Free The Thief of Time by John Boyne

table in disgust.
    â€˜Talk like what?’ I protested.
    â€˜Like a fucking lawyer. Like someone who’s afraid that I’m recording every word you say so that I can use it in a lawsuit six months down the line. Can’t you speak to me in a normal tone of voice? I thought we meant something to each other.’
    I sighed and looked out of the window, unsure whether I wanted to be dragged down this well worn road once again. ‘Tara,’ I said eventually, leaning forward and taking her tiny hand within my own, ‘for all I know you may very well be recording this conversation. It’s not as if you have a very good track record of honesty with me, now is it?’
    I suppose at this point I should point out a few things about my relationship with Ms Tara Morrison. Approximately a year before, we attended an awards ceremony together – well, not so much together as part of a group representing our station. Tara was accompanied by her then boyfriend, an underwear model for Tommy Hilfiger, while I had booked a professional escort – nothing sexual, purely accompaniment -for the evening as I was between relationships at the time and really had no desire to begin a new one with anyone. Considering that I hit puberty over 240 years ago, it can’t come as too much of a surprise to learn that I grow weary of the endless round of dating, breaking up, dating, marrying, dating, divorcing, dating, widowing, etc. Every few decades I need a little time alone.
    On the night in question Tara had a disagreement with her model friend – something about him actually being a homosexual, I believe, which was bound to throw a spanner into the works – and she accepted my offer of a lift home. After driving my escort back to her own house, we stopped off for a drink at my club and talked well into the night, mostly about her ambitions, which were plenteous, and her commitment to journalism and our television station, which she called ‘the future of broadcasting in Britain’, something even I didn’t believe. She cited a number of responsible role models and I admired her grasp of the history of her profession, her awareness of how the professional and the sleaze raker can co-exist in one industry, and how it can be difficult at times to differentiate between the two. I remember a particularly interesting dialogue we had on the subject of the public interest. Afterwards we returned to my apartment, where we said goodnight to each other and slept in the same bed without so much as kissing, an unusual but appealing arrangement at the time.
    The next morning, I cooked breakfast and invited her back for dinner, which in the end we skipped in favour of a return to bed, where rather a lot more happened than had taken place the previous night. After that we continued our relationship for some months in an extremely discreet fashion – I told no one and to the best of my knowledge neither did she. I was fond of her, I trusted her and I made a mistake.
    She was intrigued by the fact that Tommy DuMarque was my nephew. (I didn’t tell her that it was actually his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather who was my nephew; such information seemed surplus to requirements). She’d been watching his programme for years and had apparently had a crush on him since he’d first turned up on television in his teenage years. When I first revealed the relationship between us, she went quite red, as if I had caught her doing something she shouldnt, and almost choked on some cantaloupe. She begged me to introduce her to him and I did, one fairly pleasant evening the previous summer, when she practically tore his trousers off in front of me. He wasn’t at all interested – he was in a volatile relationship with his screen grandmother at the time and she was apparently a jealous lover – and I think he found her a little silly, although to be fair to her she had had a little too much