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SEVENTY-SEVEN

I suppose you’d like to hear from me, directly, about how it feels to walk into that place, that space, with all those women looking at me, all those faces, those eyes, those expressions of distaste, dislike, fear, curiosity, rage.

Well, the first thing I can tell you that I feel is like a fucking idiot .

I turn to Martha. I see what she has done.

She has lured me into a trap with her lackluster sex and her talk of dreams and her stupid messages that, God , I cannot believe I fell for.

I am better than this, is what I think when I walk into that space.

I am better than this, and I am better than all of you.

I cannot imagine for a moment what they want with me.

What? I think. What do you want? What do you want me to say, want me to do?

You all wanted me , I want to say. You all had gaping voids in your lives, and you all invited me to fill them. I did not force one of you to choose me. Not one of you.

But I don’t say anything, I merely stand with my arms folded and look from one to the next.

I see my sons. Sam eyes me warily. Joel eyes me challengingly.

They are both so handsome. I feel a kick of pride at the sight of them.

And then I see Lola, my elder daughter with Laura, and my stomach lurches.

I have not seen Lola since she was six. She is now a young woman, long and lean, dressed in black, unable to look at me at all.

Wow , I want to say, look at you! Just look at you!

But again, I say nothing. I see, much to my disgust, the girl called Kadija from the café in Tooting.

What on earth, I think, is she doing here? And that’s when I break my silence.

I turn to Martha and issue a small laugh. “What’s going on, darling?” I ask her, in my softest, most vulnerable voice. “What on earth have you done?”

Martha looks at me and I see her sigh. “It’s over, Al,” she says. “This is the end.”

I frown. “The end of what, exactly?”

I hear someone tut, someone else sigh.

I put my hand against my heart, and let my eyes fill with tears. “No, really,” I say. “The end of what? The end of me just trying to survive in this world? Just trying to make people happy, give them what they want?”

The gathering is silent for a moment until a young woman—I think it might be the girl who reported me to the police in Reading—gets to her feet and says, “I’m sorry.

You think I wanted you breathing down my neck in the dark?

You think I wanted to feel like my heart was going to burst apart, explode out of my chest, like I might be about to be killed or raped, that my life might be about to end?

You think I wanted that, you sick fuck ?? ”

And then I see what is happening here. It is a reckoning. These women and children have come together to make me atone for my so-called sins. But these women and these children—they know nothing.

I sigh sadly and reply to the woman accusing me. “You know it wasn’t me. The police know it wasn’t me.”

Then the woman called Kadija gets to her feet and takes three steps toward me, a finger pointed at me feverishly.

“You made me not want to come into work in the morning. You made me feel like meat. You knew nothing about me, about my history, about the things I have had to deal with in my life, my trauma, yet you thought it was OK to come into my workspace and intimidate me and scare me and make me feel unsafe—”

And that is when I lose my cool. This stupid, stupid girl with her stupid, stupid sense of entitlement, to what? My respect? What on earth has she done to earn my respect? Nothing. Not one thing.

“Trauma!” I say. “You know nothing about trauma. None of you know. But you don’t see me whingeing about it, complaining about people making me feel ‘unsafe’ because someone stood a little close. Jesus Christ.”

Nina gets to her feet, and I see in her eyes that she is about to make some kind of a pronouncement.

“So, this trauma,” she says. “The—what was it you told me—the waterboarding? The neglect? Your cruel father? The jibes about your appearance? Being cut out of the inheritance for no good reason?”

I clench my jaw and stare at her, waiting to see where she is going.

“Simon…,” she says, with almost tangible relish. “Simon Smith.”

I feel the center fall out of my world. She has my name. But then immediately it jumps back into place. Go on , I tell Nina with my eyes. Go on then.

“Only child of Richard and Felicity Smith,” she continues.

“ Beloved only child. Given everything. But nothing was ever good enough. Loans and more loans, until your poor parents were almost bled dry. Your mother changed her will because she was scared you were going to kill her in her sleep. Your parents were scared of you. You made their lives hell with your superiority complex, your insistence that they pave your way with gold. And then when you found out about the will change, you arrived at your mother’s door blue with rage, you screamed into her face so loudly she swore she was being berated by the devil.

