Chapter 50
Ethan
If I close my eyes and think about the past few weeks, in my mind, the memories are golden and sun-drenched. You know, like a retro movie where sun flares keep hitting the lens.
I couldn’t have chosen a better place than Australia to come with my son and work on our relationship.
With every day here, we heal, and we talk, and we build.
I don’t mean to say that we’re baring our souls—this is an introverted fourteen-year-old I’m dealing with, after all.
There’s more grunting than baring, at his end, anyway.
Still, I’d call this healing. Every time he feels my full attention on him, I hope it rewires his system a little in the direction of knowing deep inside how important he is to me.
Every time he does some crazy stunt, or we celebrate a random achievement of his just for the sake of it, or he lights me up because he’s lit up, I hope he understands that I love him for him. Just as he is.
I’ve talked a lot to him about myself. My dad.
My upbringing. The extreme bodyguard parts that have had me in their grip for so very long.
I’ve talked to him about unknown unknowns and known unknowns, about the difference it makes to develop an understanding of what you’re grappling with as opposed to being blithely oblivious to it.
We can’t always access Self Leadership. We can’t always prevent ourselves from being hijacked by well-meaning but extreme protectors, or guards. But it’s certainly helpful to know that they exist, to grasp their agenda, and to have an open line of dialogue with them.
I should know. Aside from this past fortnight on K’gari, Philip and I have been working hard on doing just that.
Even without the official therapeutic work, this place is like therapy all on its own.
Elena and I may have tried to give Jamie as normal an upbringing as possible, but a billionaire father and an elite schooling and bodyguards (actual, not just emotional) barely constitute normal.
London’s an intense environment at the best of times, and this is a world away from that frenetic pace.
Starting in Sydney was a way of easing ourselves into the transition with big city energy and the delights of Bondi. We may not have visited the Opera House (Jamie has the cultural sophistication of a banana) but we scaled the bridge: terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.
Since then, we’ve shed our city skins and morphed into surfer dudes—I’d like to think so, anyway. Noosa was good, clean fun of exactly the kind I’d hoped we’d find. Our surfing stunts may not have been worthy of TikTok, but we fell into bed exhausted every night, our hair crusty with sea salt.
And on K’gari, we became even more feral.
I’m sure both Elena and Soph would have been horrified by our lack of personal hygiene.
We got pretty attached to our 4WD camper van, watched both the sunrise and the stars at the incredible Tukkee Wurrow, and met some dingoes.
There’s something about stripping back all of the bullshit and the trappings to the stuff that really matters: food, water, nature, and human connection.
Love. Not sure there’s more to it than that.
We both had a thorough shower before Elena came to join us in Port Douglas for some beach time, and we reluctantly swapped our four-wheeled home for a swanky villa.
My ex isn’t a princess, but if she was coming all that way to get her Jamie fix, the least I could do was put her up in style.
It was a successful visit, I think. She and Jamie were ecstatic to see each other.
I was worried that hanging out as a trio would be awkward, but it wasn’t.
Not really. There was enough to do and see to keep us occupied and provide plenty of conversation fodder.
A few times, I caught her observing us together with a mixture of what felt like bewilderment and happiness.
It seems she liked what she saw, and if I’ve given her any reassurance that this was the right call for all of us, then I’m a happy man.
I sit in my plastic folding chair, nursing a nice cold beer as Jamie struggles sweatily with our tent. I wouldn’t mind, but I even got us a pop-up one. And yet he seems to be making a dog’s dinner of it.
We’re still in Port Douglas. Jamie argued that the fancy villa where we hosted his mum was ‘wanky’ and insisted that we redress the balance with a few nights in a super basic, ‘normal’ campsite.
I can confirm that this place ticks that box: it’s extremely low budget but has a chilled vibe that I appreciate.
He’s insisted on being on tent erection duties, something I’ve agreed to with pleasure and watched with great amusement.
