5:

5:

Six months earlier . . .

Jim added kindling to the newspaper and reached for the logs he’d found round the side of the bungalow. It was his first night staying at the cemetery, and he wanted to take the late February chill off the place.

Once he’d built the fire and put a match to it he took the letter from Fiona out of his backpack. He scanned the handwritten pages, working himself up to the task at hand, picking out the key phrases, the ones that enraged him the most:

“This is your baby I’m carrying . . . ”

“ . . . I want you to stop acting like a child for once and be a man. You can’t keep running away from me forever . . . ”

“You can’t expect me to do this by myself. I need your support and so does your unborn child. I will get the CSA involved if I have to.”

Even the bright red ink she’d chosen seemed to shake with rage and accusation. She always knew how to push Jim’s buttons.

Jim’s feelings were hot embers beneath ash. Fiona wouldn’t let them just smoulder. She’d blow and blow on the ash until his smouldering resentment burst into flames. Was it any wonder he didn’t want to be with her? He fed the pages one at a time into the fire before the anger got too great to control.

It was time to start a new life, kill off his old self and become someone new. Jim McLeod must die, so that Jim McCann could live free of controlling women.

He felt a hollow sadness as the last of the pages curled up and crumbled into ash. Fiona hadn’t always been like this. When they first met, she was probably the wildest woman he’d ever come across. He smirked at the phrase ‘come across.’ It was appropriate though.

She had a hell of a sexual appetite and was more adventurous than any woman he’d ever known. She’d picked him up in some after hours dive that no decent woman would ever frequent. Jim didn’t mind, he wasn’t looking for a decent woman.

She took him back to her place, trussed him up and broke out the strap on. He’d lain face down on the bed with his ankles tied to his wrists and his butt in the air, wondering just how she’d talked him into it. It didn’t stop there though. She wasn’t just into filthy acts, she liked to do them in the worst possible places.

Graveyards and cemeteries were her big thing, the creepier the better. There wasn’t anything she didn’t want to try draped over a tombstone or tied up in a mausoleum. Jim didn’t quite know what he’d gotten himself into, but he was hooked. It was a wild and scary ride and he was discovering all kinds of things about himself, finding tastes and predilections he had no idea he had.

For all her wildness, Fiona could still get rather tiring. She was as demanding a girlfriend as she was a lover and Jim liked a quiet life. He was also developing sexual tastes that not even Fiona could satisfy. She may even have guessed this. A certain distance crept into their sex at the end. This might have been because she knew she was pregnant however, and was waiting for the right time to spring her trap.

Jim didn’t like it one bit when she did. He’d faced this problem before, but not with someone like Fiona. The minute she found out she was bearing his child it was like she had a chain round his neck.

The kid itself was an even bigger nightmare for Jim. The last thing he wanted was to look after a squalling brat. He didn’t want to see it puke and shit its nappy. A man had needs and there was nothing worse than having to put them aside to look after a little tyrant who would scream the house down if he didn’t.

There’d be no more attention from Fiona, either. He’d be in constant competition for her affection and he knew who’d win that fight. Women forget about their men when they drop a rug rat. It’s like a little switch goes off in their brain and they lose sight of the things that really matter. All they care about is the little parasite in the cot.

So Jim had taken off, like any sensible man would. He left the city and returned to the tiny little town of St Leonard’s. Then he went off the grid so he couldn’t be found.

Ironically, he’d left St Leonard’s, many years ago, for this self same reason—to avoid being a father. He was really young at the time, an off-comer to the town. Dawn was his first serious relationship and the first woman he ever lived with.

They’d been really happy for about six months, then Dawn showed him her pregnancy tester. She came right out of the toilet with it when he got home from work. Little drops of urine fell from the plastic stick onto the carpet. She was so shocked she hadn’t even washed it. They looked into each other’s eyes and saw the same fear there.

Jim was too young to cope with that level of responsibility. It brought back all kinds of bad memories from his own childhood. He didn’t want to see a repeat of that. He knew there was no way he could hang around and make a go of this. He suggested she have an abortion, said he’d pay for it and everything, but Dawn told him she wasn’t brought up to do that sort of thing. She wouldn’t hear of it after that. As far as Jim was concerned, that left him no other option.

Maybe he was a coward and maybe he didn’t want to see the look of heartbreak on Dawn’s face when she found out he wasn’t going to be there, but he slipped away late at night without telling her or leaving a note. He packed everything he wanted to keep into the back of his old van and drove away.

Jim didn’t give much thought to how Dawn would cope with a child by herself. He didn’t think it would be that difficult for her, what with all the state benefits she’d get. He did know that a baby would mean the death of their relationship. He didn’t want to hang around and watch it slip away like some ancient relative on life support. He preferred a swift, clean break with less emotional consequences.

It was easier to disappear back then, phones were less complex, not everyone had broadband and there was no social media. Jim did stay in touch with a couple of friends from St Leonard’s, those who knew how to keep quiet. That’s how he learned what had happened to Dawn.

She had found it too difficult to cope with the burden of bringing up a child by herself. Her father was the only living relative she could turn to. A strict, moral man who terrified her. She was so frightened of what he’d think, having an unmarried mother in the family, that she took an overdose of sleeping tablets.

Jim felt bad then. He didn’t know why she’d want to go and do something silly like that. She didn’t have to kill herself, she could just have gotten rid of the baby like he’d wanted. He blamed her father in the end for driving Dawn to it.

He didn’t think Fiona would try anything that stupid. She just wanted to nail his balls to the floor for getting her pregnant. She couldn’t control him sexually anymore, so she was going to use a kid instead. He wasn’t going to let that happen. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.

He knew people would say he was pulling the same cheap trick as before, and this bothered him more than leaving Fiona. Jim cared a lot about what people thought of him, you couldn’t fault him there. It was just that he also knew the things he could and couldn’t do, such as being a parent. You couldn’t blame him for knowing his limitations.

Fiona should have known better than to hound him until he left. She’d be really pissed off when she couldn’t find him, and if she ever did, she’d tear his balls off. Jim planned to stay away from women for a while, it was a lot safer. Besides, the way his sexuality was heading, he probably wouldn’t need them.