Spare

I felt massively tired. I wanted to go home, and I realized what a complicated concept home had become. Or maybe always was. I gestured at the gardens, the city beyond, the nation, and said: Willy, this was supposed to be our home. We were going to live here the rest of our lives.

You left, Harold.

Yeah—and you know why.

I don’t.

You…don’t?

I honestly don’t.

I leaned back. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was one thing to disagree about who was at fault or how things might have been different, but for him to claim total ignorance of the reasons I’d fled the land of my birth—the land for which I’d fought and been ready to die—my Mother Country? That fraught phrase. To claim no knowledge of why my wife and I took the drastic step of picking up our child and just running like hell, leaving behind everything—house, friends, furniture? Really?

I looked up at the trees: You don’t know!

Harold…I honestly don’t.

I turned to Pa. He was gazing at me with an expression that said: Neither do I.

Wow, I thought. Maybe they really don’t.

Staggering. But maybe it was true.

And if they didn’t know why I’d left, maybe they just didn’t know me. At all.

And maybe they never really did.

And to be fair, maybe I didn’t either.

The thought made me feel colder, and terribly alone.

But it also fired me up. I thought: I have to tell them.

How can I tell them?

I can’t. It would take too long.

Besides, they’re clearly not in the right frame of mind to listen.

Not now, anyway. Not today.

And so:

Pa? Willy?

World?

Here you go.

Part 1 Out of the Night That Covers Me

1.

There were always stories.

People would whisper now and then about folks who hadn’t fared well at Balmoral. The long-ago Queen, for instance. Mad with grief, she’d locked herself inside Balmoral Castle and vowed never to come out. And the very proper former prime minister: he’d called the place “surreal” and “utterly freaky.”

Still, I don’t think I heard those stories until much later. Or maybe I heard them and they didn’t register. To me Balmoral was always simply Paradise. A cross between Disney World and some sacred Druid grove. I was always too busy fishing, shooting, running up and down “the hill” to notice anything off about the feng shui of the old castle.

What I’m trying to say is, I was happy there.

In fact, it’s possible that I was never happier than that one golden summer day at Balmoral: August 30, 1997.

We’d been at the castle for one week. The plan was to stay for another. Same as the previous year, same as the year before that. Balmoral was its own micro-season, a two-week interlude in the Scottish Highlands to mark the turn from high summer to early autumn.

Granny was there too. Naturally. She spent most of every summer at Balmoral. And Grandpa. And Willy. And Pa. The whole family, with the exception of Mummy, because Mummy was no longer part of the family. She’d either bolted or been thrown out, depending on whom you asked, though I never asked anyone. Either way, she was having her own holiday elsewhere. Greece, someone said. No, Sardinia, someone said. No, no, someone chimed in, your mother’s in Paris! Maybe it was Mummy herself who said that. When she phoned earlier that day for a chat? Alas, the memory lies, with a million others, on the other side of a high mental wall. Such a horrid, tantalizing feeling, to know they’re over there, just on the other side, mere inches away—but the wall is always too high, too thick. Unscalable.

Not unlike the turrets of Balmoral.

Wherever Mummy was, I understood that she was with her new friend. That was the word everyone used. Not boyfriend, not lover. Friend. Nice enough bloke, I thought. Willy and I had just met him. Actually, we’d been with Mummy weeks earlier when she first met him, in St. Tropez. We were having a grand time, just the three of us, staying at some old gent’s villa. There was much laughter, horseplay, the norm whenever Mummy and Willy and I were together, though even more so on that holiday. Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven. The weather was sublime, the food was tasty, Mummy was smiling.

Best of all, there were jet skis.

Whose were they? Don’t know. But I vividly remember Willy and me riding them out to the deepest part of the channel, circling while waiting for the big ferries to come. We used their massive wakes as ramps to get airborne. I’m not sure how we weren’t killed.