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2
June 2019
I am Henry Lamb. I am forty-two years old. I live in the best apartment in a handsome art deco block just around the corner from Harley Street. How do I know it’s the best apartment? Because the porter told me it was. When he brings a parcel up – he doesn’t need to bring parcels up, but he’s nosey, so he does – he peers over my shoulder and his eyes light up at the slice of my interior that he can see from my front door. I used a designer. I have exquisite taste, but I just don’t know how to put tasteful things together in any semblance of visual harmony. No. I am not good at creating visual harmony. It’s OK. I’m good at lots of other things.
I do not currently – quite emphatically – live alone. I always thought I was lonely before they arrived. I would return home to my immaculate, expensively renovated flat and my sulky Persiancats and I would think, oh, it would be so nice to have someone to talk to about my day. Or it would be so nice if there was someone in the kitchen right now preparing me a lovely meal, unscrewing the cap from a bottle of something cold or, better still, mixing me something up in a cocktail glass. I have felt very sorry for myself for a very long time. But for a year now, I have had house guests – my sister Lucy and her two children – and I am never, ever alone.
There are people in my kitchen constantly, but they’re not mixing me cocktails or shucking oysters, they’re not asking me about my day; they’re using my panini-maker to produce what they call ‘toasties’, they’re making hot chocolate in the wrong pot, they’re putting non-recyclables in my recycling bin and vice versa. They’re watching noisy, unintelligible things on the smartphones I bought them and shouting at each other when there’s really no need. And then there’s the dog. A Jack Russell terrier type thing that my sister found on the streets of Nice five years ago scavenging in bins. He’s called Fitz and he adores me. It’s mutual. I’m a dog person at heart and only got the cats because they’re easier for selfish people to look after. I did a test online –What’s Your Ideal Cat Breed?– answered thirty questions, and the result came back: Persian. I think the test was correct. I’d only ever known one cat before, as a child, a spiteful creature with sharp claws. But these Persians are in a different realm entirely. They demand that you love them. You have no choice in the matter. But they do not like Fitz the dog and they do not like me liking Fitz the dog and the atmosphere between the animals is horrendous.
My sister moved in last year for reasons that I barely know how to begin to convey. The simple version is that she was homeless.The more complicated version would require me to write an essay. The halfway version is that when I was ten years old our (very large) family home was infiltrated by a sadistic conman and his family. Over the course of more than five years the conman took control of my parents’ minds and systematically stripped them of everything they owned. He used our home as his own personal prison and playground and was ruthless in getting exactly what he wanted from everyone around him, including his own wife and children. Countless unspeakable things happened during those years, including my sister getting pregnant at thirteen, giving birth at fourteen, and leaving her ten-month-old baby in London and running away to the south of France when she was only fifteen. She went on to have two more children by two more men, kept them fed and clothed with money earned by busking with a violin on the streets of Nice, spent a few nights sleeping rough, and then decided to come home when (amongst many other things) she sensed that she might be in line for a large inheritance from a trust fund set up by our parents when we were children.
So, the good news is that last week that trust finally paid out and now – a trumpet fanfare might be appropriate here – she and I are both millionaires, which means that she can buy her own house and move herself, her children and her dog out, and that I will once more be alone.
And then I will have to face the next phase of my life.
Forty-two is a strange age. Neither young nor old. If I were straight, I suppose I’d be frantically flailing around right now trying to find a last-minute wife with functioning ovaries. As it is, I am not straight, and neither am I the sort of man that other men wish to form lengthy and meaningful relationships with, so thatleaves me in the worst possible position – an unlovable gay man with fading looks.
Kill me now.
But there is a glimmer of something new. The money is nice, but the money is not the thing that glimmers. The thing that glimmers is a lost jigsaw piece of my past; a man I have loved since we were both boys in my childhood house of horrors. A man who is now forty-three years old, sporting a rather unkempt beard and heavy-duty laughter lines and working as a gamekeeper in Botswana. A man who is –plot twist– the son of the conman who ruined my childhood. And also –secondary plot twist– the father of my niece, Libby. Yes, Phineas impregnated Lucy when he was sixteen and she was thirteen and yes that is wrong on many levels and you might have thought that that would put me off him, and for a while it did. But we all behaved badly in that house, not one of us got out of there without a black mark. I’ve come to accept our sins as survival strategies.
I have not seen Phineas Thomsen since I was sixteen and he was eighteen. But last week at my niece’s birthday party, my niece’s boyfriend, who is an investigative journalist, told us that he had tracked him down for her. A kind of uber-thoughtful birthday present for his girlfriend.Look! I got you a long-lost dad!
And now here I am, on a bright Wednesday morning in June, cloistered away in the quiet of my bedroom, my laptop open, my fingers caressing the touchpad, gently guiding the cursor around the website for the game reserve where he works, the game reserve I intend to be visiting very, very shortly.
Phin Thomsen was how I knew him when we lived together as children.
Finn Thomsen is the pseudonym he’s been hiding behind all these years.
I was so close. An F for a Ph. All these years, I could have found him if I’d just thought to play around with the alphabet. So clever of him. So clever. Phin was always the cleverest person I knew. Well, apart from me, of course.
I jump at the sound of a gentle knocking at my bedroom door. I sigh. ‘Yes?’
‘Henry, it’s me. Can I come in?’
It’s my sister. I sigh again and close the lid of my laptop. ‘Yes, sure.’
She opens the door just wide enough to slide through and then closes it gently behind her.
Lucy is a lovely-looking woman. When I saw her last year for the first time since we were teenagers, I was taken aback by the loveliness of her. She has a face that tells stories, she looks all of her forty years, she barely grooms herself, she dresses like a bucket of rags, but somehow she still always looks lovelier than any other woman in the room. It’s something about the juxtaposition of her amber-hazel eyes with the dirty gold streaks in her hair, the weightlessness of her, the rich honey of her voice, the way she moves and holds herself and touches things and looks at you. My father looked like a pork pie on legs and my lucky sister snatched all her looks from our elegant half-Turkish mother. I have fallen somewhere between the two camps. Luckily, I have my mother’s physique, but sadly more than my fair share of my father’s coarse facial features. I have done my best with what nature gave me. Money can’t buy you love but it can buy you a chiselled jaw, perfectly aligned teeth and plumped-up lips.
My bedroom fills with the perfume of the oil my sister uses on her hair, something from a brown glass bottle that looks like she bought it from a country fayre.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she says, moving a jacket off a chair in the corner of my room so that she can sit down. ‘About last week, at Libby’s birthday dinner?’
I fix her with her ayes, I’m listening, please continuelook.
‘What you were saying, to Libby and Miller?’
Libby is the daughter Lucy had with Phin when she was fourteen. Miller is Libby’s journalist boyfriend. I nod.
‘About going to Botswana with them?’
I nod again. I know what’s coming.
‘Were you serious?’
‘Yes. Of course I was.’
