Читать книгу Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection - Jenny Valentine - Страница 14

Bob Cutforth was a man with secrets. He used to have a mountain of them and now he doesn’t have any. He says that it’s better this way, but it must have been pretty painful getting found out again and again, like he did, and losing everything, bit by bit. The thing I really like about Bob, my absolute favourite thing about him, is that he is way happier now with nothing than he ever was before. Bob says it’s the best kind of freedom, having nothing to lose.

He says that when he lived in a big house in Camden Square, with a beautiful academic wife and a sexy assistant and a pedigree dog and an impressive wine cellar and a great job and a fat wallet, he never for one minute stopped worrying. Bob worried about being robbed or mugged or murdered. His wife was neurotic and his assistant was insatiable, so he couldn’t please either of them and he worried about that. His dog was on Prozac and threw itself through a plate glass window one morning when he was leaving for the airport because she didn’t like being left.

Bob’s job frightened the life out of him. He went to Rwanda and Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Philippines and Libya and Colombia at times when other people were frightened just to see them on TV. No wonder he was scared. Bob says he was drinking a litre of vodka a day by the end and that the wine cellar was just for show.

I suppose the other big thing about Bob is that he could have gone missing too, easily, and he chose to stay. One minute he was everybody’s hero, like John Simpson or Raggy Omar, and the next he was a degenerate sicko with no morals, no job, a mistress, a coke habit, an expensive divorce and a drink-driving ban. He must have been tempted to run for it, but he stuck it out, all of it, and you’ve got to love him for that.

I can’t help wondering, what was so bad that Dad couldn’t face it? I don’t like where things go when I try to answer that question. I’ve said it before – it’s the not knowing that drives you mad. It’s the imagining things that you wish you couldn’t think up all by yourself.

Of course, Bob is the best person for talking about my dad and he knows lots of brilliant, secret stuff that kids me into thinking I know him better. Bob and my dad go back years. They worked on a local paper together when they were just out of college – The Radnorshire Express. Bob says there was nothing express about it and it was the slowest, dullest place he’s ever lived, and if it wasn’t for my dad he’d of gone off his head with boredom. I imagine it was a bit like Andover, which is the most boring place I’ve ever been. My mum sent me there on an adventure weekend and I still say she should have got them for false advertising.

According to Bob, my dad went missing before.

He was twenty-three or twenty-four. He was going out with a nurse from Brazil called Luzmira (Bob said it means “look at the light”). Bob and my dad were working at the Evening Standard and they spent a lot of time drinking and playing serious poker with some doctors from Charing Cross Hospital. A weird crowd, Bob said, real freaks, they put him off medics for good. Bob said Dad was in over his head and owed them a load of money. Then suddenly Dad stopped coming to work or to poker, and he lost his job. Luzmira and the doctors said they hadn’t seen him. His landlady put all his stuff in a cupboard and rented his room out. Bob thought dad was dead. About three months later Dad came back, out of the blue, and he wouldn’t tell anybody where he’d been, not even Bob, and he never did.

Still, if my dad can disappear and then show up once, he can do it again.

Agatha Christie went missing for a while when she was pretty famous and then she came back, but nobody knows where she went. Except my friend Ed, the one whose house I was at the night I met Violet, who reckons he knows exactly. Ed says that his great grandfather on his mother’s side was having a secret affair with Agatha Christie in Jamaica or Antigua or somewhere, but it didn’t work out so he went back to his wife in Swindon. He kept this shawl Agatha Christie had given him in his sock drawer and stroked it lovingly every now and then when his wife wasn’t looking. But of course she knew because wives in those days put their husbands’ clean socks away and didn’t say anything about affairs or lovers’ trinkets to avoid the shame.

If my dad was holed up with a thriller writer in the West Indies (or a nurse in Brazil) my mum would kick up a stink. She is way beyond worrying about what the neighbours might say.