They say a story should always be told from the beginning. This one is different. It begins at the end. Kit and I are no longer in prison. We have survived and are going straight. I like that phrase you English have – going straight. It does not really exist in my native language. Ir por el buen camino sounds wrong. Of course nobody ever goes straight in real life, do they? Circumstances are turbulent and often unpredictable. They toss you unexpectedly from side to side like a rubber dinghy in the ocean waves. Capsize and some shark-like monster of the deep is waiting to gobble you up. But according to the rules of that realm of fiction known as “civilisation,” Kit and I after many long years of sharing prison accomodation have got to the other side, the new found land of freedom. I invite you to imagine us living happily ever after.

This is Kit’s story. He has given me permission to tell it and I am therefore announcing my presence as the author. How we came to be in prison and by entirely independent routes, mind you, will all come out in the wash. That’s another phrase Kit taught me. Come out in the wash. By the way, my name is Sergio. You will please forgive any infelicities of grammar or style in my sentences. I was raised in a backwater peasant community in the Basque country and hardly knew a word of English before my incarceration. It was Kit who educated me. In return I taught him much more Spanish than he already knew. We became more than just friends. Companeros is my preferred term. You don’t seem to have an exact equivalent in English. Lovers is too romantic. Comrades too political. Let us just agree that after so long sharing the same three metres square space I came to know Kit’s story even better than my own. Here it is.

Kit enjoyed a safe, mostly carefree childhood. He had no siblings as a consequence of which his parents spoiled him. Perhaps there is a fine line between protecting a child and spoiling him? This is a question that later in life bothered Kit enormously. However in strictly material terms as a kid he lacked for very little. As he grew into puberty and early adolescence only one thing worried him – the thought that one day he would have to work for a living. No job that he had ever heard about seemed compatible with his work-shy hedonistic nature. His dad did something in a bank behind the scenes and always looked fed up when he arrived home in the evening, invariably finding reasons to grumble. The quality of the meal his wife served up, the absence of some essential household item or other, a spurious argument advanced on the TV news by a politician concerning a failure of government strategy. Only after a few large whiskies did the paternal mood stabilise and the atmosphere lighten. By 8.30 Kit did not have to tiptoe so carefully through the eggshells the patriarch shed in his wake.

Was this the reason why Kit took to believing that any job must inevitably involve a soul destroying degree of drudgery? Any nine to five, forty-eight weeks a year enforced routine turned you into a miserable, embittered wage slave? It is impossible to be retrospectively certain where our prejudices and aptitudes derive from. Kit accepts he may have been born congenitally laid back and pleasure seeking. Certainly he tended to be a dreamer and quite naive with it. But equally, he once told me, he rarely flinched from applying himself to an activity he positively enjoyed. Reading was one of these. Kit loved the stimulus that the written word exercised on his imagination. A good book burst spectacularly open in his psyche like a fireworks display.

When he was about thirteen something changed. Conventionally their annual family holidays had been taken for a fortnight in rented properties either in rural corners of the UK or in France. Kit loved them and mostly because during these vacations his father became a different person. He relaxed. He displayed a softer, more sensitive side to his nature. He took Kit fishing and swimming. They played football together and board games like Cluedo and Monopoly. But in that thirteenth year, for never explained reasons, his parents abandoned tradition and splashed out on an all inclusive package holiday in a swish beach hotel in the Balearic Islands. In this magical environment every need seemed to be anticipated and catered for – plus needs Kit never realised that he had. His experience was presided over by an uninhibited, fun loving group of men and women called “The Animation Team”. Four men and the same number of women. Until then he had assumed the word animation referred to cartoons and Disney type feature films but here on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean the word meant something else.

Every morning after breakfast as the guests congregated on loungers around the pools, lathering their bodies with factor fifty sun blockers, two of the team wandered amongst them, itinerant evangelists expounding on the various madcap activities awaiting in the shadowy corners of the giant complex. Archery, darts, quizzes, petanque, and table tennis just for starters. In the pool they organised games of water polo and sessions of aquagym. In the bar areas they taught you how to make paella or sangria depending on the day of the week. If this was not enough they staged comedy and musical shows each evening after dinner. Once they got to know Kit, the team adopted him like a nephew. They recognised he was more than game for a laugh and so they regularly made him a butt of their jokes. “This is Kit,’’ they would announce. “Now please don’t mistake him for the bag in which you carry your swimming things.” One day he got lucky at darts and won the prize. “Normally we give the champion a bottle of cava,” announced the organiser, “but Kit here is too young to drink alcohol. So we’re going to give him two bottles to encourage his boozing development.” When Kit showed them proudly to his parents, his dad read the label and remarked, ‘“This stuff is gut rot, son.” He took the bottles back to the room, placing them in a corner for the cleaner to find and dispose of as the whim took her.

After a few days it became apparent to Kit that the animators all loved their work. He could tell from their accents and their Christian names they hailed from different countries and not just Spain. Each had a unique talent. Hence Angelo, the Italian, could sing beautifully anything from operatic arias to modern classics like Sinatra. Kyoko, the petite Japanese woman, led yoga and fitness workshops and could contort her body into the most astonishing positions. Bruno, a tall Brazilian with a guffawing laugh you could hear at several floors distance, moved like a dolphin through the water and when called on to participate in the polo matches he organised, seemed to leap yards in the air to intercept the ball. When it came time for the holiday to end, therefore, Kit felt as if he was saying farewell to the best bunch of friends he had ever known in his life. They shook hands and even embraced him, and his face became wet with both tears of sadness but more significantly joy. Not only had he found soul mates, more importantly he had accidently stumbled across a clear cut sense of vocation.

Kit never spoke about his ambition to his parents. His father had dismissed the holiday later as “extortionately expensive, culturally debased and meretricious”. Kit needed the help of the dictionary to understand that final word. Clearly they would not be taking a break like that again. It did not matter. Now that the divine secret had been revealed to him – namely that work and fun could coexist – Kit would exercise boundless patience. So the years passed. At school he had an aptitude for the humanities rather than the sciences and widened his reading so that European literature became included, not always just in an English translation. Sartre, Hesse and Turgenev all had relevant messages for him about the task of living life independently of the people to whom you owed your tribal allegiance. His teachers and parents wanted him to go to university and, even though no course existed that would qualify him to become an animator, he agreed to go. For one thing college would provide an opportunity to perfect his French and German. For a second he would apply for a second rate provincial redbrick and use it as a kind of holiday camp, acquiring whatever extracurricular skills were on offer from the student clubs. In the event these skills came to include acting, singing and team sports. Then at the beginning of his third and final year with a lower second class degree virtually in the bag, his academic tutor booked him for a couple of compulsory sessions with the careers advisor. She gave Kit a psychometric test which he did not take too seriously. He knew where he was heading. Not that she would be allowed to find out.

The following week came the careers interview proper. He had the answer to the big question already well rehearsed. “I intend to use my languages as the plank for my career,” he humoured her. “The diplomatic service perhaps. Translator and interpreter in some ethically uncompromised global corporation.” She nodded but appeared not entirely convinced. “Do you have a plan B?” she asked. “I mean if all your applications get kicked back? I’m not suggesting for a minute they will, of course. However the plumb jobs in these areas tend to go to Oxbridge graduates. Double firsts.” He smiled and shrugged at her honest if misguided concern. “I feel with your wide range of interests and interpersonal skills you would make an excellent school teacher, Kit.” she said. “Have you considered staying on here an extra year and doing a PGCE?” Obviously he had not. What person in their right mind, having just escaped from the treadmill of education, wants to go back and spend the next forty plus years of their life chasing kids through the same monotonous hoops? A hesitation ensued during which the careers tutor, as if telepathically tuning into her student’s mind, observed, “And remember, teachers enjoy the benefit of fourteen weeks of holiday each year.”

