A Cautionary Tale

I thank my LadyCibelle and Techsan for their patience, proof reading, editing skills and of course encouragement they always give me. As I've been known to fiddle with stories, after they've seen it. I take full responsibility for the content and any cock-ups in this story.

While I'm at it I think I'd better thank all my friends out there, who write to me and encourage me to continue writing and posting these demented ravings of mine. Your emails are greatly appreciated.

This is not a stroke story, so if you were looking for one of those kind-of tales, I would suggest you'd bet better served looking elsewhere.

Author's notes: - Winkle = Edible marine gastropod mollusc the meat of which is extracted from the shell with a little difficulty using a small pointed instrument (needle or pin). Hence, winkle out = extract information etc. I winkled the information out of him/her. - In flagrante delicto (Latin) = in the very act of committing an offence.

All right, this one has been done before, but I'm in the mood for rehashes lately. I might well have bitten off more than I can chew here, so this could well be a little difficult to read, but I had some fun writing it. I'll just ask the reader to be careful about what you are actually reading though. If things start not to make sense, think very carefully about what's going on. I'm pretty sure that you've all been there sometime in your life.

*

It really wasn't an easy scene for me to watch, so I didn't stand there for very long. Slowly and with a sick feeling in my stomach, I turned back into the crowd of revellers and began to make my way out of the club.

You know it wasn't as if I was just angry, there was a terrible feeling of disappointment I felt as well. I'd just seen the two people who I thought were my closest and most trusted friends standing on the dance floor kissing and cuddling each other. One, the woman I loved and I'd thought I was about to become my wife. The other, my oldest friend and confidant, the guy I was just about to set up a business partnership with. You know you really have to trust someone if you're going into business with them, the same kind of trust you need to have in a woman when you decide to ask her to marry you.

Damn it, it looked like I'm just fucking useless when it came to picking the people I put my trust in. Both of these two had let me down, just like the first woman I'd asked to marry me had.

How come I'd discovered them in that clinch on the dance floor? Well, you see, in theory I shouldn't have even been anywhere near there. It was the old story of the guy coming home unexpectedly a day early and catching the mouse.... No, hang on there, the fox and the mouse at play.

Frankie and I were just about to set up as agents in the UK for a Korean company, which was planning on moving into Europe in a big way. I'd been on a visit to Holland to meet up with the Koreans and a few of the guys who were hoping to be agents for them in some of the other EU countries. Well, things had gone pretty well and, I'm going to be honest, the whole damn thing kind of turned into one big party. I'd got on very well with a couple of French guys and a Spaniard; we'd kind-a tied one on a bit.

I'm not sure how the subject had come up, but during the afternoon I'd mentioned that I'd had to cancel my engagement party to make it to the conference. Now I'm pretty sure that if Jose had been sober he'd wouldn't have suggested the idea, and if I'd been sober I'd have turned him down flat anyway. But I had vague memories of four rather drunken guy's climbing into that little Cessna so that Jose could fly us all home. Looking back, I'm surprised that no one at the airfield had realised just how pissed we all were, and didn't stop us from flying.

As it was I had jumbled recollections that we were crossing the North Sea. I believe I did get a little worried; I'm not sure if it was Jose's condition that worried me, or if it was the fact that my bottle of Scotch was empty. Anyway we made it to our town's local amateur airfield. Jose, Jacques and the other guy refused my offer to stop over and promptly took off again, disappearing in the general direction of Wales.

I'd think I called Lydia's mother, who told me that she'd gone out with her girl friends for the evening. Now as there were only three places with any nightlife in town, I'd found her at my second stop. Damned if I can remember how I got there though. The trouble was that when I did, I'd bloody found her making whoopee on the dance floor with my prospective partner.

One thing I couldn't get my head around was that Frank, the guy I'd just seen holding my intended bride in his arms, had been the one who had tried to tell me not to marry my first wife Fiona. When I'd told him we were getting married, he'd gone all quiet on me for a while and it had taken me sometime to winkle out of him that he thought I was making a big mistake. But I couldn't persuade him to enlarge.

