All at Sea, page 7
It was two weeks before Tony called. By then I had rehearsed the conversation a thousand different ways, but none of my imaginary scripts had prepared me for what he had to say.
The day he read my note and left, he had looked up the nearest Narcotics Anonymous group and attended his first meeting that evening. He found a local Cocaine Anonymous group too, and had been attending a meeting of one or other every day. Since I last saw him he had not touched crack. More incredibly still, he said he had felt no desire to. He was staying with an old friend who smoked crack most nights, but according to Tony the meetings had inoculated him against even the temptation to join in.
How was this possible? I could hardly believe my ears. But I knew Tony was not lying. As he described this mind-blowing new thrill of emotional honesty to me, he sounded euphoric. In the draughty church halls and community centres where recovering addicts gather, Tony had stumbled upon a context that released him from the guarded gangster code, and allowed him to connect with men in a register much more suited to who he really was. He couldn’t get enough of it. His phone was full of new numbers, and in this new fraternity Tony was in his element. He loved the organised gallantry, the elaborate declarations of brotherly support, the ceaseless text messages checking up on each other.
I told him it was amazing – and it was. What I did not say, but did not doubt, was that it wouldn’t last. How could it? For a start, most addicts relapse sooner or later, even when they follow the twelve-step programme to the letter. In Tony’s case I could not see how it would work when he was disregarding the fellowship’s insistence upon total abstinence. As he was continuing to smoke cannabis and drink, it could only be a matter of time before crack made a reappearance. On the other hand, to be less than encouraging while it lasted felt gratuitously unkind, and within days we were seeing each other again. After a month or so it seemed mad to make him keep living with a friend who smoked crack, so he moved back in with me. For many months after that I kept waiting for him to fall off the wagon, and after a while he did stop going to meetings. But he never touched crack again.
It was my first intimation of a quality in Tony that made him unlike anyone else I have ever known. Most of us talk all the time about how we are going to change, but good intentions seldom translate into action, and rarely last even when they do. When Tony put his mind to something, he was capable of almost anything.
The novelty of talking truthfully about his feelings began to open his eyes to all sorts of other possibilities. He enrolled at the local college and took courses in drug awareness and counselling. In the course of role-play workshops he made the revelatory discovery that he was an appalling listener, and began to notice that no one else in his circles listened to a word anyone said either. They were just waiting for their turn to talk. As he began to pay closer attention he realised that no one said anything interesting anyway. He was suddenly bored, and hungry for something more.
Why Tony had fallen in love with me was a question I used to puzzle over, and that was now becoming clearer. With the exception of the police, no one in his life had ever questioned him closely about himself, or listened carefully to his answers. ‘You ask all these questions cos you’re a journalist,’ he used to say in the early days. ‘No,’ I would disagree, ‘I became a journalist because I’m interested in people.’ Tony was beginning to become interested in himself, and to re-examine his past for more complex clues than the account he had constructed out of crude headlines: Racism, Prison, Unhappy Marriage.
There was a conspicuous rigidity in his insistence that he felt nothing but gratitude for having been adopted which had often made me wonder, so I bought him a book about adoption called The Primal Wound. He read it in one sitting, transfixed. ‘Dec, it’s like reading my own diary.’ The pain of rejection he had always tried to deny manifests itself, he read, in behaviours which adopted children and their parents often find bewildering, and explained his compulsion to steal and run away in terms he had never considered. The possibility that all parties involved in his adoption could be blameless, and yet still the adoption could have damaged him profoundly, was sensational. Tony found a therapist, and saw her every week for the rest of his life.