In late November of that final year Kit began writing letters to hotels in tourist hot spots. Some ignored him, others replied. “We are okay for now but have you thought about trying our sister hotel in the Algarve?” That sort of thing. Gradually the overseas leisure network opened up like an oyster to his gaze. His knowledge of the animation map expanded right across southern Europe into North Africa and beyond. Patience produced contacts and contacts insider information. Then one day in early April he received a letter from The Canary Islands. “Dear Kit, we have read your CV with interest. We have a vacancy at our adults only hotel. Our assistant general manager will be in London on the weekend of April 20th and would like to meet you. ” The interview could not have gone better. When are you available? My finals will be finished by June 2nd, sir. “Perfect, Kit! I shall be happy to have you flown out on the 10th. Does that suit?” In this way the animation oyster generously embraced him into its gorgeous interior.

As far as his parents were concerned, a few white lies did the trick. He was taking a year off to go backpacking. They were happy for him, even crossing his deceitful palm with silver. He read up as much as he could about Tenerife. Its resorts remained open for overseas business all year round. In fact the winter months proved even more popular to sun-starved northern Europeans than the summer months. The climate drew the young and the old alike inexorably like moths to a candle. His hotel was situated on the south coast in a place called Las Americas. A behemoth of a building with three pools, beach access and fabulous five star facilities. From now on The Paradise Park Hotel would be his home and place of unlimited recreation. It went well from the outset. His buddies liked him. He happened to be the only Brit and that gave him a kind of kudos, he sensed, especially once they discovered his French and German came almost as fluently to his tongue as English. He could coax the frauleins and flirt with the mademoiselles in their own language. Apart from that his only other USP was his blonde good looks. New team members were inducted carefully. He followed an allocated leader to an assignment and simply repeated their exhortations or parodied their mannerisms. The patter consisted of ad lib doubles entendres and childish puns. He quickly caught on that Eurobabble was the lingua franca of the animation team, at least the public face of it.

During those early weeks Kit found himself falling easily into the role of a stooge. He sang out of tune and danced like a lame grizzly bear but his ineptitude became craftily integrated into the team’s evening onstage comedy shows. Everyone loves a dimwit, especially those guests who have been told it so often about themselves. Here’s a taste. At Ana’s suggestion – she was a local Canarian and stunningly lithe and beautiful – Kit came on with a guitar and began strumming the fierce throbbing intro to Roy Orbison’s song Pretty Woman. Obviously he mimed to a soundtrack, he could not really play the instrument. The audience universally knew the riff and began clapping to the rhythm, their anticipation rising with every bar. But the opening words never came. Kit would look helplessly around the stage, wondering what had gone wrong. Where were the words? The song? Eventually, his rock idol confidence totally collapsed, he would stop strumming and wander off dejectedly into the wings. This brief interlude would be repeated throughout the show and always get a huge laugh until finally Orbison’s powerful voice came in and the hilarity turned to wild applause. The dummy had finally come good!

Given the animation team functioned from 9am until 11pm for seven days a week, the management generously allowed downtime to individual members. It all depended on service. A long weekend here, a fortnight there, and on full pay. You could use the break to go anywhere you wanted. But when it came to Kit’s turn for a short break he refused politely to take it. He loved the hotel environment, the team and most of the guests. Besides, there was nowhere he wanted to go. The team camaraderie worked on him like a drug. Just to be with the gang filled him with the kind of elation less scrupulous people get from laughing gas. After three months he felt close to all of them with just one exception – Ana. There were gay ones, clumsy ones, reckless ones. There was a frustrated painter and a failed ballet dancer. One hid his misery behind a clownish mask, another wore her thwarted ambition on her sleeve. All of them appeared to be singletons. One other thing I must mention though. It is to do with the age-old problem of physical desire. Animators could exercise it behind closed doors with each other but the guests, however friskily they came on to you – and they did – had to be resisted on pain of instant dismissal. El gran jefe, as we Spaniards refer to the top dog, had it written into their contracts. “Las relaciones carnales con las huéspedes están estrictamente prohibidas.”

So to the beautiful and unattainable Ana. She was never less than friendly towards Kit, she never voiced irritation even if he missed a stage cue. But for some reason he felt intimidated by her. He could not put his finger on what caused it either. Two years older than him, she possessed the photogenic charisma of a film star. If she walked into a room all eyes zoomed automatically in her direction, women’s equally to men’s. The hotel was usually packed to the rafters with women of all ages who flaunted their supposed sexual allure, whether or not any actually existed. They waltzed into the bars and lounges like honey bees sniffing out highly pollinated flowers. Entitled and over-tanned. Ana had none of that narcissism or brashness about her. An aura of perfectly clean and uncomplicated light just seemed to emanate from her body. But in this lay the paradox. Of all the animators Ana alone seemed to have a permanent partner. Kit occasionally spotted them together, usually at the end of an evening as the entertainment shift ended. A stocky runt of a workman who lacked both dress sense and height. Ana must have towered two inches over him even in her flats. His manner towards her resonated grumpiness and impatience. By then Kit had acquired sufficient Spanish to understand some of the phrases he overheard. Presumably they lived together. Why else would he turn up to collect her so late virtually every night? Ana would obediently clasp his oafish tattooed arm and off they would march down the marble staircase into the Tenerife night. Kit puzzled a good deal about this. Did she not realise how much better she could do?

One morning approaching 10.30 he stood on a patio balcony gazing towards the ocean horizon when a familiar voice broke into his daydream. “What are you thinking about, Kit?”

Somehow not turning to face Ana liberated him from the shyness that would usually have stifled his voice. “I’m thinking what a long way it is to the real America,” he replied, “and how nice it would be for the two of us just to sail away one evening into the sunset.” Shocked instantly by his own audacity he twisted around now to see what effect his banter had on her.

“Aldo asked me to remind you that he needs your help keeping the scores in the darts tournament,” she smiled.

“I haven’t forgotten,” he said with a glance at his watch. “We have five minutes, I think?” Her smile did not change. Just the briefest nod of assent and off she went, leaving Kit astonished at the number of intelligible sentences he had managed to put together in her company.

That evening most of the team were granted early respite from their comedic labours. Aldo picked a couple of assistants to help with his warm up mock bingo routine. Behind the stage the guest act were donning their outfits, The Queen Tribute Experience. Kit was lounging in his room reading a book when the knock on the door came. It was Ana carrying a bottle of something and two glasses. “I thought you might like some company,” she said.

They made love three times that first night. Kit was not a virgin but he had never experienced anything quite so orgasmic as this before. Where did these great surges of passion and potency come from? The contents of the bottle must have had something to do with it, he supposed later. A weird concoction that tasted of aniseed and the earth. In between bouts of lust they talked about nothing in particular. The kind of small talk strangers make when they bump into each other while waiting in a queue for a long overdue bus. She came back with another bottle the following evening and then the one after that. The surly, short-arsed boyfriend never got mentioned once. The only remotely secretive cat that got out of the bag concerned Ana’s fertility – or rather lack of it. “Condom not needed,” she instructed Kit. “I never had one period in my life.”

