So there are words on paper, and three times I’ve tried to fix it, or, perhaps just make it sound better because reading it in my head, there’s too little background and too many questions.
The flow of the story isn’t working for me, so I guess it’s time to sit down and work out what it is I’m trying to say.
The notion that our main character, Graham, is a loser seems to shine through, and that’s not what I’m trying to portray him as. No, far from it, it’s been a lifetime of bad choices that have put him where he is, and he knows it.
So, in part, this is about owning your mistakes, and it’s my job to make him come across as a hero in waiting. There’s good in him, perhaps too much, but there is also that attitude that led to all those bad choices, the one that can get him into trouble, and a sort of intransigence inherited from his father, that has more or less got him ostracised from the family.
I want this character to be a chop off the old block, both of whom are the type not to back down, not to say sorry, and, to quote a rather apt allegory, would cut their nose off to spite their face.
Graham’s intransigence led to his refusal to follow his father into business, refusal to go to University despite having the necessary qualifications, and just to round out the defiance, his choice of women whom he knew would meet with family disapproval.
And these factors, over a period of time, saw him bounce from a low-paying job to jobs with no prospects, and a string of failed relationships, until this moment in time, where he was basically on his own, working the graveyard shift as a security guard. The sort of job where qualifications weren’t looked for and workmates looked like and probably were ex-cons.
There are a few more details like the older brother, Jackson, politician and schemer, the same as his father before him (the seat was passed down through the family), like the younger sister who is a highly successful surgeon, married into immense wealth. His brother had been less successful in the marital stakes but what he lacked in a wife was more than made up with a string of highly eligible and beautiful women.
And, no, he doesn’t resent the fact they’re rich, or that his parents were, too, just that they treated him with contempt.
It was almost five years since the last time he had seen any of them, that last time he attended the family Christmas in Martha’s Vineyard, the ‘Stockdale Residence’ an ostentatious sprawling fifty-room mansion that, in a drunken rage, he’s tried to burn down.
Once again, he had not received an invitation to the next, due in a few days, and it was not entirely unexpected.
Graham has his faults, but that even, five years ago, had pulled him off the road to self-destruction, helped along by a year stint in jail where he learned a great many lessons about life itself, and survival.
The four years since?
A lot of regrets, and a lot of repentance. Life after jail was a lot worse than life trying to defy the family and the system. There were two roads he could have gone down, and thankfully for him, it was not the wrong one.
So, he’s back on the path, a whole lot wiser, a whole lot tougher.
That might not have been exactly what I was thinking for him over the first three attempts. I don’t think any character really begins to shine until halfway through, as you find him meeting various challenges in ways even you, as the writer, find quite unexpected.
Is that the end result of being a pantser over being a planner?
I don’t think, even as a planner, you can create a character that’s not going to change, or even surprise you, as the story evolves.
And somehow I don’t think I’m about to change from one to the other.
I have an electronic notebook on my smartphone and writing pads at the ready at home in my office/writing room/library.
As soon as one hits, I get it down, either on paper or on the phone app. I use SomNote as it’s easy to export the text to an email or have a version of the app running on my computer and just copy and paste. SomNote is great because I can use it anywhere.
Of course, it doesn’t work so well in the shower, so I’m still waiting for a waterproof phone. Or perhaps it can wait for a few minutes until I’m finished.
But the trouble with that is, these ideas come so quickly and are sometimes so vivid that they need to be put down as quickly as possible. I have come up with the perfect dialogue for a tricky scene and played it all out in my head, and by the time I got to the paper, it was almost gone.
Perhaps a whiteboard and a permanent marker on the wall.
Or is that going too far?
A long time ago, I received a portable tape recorder for a present, you know, the one you can hold in your hand, and the tapes so small you wonder how much will fit on it. The gifter said that when ideas came to me, all I had to do was speak. It was also voice-activated.
Needless to say that conjured up a few ideas right there.
But I used it, but I found it quite weird to be talking, ostensibly to myself, in the car whilst driving home, or going to, work, and the curious looks I’d get from others. One thing it did teach me was that when a conversation was replayed, it would sound ok or like most of the time, hardly what one expected a conversation would really be like.
So, because of that device, I learned to read out all conversations, and if they sounded stupid, they were.
So, ideas come in the shower, ideas come while driving, ideas come when reading the newspaper, and ideas even come when reading books.