‘How’s it going over there?’ I enquire, crossing one ankle over my other knee. Thanks to the fleet of staff at the villa, my Noosa t-shirt is distinctly cleaner than it was, but that won’t last long. I reckon we’ll have to burn our clothes when we get home.
‘Fuck off,’ he mutters, and I snigger to myself before taking another cleansing sip of beer. Ahh, this is the life.
Finally, the tent is up.
‘Well done,’ I tell him. ‘Make sure to hammer the tent pegs in nice and deep. We don’t want to blow away in the night, do we?’
He gets to work, hammering away at the pegs one by one.
Bless him, physical coordination is not this kid’s skill.
He may have built a little muscle with all that surfing we did, but he’s still all gangly limbs, with very little control over his motor skills.
I grimace as he attempts to bash one in.
The ground is seriously dry, to be fair.
I imagine it’s hard work, trying to hammer aluminium into earth as packed as this, but he has the angle all wrong.
‘Careful. Try and hit it head on.’
‘Nobody asked you,’ he grunts, and I chuckle.
‘Fair enough.’
Thirty seconds later, after a particularly aggressive hit at an ill-advised angle, the damn thing snaps in two with a comedic donk sound.
Jamie stares at it in abject horror and gasps loudly.
He looks up at me, his eyes wide. I stare back…
and then I lose the plot, laughing my head off.
I don’t know why it’s so funny—it’s low-key slapstick, nothing more—but I find it hysterical, for some reason. I’m crying actual tears.
‘You should see your face.’ I point my beer bottle at him. ‘Absolutely priceless.’
‘But what are we going to do?’ His tone is panicked. He looks around at the tent wildly.
‘Hmm, I dunno.’ I pretend to think. ‘If only we had a couple of spares—oh, wait.’
I push myself out of my chair and wander over to the pile of pegs. ‘Here you go. They tend to provide extras in case the person putting it up is a total muppet.’
‘It wasn’t my fault! The ground was too hard!’
‘You tell yourself that.’ I ruffle his hair, just to piss him off even more. ‘But honestly, chill. It’s just a tent peg. It’s not like it’s a five-hundred quid graphics card, is it?’
He sucks in a harsh breath that I’ve gone there. ‘Such a dick.’
‘Too soon?’
‘Way too soon.’ He picks up the spare peg and tries again.
I grin. It’s far too easy to wind him up, and far too much fun.
Jamie gets the tent secured eventually, and we set up our bedding. I eye it with distrust. That foam pad does not look enticing. With the tent, we’ve rented the pads, sleeping bags, and pillows.
He points at the folded pillowcases. ‘Should we put the pillow sheets on?’
That cracks me up again. ‘They’re commonly known as pillowcases, but yes.’ Where the hell did I get this funny little human from?
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Sound familiar?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Go on, then.’
We kneel and unfold our pillowcases. He looks at his dubiously.
‘Like this.’ I ruche it up over my arms and show him how to hold it away from him and feed it over the far end of his pillow.
‘I’ll tell you an embarrassing story. When I went off to uni, I’d never changed my sheets.
I had no idea how to do it. I got to St Andrew’s, and Mum had bought me new linen and a new duvet, but I didn’t have a clue how to get the duvet cover on.
I was reading Economics, but I swear it took me an hour to figure it out.
So let’s make a man of you and teach you how to put on a real, live pillowcase, yeah? ’
I will say this for the Aussies. Their barbecuing skills are worthy of their global fame.
Even at a very basic campsite and caravan park, the barbecue they’ve laid on tonight is legendary.
Jamie and I ate our bodyweight in sausages and burgers, and we’re sitting side by side in our old man folding chairs, doing a little stargazing.
We’ve pushed our chairs right up next to each other, and his tousled head is lolling on my shoulder while I have my arm around him.
We’ve done a lot of this recently—just hanging about and staring at the sky—and it strikes me how much more life-affirming it is than watching Netflix.
It’s prompted some big discussions too, about space and the meaning of life, as well as what should be straightforward questions from Jamie about the behaviour of the moon and the stars and the tides.
His keen interest and smart questions have made me realise how woefully inadequate my working knowledge of astrophysics is.