It did not need to be discussed that these assignations would not be revealed to the rest of the team. Daytime business therefore continued as usual. At shared meal times the free for all of banter and camaraderie did not change. But during lunch on that fourth day Kit, always sensitive to the minutest alteration of a person’s mood or shift in the dynamic of conversation, noticed something odd. When Ana arrived last at the meal the obvious place for her to sit was the only available chair next to his own. But instead of taking it she grabbed a chair from an adjacent table and inserted it between Aldo and Caspar who willingly parted sideways. Was she trying to avoid him? The thought rankled for a few seconds but he quickly dismissed it. They had an improv comedy show to stage that night and no doubt Ana had a few new ideas she needed to roll past them. But later he tried several times to catch her eye and she steadfastly kept the direction of her gaze elsewhere. Eventually around 4.30 he managed to catch her alone in the aerobics studio putting the pilates equipment away. “Are we on for tonight?” he asked hopefully.

Her face darkened. “I can’t do it,” she replied. “I’m sorry, Kit.”

“No problem!” grinned Kit in a determined effort of graciousness. “There’s always tomorrow night and if that doesn’t work the night after. It’s completely cool.”

Ana’s expression did not alter. “No, I mean I can’t do it ever again,” she said.

Ever again? Her English wasn’t the best. Had she meant to say something else? “You’re not being serious, are you?” he tried to smile. But her manner hardened slightly as she nodded. “Not ever again? But why? Have I done something wrong?”

“No, of course not!” she exclaimed. “It is something hard for me to explain.” Kit begged her to try. “It is Eduardo,” she continued. “I thought I had ended it but he is – how do you say it? – muy persistente. I find it impossible to turn my back towards him. I’m so sorry. You are such a sweet guy.”

He’s a bully and ignoramus, thought Kit, wondering how to communicate the sense of these words in Spanish. He contented himself with saying, “You deserve so much better than him, Ana. I’ve seen how he treats you.”

She seemed about to assent then changed tack. “But we have shared histories together, so many things done together,” she explained. “We were novios de la infancia. From thirteen years of age.”

Kit repeated the Spanish phrase in his mind then he got its meaning which stung like a sudden onset of migraine. “Childhood sweethearts?” he translated bitterly and she nodded. “Welded together for better or worse till death do you part.”

“Que dices?” she asked.

“It’s fucking madness!” he yelped. “¡Está loco completamente!” And the fact she did not actively disagree served him no comfort at all. “He’s an ugly ignoramus!”

In some parts of Spain you will find a saying that roughly translates as “from one seed of madness are born many strange plants”. The strange plant that grew out of Kit might be called dejection or melancholy but those words do not seem to really get to the essence of his complaint. Without Ana in his arms he ceased to function. He tried to perform his animator duties yet his mind wandered all over the place. It was as if Ana had bewitched him. There were accidents, mistakes and complaints from residents. After a few weeks he knew he had to leave before the jefe fired him. He knew anyway his only chance of getting over Ana was to put a vast distance between them. Loco he might be but some rational instinct still survived intact.

By the way, ‘rationality’ served Kit and I well during our cellmate days as a topic for discussion. What exactly is it? Observed from a standpoint of relative freedom it looks like one thing; observed from prison its appearance shifts and changes by the hour, never mind the day. I came to the conclusion rationality is merely a figment of the human imagination. It constitutes a set of rules we use to paper over the numerous cracks in reality that confront us on a quotidian basis. What the eye does not detect the lazy decorator gets away with. Have you ever considered why the concept of black holes has so much credence with cosmological scientists? It is because black holes symbolically represent on the universal macro level what life is actually like on the human micro level, – uncertain, dangerous and pitted with innumerable trapdoors. One false step and we can fall down one. Hence we prefer to create the illusion that they do not exist, employing this post enlightenment concoction of rationality as our decor. This in my opinion is what happened to Kit. He plummeted head first down the Ana black hole, gaining impetus all the time and having nothing immediately available by way of experience or common sense to cushion him. What he had was a vague memory of what it felt like not to be falling into a bottomless pit and his survival instinct trapped him there as if suspended on a temporary ledge.

Yes, we talked endlessly about the distinction between reason and reasonableness, the way the great colonial nations of the world, for instance, always transposed reality through whatever filter of logic best suited their own private interests. Nobody was more reasonable in its own estimation then the USA, the gran jefe policeman of the world, was it? Just ask Nicaragua or Vietnam or Palestine. But however bizarre the applications of rationality may be in a geopolitical or domestic context, I cannot deny the fact it remains essential to all of us, if only as a coping strategy. Appetite and instinct are the only real drivers of human behaviour and one day they will drive us, no doubt, over the edge of reason into extinction. Kit and I came ultimately to the conclusion that, although reason is sometimes exercised by people with admirably noble intentions, its principle function is to enable the common herd to veneer over the terrifying and perforated nature of reality with colourfully distracting imagery.

But I leap far ahead of myself. I must not abandon my friend, who is solitary and bewildered there in Tenerife, without speculating about his state of innocence. My private opinion is that Ana did want Kit but she also needed Kit to actively demonstrate how passionately he wanted her. She wanted him in effect to fight for her. To confront Eduardo. To enact a tableau of romantic love so dramatically in front of them both that the decision to ditch the man she had grown up with was taken out of her hands. Then she could stand up to Eduardo and honestly say, “Listen to Kit’s words and reflect! This is how I need to be loved! And now it is too late!” Yet Kit, emotionally callow as he was, untutored in the vagaries and power games of romance, guessed nothing of Ana’s intentions, indeed she almost certainly only vaguely understood them herself. He instantly took her word as her gospel. He capitulated. The only offspring of parents who had always assiduously protected him, Kit got violently sucked down into the very first black hole he ever came across.

So by early December he found himself back in England. Michaelmas academic term had not yet finished. Two days of prevarication and white lies expended in the company of mum and dad exhausted him. The truth was too painful to even think of broaching. “Is it too late now to join the PGCE course this year?” he asked his somewhat surprised ex-careers tutor on the phone. “I promise to work through the Christmas holidays to catch up with all the course work I’ve missed.” The kindly lady went off to consult with her colleagues. In this way plan B very quickly displaced its predecessor. I think of it as a reflex action, like the leg spasming upwards when you tap the tender area just beneath the knee with a mallet. A man wallowing around in a black hole does not make calculated decisions. He dives towards whatever ledge appears closest to his floundering vicinity. And in the same way Kit became a qualified secondary teacher, he also became a husband to Sian. They met in the first week of the Lent term and by Easter weekend had declared their love for each other. It was not that Ana had been forgotten. She had been superseded. In the same way a war is eventually superseded by a peace treaty, – the scars, the dereliction, the gnawing sense of futility remain as yet unresolved.

Ten years went by. Kit surprised even himself with the ability he showed in the classroom. Somehow for all but a handful of recalcitrant losers he managed to make learning French and German seem interesting. Promotions followed quickly. The head and the governors clearly valued his vigour and ability to relate to socially marginalised students. Sian gave birth to two children in rapid succession. In between maternity leaves she taught year fives in a local primary school. Following the paternal example Kit’s happy family of four took holidays in the UK at Easter and in the south of France in Summer. Then one Christmas Sian suggested they take their main August holiday in the Canary Islands. She shoved a brochure in front of him, acquired from a colleague at school who had been vacationing there for fifteen years. Kit took a diplomatic browse at the literature then knocked the idea right on the head. “Far too hot in August,” he announced. “Forty degrees is not unusual.” But Sian persevered. She insisted that she felt in a holiday venue rut and needed a change. Brian and Claire expressed similar feelings and too late Kit realised a family rebellion against tradition had been cunningly orchestrated behind his back. So in the end they settled for mainland Spain, the Costa Blanca, and a fortnight in a four star all inclusive beach hotel. Christmas week transitioned peacefully into the new year.

