Something to Believe In

Tommy leaned across the table at the front of the courtroom. He was the third lawyer sitting at the Crown Attorney's table, the most junior one, at the end. Cheryl had wanted him on this case. She was standing in front of the jury now, making the opening remarks. Tommy peered around Teeves, the lawyer sitting next to him, to look at the defendants. He groaned softly to himself. He hadn't recognized the name in the briefs, but now that he saw him it all came back to him. He slouched down and put his hand over his face.

It was just like with Cheryl. He hadn't remembered her name either, not when he addressed his cover letter to her. Of course he hadn't been interviewed by her – Teeves had interviewed him. He hadn't even recognized her when he was introduced to her in his third week, or all those times when he saw her in the distance. It was only when he had his first conversation with her, about a child abuse case he was working on, that it came back to him, suddenly, like the breaking open of a dream from the night before in the middle of the day. He was standing in her office and she was sitting at her desk, in a black fitted jacket with two rows of three buttons up the front. She wore blue rimmed glasses and she pushed them back into her thick brunet hair that was swept back into a bun. She put her hands on the edge of the desk. Her nails were unpainted but long and slightly pointy. The skin on her hands was dry. She stood up and turned her back to him, looking out the window and thinking. It was a tricky case, he remembered. It was only when she stood up that it started to come back to him. She was slim and the fitted jacket showed her figure just the way it had seventeen years ago. He remembered squinting in confusion, picturing a different suit – a red one – topped by that same hair, all those years ago. She hadn't worn glasses then and her hands hadn't been dry. She had turned to him, her glasses pushed back, and he stared at her face in shock, the surprise of it showing. She had circles under her eyes now, the kind that weren't dark but that cut deeply into the skin, slopping down her cheeks. Those weren't there then. She saw the look on his face and smiled slightly, the corners of her lips turning up, softening her and giving her an almost flirtatious look. "What?"

Tommy stepped back. "Umm. Nothing. You just reminded me of someone." He felt himself start to perspire into his white shirt. He hated when that happened. His shirt would be sticky for the rest of the day. It was funny, that day when he recognized Cheryl happened more than two years ago and he remembered so clearly his annoyance over his shirt, but he didn't remember what he had said to Cheryl to smooth things over. She still had no idea. But then, why would she? Seventeen years ago she had been a junior lawyer, working on one of her first cases. Seventeen years ago he was seventeen. Some skinny, petty punk, with sandy blood hair that kept falling in his eyes. Now his hair was close shaved and darker, and he wore horn rimmed glasses. Seventeen years ago, though, he had sat in the dock in the jeans and thin jean jacket he had been arrested in, his sneakers still damp from the wet grass he had walked across the night before. They had broken into that deserted house, up on Lawson's Hill. Will and Pete's parents had bailed Will and Pete out. But, no, not his dad. He had left him to face the consequences of his actions. That was at the beginning of the nineties, when courts were just starting to crack down hard on crime. It was a nothing crime that Tommy had committed. The house was supposed to be haunted. They had got caught with pot. It was breaking and entering of the most sort. Will and Pete never even got criminal records. Tommy's father would point out that neither did Tommy, technically. Everything was expunged. He was a minor. Seven years later he got into one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. But in between committing his crime and going to law school, Cheryl had got up in her tight red suit and argued to the judge that he should come down hard on exactly this sort of young offender. She said they should move it up to adult charges.

What was it to her? Just one of a thousand cases, that all stacked in a row, gleaming with success, made a career. If Tommy had got a more tired prosecutor, like Teeves perhaps, he would have got community service. But Cheryl argued well and Tommy's lawyer was whoever the court had appointed. He didn't remember his name either. He never saw him again. Some slimy looking guy with slicked back, balding blond hair. He had suggested that Tommy plead guilty to breaking and entering and that way get out of the more serious drug charge. But Tommy had refused. He had got out of everything in his life before. And he had no reason to suppose the he wouldn't this time. But everything had gone catastrophically wrong.

One year. Hard time. Prison. In adult jail.

Nobody bailed him out.

Even now, sitting in a different courtroom, seventeen years distance from the events, Tommy could feel his heart contract, gripped with rage. He told himself to breath evenly and concentrated on letting go of the feeling.

But that didn't change the fact that good old Rob, from that year, was sitting twenty feet from him. He couldn't prosecute on a case against someone he knew. It was a conflict of interest. His file from all those years ago was sealed – he had been under eighteen, after all. Tommy tried to breath evenly. Unlike Cheryl, though, Rob would remember him. And unlike with Cheryl, this case was both legally and morally a conflict of interest. He only worked with Cheryl. He didn't hold years of her future in his hands.

He saw Rob looking around, perhaps feeling the presence of someone looking at him. Tommy moved his body so that Teeves obscured him. "Fuck," he said under his breath. Teeves shot him a dirty look.

