Jogging Memories Ch. 08

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Richard was just getting settled in his hotel room, unpacking the few clothes that Emma had thrown onto the frosty lawn from their bedroom window, when his mobile phone rang. He recognised the number, it was that silly young Cheryl tart from the petrol station. She was the last person he wanted to speak to just then. He'd used her arse for recreational purposes over the last couple of weeks, but there was no spark or excitement in it, and the fling had run its natural course. So he let it ring.

However, after twenty minutes of constant redialling and ringing, Richard decided to pick it up.

"What d'yer want, Cheryl? I'm busy."

"It's not what I want Rich, sweetheart, it's what my Dad'll want when he finds out you put me up the duff."

"What do you mean 'Up the duff', you're crazy girl!"

"Pregnant, you prawn, we're going to have a little half-white, half-black baby, Rich, and my redneck Dad'll want yer to pay for it. Especially as you're married and therefore up to your scrawny old neck in shit street."

"So," Richard laughed, "How do you figure that happened, then?"

"Sex, you know, Rich. We had bareback sex five, or were it six times? That's how baby's happen, like."

"We've only been seeing each other two or three weeks, Cheryl, so it's a bit early to tell, isn't it? Besides," Richard pointed out, "You clearly told me that you was on the pill."

"So I lied, sweetheart."

"So why...?" Richard started, while his brain whirred, "Ah, I bet you have a black boyfriend, don't you, Cheryl, my sweetheart?"

"So ..." she hesitated, sounding less sure of herself in the face of Richard's confident banter, "What ... what if I have?"

"Surely you've heard about DNA, girl?" Richard laughed, "All it needs is a blood test and I'm in the clear."

"Yeah, well," she retorted, "My old man don't know nuthink about scienty things, he's a night club bouncer an' he knows where you work, I got the name off the side of your pick-up truck."

"You know this isn't gonna work out well for you, Cheryl," Richard thought he would nip this in the bud, "Besides what happens to me, eventually once the sprog's born and the blood tests come in, your boyfriend's not going to be happy that you've been screwing somebody else, will he?"

"It was his idea, actually," Cheryl said haltingly, "So you get duffed up and then when my boyfriend steps in to start courting me, even though I'm carrying someone else's baby, Sanjay would look like a hero-"

"Goodbye, Cheryl." Richard hung up.

Damn! Richard thought, now I've got to watch out when I go to work, and when I come off work at the end of the day. I might have to make arrangements to drive directly to individual jobs. Bugger, he thought, that was the whole point of getting the vasectomy in the first place, to avoid all this baby shit. Emma was the perfect wife for me, reasonably pretty, but quiet, placid, docile. We could have a nice life, a little house with just room for two, no bloody kids, two or three nice holidays a year, and plenty of opportunities to have a few flings that she'd never know nothing about. Emma thought it was so sweet that I suggested we abstain from sex for a couple of weeks before the wedding. I had to do something to stop her finding out exactly why while the swelling from the gonad op went down. When I heard she had the miscarriage on that boat trip, I hauled that clinic over the coals and had myself regularly checked until I was sure I was safe. Yeah, Richard thought, I had the perfect life with Emma and all the pussy I wanted. I just shouldn't have played about quite so close to home...

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Tommy was up for parole under the early release scheme after nearly two and a half years, when a certain Chief Superintendent Haroldson, accompanied by his Detective Sergeant wife Rachel, spoke up for him as character witnesses, which helped in some way to secure the early release.

Tommy had had a long time to think about what had happened to him all those years before. He had been a bit of a tearaway as a youth, stealing cars and joyriding was an occasional pastime for him and a select few of his friends, usual fuelled by drink, or to get home after a party and save the cab fare. Tommy was never caught, so he never had a criminal record. Gradually the other youths grew out of it as they settled down to the responsibilities of married life, but not Tommy. Although he was the first of his friends to be married, he was the last one willing to give up his juvenile ways.

He fully accepted the mess he had made of his own life, that of the rest of his families and the poor innocent girl who died through his actions.

