to my uncle’s house. When the sea is high, or rough, it’s too dangerous to approach – a single wave could knock you senseless. But on a windless day, with the ocean as flat as the icing on a sponge cake, it is a perfect place to dive from. When my family was still on speaking terms with one another, we used to play here, in the summers when we visited Ionia.
The game we played was this: each of us had to jump off the rock and turn to catch a soccer ball before we crashed into the water. There were many variations: you could work in a spin or a somersault, or do it with two jumpers who had to pass the ball between them and then back to the thrower. It was the best game we had, and it was – not coincidentally – theonly family game we played that lacked any sense of competition. We called it Bolder than Mandingo, because that was what you had to shout before you hit the water.
It was Patrick’s idea to say it, and because of his Boston accent, and the obscurity of the phrase, and perhaps because of Patrick’s obsession with hair loss (this was before the wig), Vivian and I thought we were saying ‘Balder than Mandingo’ as we leaped off the rock. But Mandingo was the title of a sixties novel about an interracial love affair, and ‘bolder than Mandingo ’a plaudit invented by some reviewer for another book.
Bolder than Mandingo became family shorthand for a leap into the unknown so I decided to write it on the invitations for the party I had before I left London for Ionia. Most of the guests thought it was a reference to a forgotten spaghetti Western, and my friend Stevo turned up in a bootlace tie.
My four-week notice period at the BBC had concluded the same day. It somehow reminded me of my last day at prep school, when I hung my tie on a lamppost on the way home in a moment of uncharacteristic spontaneity. Afterwards I dreamed about my dead mother telling me off and was racked by guilt and went back to retrieve it, the nylon stripes damp with rain. I probably still have the tie somewhere.
I was surprised how quickly the decision to leave my job had overtaken me. For a while, it had looked as though I was going to take a sabbatical, and leave a door open back into my old life at the BBC. But then I decided that after six months in Ionia, I would rather come back to London and start afresh than go back to a job I had grown to hate.
The possibility of change changed everything. The thought that I had no alternative was all that had kept me in my old life, and now that things could be different, they couldn’t stay the same. I couldn’t become a tribesman on Irian Jaya, or a Tatar horseman. But I could live as Patrick had lived. His will offered me that possibility. And his life seemed sufficiently different from mine to be the change I craved. By now, I felt tooclose to the idea of being free to contemplate anything else. It was that moment suspended between the rock and the ocean when you bunch your knees up and anticipate the cold shock of the water. It was too late to get back on the rock now. Bolder than Mandingo.
The rather complicated provisions of the inheritance had been simplified by the rumour network in the office. I had come into a fortune, the gossip went, so I was jetting off to start spending it. On my last day, one of the producers, a man called Derek Braddock, came up to me with a mock-quizzical expression on his face as I was clearing out my desk.
‘Damien,’ he said. ‘Got a message for you, mate. Couldn’t quite understand it.’ He passed me one of the flimsy pieces of paper that we used for telephone messages. ‘Bloke called Riley. Says he wants his life back.’
I looked at him for a moment. ‘Life of Riley. Very good, Derek. You’re wasted here.’
Derek chuckled like a moron. He had a pale and mumpy face – like a photograph of a Great War soldier. I thought: There’s nothing more coercive than a bad joke.
Wendy had come up alongside him, with her hands behind her
The game we played was this: each of us had to jump off the rock and turn to catch a soccer ball before we crashed into the water. There were many variations: you could work in a spin or a somersault, or do it with two jumpers who had to pass the ball between them and then back to the thrower. It was the best game we had, and it was – not coincidentally – theonly family game we played that lacked any sense of competition. We called it Bolder than Mandingo, because that was what you had to shout before you hit the water.
It was Patrick’s idea to say it, and because of his Boston accent, and the obscurity of the phrase, and perhaps because of Patrick’s obsession with hair loss (this was before the wig), Vivian and I thought we were saying ‘Balder than Mandingo’ as we leaped off the rock. But Mandingo was the title of a sixties novel about an interracial love affair, and ‘bolder than Mandingo ’a plaudit invented by some reviewer for another book.
Bolder than Mandingo became family shorthand for a leap into the unknown so I decided to write it on the invitations for the party I had before I left London for Ionia. Most of the guests thought it was a reference to a forgotten spaghetti Western, and my friend Stevo turned up in a bootlace tie.
My four-week notice period at the BBC had concluded the same day. It somehow reminded me of my last day at prep school, when I hung my tie on a lamppost on the way home in a moment of uncharacteristic spontaneity. Afterwards I dreamed about my dead mother telling me off and was racked by guilt and went back to retrieve it, the nylon stripes damp with rain. I probably still have the tie somewhere.
I was surprised how quickly the decision to leave my job had overtaken me. For a while, it had looked as though I was going to take a sabbatical, and leave a door open back into my old life at the BBC. But then I decided that after six months in Ionia, I would rather come back to London and start afresh than go back to a job I had grown to hate.
The possibility of change changed everything. The thought that I had no alternative was all that had kept me in my old life, and now that things could be different, they couldn’t stay the same. I couldn’t become a tribesman on Irian Jaya, or a Tatar horseman. But I could live as Patrick had lived. His will offered me that possibility. And his life seemed sufficiently different from mine to be the change I craved. By now, I felt tooclose to the idea of being free to contemplate anything else. It was that moment suspended between the rock and the ocean when you bunch your knees up and anticipate the cold shock of the water. It was too late to get back on the rock now. Bolder than Mandingo.
The rather complicated provisions of the inheritance had been simplified by the rumour network in the office. I had come into a fortune, the gossip went, so I was jetting off to start spending it. On my last day, one of the producers, a man called Derek Braddock, came up to me with a mock-quizzical expression on his face as I was clearing out my desk.
‘Damien,’ he said. ‘Got a message for you, mate. Couldn’t quite understand it.’ He passed me one of the flimsy pieces of paper that we used for telephone messages. ‘Bloke called Riley. Says he wants his life back.’
I looked at him for a moment. ‘Life of Riley. Very good, Derek. You’re wasted here.’
Derek chuckled like a moron. He had a pale and mumpy face – like a photograph of a Great War soldier. I thought: There’s nothing more coercive than a bad joke.
Wendy had come up alongside him, with her hands behind her
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