I wouldn’t mind if they’d asked. I never complain about being recognised or having to pose for selfies, as that would be ungrateful and disrespectful. And I’d hate – more than anything – to be perceived as being rude to anyone. Having said that, I always try to keep my head down when I’m out and about. I never pretend that I’m someone. I hate being in that mindset, thinking that I’m the centre of attention. But more and more, things like this kept happening. I’d leave the house and be reminded very quickly that my existence had changed. There wasn’t much I could do about it. This was the reality of the ‘new life’ that Ivan had been asking about.
It was a life that didn’t come without its own peculiar risks. I only had to walk out of a pub looking unsteady and some newspaper somewhere would print a story that I was an alcoholic. I only had to scowl in someone’s direction and it would be reported that I was in the middle of a heated argument. So I needed to make sure that my behaviour in public wasn’t merely immaculate – it could never even be perceived to be anything less than immaculate, even down to the expression on my face.
Maintaining that level of good behaviour wasn’t easy, especially for someone with a past like mine. It wasn’t a comfortable combination, all those eyeballs, all that stress – and my personality. The more I felt watched, the more that old, raucous version of me wanted to kick back. The intense pressure to behave immaculately – in trains, on the street and within private members’ clubs – taunted that unstable ghost living inside me. It goaded him and mocked him and motivated him to take me over. I felt him writhing around, pushing at me, tempting me to make chaos. As the girl took another photo, and this time barely bothered to pretend she wasn’t, I buried my fists deeper into my pockets and pushed my chin into the collar of my coat, as my left leg bounced up and down in nervous, aggravated motion. ‘I should’ve got a car back,’ I thought to myself. ‘Fuck this. I’m not taking the tube any more. I’m going to stop taking public transport.’
By the time I got to Liverpool Street station I’d done a lot of serious reflecting. What on earth was I thinking? Who was I turning into? Some TV celebrity puffing on £400 cigars who refuses to go on the underground? In that moment with the girls and the photos, it felt as if everything I was, everything I’d fought so hard to become, was at risk of getting lost. I didn’t want to fall head first into this new life, with its new definition of success. It wasn’t just that I was worried I’d change for the worse and become some spoiled ‘celebrity’. I was afraid that if I didn’t grab hold of the situation, the old me would fight back in a way that I couldn’t control. There was a genuine danger that I would revert to finding my buzzes elsewhere. That could be drinking. That could be fighting. That could be getting myself killed by a double-decker bus. Too many people were relying on me these days for that to happen. It wasn’t only my wife and five children. My life had somehow turned into a small industry. There were teams of people making serious parts of their livelihoods off the back of me, and all of them needed me out of prison and off the tabloid scandal pages, not underneath ten tonnes of steel and rubber in the middle of Piccadilly. My success and theirs were intertwined. I felt a responsibility to every single one of them.
But what could I do? How could I exorcise this ghost when I had all these eyeballs on me? Perhaps I could take a spell out of the limelight and go back to West Africa, where I’d carried out some security work before life in the media found me. That might be fun – I’d get into some interesting scrapes – but there was no way I’d get it past Emilie. It was too sketchy. I thought about running a marathon or taking up boxing in a serious way, but neither of these would really test me. I needed that perfect balance, somewhere I could feel fear but actually be relatively safe.
As soon as I had that thought, an incredibly vivid memory came to me. It was so powerful it was like being in a momentary dream, one that took me back all of twenty years, when I was seventeen. It was my first adventure training package in the army, and we’d climbed Snowdon in Wales. Before that day, during basic training, my life in the military had been extremely controlled. We’d been spit-polishing boots, doing drills and press-ups and running around in the mud, all under the instruction of barking troop sergeants, with almost every minute of every day being tightly regimented. Even though I’d been pushed to my limits, it had all been done in an environment of safety. I’d been scared and intimidated, but the only things I’d really had to fear were failure and humiliation – threats to my feelings. It had been fake danger. And then we’d climbed the mountain.
And it wasn’t just any mountain. It was Snowdon, at 3,560 feet the highest peak in England and Wales. It was said to be where Sir Edmund Hillary himself had trained for his successful assault on Mount Everest. When we reached the summit that day I remember thinking, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve just climbed a mountain!’ It felt like the greatest achievement of my life. I’d never experienced getting out into the world like that before. I’d never felt as if I’d truly conquered anything. And there I was, on top of the world, breathing the air of the gods.
But that wasn’t the only reason my memory of Snowdon was so precious. After my father suddenly died at the age of just 36, on 31 December 1985, my mum and her young boyfriend Dean moved the family from our three-bedroom council house in Portsmouth first to an eight-bedroom mansion outside Southampton, and then to northern France. Flush with money from my dad’s life-insurance payout, they bought a huge house that had once been a children’s home on a large plot of land on the outskirts of a town called Saint-Lô, twenty miles from Bayeux. Life with my mother and new step-father was tough, and my happiest times were the hours I’d spend tearing around in the fields and woods playing soldiers. I had a wild time, and even at that age I began to wonder about being an actual soldier when I was older.
As wild as those days had felt to me, however, they had really been lived within a controlled environment. Even when I stayed in one of my dens for two or three nights, someone would always have to know where I was. If I ever got into trouble I’d feel it. Part of why I wanted to join the army was my urge to re-create those experiences of wild adventure under open skies. But in the early weeks and months after I joined up, the experience had been more like being at home with my stepfather. I was always watched and pushed and corrected by a figure of authority.
All of that changed on my ascent of Snowdon. My most vivid memory of all, even more than of reaching the top, was when I saw the lad in front of me almost fall off a narrow track, right off the side of it. I’d seen the fear first grip him, then overwhelm him, and watched him give up the climb completely, fumbling his way back down to safety. I’d become infected with that same fear. It had soaked into me like a heavy, disabling liquid. I looked around me and realised I was on the edge of death. Anything could have gone wrong. I could have slipped. The weather could have come in. I could have got hypothermia or been blown off the mountain. I’d never experienced such vulnerability. For the first time, I felt that I had my own life in my hands. As the fear washed through me I had to make that decision. Do I listen to what it’s telling me? Or do I trust myself to do this? Do I go up? Or down?
It was that fear I remembered most. As I paced up and down the platform at Liverpool Street waiting for the Chelmsford train I was in a trance of memory, feeling it again as if it was all happening to me right now. That fear had almost beaten me. But the moment I’d committed to the decision to climb, an incredible transformation had taken place. My perception changed. It had been as if the mountain itself had stopped trying to hurl me down its precipitous flanks. Now, instead, it was drawing me up to its summit and I no longer felt as if I were on the edge of death.
Why had that change occurred? How had it happened? Partly, I realised, it was because, in making the decision to continue on upwards, I’d fully embraced the responsibility of my task. There were no rules on that mountain except for the ones I gave myself. There was no drill instructor telling me where to look or put my feet. There was no stepfather telling me what time I had to be in or where I could or couldn’t go. It was lawless up there. Amid the freezing blasts of wind I found