That fateful night when he walked to the shops for a pint of milk and a packet of cigarettes, and casually, almost habitually, trying all the door handles of parked cars along the way, before he found one that was open, an old but powerful Jaguar saloon. The temptation was just too great for him to resist.

Just a twenty-minute ride about, Tommy thought, drop the Jaguar off near the shops, get the shopping and then walk back home. Sally wouldn't even know. Rewiring the ignition, it was like he'd never been away. The ride was superb but then, completely out of nowhere, a blue light started chasing him. He soon lost it but the incident took him a long way away from home.

He parked up by the cemetery, the one on the top of the hill. As soon as he got out of the car he heard the siren before he saw the lights. If they found the car with a warm engine they would know he had scooted through the cemetery and, with their radios, they could get a unit to cover his escape at the other side. Although there was a climbable wall on this side, bordered by residential properties, there were high railings at the other end next to the shops and main road and they'd catch him easily as he would have to leave by one of the two gates. He would have to run all the way in the darkened cemetery to stand any chance of getting away. The gates at the bottom, won't have been locked this early in the evening.

As Tommy climbed the ancient crumbling wall, a loose brick fell away. He stopped. The brick had given him an idea. The Jag was an automatic, with the car in drive and the brick on the gas pedal, it would drift slowly down the hill and because of the camber probably hit a lamppost somewhere, no more than halfway down, but in the confusion generated he'd easily get through the cemetery before they could block his escape route.

Tommy restarted the car, steered it into the middle of the road and, holding onto the handbrake with the brick revving the engine, he put the lever in drive mode and released the handbrake. The car moved off slowly enough for him to slam the door shut. The car reached the crest of the hill, before disappearing from his view over the top. As he climbed the wall, the pursuing police car roared up the hill.

Tommy leaped from the top of the wall into the darkness, the wet grassy ground made him slip and he rolled down the slope, hitting trees and gravestones with glancing blows until hitting one which stopped and winded him. He was out of it, unsure for how long, probably for no more than a few minutes. He was wet through and cold. It was raining hard. He got up and checked his surroundings. He hadn't rolled far, maybe twenty to thirty feet from the wall. He gingerly made his way down the hill towards the gates, trying to stick to the gravel paths. Soon, he could hear sirens, lots of them, and then see flashing lights.

He followed the gravel paths down the hill inside the cemetery, down to a set of gates at the bottom by the traffic lights on the crossroads. The gates were locked. He was able to look through the railings, though and there was mayhem everywhere. The Jaguar he had stolen had somehow made it all the way down to the traffic lights. It was on its roof. Several cars were littered around the crossroads as badly damaged wrecks. The police were cordoning off the area with tape, one of them approaching the gate. Tommy stepped back into the shadows, unseen. The copper tied off the end of the tape on the gate railing and departed back the way he came. Tommy stepped forward again to the railings to see what damage he had caused. There was a girl laying on the pedestrian crossing, several ambulance men around her. Other ambulances were also arriving on scene. There was a fire truck, the firemen cutting the roof off one of the cars in a cascade of orange sparks.

Tommy was frozen to the spot. The enormity of what he had done, ruined someone's life, probably more than one person. Ruined his own life, too, as well as that of Sally, his parents, her parents. He had made a complete mess of his life by this one stupid wanton act, something he did for a few minutes of fun. He wanted the ground to open up, a grave to swallow him down into the hell that he deserved.

He watched fascinated until the end. The girl, her face covered by a blanket, was eventually stretchered away, along with the walking wounded. He counted them one by one, each of them engraved on his troubled mind. Altogether seven people were taken away in five ambulances, with two fire trucks, and six or seven policemen in attendance. When it was over and the place went quiet some four or five hours later, he sat in the shadow by the wall and cried silently to himself until he fell asleep.

It was cold and still raining hard when he awoke at dawn. Tommy was soaked through and shivering. The police were back at the scene of the accident in force at first light, combing the road surface for clues. They didn't notice Tommy, as the gatekeeper unlocked the gates. Tommy walked down through the cemetery towards the gates at the opposite end to the crossroads. He didn't want to go through the scene of his crime.