That conversation was to cause a rift between us that lasted a lot longer than the marriage to Fiona did.

My marriage that I thought had started out very well - hey, we had a brand new house and Fiona fell pregnant within four months - lasted exactly two years from church to divorce court. It turned out that Fiona was one of those women who couldn't keep her legs crossed. Whether Frank knew or he just didn't trust her, I never did find out. When we became friends again, neither of us ever brought the subject of Fiona up again.

Okay, so you're all itching to find out how I discovered that Fiona was - well, to put it bluntly, a slut. I must tell you that it has very little bearing on this story, other than to give you an insight into my state of mind. Which is very important!

To tell you the truth, I didn't discover that Fiona was a slut who was cheating on me. The credit for that discovery has do go to our next-door neighbour Bridget. I came home from work one evening and as I turned into the street where my house was, a police car passed me. I watched the thing, as it tore down our suburban street at breakneck speed and came to a stop beside a crowd of people who were standing on the pavement outside my house.

When I arrived on the scene, one officer was restraining Bridget, whilst in the middle of my front lawn, another officer was attempting to tend to the injuries of a rather excited and somewhat dishevelled Fiona. Unfortunately Fiona was making a very good job of fighting off his ministrations. It didn't take very long for the extremely verbal Bridget to inform me that Fiona and Bridget's husband had been playing a cosy game of house together.

The occupants of the second police car to arrive were pretty quick in discovering the comatose body of Bridget's husband. He was found lying in my rear garden, stark naked and with a lump the size of a cricket-ball on his head, where apparently Bridget had hit him with a rolling pin.

A side point that has nothing to do with this story at all: Fellas, if your missis is Irish or even has a drop of the Gaelic in her blood, don't go fucking around on her behind her back! Damn, those Irish girls can have some bloody temper on them.

Anyway back to the story. It soon became apparent that Bridget had sneaked into the back door of my house, where she had discovered her husband and Fiona in flagrante delecte, no, flagrente dilicto. Oh, bugger, you know where we're going here; they were fucking like a pair of bunny rabbits from Bridget's description.

Anyway Bridget was just a little bit peeved when she discovered them and she chased her wayward husband out of the house, apparently raining blows on him with her rolling pin as she did so, until finally she'd knocked the arsehole clean out in the rear garden.

Whilst Bridget was otherwise occupied, Fiona had decided that making herself scarce would be the prudent thing to do. Fiona had thrown some clothes on, and was in the process of making her escape through the front door when Bridget, having dealt with one of the adulterers, found the time to deal with the other. Somehow Bridget had lost her rolling pin, when it had become imbedded in the windscreen of Fiona's car. It was apparent that the two women then entertained the growing crowd of concerned(?) neighbours, with a traditional catfight.

From the look of the two girls' clothes, or should I say the lack of them, it had nearly got to the point where it could be called pornographic. It appears that besides trying to pull each other's hair out and scratch their opponent's eyes out, they had tried to remove each other's clothing as well, one small piece at a time; from what I could see they very nearly succeeded, before the police arrived and stopped play. It took three ambulances to take all the protagonists to three separate hospitals, for safety's sake, the police informed me later me later.

For economy of words and as this story isn't really about Fiona and me. Both women were charged with public order offences and with assaulting police officers. The police did ask me if I wanted to charge Fiona with assaulting me as well, as it had fallen to me to calm her down in the end and I hadn't gotten away completely unscathed. Actually when she saw it was me she was fighting with, Fiona fainted, probably because she realised the bubble was about to burst.

Anyway Bridget was charged with GBH on her husband as well. Fiona and I divorced pretty quickly, although the arguments over maintenance slowed things down a bit and the paternity case went on for a year or so. But DNA tests were to prove that I was no relation to Fiona's son, or the daughter she bore seven months after her fight with Bridget. Quite a disappointment really, as I was just about getting used to the idea of being a daddy.

Oh, neither child had the same father and out of interest, Bridget's husband didn't sire either of the children either. God only knows what happened to Bridget's marriage and I didn't really care. I did kick the shit out of Bridget's husband outside one of the local pub's one night; strange but there were never any ramifications to that one. I never could understand that, as he knew full well who it was that worked him over that night. Perhaps the bastard found a conscience, or maybe he was just relieved that he didn't have to keep looking over his shoulder any more.