When Kit occasionally reflected on those few months spent entertaining hotel guests in Tenerife, he envisaged himself back then as another person altogether, as a sort of prototype Kit whose character and temperament had been radically overhauled and updated by something called maturity. That naive young lad who fell head over heels for Ana certainly shared the same physiological traits but in all other respects he had been different. Yet in my opinion this logic was terribly misguided. None of us change in that fundamental way it had become convenient for Kit to believe. The pupa of an insect is not essentially dissimilar to the creepy crawly organism that will soon emerge. The caterpillar may appear to the observer’s eye a singularly different creature to the gorgeous butterfly that ushers forth but the core of that animal’s being has not one bit altered – only its ability to forage and fly. So it is with us. We carry the tiny eggs of fear and resentment and thwarted dreams around on the hidden underbelly of our psyche and occasionally one will drop off and the demon within become hatched.

It was not entirely clear which one of them recognised the other first. The journey to the Costa Blanca had been much more wearisome than it should have been. Early taxi from home then a long delay waiting for take-off clearance then a laborious transfer from the arrival airport to the final destination. At the hotel reception a queue for registration ensued during which Kit sent Sian and the kids off to the poolside bar while he completed the paperwork. The extraordinary thing was that Ana had not changed in appearance one bit. For a second or two Kit thought he must be hallucinating. She stood in the background apparently giving instructions to a colleague and the electricity of his stare must suddenly have alerted her. “So it is you,” she said, approaching him without further hesitation. They locked eyes across the reception counter. Had she forgotten his name? “What are you doing here, Kit?” she reassured him.

“I’m hoping to eventually check in with my family for a fortnight’s holiday,” he replied, trying to smile, wafting a bunch of passports.

She took them instantly. “Here, let me do that,” she said and tapped at the keys of a computer. “Let me see. Sian, Brian and Claire? You have been busy. I must congratulate you, Kit.”

He wondered if this was an attempt at irony. It could just as easily have been regret. “You don’t seem to have changed one bit,” he replied. She shrugged it off and opened a drawer, searching for room keys or whatever else. “How long have you been working here, Ana?”

She hesitated, maybe darting him a sneaky glance, he adjudged. “Three years,” she finally answered. “You didn’t know I was here then?”

Ah, he got it now. She thought – but it was just too absurd for words. “Of course not,” he said. “This is what might be called a coincidence. A staggering one perhaps but nothing else.” He read her expression as hovering between dubious and disbelief. “Why did you leave the Canary Islands, may I ask?” he said.

“We got offered a better job by the company,” she replied. “More money. Better security. I’m a supervisor here.”

Only one of those words mattered to him. “We?” he repeated.

“Eduardo. He’s the hotel’s full time maintenance man,” she said. “Your room numbers are 379 and 380. They’re interconnected. A top of the range family suite. Here are two keys. You will have a nice view of the sea.”

He felt himself flinch at the slight touch of her finger as he took them. Or was it the mention of the name that did it? “I wrote you a letter,” she added as he began to turn away.

He turned back abruptly. “You did? I didn’t receive it,” he said.

“In fact two,” she continued. “Perhaps I got your address wrong? But the Spanish postal system is lousy. Never recovered from Franco.”

He wanted to ask her what she had written in those damned misdelivered letters but somebody called to her suddenly and she excused herself. The rooms turned out to be elegantly comfortable as Ana had implied. The larger parental one had a balcony but the kids’ not. They were connected by a solid internal door to ensure privacy. For what remained of the day and the evening he kept thinking about this bizarre meeting. What the hell did it mean? And the way she had spoken to him. Like their parting had been just a few weeks ago. And the grimace on her face when she disclosed that her relationship with the rancid prat Eduardo still endured! Two thirds of her life trapped in a demeaning cage of her own sentimental volition! Of course he said nothing of this to Sian who remarked more than once how distracted he seemed. That night in bed when they made love it was Ana who he caressed. The following night, too, and the one after that. “What’s got into you all of a sudden?” she demanded to know. “You’re crushing me to a pulp!”

As one leisurely day passed into the next Kit struggled hard to fend off this great boulder of desire. The deceitful ecstasy of the past had manifested out of nowhere and he felt it pushing him inexorably downhill. He played with the children in the pool. He took them on a boat trip to see dolphins. Brian loved table tennis and they often played while Sian took Claire with her to the aqua fit sessions. One day Kit entered a poolside toilet where a man in overalls seemed to be replacing a damaged urinal stall. He gruffly pointed at an out of order sign when Kit thought he recognised Eduardo. His hair had thinned, he had developed a paunch but nothing about the curmudgeonly manners had changed, it seemed. “Que tal, Eduardo?” he asked. The maintenance man who was bent over a large tool box digging out an implement barely honoured the clearly unwanted enquiry with a glance. “¿Qué te importa, hombre?” he snarled back under his breath.

Kit wondered what feelings, if any, Ana retained for him. Why would she have written him letters unless to express regret at the abandonment of their love? At the loss of an opportunity to regain her freedom? Surely she had wanted him back? Such a confusion of thoughts became earworms wriggling perpetually around in his waking and dreaming consciousness. He drank more heavily than usual. The heat intensified literally and the physical discomfort he felt morphed into the emotional turmoil. On the occasions he saw Ana she always smiled, albeit with a professional detachment. Her glances, her manners, her occasional inquiries – the inscrutable paraphernalia of human behaviour – teased and tormented his mask of composure. As for her fiance – or had he long since become her spouse? – Kit stumbled upon him in the most unlikely places, always with the ginormous tool box closeby, as if its contents held the final solution to the problem of architectural dilapidation. Sometimes Eduardo had an assistant for company but most often he worked alone, cementing, painting, screwing, tiling and whatever else he had been ordered to do. Never once did he smile or show pleasure in his craftsmanship. Never once did he speak unless he was first addressed. One morning before breakfast Kit spotted a figure high up tethered improbably to the trunk of a palm tree, machete in hand, hacking at the redundant branches which periodically surrendered to the barbarity of the assault. A closer look confirmed the simian frame to be indeed Eduardo’s. And Kit found himself ardently wishing the hoist contraption would snap and his usurper hurtle fatally downwards. Then he closed his eyes and actually witnessed it happen, the sickening crunch of bones. “What are you doing, daddy?” Claire simultaneously demanded, alerted not just by his strange posture on the balcony but the sudden yelp emitted from her father’s mouth.

“Just dreaming that the impossible might happen,” he replied and instantly retreated into the bathroom to discourage any further questions.

Kit once confided to me that a fortnight had proved tragically a smidgeon too long to suffer the scalding needles of purgatory. If the package holiday had been for just ten days he might well have escaped unscathed back to the domestic ennui of Blighty, the confabulation of normality. A suffocating man can only endure for so long. He either comes up for air or he drowns. Nine days had elapsed when he spotted Ana leaving the building. He made an excuse to his family and stealthily followed her out past the security guards who patrolled the estate and into the street. Once he felt safe from prying eyes he made his move and as he declared his undying unquenchable love Ana did not even seem surprised. “What are you asking me to do, Kit?” she said.

They would elope without delay, he explained. Go abroad. America, Australia, France. It did not matter where. He had savings. He had senior experience as a teacher of modern languages and could easily find work anywhere. She did not immediately answer. Her gaze shifted into the far distance of clouds over La Gomera. He urged her on further with the earnest vocabulary of promises and passion that had failed to be at his disposal a decade earlier. “Have you considered your children?” she asked when he paused for breath. The answer to that question he had been rehearsing for days. They would survive. Children are far more resilient and adaptive than we choose to believe. Ana took a deep breath. She thanked him for being so open and honest and loveable. She would always think of him with gratitude and affection. But the truth was the boat had long since sailed. What did the English say about making their beds? “You have made your bed with the lovely Sian and your delightful kids,” she observed, “and I have unfortunately made mine with – what did you once call him? – that ugly ignoramus.” She advised Kit to try to enjoy what remained of the holiday and spun round on her heels, becoming lost in the crowd within seconds.

