Prologue: 21
st
April 2013
My name is Jim Baines. Born in Nottingham, England, October, 1978. White. Male. Thirty-four years old. Eleven stone, six pounds as of last Saturday. Five-feet eleven. And honest, with it. Could have said six feet and, well, it's not like you'd have ever known, is it? But I've always had a thing about accuracy. A bit OCD maybe. Like to get the details right, you know?
Bear that in mind for later. When I'm telling you shit that you're going to have a much harder time believing.
Look at me and you'd probably think; average guy. Not bad looking. Keeps himself in shape. Look a bit harder and maybe you'd think; actually, you know what, he's better-looking than I thought. Definitely looks good for his age, anyway.
I guess not drinking, not smoking, not fucking myself up with drugs and working out regularly means I can still pass for late-twenties. Maybe even younger. And somebody had the right genes somewhere along the line for me to inherit a pretty good masculine shape. Forty-inch chest. Thirty-two-inch waist. Oh, and a thick mop of brown hair, with a hairline that hasn't shifted since my teens. But I'm no movie star. On first glance I wouldn't catch your eye. So yeah, you'd think; average guy.
You'd be wrong, though. But, well, more on that later. Much more.
For now, I guess there's other stuff you need to know about me. Actually, no, scratch that. There's other stuff that
I
need you to know about me. Because I know, later on you're going to judge me harshly. Perhaps rightly so. But I need you to make that judgement at least being in possession of, well, the key facts. The background. The mitigating circumstances. The... yeah, okay, the lame attempts to justify the unjustifiable.
Whatever. It's stuff I need to tell you before we get on to... well, the reason you're reading this shit in the first place. So, here goes nothing.
At age twenty-four, I'd thought I was the luckiest man alive. I'd finally married Katie, who'd been with me since I was fifteen and who was so lithe; so elegant; so classically beautiful that I'd never understood how we ever came to be together.
I doubt anyone else could work it out either. Probably thought I was hung like a horse. I'm not, as it happens. See, that honesty thing again? But, well, in their eyes there had to be some reason why such a stunning beauty would be with an average chump like me.
Yet there we still were. The business I'd inherited was finally taking off, after years of hard graft. Katie was about to land a publishing deal for the children's stories she'd always loved to write. And our beautiful daughter Kiera - who had arrived entirely unexpectedly and turned our world completely upside-down eight years earlier - was growing into a clever, funny, confident child who seemed ready to take on anything the world could throw at her.
Yeah, you read that right. Eight years earlier. I really was a father at sixteen. That's not exactly average, is it? Still, it isn't the only reason I'm not an average guy. As you'll find out soon enough.
So, yes, Katie and I had been teenage parents. I can't begin to describe the chaos that had caused for two well-educated kids from respectable families; the utter destruction of best-laid plans wrought by nothing more than a split prophylactic.
It was a traumatic time. My mother had been taken by cancer when I was fourteen and my father had only just started to recover when I hit him with the news that he'd be a granddad. He didn't take it well. In fact, he never really recovered and was dead before Kiera's second birthday from a massive stroke. Yeah, like I said: Traumatic.
Katie hadn't had it much better; a termination had been unconscionable for her - and me - but her parents were obsessed with her future and the consequences a baby would have. The wedge that argument had driven between them was huge. She'd got her way; Kiera was born. But the anger and resentment had lingered on long afterwards. In the end her parents moved away, down to the south coast, and left us to bring our daughter up alone.
It was tough. Somehow, within mere months, Katie and I had gone from revising for GCSEs to raising a child, only to then be hit with my father's death just at the point when we'd thought we were starting to get used to our new lives. All that had pushed us right to the precipice. Right to the edge.
But we'd looked over that edge; held on to each other and got through. Those hard, dark, confusing times were behind us. The future might have looked a lot different from that which our pre-Kiera selves - university-bound, high-flying careers ahead, blithely oblivious to fate - would have imagined. But, right then, at twenty-four, it felt brighter than ever. And I wouldn't have changed a thing.
You'll have guessed by now that it wasn't going to last. Of course, you're right. A freak failure in the steering of an oncoming HGV on the motorway one night and my beautiful, precious wife was taken from me, for ever. Her parents, too. They'd been sat in the back as she'd ferried them up to stay with us for what was to have been a first reconciliatory visit; to finally spend some time with the grand-daughter they'd barely seen.
It had been quick, at least; the impact so severe that all three were killed instantly. And it had been a genuine accident; the investigators on the scene had found the truck was well-maintained. The lorry driver wasn't drunk, tired or on drugs. It was simply a mechanical failure nobody could have planned for. One in a million. Pure chance.
The driver survived; badly injured and crushed by guilt. I remember going to visit him days later in hospital; driven by a strange compulsion to tell him that I didn't blame him. Maybe as much to convince myself of that as to convince him. The two of us ended up crying openly together. His words, such as they were, offered some comfort; it had happened so quickly that Katie would barely even have seen it coming.
But still I tortured myself with thoughts of the terror; the sheer certainty of death that Katie must have known in those last few seconds of her life as she saw the truck crashing through the central reservation in front of her; utterly powerless to avoid the collision. For years afterwards I woke up, shaking with fear, from my own imagined nightmares of that moment.
Even now I couldn't really tell you what happened in the days and weeks which followed the accident. Rage, anguish, despair; tempered only by the faintest sense of gratitude that I still had my daughter who, struck down with tonsillitis at just the right moment, had been too ill to make the return journey with Katie. Pure chance had spared her, just as pure chance had taken my wife.
Pure chance was going to be visiting me again, years later. I just didn't know that, then.
Eventually I emerged the other side; the funerals conducted, the meagre handful of remaining relatives returning to their lives. I attempted to find normality but after only a few weeks I was unable to bear the ache of the memories, still wrapped up in the fabric of the house we'd shared as a family.
I knew it was slowly killing Kiera, too. My gorgeous, carefree little daughter - still just eight years old - had been crushed into a haunted shadow, lost in a child's guilt-driven grief; unable to fathom the mystery of what she had done to cause her Mummy and Granny and Grandpa to be taken from her. It was unbearable to watch her withering under the weight of loss. I felt so helpless; so hopeless. Yet I had to carry on for her. She was my world now.
So, I sold everything. As an only child I'd inherited my dad's house and his engineering business when he'd passed. Even before then, fatherhood had changed me; I'd given up my dreams of university. I had wanted to be earning -
needed
to be earning - right then to support my beautiful little baby daughter. So I'd gone straight to work at the family firm instead of staying at school. And when dad died, I'd worked hard to keep everything together. More recently I'd got lucky with a few ideas that had taken the business into new territory. It was doing better than ever.
