All at Sea, page 5
Before long our meetings assumed a familiar pattern. We would both agree that this had to stop at once. After all, I would point out, he was married. He would remind me that they had decided to separate. It was my understanding, I would say, that married men were notorious for saying that sort of thing. Exasperated by my scepticism, he would get huffy and point out that I was a married woman. ‘I can’t see that remaining the case for much longer,’ I would say. He would protest: ‘But you’ve got a lovely husband, and a great life. Look at me, Dec – I’m a criminal. No one in your world would want you to be with me. If you were my daughter, I wouldn’t want you to be with me either.’ It was, we would agree, hopeless. Then we would kiss until our lips burned and people began to stare. Before parting we would tell each other this was absolutely the last time we would meet. The promise didn’t always last long enough for us to get home. After a particularly anguished farewell I hadn’t got out of second gear before my phone pinged. ‘HC?’ the text read. I turned the car around and was back with him in a bar called Hackney Central in under five minutes.
When Tony’s wife and daughter went away on holiday for a week, our meetings grew longer but no less agitated or inconclusive. The night before their return we spent hours on the phone, revisiting the impossibility of the situation. Surely this had to be the end, once and for all. I hung up, desolate but decisive. A minute later the phone rang again. ‘Tone, we’ve agreed this can’t go on,’ I told him sternly. ‘Dec,’ he said, in a voice I scarcely recognised. ‘My mum’s died. My brother just called. She’s dead. I need to see you.’
I got dressed and drove to his house. Since that day in the park both our homes had been out of bounds; the injunction was unspoken but did not need to be stated, and as I knocked on his door it felt like trespass. All fastidiousness was forgotten when he opened it. Tony looked shell-shocked, his eyes vacant and black. His mother hadn’t been well, but no one had dreamt her condition was critical. I rocked him in my arms on the living-room sofa until dawn broke and his wife and daughter would soon be arriving home. For once we didn’t bother to pretend we were saying goodbye.
On the day Paul came home Tony was in Leeds with his family, taking care of funeral arrangements. I hoped the 200 miles between us might create some space to accommodate the sudden intrusion of reality – spouses, families, bereavement – and wondered if Paul’s reappearance would bring me to my senses. When he arrived there was a stiff, mechanical quality to our embrace, and a lifelessness in our conversation more deathly than any I could recall. Every attempt at a genuine exchange seemed to run out of steam, tailing off into claustrophobic silence. We were like distant colleagues in a lift.
I had organised a welcome-home dinner the following night. My cousin Ewan would be joining us. Halfway through cooking I realised we needed sour cream, so jumped in the car to pop to the supermarket. On my way I called Tony. He was back from Leeds, and in a café around the corner. We met in a side street behind the supermarket. I climbed into his car and clung to him like to a life raft. I can’t have been in his car for more than three minutes, but long enough to know that I was about to go home for the last time. Whatever happened next, it couldn’t be this.
The dinner passed in a charade of distraction, while my words and my thoughts parted company. ‘Pass the pepper, please.’ Am I seriously going to leave Paul for Tony? Of course not. ‘Tell us about your new job, Ewan.’ Then am I leaving Paul because of Tony? Well yes, obviously. But not because I think Tony and I have a future. We would be miserable together. If I couldn’t make a life with Paul work, I’m hardly going to manage it with a crack-smoking drug dealer. ‘What was the press pack like in Indonesia? … Who was out there with you?’ I have to leave, because I cannot be sneaking about having illicit trysts behind supermarkets – it is shameful, this can’t be who I am. If I cannot keep away from Tony now that Paul is back, the only option with any shred of integrity is to leave. What happens after that is irrelevant, so there’s no point even trying to work out a plan. ‘There’s coffee if anyone would like some,’ I say.
Was it even integrity? I wasn’t sure. It might be staggering naïvety. All I knew was that for all of my life until Tony, I had been immune to infidelity. This was nothing to boast about, for it had nothing to do with virtue. It was simply that I had never been tempted to stray. Even with the most comedic of comedy boyfriends, it didn’t occur to me to be anything other than faithful, because I never looked at anyone else. Now I could not look my own husband in the eye. A longing to go to bed with Tony was no reason to think I could spend my life with him, but enough to tell me I could not be with Paul.
