All at Sea

The police visited of course, but I had a watertight alibi, having never left the ship that I'd spent the evening on visiting some old friends of mine, and you can't get much more watertight than a ship, can you.

I was no longer sure that I much liked the person I'd become, but I was on a mission and that's all that seemed to count. I couldn't face dating, but for the first time in my life, paid several women to scratch an itch that needed dealing with, but was always left feeling somehow unsatisfied, wanting the women to get out as soon as possible afterwards.

My life was on hold it seemed and I had no idea how long it would be so. I knew I needed to change my life, so I took up the option of going back to sea, one that by then, most of the other people in my office breathed a sigh of relief about.

The other thing that I didn't need a psychologist to tell me was that I had to lose my obsession about making Blowers pay. It was ruining my life and I had to get over it. I hated the bastard, but that hate was destroying my life, more than it was his.

Stupid eh!

Easy.

Back to sea and all would be well, but of course it didn't work out that way, did it.

It was a few days before I was due to embark, off on my way to Kuwait for the fourth time that year, when it happened. Purely by chance, when walking down the street I virtually bumped into ...... Him!

"You bastard," he growled, stood there, just three feet between us.

"Get lost," I threw back at him, backing off as he advanced on me.

"You're going to pay Fielding," he threatened, and suddenly all my good intentions disappeared as if by magic.

I had him.

I had him where I wanted him and he had no idea.

I had him, and I was going to take the absolute best advantage of it.

He took a swing at me, and I ducked somewhat clumsily, checking around to make sure that that there were plenty of witnesses around us to confirm what was happening. That it was him making an unprovoked attack on me.

He aimed another badly aimed punch at me, and this time I allowed his fist to graze my chin, exaggerating the effect by staggering back wards, my boxing days, limited though they were, coming back to me. Again he leapt forward at me, another swing catching me somewhat unprepared and snapping my head back.

Fuck, that one hurt!

Almost automatically, I released a straight left into his face, feeling something break under my fist, followed by a right aimed at his unprotected chin as he staggered back.

I missed!

I aimed too low and missed his chin by a good few inches.

I missed his chin and smacked right into his throat, feeling his Adam's apple crush under the force of my punch.

He crumpled.

I moved in to beat the hell out of him, but he crumpled into a heap before me, clutching at his throat and coughing awfully. I lined up to give him a kick where it would hurt most, but stopped, breathed in deeply and stepped back from him.

He wasn't worth it.

Not while there were so many witnesses around to recount what had happened. Now it was my turn.

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An hour later I was in the local police station, swearing out a complaint with the names and addresses of five people who had witnessed his unprovoked attack on me.

He was going down!

This time it was bloody Blowers who was stood there in the dock, and me in the witness stand. It was a lower court with just a magistrate rather than a judge, mainly because neither of us had ended up in hospital. I'd sort of hoped for a life sentence with hard labour, chained up in a dungeon in the Tower of London, but had to settle for a three month suspended sentence. Not really much of a surprise to be honest.

Might not seem much but it was somehow a salve to my anger, and even if it didn't make my hate disappear entirely, then my pressing need for revenge, at least receded.

I started to tell myself that though he had caused my wife to take her own life, then he hadn't meant it to end that way.

I even began to blame myself for not being there that night when she came home and so wasn't there for her to confess to.

The only thing I didn't query in my mind, was that none of this was Robyn's fault. Her memory was sacrosanct.

I wasn't doing this for him, but myself. I knew that my hate was consuming me and that if I was going to get on with my life and climb out of the bottomless pit that I was tumbling into, then I had to do something.

In desperation I even went as far as going to see a counsellor. Not one of your expensive, highly qualified, psycho shrink types in a fancy office, but just some pretty ordinary everyday guy with a lot of experience of life; a good listener, with some plain, sensible and sometimes bloody obvious advice to offer.

The main advice he offered me was that I couldn't simply hide my grief and hate away, but that I had to confront it.

In order to confront it, then I had to forgive Blowers!

If I couldn't then I would carry on being a very unhappy man, and my life wouldn't be worth living. Till I got rid of the hate, then I wouldn't be able to go through the grieving period, as I has to.

He suggested, and I took on board, that in order for it to work, my forgiveness had to be known to Blowers, and the best way to do that was to confront him and forgive him to his face.

Not easy I know, but this counsellor fellow was pretty convincing and it was perhaps the only way forward, as unpalatable as it might be.

So that's what I did and it did work perfectly, one hundred percent you might say. The point is though, that it didn't work out quite in the manner that the counsellor thought it would.

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It took me three days to track him down, his second agency having failed when his licence was revoked now that he had a criminal record. I discovered him working in an office for some car insurance specialist, filling in claim forms or whatever. He didn't want to meet up with me of course, but I convinced him otherwise, and I eventually got to meet him on neutral ground, in a local park. We sat either end of a secluded park bench, eyeing one another nervously, both wanting to get this meeting over and done with.

"So what's this meeting about Fielding?" He demanded.

