Best of 2017

But I’m not.

It’s just one of life’s peculiarities that leads me to this one hilariously ironic moment.

The moment I face my end is the precise moment I least want to slip away.

But I can’t stop.

Even though Melissa screams my name and begs me to stay with her. Even though her hand crushes mine and the kiss from her pretty mouth reminds me of the myriad reasons I want to stay alive with her, I can’t stop my eyes from closing.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

MELISSA

ALEXANDER HENLEY, the man who is my everything, leaves me once in his hallway, just before the paramedics arrive, and again on the operating table before they stem the bleeding.

I sit and wait in the corridor while they fight to save his life, and my hands are still bloody but I don’t want to wash them.

I don’t want to wash him away from me.

My tears are quiet but they don’t stop, not once in all the hours I wait for fate to show its hand.

Dean only stays a little while before he takes Joseph back home to the bed we were leaving behind. He holds me tight and tells me it’s gonna be alright.

He’ll hold on, he says. He’s not the kind of guy to back down from a fight. No fucking way, Lissa.

I hope he’s right about that.

Dean tells me he’ll pick up Brutus on the way home. He tells me he’ll keep him safe until Alexander is back.

Brutus saved his life.

I need Alexander to wake up just so I can tell him so.

I want him to know that the dog whose life he saved from death row just saved him right back, and if that’s not fate, I don’t know what is.

I just pray to God it’s fate that brings Alexander back to me.

I recognise Claire Henley from their wedding photos as she rushes into the ward at just before midnight. Her eyes are wide and scared and her lips are pale even though she’s wearing lip gloss.

“How is he?” she asks me, and I shrug. I don’t know. Not yet.

I tell her so.

She takes a seat at my side.

“The stubborn sonofabitch will pull through,” she tells me, and I stare at her face as a tear falls. “I should’ve known his filthy fucking father would be the end of him.”

I don’t know what to say, so I don’t.

“Are you his…” she begins, and I nod.

“We were, um… moving away.”

She sighs. “About bloody time he found something he really wanted.” She brushes a tear away. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell the boys, if he…”

“He won’t,” I say. “He’s a stubborn sonofabitch, remember?”

She smiles at me. “I heard that ugly mutt saved his life.”

I smile back. “He’s not so ugly,” I say. “He’s great when you get to know him.”

“I never really gave the thing a chance. He smells bad.”

“There’s time.”

“I hope so,” she tells me. “And I hope there’s time for you to meet my boys, too. They’d love to see their dad… happy.”

So would I.

I’d love to see him happy, far away from all this with his feet on the sand somewhere.

We’re sitting in silence as a doctor heads out to us, he tugs the mask from his face and calls for “Mrs Henley,” but Claire gestures at me.

“I think this is for you,” she says, and I get shakily to my feet.

I can hardly breathe as I step forward. My knees are knocking as I wait for the verdict.

But it’s good. It’s really good.

He shows me a diagram of the bullet they took from the bottom of his lung. He lost a lot of blood, the doctor tells me, but I already know that. My hands don’t let me forget it.

My head is dizzy with relief when he tells me he’s going to be just fine. That they stemmed the bleeding and fixed him back up, and he’ll be weak for a while, but he’ll live.

He’ll live.

They’re the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard, even more beautiful than I love you from Alexander’s perfect mouth. Even more beautiful than the first time he used my real name.

I thank the doctor.

I thank him over and over through my tears.

And Claire is happy for me. She puts her arm around my shoulder at the happy news and squeezes tight.

“I told you,” she said. “He’s a stubborn sonofabitch. You’ll find that out for yourself, don’t you worry.”

I’m not worried.

I can hardly wait.

EPILOGUE

ALEXANDER

MAYBE I’M SLOWLY BECOMING a man who believes in mumbo jumbo.

The dog I rescued from certain doom is the one who saved me from mine.

The girl whose eyes I stared into as I thought she’d died in my arms, is the very girl who stares into mine as I really do die in hers less than twenty-four hours later.

And what a twenty-four hours they turned out to be.

But maybe the biggest irony of all is that it’s the same gormless photographer I told to fuck off a few hours earlier that captures the pictures needed to identify my shooter.

It’s the story Ronald pissing Robertson runs in his shitty tabloid that sees the authorities locate my cunt of a hitman and take him in for questioning.

Apparently his arm needed over thirty stitches. He’ll probably never regain the use of his fingers, which is just as well considering he needs them to pull the fucking trigger.

I don’t think he’ll be pulling another one anytime soon.

I assumed he’d get away with it, of course. After all, my father’s a better puppet master than I’ll ever be.

But not this time. This time the puppet master chose the wrong puppet. This time he rushed the job and paid on the cheap. A fool’s error most certainly, and one that makes me smile every time I ponder it.

I waited a long time for that filthy old bastard to ever make a mistake.

The piece of shit he got to take a shot at me on my doorstep was an amateur at best.

He was more than happy to blab the details of my father and all his cunting associates in exchange for a shorter sentence, and I was more than happy to fill in the blanks.

That’s how I came to stand on the other side of the witness box for once in my life, watching my father tried for attempted murder.

That’s how Melissa, Dean, Joe and I got taken into witness protection and shipped away to a nice little town on the Welsh coast a million miles from bloody anywhere.

And that’s how Melissa and I ended up as Mr Ted and Mrs Amy Brown. Just regular folk going about their regular business, with a regular kid and a dog, and my friendly nephew Danny hanging around.

Melissa really did end up as a Mrs, too.

I married her in hospital the very next day after my operation, just in case my father came back for round two.

She bought me orchids for my room, and a cupcake too.

And a crystal.

The crystal.

She fished out her lucky quartz from behind the shelving at mine and handed it right back as we said our vows.

I’ll never throw it away again.

I’ll never throw her away again, either.

My boys are coming to visit next weekend.

It’s been three months since my father was convicted, and I think the coast is as clear as it’ll ever be.

I grind the beans for the coffee machine as Dean heads back from the beach with Joe. I watch them up the path as Brutus pads along behind, and I can’t stop smiling, knowing that my beautiful wife is due home any minute.

From college.

My beautiful wife Amy is studying law at college.

She wants to be a lawyer one day, who’d have thought it? It seems not everything was for my benefit. Far from it.

She wants to be a legal aid lawyer at that. Good deeds for those who can’t afford decent representation.

I’m proud of her.

And me?

Well, I think I’m going to take it easy awhile.

I’ve got a whole collection of gemstones to start over, and a wife who actually wants me at night.

I’ve got a family in Joseph and Dean.

I’ve got my boys heading over for football practice this weekend – I’ve even set them up a pitch in the garden.

And I’ve got my vicious, unlovable, untrainable dog, who’s not nearly so vicious these days.