The Three (11 page)

Look, Lori was my friend, my
best
friend, and I don’t want to sound like I’m trashing her, but I reckon it’s important people know the truth about her and Bobby. Don’t get me wrong, Lori was special, did a lot for me, but she could be… she could be a bit flaky sometimes.

Lori and I met in high school. My folks moved to Flemington, New Jersey from Queens when I was fifteen, and me and Lori hit it off straight away. On the surface, Lori was your typical good girl. Good grades, polite, never got into trouble. But she had this whole secret life her folks never knew about. Smoked pot, drank, messed around with boys; usual kids’ stuff. Reuben was teaching American history at the school at the time, and Lori was careful to protect his rep. Reuben was cool. None of the kids at school ripped into him. He was just Mr Small, not wildly popular, but he had a way of telling a story. Quiet. A dignity about him, I guess. He was smart, too. But if he knew Lori was out drinking and screwing around behind his back, he never let on.

As for Lillian… I know she never liked me, blamed what happened to Lori at college on me, but she was okay. But then compared to my folks, pretty much anyone is. Lillian never worked, seemed happy being a homemaker–kept busy sewing and cooking or whatever–and Reuben made just enough for them to live on. Apart from their politics–they were way more liberal than you’d think, looking at them–it was kind of like they were still living in the 1950s.

After graduation, Lori and I both decided to apply to NYU–Lillian wasn’t happy about that, although NYC is only an hour or so from Flemington. Didn’t take long for Lori to get into the party scene, start doing heavy drugs, coke mainly. We had this whole system for when she knew her folks were coming to visit; we’d
clear up the room we shared, she’d cover up her tattoos, make sure there was no evidence on show, but she got to a point where she couldn’t hide it any more. Lillian flipped out, insisted that Lori come home with her and Reuben, so Lori ended up dropping out. After she got clean, she came back to the city and tried a million different careers: yoga instructor, personal stylist, manicurist, bartender. That’s where I met my first husband, at one of the bars she worked in. It didn’t last. Neither the job nor the husband.

Then, out of nowhere Lori applied for this fashion design course–convinced Reuben and Lillian to pay for it, though I don’t know where they found the cash. I thought it was just another flaky move, but turned out she was good at it–hats especially, which became her thing. She started getting commissions, moved to Brooklyn where she could afford to set up her own studio. She designed a hat for my second wedding, refused to charge me for it, even though she was just starting out.

It was just after she did that Galliano show that she found out she was pregnant. ‘I’m keeping this one,’ she said. ‘The big four-oh is coming up and I might not get another chance.’ Wouldn’t say who the father was, so I suspected she’d done it on purpose. I’m not saying she slept around, but she liked to have a good time. Didn’t see the point of being in a relationship.

She concocted this whole crazy story about being artificially inseminated so that Lillian wouldn’t freak out. I couldn’t believe she was going to go through with it–it didn’t seem right. But she said it was easier that way. After that preacher was going on about Bobby not being born of man–that he was unnatural and all that stuff–I could have said something, told the truth, but I thought it would all die down. Who could take that seriously?

When she was pregnant, Lori went through this whole religious stage, talked about sending Bobby to Cheder classes when he was old enough, shul, the whole shebang. Jewish mother syndrome, she said. It didn’t last. I’d thought she’d freak when Lillian and Reuben decided to move to Brooklyn, but in actual fact she was pleased. ‘It might not be a bad idea, Mona.’ And yeah, before Reuben got sick, having Lillian on tap did make it easier. Specially
when Bobby was a baby. It all backfired when Reuben got really bad and Lori had to be the supportive one. She was good at it, though. In a way, it made her grow up. I admired her for stepping up to the plate like that. Still… sometimes I wonder if she wanted Lillian and Reuben to move down to Florida so that they’d be out of her hair, although that makes me sound like a prize bitch, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t have blamed her. She had a lot to deal with.