I talked him into sitting a driving test, and he passed. In the new year we moved to a flat in Kentish Town, and that spring I took him to Treasure Beach. Tony had never wanted to go to Jamaica, and told me so repeatedly. ‘Bloody Yardies,’ he would protest indignantly, ‘they’ve caused me nothing but trouble. Why would I want to go to Jamaica?’ I had a feeling he might change his mind, and within twenty-four hours of arriving he had fallen in love. He looked like he had lived there all his life. Treasure Beach Jamaicans tend to be golden brown rather than black, with broad features similar to Tony’s, and in the first few days several villagers flagged our car down, mistaking him for a new local taxi driver.
That summer we threw a big house party in Kentish Town, and our respective friends began to get to know one another. My cat from Ainsworth Road came to live with us. We befriended the children who lived in the flat upstairs, a sweet-natured mixed-race boy and girl who trailed after Tony with puppy-dog eyes. Sometimes, as we fooled around with them in the garden, I could almost picture us having a family of our own.
Two problems remained seemingly insoluble. One was Tony’s profession, which could just about be accommodated in our current lifestyle, but not reconciled in my mind with parenthood. The other was the hostility of his wife and daughter. I had no direct dealings with his wife, and could tell Tony preferred to keep the ugliest details of their rows to himself, but even his edited accounts were alarming. When his wife heard that he had stopped smoking crack, Tony said she had been happy for him. When she learned of our relationship, the realisation that he had quit for me was incendiary.
There were days when I wondered if it was hopelessly unrealistic to hope for a future, when competing expectations from his past were pulling Tony in other directions. He was trying to make his daughter happy and keep relations with his wife civil enough for them to function as co-parents, while struggling to protect me from their hostility. A Facebook profile page was set up in the name of Decca Aitkenhead, not by me but by someone in Malaga. Tony’s business relationships required social maintenance, very much as corporate executives need to play golf together, but he had grown more and more disenchanted with the late-night tedium of self-aggrandising anecdotes that passed for conversation. He was also becoming demoralised by the diminishing returns. The wholesale price of cocaine had rocketed, while the street value remained stable, and the dwindling profit margin was making an alternative career look attractive. He wondered what else he might be able to do. The classes he took at the local college had given him an appetite for further study, and an interest in university. We were in the early stages of discussions about applying for a course that could lead him there when he was arrested.
The arrest came out of the blue, on a lazy Sunday afternoon. We had been to the local pub for a roast, and were about to curl up on the sofa to watch a film when my friend Tom, who lived a few streets away, happened to pass by. A few days earlier the teenage boy from next door had told us that his friend was selling a flat-screen TV, and were we interested? We weren’t, but when Tony mentioned it to Tom he was, so Tony told me to pause the movie, hopped into Tom’s car, and said he would be back in twenty minutes.
When I heard a great commotion in the street about half an hour later, at first I paid no attention. As the shouting grew louder and louder, I recognised Tony’s voice. What was going on? I went to the window, and saw Tony sitting on the wall. A short, white, ginger-haired man was standing over him on the pavement, screaming in his face. Who was he? And why was Tony just sitting there letting him? I strained to see further, and could make out half of Tom on the wall near Tony. What I guessed was the television was wrapped in a black bin liner, leaning against the car, and the boot was wide open. As I stared in confusion several more men appeared on the pavement, who seemed to be friends of the little angry redhead. Then I saw the plastic gloves. They were plain-clothes police officers. A moment later a police van pulled up, and Tony and Tom were bundled into the back and driven away.
The following twelve hours cannot have been easy for the custody officer at Kentish Town police station. I phoned continually, demanding information with all the righteous indignation and pompous legalese I could muster, insisting I be allowed to speak to Tony at once. Amazingly, I was. He and I must have talked at least half a dozen times, until in the end I think even he got fed up with the endless calls and said I might as well go to bed and get some sleep. By this point it was established that an unmarked police car had tailed Tom and Tony, thinking they looked unlikely to be friends. Tom is a white middle-class professional who makes television documentaries. After watching them visit a council estate, then a cash point, and return briefly to the estate, they deduced a drug deal was taking place and pulled them over. On finding the TV on the back seat, they assumed it was stolen and arrested both of them. Tom told me later that officers at the station had been rather embarrassed and apologetic about hauling in such an obviously upstanding fellow as himself. There was an awkward moment when swabs were taken from their mouths to test for drugs, and Tony’s was negative but Tom tested positive for cocaine. After that, Tom said, they were slightly shorter with him, but he was released without charge a few hours later. Tony was released next morning, having been charged with handling stolen goods.
