Our House(15)

‘Got it,’ he said. ‘I’ll run my crystal meth lab from here as well, shall I?’

‘Very funny.’ I held his eye. ‘And I meant it about the speeding too. I don’t want any nasty surprises.’

Was I imagining it or was there the briefest flicker of furtiveness in his face? Impossible to tell, even to my experienced eye, but something made me press the point. ‘I mean it, Bram, no secrets.’

‘No secrets,’ he said.

I should have got it in writing, had it put in the signed agreement. I should have set it as a notification daily – hourly – on our new shared diary app: no secrets.

And, yes, in spite of everything that’s happened, I still think the set-up was an excellent one – for people not married to a criminal, that is.


Bram, Word document

I torture myself sometimes with the thought of how the bird’s nest might have panned out if I’d just been able to keep past sins secret and avoid committing future ones. (‘Just’!) I think it would have succeeded, I genuinely do. In terms of the division of time and labour, it really played to our strengths: I’d take care of the weekend rough and tumble, the necessary letting off of steam (the Trinity Avenue mums always used to say that boys needed precisely the same amount of exercise as a Labrador retriever), while Fi handled the school needs, the laundry, the nutritious balanced diet. Okay – so that’s most things.

That’s not to say she didn’t have fun with Leo and Harry. She was probably the only person who could diffuse the fever pitch of competitive spirit between the two of them, to remind them that they could choose to be a team of two. They’d clamour for quizzes, especially ones about capital cities, and just as it risked coming to blows over Bucharest, she’d derail arguments with a bad joke. Like: ‘Where do Tunisians buy their music? iTunis.’ And the boys would look at each other in affectionate resignation. ‘Oh, Mum. Be serious.’

(She looked the jokes up in advance, I guess.)

It breaks my heart to know how deeply she’ll be regretting those arrangements now. It will destroy her to realize that disaster could not have struck without the framework of logistics suggested by her, without the trust she continued to place in me as a family man, a fellow householder.

Even when she could no longer trust me as a husband.





9


‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:38:35

It’s hard to say what were the first clues to subterfuge because obviously I didn’t recognize them as clues at the time. The car was an issue even before we separated, I do know that.

It was April or May when I found the speeding tickets. Maybe I’m imagining it now, but I do recall having an uncertain feeling when we discussed them, the sense that more was being concealed than was being shared. Maybe that was why I brought up his speeding with the counsellor later.

‘Bram? What are these?’ I held up a pair of letters from the DVLA that I’d discovered folded between the pages of the coffee machine manual when the thing had suddenly stopped working: two separate notes of confirmation that three points had been added to his licence. His speeding had long been a source of contention between us, though in terms of detection he’d generally got away with it. The way he drove, it was not so much that he thought the rules didn’t apply to him as that he’d identified one of life’s chief pleasures in bending them. ‘Six points? I thought you took that speed awareness course a while back?’

‘I did,’ he said, warily.

‘So why have they given you points?’

‘Because these are different tickets. The course was for the first one.’

I frowned, tried to get the situation straight. ‘So there’ve been three in all? One course and then two sets of points?’

‘Yep. You’re not allowed to do the course more than once in three years.’

More’s the pity, I thought, since he’d clearly learned nothing the first time. ‘Where are the original tickets? Are they in the study?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m just interested to know the details, that’s all.’

He cut me off in my path to the filing cabinet. ‘I’ll get them.’

With supreme reluctance, he handed over the Notices to Prosecute, one from Surrey Police and one from the Metropolitan Police. The Surrey incident had obviously been during a work journey: nine miles an hour over the seventy limit on an A road, not dissimilar to the first offence eighteen months ago, when he’d been ‘running late, not looking at the dial’. The London one was more troubling: forty-three miles an hour in a twenty zone on a road between Crystal Palace and Alder Rise. With that speed limit, it was almost certainly a residential stretch like Trinity Avenue, and forty-three was easily fast enough to kill a pedestrian, a child like one of our own.

Then I noticed the dates: one from a year and a half ago and the other from nine months ago. ‘How am I only hearing about these now?’

Silly question: because I’d stumbled upon them by mistake. Clearly, he thought he’d removed all correspondence from sight. ‘You’re only allowed twelve points before you lose your licence, aren’t you? So just two more mistakes and—’

He cut in, irritated. ‘I know my times tables, Fi. Come on, there are millions of people with points on their licence, including most of our neighbours on this street. Why d’you think they’re suddenly catching record numbers of offenders? It’s purely a money-spinner for the authorities.’