Brodmaw Bay by F.G. Cottam Page B

you never truly escaped your origins because what happened to you when you were very young shaped your character for the rest of your life.
    The Seasick Steve album he had listened to the previous evening summed it up very well for Robert. Its title was I Started Out With Nothing and I’ve Still Got Most of it Left . He knew how that felt. He had started out with nothing. He had grown up deprived of possessions and self-worth and parental affection.
    Now he had lots of things. He had a state-of-the-art laptop and a growing collection of expensive wristwatches and his Queenhithe penthouse and the Harley Davidson motorcycle in the basement garage below. He was proud of the oil painting over the marble fire surround on his sitting room wall. It was of modest size. But the signature in its bottom right-hand corner was Peter Doig’s. He had a thriving investment portfolio and money in the bank and the respect of his peers.
    All of this was important to him. He had constructed himself, piece by punctilious piece. And overall, he was pleased with what he had fashioned. He wouldn’t be thirty-one for another month. He was the third bestselling children’s author in Britain and the fourth most borrowed from the nation’s lending libraries. His books had been translated into fourteen languages and he had a development deal on the new series with a major Hollywood studio.
    He still had the common touch. That very afternoon, he was scheduled to give a talk to the sixth-formers of a large north London comprehensive. The subject was creative writing. He would read passages from one of his own novels aimed at the young adult market. It would hit the spot. It always did. Afterwards, he would inspire them with some off-the-cuff observations about how many enjoyable ways there were to translate aspects of the world into words on the page.
    He was a natural with kids. He liked them and they responded positively to him. He had been looking forward to meeting Jack and Olivia, Lillian’s two children; the two reasons, he thought, with something like self-loathing, that her body bore those tell-tale signs of motherhood he had just goaded her about.
    He groaned and threw the phone at his sofa. It bounced off the buttoned leather and skittered on to the floor. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror hung artfully on the wall opposite the balcony to backlight anyone who looked in it. He looked tanned, composed and compellingly handsome. It was a Dorian Gray illusion. He felt soiled and tormented. He looked at the costly ticking bauble that kept the time on his wrist. It was seven-thirty. If he took a sleeping pill now, he would be groggy at the school later and would under-perform.
    Robert trudged to his bathroom to get a Valium from the cabinet there. The cabinet had a mirrored door but he managed to open it without undergoing the ordeal of seeing himself for the second time in less than a minute just by glancing instead at the tiled wall. He swallowed the pill and drank a pint of water, standing over his kitchen sink. The kitchen gleamed. In the early light, everything did. He was dehydrated and his mouth tasted drily of stale booze. There was darkness here, he thought, but all of it lay within.
    He took off his clothes and discarded them on his bedroom floor. He lay down naked and buried his face in the pillow. He would sleep till noon. The alcohol and narcotic effects would have worn off by then. The injury to his heart would only have become more raw and unbearable.
    He did not really know what to do. He had never been in this predicament before. The emotional stakes had never been so high. He would awaken later sober enough to see the situation he was in with greater clarity and calm. All he was sure of, as sleep gratefully claimed him, was that he would not give up on her. The prize was too great. He would never do that. He would never give up. He knew above all else that Lillian was worth fighting for.
     
    The road reached