Our House(80)

‘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, clearly 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