"The beginning
To take you back to the beginning and to how it all started, I left school with no qualifications, not because I wasn’t a bright kid, I just wanted to learn another way. I was pulled towards friends who were either disruptive or had a rebellious streak about them and who never followed rules. If they smoked, I smoked, when they swore I swore, when they planned to skip school I blindly followed. We also flexed our muscles and the muscles in our mouths to intimidate and discriminate against the people we liked or disliked. It was a lifestyle that I knew deep down did not match who I was inside, but I went along with it anyway despite the trouble it got me into.
Going through secondary school I wanted to fit in, life at home was boring, nothing much was happening apart from my parents arguing and fighting. One night I woke to scuffles coming from my parent’s bedroom, I couldn’t hear their voices so in the darkness I leapt out of bed and crept towards their bedroom door. My brothers Eric and Danny were awake in the room next to theirs, they slept with their bedroom door open. I crept in and whispered that they should knock on the door to see what was going on, but Danny my older brother refused to get involved and Eric didn’t even stir.
We were used to their arguments, Danny oftentimes got between them to stop their fighting from escalating. He’d had enough and would walk out the house and stay out until it was way past our bedtime. Eric was hardly in, he’d be on his bicycle out in the park or somewhere around playing with his friends. I can’t ever remember him being around when our parents got into fights. Being the inquisitive person that I was, I wanted to know what was going on and knocked on our parent’s bedroom door, there was no answer. I could still hear muffled sounds which by now had quietened down slightly.
Feeling impatient I opened the door and as I walked in saw that our parents were on the floor. My mother’s hands was around my father’s throat, he was choking. I screamed and ran out the room down the stairs and straight out the front door. I ran the full hundred yards it took to get to the telephone box to call the police for help. It was only when I got to the phone box that I realised I was still in my see-through nightie. It was after 1am in the morning, we were in the Summer season, so it was still quite warm, but being aware of my naked body under this flimsy nightie I became self-conscious. I dropped down and with nothing on my feet, hair uncombed panting, crying and shaking, I dialled 999".
'The stone the builder rejected' by J J Law is available for purchase on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle Unlimited.