"I forgive you," I blurted out, nearly choking on my words, but desperate to say my piece and disappear.

"What?" He spluttered in surprise.

"I forgive you," I repeated, the words even harder to say the second time. "I know what you did to my wife, but I forgive you."

"Why?"

"Because I need to in order to move on," I told him, though even as I spoke the words, suddenly I knew that this wasn't going to be the magic solution I was seeking. This just wasn't going to work.

"But I forced her," he smirked at me. "I bloody near on raped her that first time."

"I know," I forced myself to say, gripping the arms of the bench to prevent myself from assaulting him.

"Bugger me Fielding," he laughed out loud. "She wasn't even a good fuck."

Later, much later, I convinced myself that it was all his fault and that he'd really said the wrong thing at the wrong moment.

His words made me see red, and the original purpose of this meeting was forgotten.

I had a couple of cuts on my face afterwards so he must have made some effort to fight back, and I have vague memories of him begging for mercy. I can recall the satisfying feeling of my fist breaking something on his face for the second time since our conflict began, and of his screams as I kicked the bastard repeatedly.

I can't remember very much more; not even of walking away and leaving him there. I remained in a bit of a daze till that evening when I climbed up the gangway to my ship, outbound for Saudi Arabia.

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If I'd thought about it, then I should have been surprised that I even made it as far as the ship without being picked up by the police; but make it I did. Not only that, but I was never once interviewed or even contacted about Tom Blowers' murder.

Yes, that's right, you heard me correctly.

Blowers wasn't an important guy, but his murder made the headlines. Not because of him, but initially due to the man that they arrested for killing him. Mike Jones was his name, and if that name is familiar, then it's because he was a pretty well known local hoodlum, involved in all manner of minor and not so minor scams and crimes in the area.

What I didn't know, but what became clear, was that a certain Mrs. Jones worked at the insurance company in the same office as Blowers, and that he was up to his old tricks again and Mr. Jones took exception to it.

When I first heard the news onboard ship that night, that a body had been found in the park with a bullet wound in his head, then I assumed that the press had simply got it wrong again. When it became clear that they hadn't, then I was, to say the least, shocked.

The court case was a sensation.

Jones never denied shooting Blowers, and made it very clear exactly why the bastard deserved it. But the case was thrown into confusion when a medical expert claimed that Blowers was possibly already dead when Jones shot him, only to be disagreed with by another equally eminent gentleman of medical persuasion, who countered that such a claim couldn't be substantiated.

Jones, for his part, understanding that he could hardly be found guilty of murdering a man who was already dead, came up with the plausible story that he'd gone looking for Blowers and followed him into the park. When he'd found him lying senseless in a pool of blood by the park bench, then in anger, he'd put a bullet into his brain anyway. He also mentioned the 'other' man he'd seen walking away from the scene in a hurry, to my surprise, describing him as a 'swarthy, foreign looking geezer, of about five foot six and walking with a limp'. Since I'm just over six foot tall with a fair, almost ginger colouring, and had no problems with my mobility, then his claims were certainly food for thought.

Whether he'd made up the story about seeing someone, or it was simply his way of thanking me for doing his job for him by giving a false description, then I'd never know, but I sure was grateful.

It certainly muddied the waters as far as the court case was concerned, and the press had a field day speculating who the mysterious 'other' man was. Reports of sightings of the mysterious 'other' man, as he became known came from all over the country, and set off a controversy about the wisdom of allowing so many immigrants to settle here.

Meanwhile, Jones' charge was reduced from murder to manslaughter, and when this started to look dodgy as well, it seemed that the defence accepted the offer for him to plead guilty to aggravated assault and possession of an unauthorised weapon. He still got a nine-month sentence, but he could have been out in five if he behaved himself. Unfortunately for him, he didn't, but that is another story that had nothing to do with me.

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So that left me not knowing whether I'd killed Blowers or not, and that was fine with me. I'd sort of kept my promise to myself that I'd kill the bugger one day without feeling that I'd become a murderer. My lovely Robyn was avenged and my hate had no target left, and so, almost casually, disappeared.

As the counsellor had predicted, going to tell him of my forgiveness, had worked out perfectly, just not in the way he'd predicted.

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And me?

Well I stayed on the ships for a few years, and even got my master's mate's certificate. I wouldn't claim that I had a girl in every port during those years, but I did have a small but select list of telephone numbers of young ladies who were normally very pleased to see me. Eventually my services were again sought back on shore, and by the time I retired, I ended up as assistant director of operations, which pleased my wife, no end.

That's right, I found myself another special woman that I could give my love to, and with enough time for us to produce two lovely children. They became the centre of my universe, but even so, just occasionally, my mind would wander back to Robyn, and how things might have turned out so differently if her life hadn't been wasted so early. I couldn't help it, but couldn't deny that sometimes, just occasionally, in the privacy of my own mind, though I loved my new family, I still missed Robyn terribly, and deep down somewhere, always would.

The end, but really, this time.