That night, unsurprisingly, Kit slept badly. He got up early and rambled around the hotel, drank coffee from the automated lounge machine then tried to jog some sense into a brain he knew had become beyond addled. But when he arrived back after ploughing up and down the deserted moonlit beach, the adrenalin of disappointment and rage still pumped through his body unabated. Fortunately his barrister who was Anglo-Spanish had sufficient skill to bring this out in court. He knew inside out the tactile locations of the Spanish nervous system. It would be risky, of course, and exoneration would be out of the question. “It is about making the court believe in your fragility, Kit,” the barrister had counselled him, “your weakness when the great tsunami of love comes unexpectedly surging towards you. Everyone can understand that dilemma. That utter helplessness and panic. The prosecution will no doubt focus on the brute materiality, the apparent coarseness of your actions, but we shall stick to the psychological territory, the interiority of your pain. Okay? It is important you understand this. The strategy is for mitigation.”

Eduardo had got on the job early that morning. The midday heat would become unbearable and he angled to earn a long siesta. A stainless steel railing habitually used by bathers to access the infinity pool had become loose and he was preoccupied unscrewing and rebedding the feet in the masonry. It was a straightforward but finicky job. In fact Kit as he approached, heading back towards his room, noticed the clutter of tools and the bag of cement laid out on the tiles before he realised who was using them. Eduardo spotted his rival first. Kit heard him say something in Spanish then laugh as if to himself. He had no intention to stop or to speak to the workman but the mocking laughter resumed at the point Kit moved adjacent to Eduardo. More words were spoken, clearly directed towards Kit even though Eduardo kept his head bent down over the task in hand. Exactly what these words meant Kit could not be sure. His Spanish remained at best rudimentary. Certainly the words “tonto” and “imbecil gigante” counted among the ones he recalled from his time in Tenerife. Anger and humiliation boiled up in his chest. “Are you speaking to me?” he challenged Eduardo who just grinned back disdainfully. “At least have the courage to stand up to my face and say what you mean!” he demanded. Eduardo told him then in English that he was a spoilt baby, to just fuck off back to England and cry on his mummy’s shoulder. Then he resumed his work as if nothing had passed between them.

In court Kit testified that he could not recall picking up the hammer and striking Eduardo on the back of the head. The prosecuting barrister clearly did not believe this. “If it was not a calculated act of violence,” the vulturous lawyer droned, “why did you hit him twice more on the head as he lay there unconscious on the ground? The blood spurting out of his fractured skull?”. Kit’s defence, or rather his wily old counsel’s, was that something alien had taken over his will power, had demolished his conscience. Effectively this much abused, avenging incubus perpetrated the attack and not the defendant in the dock, who as his name suggested, behaved in normal circumstances as submissively as a young feline pet. It remains unknown whether it was that argument or the unblemished record of conduct Kit could point to, underpinned by character references from colleagues, medics and family members, that finally convinced the court to exercise a degree of clemency. Twelve years was still a harsh sentence in Kit’s eyes. But he confronted it boldly. He woke up in prison to who he really was – or rather who he really wasn’t. But more of that in a minute.

Now as for the historical footnote in Kit’s story which is me, Sergio, I got into the calaboose by altogether a different route. Yes, I killed someone alright but it could not remotely be described as a crime of passion. Unless passion turns out to be an as yet scientifically undiscovered force of nature, a bit like dark energy, cluttering up the universe and tyrannically transforming the very best of human intentions into the moral equivalent of faecal matter? It happened on a Friday evening. I’m a builder with a particular skill in bricklaying. Like everyone in this trade, come close of play at the weekend me and my mates go straight on the piss. No going home first to scrub up. We grab our wad off the jefe and dive head first straight into the closest bar to our site. So when my mother eventually reached me by phone I was, as Kit eventually taught me to say, somewhere between well-oiled and rat arsed. (It makes me laugh now to think how many phrases for ‘drunk’ you English have! Almost as many as the Inuits have for snow.) But I wasn’t laughing when my mum told me that she thought dad had just experienced some kind of seizure. He couldn’t get up from the kitchen floor, white stuff like foam drooling out of his mouth. She needed me home double fast. “Haven’t you phoned for an ambulance?” I demanded. She had but been advised to expect up to an hour’s delay due to the cutbacks. When I say I drive a pick up van you will maybe guess the rest of my tragic tale. In my haste I stupidly overtook someone on a blind bend and suffered virtually a head on collision with a saloon coming in the opposite direction. I got away with two cracked ribs and a few cuts, the other guy died in hospital two days later. The rap would have been much bigger except for the extenuating circumstances that were easily provable.

When they banged me up with Kit he was already several months into the second year of his sentence. The age difference between us, just under eleven years, did not appear to count for much with him. He welcomed me gladly into the fold like an older brother. People without direct experience of jail tend to think of The Shawshank Redemption as the standard model for the culture of incarceration. Bullying and corruption at every level of the organisation. Maybe that remains the norm and we just got lucky? For a start our governor, Gobernador Ignacio Flores, considered himself a progressive thinker. He personally interviewed each new inmate before allocating them to a cell. And he took the trouble beforehand to read whatever reports had been supplied by court officials. In other words he did his homework. Sometime later I heard a story that Flores had originally trained as an oceanographer. His grandfather had been imprisoned, tortured and finally executed by General Franco. But whether this experience accounted for the exotic perfume of the man’s ideas is impossible to judge.

Anyway our gobernador advocated meditation as a coping strategy and he presented me with a copy of a small book called The Incredible Power Of Now that he had written himself. He suggested that I should try to think about prison life as providing an opportunity for growth in unexpectedly rewarding directions. “There are two kinds of recidivist, Alvarez,” he lectured me. “The first I compare to a crocodile because his nature is inflexibly established as devious, predatory and violently cruel. The other I refer to as a dolphin. By nature he is docile and playful and not without intelligence. But occasionally he is prone to misread the direction of the currents and the prevailing wind, and thereby lose contact with his familiar habitats. At such times he will panic and blunder destructively around until he rediscovers his original bearings. In this penitentiary I see that absolutely nothing but mayhem is ever to be gained by housing crocodiles and dolphins together. Having studied the court’s assessment of your character and crime, I conclude that you are something of a hybrid – but definitely more inclined to dolphinhood than to savage reptilian. Therefore I intend to accommodate you in the dolphin wing with an Englishman whose capacity for remorse, my colleagues tell me, is becoming increasingly more leviathan in its scale than dolphin. His example should inspire you.”

I need to say Kit was the first English hombre I ever met, or saw on screen even, who I actually liked. (A possible exception is Michael Palin) His Spanish was basic, my English non-existent, but I was able to communicate most of the governor’s sermon. Kit laughed out loud. “Never mind the power of now,” he said. “It’s only the power of wow that matters. You have to keep busy in order to kill time. If you don’t, sure as hell time will kill you.” He quickly made me understand that I needed to commit to some specific task or project. “For instance, learn to speak English,” he suggested. “I shall be happy to teach you. In return you can help me improve my Spanish. What do you say?”