Tommy knew what he had to do. He had to get away from Nottingham, away from his wife and family. If he had to live with the guilt at all, he couldn't live with saddling them with the stigma of his crime, whether he owned up to it or not, they would suffer. He couldn't even face them this once, let alone day in and day out, it would eat him up alive. Better to make a clean break, he thought. He had enough shopping money in his pocket to get a bus ticket to another town. But then he thought if he was still Tommy Barlow, wouldn't they be able to track him down easily? Then they would want to know why he ran, then it would all come out.

He needed a different name, a new identity. Just then he passed a brand-new headstone, so fresh that it stood out from all the rest, it must've only just been erected. He read the crisp inscription chiselled into the shiny marble: "Robert Neil Morris, born Nottingham 30/11/1958, the only beloved son of Gerald and Christina Morris, died 14/3/1980, age 21 years. Rest in Peace."

He decided that Tommy Barlow was now dead. He deserved to die for what he had done. It was a rebirth for Bob Morris, a man who would respect others and, in turn, earn the right to be respected.

He pulled Sally's shopping list out of his pocket and scribbled down every detail of the inscription onto the back of it. Somehow he made it to the bus station and took the first coach out, all the way down to London. After he bought his ticket and while he was waiting for the coach to depart on schedule, he looked up Gerald Morris in the phone book on a public call box. There was only one in the parish close to the cemetery. He added that address to his shopping list. Surely he could get lost down in London, find some kind of work, somewhere to sleep. Exist, hardly a life but then, he thought, he had no entitlement to a life of any value. The incident had sucked all the joy out of him.

Tommy slept in a shop doorway that first night, in Regent Street of all places. He only knew it even existed from the Monopoly board game he used to play as a boy. The Salvation Army brought around cups of hot soup during the night. Unshaven and dishevelled, his clothes close to ruined, Tommy looked like a derelict and blended in with the rest of the queue. He asked the volunteers if they knew where he could find work. Someone told him the name of a church hall where he could enquire for temporary employment. He queued up at that hall at first light with a number of other young men. There was plenty of casual work, it appeared, if you knew who to ask.

A volunteer at the church hall was very helpful. 'Bob', as he now called himself, told the volunteer that he had been robbed of everything while he had slept on the streets, drivers' licence, wallet, everything. Fortunately, Bob lied to the volunteer as if he was born to it, he added the good news that he didn't have a credit card to steal. No problem, offered the volunteer, this happens all the time to people on the road. He took down Bob's details and said he would take care of it all for him.

In the meantime, the volunteer arranged a bed for the night and a day's work with a team of builders renovating a Georgian building, where he helped to mix plaster for the skilled plasterers and modellers. He was paid cash in hand at the end of the day, which the church hall kept in their safe for him. The next day he was carrying bricks, the day after that he got half a day digging a flooded ditch. At the church hall, he was provided with some worn but clean change of clothes. Sunday, after church, he helped wash down graffiti off a tiled wall in a road underpass, for which he received double pay.

On the Monday, after another day at the Georgian renovation, when he was painting walls and ceilings with magnolia silk paint all day, the volunteer had some good news for him. Handed to him was a duplicate National Insurance card in his adopted name and an address for a cheap lodging house. He took his money out of the safe and booked a room at the lodging house for a couple of weeks. With his bundle of cash Bob opened a new Post Office savings account in the name of Robert Morris and deposited the money he had saved.

By the end of the week he had a permanent job at an engineering shop underneath some railway arches near Paddington station. He was somewhat amused that he seemed to be living his life on a Monopoly board; he would find a top hat and a dog next, he thought, with the first smile he had allowed himself for a week. He was back working with lathes. It felt good to be doing something that used his skills rather than simply labouring. The money was good too, much better than he had earned in Nottingham, and the company were pleased with his work and asked few questions of him.