Rob looked surprisingly the same after seventeen years. Same solid frame. Same thick brown hair. And he still had all his teeth. He was, what, forty-three now? Tommy looked up at the ceiling, trying to work it out.

Then he glanced around the courtroom, taking everything in: the judge in his robes and white wig, the sunlight spilling through the blinds on the left side of the room, the jury on the right side, with the overweight foreman in a business suit watching everything eagerly while a middle-aged woman snoozed. Rob was on trial for murder. A hit in prison. He probably did it, Tommy thought. Wow, he thought to himself, do I have a conflict of interest here.

He tried to think of what he would say to Cheryl. Not the truth, that was for certain. Maybe he could talk to Teeves instead. Tommy always called Teeves "Teeves", his last name. It was a leftover affect from all Tommy's years at pseudo British boys' schools. It felt natural, and besides, it peeved Cheryl (although she'd never admit that) that she was left out. He would never address a woman that say; it would have felt wrong. Tommy thought it secretly pleased Teeves, too. Teeves was the same level as Cheryl, same seniority, although Tommy was officially working for Cheryl these days, not Teeves anymore. Even if Tommy's personal hatred of Cheryl hadn't been there, something secret and under wraps that he was waiting with, waiting malevolently to do something with, Tommy would have liked Teeves more. He was in his late forties, a good fifteen years older than Tommy, with a paternal aspect. He was always good with the junior associates. Right now he was pushing his wire glasses up his noise and listening carefully to Cheryl's opening address. Occasionally he made a note with his long, narrow fingers on the yellow notepad in front of him.

Rob wasn't in jail. Tommy knew that. Bail, he thought. So Rob had got out of prison and then got charged like this. Could happen to him, too, Tommy knew. Even after all these years.

What he would really like, Tommy thought, would be to have a drink with Rob. Find out how things were going. Rob had done him a favour once. And surprisingly, it didn't dishearten Tommy to remember it.

Tommy ran his pencil over the pad in front of him. That's what he would do. He would find Rob, outside of the trial. Maybe this weekend. They could have a beer. They were old buddies, after all. It didn't matter where they were old buddies from. That was nobody's business. Someone from the past. From school. Or a relative. A friend of a friend.

They would have a drink. Catch up. And then Tommy would tell that bitch Cheryl that he had a conflict of interest. That would steam her.

Although he wasn't sure why it would steam her. She didn't seem to feel his dislike of her. She seemed to particularly like him. And she got him moved from the child abuse division. She told him it was a backwater and if he wanted his career to move forward he had to move on.

But Tommy missed the child abuse division. It was so clean cut. Every night when he went home he felt like he was helping people, putting the real bad guys away. He loved that. And he didn't care about his career. Not at all. Not the way Cheryl did. She couldn't understand that. But if he cared about his career he would have followed his two older brothers into his father's law firm. Stuart and Philip were partner's now. Well, Phillip was almost fifteen years older than him and had a son turning twenty this weekend. He should be a partner. And Stuart had a seat in parliament. But none of that concerned Tommy. He couldn't imagine himself as a partner. Or a member of parliament. The closest he could come to imagining any future for himself was looking at Teeves: someone sidelined, no longer a contender, perhaps never was a contender. Tommy liked his life, though. He liked the clarity of it. Working those cases. Talking to the kids, too. He was good at that. Patient; easygoing; not hard driving. Then he liked going home and playing mini-put in his apartment, with his hole in one, in his south facing apartment that looked over the park. He wished he had a girlfriend, that was the only thing. He wished he had a family. The thought would come to him on Friday nights, with the whole weekend ahead of him, that he wished he had someone. He felt like it was time. He would flop on his couch, under his prints of California and sigh. He wasn't hard driving with girls, either, and his demeanour wasn't serving him well. He had had only one serious girlfriend, ever. Although now, since college, there had been many different girls – all one night stands, picked up in bars. Tommy was surprised how easy it was. But no one he wanted to create a relationship with.

Court was adjourning for the weekend now. Tommy glanced at the clock in the lengthening shadows of the courtroom. Outside the autumn light gleamed a beautiful, soft yellow in the street, almost as if it had a patina. The street in front of the courthouse was cobblestone, a nod to the distant past, and huge maple trees lined the street. Across from the court was the impressive mews, as they were called, with their art galleries and bars. The district had come up from thirty years ago when the neighbourhood had been haunted by drug addicts and prostitutes. This was just its most recent revival, though. It had been through at least three cycles of wealth and dereliction in its two hundred years.

"Want to go for a drink?" Teeves asked.

"Sure," Tommy shrugged.

The whole time he was drinking with Teeves, though, he was thinking about Rob. He would have to see Jack to get Rob's address. To peek into the court services system would be to risk getting disbarred if he ever got caught. Although he knew he wouldn't get caught. But still.

