All at Sea

All at Sea
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Shortlisted for the 2017 PEN Ackerley Prize‘The thing to remember about this story is that every word is true. If I never told it to a soul, and this book did not exist, it would not cease to be true. I don’t mind at all if you forget this.The important thing is that I don’t.’On a hot still morning on a beautiful beach in Jamaica, Decca Aitkenhead’s life changed for ever.Her four-year-old boy was paddling peacefully at the water’s edge when a wave pulled him out to sea. Her partner, Tony, swam out and saved their son’s life – then drowned before her eyes.When Decca and Tony first met a decade earlier, they became the most improbable couple in London. She was an award-winning Guardian journalist, famous for interviewing leading politicians. He was a dreadlocked criminal with a history of drug-dealing and violence. No one thought the romance would last, but it did. Until the tide swept Tony away, plunging Decca into the dark chasm of random tragedy.Exploring race and redemption, privilege and prejudice, ALL AT SEA is a remarkable story of love and loss, of how one couple changed each other’s lives and of what a sudden death can do to the people who survive.

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4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016

Copyright © Decca Aitkenhead 2016

Cover photograph © www.williamrichardsphotography.com

Decca Aitkenhead asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008142155

Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008142179

Version: 2016-12-05

For Tony

You always said I should write a book about you.

It wasn’t meant to be this one.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Acknowledgements

Footnote

Praise

About the Author

About the Publisher

The thing to remember about this story is that every word is true. If I never told it to a soul, and this book did not exist, it would not cease to be true. I don’t mind at all if you forget this. The important thing is that I don’t.

My three-year-old son asks me to tell him the story almost every day. ‘Tell me the story about how Tony died-ed again,’ he says. And so I do, until he knows the words and can join in, as if it were a well-worn nursery rhyme. He needs to hear the story to make it real for him. But the ritual makes it sound more like Little Red Riding Hood to me – just another fantastical fairy tale.

The first time I read the story of Tony’s death, it was a news report in the Guardian, my own newspaper. I love newspapers. I have been a journalist for twenty years. Even as a child I was a compulsive writer, but only ever of diaries, letters, lists – never fiction. Where would be the point in making up a story, when the truth is by definition always more interesting? And so for twenty years I have been reading and writing what I thought of as the truth. Then I read about my own family’s tragedy in my newspaper, and the only thing I could think was: they can’t be talking about me. They can’t mean my family. This could never happen to me and my family. This is something that happens to other people.

‘This happens to other people’ is a recurring cliché of the random tragedy survivor’s experience. I have heard it countless times in my job, from stunned interviewees recounting a bolt from the blue – and to tell the truth, I have always found it puzzling. What do they mean? Why would they imagine that other people are any different from them? Now here I was, thinking exactly the same thing: this happens to other people. And slowly, I began to see why.

We read about freak disasters every day, knowing perfectly well that the news is not fiction. And yet, deep down, what we are reading must feel to us made up. Why else would we be so incredulous when they happen to us? Even the journalists who report them must be in the same boat. I have been writing about real people for all these years, and apparently had not grasped that they were real.

Back in the early Nineties, among a particular type of London media sophisticate, something called postmodernism was the height of fashion, and dinner parties would routinely be ruined by some cultural studies graduate boring everyone to death about the absurdity of constructs such as ‘truth’. At the time I wrote it off as a fad for pseudo-intellectuals hoping to look clever. Now I wonder if they weren’t onto something after all.

Because it isn’t really possible to write about a real-life event without turning it into a form of fiction. Once an accident of chance has been organised into a narrative, it can be honest, and accurate, and illuminating. But it is only an edited version of a partial perspective, not the same thing as the truth.

So now I am afraid that by writing this story, I will make it untrue. Chapter headings and syntax and punctuation will elbow all my tears and grief out of the way, until the catastrophe has been reduced to just another piece of work, and my memories of what happened have been replaced by this printed version, creating a safe distance between myself and the horror.

Of course, in many ways this is enormously appealing. If I take control of this narrative and become its author, I will steal its power over me; I can detach myself from my own story, and escape. Who wouldn’t want to do that? And yet, that is also the very thing I fear most.



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