he shook my hand and ordered a round of drinks. That night we spent nearly six hours together, in a private room at one of Soho’s finest restaurants where the steak he ordered for me cost £68 and the waiters didn’t make eye contact. It was like a date, and every time he ordered another bottle I blinked at the absurdity of it all. I kept trying to leave but Simon would brush my attempts away with irritation. ‘We’re getting to know each other, son of mine! What could be more important?’ Then he’d plunge into another story about his clever business strategy, or explain how he fucked over a rival by being more ruthless. I got home and rolled into bed at 3 a.m., knowing that I’d have to be up again in three hours. I woke up at 6 a.m., my head screaming in pain and my hands shaking. I picked up my phone and saw he’d already texted me. Football this weekend. See you for breakfast before. Even though my mind was cloaked in fog, I understood then that there would be no clean break here. Simon had paid up and now he wanted me in the fold. Was it because he liked me and was glad to have found this long-lost son? Could have been. More likely though, he just wanted to control the situation, control me. If he had to endure being put in a vulnerable position, he was going to extract something, anything from it. Even if I didn’t want to play ball. Especially if I didn’t.
I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d had to go on like this for years, playing the version of a son he wanted. Within just a few weeks of handing over the money, it was already pretty unbearable, Grace. The fascination with me wore off pretty quickly, and Simon started to treat me like he treated everyone else. That meant I was expected to jump to it when called. He’d call when I was at the office, and if I didn’t pick up, he’d just call again. One day I put my phone on flight mode for eight hours just so I could avoid the blinking light out of the corner of my eye. When I turned it off, I had three text messages from him, one which called me a ‘lazy cunt’. The message was wrapped up in his usual banter, but it was obvious that he meant it.
I continued to go home as much as possible. My mother was doing a little better, though still gardening obsessively. I didn’t tell Lottie that I was spending so much time with Simon, of course. I didn’t tell her anything. The school fees were paid and the mortgage settled. Lottie didn’t ask how I’d managed it all. It made me feel angry for a minute, she’d always had everything handled for her and never stopped to consider what it took. But it was ungenerous of me. Mum couldn’t be expected to know what I’d done to secure our family. She wasn’t strong enough. She might never be strong enough.
Simon only mentioned my mother once in my presence. After our first meeting I had wondered whether he really remembered her. It was clear she wasn’t exactly the only woman to have received the full Artemis treatment. It would have been understandable if she was just a vague blur in his mind. But he glanced down at my phone one day, as it lit up with a text alert and noticed my screen saver.
‘That your mum?’ he asked, his eyes focused on a photo of Lottie hugging my sisters on the lawn outside our home. I nodded, but tensed up slightly, not wanting him to see my family or pollute our space. ‘Christ, time isn’t kind to women,’ he said. ‘You shack up with a firecracker at 25 and you wake up at 50 with your nan.’ A white-hot rage swept up my body, heat flooding my face. I tipped over the small bar stool with rather too much drama, and stormed out. Simon sent me a case of wine later that night, my housemate Ben bringing it up to my room and asking who was buying me £5,000 worth of plonk. At least it was good wine and not the filth he served up under his own label. Anyway, wine or no wine, it was too late. I’d decided that I was done with this late-in-life dad. I was going to write him a letter explaining that I was grateful for his help but emphasising that I had spent twenty-three years with a wonderful father and wasn’t looking for a replacement. I felt rather an astonishing amount of relief as I typed it out that night. His world was overwhelming and I wanted to go back to mine.
And that might’ve been that. He would’ve kicked off a bit, but really what could he do? My existence was a potential grenade in his life and I couldn’t see that changing. He would never tell his wife or daughter about me. And I didn’t want him to. Better to shake hands and go our separate ways – I felt confident that he’d see that eventually.