On Saturday morning he caught the northern train. The trees were turning orange out the window. Tommy brought out the sandwich and can of orange pop that he had packed. When he finished them he carefully tucked his garbage in the side picket of his brief case. Then he smiled briefly at the scenery going past before pulling out a paperback murder mystery.

At Marlowe he stepped off the train, the green open-air platform familiar to him after his many visits here over the years. The truth was he would use any excuse to visit Jack. He was aware that this was sick and twisted, but the thing was he always felt happy going to see Jack. And then he still felt happy when he boarded the train in the other direction going home. In fact few things in life were as reliably uplifting as visiting his old cellmate. He knew he shouldn't visit; he knew that any psychologist would have bad words to say about it – probably something about Stockholm Syndrome – but he wanted to visit. He couldn't help himself. Over the years, in the sixteen years since he'd been released, he probably averaged four visits a year.

Tommy stood in the open-air bay of the shuttle that took visitors to the prison and kicked a twig that had fallen to the ground. No one else who was waiting here looked like him. Tommy was wearing his thick wool work overcoat, which was his most suitable jacket for standing around outside in the cold, if not the most suitable for sitting on a train. He was clean-shaven and wearing his contact lenses for once. His green eyes were clear in the crisp autumn air. There was no trace of day old stubble; no eyes bleary with a hangover on him, as there were on at least two of the other men waiting. His shoes were his good black leather oxfords, polished. To his father's club he regularly wore sneakers and stubble; to work he wore his glasses. But for Jack he would look perfect, effortlessly presentable. He still worked out, too, a habit he picked up in prison. Jack had called it 'the prisoner's routine' back then – a set of push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks and stretches that could e done anywhere without any equipment. Tommy did them every morning, and they kept his stomach taunt and his shoulders straight.

Tommy smelled the cigarette smoke in the air as he waited and could almost feel the smoke in his lungs. Sometimes, at times like this, he still hungered for a cigarette. But he had only smoked in prison. He stopped when he got out, not one to endanger his health recklessly.

He glanced around at the other people waiting for the shuttle: a slim, young woman with two children, the eldest of whom was already starting to whine and the baby's nose was running; a fat girl in her twenties, her greasy hair pulled back in a severe ponytail; an older woman, perhaps in her fifties, smoking a cigarette intently. Tommy felt completely at ease and safe here, the same as he did at his office, or the club his brothers played squash at and occasionally invited him to. Tommy, always Thomas to his co-workers, felt at ease everywhere, as if he could just be set down anywhere on earth with his privilege and good breeding telling him intuitively how to behave. He had been the same in school. But not in prison. When he had been inside the walls of Marlowe he had not been so at ease, not at all. Not with his good looks and his youth.

When he visited, though, this wasn't what he thought of. What he thought about was Jack. His cellmate had been twenty-eight to his seventeen. He was in for murder, and he knew everything about how to survive. And he was fond enough of Tommy.

Tommy went to prison on the heels of a rebellious youth, minor school failures, an inappropriately close relationship with his girlfriend, at least according to his father, and, before all that, the death of his mother when he was fifteen. His father was remote. But in prison Jack had nothing but time. Time to talk.

Back when he was in prison, if someone had asked Tommy – a psychologist or psychiatrist perhaps, although none ever did – if he liked Jack, he could have answered honestly that he didn't. He might have said he was okay. Or that he could be worse. In prison Tommy had been afraid of Jack and nervous of everything. Nervous he'd get killed; nervous he'd commit some crime, or get caught committing some crime, that might mean he had to stay. When he first went home he thought he would never go back. But around Christmas, six months after he left, he found himself compelled to visit Jack, to see how he was doing. He found himself laughing with him, and answering his questions, and filling his commissionaire account with his eighteen year old's generous allowance from his guilt racked father.

Today he stepped off the shuttle bus and into the waiting room of the prison. He filled out the form requesting Jack O'Connor, and then took his coat off and was patted down by a guard. He was duly shown into a small room with a green linoleum floor, green walls and a sterile metal table and chairs in the middle. He sat down in one of the chairs and flung his coat on the table. He tapped his fingers impatiently.

The guard led Jack in, his hands chained. He looked a little older than the last time Tommy had seen him. His brown hair had receded just a little more; his body had thinned out just a little more. Tommy always had trouble acknowledging that he was now six years older than the age Jack had been when he was Tommy's cellmate. Jack had seemed so knowledgeable, so strong, so settled – none of the things that Tommy felt when he was twenty-eight or even thirty-four. But then, for a young lawyer in training, or indeed any member of the heavily schooled upper classes, twenty-eight, or even thirty-four, is only the beginning. But for a murderer incarcerated for life, twenty-eight (or thirty-four) was the peak – the peak of a man's physical strength, of his brutish energy, of his raw ambition. Forty-five, the age Jack was now, was already on the other side of this – with his health, and strength and confidence slipping slowly but surely away.

