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Ex
Laurie Avadis
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound.
Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
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Thank you for your support,
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Founders, Unbound
About the author
Laurie Avadis is a keen athlete, artist, photographer, and a musician (he routinely gigs with his band, The Nightingale Experience after spending about 250 years as lead singer of The Last Postman) – but writing has been his definitive mode of expression from an early age. He is a practicing family lawyer with his own firm in Camden Town, passionate about justice for children, and lives in Surrey with his wife, three cats and one tiny fish which is immortal. Ex is his first book.
For my wife, Catherine
You were my almost father
and I was your nearly child
The Day Before the Day Before You Died
Laurie Avadis
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Acknowledgements
Subscribers
Chapter 1
Just before his eighth birthday, Daniel’s father tried to kill him. It was a family tradition. Five o’clock one vindictive October morning his father wordlessly ushered him from the sanctuary of his bed and drove him down to the Thames at Kingston.
Daniel sat on the dank towpath sheltering under an umbrella whilst his father, M, inflated an alarmingly ragged dinghy that had been hidden under the morass of ‘kit’ he stored in the rear of the family car.
‘Here we are,’ said M, standing back to admire his efforts, his remaining strands of hair billowing in the icy wind, raindrops strafing his pate.
‘Where are we?’ asked Daniel.
‘I am here,’ M replied, lugging the dinghy awkwardly over and into the water where it landed with a splat. ‘And you,’ he led Daniel over to the dinghy and helped him in, ‘you are in there.’
Daniel took stock for a moment. The dinghy teetered on the jagged waves, taking in an alarming quantity of water. He was dressed in his school uniform – no surprise really, since he spent every waking moment of his childhood in that uniform – it was the middle of winter, and he had no oars.
Daniel looked up at his father tearfully as he was cast out into the deluge by a single prod of M’s favoured forefinger. ‘I have no oars, Dad. The boat’s all leaky.’
‘Far too much emphasis is placed on issues such as aquatic propulsion and buoyancy,’ his father bellowed. ‘Be a man, Daniel.’
But Daniel did not want to be a man. He wanted to experience the kind of life normal children lived – to be pursued by a swarm of killer bees across the veld or sewing up footballs until his fingers bled in a huge windowless factory. Instead, he found himself clinging to the sides of a sinking dinghy, borne along the Thames by a racing current, soaked to the bone, unable to differentiate between river and rain.
He must have swallowed at least half his body weight in water before washing up at the lock, about half a mile downstream. The lock-keeper plucked Daniel out of the maelstrom with his spade-like hands and pumped life back into his stuttering lungs. An ambulance retrieved him and placed him, quivering, into the festering belly of Kingston Hospital where he was studiously neglected. A staff nurse who had discovered him sitting on the floor in a corridor called his father who had only just returned home, presumably to plan his funeral and thus he was repaired and restored, unquestioningly, to the care of M.
Daniel could tell immediately by his face that he had disappointed M yet again. It was not his fault, no one had shown him how to be murdered – it was no wonder that he wasn’t good at it.
The incident hardened Daniel in many ways. His father spoke of further river-based experiences with great enthusiasm and even at this tender age Daniel could see that he intended to try to kill him again. On his eighth birthday Daniel gathered together his few monetary assets and made his first and perhaps wisest investment. The next time M knocked on his bedroom door on a Sunday morning, Daniel emerged already fully dressed and wearing his very own second-hand Royal Navy life vest.
Chapter 2
M had not always wanted to murder his son with such determined reluctance. There were times when, some might say, he had been an inherently good man.
‘I am an inherently good man,’ he would think to himself as he offered the train seat he had coveted to an elderly citizen, silently entreating their heart to explode before they could accept it. ‘I am the best of the best,’ he would think, ushering a young mother across the road ahead of him, as his right foot furtively toyed with his accelerator pedal. ‘I love all of humanity,’ he would declare loudly as he opened a shop door for a soiled and ungracious youth, envisioning as he did so the noise its nose would make as he slammed the door back into its face.
Who, then, was able to glimpse the inner virtues of this ostentatiously poisonous individual? His mother, Bernice? No, she had long since abandoned the cruel seas and toxic deserts of North London for a home atop the wild mountain ranges of Milton Keynes, rationalising that since there was nothing left there that was worth burning, she would be safe from the ravages of modern times. To her, M was no more than an occasional unwanted visitor, like the Hare Krishna or influenza and whilst absent, his face became vague and dissipated as if it had been drawn on tissue paper and dropped into a bowl of warm water.
