Richard Cheeseman, who else? All I wanted was to embarrass Richard Cheeseman. I’d pictured him being held for a few hours at Heathrow airport while lawyers scrambled, and a much-humbled reviewer would be released on bail. That’s all. How could I have predicted that British and Colombian police were enjoying a rare season of cooperation that might result in poor Richard being arrested at Bogotá International Airport, preflight?
“Easily,” my conscience replies. And yes, dear reader, I regret my actions very much, and I’m aiming to atone. With Richard’s sister Maggie, I set up the Friends of Richard Cheeseman to keep his plight in the news — and, lamentable though my misdeed was, I’m hardly in the Premier Division of Infamy. I’m not a certain Catholic bishop who shuffled boy-raping priests from parish to parish to avoid embarrassment for the Holy Church. I’m not ex-president Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who gassed thousands of men, women, and children for the crime of living in a rebel-held suburb. All I did was punish a man who had smeared my reputation. The punishment was a little excessive. Yes, I’m guilty. I regret it. But my guilt is my burden. Mine. My punishment is to live with what I’ve done.
My iPhone trills in my shirt pocket. Needing a breather I pull over into the shade of a shed-sized boulder. I drop the phone and pick it up from the bleached grit by the Moshi Monsters strap that Anaïs attached to it. Appropriately, it’s a text from Zoë or, rather, a photo of Juno’s thirteenth birthday party at the house in Montreal. A house I paid for, owned by Zoë since the divorce. Behind a pony-shaped cake, Juno’s holding the riding boots I paid for, and Anaïs’s pulling a goofy face while holding a sign saying, BONJOUR, PAPA! Zoë’s contrived to get herself into the background, obliging me to guess at the photographer’s identity. It could be a member of La Famille Legrange, but Juno’s mentioned some guy called Jerome, a divorced banker with one daughter. Not that I sodding care who Zoë puts it out to, but surely I’ve a right to know who’s tucking my own daughters into bed at night, now their mother has decided it won’t be me. Zoë’s attached no message but the subtext is clear enough: We’re Doing Fine, Thank You Very Much.
I notice a handsome bird on a branch, just a few meters away. It’s white and black with red cap and breast. I’ll photo it and send it to Juno with a funny birthday message. I get out of MESSAGES and press the camera icon, but when I look up I find the bird has flown.
TWO BIKES ARE leaning against the lighthouse when Crispin Hershey finally arrives, which displeases him. I dismount, sticky with sweat, my crotch saddle-sore. I walk out of the nuclear brightness to the shady side of the lighthouse — where, oh, great, two females of the species are finishing a picnic. The younger one’s wearing a faux Hawaiian shirt, knee-length khaki shorts, and daubs of bluish sun-block over her cheekbones, cheeks, and forehead. The older one has earth-mother tie-dyed clothes, a floppy white sun hat, unruly black hair, and sunglasses chosen for maximum coverage. The younger one leaps up — she’s still a teenager — and says, “Wow. Hi. You’re Crispin Hershey.” She speaks in estuary English.
“I am.” It’s been a while since I was recognized out of context.
“Hi. My name’s Aoife, and, uh … Mum here’s actually met you.”
The older woman stands and removes her sunglasses. “Hello, Mr. Hershey. There’s no reason in the world you’d remember, but—”
“Holly Sykes. Yes. We met at Cartagena, last year.”
“Wow, Mum!” says Aoife. “The Crispin Hershey actually knows who you are. Aunt Sharon’s going to be, like, ‘Whaaa?’ ”
She reminds me so much of Juno that I ache, a little.
“Aoife.” There’s a note of maternal reprimand; the megaselling Angel Authoress is uneasy with her fame. “Mr. Hershey deserves some peace and quiet after the festival. Let’s get back to town, hey?”
The young woman swats away a fly. “We only just got here, Mum. It’ll look rude. You don’t mind sharing a lighthouse, do you?”
“No need to rush off on my account,” I hear myself saying.
“Cool,” says Aoife. “Then have a seat. Or a step. We saw you on the ferry to Rottnest, actually, but Mum said not to disturb you ’cause you looked dead beat.”
Angel Authoress seems keen to avoid me. How rude was I to her at the president’s villa? “Jet lag won’t take ‘please’ for an answer.”
“You’re not wrong.” Aoife fans herself with her cap. “That’s why Australia and New Zealand’re, like, invasion-proof. Any foreign army’d only get halfway up the beach before the time difference’d kick in, and they’d just like whoa, and collapse in the sand and that’d be it, invasion over. Sorry we missed your event earlier.”
I think of Aphra Booth. “Don’t be. So,” this is to her mother, “you’re appearing at the Writers Festival too?”
Holly Sykes nods, sipping from a bottle of water. “Aoife’s doing a sort of gap year in Sydney, so this trip tied in nicely.”
“My flatmate in Sydney’s from Perth,” adds Aoife, “and she’s always saying, ‘If you go to Perth, you got to go to Rotto.’ ”
Teenagers make me feel so sodding old. “ ‘Rotto’?”
“Here. Rotto is Rottnest Island. Fremantle’s ‘Freo’; ‘afternoon’ is ‘arvo.’ Isn’t it cool how Australians do that?”
No, I’d ordinarily reply, it’s baby talk for grown-ups. But, then, whither humanity sans youth? Whither language sans neologisms? We’d all be Struldbrugs speaking Chaucerian.
“Fancy a fresh apricot?” Aoife offers me a brown paper bag.
MY TONGUE CRUSHES another perfumed fruit against the roof of my mouth. I throw away the apricot stones, thinking of Jack’s mother throwing away the beans that’ll turn into the beanstalk in the morning. “Ripe apricots taste exactly of their color.”
“You talk like a real writer, Crispin,” says Aoife. “My uncle Brendan’s always teasing Mum, saying now she’s this famous author she ought to talk posher, not all, ‘Watch yer bleedin’ marf or I’ll clock yer one, innit.’ ”
Holly Sykes protests, “I do not talk like that!”
I miss Juno and Anaïs teasing me. “So what’s this ‘sort of’ gap year of yours about then, Aoife?”
“I’ll be studying archaeology at Manchester from September, but Mum’s Australian editor knows a professor of archaeology at Sydney, so this semester I’m sitting in on the lectures in return for helping with a project at Parramatta. There was a factory there for convict women. It’s been amazing, piecing their lives together.”
“Sounds worthy,” I tell Aoife. “Is your dad an archaeologist?”
“Dad was a journalist, actually. A foreign correspondent.”
“What does he”—too late I spot the “was”—“do now?”
“Unfortunately a missile hit his hotel. In Homs, in Syria.”
I nod. “Excuse my tactlessness. Both of you.”
“It’s eight years ago,” Holly Sykes reassures me, “and …”
“… and I’m lucky,” now Aoife reassures me, “ ’cause there’s, like, a gazillion interviews with Dad on YouTube, so I can go online and there he is, chattering away, large as life. Next best thing to hanging out.”