Our House(97)

A little under ￡1.6 million. It doesn’t sound like much, does it, after all this?

*

It was relatively recently that I decided that two could play at Mike’s game. It was just after Christmas, when I understood Fi was never going to save me, save us, never going to fix the abominable mess I had created for our family, never going to take the torment out of my hands, out of my head.

That had been a pipe dream. She really was done with me.

Using an agent whose details you’ll find on no legitimate search engine, I bought myself a counterfeit passport, and then I furnished Graham Jenson with the innocent details of that new bank account. You see, the strength of Mike’s plan – the legitimacy my involvement gave it – was also its weakness: I didn’t need the sinister aid of phishing to ‘correct’ the details, I could simply email Jenson myself. Obviously I couldn’t use the email account Mike and Wendy had access to, so I sent the new instruction from my work email.

Dixon Boyle & Co weren’t nearly as slapdash as I’d hoped, however, and Jenson’s trainee, Rachel, rang to query the last-minute change of receiving account. Naturally, I reassured her that the instruction was genuine and I hadn’t had my email hacked by crooks.

‘We have to be very careful,’ she said. ‘We just had a warning from the Law Society about criminals intercepting emails between solicitors and their clients. There was even a case recently where they set up a fake branch of the conveyancing firm.’

‘Unbelievable,’ I said. ‘Thank you for being so thorough.’

I take pleasure – measly, hollow, but pleasure nonetheless – in Mike’s defeat. In the thought of him cancelling his flight to Dubai, cancelling everything, checking his balance day after day, waiting for the ￡1.6 million that will never come. Firing off threats, discussing with his sidekick what torture they will visit on me when at last they track me down.

But that won’t happen. I’m off the grid now. Let his texts pile up, never to be delivered, let the emails gather, never to be read.

Let the boys cry only briefly.

Because in a few hours I’ll be off grid old-school. If you know what I’m saying.

*

You know, maybe I was wrong to call it a divine revelation. The decision to take your own life doesn’t come upon you as an epiphany. I do know a bit about suicide, including the fact that it’s the biggest killer of young men in the UK. Undiagnosed depression, the alcohol and drugs factor . . . I won’t lecture you. It’s not like I haven’t just spent a hundred pages explaining the context of my decision.

I really believe it has been there in me, dormant, for my whole marriage, my whole life – or at least since my father died. It wasn’t only the drinking that camouflaged it (or expressed it), but also the sex, the risk-taking, the fights, the recklessness. Wasn’t it all just self-destruction by a thousand cuts?

A slow slicing.

You know, on the speed awareness course I took a couple of years ago, there was an exercise in which the instructor went around the room and asked us to say in one word why we’d been speeding.

‘Ignorance.’

‘Lateness.’

‘Impatience.’

‘Overtaking.’

‘Habit.’

On it went, all the predictable culprits, until one guy said, ‘I was chasing my brother’, and we all cracked up.

Then it was my turn. I could make something up (‘noble causes’ seemed to go down well, even if it was two words: taking a heavily pregnant wife to hospital, for instance, or a child with something stuck in his throat). Or I could tell the truth.

‘Bram?’ the instructor said, making a point of reading from my name tag, a little touch of ceremony. ‘Why do you think you were speeding?’

I could tell the truth in one word, and it’s the same one I’ll use now to account for this, the end of me:

‘Pain.’





49


February 2017

London

It has been a very long day, but both the producer and interviewer of The Victim have been exemplary in their professionalism and Fi leaves the Farringdon studio with a sense of accomplishment, of good having been done. There’s a freeing feeling too, though she of all people knows freedom is an illusion.

In a café on Greville Street near Farringdon Station, Merle is waiting. It’s one of those self-consciously hipster places with bulbs hanging bare from cables and chairs salvaged from skips. Their coffees have a love heart sketched in the foam and come with a chocolate-covered edamame bean on the side.

‘Is it Valentine’s Day or something?’ Fi says, obliterating her love heart with the back of her spoon.

‘We’ve passed that,’ Merle says. Like Fi, she wears black. They always do when they meet, as if the two of them mourn not an individual but an ethos or a state of being. Privilege, perhaps, or control. ‘What did Adrian give me? Oh yeah, I forgot.’ She glances down at her own body, the growing baby bump, and Fi thinks suddenly of poor Lucy Vaughan and the way she eyed Merle’s red smock that day at the house, wondering whether she should offer her congratulations.

Merle checks that there’s no one in earshot. ‘So how did it go?’

Fi nods. ‘Really well. Tiring, though. I feel like I could sleep for a week.’