He’s hungry, though it takes him a minute or two to recognize the sensation, because it’s without urgency or anticipation. It’s simply a variation on the new constant: rawest anguish. Grief. Loss.
But you have to eat, even if it is going to remind you of all the times you doled out sausages to ravenous boys, coaxed broccoli into their mouths while privately agreeing it was food fit for the devil. Or maybe it will remind you of a face across the table at La Mouette, the best restaurant in Alder Rise, back when the face still smiled at you, back when the woman the smile belonged to still believed in you. Wanted to know your story, defend your frailties. When you all lived together in the house the woman loved and to which both the boys came home from the maternity ward.
Stop, he thinks. You have no right to be sentimental. Or self-pitying.
He leaves the bar, the first he’d come to on exiting the hotel, and follows signs to the nearest restaurant. He finds himself climbing through a building in a lift, which makes him think of Saskia and Neil and of the resignation email that will be sent to them automatically on Monday at 9 a.m. The request that Fi be sent his remaining salary payments – for what it’s worth.
The top-floor restaurant has windows facing the airport and from his table he has a clear view of the planes coming in, touching down as if toys controlled by some capricious child. Everyone around him has the disengaged air of those in transit: too early to check in or too tired on arrival to make anything of the day. Might as well have some lunch.
He orders something with potatoes and cheese. Swiss mountain food. The glass of red wine doesn’t help the anxiety any more than the beer did, but at least the action of drinking it is familiar. He supposes he should be grateful for every last minute of this borrowed time, grateful it didn’t end at airport immigration when he negotiated passport control. Somehow, his impersonation of old Bram, family holidaymaker and occasional business traveller, had satisfied both the human officer and the thermal camera that scanned arriving passengers for fever and virus (though not, as he’d feared, guilt), and he’d been waved through.
Crazy, but even after he’d cleared baggage reclaim and customs and was out among the general public, he still expected to be approached and asked to step aside.
To be asked if the name on his passport was really his own.
16
‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:01:36
Have I considered alternative theories about Bram’s disappearance? Believe me, I’ve considered everything. Even the police acknowledge that his continued absence might be owing to circumstances unrelated to the house fraud, that he might never have got as far as being a fugitive from the law. He might have been killed in a brawl and his body hidden, or he might have gone on a drinking binge and fallen into the river – you wouldn’t last five minutes in the Thames in January temperatures. We’re talking about someone with a volatile temperament here; we’re talking about a heavy drinker.
I know it sounds awful, but when the police ask me what Bram was like, really like, what made him tick, the first thing I think of is the boozing. I don’t remember a day when he didn’t drink. Mind you, that didn’t make him unique on Trinity Avenue. There were men – and women – who would come home from work and within an hour have inhaled a bottle of wine. I used to think it was pure luck that their fix of choice happened to be a socially acceptable one, but then I realized it was their fix of choice because it was socially acceptable.
(I say ‘their’ but I mean ‘our’: it’s not like I’m teetotal myself.)
One of Bram’s little quirks was that he disliked lime; he joked that it was an allergy and that this was where Leo got his allergies from, but in fact it was to do with some epic tequila session when he was a student. He mocked alcohol-free lager, he mocked Dry January, he mocked mocktails; he mocked anything that didn’t have alcohol in it.
I realize I’m using the past tense, which I shouldn’t do. But you see why I’m so certain that if he is dead then he won’t have died sober?
*
I know now that September was a significant time for Bram and his misdemeanours, but my own crime-related concerns during this period were about the wave of incidents that had suddenly swept Trinity Avenue.
First, one of the tenants in the flats on the corner of Wyndham Gardens returned from holiday to discover his place ransacked by people renting it in his absence through some Airbnb-type website. Though avid in our interest, we all agreed he probably shouldn’t have been subletting in the first place.
Deeper sympathies were extended to Matt and Kirsty Roper soon after when they were burgled in broad daylight. Kirsty was one of us, hers a misfortune we could get on board with: a side gate left on the latch while the family nipped out to the garden centre; the alarm not activated (they were only going to be gone twenty minutes); a Stonehenge of laptops and other devices left enticingly on the kitchen table; a barking spaniel that the neighbours had been trained to ignore – it was a perfect storm of elements that might have broken over any of us.
‘The police think he must have been watching the house,’ Kirsty told us. ‘In a way, that’s the most upsetting bit.’
Gripped by the drama, her son Ben, Merle’s Robbie and my Leo formed a detective society, meeting in our playhouse to hypothesize. I delivered biscuits and juice to them, at no time pointing out that their meeting place had itself once been the scene of a crime of sorts.
There was no news of the culprits being caught and soon Kirsty reported that the police had decided not to investigate. ‘They haven’t got the manpower. They have to prioritize real crimes.’
‘Burglary isn’t considered a real crime?’ I said.
‘You know what she means,’ Alison said. ‘Murder. Assault. Rape. The kidnapping of our infants. The kind of thing that gets on Crimewatch or The Victim.’
Though I did know what she meant, I personally thought breaking and entering a most unsettling violation. The idea of criminals soft-footing around my house, touching the boys’ possessions, seeing how we shared our lives (or didn’t, in the case of Bram’s and my separate bedrooms): it was not so much an invasion of privacy as of the soul.
Bram, Word document
If I can just keep my job, I thought, riding the lift up to the HR department on Monday morning and thinking it couldn’t climb high enough as far as I was concerned, that I’d happily stay in that little mirrored box for hours, days, perpetually between places, between problems. If I can somehow keep all of this a secret from Fi. If those poor people in the car pull through and the police close their investigation owing to lack of evidence, then I’ll never sin again. I’ll become a missionary, I’ll be celibate, I’ll—
‘Bram?’ Saskia said.
I started. I hadn’t noticed that I’d exited the lift, navigated the corridor, reached her desk.
‘Did you want me?’ she prompted, with an impressive game face. She wondered perhaps if I was a simpleton, employed here on some minorities quota.
‘Yes, sorry. I’ve got your contract,’ I said.
‘It’s your contract, but thank you.’ She gave me a small smile as she took it from me, prim but pleased.
I cleared my throat, reached for the prepared lines. ‘As you’ll see, there’s some personal information I’ve disclosed and I wanted to chat to you about it face to face. Can we . . .?’
‘Of course.’ Professionalism not quite veiling human curiosity, she led me from the open-plan area into a nearby meeting room and discreetly pushed shut the door. We sat opposite each other, the contract and Saskia’s notebook on the table between us. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Well, it’s the bit about motoring convictions . . . The thing is, Saskia, I’ve received a driving ban.’
Received: it didn’t seem like the right word, you received an award or praise, something desirable, whereas this was something so undesirable that the person I was saying it to was compelled to take written notes.
‘I see. Well, given your sales role, that could be problematic. When did this happen?’ she asked.