I scrutinised my own logic anxiously. Was I being ridiculous? Other people happily spend half their married lives fancying someone else. They’re not unworldly enough to mistake common temptation for marital curtains. If only I was French. I still loved my husband, even if I couldn’t stand to be with him; the horror of deceit made me nauseous. Or was I just pretending to be appalled, in order to dress up cheap betrayal in bogus honour?
After Paul went to bed I sat up late, gazing down on Ainsworth Road from a top-floor window. I thought about our wedding day, and about our families, and our friends. I pictured an imaginary grenade in my hand. Was I really about to pull the pin and lob it into this life we had built together? I wondered what would be left after the explosion.
My bag was packed before Paul awoke. ‘I’m leaving,’ I told him. The air was flat, deadened by defeat. ‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll be at Tom and Charlotte’s,’ I said. ‘Okay,’ he said. I drove to our old friends in Kentish Town, wondering what they would say, and what I had done. They were taken aback. They put me in the spare room, and I thought I would stay for perhaps a week or two while I worked out what to do.
Two days later Tony called and asked to meet me in Hackney. As he got out of his car, I saw a large black canvas holdall in one hand. He held it up, in the manner of a chancellor on budget day. ‘I’ve left,’ he announced breathlessly. What was he talking about? It took me a moment to register what he meant. ‘I’ve left. I want to be with you. You’re my girl now.’
And that was how Tony and I became the most implausible couple I have ever known.
If you have nowhere to live in London, need to find somewhere fast, and don’t own the most rudimentary household items – vacuum cleaner, ironing board, kettle – where do you go? Tony was the sort of person who always knew someone to call. He had a friend who owned a lettings agency – ‘Bit dodgy,’ Tony grinned, ‘but he owes me a favour’ – so after a quick call we made our way to the office.
Should Channel 4 ever want to make a docusoap about the East End property market, I could show them just the place to film. When we first walked in I half wondered whether cameras weren’t already installed, for every detail had been so finely observed – the directional haircuts and ski tans, the rhyming slang and restless testosterone – the room looked more like a reality TV set than real life. All the young men seemed to know Tony, and were on their feet in a flash. As I watched them fizz and buzz around him, competing for his wisecracks (‘Think you’ve got enough gel in that hairdo, mate?’, ‘Call that a watch?’), I saw the extraordinary effect he had on other men. By my terms, Tony’s social technique was borderline rude. Men found it mysteriously flattering, and compelling.
What we needed, Tony explained to the boss, was a short-term lease on a fully furnished flat equipped with everything right down to teaspoons. ‘Well that’s Canary Wharf, Tone, innit?’ I thought he had to be joking. I wasn’t living there. In an improbability contest, moving to Canary Wharf would beat leaving my husband for a drug dealer hands down.
Canary Wharf is a brutally modern development of shiny skyscrapers in what used to be London’s old East End docklands. Only a few miles south of Hackney, it feels more like Tokyo. Early each morning, driverless trains deliver young professionals in suits to their desks in the glittering high-rise concrete forest where they sit at screens all day making multinationals richer until it’s time to eat sushi in air-conditioned branches of international restaurant chains, or work out in corporate gyms. It looks like a child’s drawing of capitalist alienation – only, of course, there are few children there to draw it. There aren’t really any old people either, nor any trees, or greenery, or clutter. It was my idea of perfect hell. Now it was my new home. By teatime we had rented the sort of executive apartment designed for IT executives from Shanghai who like concrete and glass; it made me feel as if we had gone into internal exile.
