On our first proper date I took him home to meet my father. In retrospect I can see this was odd, but at the time it felt perfectly natural. When I picture myself presenting Paul to him now, I’m reminded of our old childhood cat trotting down the drive with a rabbit swinging from her jaws. She would drop her kill on the doormat, sit beside it triumphantly, and yowl for one of us to come and admire how clever she had been. From the sofa in my father’s living room, glowing, I watched my new boyfriend enchant him. They talked about football and politics. The framed Declaration of Arbroath which hung in the hallway, asserting Scotland’s independence in 1320, was not something Paul had ever expected to find in a country house in Wiltshire, and he was spellbound. Within a week he had moved in with me.
We were happy beyond our wildest dreams. We bought a flat together in Hackney, and threw fabulous parties; he took me to the Highlands, I took him to Treasure Beach. After just eighteen months we got married on my grandmother’s farm in Scotland. He wore a kilt, I wore bunches; it was, by universal consent, a magical wedding. Six months later we set off around the world.
Our working lives in London had been leaving us with only the scrag end of each day to ourselves, and we wanted more time together, so I cooked up an idea to write a travel book which would take us around the globe, ending up in Treasure Beach, where we lived for nine months while I wrote it. The return home to real life was a little bumpy, but everyone said that was only to be expected. In 2003 we moved to a beautiful big Victorian house on Ainsworth Road in Hackney, where we would in theory begin the next chapter of our charmed life and start a family. The only downside in it all was that by then we were both miserable.
The disintegration of a marriage is so excruciatingly complicated that to extract any definitive cause from the carnage would be trite – and yet it is what we all do. The most commonly cited explanation for the breakdown of a relationship is the terrible realisation, on both sides, that each person is not whom the other had thought. In our case, if I had to name one reason, it would not be that. It was more that Paul and I had been wrong about who we ourselves were.
I had been intoxicated by Paul’s indifference to traditional middle-class preferences for domestic order, financial prudence, responsible drinking. Over time it became increasingly apparent that, actually, these mattered more to me than I had liked to think. In Paul they triggered such primal hostility that the only way he could see to remain loyal to his roots was to systematically sabotage the very life his ambition had longed for and led him to. For him, self-preservation was English and prissy; integrity and honour lay in self-destruction. He could never quite decide where he belonged. Was it in professional London’s high-ceilinged kitchens eating fettuccine, or on a park bench in Glasgow drinking Special Brew? I wanted the fantasy of a husband who would observe the conventions of a comfortable life, without in any way acting like every other middle-class bore. We could see it was hopeless. We did not know what to do. So we struggled on, trapped in the hell of loving someone who filled us with dismay and despair.
If Ainsworth Road had been a typical London street where no one knows their neighbours, we might never have met Tony. But traffic controls at one end of the road made it feel more like a cul de sac, and within a few months of moving in we became friendly with the tall, gregarious, good-looking mixed-race man with dreadlocks who was always out on the pavement and seemed to know everyone. He was so loud you could hardly miss him. He lived with his wife and their ten-year-old daughter, and in the interests of appearances owned a property development company. He had a geezerish air of mischief about him, but came across as such a happy-go-lucky family man that you would never have guessed he wholesaled cocaine for a living and was addicted to crack.
At first we would just say hello in passing on the street. As we got to know him better, he would sometimes drop in. He was always smiley, and invariably had an anecdote, which he would tell at breakneck speed in his booming gravelly baritone, the accent a curious combination of flat Yorkshire vowels and cockney glottal stops. When animated – as he usually was – he had an endearing tendency to tumble his words together into a flurried blur, and sentences would frequently end with ‘Know wha’ I mean?’ The question was rhetorical, but quite often I didn’t.
It was hard to judge his self-assurance. He was a physically arresting presence, six foot two and muscular with a purposeful stride, his broad shoulders accentuated by good posture. He carried his head unusually high, and stood square. The dreadlocks weren’t braided but left to form naturally, and fell shoulder-length; he wore them tied back in a scrunchie, and would toss the fringe out of his eyes with a faint shake. Always holding a spliff, he smelt of designer cologne and cannabis. He dressed casually but expensively – Armani jeans, Phat Farm sweatshirts, white trainers – and although in his late thirties would sometimes be mistaken for a professional footballer. The initial impression was of lively confidence, but as we got to know him better I began to wonder. There was something in his expression to suggest bashful uncertainty about his place, and the loudness might be camouflage for doubt.
Tony and his family moved out of Ainsworth Road the following year, to a house further east. He still appeared on the street regularly, though, and when our rental flat needed to be redecorated we asked him to put his property company’s team on the job. Paul was away working in Afghanistan while the work was being done. Tony would pop in with progress reports, or a query about a detail, and when he appeared one evening with a bottle of wine we sat up late talking.
By now I was curious about his life, because he had dropped enough hints to suggest it might contain something of a story. Like any career criminal, Tony had been dissembling and obfuscating for most of it, and was adept at deflecting direct inquiry – but I am equally adept at being nosey. At first my questions made him so uncomfortable that he would literally squirm in his chair. Before long the tenacity of my interest disarmed and then enthralled him. ‘Are you trying to interview me?’ he would tease, and in a way I suppose I was. His visits became more frequent, and over the course of late-night conversations at my kitchen table I learnt the story of his life – or at least, the one he chose to tell.
Tony was born in Leeds in 1965, to a white fifteen-year-old mother. He had a hazy memory of being told that her father was a policeman, but whether this was true he did not know. Of his own father he knew nothing. When Tony was a toddler there had been some speculation that he might be half-Persian, but as he grew older it became evident that his ethnic origins were African or Caribbean. He liked to think his father had been visiting the UK from Africa as a student – even a Nigerian prince, possibly – but conceded that a black man in Leeds in 1965 was more likely to have belonged to the post-war Windrush generation of West Indian immigrants. Whether the man had ever been made aware of his son’s existence was unknown. Tony preferred to hope he had not, and could be absolved of blame for abandoning him.
The first eighteen months of his life were a mystery. He did not know for how long he remained with his mother, and thought he might at one stage have been a Barnardo’s baby. All he knew was that at the age of 18 months he was fostered by a white family who lived in a suburb on the outskirts of Leeds. His earliest memory was of rocking frantically in bed at night to soothe himself.
The Wilkinsons already had three older children of their own, two boys and a girl. They were in most respects a conventional upper working-class white couple – he was an engineer, she a housewife who later worked in Debenhams – but they had fostered more than 100 children before Tony arrived, many of them troubled or abused, and several black. Tony never fully understood why he was the one they decided to adopt, but within a few years he was Tony Wilkinson.
Tony had two versions of his childhood. Sometimes he was the unaccountably