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SEVENTY-ONE

I have money. Twenty thousand pounds. It was all I could extract in the craziness of what has just happened without drawing attention to myself.

The feel of it in my bag, the heft, the weight, the freedom after these past few years of living in single sums of thousands.

Twenty. There should have been more. Jessie has hundreds of thousands squirrelled away, but of course the blessed fucking children get that.

I did not like having to be mean to Jessie.

I did not like it at all. But I have told Martha I have money, and I have to prove to her that I have money.

So I was mean to Jessie.

And it broke my heart to do it.

She has always treated me like a king, made me feel like a god.

And she’s always been so, so kind to me.

And generous too, but when I told her about my predicament, my poor mother, my perilous financial situation, when I cried again and allowed her to hold me while I told her I didn’t know what I was going to do, that I was lost, that I was desperate, and she stroked my hair and said, “André, I am so, so sorry, but I just can’t help you.

I really can’t,” I saw red. Or some other color, in fact, a sort of bruise color, sick gray, violent purple, putrid, dirty yellow.

And then I found that my hands were at her throat.

I know I said I wasn’t a violent man. I’m not a violent man. Not until someone pushes me too far, to a place where I can no longer talk sense to myself. And in that moment—why couldn’t she have just given me the fucking money? What was wrong with her?

I put my hands around her neck and I squeezed.

I told her I would call her children right now and tell them all about their mother’s secret life, the male prostitute she’d been paying to have sex with her for over fifteen years, the thousands of pounds she’d spent on him, the things she liked him to do to her, the objects belonging to their father that she’d given to him, the lovely Cartier watch, for example.

Her eyes filled with the magical glistening tears that having a man’s hands around your throat somehow conjures up, animal, beautiful, and I felt her nod, try to say something, so I loosened my grip, licked my lips, waited for her to find her voice.

“I have money, cash. But not much. The rest is in stocks and shares—I can’t touch it. But you can have my cash. You can have all of it.”

I tied her to a chair, and I took her cards to a local machine and checked her accounts.

She was not lying. Twenty thousand one hundred and eighteen pounds in two separate bank accounts.

The next day, I took her to her local branches, where I watched over her from a distance as she emptied them both, then we went back to her flat and I cooked her garlic chicken with mashed potatoes and we drank a bottle of wine, or at least I did, she just stared at her wine with big, glassy eyes.

I told her that she was the greatest woman in the world and that her children did not deserve her, and then the next morning, I left.

The bag sits at my feet now as I stand on the platform at the train station heading home to Martha.

I’ll tell her that it’s all I could free up in the short term, that I still have to sell my mother’s house, that it’s been valued at nearly ￡500,000.

But at least we have something in the bank for now, and we can start working toward Martha’s Garden on the Beach again.

As I look up the platform to see if the train that is due in forty seconds is visible yet at the top of the track, I feel my phone vibrate and pull it out of my jacket pocket. It’s Martha.

What’s your ETA?

I reply:

I’ll be home at midday. Just after.

OK, can’t wait to see you! I’ll be in our room.

I send her a throbbing-heart emoji and smile and tuck my phone back into my pocket.

Our room.

I can’t wait to be back in our room, after all those days in Paddy Swann’s bed with Paddy Swann’s wife, Paddy Swann’s pillows, Paddy Swann’s beard stubble in the razor in Paddy Swann’s en suite. I want to be back where I belong, where I am loved and appreciated, where I am wanted and needed.