Panic mounted when we unpacked our respective bags. Tony kept returning from his car with more armfuls of clothes – designer jeans, endless boots, pair after pair of identical trainers – and wrestled to cram them into his half of the wardrobe. When I had hung all of mine up, they occupied less than nine inches of rail. The comically lopsided spectacle made us both laugh, but as a metaphor for what we had embarked on it felt ominous. I was moving in with someone so fantastically unlike me, even our wardrobe looked like a joke. The recklessness of sudden domestic intimacy with a man I had only just slept with hit me again next morning, when we stood side by side in the bathroom brushing our teeth. I could see our faces in the mirror, but the reflection felt unreal, as if an imposter had kidnapped my identity.
After a week I went home and told Paul I was seeing Tony. To keep him in the dark was unconscionable; he had a right to know. But when it came to full disclosure, the cohabitation detail was beyond me, and I told Paul I was living alone. I told myself it was a kindness – that the whole truth would be gratuitously cruel – but suspected altruism might be a convenient disguise for the real reason. Paul had absorbed my announcement about Tony with the terse dignity I would have predicted. I was afraid the news that we were living together might make him laugh. The new domestic arrangement was still startling to me, and my own faith in its wisdom too shaky to withstand incredulity.
Living in Canary Wharf quickly proved every bit as awful as expected. Tony’s cannabis smoke wafting down magnolia corridors freaked our new neighbours out a lot. His after-dinner progression onto crack troubled me similarly. Even watching television together presented a challenge. Tony liked action superhero movies featuring multiple body counts, whereas I favoured programmes in which nobody gets blown up. By a stroke of luck we soon stumbled upon The Sopranos, a discovery without which I would go as far as to say we almost certainly would not have lasted more than a month. But bit by bit we began to find our feet, and found scraps of territory beyond our sofa that could accommodate our incongruity.
At first it was long car journeys. Road trips can often curate conversational intimacy, but in our case the charm was not what was said so much as how Tony drove. Although fast, he was never aggressive at the wheel, and nothing ever fazed him; unlike me he was quite immune to road rage, and I don’t think I once saw him sound his horn or flash his lights. I found the calmness of his gallantry at the wheel inexpressibly soothing, and could sit beside him for hours, lost in the childlike sensation of security.
Football matches and boxing fights also seemed to work. In any theatre of masculinity Tony would come alive, and I liked to watch him magnetise other men. Their eagerness to defer was intriguing. Men always claim to be oblivious to masculine beauty, which is obviously a lie, because in my experience the presence of a good-looking man usually generates a wary unease. Given the competitive subtext of most male interactions, this is not terribly surprising. But Tony’s beauty had the opposite effect, and seemed to excite men. They liked to cluster around him, as if proximity could confer vicarious glamour, and were forever wanting to give him something. It happened everywhere we went. Shopkeepers, market traders and restaurant waiters, unsolicited and for no discernible motive, would give him something for free. Tony was always pleased, but too used to it to be surprised.
In Tony’s presence men tended to lose interest in women, and on his arm I became acquainted with the novel status of a social passenger. In previous relationships I had been the dominant social force – the loud, bossy one – and it was surprisingly relaxing to be released from the role. Relieved of responsibility for making it work, a night out in Tony’s world often felt like a social anthropology field trip.
It was only in the company of my friends that the roles reversed, and all of Tony’s confidence melted away. Worried about what they would think of him, he assumed the worst, and paranoia could put him in danger of fulfilling the prophecy. In dismay I would watch him grow sullen and withdrawn, or boorish and overbearing, or edgy and distracted. I would overcompensate by laughing too much, shrill with insincerity, while my bewildered friends made heroic efforts to act as if we were a perfectly normal couple.
In Tony’s circle my middle-class manners were neither normal, nor massively successful. Perhaps a little over half his friends were white, the rest black, and a lot were or had been criminals, though far from all. But they were all men, and observed a social code to which my conversational approach was ill-suited. In my world, curiosity is the key to social success; if you want to ingratiate or flatter or show respect, you ask questions. So I did. In Tony’s world, to question someone you’ve just met – or for that matter, anyone – was a calamitous faux pas guaranteed to provoke offence and suspicion. Several friends quietly suggested to him that I was an undercover police officer. His news that I was in fact a journalist was not found reassuring.