He smiled when he saw Tommy, a warmth coming into his hard faced that carried not a trace of fat, an unaccustomed turning up of the lips. Tommy watched him as the guard led him to the other chair. He had the face of an older boxer or fighter, Tommy though.

"Bring any cigarettes?" He asked gruffly.

Tommy smiled and shook his head. "I'll put four hundred in your commissionaire account before I leave, though."

Jack looked away, glancing at the green walls, and smiled again. "How are you doing?"

Tommy shrugged and they exchanged the usual greetings, Tommy hearing about Jack's back, which bothered him now, and the guards who were assholes. Tommy told him about Rob and Jack laughed, arching an eyebrow. He told him where he thought he stayed, enough so Tommy could track him down. Tommy explained about the whole trial, the conflict of interest, and Jack nodded. Tommy talked to Jack for a minute about "the bitch Cheryl" as he caller her, and Jack laughed, leaning back as he always did. "You should bang her," Jack said in slow drawl, "and then make sure her husband catches you. Then the shit would hit the fan." He had made this suggestion before.

"But then, the shit would hit the fan for me, too," Tommy said, something he had said before, too.

Jack shrugged. "Got a girl?"

"I picked up a hot girl at the Gladstone last weekend. Long blond hair – dyed. Medium boobs – nice, though – the boobs, not the girl. The girl was a bitch. Not a bitch to me, but I could tell. She would be. Not worth a second night, you know?"

Jack shrugged. "Be wroth a second night to me. But I suppose when you're young and rich and good-looking there are so many more choices."

Tommy looked away. "I don't know. I can't find anyone I like. But, you know, I'd like to settle down."

"Shouldn't be too hard."

There was nothing new in this conversation. Everything had been said in the same way, with perhaps a few details varied, in every visit for the past six years. Jack frowned and looked Tommy up and down. Tommy shouldn't be visiting him, Jack thought. In some way he was stuck. And yet, he was stuck in such a luxurious place, he thought. Such a good-looking boy – well, man now – with so much money and such a wholesome way about him. Jack sighed. "What are you doing here?" He asked. He had asked this before. "Get your brothers to set you up." He had never said that before. "You should have a family. A future. You could bring your wife to visit me here. You could tell her everything."

Tommy froze. This was outside the regular game of their visits.

"You loved Jenn, your old girlfriend." Jack sighed "But that was before me." He hesitated, frowning. "I hope I didn't wreck you."

"Fuck you," Tommy said suddenly, sitting up straight and glaring. He stood up.

"Oh, don't go, kid," Jack said, shifting. "You're the only visitor I have. And I'm only saying this because I do care. You've got to get over this. Move on."

"It not like I'm a screw up. I'm a lawyer. It's not like I'm a drug addict."

The corners of Jack's mouth turned up. "I'm not saying you're a screw up. I'm just saying . . . That you need to . . ." He hesitated. "Find someone," he said slowly. "Because you won't always be as young and charming as you are even at thirty-four. It's not going to get easier."

Tommy didn't say anything. He didn't know what to say.

Jack shifted again. "Do you still see Chase?"

"I regret I told you about that."

Jack shrugged. "You tell me everything. You have no one else to tell anything to. Your brothers have families. Your father is old. And you hate him anyway. Your friends . . ." Jack frowned and shrugged again. "They're your friends in name only. They don't know you did time, or the ones who do, they treat it as some lark. You're told me what Will says. You hate him, too, right?"

"I'm not seeing Chase. It was just a one time thing. I was twenty-two."

A one time thing for eight months. That's a long time for a 'one time' thing. How many girls have you slept with in the last ten years?"

"Three hundred," Tommy said crisply and evenly.

Jack smiled knowingly. "That's a high number, kid."

Tommy sighed and looked away, examining the wall to his left. "All one night stands. Never twice. I mean, they're attractive. I don't know why I can't form a relationship. I don't know . . ."

"I'm sorry," Jack said quietly.

Tommy looked up sharply. Everything was off script today. "Why?" He said in shock.

Jack shrugged again, his blue eyes fixed on Tommy. "I'm sorry I pushed you around so much, made you do things. I know you liked it by the end. I don't know. I wasn't as old then as I am now. I feel like I broke you and now you're in some sort of purgatory. You need to move on with your life." He paused and looked at his hands in his lap. "You need to keep visiting me, though," he said making a joke of something that was true.

"I won't stop visiting you," Tommy said, a childish sincerity creeping into his voice that Jack hadn't heard in years.

"Okay, then," Jack said, standing up and knocking on the door for the guard. This was also off script. Tommy always left first. But today, he watched as the guard led Jack off. Tommy watched how old he looked. And then he put his hand to his forehead, rubbing it hard.