This leads me to another point that I learned early on. Writers must read. Not only novels of their chosen genre, but any reference books that go with it. The research was, a friend and more successful author than I told me, was mandatory.
So too was the reading to the classics, old English, and sometimes American, literature, to gain an appreciation for the written word. We might not follow those styles, but we can learn the majesty of the English language.
That author taught me a lot, though at the time I didn’t realize it. Perhaps I thought I was already smart enough to write, but I’m guessing that it took a long time before I felt my writing was worth reading before publishing it.
I don’t profess to have a full understanding of the language. I might have loved that school subject called English, and later in university, creative writing, and literature, but not all of it soaked in. But writing is one of those odd things, that it can take many forms and styles, but at the end of the day, if the reader understands where the story is going, and when at the end, is satisfied that it was ‘a good read’, then the author’s work is done.
The only trouble is, getting the next idea, and then they were able to write a second book, or third. It is said everyone has one book in them. For those who can write more, well, that might be what might be called, a gift.
My trouble is that I have too many ideas, too many starts, and brief outlines to work with, I don’t know which story to start on next. I guess being spoilt for choice is a good thing, yes?
It started with a phone call, a phone call that I never expected to get.
I was one of those people who went through life, almost invisible. It was not what I wanted, it just happened.
I was not the sociable sort, at school I tended to spend my time studying and then being labeled a nerd, I didn’t make friends, except for those who wanted help with their homework.
Few friends in elementary school, fewer in middle school, and none in college, that is no one that you could call a true friend. They were more acquaintances that were there for the help I could give them, but no one that would invite me to parties, or to just hang out.
That continues on into university. Except there were several new acquainted that were a little more than that, though not quite BFFs.
There was one, in particular, Anna, who was one of the study group, the one who needed the most help, someone who had been wavering on returning after the first year.
My trouble was that I liked her more than she liked me, my opinion of course, based on what I called the indifference factor, but perhaps I had more expectations than she did
She was doing uni because it was expected of her, not because she wanted to be there. She could take it or leave it, and the last time I spoke to her, she was going to leave.
And when she left to go back home, it was the last time I expected to see or hear from her.
Until that phone call.
“What are you doing this weekend?”
A dumb question, nothing of course, but I wouldn’t tell her that. I was still in shock that Anna would call me, for anything other than school, if at all.
“Not a lot.”
“Good. How would you like to housesit with me?”
House sit? Surely she had a dozen others who would do anything for her. She was that popular and well-liked. And would probably be far more amusing than I ever could be.
“If you like. I had no idea you did house minding.”
“I don’t, but an aunt is going away for the weekend, and she wants someone to look after the cat. I hope you like cats. And gardens. It has a nice garden.”
Cats I could take or leave. Gardens, it was probably a birdbath, two beds of roses, a large tree with a seat under it, and neighbors peering over the fence.
But it was a weekend somewhere else other than my little room, and Anna would be there. Maybe I could try to get past my shyness and actually talk to her.
“OK. I’m in. Do I need to bring anything?”
“No. I’ll send you the address and see you there at 5 pm. Friday.”
Why did I get the feeling I was being set up?
That feeling of impending doing followed me down the path from the front gate to the front door.
Far from the house being a small thatch cottage, based on the address she gave me, it turned out to be a three-story manor house with a large outhouse that looked to be once a stable and coach house
It seemed far too large to be a house for one person.
When I rang the doorbell, I expected a butler to answer the door, but it was Anna herself.
“Nice place,” I said.
“Too large and too hard to maintain. Were trying to convince her that she would be better off in something smaller. But you should see the back.”
Based on the front garden which could happily grace the front cover of any country living magazine, I couldn’t wait.
She let me pass and closed the door behind us. It sounded like the vault was closing and there would be no damage until the timer released the locks.
Inside, the whole place reeked of heritage and antiques, and the personality of its owner. The walls had paintings, table tops had old magazines, the seats worn leather, and worn carpet squares covered floorboards that creaked when you walked on them.
At the end of a long corridor was the kitchen at the end if the house, after passing several sitting and dining rooms. It was a very large house and raised a very important question.
She had not mentioned any family or relatives with anything like the wealth this house exuded. In fact, she had often implied that she was just an ordinary person.
This was anything but ordinary.
I caught up with her on the back patio, just off a large sunroom, to view what had to be an acre or more of manicured laws, garden beds, and trees. All it was missing was a maze.
“Do you actually have a secret life?”
