LITMIR.BIZ

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only married for immigration purposes. But when they had tried splitting up, he went to pieces. Tony was immensely proud of the fact his parents had both been virgins on their wedding day and remained together until his father’s death some years ago, and it was clear that for all his well-trodden grumbles he maintained a powerful if sentimental attachment to the idea of marriage. He was often out with his daughter, but we very seldom saw his wife – I’d never once seen them together – and I think he liked it when people were surprised to discover he had been married for sixteen years.

      As he grew more relaxed, I began to see that Tony enjoyed the idea of being an anomaly. ‘You should write a book about me!’ he was forever exclaiming. ‘Seriously, you should. My life would make a wicked book.’ It was certainly unconventional, I agreed. There had to be a market for a gangster memoir, he persisted; his own bookshelf proved it. At least half the titles on it were bestselling examples of the genre – ‘And mine would be way better than any of them. Come on, D. You know you’re going to write it one day.’ I used to laugh and roll my eyes. Tony’s narrative approach to his criminal adventures was so wildly erratic that I could never be sure what to believe, and didn’t fancy my chances of taming the tangle into anything that might resemble a verifiable story. Besides, I told him, everyone always thinks their life would make a fascinating book.

      In the early Nineties Tony and his wife moved back to London, and bought a flat on Ainsworth Road. Following the birth of their daughter in 1994, Tony wound up the more ostentatiously lawless aspects of his criminal lifestyle, and confined his business concerns to the discreet wholesale trade of cocaine. For a year he attended church, to get his daughter into the local Church of England primary school, and despite neither believing in God nor having always been to bed the night before, he enjoyed his Sunday mornings with the matrons of the community. I imagine they were rather bowled over by him.

      Most people were. Tony made all sorts of friends on Ainsworth Road – West Indian grandmothers, a gay neighbour dying of Aids, the publisher who lived next door to us – and at weekends would round up whoever he could find to go off touring festivals in his old VW camper van. When his daughter started school, and would need to explain how her father made a living, he opened an organic wholefood store, followed later by the property development company. As he saw it, he had practically gone legit.

      At times I got the impression he genuinely believed he had. The tendency to mistake one’s own deceptions for the truth is an occupational hazard in his line of work, and indeed may well be a prerequisite for success. Tony could work himself into such a fever of blameless umbrage, he would quite forget he was actually guilty as charged. I saw this for myself once or twice, when he arrived in a great froth of indignation after being stopped by the police on his way. He drove a large white 5-series BMW – not especially flash, for it was several years old, but ferociously high-powered – and Tony liked to put his foot down. He had been driving for ten years, was never without a spliff at the wheel, and had a relaxed attitude to drink-driving laws. What he did not have, however, was a driving licence. How he kept getting away with it – and he always did – was a mystery, but even more baffling was his outrage at the audacity of the police for pulling him over.

      There was more to it than merely believing his own lies. At the heart of the confusion, I began to see, lay a deep ambivalence about his criminal career. It is no small achievement to break the law for so long without getting caught, and part of Tony was unapologetically proud of outwitting a system disgraced in his eyes by racism. If the law’s sole purpose was to crush and humiliate him, the only self-respecting response was to break it. But another part of him felt ill at ease with a career that had consigned him to the margins. He loved talking about his old organic shop, and the palpable relish with which he dished out business cards for his property company suggested he rather coveted the casual freedom of legitimacy. What he had really enjoyed in church, I guessed, was the unfamiliar balm of acceptability.

      My own ambivalence about his criminal status was similarly unresolved, but slightly different. I had no moral problem with his job. How could I? I had happily enjoyed taking illegal drugs. Besides, if my own experience of the authorities had been anything like Tony’s, my retaliation would probably have made him look like Uncle Tom. So his criminality was not the problem, in itself. What troubled me was whether my attraction to him was in spite or because of it. I very much hoped it was the former, and thus pleasing proof of my good liberal credentials. I worried that it could be the latter, and nothing but the cheap thrill of vicarious transgression.

      The one thing of which Tony was unmistakably ashamed was his addiction to crack. I first learned of it from Paul, when he came home one night somewhat unnerved, after an evening with Tony and his friends. ‘Bloody hell, Dec, they smoke crack.’ I was shocked. Like most people who have taken recreational drugs, I had always drawn an important distinction between substances that enliven a night out and ones that ruin lives. Crack belonged firmly in the second category, and was no part of my world. The first time I saw anyone take it was the night Tony took out a small bag from his pocket, emptied the contents into a teaspoon, and began cooking it up over my Aga.

      The appropriate response to someone smoking crack in one’s kitchen is an etiquette challenge for which I was unprepared. I couldn’t think what to say. I considered asking him to stop, but did not want to look prim, and the studied casualness with which Tony lit up made me suspect he was equally embarrassed. Unsure how to broach the subject, he had decided the best course would be to say nothing and act as if it were perfectly normal. I went along with the pretence for an hour or so, until curiosity got the better of me.

      My questions quickly made him defensive. He first began using crack years ago, he said, but had quit when his daughter was born, and stayed clean for a long time. He blamed strains in his marriage, and the endless rows, for turning him back to it. Then he reeled off a long list of all the crucial differences between himself and the common or garden addict who steals his mother’s pension to blow in a crack den.

      For a start, he pointed out, he didn’t smoke it in a pipe like a proper crackhead, but only in a cigarette – an altogether milder and more respectable delivery method. He only smoked at night time, and never until the day’s business had been taken care of. He wasn’t like those addicts who neglect their responsibilities. He did take it every night, but whenever he went abroad on holiday he would go a fortnight or more without it, so he couldn’t really be an addict, could he? Besides, crack would only be a problem if he couldn’t afford it. Given the nature of his profession, there was never any shortage of the raw materials, nor any need for him to associate with unsavoury types who sell rocks on the street. His daughter knew nothing about it, and his wife wanted for nothing. It wasn’t as if he was raiding the family budget.

      All of this was factually true, I soon came to see – but I did not believe that Tony really felt what mattered most about crack was its affordability. Nor did the idea that he was not technically an addict ring true. All of his justifications and strenuous protests sounded like the desperate sophistry of denial, and the person he was contriving to deceive was himself. I felt sorry for him. I had never met anyone who cared more about looking indomitable – invincible, even – or invested as much pride in the impression of strength. Crack addiction was a weakness he could not afford to acknowledge, even to himself.

      Why I did not find it more off-putting was a puzzle. It was unedifying, certainly, and his transparent self-delusion only made it more disturbing. But there was a magnetism about Tony that eclipsed my reservations, and beneath all the bluster his longing for approval had a charm I found compelling. Then there was, too, the unavoidable fact of his beauty, mesmerising to the point of hypnotic. I noticed that I neglected to mention his visits to anyone. As Paul’s return from Afghanistan drew near, I could no longer carry on pretending to myself that my feelings for Tony were entirely platonic.

      Tony and I were struggling to sustain the pretence between ourselves. The increasingly charged atmosphere in my kitchen was never explicitly acknowledged, but a careless brush of a hand on a shoulder would be enough to make us breathless and freeze. One night, as he was about to leave he took my elbows in his hands and we stared at one another in silence. I thought he was about to kiss me. He dropped his hands, murmured ‘You’re not my woman,’ turned and left. When a few nights later he suggested, very casually, that we should maybe go for

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