Fiona does have a bit of a habit of turning up at my place now and again, asking me whether I can forgive her and take her back; some bloody hopes she's got.

Thinking about that, and what I'd discovered about Lydia and Frank in that night club, I'm beginning wonder whether I've got a bloody big sign on my back that says "MUG" in great big letters. You know, is there something about my personality that tells folks this stupid bastard can be taken for a bleeding ride?

Okay, enough of the history; back to the real story. There I was walking out of the club, totally pissed-off with the world and just about everyone in it, when Sharon, one of the girls who's always kicking around the local club scene comes up to me. Sharon's a nice, pretty girl, but she appears to spend most of her time in a state of permanent inebriation. Christ knows how the girl ever finds her way home at night. No, that's a silly question, Sharon probably gets a "ride" home quite easily; she just has to figure out who's bleeding bed she has woken up in, in the morning.

Damn it, there I go digressing again. Anyway Sharon comes up - correction, "staggers" up to me - mumbles her normal greeting, "Hello, Handsome." And then she throws her arms around my neck and proceeds to try to lick and suck my tonsils out; you get the general idea. Now this wasn't actually an unusual thing for Sharon to do, because she is a very friendly girl, but it always is a little disconcerting. You never knew who or what had been in that mouth of hers earlier in the evening. No, not me. I'd always treated Sharon as a friend; besides one course of penicillin jabs in the arse when I was young had been enough for me to get a little careful over the years.

"What wonderful news. Congratulations to you and Lydia," Sharon slurred at me after she removed her tongue from my throat. Then releasing me from her grasp and, before I'd recovered my breath enough to say anything to her, she promptly disappeared into the crowd again.

"Damn it, that's old news now, Sharon," I thought to myself. At Lydia's mother's insistence the official announcement of our engagement had been posted in the local newspaper that very week. Sharon didn't know that that engagement had just come to a sudden and unexpected end.

Out in the car park, I found Frank's car and kicked both headlights in. Yeah, well, it's the kind of thing you do when you're pissed off and drunk. Well, I think it was Frank's car anyway; you know you don't really think straight when you're in the condition I was that night.

I was about to kick in the headlights on Lydia's car, when the thought entered my mind that it wasn't a very good idea, when you consider that it was actually my car. I let Lydia use my car when I was out of town. So instead, I dug the keys out of my pocket and drove the damn thing home. No, not really a clever thing to do, when you'd drunk as much as I had that day, but I wasn't in any condition to think sensibly.

I stormed into the house and to start with, I was knocking the place about a bit. You know breaking ornaments and the like. But then it struck me that it was my fucking house I was busting up, so that wasn't a good idea either. Although Lydia had been staying there most of the time for the previous six months or so. It was my bleeding house I was smashing up.

I'm not sure what happened after that, I must have fallen asleep on the bed. Anyway I think it was about two AM when my bloody mobile phone started ringing and woke me up. You know what it's like when you waken from a drunken stupor. I knew I could hear the bloody phone, but I was buggered if I could find the damn thing. The phone went to the message service before I found it in the laundry basket. How did it get in there? Well, I'm buggered if I know, but that's where it was. I tracked the fucking thing down by calling it from the landline.

There was a message on the answering service from Lydia, telling me that my car had been stolen. Well, I suppose that was the obvious conclusion for her to come to. As far as she and lover boy Frank knew, I was still in Holland.

"Ah, shit!" I thought and didn't reply; then I must gone back to sleep.

It was almost nine AM when that bloody mobile started ringing again. I let it go to the message service as I staggered out of bed and went to the kitchen. Coffee, aspirin and some hair of the dog was called for. Not necessarily in that order.

The message from Fiona was just asking me if I received her previous message about the car being stolen the night before and telling me that Frank was going to drive her to the airport to meet me.

"Bollocks to the bastards!" I thought; they were going to have a fucking long wait, because I wouldn't be there.

