There was a ruminative silence.
Well. Gosh. Now what? Youre the agent. Id have thought this gave you no end of creative opportunities.
Ill have a little think and call you back. By the way, Jesss father has been trying to get hold of you. He called here, and I said we didnt give out personal numbers. Did I do the right thing? You did the right thing. But give him my mobile number anyway. I suppose theres no avoiding him.
Do you want to call him? He left his number.
Go on, then.
While I was on the phoo Theo, both my ex-wife and my ex-girlfrie messages. I had thought of her of them when Theo was reading out that story; now I felt sick. I was beginning to realize an important truth about suicide: failure is as hurtful as success, and is likely to provoke even more anger, because theres no grief with which to water it down. I was, I could hear from the tone of the messages, in very deep shit. I called dy first. You fug selfish idiot, she said.
You dont know anything, apart from what you read in the paper.
You seem to be the only person in the world that the papers get bang thts. If they say youve slept with a fifteen-year-old, you have. If they say youve fallen over drunk ireet, you have. They doo i stuff for you.
This was actually quite an acute observation. She was right: not once have I been the victim of misrepresentation or distortion. If you think about it, that was one of the most humiliating aspects of the last few years. The papers have been full of shit about me, and every word of the shit was true.
So Im presuming, she went on, that theyve got it right again. You were up the top of a tower-block with the iion of hurling yourself off.
And instead you came back down again with a girl.
Thats about the long and the short of it.
And what about your daughters? Do they know? Not yet. But someo school will tell them. They always do. What do you wao say to them? Maybe I should talk to them.
dy barked ohe bark was, I suspected, inteo be a satirical laugh.
Tell them what you want, I said. Tell them Daddy was sad, but then he cheered up again.
Brilliant. If we had a pair of two-year-olds, that would be perfect.
I dont know, dy. I mean, if I t see them, then its not really my problem, is it? Its something youve got to deal with.
You bastard.
And that was the end of the first phone call. Pointing out that her refusal to let me participate in my daughters upbringi me out in the cold struck me as a restatement of the bleeding obvious, but never mind. It got her off the phone.
I dont know what I owe my daughters any more. I gave up smoking, years ago, because I khen that I owed them that much. But when you make the sort of mess Ive made, smoking seems like the least of your worries - which is why I started again. Now theres a journey: from giving up smoking - giving up smoking because you want to protect your kids from loss for as long as possible - tuing with their mother about the best way to tell them of your attempted suicide. They never said anything about that versation in aal classes. Its the distahat does it, of course. I got further and further away, and the girls got smaller and smaller until they were just tiny dots, and I could no longer see them, literally or metaphorically. You t make out their faces, you, when theyre just tiny dots, so you doo worry about whether theyre happy or sad.
Its why we kill ants.