So right from day one we agreed a deal and shook hands on it. The governor made sure we dolphins did not lack note paper and writing utensils. Ten new words or phrases each day rose to fifteen after a few weeks as I got the hang of things and then later to twenty. This assignment was more than sufficient for small brained me but Kit had two other ways of killing time. He wrote every day to his wife and children, explaining, apologising, encouraging, taking an interest in their lives. He asked them to send books, which they routinely did. At least one each week would arrive, sometimes two or three, all of which he devoured. Being a lazy reader – I only finished about three books in my entire life – his dedication astonished me. Some books were written in French or German but mainly in English and eventually, as my familiarity with the English language developed, Kit would choose short passages from them that he thought might help accelerate my learning. One day he received a Spanish book. “This is a present for you, Sergio,” he said, “so long as you permit me to read it when you are finished?” Entitled El Amor En Los Tiempos Del Cólera, it struck me as quite bulky with intimidatingly small print on the pages. Of course by then I knew the exact task Kit had set himself, to get to the bottom of a subject he had never properly understood – Love!

“How come you don’t understand it?” I had originally asked him. “It’s like saying you don’t understand what to do with your polla! Obviously you do because you have two kids!”

He laughed like a drain. (What a crazy phrase that one is!) “You are just identifying the most obvious and least interesting part of the puzzle,” he replied. Then he showed me a book called The Four Loves that he explained had been written by a Christian scholar called CS Lewis. “It schematises the subject into four distinct and separate categories,” he continued, “and the male member is only relevant to one of them. I’m not convinced Lewis has come close to the final solution here, by the way, but it’s a relevant contribution.” Apparently there had never been any talk about love in Kit’s family when he was growing up. The word embarrassed his father. This was why Kit concluded that he had grown up with such huge misconceptions about the way his deepest feelings worked. “Of course I shall never finally succeed in my task of cracking the code of love,” he confessed, “of solving the enigma. I know that now. But the pleasure of being in the company of numerous other searchers who have similarly tried is intensely rewarding.”

Let’s get one thing straight. I did not like being in prison one bit. However I did like being in Kit’s company. In some respects I found him strangely obsessive but we never once argued and I found under his tutorship my thinking about all sorts of things diverted and stretched into new directions. The years accumulated. And so did the journals my jail partner meticulously kept, full of scribbled notes and reviews of the books he had been reading. Then one day he told me that he felt impelled to write a book of his own based entirely on the best bits of all the stuff he had been reading. “I find I have got to a place in the journey where I need to take stock,” he told me. “I need some external authority to reassure me I have been meaningfully engaged all this time and not just chasing after castles in the air.” His book would be provisionally entitled, “The things dolphins do for love : A journey into unexplored oceans and back”. I suspect this title was deliberately intended as a nod to Flores and it succeeded admirably when the governor was duly informed. He set Kit up with a computer and a printer in our cell and took him off the prison library duties to which he had been assigned until such a time as the manuscript was finished.

I obviously got to read bits of the manuscript as it went along. Partly a diary of prison life, partly an autobiography, partly a philosophical treatise on the nature of love is how I would choose to characterise the work. One theme was cleverly interlaced with the other so that the narrative constantly raised questions about this thing we call love while relating the possible answers to crucial events in the author’s past and present life. Whether it had any literary merit, of course, was well beyond my ability to judge. The first UK literary agent he emailed it to, however, had no doubts. He wrote back at length praising the originality of the manuscript but also suggesting improvements. The agent praised many of the chapter headings (Everything You Want To Know About Woody Allen But Never Dared Ask was his favourite) but he clearly disliked the title. That would be no problem. We both knew the title to be simply a ruse to get Flores on side. It could easily be changed to suit a publisher’s marketing needs. Kit felt really pleased with such a positive response and began revisions immediately.

The final version ended up with the title A Jailbird’s Guide To The Mystery Of Love and was bought by the first publisher Kit’s agent sent it to. By the time he was released, having had two years deducted for exemplary behaviour, the book had reached the top of The Sunday Times best seller list and had several film companies bidding for the production rights. Kit may no longer have had a career in teaching but all his financial concerns had been vanquished. Brian and Claire were now both at university, the latter studying criminology. Sian now judged it was the right time to confess that she had formed a relationship with another man who wanted to marry her. “So you have stopped loving me?” Kit asked her directly.

Sian shook her head. She appeared genuinely anguished. “I’m in a dilemma,” she wept. “I love you both equally but in different ways.” When Kit asked her to be more explicit, she said, “I love you with all my soul but I love George with all my heart.” Kit was unsure how devastated he ought to feel. But clearly when the second edition of Jailbird came out it would need to be updated with an additional chapter. He bought a three bedroom flat in a leafy residential suburb and allowed her to file unopposed for a divorce settlement.

With the success of the book came two other things, namely fame and fan mail. The first of these could have been done without. The interest of the media in Kit’s life was prurient at best. The second, however, constantly intrigued him. All sorts of people wrote to him and often asked for advice about the direction of their own troubled love lives. His publisher had already asked Kit if he had thought of writing a sequel, maybe even a novel or certainly a book that cashed in while his fifteen minutes in the fashionable limelight endured. But Kit disliked the opportunism of this idea. In any case he had spent more than a decade caged up physically and mentally and wanted the freedom to stretch his legs in whichever direction they wanted to go. As it transpired they decided to do a fast sprint into relationship counselling. If decent thinking people wanted his help unpicking the emotional confusion in which they dwelt, Kit reasoned, then they could happily pay for it. He undertook a fast track training course, created a website and the appointments came flooding in.

What also arrived were offers of marriage from women – two in America, glossy photographs attached – dopes who had read the book and decided they had fallen head over heels in love with its author. Then a television company that had devised a show called Love At First Sight contacted him about becoming their resident relationship counsellor. The programme consisted of a computer algorithm matching up couples according to the results of psychometric tests they had taken and marrying them without any prior physical contact. The cameras subsequently pursued each couple for a year into the ups and downs of their marriage, charting every intimate detail of the successes or setbacks of the social experiment. Kit politely turned all these offers down while concluding that the marketing of love as a romantic commodity in the age of social media and multichannel television needed to be more carefully regulated. Brian’s prediction that developments in artificial intelligence would soon be enabling people to have their lovers tailor made to their own specified requirements no longer seemed so youthfully callow.

Opprobrium often follows swiftly in the wake of success and Kit had less immunity than most. A legion of academics quickly lined up to knock the amateurish spots off him. Who did he think he was? If the murdering recidivist was going to reinvent the wheel, why had he not properly examined the labour of pioneers in Biology, Sociology, Psychology and Anthropology first? It was a sure sign of the meretricious times that a bombastic charlatan could rise up out of nowhere like this and find himself proclaimed as the new guru of love by the blinkered masses! This criticism simply served to amuse Kit. It did not impinge on his confidence or energy of purpose one jot. If his own private search for meaning had relevance to others, indeed if it encouraged their own deliberations on the nature of love, Science ought to welcome the resurgence of a vital yet much trivialised public debate. “Surely the Academy should be more tolerant and, dare I say, loving to any new kid on the love block?” Kit quipped to one Today Programme journo who had the temerity to challenge him live on radio 4 airwaves.

Having recently completed the second year of an undergraduate psychology course, Kit’s son, Brian, chucked a few rocks of his own on the mountain of displeasure in the form of a private letter to his dad. He ridiculed his father’s failure to properly understand gender dysphoria and the stupidity of including it within a discussion of transgressive love. Furthermore the boy argued that narcissistic personality disorder played a major part in the formulation of romantic relationships. Individuals fall in love with a fantasy person they have concocted in their own head, Brian asserted, and not the actual person. This leads to disillusionment after a period of time when the lovers come to realise the truth about their partner. Kit did not properly engage with his son on these issues, except to thank him sincerely for reading the book and contributing to the debate. He meant it too. Kit thought he had made it clear in the text, especially the epilogue, that Jailbird was just a personal take on a complex subject that human beings might never finally get to the bottom of anyway. Why academics working in the field of human relations, even aspiring ones like Brian, took offence so quickly at his presence amongst them he just did not comprehend.