“I was always told not to advertise our wealth.”
“Isn’t showing me this, a form of advertising? After all, I’m apparently from the wrong side of the tracks.”
“I trust you.”
“But you don’t know me, or anything about me.”
“Why do you think you’re here?”
If I wanted to make an educated guess, my first thought was to set me up for something, for the very reason she was aloof, and people like her, and those she kept company with, were not people like me associated with.
I was surprised not to see the two girls I’d once nicknamed ‘the dynamic duo’, Melissa and Winona, with her. Maybe they would turn up later.
My second thought, the most improbable reason, was that she wanted to get to know me, but, why choose a place like this? To make me feel small, grateful, impressed? Ten minutes in a Cafe was all she needed to find out what she needed to know about me.
An alarm bell went off when I asked her where I could get a drink of water, and she said, the kitchen, but didn’t really know where it was. I got an instant bad feeling.
That was followed by a bang that I thought came from the rear of the house.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“You hear all sorts of noises in places like these.”
If she wasn’t worried, neither was I.
Then the door chime rang.
“You expecting more visitors?” My internal fear factor was rising exponentially.
“No, but I’d better find out who it is, just in case.”
I shrugged and headed towards where she indicated the kitchen was, the rear of the house, what I would call an educated guess
After I found the kitchen, not technically at the rear, I returned to find my worst fears had come true. Not only the dynamic duo but also their boyfriends, Chad and Lester, two of the worst bullies from school days.
“Well, look who it is.” Chad was particularly menacing.
A glance to the side, it was hard to tell if Anna was looking pleased or neutral, but she wasn’t surprised. I glanced in Anna’s direction and all I got was a tilt of her head.
“Shouldn’t you be down the country club trying to prove you’re a new version of your drunken bully of a father?”
His smile turned into a very angry look. “Don’t go there, Scanlon.”
“Why are you here then?”
I expected to hear Anna had invited them. Instead, “we’re here to make sure Anna doesn’t make a mistake.”
“I don’t need your help or advice Chad. In fact, you should leave.”
None of the four looked like they had any intention of leaving. “Not until we’ve impressed upon both of you, the error of your ways. We thought you were smarter than this or did Scanlon force himself on you?”
She shook her head, not necessarily in anger, but more in despair. “I don’t know where you get your ideas from Chad, but you are very much mistaken. So, I will only say this once more, Chad,” she added quietly, “otherwise you will find yourself in a world of pain. Leave now while you still can.”
Chad, being Chad, was the master of ceremonies, puffed up as he had been in the schoolyard when he was about the unleash his gang on some poor misguided fool, usually me, or one of three others. But it was Melissa who spoke instead, “You go teach Scanlon a lesson outside by the pool while we have a talk to Anna.”
Lester took the cue, came over, and grabbed me by the shoulder. I thought about trying to shrug him off, but Chad was across the room before I could initiate anything. Best to leave calmly and sort it out outside.
I gave Anna a last look, but she was wearing her poker face. Had she set this up? It seemed as though she hadn’t, but then, it didn’t look like she was worried about the dynamic duo.
I shrugged.
Intentional or not, Chad and Lester were about to learn a very valuable lesson, and revenge, at least on them, was going to be sweet.
There are two other characters that will be used in this rewrite, the second an addition to give the main character a means of letting the reader get to know a bit about him.
His name is Milt, an African American that’s always been on the fringe. Another who is a victim of his circumstances but not letting it get the better of him, the sort of man who makes the best of a bad situation.
He’s seen active service in the army, honourably discharged, but still affected though not as bad as some of those he served with. He is in fact the ideal man for the job, with combat experience, so he’s not likely to get flustered in a shit storm.
And probably not the man you want on this site. Being in desperate circumstances doesn’t mean you do desperate things.
He is one of a team of four and our main character drew the straw to partner him. There are two others, based on the other side of the park, neither of whom are trustworthy, Smithy, the overall leader, to whom they all report at shift start and end, and Carruthers, an Englishman reputed to be ex SAS, but no one is inclined to believe him.
The scars on his neck tell a story, but it was left to the other’s imagination, as he doesn’t talk about it. Milt was of the opinion he was captured in Afghanistan and tortured, but that could be just be canteen scuttlebutt.
Whatever the circumstances, Graham kept away from him as much as possible, and was glad when he didn’t have to partner him for the shift.