I can recall only one occasion when a friend of Tony’s asked me questions about myself. We had already met lots of times, and I liked him enormously; he was a drug dealer from Hackney in his mid-twenties, white and skinny, with a Dickensian pallor to suggest minimal exposure to daylight. Always late for everything, he would burst in with a great flurry of excuses about far-fetched misfortunes, a surprising number of which would turn out to be true. Everyone had an anecdote about his propensity to land himself in trouble, and perhaps it was his status as the loveable clown that licensed him to break the code and ask me questions. He was curious about my job: how did an article get commissioned, was I allowed to write whatever I wanted, who made up the headline? I was amazed, and rather touched. The conversation lasted only a few minutes before he clamped a hand over his mouth. ‘God, mate, sorry. What must you be thinking? Dunno what happened there. Talk about embarrassing. I’m really sorry. You must think I’m coming on like Old Bill.’
If Tony and I came from different social worlds, we also occupied separate time zones. I would generally get up around 8 a.m., and work at my desk in the spare room until he woke up at around four in the afternoon. His day would start with coffee, a spliff, Sky News, and a quick-fire burst of phone calls. As he tended to be quite grumpy when first awake, he had worked out that this was the ideal time to phone everyone who owed him money. His threats were seldom particularly inventive or colourful; they didn’t need to be. The sound of his growl through the wall was menacing enough to make me jump, and quite hard to reconcile with the sleepy smile and gentle kiss he would pad through in his slippers to deliver to me at my desk.
Once he was up and about, there was usually business to attend to. This consisted largely of ‘meets’. He had a personal mobile, and a work one whose number would be regularly changed, but nothing of any significance could be discussed over the phone, so he would head off to meet associates in car parks or pubs, or they would show up at our flat and disappear into the bedroom with Tony. Before long the cast of faces became familiar, and we would exchange pleasantries and drink tea before they retired to talk business, for all the world as if I were a housewife married to a reputable entrepreneur.
The truth was that Tony’s work was quite boring. When I told friends about it, they pictured Hollywood gangsta high drama – car chases, concealed weapons, death threats – and were disappointed to learn that it was mostly just phone calls and meets. He employed a City accountant whose client base consisted exclusively of criminals, and who specialised in producing false accounts convincing enough to satisfy the Inland Revenue. The cocaine was stored in a safe house two boroughs away, but even that turned out to be less exciting than it sounded; it was just a bloke’s flat on a council estate. Occasionally there would be a dispute with a supplier about the purity of a consignment, and Tony would come home in a bad mood. But he was always reluctant to go into details about his work, on the sensible principle that should the police ever show up, if I knew nothing I would be unable to tell them anything. As information could only compromise me, I was happy with this arrangement, although oddly enough I never worried about the police. Tony’s business operation seemed too mundane to be risky, and the possibility that he might get caught did not enter my mind.
As far as I could see, there was only one major flaw in his business model, but it destabilised the entire drug-dealing economy; this was credit. Every purchase Tony made was on tick, and his supplier would be paid only once Tony had sold the consignment on – but Tony’s clients could only pay him when they had in turn sold it on and been repaid, so the economy consisted of a long daisy chain of loans. Given the precarious nature of the business, and the character of some of the parties involved, the chain frequently broke down. Without recourse to legitimate means of recovering money owed, the threat of violence was embedded in the terms and conditions of business. To achieve the desired leverage, it needed to be credible.
Tony was very open about his relationship with violence. It used to be his favourite part of the job, he said, and recreational violence had been tremendous fun too. He had no interest in gratuitous non-consensual violence, and only contempt for nutters who pick fights in pubs with innocent or defenceless strangers. Any man who hit a woman or child was beyond the pale. The rules of engagement, as he saw it, were straightforward. If violence wasn’t justified as a necessary business tool, it could be legitimately deployed only if the other party provoked it, or was equally enthusiastic about having a fight. The latter scenario was his favourite, and explained his fondness for football hooliganism. He had travelled all over the world supporting England, but sometimes never even made it to the game, for the football was only a sideshow, and the main attraction the rival hooligans also there only for the fighting.