But that night Simon’s parents were killed in a car crash. I found out when he called me sobbing the next morning. I had the letter in my bag, ready to send on my way to the office. Instead I found myself leaving work (I pleaded a family emergency, which wasn’t a total lie) and heading for Simon’s house in Hampstead. His wife and daughter were in Monaco, he had said. Could I come over? I’m not a monster, I couldn’t leave the man crying alone. So I sat in his lurid mansion as a small Vietnamese woman served us iced tea and offered up an endless amount of biscuits. The biscuits sat uneaten, even though I was starving. The iced tea was rejected in favour of a bottle of whisky that Simon kept reaching for, topping up a gold glass on the floor by his feet. Simon himself sat slumped on a sofa surrounded by huge tasselled cushions that threatened to envelop him. I positioned myself across from him, perched on a large pouffe, wishing fervently that I was almost anywhere else on earth.
In between phone calls to his brother, a lawyer, and his assistant, he talked in my general direction about how Kathleen and Jeremy were ‘diamonds’. I offered him up some words of condolence, and told him I knew how hard it was to lose a parent. He didn’t much like that, slurring that I was trying to make him feel bad about not taking on his responsibilities. So then I apologised, trying to downplay my own loss and then being annoyed with myself for doing it.
The day dragged on, and I was mainly left on my own in the sitting room as Simon took more phone calls and drank more whisky. At 4 p.m., he muttered something about Bryony being on her way home, which I gratefully took as my cue to leave. As I made obvious moves towards the door, Simon grabbed my arm and pulled me down onto a peach chaise longue in the hallway. And then, in a slightly garbled and not entirely coherent way, he told me something which changed the course of my life. He told me about you, Grace.
Until that moment, I don’t think I’d really examined the idea of having a whole other family. Simon was a means to an end – I had my family and I didn’t have any desire to know Bryony or her ghastly mother. I didn’t want much to do with the way they lived and I suspected that they’d feel the same about me, had they had any idea of my existence. But you were different. You were an outsider, someone who had no choice in the matter either. And as Simon rambled about how he’d failed to live up to the standards set by his own parents, I saw the similarities in our stories. Both born to young and silly women dazzled by this big man, and then cast aside when he was bored and it became inconvenient. Though I do think that two illegitimate kids by two different women stretches the word ‘inconvenient’ somewhat.
I don’t know why he told me about you, Grace. He was drunk, but he must’ve been drunk a thousand times and not told people about his secret daughter. I can only suppose it was the grief. It’s supposed to do funny things to people, isn’t it? Like my old aunt Jean, toeing the party line on my parentage for twenty-three years and blurting it out at a funeral as though she couldn’t hold it in any longer. He told me that he was young, that his parents had told him to sort the problem and that he’d been afraid of losing everything. It was all bollocks, of course. A real gentleman wouldn’t abandon one child, let alone two, but I couldn’t say that while he sat there drunk and weeping. I just told him he’d done what he thought was best while I asked questions about you as gently as I could.
In his slightly broken state, his guard was down just enough to give me enough to go on. I’ll be frank with you. He didn’t know much. His sadness about it all was pretty performative and I don’t imagine he’d kept up with your life. I hope that doesn’t upset you. From what I know of you, I imagine it won’t. He knew your name, and where you’
d grown up. He even knew that you worked in fashion, which meant that ‘the apple didn’t fall far from the old tree’ apparently. I stayed poker-faced, not showing that this information meant a thing to me, and I extricated myself half an hour later, at which point he was on the phone shouting at his brother about the family house in St John’s Wood. He’d forgotten everything we’d discussed.
But I hadn’t. I spent the next two hours in a pub trying to find out as much as I could about you from Google. I must say, Grace, you’ve got a remarkably minimal online presence. It’s so small as to make one suspicious actually. It’s almost as if you’re trying to hide from the world. Still, you can’t avoid it entirely, can you? There’s always going to be a footprint, even if you have sworn off social media and seemingly never so much as looked at LinkedIn. Well done you for that, by the way, it’s a cesspit of braying estate agents and other bullshit merchants.
