38

Tony’s head was still thumping from the night before. He’d drunk too much at Patricia’s and was feeling the worse for it now. He flicked through the transcripts Darren Brown had dropped off and tried to concentrate. The Legal Service was closed between Christmas and New Year but he thought that doing some work might take his mind off his troubles. It hadn’t helped the way he had hoped.

His life had unravelled. Six months ago he had been smugly thinking about the dilemma of juggling a wife and a girlfriend. Now he was facing the new year alone. And as Patricia reminded him last night, no one would have any sympathy for him. He didn’t know why he had gone to see her. His life had hit rock bottom. There were several women who would have happily given him some comfort but he chose the one who, he knew deep down inside, would tell him the truth.

He admired Patricia. Always had. He cringed when he thought of the clumsy pass he had made at her last night. Trust her to reject him so bluntly. He smiled at the thought. She was one of the few people in his life who was always honest with him - along with his mother, his daughter and Beth Ann. These four women were the mirrors of his true self.

When he had fled the mission, he had written those five steps for survival. One had said: ‘Appeal to selfinterest, never to mercy or gratitude’. The surest and best way to make your fortune, he had thought, was to let people see clearly that it’s in their best interests to promote yours.

Always he tried to make people think they needed him. He knew Patricia never did. He had tried to make Beth Ann dependent on him. He had, through his own insecurity, distanced her from her family, made it difficult for her to see them. He had refused to allow her to take a paying job and had eventually agreed to one that was voluntary, and then only because he knew that, if she was in the prison all day, she could not contact him when he was up to no good.

He was more aware of his shortcomings than others would realise. That’s why he invented his five steps for survival in the first place. So he could create a facade, so he could fool people.

And yet, Beth Ann had loved him and she was the one who knew him best. That day, that awful day, when she confronted him in the laundry, the evidence in her hand, he had fled. He couldn’t face the hardness in her face, this look he had never seen before. He knew in his heart, by looking into her eyes, that she had turned cold against him. It was the second time in his life that he had run away.

He had thought at the time, justifying things to himself, that if he could legitimise his relationship with Rachel, it would make everything less shabby. When she had ended it with him, he’d been stunned. And hurt, he’d begrudgingly admitted to himself. But a deep part of him was relieved. He’d known as soon as he’d moved in with her it had been a mistake. But Beth Ann would give him no ground.

‘I have packed your things. I would like to arrange to have them sent somewhere,’ she had told him.

‘I can come by and pick them up.’

‘I’ll be out between four and eight tomorrow. They’ll be in the garage. I’ll leave it unlocked.’

‘Do you think they’ll be safe there?’

‘Don’t know. Better come close to four then.’

‘I’d like to see you.’

‘I don’t think that would be wise.’

Not rude but not welcoming. He had not expected her to beg. She was too dignified for that. It was one of the many things he loved about her. But her determined stoniness had given him no opportunity to talk about a reconciliation. He looked for every possible opening, any loose word. She gave him nothing and now he found himself heading towards a divorce that he didn’t want.

His relationship with his daughter had improved but there was still a long way to go to properly repair it, to bring it back to what it had once been. He missed their talks and their rituals.

‘How’s my favourite daughter?’ he would ask.

‘I’m your only daughter,’ she would reply.

‘If I had a hundred daughters, you’d still be my favourite.’

It was silly but he had always loved it because it was their ritual, developed with affection and repeated over the years. Simone always smiled so brightly when they played the game. Lately she had refused to play along. He’d asked his lead question several times only to be rebuffed and it hurt too much to keep on trying.

Her angry early morning phone call had forced him to face what a coward he had been about Emily. He had used his rage at what had been done to her - and what he thought had been done to him - to make it impossible for him to stay. And he dreaded coming back to face her, his little sister who he could not protect. When she killed herself, he realised just how selfish, how irredeemably selfish he had been.

When Tony went home for the funeral he knew that he could never be in the town again, never be at the mission, never be in the house they grew up in, without seeing Emily and being confronted with how he had run away from her when she needed him the most. There was no place in that town where he would not have a memory of her, no place there where he would be able to forget her or his role in her death.

He had thought that the attention of others - the admiration of the Darren Browns and the Rachel Mileses of the world - would help him to forget his biggest failing, his biggest mistake, but now he realised that it didn’t. It was a false sense of self he gleaned from their attention. It cultivated vanity, not self-esteem. Their adoration should be a pleasant compliment; it should not define him. He should enjoy it only if he could keep it in context, not get addicted to it.

Tony flicked through the transcripts one more time. Here, buried in his conversations with Darren Brown, was the thing that he really could be proud of. Here, in his work, was where he had been unselfish, where he had been courageous, where he had not run away.

George Orwell, still Tony’s favourite writer, had said that the prime responsibility lay in being able to tell people what they do not wish to hear. Frederick Douglass, another of his heroes, had once said that those who expected truth or justice without struggle were like those who could imagine the sea without an image of the tempest. Noam Chomsky wrote that power quite probably knows the truth already and is mainly interested in distorting or suppressing it.

These great writers, great thinkers, great minds had given him courage and guidance in his work. When he was challenged by people asking, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ he would confidently reply ‘Who the hell is asking?’ When he was asked, ‘How dare you intervene?’ he would retort with ‘How could I stand idly by?’ To those who tried to embarrass him by the company he kept - communists, trade unionists, ‘radical blacks’ - he would point out that they were in dubious company themselves.

Yet, for all his achievements, for all he was proud of, his journey had been marked with mistakes and regrets.

He could not go forward - whichever way that might be - without going back. Hadn’t that been what he had always told Simone? What he had been saying in his interviews with Darren? We need to understand our history before we can make sense of the future. It was one of his most used speeches.

His next step, he knew, was to finally return home.