Page 7 of The Family Remains

‘Because he wrote a five-thousand-word article about our family that ran in a broadsheet magazine only four years ago. And maybe Phin does more than just sit on jeeps looking masterful. Maybe he, you know, uses the internet?’ I clamp my mouth shut.Nasty nasty nasty.Don’t be nasty to Libby. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Sorry. It’s just frustrating. That’s all. I just thought …’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know.’

But she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know at all.

‘So,’ I say, ‘what are you planning to do? Are you still going?’

‘Not sure,’ she replies. ‘We’re thinking about it. We might postpone.’

‘Or you could …’ I begin, as a potential solution percolates, ‘… find out where he’s gone?’

‘Yes. Miller’s doing a bit of work on the reservations guy. Seeing what he can wheedle out of him. But seems like no one there really knows much about Phin Thomsen.’

I draw the conversation to a close. Things that I cannot discuss with Libby are buzzing in particles through my mind and I need peace and quiet to let them form their shapes.

I go to the website again, for Phin’s game reserve. It’s a very worthy game reserve. Internationally renowned. Unimpeachable ecological, environmental, social credentials. Phin, of course, would only work in such a place.

He told me when he was fifteen years old that he was going to be a safari guide one day. I have no idea what route he took from the house of horrors we grew up in to get there, but he did it. Did I want to be the founding partner of a trendy boutique software design solutions company, back then, when I was a child? No, of course I didn’t. I wanted to be whatever life threw at me. The thing that I would be after I’d done all the normal things that people do when they haven’t grown up in a house of horrors and then spent their young adulthood living alone in bedsits, with no academic qualifications, no friends and no family. I wanted to bethat thing. But, in the story that this spinning Rolodex of endless and infiniteuniverses gave to me, this is where I am and I should be glad and grateful. And in a way I am. I guess in another of those universes I might, like my father before me, have sat and got fat whilst waiting for my parents to die so that I could claim my inheritance. I might have lived a life of boredom and indolence. But I had no option other than to work and I’ve made a success of my life and I guess that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

But Phin, of course, Phin knew what he wanted even then. He didn’t wait to be formed by the universe. He shaped the universe to his will.

I head into work and find the same lack of focus plagues me through a conference call and two meetings. I snap at people I’ve never snapped at before and then feel filled with self-loathing. When I get home at seven that evening, my nephew Marco is wedged on to the sofa with a friend from school, a pleasant boy I’ve met before and have made an effort to be nice to. He gets to his feet when I walk in and says, ‘Hi, Henry, Marco said it was OK if I came. I hope you don’t mind.’ His name is Alf and he is delightful. But right now I don’t want him on my sofa, and I don’t even spare him a smile. I grunt: ‘Please tell me you’re not planning to cook?’

Alf throws Marco an uncertain look; then they both shake their heads. ‘No,’ says Alf, ‘no, we were just going to hang.’

I nod tersely and head to my room.

I know what I’m going to do. And I really do have to do something, or I’ll explode. I can’t sit around waiting for the lugubrious Miller Roe to sort this out. I need to sort it out myself.

I go on to Booking.com, and I book myself a four-day, all-inclusive ‘Gold Star’ stay at the Chobe Game Lodge in Botswana.

For one.