The Family Remains(5)

I call Libby when I return home.

Lovely Libby.

‘Hello, you!’

She is so very the sort of person who says ‘hello, you’.

I return it as fulsomely as I can manage. ‘Hello, you!’

‘What’s new?’

‘New? Oh, nothing really. Just had a run. And a shower. Just thinking about what we were discussing at your birthday dinner the other night.’

‘The safari?’

‘Yes, the safari. Lucy says I shouldn’t come.’

‘Oh. Why?’

‘She thinks that you and Miller want it to be a romantic getaway for just the two of you.’

‘Oh, no, nonsense. Of course, you’d be welcome to come. But we’ve hit a snag.’

‘A snag?’

‘Yes. Miller called the lodge the other day to ask about an extra person on the booking and apparently Phin has …’ She pauses.

‘Yes?’

‘He’s gone.’

I sit heavily on the nearest chair, my jaw hanging slack with shock. ‘Gone?’

‘Yes. Said he had a family emergency. Didn’t know when he’d be back.’

‘But …’ I pause. I’m fuming. Libby’s boyfriend Miller is a well-regarded investigative journalist. He’s spent a year of his life tracking Phin down (not for me, you understand, but for Libby) and then five seconds after finally tracing him, Miller’s clearly done something utterly stupid that has resulted in Phin taking flight, the journalistic equivalent of stepping on a twig during a stag hunt.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say, trying to sound calm. ‘What went wrong?’

Libby sighs and I picture her touching the tips of her eyelashes as she often does when she’s talking. ‘We don’t know. Miller could not have been more discreet when he made the booking. The only thing we thought is that Phin somehow recognised my name. We assumed, you know, that he would only have known me by my birth name. But maybe he knew my adopted name. Somehow.’

‘I’m assuming, of course, that Miller made his own booking under a pseudonym?’

There’s a brief silence. I sigh and run my hand through my wet hair. ‘He must have, surely?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, why would he need to?’

‘Because he wrote a five-thousand-word article about our family that ran in a broadsheet magazine only four years ago. And maybe Phin does more than just sit on jeeps looking masterful. Maybe he, you know, uses the internet?’ I clamp my mouth shut. Nasty nasty nasty. Don’t be nasty to Libby. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Sorry. It’s just frustrating. That’s all. I just thought …’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know.’

But she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know at all.

‘So,’ I say, ‘what are you planning to do? Are you still going?’

‘Not sure,’ she replies. ‘We’re thinking about it. We might postpone.’

‘Or you could …’ I begin, as a potential solution percolates, ‘… find out where he’s gone?’

‘Yes. Miller’s doing a bit of work on the reservations guy. Seeing what he can wheedle out of him. But seems like no one there really knows much about Phin Thomsen.’

I draw the conversation to a close. Things that I cannot discuss with Libby are buzzing in particles through my mind and I need peace and quiet to let them form their shapes.

I go to the website again, for Phin’s game reserve. It’s a very worthy game reserve. Internationally renowned. Unimpeachable ecological, environmental, social credentials. Phin, of course, would only work in such a place.

He told me when he was fifteen years old that he was going to be a safari guide one day. I have no idea what route he took from the house of horrors we grew up in to get there, but he did it. Did I want to be the founding partner of a trendy boutique software design solutions company, back then, when I was a child? No, of course I didn’t. I wanted to be whatever life threw at me. The thing that I would be after I’d done all the normal things that people do when they haven’t grown up in a house of horrors and then spent their young adulthood living alone in bedsits, with no academic qualifications, no friends and no family. I wanted to be that thing. But, in the story that this spinning Rolodex of endless and infinite universes gave to me, this is where I am and I should be glad and grateful. And in a way I am. I guess in another of those universes I might, like my father before me, have sat and got fat whilst waiting for my parents to die so that I could claim my inheritance. I might have lived a life of boredom and indolence. But I had no option other than to work and I’ve made a success of my life and I guess that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

But Phin, of course, Phin knew what he wanted even then. He didn’t wait to be formed by the universe. He shaped the universe to his will.

I head into work and find the same lack of focus plagues me through a conference call and two meetings. I snap at people I’ve never snapped at before and then feel filled with self-loathing. When I get home at seven that evening, my nephew Marco is wedged on to the sofa with a friend from school, a pleasant boy I’ve met before and have made an effort to be nice to. He gets to his feet when I walk in and says, ‘Hi, Henry, Marco said it was OK if I came. I hope you don’t mind.’ His name is Alf and he is delightful. But right now I don’t want him on my sofa, and I don’t even spare him a smile. I grunt: ‘Please tell me you’re not planning to cook?’