And Bobby… I don’t like to say it, but I swear to God he was a different kid after the crash. I know, I know, it could’ve just been PTSD or shock or whatever. But before it happened… when he was small… look, there’s no other way to say it. He was the toddler from hell, threw a tantrum about a million times a day. I called him Damien after that kid in the movie, which made Lori mad. Lillian didn’t see the half of it–Bobby behaved like a little angel whenever he was with her, I guess because she let him have his way all the time. And Reuben started getting sick when Bobby was two or so, so she wasn’t around him all that much. Lori also spoiled him rotten, gave him whatever he wanted, though I told her the only person she was hurting was him. I’m not saying she was a bad mother. She wasn’t. She loved him, and that’s all they need, right? Although the truth of it was, I couldn’t tell if he was spoiled or just what my mother would call a bad seed.

Lori hoped he’d settle down when he started at school. One of those arty Magnet schools had just opened up in the neighbourhood and she decided to enrol him there. It didn’t help. Within days of him starting there she was called in to talk about his ‘difficulties integrating’, or whatever bullshit way they described it.

This one time, when Bobby was four or so, Lori had this big client she had to see. She was stuck for a babysitter and as Lillian was taking Reuben to be assessed by a new doctor, Lori asked me to babysit. I was living in an apartment in Carroll Gardens at the time, and my then-fiancé had bought me a kitten, cute little thing, we named her Sausage. Anyway, I left Bobby in front of the television while I had a shower, and as I was drying my hair I heard this high-pitched screaming sound coming from the kitchen. I swear, I never knew animals could scream like that. Bobby was
holding Sausage by her tail and swinging her from side to side. He had this look on his face that said, ‘Jeez, this is fun.’ I’m not ashamed to say that I whacked him; he fell and knocked his forehead against the kitchen counter. Bled like anything. I had to rush him to the emergency room to get stitches. But he didn’t cry. Didn’t even flinch. Lori and I fell out over that for a while, but it didn’t last long, we had too much history. Last time she asked me to babysit though.

Then after the crash… it was like he was a whole new person.

The press attention after Jess was medivacced to the UK was like nothing I could have imagined. The three ‘miracle children’ were fast becoming the story of the decade, and the UK public’s thirst for news on Jess’s condition was unquenchable. Paparazzi and tabloid hacks had taken up permanent residence on the steps of my apartment building, and the hospital was practically under siege. Gerry warned me not to say anything too personal on my cellphone, just in case it was being hacked.

I will say that the public support Jess received was overwhelming. The gifts from well-wishers soon filled Jess’s room; others left messages, flowers, cards and legions of soft toys outside the hospital–there were so many that you could barely see the railings that ringed the grounds. People were kind. It was their way of showing they cared.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Marilyn and the rest of the Addams Family was deteriorating daily. I couldn’t avoid encountering them in the waiting room, and side-stepping Marilyn’s demands for me to hand over the keys to Stephen and Shelly’s house was becoming unendurable. But the real cold war didn’t start in earnest until January 22nd when I overheard Jase haranguing one of Jess’s specialists outside her room. She still hadn’t woken up at that stage, but her doctors had assured us that there was no sign of impaired cognitive functioning.

‘Why the fuck can’t you wake her up?’ Jase was saying, while jabbing a nicotine-stained finger into the poor doctor’s chest. The doctor assured him they were doing everything they could.

‘Yeah?’ Jase sneered. ‘Well, if she ends up being a fucking vegetable, you lot can fucking well look after her then.’

That was the last straw. As far as I was concerned the Addamses had shown their true colours. I couldn’t stop them visiting Jess,
but I could let it be known that under no circumstances were they going to take care of her once she was discharged. I contacted Shelly’s solicitor straight away and instructed her to inform the Addamses of Shelly and Stephen’s custody arrangements.

A day later, there they were on the front page of the
Sun
. ‘Jess’s Gran Cut Out Of Her Life.’

Fair play to the photographer, he’d caught them in all their thuggish glory, Ma Addams glaring into shot, the brothers and various offspring scowling around her like an advert promoting the benefits of birth control. Marilyn especially wasn’t shy about letting her views be known:

‘It’s not right,’ Marilyn (58) says. ‘Paul’s lifestyle, it’s not moral. He’s a gay and we’re upstanding citizens. A family. Jess would be better off with us.’

The
Sun
didn’t miss a trick of course. They’d got their hands on a photograph of me taken during last year’s gay pride parade, dressed in a tutu and laughing with my then-partner, Jackson. This was displayed in a full colour spread opposite the Addamses’ mug shots.

