Addicts. I’m surrounded by them.
I am one.
Porn, webcam girls, escorts… a constant itch I can’t scratch. A tick behind my eyes. A nausea… a need.
But there’s no self-delusion where I’m concerned. I know exactly what I am. I know exactly where I’ve come from, too.
It was neither selflessness nor an amiable disposition that saw me agreeing with every single one of Claire’s custody demands when she loaded up our boys and a couple of token houseplants and took off to Hampshire in her – my – new plate Range Rover.
I could have fought her, and I could have won. Hired myself a nanny, or checked the boys into full-boarding at their private school and fought her every step of the way until she was too tired to fight me anymore.
She’d run out of both money and stamina long before I ever would.
But I didn’t fight her. Not because I didn’t give a shit about losing my boys – believe me, I gave plenty of fucking shits – but because of the final seething line Claire delivered as she slammed the door on our life and me along with it.
You’re just like your father, Alex. Just like your filthy fucking father!
I’d poured myself a whisky as the Range’s tyres screeched down our driveway. Thought about it as I smoked a cigarette, and thought about it some more as I smoked my way through another, and another after that, until the whisky bottle was all but empty and my tie was loose around my neck, and no matter how hard I thought about it there was only one verdict.
Every piece of evidence stacked up against me.
Guilty as charged.
My sentence was the realisation that I love my boys even more than I despise my father. And that’s exactly the reason I only see them once a week on a Sunday.
It’s better that way.
For them, not me. Definitely not for me.
It’s a shitty day today, the kind of light drizzle that makes the world look miserable as sin. I head away from London, with the headlights on low-beam in the dull afternoon, listening to nothing but the rhythmic thump of the wipers and Brutus panting in the passenger seat.
Claire hates it when I bring the dog. She trusts him less than she trusts me.
Under normal circumstances, I’d say she was right. The animal has a foul temper and his social skills skirt closer to nil even than mine. But Brutus loves our boys, just as I love them. Maybe because I love them. And they love him back, in spite of his mean eyes, and his truly monstrous overbite and the fact that his breath stinks worse than Bill Catterson’s diseased little prick. They see right through all of it, and love him all the same.
I hope that’s how they feel about me, too.
Adults rarely give kids credit for all that much. My parents certainly didn’t when I was growing up. They thought I’d buy into the paper-thin smiles, and the hushed voices, and the bristling niceties they put on for appearance’s sake, as though I was too young, too naive, too fucking ignorant to pick up on the hatred simmering under the surface in our household. As though I couldn’t possibly see through their bullshit veneer enough to know they couldn’t stand the sight of one another.
I’ve never wanted to patronise my own boys like that, so I don’t.
When Thomas and Matthew asked me why their mother didn’t love me anymore I told them the truth.
Because I’m an asshole.
Because I’m incapable of plastering a fake smile on my face for the sake of keeping the peace.
Because I can’t leave my work at the office.
Because I don’t love her and she knows it, she’s always known it.
And they’d listened, and shrugged and nodded, and Matthew – being a couple of years younger than his brother – had shed a a few quiet tears, and that was that. They’d settled in Hampshire, with Claire’s parents up the road, and every Sunday afternoon they’d be waiting for our allotted time together.
Despite the crappy weather I’m excited today. Rugby tickets, England vs Wales, the best seats in the house for the game next month.
I can’t wait to see their faces. They love rugby, Thomas especially. His games tutor tells me he’s good for ten years old. Broad and strong and resilient, fast too.
He doesn’t quit, that’s what I’m told, no matter how tough it gets, Thomas will always dive headfirst into the scrum and come up trumps.
He’s a winner. Just like me.
Matthew, well, he’s much more like his mother.
I pull onto the driveway, parking up right in front of the door to make an entrance, and the curtain in the main living room twitches just like always. Claire never comes outside to greet me.
I’ll occasionally catch a flash of tight blonde curls, or a hint of a scowl as she shoots me daggers from behind the window, but she never graces me with the courtesy of a sneer to my face.