The Telling Error (37 page)

The two men who weren’t his father shoved the boy’s sister back into the car. She was shaking as if an electric current were ripping through her, and wiping her face with her hands. Her father produced two envelopes from his jacket pocket and handed one to each of the men. Then he got into the car and the family set off for home.

‘So,’ said the father to his daughter, ‘you begged for another chance and now you’ve got one. Are you going to lie to me again?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Is that a solemn promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ said the father. ‘Because if you go back on your word, next time there’ll be no joking around. Next time it will be the real thing. Bardolph House is a hospice, not a lunatic asylum, but there are lunatic asylums, real ones, and plenty of them. Don’t think we wouldn’t go through with it just because we didn’t today.’

The boy, the brother, didn’t understand. Somehow, he mustered the courage to ask about the two men: who were they, if they weren’t real lunatic asylum workers? His father told him that they were friends who had agreed to help him out.

The boy hoped that his sister would stop lying after that, but she didn’t. She lied as much as she ever had. Mercifully, though, there were no more trips to lunatic asylums, and somehow, after that awful day, the closed-door games room tirades didn’t seem quite so frightening. They seemed normal. The boy’s mother stopped crying when they happened. Instead, she listened to the radio in the kitchen and got on with preparing the dinner or the breakfast. The boy started to listen to music, through headphones, and found that he was able to think about other things, even knowing that the yelling was going on in the background.

The grown-up boy still sees his sister regularly. They both still see their parents regularly. Since the sister moved out of her parents’ home, aged eighteen, there has been no yelling. Her brother has no idea that she only keeps in touch with their parents for his sake. If asked, he would probably say, ‘They fought like cat and dog when she was a teenager, but it’s all fine now.’ His sister, being an expert liar, would probably say the same thing.

What is a poor (or even a rich) woman to do when, week after week, the newspapers contain no mention of her name or her sex life? Much to the chagrin of Saint Paula of Privilege, she can’t sue the
Sun
or the
Mail
for failing to run scurrilous stories about her in the absence of new material, and even I, her most vocal adversary, have neglected her of late in favour of my old friends
Keiran Holland
,
Reuben Tasker
and
Bryn Gilligan
, each of whose separate but thematically linked
dedication to irrationality grows stronger by the day
.

Here’s the story, for those of you who missed it: Tasker published a new, much less pretentious and rather gripping horror novel last month,
Riven
, that garnered some
favourable reviews
. If I were his editor, I’d encourage him to dispense with the supernatural element of his writing, since his chief talent is for describing gruesome horrors inflicted on one human being by another; meanwhile, the representatives of the spirit world sip ghost-blend coffee out of Styrofoam cups in the wings and mutter, ‘We’re pretty much redundant here, aren’t we, guys?’

If Bryn Gilligan is reading this, he won’t approve of the above paragraph. Young Bryn took to Twitter recently to
argue
that Tasker’s novel
should not
have valuable column inches squandered on it, and that readers should not waste time reading it, when he, Bryn Gilligan, is no longer allowed to sprint competitively. Yes, you did read that correctly. Gilligan seems to believe, in a worrying lost-his-marbles kind of way, that because he suffers, Tasker must also deserve to. (Is this my fault, for drawing a parallel between them? Probably.) Gilligan is still engaging with his Twitter critics on an hourly basis, trying to persuade them that if they had been him, they too would have taken performance-enhancing drugs. When they declare themselves unconvinced, he tweets, ‘BLOCKED,’ at them and then, as far as I can tell, neglects to block them and continues to try to win them over.

I
pointed out
to Gilligan that what he ought to want, rather than equal-footing pariah status for him and Tasker, is the opposite for both of them: acceptance, and a modicum of compassion. Gilligan didn’t respond, but Keiran Holland did, God help me. Holland
retaliated
with two lists, each of which he tweeted at me one item at a time, like an online drone attack. The
first
was of literary masterpieces composed by writers partial to mind-altering substances. The
second
was of critical and commercial flops written by the square and sober. These lists would have been a devastating critique of my position if only I’d argued, even once, that opium addicts were incapable of writing well and/or that all novels written without a narcotic boost were indisputably fantastic. Perhaps I’ll devote my next column to two lists of my own: one of brilliant sporting wins by those on steroids, and one of people who have never taken illegal drugs and can’t even run for a bus.