The story spread like wildfire and it wasn’t long before the other tabloids managed to procure similarly compromising photographs of me–no doubt courtesy of my friends or ex-friends. I suppose I couldn’t blame them for cashing in. Most were struggling artists themselves.

But the tide really turned against me when Marilyn and I were invited to appear on the Roger Clydesdale show. Gerry warned me not to go on it, but I could hardly let Marilyn have her say unchallenged, could I? I’d met Roger at a media launch a few years before, and on the few occasions I’d caught his morning ‘current affairs’ show, he’d been rather harsh on what he called benefits scroungers. I suppose I naively assumed he’d be on my side.

The atmosphere inside the studio was electric with anticipation; you could tell that the audience was gagging for a showdown. They weren’t disappointed. At first, I’ll be honest, I thought it was going my way. Marilyn slumped on the studio couch, mumbling inarticulate answers to Roger’s trademark, ‘Why aren’t you
actively looking for a job?’ questions. Then he turned his gimlet eye on me.

‘Do you have any experience dealing with children, Paul?’

I told him that I’d been looking after Jess and Polly since they were babies and reiterated that Stephen and Shelly had chosen me as Jess’s guardian.

‘He just wants the house! He’s an actor! He doesn’t care about that kid!’ Marilyn squealed, for some reason getting a round of applause from the audience. Roger paused for several seconds to let the furore die down, and then he dropped his bombshell. ‘Paul… Is it true you have a history of mental illness?’

The audience erupted again, and even Marilyn looked a bit thrown.

I wasn’t prepared for the question. I stuttered and stammered and did an appalling job of explaining that my breakdown was a thing of the past.

Of course, this revelation spawned countless screaming headlines along the lines of: ‘Nutter to take care of Jess.’

I was devastated, of course. No one likes to see things like that written about them, and I only had myself to blame for being too open. I’ve been harshly criticised for how I dealt with the press after that. Among other things I’ve been called a publicity whore and an ‘alleged egomaniac and narcissist’. But whatever the press chose to say about me, I had Jess’s best interests at heart. I’d put my career on hold for the foreseeable future in order to devote all my time to her. Quite frankly, if I was interested in exploiting her for monetary gain, I could have made millions. Not that money would be an issue, Shelly and Stephen’s life policies were fully paid-up and there was the compensation that I was intending to put into trust for Jess. She would always be looked after. The reason I appeared on the various morning shows was nothing to do with money and everything to do with setting the record straight. Anyone else would have done the same.

As you can see, I had a lot on my plate, but Jess was my priority. She was still unresponsive, but apart from her burn injuries, physically she was doing well. I needed to start thinking about what to do about her living arrangements.

Dr Kasabian, who was pipped to be Jess’s psychologist when she eventually woke up and started talking, suggested that it might be best for her to be in familiar surroundings, which meant moving into Stephen’s house in Chiselhurst.

Walking in there that first time was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Everything, from the wedding and school photos on the walls, to the dried-up Christmas tree in the driveway that Stephen hadn’t got around to throwing away, was a reminder of what Jess and I had lost. When I shut the door behind me, the shouts of the hacks outside filtering through (yes, they even followed me on this painful errand), I felt as bereft as I did when I first got the tragic news.

But I made myself confront the scene. For Jess’s sake I had to be strong. I walked slowly through the house, finally breaking down completely when I saw the photos of me and Stephen as kids that he’d put up in his office. There was me, pudgy and gaptoothed; him, svelte and serious. Physically, you would never have known we were twins, and our personalities were similarly diverse. Even at age eight I knew I wanted to be on the stage, whereas Stephen was far more retiring and serious. Still, even though we didn’t run in the same circles at school, we were always close, and when he met Shelly, our relationship actually deepened. Shelly and I got on like a house on fire straight away.

Though it broke my heart, I made myself stay the night in the house–I needed to acclimatise for Jess’s sake. I barely slept, and when I did, I dreamed of Stephen and Shelly. The dreams were so vivid it was as if they were right in the room with me, their spirits clinging to the house. But I knew I was doing the right thing where Jess was concerned, and I know they gave me their blessing.

To date, their bodies haven’t been recovered. Nor has Polly’s. In some ways that’s a blessing. Rather than a terrible trip to identify them in some soulless Portuguese morgue, my last memories of them are of our final dinner together: Polly and Jess giggling, Stephen and Shelly talking about their last-minute holiday. A happy family.

