Act 2: Chapter 9: Fat Man in a Suit

Everything I’ve told you so far happened more than twenty years ago. After Stevie died, I swore she was gone for good. No clothes. No makeup. No secret stashes. Nothing.

For a while I ended up in Altrincham, living with my best friend’s brother, which was about as much fun as it sounds. His wife had divorced him, hacked down all the palm trees in his garden, and left him with nothing. He had a house with no furniture, I had furniture and no house, so it should have been a match made in heaven. It wasn’t. He was a psychopath. He stole a third of my belongings, tried to poison me, and years later I opened the Daily Mail to read that he’d stabbed his partner fifty-one times. I had warned her back then. Told her he was strange. She didn’t listen.

That was the sort of backdrop I was living in. Oasis were at their peak, Knebworth was happening, I went and came home in the back of an old Ford Granada that looked like it had rolled straight off The Sweeney. The two blokes who drove it looked like they’d fallen out of the Stone Roses. Meanwhile, I was sat up late at night teaching myself to code for this new thing called the internet. And it paid off. Within a year I was picked up by a company in London and found myself working for NatWest, building their first intranet mortgage system.

The truth was, because it was all brand new, you didn’t need to be brilliant, you just needed to be there. So I told myself I was brilliant. A successful software engineer. Stevie was a glitch in my past, nothing more.

I pressed into Steve hard. Bought suits from the Big and Tall shop because, yes, I was getting fat. I told myself I was living the dream: glossy flats, big contracts, Canary Wharf one month, Angel, Islington the next. At twenty-nine I walked past Watches of Switzerland, saw a Rolex Submariner in the window and bought it on impulse. Fifteen to eighteen grand in today’s money. That was how I tried to fill the void.

I did try Stevie once more, though. One afternoon after drinking, I impulsively bought some women’s clothes, put them on, and looked in the mirror. By then I’d ballooned in weight. The clothes were cheap, badly cut, and I looked dreadful. I’m vain enough to admit it — I didn’t want to be a bad-looking Stevie. It felt pathetic. A fat man in a dress. That was the last attempt.

So I doubled down on the new story of Steve. Football became part of it. I tried to care. I even learned some stats, memorised appearances and scores, so I could bluff it in the pub. But when someone cheered a “brilliant pass” I had no idea what they were on about. I just smiled along like I did.

Football gave me three things. First, a faint thread back to my father, who had taken me to the odd game at Anfield as a boy. Second, it made me feel like I was doing something normal, something male. And third, the same group of lads travelled abroad for matches, so I got a little sense of belonging. But truthfully, it was never me.

And through it all I was desperately alone. I didn’t sleep around, didn’t do one-night stands. I wanted what I’ve always wanted: intimacy. To be close to a woman. To hug, kiss, tell her everything. But women weren’t interested in me. Not then. I was fat, badly dressed, sweating in awful suits from the fat man’s shop. I looked appalling.

The years blurred together. Money, contracts, glossy flats, Rolexes, football trips, endless drinking. But it was all surface. Beneath it, I was just a fat man in a suit, pretending to be someone. No Stevie, no real Steve either, just this grieving man in the middle, waiting for something to change.

And eventually, it did. That is how Sarah found me.