Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (24 page)

By now an established member of the fitness and health community in the South East, I continued training, mentoring and encouraging others into the industry, and developing those who wanted to progress further. I am really proud that some of my former protégés now have their own studios or gyms and are all good friends.

My past occasionally reared its ugly head. When I was nominated as a candidate for the local businessman of the year awards by a journalist in my area, my first reaction was not pride, but terror. The other men and women up for the award were all ‘toffs’, I thought, and not the sort of people who would want to sit at a black-tie function with someone like me. I felt quite sure that they would laugh at me when I turned up for the ceremony in my suit and dickey bow and borrowed shiny black shoes! I thought that they would make fun of me. Of course, nothing of the sort happened, because I am not the little scruff I used to be; I have actually become a respectable member of the local business community. This realisation was one of the most surprising that I had ever had, and I was even more astonished to realise that not only did other people respect me, but also that I was beginning to respect myself. For years, I’d had to pinch myself every time something good happened to me. Now, I was beginning to be able to accept my adventures as something I had actually earned.

And there were many adventures. I had long enjoyed watching American Football. Who would have thought that I would enjoy a private box at Candlestick Park in San Francisco courtesy of Silicon Valley billionaire Ray Lane, or attend Calvin Klein’s party on Shelter Island with the owner of a New York-based model agency and some of her clients? How could that little boy, working so hard in the boxing ring, have grown into this tall, confident man teaching master classes at Le Sport in St Lucia and sharing drinks with an old icon of mine, the ‘Green Goddess’ Diana Moran, in the small Caribbean airport (and getting her just a little tipsy)?

There were still times when I was sure that I didn’t belong with all these nice, upper-class toffs and even moments of sheer panic when I thought, I can’t go in there! That’s not for me; they’ll make fun of me. Ian tells the story of when we were first at Le Sport and how convinced I was that I wouldn’t fit in with ‘those sort of people’ – only for him to come down to breakfast the next morning and see that I was already on first-name terms with everyone. I told myself and gradually came to understand that it didn’t matter any more where I had come from and who I had once been. All that mattered now was that I was someone who had worked hard to become a respected professional and that it was perfectly fine for people to like me for myself, because there was no longer any reason for anyone to cross the street when they saw me. I had changed, too. I was no longer attracted to the dark side. I no longer needed to prove myself with my fists and my ability to survive any attack. Although I will always have to go on proving myself, by this stage I knew that there were other, better ways than that.

Yes, life was good. Best of all, I knew that I had worked long and hard for all the good things that I was enjoying and that I deserved them. Although I was nearly forty, I had only just finished growing up – I had done more maturing in the previous four or five years than in the twenty before – and become the adult man that my unresolved past had never allowed me to be before.

Finally, I could see that I did deserve to be happy.

But did I deserve to have someone special in my life, someone who would stay with me always? Well, perhaps… but I hadn’t found her yet.

14

M
Y
H
APPY
E
NDING

T
hen I met Jo, a beautiful woman fourteen years younger myself. It was about four years after I had been cleared of GBH and GBH with Intent and I was still living in Essex and working as a senior personal trainer. Jo was one of the clients at a club where I was working at the time. One day, I was putting a client through her paces, having left some equipment in front of a mirror with the intention of picking it up later. Assuming that the barbell was for anyone to use, Jo picked it up and I went over to set her straight. That was our first encounter. We didn’t exchange too many words but I was struck by how pretty she was.

A few weeks later, Jo was training again. I offered her a free training session and got her mobile number. Cunning, eh? Just as we were talking, my mate Ian rang.

‘I can’t talk to you now,’ I whispered into the phone. ‘I’ve just got chatting with a really hot bird.’

But I was already beginning to realise that Jo wasn’t just a hot bird. Shortly after our first date, I invited her to a party. The next day, I took her out again, and after that we started seeing each other every day. I had been seeing two other girls, but I realised that Jo was special and devoted myself exclusively to her. I realised that I could – finally – concentrate on a real, adult relationship based on mutual love and respect. That was eight years ago and, although I didn’t realise it then, it was the beginning of a new life for me. Even after Jo and I started going out, I still thought that I was too old to settle down and become a family man. Fortunately, Jo helped me to see otherwise – plus, she was fourteen years younger than me and obviously keen to have kids herself. I realised that what I felt for Jo was more than enough to make me want to settle down and stop my bachelor ways. Suddenly, it was time to grow up and become what I had never expected: a respectable, middle-class man in a tidy suburb with a pretty partner and two wonderful children.

Where I live today isn’t very far, in geographical terms, from the hell where I grew up. But it couldn’t be further away in terms of environment and atmosphere. Ironically, the money that I got from the Mapperton case gave Jo and me the deposit we needed to buy our family home. Over the years, I had imagined various destinies that seemed possible. I had imagined being a professional boxer. There was a time when I could have seen myself going into security full-time. In my darker moments I had feared that Starling and Coral might have been right about me, and had imagined a life behind bars. This life that I have now, in a comfortable family home with carefully groomed lawns and neighbours who wave hello in the morning, is one that I never envisioned – not in a million years.

Jo is the perfect person for me. She is deeply moral. She is from a nice family, she doesn’t like swearing and she really believes in right and wrong in a very straightforward way that is both refreshing and reassuring. Jo has taught me how to behave myself. I was thirty-nine when I met her, and I was sure that I was never going to settle down now, that it was too late for me. Jo showed me that I still had time. On only one occasion has Jo seen the darkness inside me. We were in our car when another driver made me angry. I started yelling and dragged him out of the window of his car. I didn’t hurt him; I just scared him a little bit and then got back into the car with Jo and drove off. Poor Jo was so scared and shocked by what I had done that she started to hyperventilate, and I felt so awful about having upset her that I resolved then and there never to do anything of the sort again. And I never have. Until that moment, reacting with sudden, ferocious anger whenever anyone pissed me off seemed to me to be perfectly normal, rational behaviour. Jo has helped me to see that this behaviour is not rational, and that it is not normal. She keeps me in line. She says, ‘Who cares if he is being rude to you from his car? He isn’t hurting you. Ignore him. Why are you getting so angry?’ And, because I care about what she thinks of me, I listen to her. Thanks to her, I have learned to be able to get angry without acting on that anger.

