He Was Charming. He Was Taken. He Was an Addict. I Loved Him Anyway

From ELLE

One hot morning while on vacation in Jamaica, Decca Aitkenhead's partner, Tony, drowned while rescuing one of their young sons from a freakishly strong ocean current. Aitkenhead, an award-winning British journalist, tells this heartbreaking story in her new memoir, All At Sea. But before this tragic chapter, Decca and Tony lived through some stormy early years. She was still married to her first husband, Paul, when they were getting to know each other; Tony was a drug dealer and a crack addict. In this excerpt from the memoir, Aitkenhead outlines how their love transcended these obstacles.

Tony thought he had been only seven or eight when he saw a television documentary about street hustlers in Soho, who defrauded gullible punters hoping to buy sex or drugs. That, he decided, looked like the life for him. In early adolescence his court appearances grew more frequent, the periods of detention lengthened, and his hostility to authority hardened. The youth justice system was chaotic and arbitrary; sometimes he would be locked up in secure homes alongside children whose only crime had been to lose both their parents, and he was always particularly indignant on their behalf. If the authorities had imagined he would consider his own punishment legitimate, they were disappointed.

The only good to come of it was the loyalty his parents were called upon to prove, over and over again. If Tony was testing them, they did not fail. Had they given up on their son, I'm not sure that he would ever have been able to love, and might well have become dangerous enough to be capable of anything. As it was, he learned a concept of love that had little to do with intimacy, of which he had no experience, and everything to do with loyalty. But the boy his parents brought home from each incarceration had grown more unreachable, and at fifteen Tony ran away to London to realize his childhood ambition.

He was always rather nostalgic about his years as a hustler. Soho's seamy warren of alleyways became his teenage playground, and there was a certain daring glamour in his tales of touring the clip joints and late-night illegal drinking dens, promising fictional pornographic beauties to gullible tourists and passing off bags of tea leaves for cannabis, before disappearing into the shadows with pockets crammed full of cash. I said he must have been lonely and frightened, but if he was he had chosen to forget. Dodging the police was all part of the thrill, he said, and by his account an absorbing game of cat and mouse. His only unhappy memory was a surprising one. Having romanticized Caribbean culture for years back in Leeds, he had arrived in London with an Afro flat top and the carefully styled look of a Jamaican rude boy. The first actual black men he met were a shocking disappointment. "I couldn't believe it," he said. "They just hung around the bookies all week, waiting for their welfare checks. Then they'd get pissed and beat up their missus."

By seventeen Tony had established himself as a highly proficient hustler, and was going out with a prostitute who worked for a gang of Jamaican pimps. After he helped her to escape their control, they broke into his south London squat at dawn and beat him with iron bars, before carting his girlfriend off to resume her services. Tony got hold of a gun, tracked them down and shot several of them. Nobody died, and he went on the run, until a little over a year later the police found him. He was still in his teens when he stood trial at the Old Bailey and was sentenced to fourteen years.

There was no glamour in his account of prison. Even though the sentence was reduced on appeal to seven years, he still served nearly five, much of it in segregation on account of violent noncompliance with the regime. Pragmatic self-interest was not a strategy with which Tony was psychologically familiar. He would have rather died-literally-than surrender to the authority of prison staff he considered more morally disreputable than most of the inmates, and his back never recovered from the beatings they inflicted. Resistance was a matter of principle. It even extended as far as temporarily turning vegan, simply in order to be a nuisance.

Two weeks after his release he met a young blonde Californian woman on a grand tour of Europe, who invited him to join her. They went traveling, moved to Los Angeles, and married a few years later at a $50 wedding chapel in Las Vegas.

According to Tony, the marriage was essentially expedient and transactional. He became a violent gangster who made a lot of money out of drugs, gunrunning, protection and so forth. She looked good, and liked spending it. It was a stormy relationship. Tony had a large stock of spectacular marital row anecdotes, which had the slightly worn air of many previous outings, and he often said that he should sue the Beach Boys for misleading him about the nature of California girls. Sometimes he claimed his wife had sprung the wedding on him in Vegas while he was drunk; at others he said they only married for immigration purposes. But when they had tried splitting up, he went to pieces. Tony was immensely proud of the fact his parents had both been virgins on their wedding day and remained together until his father's death some years ago, and it was clear that for all his well-trodden grumbles he maintained a powerful if sentimental attachment to the idea of marriage. He was often out with his daughter, but we very seldom saw his wife-I'd never once seen them together-and I think he liked it when people were surprised to discover he had been married for sixteen years.