As Bob, he needed a birth certificate, the girl in the office said, and told him where he could send off for a duplicate, which came in within ten days. He did the same thing with Bob Morris's driving licence, a valid copy of which duly arrived in the post with his new address without any problem. For the hell of it, he applied for a passport while he was on a roll, his new foreman more than happy to lie on the form that he had known Bob for over two years. The girl in the office then said he needed a bank account, as the company were switching over from weekly cash pay to monthly cheques in a couple of months. Tommy took his cash and valid identification papers down to the bank and he opened up his first bank account.

It was as easy as that. He was no longer Tommy Barlow, but Bob Morris.

When he collected his seventh week's wage, there was an additional cheque inside for several hundred pounds. He queried it with the office, the helpful girl informed him that the tax office had changed his tax code from the emergency one he started with and discovered that he had overpaid his tax in a previous financial year. Therefore he was entitled to a rebate, which was too much to pay him in cash.

He stayed at the firm for six months until he heard that one of his colleagues was moving to Germany. An engineering company over there had recently expanded and were looking for skilled engineers. They were paying a comparative fortune, way over the odds, to anyone who could prove they could do the job. There was nothing keeping him in England any more except loneliness and heartache, so he followed his friend and worked for five years in Germany, cheaply renting a flat with other engineers.

When he returned to England he secured a job back in the Midlands in Buxton and, on checking the prices of houses in the area, found he had saved enough for a substantial deposit for a three-bedroom house. Once the house had been secured on a mortgage, he furnished the place simply and advertised for a couple of lodgers, the income from whom paid the mortgage. He could therefore afford to pay off the original loan at more than double the rate, which significantly cut down the amount of interest he was paying and the length of time to pay it all off.

In seven years, by the time he fell in love with and, as Bob Morris, as he was happy to be called, married Jennifer Diplake, he had paid off the mortgage completely. When Jennifer was carrying their third child, Tigger, six years later, they traded up to a four-bedroom house in a very nice part of the town, with an affordable mortgage.

He had always been aware of Jennifer's first affair with his supposed friend Richard on the cruise in which they were supposed to have been having their second honeymoon. Bob rarely drank alcohol, and he had poured most of his drink away without anyone realising, so he only consumed a fraction of the roofie he had been administered by Richard, which only knocked him out for a half an hour or so.

He came round, finding himself naked and in bed with the equally naked Emma, Jennifer's best friend. He couldn't wake the woman up and, as he tried to clear his hazy mind, he recalled that neither of them appeared to have drunk very much. Emma had quietly told him earlier that she and Richard were trying for a baby, so she was sticking to soft drinks throughout the evening, other than the one round that Richard had got in.

Bob quickly surmised from this that they had been drugged. Listening at the interconnecting door between their two cabins revealed the sound of lovemaking between Richard and Jennifer from his cabin. That confirmed the reason for the knockout drug.

He lay back on the bed in Emma's cabin carefully considering his options. Leaving Jennifer would mean leaving the kids, who were now his life. Later, he heard them getting up and come through to the cabin where he and Emma were in bed.

So Bob pretended to still be dead to the world as they manhandled him back into his original cabin, Jennifer all the while wailing to Richard how the whole thing was a big mistake.

This had the effect of putting a damper on the rest of the cruise, Bob pretending to be unwell, which caused him to withdraw from any enthusiastic enjoyment of the remainder of the cruise. Jennifer assumed that he was suffering after-effects of the drug. Emma was also very ill, which substantiated Bob's reaction.

Many months later he heard from Jennifer that Emma had miscarried during the cruise, which understandably depressed Jennifer for some time after she discovered the fact.

Bob kept close to Richard after the cruise. He regarded the odious creep as his enemy, whilst meeting him for drinks regularly, monitoring anything that was happening between his wife and Richard.

Bob worked hard to get himself fitter, realising that he had become flabby during those first ten years of his marriage. He was in his mid-forties, his wife of ten years just thirty years old. He decided that the reason for her straying was to a large extent his own fault. Perhaps it was unfair to place all of the blame on her. He took up jogging, just around the local park to start with, then running further afield; even jogging to and from work once he was up to speed. He concentrated on his life with the children, encouraging their interests and becoming more and more involved with them, including activities at the school.