There’s been a lot of hasty googling on my part.
‘What do you miss most about home?’ I ask him. ‘And if you don’t say Mum, I’m going to tell her.’
He laughs softly. ‘Mum. But also my PC, and playing Elden Ring.’
‘I get that. The stars are pretty cool, though.’
‘Yeah. They are. What do you miss the most?’
I consider. ‘Macchiato from that place on Portobello. And Soph.’
‘Oooh. You love her.’
‘You know it.’
‘You call her all the time, and you never want to hang up.’
This seems unfair. I’ve been consciously limiting my phone time with Soph so Jamie doesn’t feel as though I have one mental foot back in England.
But it’s always gutting to hang up on her.
‘Well, I miss her. But also, we haven’t been together that long.
Being away from her is a chance to get to know each other properly, you know?
To have some good conversations.’ Without constantly being distracted by trying to fuck her instead.
‘Are you going to marry her?’
I look up at the night sky. It’s a lot better lit here than it was at Tukkee Wurrow, but it’s still aeons better than the light pollution of London.
I should probably be better at picking out the constellations by now.
‘I want to marry her. I love her very much, and I think she’s one of the best human beings I’ve ever met.
That’s a pretty good basis for spending my life with someone, I think. ’
‘Do you think she’s a better human being than Mum?’ he asks, and I jolt.
‘No! God, no. Your mum is an amazing person—she’s so loving.
So warm. She’s incredible. But I wasn’t the best version of myself when I was with your mum, not by a long shot.
And I didn’t even realise. So that made things really tough on her, and I’ll always regret that.
Soph knows how to handle me. She has a lot of expertise in this stuff—in why we do the things we do, and why our different parts can struggle with different things.
She’s the reason I’ve been on this journey. I have a lot to thank her for.’
‘She makes you really happy.’
‘You make me really happy.’ I rub my cheek against the top of his head. ‘But yes, she does, too. How would you feel if I asked her to marry me?’
He shrugs against me. ‘I dunno. It’s fine. I’m cool with it.’
‘Really? It would be a big step, one of your parents remarrying.’
‘Loads of my friends have step-parents. It’s not that deep. Would she be my stepmother? She’d be fun, I suppose.’
‘Yes she would, if she said yes. And yeah, I think she’d be a lot of fun.’
‘You’re fun now, too. As long as you don’t get back to London and turn all boring again.’
‘Hey, I won’t. I’ve given up work, remember? You’ll be the one being boring at school all day, every day, while I’m living it up and doing whatever the hell I like.’
He groans. ‘So unfair. You could even go to the cinema in the middle of the day.’
‘I could,’ I agree.
‘So when are you going to ask Sophia to marry you?’ He twists his head to look up at me, his grin cheeky.
‘I don’t know yet. I wanted to see how you felt first. And I have no idea if she’d even say yes. I buggered off and left her, remember?’
‘Well, I’m fine with it. So don’t use me as your excuse. Sometimes you’ve got to put yourself out there, you know? You didn’t know Miles would say yes, but he did.’
‘True. But I probably wouldn’t have been heartbroken if he’d said no. I’m not in love with Miles.’
‘Maybe. But you wouldn’t be here, either.’ He nestles back against my shoulder again.
I sigh. When did he get so wise? ‘You’ve got me there, mate.’
‘Is she going to come out and meet us?’
‘No, I told you. This is just you and me, and I’m good with that.’
‘But she could come and see us in Malaysia. You could pop the question then.’
‘You’re really shipping us, aren’t you? I haven’t even thought about how I’d pop the question.’ That’s technically a lie. I have thought about it, at length. I just haven’t worked out the perfect plan yet.
He springs out of his seat and turns to me, his face alight.
‘I know! You could use our secret project to propose!’
That gives me pause. Jamie and I have been working on something on and off for the past two months. It’s extremely complicated but seriously enthralling.
And it could just make for the perfect proposal.
I sit up straighter. ‘Go on. What do you have in mind?’