As he grew more relaxed, I began to see that Tony enjoyed the idea of being an anomaly. "You should write a book about me!" he was forever exclaiming. "Seriously, you should. My life would make a wicked book." It was certainly unconventional, I agreed. There had to be a market for a gangster memoir, he persisted; his own bookshelf proved it. At least half the titles on it were bestselling examples of the genre-"And mine would be way better than any of them. Come on, D. You know you're going to write it one day." I used to laugh and roll my eyes. Tony's narrative approach to his criminal adventures was so wildly erratic that I could never be sure what to believe, and didn't fancy my chances of taming the tangle into anything that might resemble a verifiable story. Besides, I told him, everyone always thinks their life would make a fascinating book.

In the early '90s Tony and his wife moved back to London, and bought a flat on Ainsworth Road. Following the birth of their daughter in 1994, Tony wound up the more ostentatiously lawless aspects of his criminal lifestyle, and confined his business concerns to the discreet wholesale trade of cocaine. For a year he attended church, to get his daughter into the local Church of England primary school, and despite neither believing in God nor having always been to bed the night before, he enjoyed his Sunday mornings with the matrons of the community. I imagine they were rather bowled over by him.

Most people were. Tony made all sorts of friends on Ainsworth Road-West Indian grandmothers, a gay neighbor dying of AIDS, the publisher who lived next door to us-and at weekends would round up whoever he could find to go off touring festivals in his old VW camper van. When his daughter started school, and would need to explain how her father made a living, he opened an organic wholefood store, followed later by the property development company. As he saw it, he had practically gone legit.

At times I got the impression he genuinely believed he had. The tendency to mistake one's own deceptions for the truth is an occupational hazard in his line of work, and indeed may well be a prerequisite for success. Tony could work himself into such a fever of blameless umbrage, he would quite forget he was actually guilty as charged. I saw this for myself once or twice, when he arrived in a great froth of indignation after being stopped by the police on his way. He drove a large white 5-series BMW-not especially flash, for it was several years old, but ferociously high-powered-and Tony liked to put his foot down. He had been driving for ten years, was never without a spliff at the wheel, and had a relaxed attitude to drunk-driving laws. What he did not have, however, was a driving license. How he kept getting away with it-and he always did-was a mystery, but even more baffling was his outrage at the audacity of the police for pulling him over.

There was more to it than merely believing his own lies. At the heart of the confusion, I began to see, lay a deep ambivalence about his criminal career. It is no small achievement to break the law for so long without getting caught, and part of Tony was unapologetically proud of outwitting a system disgraced in his eyes by racism. If the law's sole purpose was to crush and humiliate him, the only self-respecting response was to break it. But another part of him felt ill at ease with a career that had consigned him to the margins. He loved talking about his old organic shop, and the palpable relish with which he dished out business cards for his property company suggested he rather coveted the casual freedom of legitimacy. What he had really enjoyed in church, I guessed, was the unfamiliar balm of acceptability.

My own ambivalence about his criminal status was similarly unresolved, but slightly different. I had no moral problem with his job. How could I? I had happily enjoyed taking illegal drugs. Besides, if my own experience of the authorities had been anything like Tony's, my retaliation would probably have made him look like Uncle Tom. So his criminality was not the problem, in itself. What troubled me was whether my attraction to him was in spite or because of it. I very much hoped it was the former, and thus pleasing proof of my good liberal credentials. I worried that it could be the latter, and nothing but the cheap thrill of vicarious transgression.

The one thing of which Tony was unmistakably ashamed was his addiction to crack. I first learned of it from Paul, when he came home one night somewhat unnerved, after an evening with Tony and his friends. "Bloody hell, Dec, they smoke crack." I was shocked. Like most people who have taken recreational drugs, I had always drawn an important distinction between substances that enliven a night out and ones that ruin lives. Crack belonged firmly in the second category, and was no part of my world. The first time I saw anyone take it was the night Tony took out a small bag from his pocket, emptied the contents into a teaspoon, and began cooking it up over my Aga.

The appropriate response to someone smoking crack in one's kitchen is an etiquette challenge for which I was unprepared. I couldn't think what to say. I considered asking him to stop, but did not want to look prim, and the studied casualness with which Tony lit up made me suspect he was equally embarrassed. Unsure how to broach the subject, he had decided the best course would be to say nothing and act as if it were perfectly normal. I went along with the pretense for an hour or so, until curiosity got the better of me.