The other character. Penelope has featured in the earlier versions of the story. Over the changes her background has changed, but I’ve settled on a medical surgeon career, renown for doing tricky procedures with a high success rate, and in doing so gained a reputation, some not always good.
Wealth and ego don’t always make a good pair, and marrying wealth brings its own rewards and pitfalls, particularly when you discover the man you married isn’t exactly whom you thought he was.
It is of course a typical scenario, but I’m going to try and weave it differently. There will be no more teasers until the story starts.
But she will be introduced earlier than in the previous iterations because she needs some backstory too, otherwise just arriving at Graham’s work and getting shot, while provoking a volatile situation that drags the reader in, out of left field is not exactly the best start.
I have an electronic notebook on my smartphone and writing pads at the ready at home in my office/writing room/library.
As soon as one hits, I get it down, either on paper or on the phone app. I use SomNote as it’s easy to export the text to an email or have a version of the app running on my computer and just copy and paste. SomNote is great because I can use it anywhere.
Of course, it doesn’t work so well in the shower, so I’m still waiting for a waterproof phone. Or perhaps it can wait for a few minutes until I’m finished.
But the trouble with that is, these ideas come so quickly and are sometimes so vivid that they need to be put down as quickly as possible. I have come up with the perfect dialogue for a tricky scene and played it all out in my head, and by the time I got to the paper, it was almost gone.
Perhaps a whiteboard and a permanent marker on the wall.
Or is that going too far?
A long time ago, I received a portable tape recorder for a present, you know, the one you can hold in your hand, and the tapes so small you wonder how much will fit on it. The gifter said that when ideas came to me, all I had to do was speak. It was also voice-activated.
Needless to say that conjured up a few ideas right there.
But I used it, but I found it quite weird to be talking, ostensibly to myself, in the car whilst driving home, or going to, work, and the curious looks I’d get from others. One thing it did teach me was that when a conversation was replayed, it would sound ok or like most of the time, hardly what one expected a conversation would really be like.
So, because of that device, I learned to read out all conversations, and if they sounded stupid, they were.
So, ideas come in the shower, ideas come while driving, ideas come when reading the newspaper, and ideas even come when reading books.
This leads me to another point that I learned early on. Writers must read. Not only novels of their chosen genre, but any reference books that go with it. The research was, a friend and more successful author than I told me, was mandatory.
So too was the reading to the classics, old English, and sometimes American, literature, to gain an appreciation for the written word. We might not follow those styles, but we can learn the majesty of the English language.
That author taught me a lot, though at the time I didn’t realize it. Perhaps I thought I was already smart enough to write, but I’m guessing that it took a long time before I felt my writing was worth reading before publishing it.
I don’t profess to have a full understanding of the language. I might have loved that school subject called English, and later in university, creative writing, and literature, but not all of it soaked in. But writing is one of those odd things, that it can take many forms and styles, but at the end of the day, if the reader understands where the story is going, and when at the end, is satisfied that it was ‘a good read’, then the author’s work is done.
The only trouble is, getting the next idea, and then they were able to write a second book, or third. It is said everyone has one book in them. For those who can write more, well, that might be what might be called, a gift.
My trouble is that I have too many ideas, too many starts, and brief outlines to work with, I don’t know which story to start on next. I guess being spoilt for choice is a good thing, yes?
It started with a phone call, a phone call that I never expected to get.
I was one of those people who went through life, almost invisible. It was not what I wanted, it just happened.
I was not the sociable sort, at school I tended to spend my time studying and then being labeled a nerd, I didn’t make friends, except for those who wanted help with their homework.
Few friends in elementary school, fewer in middle school, and none in college, that is no one that you could call a true friend. They were more acquaintances that were there for the help I could give them, but no one that would invite me to parties, or to just hang out.
That continues on into university. Except there were several new acquainted that were a little more than that, though not quite BFFs.
There was one, in particular, Anna, who was one of the study group, the one who needed the most help, someone who had been wavering on returning after the first year.
My trouble was that I liked her more than she liked me, my opinion of course, based on what I called the indifference factor, but perhaps I had more expectations than she did
She was doing uni because it was expected of her, not because she wanted to be there. She could take it or leave it, and the last time I spoke to her, she was going to leave.
And when she left to go back home, it was the last time I expected to see or hear from her.
Until that phone call.
“What are you doing this weekend?”
A dumb question, nothing of course, but I wouldn’t tell her that. I was still in shock that Anna would call me, for anything other than school, if at all.