To Kit’s astonishment a possible answer to that question arrived in the post via his publisher. It came from the last person in the world who he would have expected to get in touch – Ana. “Dear Kit, I am so glad you wrote your book,” she began. “It has opened my eyes to many many things.” She went on to say what some of these were. “Most people I know love the book as much as I do,” she continued. “Those critics who express dislike for it seem to me to be intimidated by your ability to be so open and personal and often humorous. Somehow these critics find such intense personal self-disclosure to be unscientific. It also strikes me they disrespect your generalist approach as a lay person, so to speak. They consider themselves leaders in their disciplines and they have arrogantly come to believe their way of doing knowledge is superior to everyone else’s. The habit of squinting at the world in one particular manner for so long has convinced them no other type of gaze can possibly be valid.”

Kit read the typed letter several times. It showed no animosity or bitterness. It made no reference to his offence or the subsequent prison sentence. And it revealed absolutely nothing about Ana’s own life thereafter. He studied the valediction, written in her own hand, “Yours most affectionately, Ana”. For a while he wondered if this was a hoax, a joke letter written by somebody pretending to be the real Ana, somebody perhaps who she knew, taking the rise. But what finally persuaded him the letter might just be genuine was the postscript. “I do hope this letter reaches you, unlike those other two, so long ago!” He kept the reply deliberately brief, simply thanking her for the extremely kind words. Then he said, “I still feel terrible shame at the pain I inflicted on you. My actions were unforgivable. Believe me when I say I am sorry. That word is hopelessly inadequate. I wish you well and hold you dear.”

All Kit’s doubts about the true identity of the letter writer became eradicated within a fortnight when a second one arrived. “Please believe me equally, Kit,” Ana said, “that there is nothing to forgive. You only did to Eduardo what I had frequently dreamed of doing to him myself! To be honest, I subsequently thought that my subconscious desire to be rid of him must have somehow transmitted itself to you. I have felt awfully guilty. You must understand that Eduardo subjugated me. I was in effect his slave. How this happened I do not understand to this day, how one personality can exert such control over another. I tried to explain this to you in the letters you say you never received. When you didn’t reply, I gave up trying to struggle against his tyranny.”

If that paragraph had relieved him, the next one intrigued and excited. Ana would be in London in a couple of months, she announced, representing her hotel at a leisure industry conference. Could they meet? The dates and the venue’s address were attached. She wrote nothing else about her personal circumstances. He accepted the invitation immediately then conducted an internet search and discovered she had become a senior manager at the hotel. An employee profile he came across mentioned a few background details about Ana that he already knew but nothing relating to her marital status. And as the day of the rendezvous approached, Kit found himself increasingly nervous, unsure what he expected to get out of this potentially reckless expedition down memory lane.

He arrived at the Park Lane Hilton Hotel punctually five minutes before their appointed meeting time. A receptionist phoned up to her room while directing him to a seat in the foyer, opposite to the lift. Apprehension can play strange tricks on the mind. Who was to guess how the years might have aged her? Would there now be wrinkles and grey streaks where there had once been unblemished skin tones and long jet black hair? Would that lithesome athletic body have begun to run towards fat? He need not have worried. The Ana who emerged from the lift had indeed changed but merely from a young woman into a mature sophisticated lady, groomed in a style of executive glamour that made him feel shabby and out of place, as if he was attending an interview for a job that he did not have a hope in hell of being offered. The dark hair drawn tightly back into a bunch at the back of her head, the perfect oval symmetry of her face, the finely trimmed arch of her eyebrows, the delicate nose, the fulsome pout of lips that invariably seemed to be trying hard to suppress a sardonic smile of amusement. He drank it all in as she walked with all the casual sloth of a catwalk model towards him. An acid blue tight fitting top, a black knee length pleated skirt, high heels and two-tiered dangling crystal earrings. It struck him as more apparition than reality, as if Ana’s inner being had become appropriated by some Hollywood sprite, vampish and Kardashian-like. He stood up and extended a limp hand which the diva ignored as she thrust herself into his body for an uninhibited physical embrace. “You’re thinner, Kit,” she told him in the moment of release, “but just as handsome as ever.”

Over the course of three hours the conversation never flagged, simply moving territorially from the foyer to the cocktail bar to the restaurant and back to the cocktail bar. What it all boiled down to was this: She had never become romantically involved with another man after Eduardo’s death. It felt to her like men were intrinsically unreliable. They could not be trusted. However an older woman had come into her life with whom she had enjoyed a tender loving relationship. Eventually the passion had died but they still lived together in a mutually supportive platonic friendship. Kit’s book had torn through her defences like a force nine hurricane, opening her eyes to the moral stupidity and cowardice she had allowed to blight the first three decades of her life. She gazed with horror at her capacity for self-deception. How Kit must have suffered to retain his sanity in prison! She felt the full weight of her responsibility to him and she wanted nothing more ardently than to make amends. She hoped and believed that it was not too late for them to revive their love, to embark on a brilliant new life together. What did he think?

Kit thought all sorts of deviant things in fact. He partook of more alcohol than he had consumed for a very long time but still managed to maintain an affable front while keeping his own cards close to his chest. For instance, he speculated that if his suffering had troubled Ana so much, how come she had not visited him when he was languishing in prison only an hour’s drive away from where she lived in Spain? Not so much as a brief note of sympathy! And had reading his book really changed her as radically as she claimed or had it just become convenient for her to believe so? As for the stuff about the scales of self-deception being removed from her eyes, he suspected the lady might be protesting just a bit too much. Could it be this self-deceiving element of her nature that she retrospectively claimed to deplore had not been completely eradicated and was suddenly budding again like a magnolia tree in Spring? Just as Eduardo had bewitched her, had toyed with her besotted feelings, so she had done the same to Kit – and in this present moment was busy doing so once more! Kit recalled the maxim that those who have abusive power done to them may only be able to expiate their pain by inflicting the same practice on a third party. And so the battle between desire and circumspection invisibly proceeded within him.

Long before they returned to the cocktail bar for cognacs and coffee, even though no explicit invitation had been extended, it had become clear to Kit that Ana’s bed and shapely body were available to him that very evening if he so desired – and no question he did absolutely desire. The way Ana had so skillfully constructed the artifact of her appearance guaranteed that. But what held him back were her motives whether unconscious or otherwise. She had effectively seduced and enslaved him twice already. Perhaps completing a hat trick of seductions might represent for her the ultimate frisson? Because she would not just be enslaving a besotted naive nobody like before but a celebrity author who the world acclaimed as the ‘the new guru of love’. It would be a master stroke in the restoration of her damaged self-esteem.

Afterwards Kit would always recollect this Hilton encounter as if it had been a phantasmagoric film he watched utterly enthralled in a west end cinema. There had been suspense and drama and arousal by the bucketful yet much of the dialogue had sounded hackneyed, and as for the ending, it came too suddenly and inconclusively. The truth was that Kit’s cognitively energised will power had managed to wrestle his libido into temporary submission. He invented a lie about having an early hospital appointment to deal with an enlarged prostate problem. To be fair Ana had not batted as much as a false eyelash. “I shall be here for another four nights,” she said and presented him with a voluptuous valedictory kiss. “After six in the afternoon my diary is empty,” she added. “Let us speak again very soon.” He had been permitted to exit from the cinema in a state of priapic confusion. Tomorrow, as they say in the movie, is another day! Kit used it to hatch up another excuse. His widowed mother had been taken ill. She lived alone in a bungalow on the south coast and he urgently needed to attend to her. A good part of this happened to be true anyway. By eleven that morning he had texted a message to Ana and driven off in his car to Hastings.