"You didn't break me," Tommy muttered aloud as he got on the train. He felt enraged that Jack would even think such a thing, think he had had so much power. He felt his heart gripped by the raw anger that he felt when he looked at Cheryl. They didn't get it, either of them, not Cheryl or Jack. He was rich, he thought to himself. He could have whatever he wanted. Cheryl might be his boss, but she didn't have any real power over him. There was nothing he wanted that she had the power to give him. Her power only extended as far as the ambitious, not to the more mellow likes of him. And Jack had absolutely no power over him, at all.

That night Tommy tossed in bed, thinking about Jack. Once, Jack really had had the power. Tommy shut his eyes tight and tossed his duvet over his head, anger reaching out its tentacles again.

He was haunted by his thoughts in a way he hadn't been for year now. There were parts of his prison time that he couldn't bear to think about; they were like blackness and when his mind approached them, he had to turn away. Once he had killed a man in self-defence. A weak, hobbled, vicious man. This did not haunt him. But later, when he got to know Jack more, he had got involved in the drugs they used to run into the prison. And there had been another murder. And that one haunted him. He regretted it; he wanted to take it back. But he couldn't.

He wanted to say he had gone to prison so young, it wasn't his fault. But that wasn't exactly the truth, he knew. He hadn't had to kill that man; he had done it freely. He shut his eyes tight hard.

And what of his future, he thought. He knew what a psychologist would say: that he was a repressed homosexual. But that didn't seem the truth to him; the truth seemed infinitely more complicated. Before he had gone to prison he had gone out with Jenn for two years, in the midst of his mother's death. It was a grand distraction, beautiful – magical in his memory, enchanted, as if crystals were floating in the air. He had loved her. Perhaps he had never loved anyone again. Certainly he had never loved anyone with the same innocence again. It pricked at his mind that he loved Jack. It seemed so unfair. He clutched the duvet in his arms. He hadn't wanted to. But Jack had had all the cards back then. And Tommy had needed him. And they had known each other so well. Perhaps the truth was closer to this – he had never loved anyone after Jack.

When he lusted, he lusted for women. He knew that. But sometimes when he dreamed at night, he dreamed of Jack. And then he had had that relationship, horrid and squalid as it was, with Chase for eight months. It was not something he wanted to repeat. But he had enjoyed the sex. He had enjoyed not being in charge, not being the one in control. He had enjoyed being a body that was done things to, the same as he had been with Jack. And then he enjoyed losing himself in sensation, like a veil falling over his mind. It wasn't like linear sex with a woman, where he planned things, thought about when he should put his hand on her leg, when he should get out the condom, whether she had had an orgasm, whether he should cum now. It as nothing like that. Sex with a woman was like something beneath a hundred watt bulb. Sex with Jack and Chase had been something dark and mellow and hidden. For him. Not for them. All he had to do was relax enough, release himself, and then it was like drinking or drugs without the bother of those things. It was a grand submission to sensation.

He hadn't wanted anything like that when he was a kid, a teen really, before he went to prison. But he was young and green. It was like prison had taken him and twisted him, and maybe he couldn't twist himself back.

And yet, he didn't want to explore that now. If he could there was some part of him that would go back in time and be with Jack again as the seventeen year old he had been, despite everything. But not now. Not at thirty-four. And he didn't want to go to gay bars and find men. It was the passivity of everything with Jack that had been enticing. And the safety.

Tommy sighed in bed and sat up, swinging his feet onto the cold floor and drumming his toes on the hardwood. It was the safety, he thought with sudden clarity. It was almost like love; it had become love to him. No one had ever really cared for him, not that he could remember at least. His father was a remote figure. He hardly ever saw him on weekdays, and on weekends there were so many things pulling at his father's time – his brothers, his mother, his father's friends and squash games. And his mother . . . He bit his lip, remembering. He couldn't remember her before she got sick. There had always been his brothers, of course, looking in on him between their university schedules and their girlfriends. And there was the housekeeper. But no one had really cared; no one had cared who had time to weave that care into love. He had loved Jenn, of course, and she had loved him back, but her love for him wasn't nurturing or care taking. It was a love of what he could do for her, where he could take her, what amusing conversation he could provide. It was the opposite of unconditional love.

But with Jack . . . He knew, rationally, that Jack hadn't loved him. Jack was using him. He was nothing but a body to him. And yet – Jack had done more for him than anyone else. He had kept him safe. He had fulfilled his end of the bargain. And he wasn't like other boyfriends in prison – Jack had never humiliated Tommy in front of other prisoners, never traded him, never hurt him like that.

And yet Tommy knew, he had always known, that it was sick to think like that. His first week in prison Jack had pushed him down against the bed and held him by his wrists. He had five inches of height and a hundred pounds of weight more than Tommy. And Tommy remembered that he had struggled. He remembered his own sick fear, like an acidic sweet taste in his mouth. The smell of his own sweat. But that wasn't how it ended. They were two men in a cell, and Jack listened to Tommy for hours. Jack had never met anyone like Tommy, and Jack wasn't a stupid man. They didn't have TV and Tommy interested him. And more than anything he had ever known, Tommy loved that interest. It was like love, but love magnified by time and power. To someone who had never known intimacy, to someone who had really never know another person, it was like a drug. It was intoxicating. And he had never had that again.

