Chapter 10 #2
“Right then.” He sighed. “I’ll have my camp in that far corner. Two men with me—my scribe and my messenger—plus three men
in the opposite field.” He snapped his fingers left and right. “You remaining five, head to Scarborough for supplies. I’ll
have the constable summon a patrol along the coast. I’ll write a letter. I don’t want the king thinking we haven’t done our
due diligence.”
Five men rode off and the remaining five unpacked and set up tents. Already they were trampling and slipping over the banks
of the canal. The footpaths and trails Simon and I had hewn were meaningless to them. Their horses were shitting everywhere.
The prince laid claim to our house, pulling his scribe and messenger inside, slamming the door behind him.
This left Simon and I on our own and at a loss.
Any sense of strategy or way ahead was gone.
Again that pang, that yawn of grief. Simon looked at me with that look—that nothing look, where had I seen it before?
—it was beyond how I had once looked at Callum, it was more like the way my ex had looked at me when we first moved in together: a shrug of empty-headed happenstance.
That’s what it was. We had arrived at a place, unaware of the finality.
Maybe we moved in too soon, maybe we moved in too late.
A set of expectations had not been laid out.
We had been giddy and freewheeling when it was all decided—am I thinking of now or am I thinking of then?
—when we found the place in Greenwich, the place outside York, the view over the river, the creek, the easy commute, the seclusion of the forests, the sunsets, the bathroom battles at bedtime that are so fun and cute at first until the dreamscape erodes into something uncanny, something gray and unclaimed; the goats need milking, the plants need watering.
By the end of it all, it wasn’t a flat, it wasn’t a building, it wasn’t a home.
It was a hut. A roost for seagulls and spiders.
A warren of unpaid bills and now a sneering, snotty prince.
Every year there’s at least one suicide at Canary Wharf. A morally bankrupt banker hits pavement, train, marble floor, and
for one day a billionaire somewhere in the world has trouble getting in touch with his account manager.
Mine was a slow-moving, deathless self-combustion. It was limbo. It was the sudden realization of the barren earth I had been
pouring myself over until I had run out of myself. There was nothing left of me. Callum had taken it all.
But the thing about Callum was that he had a blind spot.
That night at dinner, as he detailed his hospitality tricks and how he could make anybody fall in love with him, he couldn’t see that he was confessing to all the wool-pulling tactics he had used on me—and that had to be the ultimate sign of a master, that even his confession could still be so charming.
This was a cheeky chap striptease of vulnerability and it forced me to reward him even still, to fawn and say, “Nooo, I think Tenerife’s a great idea, it makes total sense.
I’ll make sure the commissions pay out the way they should”—out of control of my own words.
I paid for the meal. I felt tears sting the corners of my eyes as I hugged him goodbye and said I had left something back at the office and had to go back.
“No, no, you go on ahead,” I insisted, and I left.
I hid my face as I walked back to our building alone, strode through the lobby, took the lift up.
I went to my computer and logged on to our billing platform, the creaky old system we used for commissions and legal money laundering.
I pulled up his accounts. I clicked here and there.
And I fucked Callum as hard as I knew how to fuck someone. The way I had always wanted to.
I avoided Callum at work for a few days until payday, when his commission was half its usual sum. It took him another week
to figure out it was me and what I had done, the avalanche I had started. I was already dead to myself so being dead to him
came as no shock. There was no confrontation—there couldn’t be one because there was no “right” way to do the wrong I had
been doing for him and all the others. Callum simply evaporated like rain on Tenerife. There was no goodbye.
It took another month for a compliance officer to come for me next. A security complaint was raised—a serious one. I was invited
to a disciplinary. Several. The clucking henhouse of HR did their song and dance, mental health terminology bandied about
like hot pokers. My systems access was downgraded. I felt oddly at peace as my world fell down around me. There was a bizarre
comfort in never seeing or speaking to Callum again, how it confirmed my suspicion that I had been used, that these people
would never amount to anything more than the amusing little fantasies they projected of themselves onto the walls of the dark
empty room inside me.
When everything was over and done, I found myself with the dogs, with the boyfriend about to leave, with the days that never
amounted to anything more than a sequence of time and breaths, all while I felt the oddest, strangest sense of contentedness.
As wrecked and ruined as I was, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.