“Not a lot.”
“Good. How would you like to housesit with me?”
House sit? Surely she had a dozen others who would do anything for her. She was that popular and well-liked. And would probably be far more amusing than I ever could be.
“If you like. I had no idea you did house minding.”
“I don’t, but an aunt is going away for the weekend, and she wants someone to look after the cat. I hope you like cats. And gardens. It has a nice garden.”
Cats I could take or leave. Gardens, it was probably a birdbath, two beds of roses, a large tree with a seat under it, and neighbors peering over the fence.
But it was a weekend somewhere else other than my little room, and Anna would be there. Maybe I could try to get past my shyness and actually talk to her.
“OK. I’m in. Do I need to bring anything?”
“No. I’ll send you the address and see you there at 5 pm. Friday.”
Why did I get the feeling I was being set up?
That feeling of impending doing followed me down the path from the front gate to the front door.
Far from the house being a small thatch cottage, based on the address she gave me, it turned out to be a three-story manor house with a large outhouse that looked to be once a stable and coach house
It seemed far too large to be a house for one person.
When I rang the doorbell, I expected a butler to answer the door, but it was Anna herself.
“Nice place,” I said.
“Too large and too hard to maintain. Were trying to convince her that she would be better off in something smaller. But you should see the back.”
Based on the front garden which could happily grace the front cover of any country living magazine, I couldn’t wait.
She let me pass and closed the door behind us. It sounded like the vault was closing and there would be no damage until the timer released the locks.
Inside, the whole place reeked of heritage and antiques, and the personality of its owner. The walls had paintings, table tops had old magazines, the seats worn leather, and worn carpet squares covered floorboards that creaked when you walked on them.
At the end of a long corridor was the kitchen at the end if the house, after passing several sitting and dining rooms. It was a very large house and raised a very important question.
She had not mentioned any family or relatives with anything like the wealth this house exuded. In fact, she had often implied that she was just an ordinary person.
This was anything but ordinary.
I caught up with her on the back patio, just off a large sunroom, to view what had to be an acre or more of manicured laws, garden beds, and trees. All it was missing was a maze.
“Do you actually have a secret life?”
“I was always told not to advertise our wealth.”
“Isn’t showing me this, a form of advertising? After all, I’m apparently from the wrong side of the tracks.”
“I trust you.”
“But you don’t know me, or anything about me.”
“Why do you think you’re here?”
If I wanted to make an educated guess, my first thought was to set me up for something, for the very reason she was aloof, and people like her, and those she kept company with, were not people like me associated with.
I was surprised not to see the two girls I’d once nicknamed ‘the dynamic duo’, Melissa and Winona, with her. Maybe they would turn up later.
My second thought, the most improbable reason, was that she wanted to get to know me, but, why choose a place like this? To make me feel small, grateful, impressed? Ten minutes in a Cafe was all she needed to find out what she needed to know about me.
An alarm bell went off when I asked her where I could get a drink of water, and she said, the kitchen, but didn’t really know where it was. I got an instant bad feeling.
That was followed by a bang that I thought came from the rear of the house.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“You hear all sorts of noises in places like these.”
If she wasn’t worried, neither was I.
Then the door chime rang.
“You expecting more visitors?” My internal fear factor was rising exponentially.
“No, but I’d better find out who it is, just in case.”
I shrugged and headed towards where she indicated the kitchen was, the rear of the house, what I would call an educated guess
After I found the kitchen, not technically at the rear, I returned to find my worst fears had come true. Not only the dynamic duo but also their boyfriends, Chad and Lester, two of the worst bullies from school days.
“Well, look who it is.” Chad was particularly menacing.
A glance to the side, it was hard to tell if Anna was looking pleased or neutral, but she wasn’t surprised. I glanced in Anna’s direction and all I got was a tilt of her head.
“Shouldn’t you be down the country club trying to prove you’re a new version of your drunken bully of a father?”
His smile turned into a very angry look. “Don’t go there, Scanlon.”
“Why are you here then?”
I expected to hear Anna had invited them. Instead, “we’re here to make sure Anna doesn’t make a mistake.”
“I don’t need your help or advice Chad. In fact, you should leave.”
None of the four looked like they had any intention of leaving. “Not until we’ve impressed upon both of you, the error of your ways. We thought you were smarter than this or did Scanlon force himself on you?”