Tommy stood up and leaned against the windowsill, looking out at the park in the night. All he could make out were the tree branches. He knew his father and his brothers thought prison had ruined him in some way, made him desolate, and that's why he lacked ambition – with both work and women. Tommy had laughed once when Stuart had whispered something like that to Phil just in Tommy's hearing. "That's not it, at all," he had said to himself at the time, but he didn't understand what he meant. Rubbing his forehead as he leaned against the window, he realized now. He was desolate, wrecked, before prison. Wrecked by his mother's death and the mindless ambition of everyone around him.

The only time he had touched up against anybody real was in prison. Every night when he went to sleep, even now so many years on, he imagined that he was being held by Jack; it was what got him through. And if he hadn't gone to prison – if he hadn't had to fear something outside himself – he certainly would have been more cavalier with his life. Will, his antipode friend from his childhood, had done hard drugs and cavorted with prostitutes. He was in rehab for his fourth time right now. He was a pathetic waste of human life, Tommy thought to himself in disgust. And it wasn't that Will wasn't a lawyer; it's that he wasn't anything, not even a person, hardly. And that's probably all Tommy would have been if he hadn't gone to prison. So prison, in some unfortunate way, had given Tommy something – even if it was only an edifying dose of fear. And Jack, somehow, too, had given Tommy something, some hope to get through each night. Tommy tapped the window frame with his fingers. He was thirty-four years old and this was all he had, he thought: love for a man who had thoroughly abused him and a certain determined endurance of the respectable life because he was afraid of the alternative. He turned on the light and pulled his murder mystery out of his bag where he had left it after getting home on the train. He needed to stop thinking. He read until past three in the morning, finally turning off the light to curl up and sleep.

On Sunday Tommy had dinner with his father the same as he did every Sunday night. He supposed that when he got married, or if he moved to Europe, his father would have dinner with Stuart and his family, or Phil and his family. But for now, Mr. Bishop, retired law partner and judge, still practising for the occasional case, was Tommy's. They were going to go to the club. Tommy let himself in the majestic oak door of his childhood home. In front of him was the long, wide hallway that lead towards the stairs. On his right side was the archway into the living room, where the bay window and side windows let in light dappled from the willow trees on the east side of the house. The grand piano, that no one had ever played, at least that Tommy knew of, gleamed in the sunshine, not a speck of dust on it. The dark, hardwood bookcases on either side of the fireplace held the family's formal books – leather bound editions of Dickens and Trollope that Tommy's great grandmother had bought at the end of the Victorian era. Tommy stood for a minute, his hand resting on the dark wood doorframe, as he looked in that room. When he was thirteen he had stood in front of that fireplace and built a fire there, not getting any embers on the Persian carpet. It had been raining that day, he remembered, and cold; his mother had been at the hospital and the house had been deserted. Why he had decided to build a fire and how he knew how to do that – he had never been a Boy Scout – were lost in the distance of time. He smiled at the memory, though, and tapped his hand against the doorframe.

He walked towards the back of the house where his father's study was, past the commodious dinning room with its large, gleaming table, past the wide staircase, and through the door into his mother's kitchen, the cabinets still the yellow she had chosen more than twenty years before. He didn't pause here. He walked around the centre island and through a pocket door to the right, into his father's study.

The study looked like a law office, lined with books. "You're here early," Mr. Bishop, Tommy's father, said, looking up from a book he was reading with a magnifying glass.

"Mmm," Tommy said, nodding. He didn't sit down, but paced the small space restlessly. A red wool carpet was underfoot and to either side of him were leather bucket chairs.

"Do you want a drink?" His father asked. "Or do you want to go to dinner now? Have a seat if you'd like," he said, extending a hand to point to a chair in the corner.

Mr. Bishop was an old man now, his hair mostly gone with a white fringe around the sides of his head. He was slender and tall, slightly stooped and his face looked kindly. The wrinkles in his face arranged themselves easily into a warm and friendly layout. Tommy was his fourth child – Stuart and Philip being the eldest boys, followed by Mitchell who was a detective with the police force now, and then, far at the end of the family, with more than a seven year gap between him and Mitchell, was Thomas, the baby of the family. Mr. Bishop had been forty-five when Thomas was born. He could still see him as the toddler who stood in front of his desk clutching a paperweight that he had grabbed. He was a beautiful toddler, with a charming smile. Mr. Bishop had no other memories of Thomas after that for years, or none that came to mind now as he watcher him. There were no pictures in the photo albums. When Thomas was four, his mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Not much of a childhood, Mr. Bishop knew. No one had been paying attention. And he had been so strict back then. And so confident. The older boys had turned out fine, and he just assumed that Thomas would, of course. Even when he had sent him off to boarding school at twelve and his mother had died when he was fifteen. Mr. Bishop stood up uneasily and poured himself a drink. "How are you, Thomas?" He asked. He always called his son Thomas. He had even when he was the toddler holding the paperweight.

