Best of 2017

Takes cigarette breaks, and nobody will ever be allowed a cigarette break around Mr Henley’s property.

Broke a company branded paperweight in meeting suite five last summer.

Four individual sick days this last quarter.

That leaves us, she says. It’s bound to be one of us. Both of us. Who knows?

That’s when she decides to run us through the ropes. Just in case.

I listen in awe at the end of our Friday shift, soaking in every single word as she tells us all about the inside of Alexander Henley’s home, the inside of Alexander Henley’s world.

Alexander Henley collects gemstones. Rare ones that she has to polish with a special cloth. He keeps them in a dedicated room on the top floor of his Kensington town house, in special cabinets with combination locks. She knows the codes by heart, even though he changes them every month like clockwork.

Alexander Henley has more suits than she’s managed to count, but they’re all black, and so are his ties. Every. Single. One.

Alexander Henley finishes every evening with a single shot of whisky from an expensive crystal tumbler. He smokes one cigarette, by an open window in his entrance hallway and leaves the ash in an antique inkwell she has to polish to gleaming every afternoon.

Alexander Henley only ever uses the same one set of cutlery, and would rather take it from the dishwasher than choose a fresh set from the cutlery drawer.

He listens to dreary melancholic blues to wake up in the morning. Sometimes it’s still playing when she gets there. She hates it, but I know I’ll just love it, like I love everything else about him.

My heart tickled when she told us about the framed photographs of his children, and how they have to be facing just so on his mantelpiece. She told us that they’re gone, to Hampshire with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, some football coach named Terry.

Maybe the biggest surprise of all came when she told us he has a dog. Brutus.

I can’t imagine Alexander having a dog, and I don’t know why, it just seems so… human. Not much seems human about Alexander Henley.

She shook her head when she gave us the warning, beckoned us in close, as though she was spilling state secrets.

“Brutus is a beast,” she said. “You’ll have to win his trust or he’ll take your hand off, and you don’t want that. The last thing you want to be doing is bleeding over Mr Henley’s cream carpets.”

We’d oohed and aahed as she told us about his favourite treats, these weird dried fish sticks she has to pick up from the vets in the middle of Kensington.

“Never run short,” she told us. “Friendship is unsteady with that dog, and you’ll never get him out for his afternoon walk if you don’t have those to bribe him with.”

It turns out that’s another of Cindy’s duties. The afternoon walk, and apparently she’s gone through three different aprons after Brutus has tried to tug them off her halfway around the block.

“Why is he so mean?” I asked, and she’d sighed and shrugged.

“Rescue, I think, after his wife left. Guess he was lonely.”

I can’t imagine that, either. He always seems so… composed.

“Just remember,” she told us, “Mr Henley notices everything. Every. Thing. Make sure you get it right, or you’ll be out of there before your feet hit the floor.”

We nodded. Nodded some more. Made little notes for later. Made notes to give us the edge.

And so we make a pact, Sonnie and me, at the end of another long week as we hobble down the bazillion steps to the ground floor.

No hard feelings, that’s what we promise.

“May the best scrubber win,” she says, and holds out her hand before we part ways on the street.

And I shake it, I shake it and smile, and wish her good luck, even though I know it won’t be going her way.

Because there’s no way on earth I’m going to let her win this one.

Alexander Henley’s dirty boxers will be all mine.

CHAPTER FIVE

ALEXANDER

MOST ADDICTS WON’T ACCEPT they’re addicted. That’s a fact. Not a fact I read in some shitty self-help book, either. It’s something I see every day, every time I have to pluck the same old assholes from the jaws of a custodial sentence.

That’s the other thing about money – it grants the privilege of eternal self-delusion.

My clients aren’t addicts, they’re professionals with hobbies. No client has ever looked me dead in the eye and admitted they’ve got a problem, not even in the cold light of day with their back against the wall and their freedom well and truly in my hands.

There’s always a million excuses. A set-up, burning the candle at both ends, living life to the max, and, of course, the best one – they went a little overboard.

That’s what they call snorting drugs all weekend and setting fire to your five-star hotel suite – going a little overboard.

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 t

hey 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.

Today, it appears, is different.

I see her as the door opens, easing aside for the boys as they come charging out. I register the difference in a heartbeat, the change in her willowy curves, the Empire line dress. The way she’s standing, one hand idly on her belly, rocking back on her heels as though she’s a few months further along than she really is.

I’d say three months tops.

I get out of the car just in time for the boys to slam right into me, warm arms squeezing me tight as Brutus barks his greeting at them from the passenger seat.