As he pulled his wheelie short stay case to the car the precinct gardener caught his eye, weeding the borders and mulching the rose bushes that lined them. “Canary Islands, is it?” she smiled. “Mauritius?”

“Nowhere quite so exotic. East Sussex.” he replied. “Those David Austens are looking healthy. I like the red blooming ones best.”

“Me too,” she agreed. “My love is like a red red rose, newly sprung in June.”

“I like that poem,” he grinned.

“Ay, I know,” she said. “Eva Cassidy sings a great version of it.”

Then he continued on his way trying to remember her name. Something Scottish? Megan? But it would not come to him. He climbed in, set the navigator for St Leonards and the radio to easy listening. With luck he would hit the motorway in fifteen minutes. One song ended and another began. He did a double take. It was Eva Cassidy singing My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose. The quickfire coincidence made the hair on the back of his head bristle. It made him reflect too. How did the gardener know he liked that poem? Or was it just a wild guess? Then he remembered that he had written something about it in Jailbird.

But Morag – that’s the woman’s name he could not remember – was no ordinary gardener as Kit discovered by accident several months later. She had another string to her bow, or should I say guitar? Here’s a spoiler. This story has not much further to go. I’m deliberately going to end it while Kit is still very happy.

I met Morag when I came to London and Kit put me up in the spare bedroom. My release from the slammer had occurred a tad less than a year before his and unlike Ana, who he nowadays jocularly refers to as the queen bee, I visited him there every week. We have made big plans together. I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say they involve Spanish real estate and sunshine deprived northern Europeans. Kit wanted to help me move forward in life and I was in no position to refuse. “I had a narrow escape with the queen bee, Sergio,” he confessed. “Me he salvado por un pelo.” I congratulated him on how well he’d retained the Spanish I taught him. Then he narrated the encounter at The Hilton you have just been reading. “Do you think I made the right decision?” he asked. From everything he had told me it seemed clear that Ana, despite her intelligence and vivacity, had been very badly damaged by her relationship with Eduardo. She confessed to having relinquished all trust in men for God’s sake! I’m no shrink but Kit’s instinct to run away from her honey pot and royal jelly offer was surely the only sane course of action. My trade is building. If the joists in the floor of a house have become infested with woodworm, no cosmetic treatment in the world is going to stabilise them. You have to rip them all out and install brand new timbers. And so it is with love. The foundations of any intimate relationship will, of course, always be slightly unpredictable but when the rot is so ingrained to be clearly visible to the naked eye, only a romantic fool would even try to erect his life on it.

Kit listened and nodded silently as I delivered my point of view yet I could not help notice the distant melancholic caste in his eyes. When I asked him what he was thinking, he replied, “Just that perhaps foolishness and true love are different sides of the same coin?”

One Friday evening six months prior to my visit, Kit had gone into a local pub for a drink and heard live music, an acoustic guitar and a female voice singing a folk ballad. He carried his pint into the adjacent room and there she sat on a chair entertaining a crowd of revellers. Standard fare but professionally delivered. Morning Has Broken followed by Forever Young. Then she announced, “Here’s one I wrote myself. It’s called The Love Guru.” And off she went.

HE GETS UP AT EIGHT-THIRTY
THEN GOES FOR HIS MORNING STROLL
SAYS HULLO TO THE GARDENER
WHO’S DIGGING A LITTLE HOLE

HE ADORES ROMANTIC FICTION
FROM THE BRONTES TO TREMAIN
THE HEROINES WHO LOVE TO LOVE
THE HEROES WHO ARE USUALLY INSANE

HE SPENT TEN YEARS IN CLINK
FOR DENTING HIS RIVAL’S SKULL
IT GAVE HIM TIME TO READ AND WRITE
HIS PORRIDGE WAS RARELY DULL

AND NOW HE DOES MARRIAGE GUIDANCE
THOUGH HIS OWN HAS GONE TO POT
SOME THINK HE’S THE FONT OF WISDOM
WHILE OTHERS JUST A SILLY CLOT

That’s just a taste. Several more verses followed. Judging by the applause, the punters seemed to like it a lot. At the end of the gig Kit approached her directly. “I wonder if you’d allow this silly clot to buy you a drink?” he asked and Morag smiled back affirmatively.

She is twelve years younger than him and has endured more than a fair share of her own romantic entanglements. After a few dates Morag confided to Kit, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important and probably least recognised element in a genuinely loving relationship is power. Who has it, who abuses it, who shares it? Etc, etc. Unless there is negotiation and compromise, love quickly burns itself out. Pretty obvious really, don’t you think?”

There is no sign that I could detect of any burn out in their relationship, mind you I wasn’t around at the outset. They do not yet cohabit. They do have lots of sleepovers, however, and laughter appears to be a virtually constant companion. “Our relationship exists on the basis of a three month rolling contract,” Morag told me. “Renewable by mutual consent. We are learning how to be and let be as partners. We have agreed love is a process not limited by time or finite criteria.”

One day Kit and I were waiting idly for Morag to return from an errand in town before opening the first bottle of the evening when he suddenly said, “You know it’s not that I disagree with her about the importance of the power dynamics in relationships. Indeed I frequently impress on my clients that the politics of love are at least equally important as the physical aspects.” And he lapsed into a thoughtful silence which was often his way during the prison years.

“Pero?” I attempted to jog him out of the reverie. “But?”

“But do you remember what Flores used to say about the deepest, least explored parts of our oceans?” he continued. I shook my head. I had only once been privy to the governor’s academic musings. “There may well be strange and exotic creatures living in the deeps we as yet know nothing about. Is it not the same with us? I tell you confidentially, Sergio, I still have the occasional wet dreams about Ana. I wake up feeling equally exhilarated and disgusted with myself. What do you make of that?”

“You know I read somewhere recently,” I replied, “that your King Henry – the fat syphilitic one – had similar dreams about Ann Boleyn long after he’d executed her.”

“That may have been caused by guilt,” Kit observed with a grin. “In my case it feels – I don’t know exactly – not quite as clear cut as regret but something similar. As if destiny had clearly signposted me in a definite direction of travel and yet I’ve obstinately gone another way. Sometimes I wonder if this sense of destiny beckoning to me is like one of those as yet unidentified marine creatures Flores talked about. On the other hand maybe I just need to grow up? There is something in my nature that is reluctant to do so. A Peter Pan who just wants to fly around and indulge in sensual fun. How should I banish him, do you think?”

At that very moment we heard the front door being opened but it did not deter my impulse to respond. “Your childishness, your sense of fun, your naivety – whatever you want to call it – is one of the most endearing aspects of your character,” I objected. “At least it is so to me. And I am sure that is also true for Morag. You must never banish it!”

“Yes I totally agree,” said Morag, dumping a shopping bag on the table. “We are not just one person. We are several. But we must learn to listen to the different voices in a discriminating way, that’s all. Certainly if we want to live peacefully into old age. I have a single mother voice, a betrayed lover voice, a songwriter voice, an ecological activist voice, a feminist voice – not to mention several other voices whose messages I haven’t yet quite worked out. We are a team and, as the old adage goes, there is no I in team. Fancy a drink, anyone?”

Kit jumped to his feet with a guffaw of delight. “I’ve got a bottle of champagne I was saving for a special occasion,” he announced. “This definitely seems to be it!”

While Kit did the honours with the drinks Morag brought in her guitar and began quietly strumming. “Any requests?” she asked. Kit looked towards me and I simply shrugged.

“You choose, Morag,” he replied. So she sang her favourite Rod Stweart song, The First Cut Is The Deepest, and we sipped along with it in contented awe.