Tommy leaned on the edge of his father's desk and shrugged. "I saw a guy from prison," he said swallowing hard. "In court." He didn't know why he blurted this out. He hadn't planned to. He hadn't even planned to get here so early. He always came at six o'clock and it was only four now, with the tall shadows of autumn lengthening over the house. There was no reason not to come; no reason not to want to see his father early on a Sunday. But he hadn't even thought about it. And now he was stuck in his father's study with nothing he had planned on saying. "I have a conflict of interest," he went on. "I'll have to inform my boss."

Mr. Bishop nodded, waiting for more. Tommy said nothing, though. "Well," Mr. Bishop finally said, sipping his sherry, "that sounds reasonable."

Tommy turned away, narrowing his eyes angrily. "I'll have to reveal that I went to prison."

Mr. Bishop's shoulders sagged. "You don't have to do that, Thomas. Just say you knew him as a teenager."

Tommy turned back to his father and looked at him with disgust. "This guy was incarcerated from 1986 until 2001. I wouldn't have seen him anywhere but prison." Tommy hadn't thought of that when he was sitting in court, thinking of having a drink with Rob. But it had occurred o him on the train home from seeing Jack.

"Well," Mr. Bishop said, licking his lips slowly, "it doesn't really matter. It was just a youthful indiscretion. You're not required to go into details. Just tell your boss. He'll have a laugh over that."

"My boss is a she," Tommy said angrily.

"Well, I'm sure she won't take it seriously. Everyone had something in their past. A little pot is hardly a sin."

Tommy turned towards his father, his hands in his jeans pocket, his jaw clenched. "If that's the case, how come you didn't bail me out? Pete didn't go to prison. Will didn't go to prison. Why didn't you bail me out? Why didn't you pay a lawyer to appeal? I could have got community service!" He had never spoken to his father about this before. When he got out of prison, he was so relieved to be home he had done nothing to rock the boat. And then, soon enough, he had been shipped off to a military college for troubled boys. Now, though, his voice was clipped and filled with controlled rage. "Do you know what it as like? I was seventeen! I was in jail with convicts – hardened men. Do you know how scared I was? It changed everything in my life. It ruined my life!"

Mr. Bishop smiled gently. "Your life is hardly ruined, Thomas."

"I suffered!" Tommy shouted. "Don't you understand that? It was a year! That's a long time. I was so scared. My cellmate – my cellmate . . ." Tommy was tripping over his words now. "He was a sadist. I couldn't fight with him. He was six foot two. I mean . . ." He stopped, unsure how to go on.

Mr. Bishop looked down at his desk, looking almost ashamed. "His supposed sadism doesn't keep you from visiting him. Or keeping his prison account full."

Tommy's face was white with rage. "How do you know that?" He shouted.

Mr. Bishop shrugged calmly. "When you go out of prison, at first – when you went to that military school to finish high school – I was worried about you. I paid a detective to keep tabs on you. He told me where you went. What you spent money on."

Tommy sat down in one of the chairs, his jaw clenched and his eyes narrow. "And how long did you do this?"

"Well," Mr. Bishop said, running his hand over his highly polished desk, "until you finished your second year of law school. Then I figured you were okay."

Tommy's mind raced. That was well after he had known Chase. His father knew everything. "You bastard!" Tommy shouted.

His father looked at him, perfectly calm. "I was worried about drugs. Mostly. I just wanted you to be okay."

"If you were so worried, why didn't you keep me out of jail!"

"Thomas," Mr. Bishop said slowly. "If I could do one thing over again, I would have kept you out of prion. If I could do it over again – I promise you I wouldn't let the same thing happen. I – I was angry with you. Well, you know that. It doesn't matter. You're a fine young man now. I'm proud of you."

"You don't know anything." Thomas shouted, standing up. "You don't understand at all!"

"What do you want me to understand, Thomas?" Mr. Bishop sighed.

Tommy swallowed hard. He didn't know what to say. "I . . ." He stopped. "I did things I regret in prison."

"We all do things we regret, Thomas."

Tommy swallowed again. "You think I'm talking about sex, but I'm not. I did illegal things. I did objectively bad things. I . . ."

His father cut him off. "You did what you had to do to survive."

Tommy dropped into a chair. "No, I didn't dad. I did . . ." He groped for words. "I did sadistic things. I . . ." He couldn't say it, not even now. He couldn't go back to prison, not even to atone. And he didn't trust his father enough that he wouldn't dig it up, see that justice was done. His father was always big on justice, on the black and white of it. "I regret, so much," he said instead. He knew that his father thought he was talking about; he knew Mr. Bishop imagined he was talking about sex, or fights, or maybe bullying someone. He didn't know that he was talking about drug running and murder. But it was a gang, Tommy thought to himself as he had a thousand times before, and he had to do what he had to do, to make sure he was on the right side of things, to make sure he had some protection and friends. But that wasn't it. Or, at least, that wasn't all of it. He was as guilty as Lady Macbeth, with the blood on her hands. And some things can never be taken back.