Through all of this, I don’t know what I would have done without Mel, Geoff and the rest of the good people from 277 Together. Remember, these are men and women who had lost their own loved ones in the most horrendous way possible, but they sprang to my defence at every opportunity. Mel and Geoff even accompanied me when I moved my belongings into the house, helped me decide what to do about the family photos displayed everywhere. We decided to put them away until Jess had had time to fully accept her parents and sister’s deaths. They were my rocks, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

The bile spewed by the Addamses and their tame hacks wasn’t all we had to deal with, especially when all the conspiracy stories started going viral. Mel was especially incensed by this–you wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she’s a staunch Catholic, and she was genuinely offended by the horsemen conspiracy theory in particular.

Around that time, we got the news that a memorial service was being planned. The few bodies that had been recovered wouldn’t be released until after the inquest, which could be months away, and all of us felt that we needed some closure. They still didn’t know what had caused the Go!Go! crash, although terrorism had been ruled out, as it had in all of the four disasters. I tried not to catch too much of the ongoing investigation on the news–it just made me feel worse–although I’d gathered that they suspected it might have had something to do with an electrical storm that had caused severe turbulence for other flights in the area. Mel told me she’d seen the footage from the Navy sub they’d sent down to try and retrieve the black box from the wreckage on the ocean floor. She said it looked so peaceful down there; the middle section of the aircraft looked barely damaged, settled forever in its watery grave. She said the only thing that kept her going was the thought that it had been quick. She couldn’t bear the idea of Danielle and the other passengers knowing they were going to die, like those poor passengers on the Japanese flight, who’d had time to leave messages. I knew exactly what she meant, but you can’t think like that, you just can’t.

The memorial service was going to be held at St Paul’s, with an additional service in Trafalgar Square for the public. I knew the Addams Family would be there, no doubt with their favourite hack from the
Sun
in tow, and I was understandably nervous.

Again, Mel, Geoff and their army of friends and family came to my rescue. They stuck to my side throughout that fraught day. To be honest, they were from the same background as Shelly’s family. Geoff had been out of work for years, and they lived on a council estate in Orpington not far from where the Addamses lived. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable for them to take Marilyn and co’s side, especially as I was being painted as a ‘public school snob with artistic aspirations’. But they didn’t. When we arrived at the service, coincidentally at the same time as the Addamses (how’s that for fate? There were thousands of people there), Mel jabbed a finger in Marilyn’s face and hissed, ‘You cause any trouble here and you’ll be out on your ear, you hear me?’ Marilyn was wearing a cheap black fascinator that resembled a giant spider, and although she remained stony-faced, it quivered indignantly. Jase and Keith bristled but they were both stared down by Gavin, Mel and Geoff’s oldest son, a shaven-haired fellow with the build and look of a strip-club bouncer. I found out later he was ‘connected’. A geezer. Someone you wouldn’t want to mess with.

I could have hugged him.

I won’t dwell on the service itself, but one part in particular touched me–Kelvin’s reading. He’d chosen that W. H. Auden poem, ‘Stop all the Clocks’, the one most people know from
Four Weddings and A Funeral
. It could have been mawkish, but here was this huge dreadlocked fellow, reading with quiet dignity. When he read the line, ‘Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead’ you could have heard a pin drop.

I’d barely made it outside the cathedral when I got the call from Dr Kasabian. Jess had woken up.

I don’t know how Marilyn and the Addamses found out that she’d emerged out of her coma–I assume one of the nurses must have called them–but when I arrived at the hospital, my emotions threatening to swamp me, there they were, waiting outside her room.

Dr K knew all about our fraught relationship–he didn’t live under a stone–and insisted that the last thing Jess needed right now was a tense atmosphere. Marilyn grumpily agreed to button her lip, told Fester and Gomez to wait outside, and we were ushered in to see her. Marilyn, her fascinator still quivering, made sure she reached Jess’s bedside first, practically pushing me out of the way.

‘It’s me, Jessie,’ Marilyn said. ‘Nana.’

Jess looked at her blankly. Then she reached out a hand towards me. I wish I could say that she knew who we were, but there was no recognition in her eyes, which was absolutely understandable. But I can’t help but think that she looked at both of us, sized us up, and figured out, right then, who would be the lesser of two evils.