CHAPTER 1
‘Bugger…’
I swear angrily and stare impotently at my right hand.
Blood is dripping from the index finger at an alarming rate. It is trailing down the finger like a glistening worm-sized snake.
I look firstly at my hand and then to the pair of trousers I am holding in my left hand. And then back again. I repeat this like a crazed spectator watching a miniature tennis game with no players until I realise I am becoming slowly hypnotised by the movement and the track of blood moving languidly down my hand.
I focus on the trousers instead.
The price tag on the trousers is still resolutely and mockingly in place; its Kevlar reinforced plastic connector now slightly smeared with red where the laws of science decided that my skin would split more easily than the substance making up the tag.
I swear again, even louder, and shake my head. It makes little difference to the situation but I feel satisfied that a point has been well made.
I am sitting on the floor wearing black underpants and a white shirt. A pair of black socks is on the sofa to my right ready to be put on once the valiant Trouser Battle is finished.
I realise with some alarm that there is a high risk that my shirt may soon resemble a blood-splattered Jackson Pollock artwork if I do not sort out the blood-snake that has now divided itself into a scarlet lightening fork of advancing blood where my index finger and thumb meet.
I throw the trousers on to the sofa, keeping my right hand as still as I can. I stand up and move over to the kitchen sink. As I run cold tap water over my hand and watch the blood disappear down the plug like paint from a laden brush, I realise that I have a truly ominous feeling in the pit of my stomach about tonight.
And in my experience of life so far, I have found that a truly ominous feeling in the pit of my stomach is often followed by a reality that is much worse than I could ever have imagined.
Which is not the happiest of thoughts.


CHAPTER 2
So.
Who am I and what am I?
To neatly sum it up, my name is Simon. I am forty one and very nearly, just a little bit, off being divorced. I live in a one bedroom cottage bought from the estate of the Right Honourable Lord Aubrey Mutchdone.
His Lordship is currently serving seven dishonourable years at Her Majesty’s pleasure for shooting a hunt protester with a twelve bore shot gun. There is a story there, but it is better left until another time.
*
Karen, who is very nearly just a little bit off being my ex-wife, still lives in the four-bedroom well appointed modern dwelling that was for the last eight years known as the family home.
I moved out six months ago, three weeks after Karen informed me, in one of the few dialogues we shared after nineteen years of mostly soulless and dutiful marriage, that she had been having an affair for eight months with the twenty two year old son of the caretaker at our local school.
The young man was called Harry. He was tall, with black hair greased and slicked into some passably realistic stud look. He was slim built with muscles that were far too clearly and annoyingly defined beneath the tight, fitted tee-shirts he wore.
He’s just so gorgeous were Karen’s somewhat sickeningly dreamy words during one of our arguments on the subject.
It was mostly my fault of course.
Karen had put me right on that one using a potent mixture of invective and finger pointing. Her argument was fiercely logical.
1. She had asked me to sort the garden out. In fact, she had repeatedly asked me to sort the garden out.
2. And it was so bloody typical of me that I had not carried out her bidding. Yet another one of my many failings apparently.
3. So she’d advertised in the parish magazine for a gardener and from that had found Harry.
4. And everything else that followed could, of course, be inextricably linked to my failings in the first 3 points.
5. QED – or some other pretentious Latin acronym.
Of course Harry had actually ended up sowing his seeds far more regularly than the advert, or any subsequent discussions on herbaceous borders and lawn feed had realistically required.
He had ploughed my wife’s furrow with apparent and repeated relish…
*
Harry didn’t live in the four-bedroom well appointed modern dwelling that was for the last eight years known as the family home. That would never do.
I suspect that Karen realised, with panicked alacrity, that Elspeth, our somewhat attractive seventeen year old daughter, was in fact much closer to Harry’s age and may have provided Harry with ample temptation to turn his amorous seed sowing attentions from mother to daughter.
That would never do either.
Certainly not for Karen who had so recently spent a small fortune of my hard-earned money on a succession of botox injections, facial treatments and expensive creams to prevent her skin looking perfectly natural for its age.
But, of course, over and above the carnal allure of Elspeth, there were also the neighbours to think about.
And the friends and acquaintances we had made in the village.
Separation and divorce were ok -
- these things happen -
- at least this way you can both stay friends -
- it’ll probably be for the best -
- blah-de-blah-de-bloody-blah-de-blah -
– but shagging a young man eighteen years younger than you was most certainly NOT socially acceptable.
Not in our village anyway.
Karen bitterly informed me that if you were a man you could just about get away with that kind of thing. As long as you were shagging a young woman eighteen years younger, and that the mathematics of subtracting eighteen from your own age didn’t leave you as a fully fledged child molester.
But not a woman.
A woman couldn’t get away with it. And for some unfathomable reason, I think she blamed me for that.
So Harry didn’t live with Karen and had instead become a sex tourist at the village resort that had been known, for the last eight years, as the family home.
*
‘Is this going to carry on?’ I had asked a day or two after she’d dropped her bombshell.
‘What do you mean?’ Karen had replied, adopting her oft-used tactic of answering a question with a meaningless and unhelpful question of her own.
‘Are you going to keep shagging your toy-boy lover?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘You’re my bloody wife…’
‘What does that mean these days anyway?’
‘It means we got married and swapped vows and all that.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
I paused at that point. ‘Are you ever going to actually answer a question?’
‘Why should I?’
‘Do you want a divorce?’
‘Do you?’
‘Fucking hell!’
‘Do you have to swear so much?’
‘Did you have to shag the gardener?’
‘Did you do anything to stop me?’
The discussion, as much as it could be called one, it was more a dialogue of meandering and meaningless questions, continued on and off for three long days before I packed a suitcase, walked out down the front path of the house that was for the last eight years known as the family home, rented a pokey flat in town as a temporary stopgap and moved into my new just-separated-life on a wet and windy weekend in November.
Two months later, I had bought Mutchdone’s cottage as a more permanent stopgap, and a week later I had bought a whole new set of make-them-yourself furnishings for what is now known as the forty-one-and-very-nearly-just-a-little-bit-off-being-divorced-man’s home
Four months later the furniture is nearly stable and no stay-fast connectors have fallen out for at least a fortnight.
Home sweet home.
*