She changed the locks the day after your father died.

She was terrified that you would come back and finish her off.

But she loved you so much, your mother. She adored you. Until the day she died.”

I feel a wave of nausea wash through me at her words.

Images flash through my mind. My childhood home so lovingly tended.

The garden that was my father’s pride and joy.

The holidays that were so painstakingly planned for and looked forward to and which I always, always hated, and always, always spoiled.

The attempts to find me friends, to buy me gifts that might make me happy.

My mother’s hand on the crown of my head.

“My beautiful boy,” she would say. “Look at you, you are the most beautiful boy in the world.” My mother had loved me.

My father had loved me too. But neither of them had loved me enough to give me what I truly needed.

They tried, but they couldn’t. Small people they were, both of them, with small dreams and small ambitions.

They thought that what they had should be enough for me, but it was not.

Not nearly enough. And then they cut it all away from me and left me adrift.

“I assume,” I say now to Nina, “that you have been talking to my aunt.”

Now Emma gets to her feet. “Not just your aunt, Simon. Your cousins. Your neighbors. Everyone, in fact, that we could find in the village of Lower Dunton where you grew up. And all of them said the same thing. They all said you were a psycho. A monster. A user. And…” Emma purses her lips before letting rip with her finishing salvo. “A loser.”

The word sits in my head like the imprint of a camera flash, and I stare at Tara’s daughter, this woman who ruined my life, this ugly, ugly woman who set this whole sequence of events in motion four years ago when she told her mother to leave me.

I feel a fire burning from the pit of my stomach and into the muscle and sinew and gristle of my arms, and I make a roar and I hurl myself at her.

My fist connects with her face, and I feel some part of it crackle, satisfyingly.

There is blood and some muted screams and then there are hands pulling me back, but everything has fallen apart, all the neatly stitched seams that hold me together are falling apart and bits of me are spilling out and I don’t care anymore, I simply don’t care, not one person in this room is worthy of me, not one person in this room means anything to me, not even Martha, not my children.

None of them. And my body throws out blows and kicks as other people’s bodies attempt to overpower me and then I am somehow on the floor and my sons, my strong, handsome sons, they have pinned me down and I stare up now into the dark eyes of Sam, his face a few inches from mine, and he hisses into my face, “Where’s Mum? What the fuck have you done with Mum?”

“Nothing,” I hiss back. “I’ve done nothing to your mum.”

“Where’s my mother, Jonathan?” Emma booms from somewhere out of my eyeline. “Where is she? Just tell us. We know you’ve killed them both. Just tell us where they are!”

I can see the pieces aligning. I can see the power that this group of disparate people hold.

Through the sea of faces staring down at me, I see the face of Jessie Bland.

What is she doing here? I wonder queasily.

Has she told anyone about the money? About me throttling her?

Has she given up her anonymity to get me into this room, to bring about this intervention?

Has she told the police? I feel it all merging, all of it, all the connections hissing and popping, all the perfectly separated pieces of my life merging into a toxic black puddle, and someone has a match to it, the whole thing is about to explode, subsume, consume, and not only that but bring out all the other dormant pieces, the other people I have messed with and hurt.

The face of Luke Berner flashes through my mind. Not my fault. Not my fault.

All of this swims through my consciousness and I know I cannot be here, not anymore.

I use my heft, my substance, my terror, my rage, and I am not the small, spoiled, fey boy that the kids at school called Simone.

I am Simon, Simon Smith, I am strong and I am tall and I can fight back, I can bend the world to my will, and I throw back the grips of the people who are holding me to the floor and I leap to my feet and I push Martha out of the way so hard that I see her stumble backward against the side of a table and wince, but I cannot care about her now, I just need to go.

I stride, tough, solid, out of the pavilion and onto the beach and my feet hit the cold, hard sand.

I start to run toward the sea, and I run and I run and I run until I feel the icy chill of seawater inside my shoes, leaching through the cotton of my socks, my jeans, my underwear, my jacket, my sleeves, my chest, my neck, the top of my head.

It closes over me, the shock of it is awesome, my heart pounds, my thoughts still. I am gone.