Judgement on a Life , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Stephen Baddeley

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150 pages

English

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A Judgement on a Life is the continuing tale of Tom, Annie and Ambrosia and the twins the three of them made. It is the story of their happy times together. It is the story of their continued fear and hatred of Sir Peter, and the story of Sir Peter's hatred for Tom, his obsession with Tom's 'Melancholy' and his love for Tom's dead mother. It is the sad story of how Sir Peter took Annie away from Tom, and of how he took his daughters too, of how Ambrosia was shot, crippled, and lost Tom's baby, of how Mr. Monroe, Tom's protector, was killed, and of how his sons resolved to avenge him.It is the story of three damaged men, of their meeting, of their friendship, of their hatred for Sir Peter, and their love for those they lost. It is the story of their revenge.It is the story of the plans they made, and the story of how not everything went right. It is the story, most of all, of how everything went wrong. But they did get the girls back. But they didn't get Annie back, and Sir Peter was still alive. The story wasn't ended.

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	20 août 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838599904
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Copyright © 2019 Stephen Baddeley

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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For Rebecca.
Contents
Prologue

Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three

Part Two
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Prologue
It was agreed. My voice started the first book. You may know that. So, it was agreed, it was reasonable, Annie’s should start this book. Then I had doubts. That’s what this Prologue is about.
This is not a happy book. You should be warned about that. Warned before you start it. Then you may not want to. Then you may decide not to.
There are people in this book you may already know. Some you may already like. If this is the first time you meet them, I hope you grow to like the likeable ones. The things that are going to happen to the people you may already like, or may come to like, are not nice things to happen to anyone. What is also a ‘not nice thing’ about this book is that, some of the ‘not nice things’ that happen, are permanent things. The nice people who have those ‘not nice things’ happen to them, will never recover from them.
There are unpleasant people, bad people, in this book. You may know them already. I said at the end of the last book that the bad people would get their comeuppance one day. But sadly, life doesn’t work that way, and bad people don’t always get the comeuppance they deserve. But they do, ‘sort of’, in a funny sort of way. That’s the reality of life. We all know that. Good luck.

Part One
One
I lived, once, with my husband and two daughters in a house on low cliffs overlooking the Arafura Sea. The girls looked like me, but were more like him, in so many ways.
We were happy then.
We weren’t always happy before then. We wouldn’t always be happy after then.

That’s what this story is about, I suppose. Only happiness, mixed with sadness, makes a story worth telling and worth reading, I suppose. So this is a story about sad times, that came after happy times, that were the first happy times Tommy ever knew. But they weren’t happy times for me, not at the start. If you’ve read the first book you may know that already. If you haven’t, you’ll pick it up as we go along.

Now, back to the present. Well, not the present present, but the present in the past, telling it as it is, when really we’re telling it as it was. All of us, telling it as it is, when really we’re telling it as it was. Telling about that time in the past when the good things were happening, and before the bad things started happening again.
Two
A lot of this story is about us, about me, my name’s Tom, about Annie, Ambrosia and the girls. About other people too.
This story is about the things that happened to us. About the good things that happened to us. Then about the bad things that happened to us. After we thought the bad things that happened, before, were the last bad things that were ever going to happen, to any of us.

I didn’t expect the bad things, that were about to happen, to happen. That was because I didn’t think they were going to happen.
All of our lives are full of things that happen that we don’t think will happen, or when we think they might. They happen like that all the time. Things in my childhood happened like that. Things in my future were going to happen like that. Things in all our futures were going to happen like that. That’s what this story is about.

We don’t have control over what happens in our lives, over how what happens happens, or over when what happens happens. We all know that. Maybe we don’t know that as children, but we soon find out.

When we won. When Karlsberg hanged himself. When the truth came out. When I didn’t go to jail. When Prouse escaped. When Ambrosia was my friend. When no one knew where Annie was. When I didn’t care where Annie was. When I didn’t care what happened to her. Then, when we found her crucified and mutilated. Then, when we saved her. Then, when, even after we saved her, I still didn’t care for her. Then, when Ambrosia talked to me. Then, when Pip talked to me. Then, because of all the things they said to me, I realised I did care for her, still cared for her, always cared for her. That I just forgot that I did. That I just pretended that I didn’t. That I remembered just in time.
It was then that I thought we were safe. It was then that I thought it was over. But…
The ‘But…’ was a voice that spoke to me from my deep twilight places. It was my other self who spoke. The self who glowed in the dark. The self I didn’t like. The dark, mean, nasty, ugly and horrible self that no one could like. The self who screamed out for vengeance. I didn’t tell Annie about that voice.
From deep inside me, another voice spoke and told me it wasn’t over. Told me that things were just beginning and that the bad times we survived were just the start of the really bad times that were to come. I ignored that voice. The more I ignored it, the louder it spoke. I didn’t tell Annie about that voice either.
Three
We still have Henry and Maggie, Tommy’s cocker-spaniels, and now we have five chickens. One of them has stopped laying, but we don’t know which one. The chickens don’t come into the story again, so I’m not sure why I mention them.
You may know that I’m older than him, almost ten years, so, perhaps he keeps me young. Perhaps I make him old, but I don’t think I do, and I certainly hope I don’t. He was just a boy when I met him, and he still seems so young.
You may know that our first year was a difficult time, but that it all worked out in the end. I fell in love with him, but didn’t notice that I had. It just snuck up on me, and then exploded in my face. I did him a lot of damage before the explosion happened and I thought he might never recover from it, but he seems to have. He seems to be back to the soft, gentle Tommy he was before I hurt him. I made him hard, brutal and uncaring, but that all went away, thank God.

I’m not religious. Atheists, like me, say ‘thank God’ even though we don’t mean it. We don’t mean a lot of the things we say. You don’t either.
We say ‘bless you’, when people sneeze, but we don’t know how to ‘bless’ and even if we did, we wouldn’t bother.
We say ‘see you later’, to people we know we won’t, and sometimes to people we hope we won’t.
We say ‘how do you do?’, to people we hope won’t tell us, because we’re not in the slightest bit interested.
Does that say something about me, about us, most of us, all of us? I think it might.
But it doesn’t say things about Tommy, because when Tommy says ‘how do you do?’, he means it. He likes to know ‘how people do’, because he’s interested in ‘how people do’. I think it’s because he spent so much of his early life alone. There was only Mother, and when Mother died he imploded, exploded inwards. He shrank away from the little bits of normality he’d managed to scrape together. He was nineteen when she died and had never had a friend, of either sex. He hated his father and his brother and he had good reason to do that. They died too, and that had to be a good thing.
After we first met, and in our first few weeks together, the one good thing I did for him, among all the nasty things I did to him, was to show him that he could meet people and that he cou