3-81（在线收听）

81.

Late at night, with everyone asleep, I’d walk the house, checking the doors and windows. Then I’d

sit on the balcony or the edge of the garden and roll a joint.

The house looked down onto a valley, across a hillside thick with frogs. I’d listen to their late-

night song, smell the flower-scented air. The frogs, the smells, the trees, the big starry sky, it all

brought me back to Botswana.

But maybe it’s not just the flora and fauna, I thought.

Maybe it’s more the feeling of safety. Of life.

We were able to get a lot of work done. And we had a lot of work to do. We launched a

foundation, I reconnected with my contacts in world conservation. Things were getting under

control…and then the press somehow learned we were at Tyler’s. It had taken six weeks exactly,

same as Canada. Suddenly there were drones overhead, paps across the street. Paps across the

valley.

They cut the fence.

We patched the fence.

We stopped venturing outside. The garden was in full view of the paps.

Next came the helicopters.

Sadly, we were going to have to flee. We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that

would mean paying for our own security. I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security

firms again. Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how

much house. Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting

me off.

I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father. But

Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse

strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy

pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me

otherwise unemployable.

I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf. I’d never asked to be financially

dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I

almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered

anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the

Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big

difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence. After

decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and

mocked for being immature? For not standing on my own two feet?

The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights. We

could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort.

We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling.

It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.