She shook her head, not necessarily in anger, but more in despair. “I don’t know where you get your ideas from Chad, but you are very much mistaken. So, I will only say this once more, Chad,” she added quietly, “otherwise you will find yourself in a world of pain. Leave now while you still can.”
Chad, being Chad, was the master of ceremonies, puffed up as he had been in the schoolyard when he was about the unleash his gang on some poor misguided fool, usually me, or one of three others. But it was Melissa who spoke instead, “You go teach Scanlon a lesson outside by the pool while we have a talk to Anna.”
Lester took the cue, came over, and grabbed me by the shoulder. I thought about trying to shrug him off, but Chad was across the room before I could initiate anything. Best to leave calmly and sort it out outside.
I gave Anna a last look, but she was wearing her poker face. Had she set this up? It seemed as though she hadn’t, but then, it didn’t look like she was worried about the dynamic duo.
I shrugged.
Intentional or not, Chad and Lester were about to learn a very valuable lesson, and revenge, at least on them, was going to be sweet.
There are two other characters that will be used in this rewrite, the second an addition to give the main character a means of letting the reader get to know a bit about him.
His name is Milt, an African American that’s always been on the fringe. Another who is a victim of his circumstances but not letting it get the better of him, the sort of man who makes the best of a bad situation.
He’s seen active service in the army, honourably discharged, but still affected though not as bad as some of those he served with. He is in fact the ideal man for the job, with combat experience, so he’s not likely to get flustered in a shit storm.
And probably not the man you want on this site. Being in desperate circumstances doesn’t mean you do desperate things.
He is one of a team of four and our main character drew the straw to partner him. There are two others, based on the other side of the park, neither of whom are trustworthy, Smithy, the overall leader, to whom they all report at shift start and end, and Carruthers, an Englishman reputed to be ex SAS, but no one is inclined to believe him.
The scars on his neck tell a story, but it was left to the other’s imagination, as he doesn’t talk about it. Milt was of the opinion he was captured in Afghanistan and tortured, but that could be just be canteen scuttlebutt.
Whatever the circumstances, Graham kept away from him as much as possible, and was glad when he didn’t have to partner him for the shift.
The other character. Penelope has featured in the earlier versions of the story. Over the changes her background has changed, but I’ve settled on a medical surgeon career, renown for doing tricky procedures with a high success rate, and in doing so gained a reputation, some not always good.
Wealth and ego don’t always make a good pair, and marrying wealth brings its own rewards and pitfalls, particularly when you discover the man you married isn’t exactly whom you thought he was.
It is of course a typical scenario, but I’m going to try and weave it differently. There will be no more teasers until the story starts.
But she will be introduced earlier than in the previous iterations because she needs some backstory too, otherwise just arriving at Graham’s work and getting shot, while provoking a volatile situation that drags the reader in, out of left field is not exactly the best start.
John’s search for Zoe was at an impasse, simply because it was her job to disappear and reappear at will, and he knows he’s no match for her in that regard.
So, having gone to her residence in Paris, not finding her there which was predictable, the place looked like it had not been visited in months, he concluded a short stay might help to clear his head.
Until he gets a phone call.
Kidnappers, other than the Russians, have captured Zoe, and they’re ringing him for a ransom.
Odd, because he was not the one who placed the kidnap order on her, so why would they be ringing him?
This was initiated by Zoe, no doubt playing the kidnapper by sending him to a bigger payday.
If that’s the case then John has to deduce she has faith in him to come and get her.
Which he’s going to do, but not on his own.
It’s time to call Sebastian, someone John knew would know what to do.
Or at least hope he does!
…
Today’s writing, with Zoe languishing in a dungeon waiting for a white knight, 3,270 words, for a total of 8,871.
Everyone always wants to change their circumstances, particularly if you are among those who are not so well off.
My father always said, whenever we complained about not having enough money to go on holiday, or buy something we needed, that there was always someone worse off than we were.
As a child, I could hardly believe that was true when it looked like everyone else had everything they wanted.
As an adult, I promised myself that I would never be in those circumstances, that I would always have enough money.
And, of course, what you want, what you would like, and what really happens are very different outcomes, and no matter how much planning, or how many contingencies plans you have in place, a single event can wreck everything.
When you open the front door and see policemen, two thoughts cross your mind. The first, they’re at the wrong place, the second, that something awful has just happened.
“George Williamson?”
It was the second.
“May we come inside?”
As I stood to one side, a thousand thoughts went through my mind until it settled on one, something had happened to Jane.