Any irony in the situation was lost on Tony. Watching him disappear in the police van, my mind had spun through a catalogue of entirely plausible worst-case scenarios which made prosecution for handling stolen goods practically funny by comparison, but Tony did not see it that way. He was outraged. Once my relief had subsided it was easy to see why, for if he looked like Tom he would almost certainly not now be facing trial at crown court. A conviction seemed inconceivable, but the consequences incalculable just at the point when he was considering a new kind of life. Balanced precariously between past and future, I knew which way a guilty verdict would tip him.
I was worried about how he would come across in the witness box. Tony could be easily provoked by authority, never more so than when he was in the right, and I feared that any half-decent barrister would rattle him. Once Tony started shouting there was no knowing what a jury would infer. I recruited my brother Tom to role-play the trial with Tony, and we spent a series of comical evenings with Tom strutting about the kitchen, ‘I put it to you, Mr Wilkinson’-ing, while Tony predictably lost his temper. With each rehearsal the explosions came later and grew milder, until his self-possession was quite impervious to all Tom’s insinuations. Still taking no chances, I asked some friends to come along to court and sit in the public gallery so the jury would see he had support, a reliable sign of a serial offender being one for whom no friends or family can be bothered to turn up. Tony thought this was over the top. ‘Dec, I’ve stood trial at the Old Bailey,’ he would point out. ‘Mmm,’ I’d nod. ‘And Tone, you got fourteen years.’
He was probably right about the public gallery bit, but I struggled to share his certainty that innocence guaranteed acquittal. As the trial date grew nearer I began to see that his confidence was shakier than he liked to pretend.
On the day the jury took less than an hour to return a verdict of not guilty. We were jubilant. That spring Tony applied to Tower Hamlets College for a full-time access course to study humanities, and was elated to be offered a place. My brother Matt got married, and the estrangement with my family began to thaw. I wasn’t ready to bring Tony to the wedding with me, but a few weeks later a family friend in Wiltshire threw a party and we went together. Although not easy at first, relations between Tony and my relatives gradually found their own rhythm, and he grew close to many of them, particularly my brother Tom. The reality of him was altogether less alarming than anything their imaginations had conjured, and although to some he would always remain a mystifying choice, the generosity of his heart was unmistakable to everyone, and impossible not to warm to.
We bought a house in Hackney, and spent the summer renovating it, with Tony the project manager. Under his singular management style the site resembled a cross between Notting Hill Carnival and Changing Rooms. It was frenetic and chaotic, and fabulous fun. The work was completed by September, and Tony enrolled in college.
I would not have been at all surprised if he had dropped out in week one. Having abandoned formal education in early adolescence, he was a stranger to academic discipline, and cheerfully confessed to having little idea what he had signed up for. He fortified himself by purchasing industrial quantities of stationery and different-coloured pens and pencils, and set off on day one with enthusiasm. ‘Get out of your comfort zone’ is a tiresome mantra of self-help manuals, but the degree to which Tony was now leaving his was quite extreme, and having always harboured a fear of public failure I was lost in admiration. I found his dauntlessness poignant, and prayed he hadn’t bitten off more than he could chew.
‘Dec,’ he asked that evening. ‘What’s a paragraph?’ Tony had never written an essay, and had only the haziest notion of what one would involve. In the early weeks we spent the evenings running through the basics. Imagine your essay notes are a supermarket, I suggested. A paragraph is like a shopping basket into which you put one type of produce. Vegetables go in one basket, fruit in another, frozen food in another, and so on. If you have a basket containing radishes, chocolate and flour, something has gone wrong. ‘Paragraph = like shopping basket,’ he wrote carefully in his notebook, underlining it twice in red for good measure.