But wait! There I go again, writing about men without cleavages when Saint Paula has gone to the trouble of making herself extra-specially newsworthy to get my attention. In
an interview with
J’aime
magazine
, Our Lady of Self-Promo has revealed that, while married to diamond geezer Richard Crumlish, she had several extra-marital flings in addition to the three about which we’ve all already said, ‘So what?’ Two more, to be precise. To which I say, ‘So what? × 2.’ I do wonder how Paula’s newly ensnared landowner-farmer second husband feels about it, though. Is Fergus Preece the kind of man who will happily and with a heart full of hope spend all his free time parcelling up bottles of Clearasil to send to leopards? One thing’s for sure: he’ll need either to be extremely open-minded or exceptionally gullible if he’s going to go the distance with the People’s Pussy.

Of her five illicit entanglements, Paula says cheerily, ‘I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to be happy with Richard, or to make him happy, but do I regret my affairs? Not one bit. I am pleased and proud to have shared happy and fulfilling moments with some of the loveliest men on the planet. The thing is, I find other human beings fascinating and irresistible. I just really love and care about people. I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a warm, giving spirit, and every relationship I’ve ever had with a man has meant a lot to me. Each one of my romantic and sexual experiences has been life-enhancing and has made me a better person.’

One can’t help wondering if the category of ‘people’ that Saint Paula claims to love and care about includes any women – in particular, the betrayed wives of her five dalliances – and why her giving spirit wasn’t tempted by the prospect of giving all those husbands back to their rightful owners at the earliest available opportunity. Could it be that there was a taking spirit on the payroll at the same time? Mere hair-splitting on my part, of course, since all that matters in the final analysis is that Saint Paula has been rogered to a state of better personhood. I suppose it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis. Talking of which …

‘I’d love to get her on my couch,’ said Mrs Me, who, as careful readers will remember, is a psychotherapist. ‘I’m not sure she’s the hypocrite you think she is. Not intentionally, anyway. Most people haven’t got a clue what’s really motivating them. Riddiough might well believe that her addiction to infidelity is a kind of offshoot of a more general joie-de-vivre and affection for humanity.’

‘But that’s obviously bollocks,’ said I (for that is my clinical specialism:
things that are obviously bollocks
).

Mrs Me agreed. ‘That’s why I’d be interested to get her on my couch,’ she said. ‘To find out what’s really going on.’

It’s pretty self-evident, isn’t it? We know that Saint Paula’s grudge against her own aristocratic and wealthy parents drove her to embrace left-wing politics and
inferior schooling for her son
. Since there could be no rational motive for her making these choices, it’s safe to assume that her sole aim was to stage a very public vote of no confidence in her own privileged upbringing. Privilege is highly addictive: prized and sought after by those who’ve never had it, and almost impossible to object to when one has it in abundance, unless one’s antipathy for those bestowing it is strong enough to overwhelm all such self-interested considerations. (Don’t even think about mentioning altruism or the greater good as possible motivations, dear reader. Have you forgotten the sorry tale of the five betrayed wives? Saint Paula cares not a jot for anything but the gratification of her own ego. In that respect, she is like nearly all of the rest of us.)

The question we must ask ourselves is this: in what circumstances might regular adulteries that undermine and eventually destroy one’s marriage feel more gratifying to the ego than cherishing and protecting one’s family unit? What kind of psyche could ruthlessly strip innocent women of their husbands, drive away a once-devoted spouse who also happens to be heir to a colossal diamond fortune, create a broken home for one’s only child (who already has the misfortune of attending a broken school) and still emerge from all this with ‘Yay for me!’ as one’s dominant narrative?

Could it be that Saint Paula gets an enormous power kick out of undermining the institution of marriage? Every man she seduces into betraying his wife represents a victory over the father who made her feel powerless. And all of those foolish, trusting wives who soldier on in ignorance prove to Paula that she is cleverer and better than they are; they are all too stupid to spot that they’re married to utter bastards, and therefore deserving of everything they get.

If I’m right, this would explain why, having successfully kept at least some of her secrets for years, Our Lady of Privilege should suddenly decide to boast in print about these transgressions. Would it be anywhere near as much fun if she didn’t get to publicly humiliate all her victims, male and female? Take that,
Baron Daddy and Baroness Mummy!

I’m cheating a bit – superimposing therapy guff I’ve picked up from Mrs Me onto what I know of Saint Paula’s personal circumstances, but that’s perfectly legitimate, if you think about it. It’s rather like a doctor being able to diagnose measles because he’s seen measles many times before and knows what they look like. (A livid scarlet bas-relief in the shape of
Dr Andrew Wakefield
that covers a Welsh child’s entire body, for the non-medical among you who are wondering.) Yes, I know that Andrew Wakefield is not officially a doctor any more – in the same way that
Bryn Gilligan is no longer officially a winner.