Mr. Bishop sat watching his son. "Have a drink," he said quietly, pouring him a glass of sherry. He passed it to Tommy.

"Oh, what the fuck!" Tommy said. What could he do? Where could he take this? This pain and hate? He could go home, walk out of here and just go home, sit in his empty apartment, wait until tomorrow morning. But what then? Just go to work and come home. The same old roll of it. He might as well sit here and take the drink. He'd thrown a temper tantrum like the seventeen year old he had once been; the words he should have thrown at his father when the pain was fresh. What was the point now? This was embarrassing. "Fuck, fuck, fuck. Give me the drink." He swallowed it in one gulp. "I'm sorry, dad." He muttered.

The next morning at the office, Tommy tipped his chair back on two legs and watched Cheryl walk in. She was wearing a tight red suit. Where did she get these things? He wondered. The Victoria's Secret catalogue? He was ready to talk to her, he thought, but he didn't say anything now as he watched her cross the room. She was talking to her assistant, the girl with the long, shiny brown hair who all the associates lusted after, who stood next to her and was showing Cheryl papers. He heard Cheryl mutter "What a nightmare," under her breath. Her skin looked dull and ashy and the circles under eyes were still deep even though it was Monday. Tommy couldn't help smiling. He sipped his coffee, feeling the warmth in his stomach. They were right, he thought, living well was the best revenge.

He snapped his chair back upright and set his Styrofoam cup on the desk. He poked it with a pen, thinking. He couldn't tell Cheryl about his little stint in prison. He couldn't do it. He needed her to hate him; to envy him. To envy his family background, his devil may care attitude towards his career; his well-rested nights. He wanted her to lust for his world, for what he had, silently and in an unacknowledged way. Unacknowledged even by her, but still there nevertheless. He smiled to himself.

He would talk to Teeves instead. He stood up and walked into Teeves office. "This better be quick," Teeves said, without looking up. "I'm absolutely swamped."

Tommy closed the door behind him. "It's serious."

Teeves looked up, surprised. He pushed a file folder off a chair onto the floor and gestured for Tommy to sit down. "What's up?"

"I've got a conflict of interest. I know Rob Everton, from the White case."

Teeves paused for a second, looking confused. "You have to tell Cheryl. She's gonna blow her top. She wanted you on that case."

"I know. She keeps telling me that child abuse is a back water."

Teeves sighed. "It's not that she cares about your career. It's that she wants your help in winning these cases. And you, you know, you can do it. This is a politically huge case. The corruption that we're finding at Marlowe now. When we blow the lid off this –"

Tommy cut him off. "Umm, I was at Marlowe?" He said, ending his sentence almost as if it was a question.

Teeves looked at Tommy intently. "What?"

"I had a little thing when I was a teen. The file was sealed because I was under eighteen, and then expunged. But I knew Rob." He pressed his lips together. "I can't tell Cheryl this. I don't want her to know."

Teeves sat staring at Tommy with his mouth open. "What the . . .?" He hesitated.

"It's expunged. It's over. It doesn't matter." Tommy repeated.

"Okay," Teeves said. He looked down at his desk. "Okay. I can see why you don't want to tell Cheryl this. Okay."

Teeves brought his coffee mug to his lips. "Okay. Just tell Cheryl you want back on the child abuse side. Say it's the do-gooder in you. Just say that. I'll make it okay from my end." He hesitated again, fiddling with a pencil. Then he went on. "Get out of here for the morning." He motioned with his hand. "I'll make it all right with Cheryl."

Tommy raised an eyebrow.

"Sure," Teeves said frowning. "Just go before I change my mind." He paused. "You know you don't look like you have this kind of thing in your past. You look like your entire life has been handed to you on a platter."

Tommy shrugged. "It kind of has been handed to me on a platter. I mean, the law part. I don't really care. You know? But, uh, I don't know. . ." He and Teeves looked at each other for a minute. "Umm, thanks. If you could make this all right, I'd really appreciate it." He nodded to Teeves and stood up awkwardly. He hesitated at the door of Teeves' office and then went out. He passed by Cheryl's assistant's desk and then out the double doors to the old elevators in the hall and than out onto the street.

He went in the pub across the street and ordered a beer. He realized he never had got in touch with Rob. A part of him wanted to, even though it would be foolish in many ways. He wanted to ask Rob what had happened at Marlowe, what was going on with this corruption case. He wanted to hear the other side of it. He fiddled with his paper coaster on the bar, and thought about all that had been and all that was still going on.