Academically, it was always going to be a struggle. What I hadn’t factored in was Tony’s impact on his tutors, who were enchanted and quickly became good friends. To anyone who works in adult education, the dream student is one whose life they can transform, and in this respect Tony was an infinitely more exciting prospect than the typical intake of early-twentysomething school dropouts. He approached college much as he might a house party, and his noisy enthusiasm secured him the status of campus star. At the end of the year he graduated top of his class, and was chosen to be the poster boy for the college’s promotional campaign. His face appeared on billboards across east London. He applied to Westminster University to study psychology and criminology, and was awarded a gold scholarship.
Tony was nervous about becoming an undergraduate. In the first term the intellectual leap panicked him, but again he quickly caught the eye of tutors, one of whom had a hunch he might be dyslexic. A series of tests confirmed the diagnosis, and once equipped with software to assist literacy Tony began to find his feet. Nominated to be the student representative on his course, he took his responsibilities touchingly seriously. Most of the other students on the course were young Muslim women who lived with their parents, and the first few study groups to assemble at our house looked decidedly apprehensive on the doorstep. Tony would lead them upstairs with great trays of food, and before long I would hear shrieks of laughter from the office on the top floor. I could not have been prouder, or more charmed. At the end of his first term we spent Christmas with my family, and flew to Treasure Beach on Boxing Day. I was about to turn thirty-eight. If we were going to have children, now was probably the time. I thought it would take at least a year, but when we got home two weeks later I was pregnant.
Tony was ecstatic. I was terrified. Any concerns about Tony being the father of my children had vanished long ago; my worry was me. Was I cut out for it? I knew I did not want to not have children, but this wasn’t the same as wanting them; I envied the women in parks with dogs instead of prams, and developed a recurring dream about giving birth to a Labrador puppy. Tony’s excitement remained undimmed as I gained 6 stone, and my flap about whether I would even love my own baby – ‘But why would I? I don’t love anyone else’s, and mine will be exactly the same as all the rest’ – only made him laugh. When Jake was born Tony was a little taken aback, for he was white with blonde hair. Genetic recognition held a particular power for Tony, having been adopted by a family who looked nothing like him, but if I thought Jake’s appearance could throw him I was wrong. Nothing meant more to Tony than fatherhood, and his joyful confidence that day taught me how to be a mother. As I dissolved into the traditional puddle of adoration over our beautiful newborn son, he had the good grace not to say I told you so. We named him after Jake’s hotel in Treasure Beach.
Over the years I had observed in many new fathers the classic male misgivings – resentment at domestic confinement, alienation from a partner no longer fetching but covered in sour milk, boredom with the never-ending nappies, jealousy at finding their status usurped. Tony would not have thought to call himself a feminist, but unlike so many men who do he was genuinely egalitarian, and none of the constraints or indignities of parenthood troubled him a bit. Given the chance he would have happily taken my maternity leave and sent me back to work. As Jake got older, when Tony took him out strangers would often scoop the blonde white toddler up and demand to know where his parents were. I wouldn’t have blamed Tony for minding, but he found it only funny.
In the summer holidays before Jake was born, I had suggested he go and see Camila Batmanghelidjh. She was the founder of Kids Company, a vast and radically progressive charity in London that supported thousands of the capital’s most desperately dispossessed children, most of whom had no functional parents and many of whom were heavily involved in crime. I had met Camila through my work, and thought Tony could perhaps do some voluntary work that he could put on his CV. When they met she offered him a job on the spot. Tony was employed for the summer as a high-risk outreach worker to help gang members in south London off the streets and into education or employment. He would continue to work for Kids Company in every university holiday, with a permanent position waiting for him on graduation.