It took a little while, because Simon hadn’t given me your surname and asking for it would’ve been too direct, despite his drunken fog. But I found you eventually, after spending hours sifting through girls called Grace who worked in fashion PR. I worked by digging up info on the other girls, most of whom gave enough information about their lives on social media to make it easy to eliminate them. Happy photos of their families? Off the list. Wrong age, wrong ethnicity, lived somewhere else? Crossed off. Eventually I came across Grace Bernard. There was no photo on the company website, which felt like a sign since everyone else was happy to pose away. With the surname, I went down a few wrong lanes before I landed on a tiny article about you in the Islington Gazette from well over a decade ago. Well, it wasn’t actually about you at all. A woman called Sophie was protesting about a spate of muggings near the local school. A grainy photograph showed her holding up a sign which said ‘safe streets!’, and behind her was a surly-looking teenage girl and a slightly bemused-looking boy of the same age. The photo, well that’s when my heart started pounding. The caption gave your name. The boy was called Jimmy. The angry woman referred to you both as her children, which confused me for a minute. Simon had said that your mum died. Sorry, I’m being nosey. But there were gaps I couldn’t fill in and the mind wants answers! No matter, I got them later.
Anyway, I came to your office. I’m sure that probably sounds frightfully creepy but I felt more nervous than you’d have been had you known! I waited around from 5 p.m. one Friday, suspecting that PR girls, like us City boys, knock off early for drinks. A gaggle of women came out at 5.15, forming a human chain as they swept down the street. You came out at 5.32. I knew it was you straight away, you looked like me. Well maybe that’s not very fair to you. My nose has been broken twice in rugby scrums and I’ve got hands the size of dinner plates according to my mum. But I just knew your face. It was like I’d seen it before a million times. You’re petite and have much darker colouring than me, and you’ve got eyes a shade of green that neither me nor my sisters share. Mine are a slate grey, which I’ve always rather liked. But you were undeniably the right Grace Bernard. I almost ran across the road to say hello, like the duffer I am, but I restrained myself. Difficult to make an introduction like that on the street!
I don’t know what I wanted from you back then. Perhaps just to see you in the flesh? I think I had a deep need for information. Not knowing about my parentage had shaken me up, and I firmly believe that knowledge is power. Knowing everything about you would help me be more in control, something I’d not really felt since Christopher died. So I followed you. I’m not proud of that, by the way. It’s not nice for men to tail women around. I felt grubby really. You sat on the Tube across from me, gazing over my shoulder at nothing very much. I tried not to stare at your face for too long, but I took in as much as I could. Black trousers, a cropped leather jacket, and a weird fluffy top that I assume was fashiony. Chunky buckled loafers which I imagine you wore to make men like me feel intimidated, and it worked. I walked behind you from the station to your flat, and gazed up to the first floor as the light went on. Then I had a stern word with myself and went home. Madness really. I’m a man who doesn’t even go to North London for a hot date.
I couldn’t leave it there. I wanted to. But over the next few weeks I found myself walking down your road every spare moment I got, hoping to catch you on your way out. Seeing if you’d lead me somewhere that would tell me more about who you were. A couple of times I saw you go out running, which meant I had to wear trainers just in case. Once I followed you to a local café where you ordered a ridiculously specific coffee. Not a big socialiser, are you, Grace? One visitor in two weeks – a man who looked a lot like the teenager in the local paper.
I was getting sort of bored of it all by then. I was ready to stop following you around and weighing up whether I should send you an email explaining who I was. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to open Pandora’s box really. But it was surely saner than skulking around, not learning anything about you. Then one evening flipped everything on its head. And if I’d ever assumed that you were a bit dull Grace, I never would again.
