Quintin Jardine: Poisoned Cherries

I was happy at closing off that chapter, but it didn’t mean that there was nothing but roses in my garden. I had some serious thinking of my own to do. I was due in Vancouver in less than a month, and the central question of my life was still unresolved.

I was pondering hard, in my last few days in the apartment, about what it really meant to be my own man. When it came to it, there was only one place I could find an answer to that. So I went back to Fife, back to Enster, to see my Dad.

I told him what was at the core of it all. I reckoned that I loved Susie as much as I could ever love another woman, and that wee Janet was all my Christmases come at once. But I was scared, I said, plain scared about taking a chance on marriage again; even if my heart told me to do it, my head asked whether I could ever give up even a part of my independence.

Mac the Dentist thought about this for a while, and then he pronounced.

‘Son,’ he said, ‘I’m a fucking backwoodsman, as you well know. I have a backwoodsman’s simple attitudes to life, and his simple beliefs. And the way I see it is this. When you and the right woman have kids, you’re not your own man any more; you’re theirs and you’re each other’s, and that’s how it should be.

‘You don’t actually have this independence that you talk about, not any more. Janet will be dependent on you, for the next twenty years and more. And Susie is now too, as you are on her. Whether you live together as a couple or not, you have a duty to bring that baby up together, unless death takes one of you out of the equation. So no, you are not independent, either of you; you ceased to be so the moment you made that child.

‘What you are talking about is freedom. It’s being the centre of your own universe, giving yourself the licence to do what you like, say what you like, go where you like, fuck who you like, without a thought to the consequences for anyone but yourself.

‘Maybe you’ve done that for long enough, Oz. If you want to continue down that road, now that you’re rich and famous, the opportunities to indulge yourself in such pleasures will be endless. But compared to the love that flows into you from your children, when you come home at night and sit them in your lap, the rewards of such a life are ashes, just ashes.

‘What you’re afraid of, son, is of finding out about yourself. You’re asking yourself, and now me, whether if you choose family life, you’ll be able to stay the course. I’m not a fucking fortune teller; some do, some don’t. In my judgement, I’d say that you and Susie will make a go of it. Still, as you and I both know, nothing in life is certain but death and taxes, and a skilled accountant can avoid a good chunk of the latter.

‘The last couple of years have made you a fatalist, Oz. They’ve developed a side in you that was latent, but lurking, before things went sour on you. And along the way, you’ve lost your belief in your own inherent goodness.

‘Well, I haven’t. Trust me if you don’t trust yourself, and do what I would do if I was standing in your shoes right now.’

I looked into my Dad’s coal fire, and for some reason I thought of wee Anna Chin, and her bowl of cherries. Maybe it is , I thought. Maybe life is just that .

I leaned over my father as he sat in his big comfy chair, and for the first time in around twenty-five years, I kissed him on the cheek. Then I climbed into my nice, shiny Mercedes and headed off to Glasgow to find out for myself whether, indeed, it is.