Hey, Scotch in coffee ain't very nice, so I switched to rum. Ah, now, that was much better.

Then I got to thinking. What the fuck was going to happen later in the day? Fiona and Frank would go to the airport and I was sure that they'd eventually discover that I had cashed in my air ticket or not turned up for the plane anyway. Obviously they would try and call me on the bloody mobile; but in the end they were bound to turn up at the house sometime, and then what?

Well, I figured that I would most likely kill someone. Possibly both of them. I pulled one of the carving knives out of the block on the kitchen worktop and looked at it. Trying to decide if it would make a suitable weapon to kill the pair of them with.

But then I decided that it wouldn't. Fuck all that blood splattered over my nice new kitchen units. Damn it, we've all seen how much blood gets splattered around when someone gets stabbed, on those bloody TV crime shows. Bollocks, I ain't having my new kitchen messed up like that.

Okay, next available weapon - my shot gun. I could shoot them as they got out of the car outside. No, too bleeding noisy; that really wasn't going to do my head any good. Fuck, my head was aching badly enough as it was. Anyway I didn't know what effect the clay pigeon cartridges I had would have on the human body; probably just wound them. If you're going to do a job, you might as well be sure you're going to achieve the result you'd planned.

I didn't think either of them was going to stand still long enough for me to strangle them, so I had to come up with some other idea. The trouble was, I couldn't think of any.

There was only thing I could do and that was not to be at the house when they turned up, as I knew they had to do sometime. I would go away somewhere and then come up with a plan to kill both of them. Yeah, that sounded like a good idea to my befuddled brain.

That decision made, I had no trouble in working out where to go. A distant relative, an aunt, had left me her cottage near Ffestiniog in Wales when she had passed away some years ago. I'd used the cottage as a kind of holiday home and rented it to my friends sometimes for the odd weekend or so. Of course I'd put the place up for sale, for more capital for Frank and my little business venture, but I could stay there for the time being. Balls, there no longer was a partnership with Frank and I didn't have to sell it; I could stay there as long as I liked.

I began to pack some gear for an extended stay in the cottage. As I was putting one of my suitcases in the car, who the hell should come walking up the road but Fiona and Sharon! Both of them were looking like they hadn't been home from the night before yet.

"Hi, what you doing handsome?" Sharon asked.

"What does it look like I'm doing, Sharon? I'm packing for a trip away for a few days."

"Wan-na hand?" Fiona drunkenly slurred.

I have no idea why I accepted her offer.

"Would help, I suppose!" I answered.

"What you got to drink?" Sharon asked the moment we got inside the house.

"Coffee, Scotch or Rum." I replied, leading them into the kitchen. Where we all proceeded to down coffee's laced with our respected preference.

Shortly after that we all climbed into my car - I can't remember what we did about the rest of my luggage - and I was giving the girls a lift to Fiona's house, before I started on my journey to Wales.

When the police car first appeared in my rear view mirror, I tried to ignore him until, that is, he was joined by a couple of friends and the blue lights started flashing. Then I thought I'd better pull over.

"Would you mind stepping out of the car, sir?" The officer asked as he approached. Damn it the copper looked familiar. You know I'll swear he was the spitting image of Soapy, my old form teacher at school. Could even have been his son or something.

I got out of the car, then in that familiar tone I remembered Soapy using when he'd caught me bunking off classes, or breaking some other school rule, he asked me if it was my vehicle. I of course told him it was.

"This car was reported stolen last night, sir," he informed me.

Damn stupid of me, I'd forgotten all about that. Well, I could prove it was mine. I had the relevant documents and my passport to prove who I was, as well. But the officer's attention seemed to have been distracted in other directions by then. He appeared to forget all about the car being stolen.

"Have you been drinking today, sir?" Now I'm not daft, I gathered he could smell a little alcohol on my breath, so there was no sense in denying it.

"I had a little drop of rum before I came out. Only a small one though, officer."

Yeah, well, you got it. The next thing I know I'm blowing up his little bag for him. A positive result and I'm on my way to the nick. God only alone knows what happened to Fiona and Sharon. I don't remember seeing them after I got out of my car.