My questions quickly made him defensive. He first began using crack years ago, he said, but had quit when his daughter was born, and stayed clean for a long time. He blamed strains in his marriage, and the endless rows, for turning him back to it. Then he reeled off a long list of all the crucial differences between himself and the common or garden addict who steals his mother's pension to blow in a crack den.

For a start, he pointed out, he didn't smoke it in a pipe like a proper crackhead, but only in a cigarette-an altogether milder and more respectable delivery method. He only smoked at night time, and never until the day's business had been taken care of. He wasn't like those addicts who neglect their responsibilities. He did take it every night, but whenever he went abroad on holiday he would go a fortnight or more without it, so he couldn't really be an addict, could he? Besides, crack would only be a problem if he couldn't afford it. Given the nature of his profession, there was never any shortage of the raw materials, nor any need for him to associate with unsavory types who sell rocks on the street. His daughter knew nothing about it, and his wife wanted for nothing. It wasn't as if he was raiding the family budget.

All of this was factually true, I soon came to see-but I did not believe that Tony really felt what mattered most about crack was its affordability. Nor did the idea that he was not technically an addict ring true. All of his justifications and strenuous protests sounded like the desperate sophistry of denial, and the person he was contriving to deceive was himself. I felt sorry for him. I had never met anyone who cared more about looking indomitable-invincible, even-or invested as much pride in the impression of strength. Crack addiction was a weakness he could not afford to acknowledge, even to himself.

Why I did not find it more off-putting was a puzzle. It was unedifying, certainly, and his transparent self-delusion only made it more disturbing. But there was a magnetism about Tony that eclipsed my reservations, and beneath all the bluster his longing for approval had a charm I found compelling. Then there was, too, the unavoidable fact of his beauty, mesmerizing to the point of hypnotic. I noticed that I neglected to mention his visits to anyone. As Paul's return from Afghanistan drew near, I could no longer carry on pretending to myself that my feelings for Tony were entirely platonic.

Tony and I were struggling to sustain the pretense between ourselves. The increasingly charged atmosphere in my kitchen was never explicitly acknowledged, but a careless brush of a hand on a shoulder would be enough to make us breathless and freeze. One night, as he was about to leave he took my elbows in his hands and we stared at one another in silence. I thought he was about to kiss me. He dropped his hands, murmured "You're not my woman," turned and left. When a few nights later he suggested, very casually, that we should maybe go for lunch some time, we both understood what he was saying. "Why not?" I agreed airily, as if nothing could be more mundanely innocent.

But once Paul was home I gave myself a talking-to. What had I been thinking? I must have been out of my mind. It was nothing but a silly schoolgirl crush, and had to be nipped in the bud before it got out of hand. I sent Tony a short text: "I think we need to cool this now." He texted back: "Okay. If that's what you want."

We scarcely saw each other for the next two months. When Tony invited us to Christmas drinks at his house, it felt perfectly safe to say yes. By then I had begun to doubt whether we had ever been in any real danger of allowing mild flirtation to escalate into something more significant. Probably not, I decided. Even if we had, the danger had now passed.

I have often wondered if that would have been the end of the matter, had it not been for three separate events in the following days. The evening after Tony's Christmas party I was shopping in Hackney when he texted me to say he was in a local bar, and did I fancy popping in for a drink? I found him in dejected spirits. There had been another nuclear-grade argument with his wife; he could not take any more, they had agreed to separate. The house was to be sold, and that summer she would be moving to Spain with their daughter. Their marriage was over. The following morning Paul and I drove down to my father's house in Wiltshire, where we endured one of those relationship-endingly horrific Christmases with which divorce lawyers in January are so famously familiar. And on Boxing Day the tsunami hit Southeast Asia.

Paul and I were barely speaking when he left for the airport to fly to Indonesia. He would be gone for at least a month, and even telephone contact looked unlikely, for the tsunami had wiped out most mobile-phone reception. It was hard to say which of us was more relieved to see the back of the other. Christmas had tipped a precariously unhappy marriage over the edge into free-fall crisis, and we both knew it.

I waited a few days before calling Tony. I think I was pretending not to know what was about to happen, as if ignorance could somehow absolve me of responsibility. It was late afternoon on his fortieth birthday when I sat in a window at the top of the house and dialed his number. He answered at the first ring. I took a deep breath. "About that lunch. I've changed my mind."

Excerpted from Decca Aitkenhead's All at Sea, on sale August 16.