Our House(81)

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.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘either that or we’re the England–Germany football match during the First World War. You know, the Christmas Day truce.’

I laughed (I hadn’t laughed in a long time). ‘A war analogy, hmm. Is it that bad between us?’