You went to a pub and had drinks with a fairly motley crew. A young guy who looked like a total hippy cliché. An old man, and a plain-looking girl who wasn’t his daughter but definitely wasn’t his girlfriend. You didn’t seem like you were too attached to the hippy either. But you spent most of the evening talking to him. I nursed my pint and tried to sit near enough to pick up the conversation. Not that it was worth hearing. Newts, Grace? I really wondered about how you’d turned out when I heard that passionate discussion about amphibians.
You left alone, shortly followed by the crusty, and I was intrigued. When you wandered down the road and went into a wildlife centre, I was completely bemused, but followed your lead and jumped the fence a few minutes after you’d gone in. I began to suspect that you were looking for a place to be alone with the chap, and I worried that I might catch you both in flagrante, as it were – something a brother should never see a sister engaged in. So I stayed well away as you both went down to the deck by the water. Not quite near enough to hear what was said, but transfixed all the same. Something odd happened where he held a match to your foot, but I couldn’t make out much in the dark. And then, just as my legs started to seize up from crouching and I started to think about whether I could order an Uber to a remote wildlife centre, you pushed him into the water. I stood up in shock, Grace. You looked round quickly but I was protected by the dark. I didn’t know what to do. My brain was screaming at me to rush to the water and pull the fellow out, but my legs didn’t move. It all seemed so utterly mad. You were sharing a bottle of wine with this harmless-looking man, and then you were killing him. Why? As you tidied up around you (impressively calmly when I think back to it), I dialled 999 but I didn’t press call. I told myself I would when you left, but by the time you actually did, my mind was calmer and I knew I couldn’t. How to explain what I was doing? Ah yes, officer, it’s all fairly simple, I was following my sister (who doesn’t know she’s my sister) and I lurked behind this lovely bush while she drowned a fellow. Then I watched as she washed up some mugs and hopped into a cab. That would never do. However good my intentions, I’d be dragged into a sordid story and Lottie and the girls would be marked by it too. Whatever you’d done was your business. But it did make me realise that perhaps the vague notion I’d had about forging a relationship with you was doomed to fail. You can’t be too close with a woman who goes around pushing people into ponds really, whatever the blood ties.
Simon let me know who you killed two days later. Less whisky and regret this time around, he obviously wasn’t that fond of his nephew. But it was still a shock. An accident, he said. Andrew was troubled and had tried to seek a new life, but he was always floundering. The family were keeping it as private as possible, and I knew that the potential scandal was the reason for such privacy. That only made me feel like I’d made the right choice to stay schtum.
So you’d killed our cousin. But why? As far as I could tell, he was a nice man with no
connection to you. You wouldn’t benefit from his death financially, and I couldn’t see what you got out of it emotionally. It buzzed around my head, getting worse and worse because I couldn’t tell anyone about what I knew.
I guess a therapist looking at me around that time would say I was still processing Christopher’s death, and for all I don’t hold with that stuff, they’d probably be spot on. On top of that I was bombarded by Simon, who had stepped up his demand for contact, plus I had Lottie asking me to come home every time she called. I felt quite bonkers. As a deflection from it all, I kept on following you, desperate to figure it out, to know why you’d done it. I became a man slightly possessed. For a while, things went quiet and I scratched my head wondering why you’d kill our cousin and then blend back into the background. I started running, following your routes, but you never did anything out of the ordinary. But a few months later, you started to go to nightclubs and bars alone. I started going too, always sitting a little way away, careful to try to blend in. It’s not hard to do that, Grace, when you’re a fairly average-looking white guy in a smart establishment. I seem to blend in well, you’ve never seemed to remember my face, though I was by your side for months. Besides, you weren’t looking for me. You were on the hunt. For our uncle, it turned out. That’s when I started to figure out what was going on. I suppose you’d think I was a bit slow at the uptake really. But my feelings towards Simon were nothing like yours, and it took me a while to try to put myself in your shoes. Even when I did, I couldn’t muster up the burning hatred it would take to carry out such a plan. Watching you spend hours waiting in bars only for your eyes to light up when Lee walked in, that could only be something you’d planned.