Nonetheless, I don’t feel guilty about many of the road-rage and other small incidents I have been involved in over the years. Most of them deserved it. The ones I hurt were big, capable men who were being aggressive and they were looking for trouble. Even at my most violent, I have always retained a sense of right and wrong. I haven’t hurt women, or people who are clearly smaller and weaker than me. I would never hurt a man with children in his car.

About two years after Jo and I got together, our eldest son Harley was born. I remember the moment of his birth. I remember his first smile as if it was yesterday; I will always remember that. Now we have another son, Archie, just as lovely as his older brother.

Harley’s birth was the most important moment in my life because it was the start of a whole new chapter and a series of fantastic beginnings. Not only did I have a wonderful new son, but I had been given the opportunity to live my childhood all over again. But this time I would be living it through my own children, and I would be in a position to ensure that nothing bad would ever happen to destroy what is supposed to be the very best part of someone’s life. When Harley took his first breath, I went in an instant from being a man who had always felt that he had nothing to lose, to a new, vulnerable creature I did not recognise: the man who has everything to lose. This feeling of vulnerability, and the knowledge that I have the power to give my children the lives they deserve, or screw their lives up, was almost as overwhelming as the waves of love that I felt for my newborn son. I had never thought that I was capable of such deep, all-encompassing love. Now, as I see my kids listen to and absorb every word I say, I often feel overwhelmed by the whole thing. At last, in my mid-forties, I have had to find a new way of being a man, and not the frightened little child that I have been for most of my life. Most of the time, I am not that child, but I know that he will never completely leave me, and that I will take him to my grave with me.

Since I became a father, I have become a different person. There are days when I look in the mirror and fail to recognise the man looking back at me. Who is that guy with the gentle expression and the remains of the baby’s breakfast drying on his shoulder? Surely that can’t be me!

New parents are always inundated with advice, and most of it is easy to forget, but I received one piece of advice that I will always remember. It came from a friend of mine, who had been a fellow doorman with me years earlier. He came to visit baby Harley when he was just a little scrap and after he had admired him he took me aside and said, ‘Look in the mirror, because if you don’t like what you see you need to change it because your kids will become you. If you have a road-rage incident, your kid will grow up to experience road rage; if you scream and shout, your kid will scream and shout. You want to look in the mirror and stop the behaviour you don’t want your kid to emulate.’

As my children get older, I am more and more aware of how much they learn by imitating their parents, and how much they idolise them. It is daunting, but it also makes me determined to do and be the very best that I can all the time so that, when my children imitate me, they are imitating the sort of person I want them to grow up to be. I certainly don’t want either of them to be anything like the man I used to be.

Since my children were born, I don’t hate any more, or at least I don’t hate like I used to. It isn’t in me, although I sometimes feel it in a slightly absent way as amputees are said to feel a missing limb. The only way I can explain it is by saying that I used to blame my life on everybody else, and didn’t take responsibility for my own actions. When Harley was born, I realised that I had to be responsible for my own actions and that life wasn’t all bad; not now that I was the father of this wonderful child and the partner of this wonderful woman. Best of all, I am not a bad father. I am not the bad example that I feared I would be and I have never once even come close to lashing out in anger. I am a good father who takes care of his children and I see their love for me in their eyes as they must see mine for them. Now, if someone is aggressive to me when I am driving, I ignore them. I ignore them when the children are in the car, and I even ignore them when they are not. Ten years after that eventful flight to Florida, I went over with Harley and Jo, but this time I was the father in one of the nice families on the plane, on my way to Disneyworld. And nothing went wrong.

When my children were born, I also lost whatever feelings I had for my parents. They had always been strangers to me, but they had also been spectres whose absence haunted my life. For a long time, I had harboured deep feelings of great bitterness for my mother, for having abandoned me and for having refused to let me be adopted by anyone else. Now, I feel nothing for her at all. Nothing. As a parent, I can’t understand how my mother and father were able to give me and the rest of their children up. I would never let anyone take my babies. I know for myself how deep and strong and primitive the instincts of a parent are, and should be. My mother is still alive. The last time I spoke to her was over thirty years ago, and at that time she blamed everyone but herself for the fact that our family had been broken and destroyed. She is lying, of course. I could be angry but I can’t even feel that any more, and I have no intention of ever trying to establish contact. When she left me out with the rubbish, she stole my sense of identity and self-worth and it has taken me the rest of my life to get them back.

However, after becoming a parent, I finally decided to address the issue of my own identity and sense of self, much more for my children’s sake than for my own, because I do not want them to grow up without roots and lost the way I did. After years of not wanting anything to do with matters related to my biological family, I finally decided to go to Ireland and see the home of our ancestors in Kilkieran, Connemara. My father had died on 23 April 2005 and his dying wish had been to be buried in his home village. Those children of his who had retained some contact with him had honoured his wishes.

I had not seen my father for thirty years and I had not gone to his funeral. Why go to the funeral of someone you don’t know? I didn’t feel that I had anything or anyone to mourn. Now, I left Jo and Harley at home, flew to Ireland and made my way to Connemara and the local graveyard to say goodbye in my own way, if not to my father himself then to the father I had never had.