Siblings? Perhaps an elder sister who swooped down from on high in times of trouble, shielding M from the ravages of the Highgate sun? Someone who could navigate through the elephantine folds of her brother’s skin to the simple golden heart beating beneath? There was a sister, Bathsheba, but her exit from the familial nest had been more like a double-decker bus than an eagle. To her, life was like an out of control HGV, unconscious driver slumped over the steering wheel, careering towards her with malicious and destructive intent. Simply getting out of bed in the morning was a task of Herculean complexity, so swooping was right out of the question.
A brother then, statesman like, ushering M down a path well trodden, a virtuous figurehead, loved by all, who could find good in even the venal wasteland that was M’s soul? There was a brother, Clive, who adored M, but only in the inclusive manner in which he cherished everything and everyone through the Fuzzy Felt eyes of a whisky bottle. Clive could not judge the distance between his feet and the urinal he was often found slumped over and was certainly in no fit state to assess his brother’s worth.
Lost behind the chorus in the theatre of malice that played day after day in M’s mind, it was Daniel who saw the good in his father. Daniel, who lay like a discarded rag doll in his father’s febrile world. A trophy from a battle lost, the son after the son cherished. Daniel who loved his father with an unconditional drip drip drip, until even that tap finally ran dry through rancur and neglect.
Only M’s wife had dug deep enough to trace and nurture the tiny shoots of virtue that dwelt within him amongst an impenetrable forest of brutality. But any remaining emotional attachment had been severed like the amputation of a vestigial thumb on the day she realised that she was a mermaid and M was more the devil than the deep blue sea.
Chapter 3
M’s brother Clive was obsessed by the concept of owning a boat. He imagined a vessel borne upon a raging sea of blood, hurtling inexorably towards a gaping ventricle; it would buck and yawl whilst Neptune gouged at its shimmering bows. He knew he must build the boat with his own hands, moulding and caressing every inch until it was as sleek as red wine and invisible to the touch. He would kiss its stern with ardour and set it free upon a limitless horizon which he would navigate without blinking.
Clive’s wife, Dorritt, had hoped on the night of its conception that it was the whisky bottle’s idea to construct a ‘seafaring vessel’ in the lounge of their already cramped, semi-detached home in Dollis Hill and not her insensible spouse’s, but, in the morning, work commenced.
Clive was an utter cunt. If Dorritt had any remaining doubt about his redoubtable all round cuntishness then what became known as ‘the boat project’, aka grounds 1–9 of her divorce petition, erased it.
‘Where will this end?’ his wife had asked him when, after the third week, construction of a cabin had necessitated the evacuation of ‘Destiny’, their irksome pet armadillo, together with their dining table and chairs.
‘We will set sail for a land trodden only by the minotaur,’ replied Clive.
‘Stanmore?’ asked his wife.
‘Far beyond Stanmore to the shale fortresses, a place where acid creatures wrestle each other in the boughs of trees made of glass,’ replied Clive.
There was a pause whilst his wife pondered the exotic possibilities. ‘Neasden?’ she asked.
*
Sharing her home with 100 plus whisky bottles at various stages of consumption and a shit-panted apoplectic drunk who used them as a mattress was pretty much what Dorritt had signed up for when she married Clive. She was aware that he had a tapestry of shortcomings and that he had suffered at the hands of a dystopian tyrant as a child but when he laughed he became the little boy that had never been vanquished. And yet, she wandered through desperate sleepless hours at night as breath percolated up through Clive’s lungs with a tenacious whistle and imagined the friction of her hands around his throat; by day her friends and family had become distant aliens and laughter became as rarefied as alpine air. Had it been the project, ‘Clive,’ that she had fallen in love with rather than the man? How could she endure this eternal poverty of rapture?
When he was building the boat he was not drinking – it became his mistress – inching her out of her home, offering him the momentum to defy addiction, assuming the wifely role that she had never quite fulfilled, but it was satiating him whilst consuming her.
‘The TV has to go,’ said Clive, atop a ladder, saw in hand, wood shavings so thick on the ground around her feet that they had formed a dray. ‘And the settee and the sideboard, it all has to go.’
