Alexander

Maybe I’m slowly becoming a man who believes in mumbo jumbo.

The dog I rescued from certain doom is the one who saved me from mine.

The girl whose eyes I stared into as I thought she’d died in my arms, is the very girl who stares into mine as I really do die in hers less than twenty-four hours later.

And what a twenty-four hours they turned out to be.

But maybe the biggest irony of all is that it’s the same gormless photographer I told to fuck off a few hours earlier that captures the pictures needed to identify my shooter.

It’s the story Ronald pissing Robertson runs in his shitty tabloid that sees the authorities locate my cunt of a hitman and take him in for questioning.

Apparently his arm needed over thirty stitches. He’ll probably never regain the use of his fingers, which is just as well considering he needs them to pull the fucking trigger.

I don’t think he’ll be pulling another one anytime soon.

I assumed he’d get away with it, of course. After all, my father’s a better puppet master than I’ll ever be.

But not this time. This time the puppet master chose the wrong puppet. This time he rushed the job and paid on the cheap. A fool’s error most certainly, and one that makes me smile every time I ponder it.

I waited a long time for that filthy old bastard to ever make a mistake.

The piece of shit he got to take a shot at me on my doorstep was an amateur at best.

He was more than happy to blab the details of my father and all his cunting associates in exchange for a shorter sentence, and I was more than happy to fill in the blanks.

That’s how I came to stand on the other side of the witness box for once in my life, watching my father tried for attempted murder.

That’s how Melissa, Dean, Joe and I got taken into witness protection and shipped away to a nice little town on the Welsh coast a million miles from bloody anywhere.

And that’s how Melissa and I ended up as Mr Ted and Mrs Amy Brown. Just regular folk going about their regular business, with a regular kid and a dog, and my friendly nephew Danny hanging around.

Melissa really did end up as a Mrs, too.

I married her in hospital the very next day after my operation, just in case my father came back for round two.

She bought me orchids for my room, and a cupcake too.

And a crystal.

The crystal.

She fished out her lucky quartz from behind the shelving at mine and handed it right back as we said our vows.

I’ll never throw it away again.

I’ll never throw her away again, either.

My boys are coming to visit next weekend.

It’s been three months since my father was convicted, and I think the coast is as clear as it’ll ever be.

I grind the beans for the coffee machine as Dean heads back from the beach with Joe. I watch them up the path as Brutus pads along behind, and I can’t stop smiling, knowing that my beautiful wife is due home any minute.

From college.

My beautiful wife Amy is studying law at college.

She wants to be a lawyer one day, who’d have thought it? It seems not everything was for my benefit. Far from it.

She wants to be a legal aid lawyer at that. Good deeds for those who can’t afford decent representation.

I’m proud of her.

And me?

Well, I think I’m going to take it easy awhile.

I’ve got a whole collection of gemstones to start over, and a wife who actually wants me at night.

I’ve got a family in Joseph and Dean.

I’ve got my boys heading over for football practice this weekend – I’ve even set them up a pitch in the garden.

And I’ve got my vicious, unlovable, untrainable dog, who’s not nearly so vicious these days.

That’s more than enough strings to keep me occupied.

And when it’s not, I choke my wife’s throat until she taps out, and she does tap out these days.

When the nights draw in, and Joe’s tucked up quiet in bed, I fuck Dean’s tight little ass until he bleeds for me.

And sometimes, occasionally, when I’m feeling particularly like my old cunt of a self, I’ll pretend I want to watch them fuck each other, just to check I can still make them squirm.

They didn’t call me the puppet master for nothing.