It was a relief not having to rely any more on quashing my anxiety with gin, I had Jenny. One night after I arrived back from a late shift at the Crown she wanted to talk to me about a piece she was having trouble with and I kept looking around the flat happily as she spoke, not really concentrating on what she was saying, just looking. I noticed the way it appeared, now that she had moved in. I ran my eye over the vase of purple tulips, nice and straight and not bulging or falling over on themselves. They were a welcome addition, added some joy, more joy as if we didn’t have enough of the stuff. There were other things about her living with me that brought joy. I wasn’t alone any more, my aloneness was dispelled. The place was untidier than it would have been with just me but I didn’t care about that, a happy place was meant to look lived in.

40. All Her Fault

August 2017

The day after I attack Jenny’s work is a dark day and it is my day of reckoning.

I am not going to be that man. That man who cannot take a good hard look in the face of things, a man who refuses to admit that he has done something wrong. Something ignoble. I don’t act unless there is good reason to do so. But Jenny, even Jenny has to understand that there comes a point in a man’s life where he has got to call things as they are.

I could have destroyed everything, I say.

I hold Mikey’s football that he has left on the sitting-room floor. And I look at it intently, counting the parts where its lining has been ripped from all its use on the road. I tell him constantly to only play with it on the green, that it’s not designed for tarmac, but he says it’s not his fault, that it’s easier for him to practise his keepy-uppies on the road. He insists that all the great footballers practised on their childhood roads. I have reminded him that he’s lucky to have such an expensive football to practise with, that Pelé had to make do with a potato or a grapefruit wrapped in a sock. It is a wonderful thing, a child’s gullibility.

I keep my eyes away from Jenny, I’m afraid to look at her. She is crying and I am deeply aware that this is not an act that she succumbs to easily. In fact I rarely witness her tears.

How could you do it, Des? she asks.