‘And what about me?’ asked Dorritt. ‘Where do I go?’
Clive paused from splicing and carving at a muscular section of tree to compare his craftsmanship with his marriage. With every dowel and every mitre joint, he was deconstructing the woman who had withstood the torrent of inhumanity he had rained upon her on a daily basis. With every rebate joint and stopped house joint he was stripping away another layer of the indefatigable love that had held his head over another vomitous toilet bowl and smoothed back his rat’s tail fringe. He pulled an open mortise joint and a bridle joint from his leather apron pocket and inserted one into the other. They fitted perfectly, Dorritt and Clive, assembled, crafted, he was needed, she needed him. It wasn’t Dorritt he wanted to sail away from but everything else and he could only do it on his own. This would be proof that his father was wrong, that he was not beyond merit, that he was not the personification of reproach.
‘I have to make this journey,’ said Clive. ‘And what part will I play?’ asked Dorritt. Her face was a passive mask, behind it were a thousand screams. ‘Where will I be as you sail past the tattered cliffs of Queensbury on your way to the straits of Canons Park and beyond?’
He knew that what he would say next would determine the course their marriage would take. That it needed to be a statement of loving intent if he was to convince her that he was still her knight in argent. ‘Can you smash a hole in our bedroom floor with the monkey wrench so I can stick the mast through?’ asked Clive. ‘And mind the Armadillo.’
*
M had not assumed a parental role in the lives of his siblings because, to them, the title parent was artifice, their words poison, their assumed task, deforestation of the young until all that remained were saplings whose growth would be distorted and grotesque. He knew that he could not protect his brother and sister from abuse any more than he could make himself visible amongst an adult world of turned heads. Whilst he had been able to lock the hurricane deep inside in order to be the father he knew he needed to be for Saul, Clive and Bathsheba lacked that resource. He saw Clive and Bathsheba as victims of war crimes to whom nature dictated he must offer solace and refuge, but these were minds damaged beyond repair by a dexterous cruelty.
Just as a cowering child he had been unable to predict where his parents would strike next, often, actually always, M found himself arriving too late to repair the damage caused to society by his elaborately deranged siblings and this time was no different. By the time M entered the front door of number 22 Venison Chase, it had become a husk, clinging to Clive’s mighty vessel for support rather than simply housing it. M had decided to visit when Dorritt had finally resorted to contacting her despicable brother-in-law with a singular text message – ‘I’ve left your fucking brother to play with his 90 ft tall mistress.’
M stood in what had once been Clive’s front room and searched for a degree of sarcasm that was extreme enough for this situation before deciding that it did not exist. The boat had not been built from any specific plans, more a combination of watching The Vikings with Kirk Douglas, studying an Airfix model of the Cutty Sark, a photograph of the Battleship USS Missouri torn out of Hounds and Homes magazine, a painting of HMS Victory by a seven-year-old schoolchild, a beer mat upon which ‘Terrence the destroyer’ had drawn the battleship Potemkin and the face of Elvis in felt-tip pen and thirty-six viewings of the complete boxed set of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
This, coupled with a four week entry-level carpentry course and a copy of the Rubber Dinghies can be Fun annual from 1963 had been the blueprint for the creation of what was most likely the largest seafaring wooden potato ever assembled by a human being.
‘It’s my boat,’ said Clive. ‘I made it.’
‘A boat,’ said M, standing back as far as he could to try to gain some limited degree of perspective.
‘What,’ tried M and then, ‘how.’ ‘It must be eight and a half miles from here to the Thames, assuming you don’t just intend to bob around on the Brent Reservoir and even moving this giant wooden turd to the end of the garden would be impossible given that it currently resides inside a semi-detached fucking house.’
‘We have a plan,’ replied Clive, smiling.
‘We,’ said M, ‘tell me you haven’t involved our mutant, Benzedrine-soaked, loony loop sister in yet another episode of the car crash of your existence?’
‘It’s a really good plan,’ said Clive.
*
When M, Bathsheba and Clive had been little more than lower case vowels, they had been able to escape to the park alone for a few hours whilst their parents were engaging in their preferred callisthenic leisure activity of hacking chunks out of each other. They had been sitting in the grass watching other children play around the swings and climbing frames when a little boy of about Bathsheba’s age, with ebulliently golden locks, came and sat next to them.
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