As she did on every Wednesday morning, she got up early, I made her breakfast, she kissed the tones and told them she would be back the next day, then headed for the airport for her weekly visit to hear office.
When we had to move, her company agreed to let her work from home, and it was an arrangement that worked well, she was only missing for two days a week, and a week when the annual accounting was done.
She was due back this morning.
Instead, I had to police officers in my lounge room, looking very somber.
“Something has happened to Jane, hasn’t it.” I almost couldn’t bring myself to say it.
The policewoman spoke. It was like they had drawn straws and she got the short one.
“I’m very sorry to say your wife was involved in an accident this morning, on her way to the Atlanta airport. We have just been informed she passed away.”
It was one of those moments when there were no words. In fact, I was not sure what I felt in that moment other than a great sadness.
“How?”
“We understand a car ran a red light, hit the limousine. Had she been on the other side…”
Not much consolation in speculation.
“Do you have someone you can call; do you need us to arrange for support…”
“I have a sister, I’ll call her. Thank you for coming and telling me, I guess this is not what you want to be doing at this time of the morning.”
“Part of the job, sir.”
I ushered them to the door and after reassuring them I would be OK, and getting out the phone to call my sister, they left.
The shock of it hadn’t set in. As I closed the door, my thoughts turned to the twins, now at school. They adored their mother and would be expecting her to pick them up from school.
I would have to get them before news of her death reached them. These days, with the internet, someone would find out and it would be better to hear it from me.
“George?”
My sister, Eileen. She had been amazed that I would find a girl like Jane let alone marry her. She had always expected me to be the philandering bachelor.
“Something very bad has happened?”
“Jane?”
“Killed in a car crash this morning in Atlanta. The police were just here.”
“Oh my God, George. The girls.”
“I know. I have to get to them. Can you be here when I get home? They’ll need you.”
“Sure. On my way.”
Next call, the girl’s school. I called the head Master and explained the situation, and he immediately had them brought to his office.
When I arrived, I put on my best ‘this is a happy day’ face and went in, mustering all of the courage I had to not look like something bad had happened.
The girls, of course, thought that their mother had arrived home early and come to get them. She had done it before.
They were only mildly disappointed to see me.
“Mommy not here?”
“Sorry, you have to tolerate me for a while. We have to go home and you’ve been given a day pass.”
Knowing how much they preferred not to be at school, the diversion worked.
The headmaster gave me a wan look as we left.
I fielded a hundred questions on the way home, all of which centered around what surprise Mom had in store for them, and the fact it had to be monumental since they had to go home early.
All the tome I was trying to think of a way to let them down gently, but there wasn’t one. Being blunt wasn’t the way either, they deserved the truth.
As soon as they saw Eileen, I could see the hesitation and a note of trepidation. Usually, Eileen came over when Jane was going to have an extended stay away.
“I need you two to go into the lounge and sit down. I’ll be then in a minute.”
“Is mommy’s not coming home today?”
They knew something was wrong.
“I’ll be in in a minute and will explain everything.”
At least Eileen had to foresight not to show any sign of the distress I knew she must be feeling.
When the girls had gone into the room she gave me the teary-eyed look, and a hug.
“You must be devastated.”
“It hasn’t sunk in. I’m still expecting her to walk in the door, and this is all a bad mistake.”
“The girls…”
“This is one time I hate the idea of being a father.”
“Then I’m glad you called me. You could not break this alone. They are going to be devastated.”
Everyone who knew her would be.
Once again I had to find the courage to keep it together, but at least I had support.
It went better than I expected. At first, they thought it was an elaborate prank, though I was not sure how they could think that.
Then, when they realized it was true, they, like I was when I first heard the news, were in shock, and barely able to comprehend the reality of it.
I did remember saying at one point, “I wish she was still alive, and that she would walk back through that door…” but not able to finish.
So, we just sat there, in silence, the rest of the world passing by, going about its business.
Until there was another knock on the door.
I was going to ignore it, but a nod from Eileen got me off the seat.
Perhaps the police were back to tell me it was all a big mistake, and it was someone else who’d died.
I opened the door…
…and neatly had a heart attack.
“Jane?”
A wish come true? Standing before me was a woman who looked exactly like Jane, down to the last detail, including the unmanageable whisp of hair.
“You must be George. No, not Jane, Jill, the banished evil twin. Now, where is she?”
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 