Fi didn’t reply at first. I could see her natural response surge through her, about to explode into opposition, my crimes past and present on the tip of her tongue, but then she swallowed it, remembered her renewed commitment to the cause. Maybe it was also the sight of all those other parents with their symmetrical still-married smiles and cashmere-scarf-wrapped togetherness, but suddenly she was saying something wholly unexpected.
‘Look, why don’t we both have them? At the house, like every other Christmas they’ve known?’
‘What?’ I felt myself flush. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. They’d love us all to be together. It’s on a weekend, so why don’t we both just stay in the house for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? On Boxing Day, I was hoping to take them to my parents, so perhaps you could visit your mum with them during the day on Christmas Eve? Does that sound fair?’
Euphoria gushed through me. ‘Yes, more than fair. Thank you.’ The only thing better than spending my last Christmas with my sons was to spend it with my wife and my sons.
‘Let’s walk to Kirsty and Matt’s together,’ she said. ‘You know they’re doing drinks now?’
Another almighty concession; it was understood that as the injured party in our split – as the woman – she had first refusal on neighbourhood social invitations.
‘Harry forgot the words to “We Three Kings”,’ Leo said, when the two of them were released to us by their teachers. ‘It was so obvious.’
‘Not to us,’ Fi said. ‘We could really hear your voices, couldn’t we, Dad?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, helping Harry with his gloves. The end of his left thumb stuck through a tear and I kept that hand in mine, covering the hole.
‘I didn’t forget the words,’ he grumbled, as we headed into the street, and I waited with disproportionate dread for him to snatch away his hand. But he didn’t, he kept it in mine the whole way.
Passing along the Parade, we walked four-abreast where the pavement was wide enough, as we often had when the boys were young.
Them in the middle, one of us on either side.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:32:16
‘We’ve decided to spend Christmas together, for the boys’ sakes,’ I told Polly.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ she said. ‘Whose crazy idea was that? Yours or his?’
‘Mine. He looked so awful, Pol.’ He’d looked, in fact, like a death row inmate being given news of a temporary reprieve when we’d discussed it at the carol concert. (And his horror when he’d thought he’d filmed the kids without permission: the old Bram would have exulted in such small rebellions.) I’d been embarrassed by both the intensity of his gratitude and the melancholy that seemed to underlie it, as if he thought he’d never live to see another festive season. ‘And you know what Christmas would be like at his mum’s.’
‘What, a sincerely religious celebration? How bizarre.’ Polly gave me a warning look. ‘Just so long as your Christmas present to him is a letter from your divorce lawyer.’
Alison was less harsh. ‘I think that’s a really nice thing to do,’ she said. ‘You’re such a kind person, Fi. I know how tempting it must be to punish him by leaving him out.’
‘I’m not sure I need to punish him,’ I said. ‘He seems to be doing that himself.’
#VictimFi
@tillybuxton #VictimFi is her own worst enemy, isn’t she? Bit unfair to blame the victim, I suppose.
@femiblog2016 @tillybuxton V unfair, but also v common. It’s called the ‘just world hypothesis’: we get what we deserve.
@IanHopeuk @femiblog2016 @tillybuxton I don’t believe that for a second #lifeisshit
Bram, Word document
As I say, I devoted myself fully to the family those last weeks. No Christmas dos, no work drinks. Tuesday nights at the Two Brewers had fallen by the wayside of late and I saw the Trinity Avenue guys for a drink only once in December, that night after the carol concert at Kirsty and Matt’s. I had to be careful about what I said now. I had to isolate myself from the pack.
By contrast, I was connecting to the neighbourhood like never before, appreciating the details as if I’d just arrived from the slums – standing in the park and closing my eyes and feeling freedom on my face, blank and pure and kind of sheltering. Perhaps it was just the relief of escaping the house I was stealing and the flat that was the HQ for plotting that theft. The siren call of devices on which I might browse articles about the brutality of prison life.
I remember the weather spiked constantly between chafing cold and golden mild, a sense of punishment and reprieve. There were times when I found a weird comfort in this – if you can’t take the good for granted, then you can’t take the bad either. If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same . . . you’ll be a Man, my son!
We learned that at school.
They didn’t tell us that the worst disasters would be those of our own making.
41
Bram, Word document
‘Why are you doing this, Wendy?’
‘What?’ Caught off guard, she gave a half-embarrassed laugh, clutched the tissue in her hand a little tighter.
‘I’m serious. Why are you hitching your wagon to his star like this?’
Normally, on her visits to the flat, I kept social interaction to a minimum, grunting my responses to her attempts at flirtation and evading her eye for fear of the violent hatred she might provoke in me. As a go-between, she liked to present herself as girlish, almost simple, but it would be I who was the simpleton if I allowed myself to forget previous evidence of her guile: that emotionless steel when she phoned the hospital in front of me to test my nerve; the malicious way she had toyed with me after our night together.
But on her last call before Christmas, I found I was in the mood to engage. Maybe it was because she had a cold, sniffing pathetically every ten seconds and kneading sore eyes with her knuckles, or maybe the pills were finally blunting my rage, but I found myself feeling half-sorry for the woman.
She was pouting at me now, her expression querulous. ‘Hitching my wagon? What does that mean?’
‘You know, riding on his coat tails. Trusting he’s right when he says it will work. What the hell does he know? He’s an amateur, like us.’
She shrugged. I sensed I’d hit a nerve, though, because she wasn’t so quick with that fake giggle of hers.
‘This whole idea was his, wasn’t it?’ I pressed. ‘Have you done scams together before? Probably just petty stuff, eh? Nothing like this. This is hard core. More of a long game.’
The very blankness of her gaze confirmed my guesses to be correct. Making her wait for the building regs form the Vaughans’ solicitor had requested (and which I’d found exactly where I’d expected to, in the Trinity Avenue file marked ‘Home Improvements’), I went on, ‘How come you have such faith in him? Are you two married? Going out? You know he’s screwing my wife, don’t you?’
I thought I read a negative message in her eyes, then. She was not wholly approving of his behaviour and yet remained in his thrall, somehow. Did he have something on her too?
‘Don’t you care that you’re destroying my life and my children’s lives?’
She shook her head. ‘No, you’re doing that, not me.’
‘Right. So you’re a monster like him. You take no responsibility for your actions. How admirable.’
She gazed at me, clearly struggling between the dim-witted act she’d been cultivating and the more complex intelligence she surely realized I knew she possessed. ‘It’s so boring the way you think, Bram.’