2
JOURNEY’S BEGINNING: APRIL 2002. I was never a natural step father. There was always something awry. Even from my first meeting with the child, deep down I just knew I was doomed to fail in my effort to bond with her. To Lita Limoncello I must have blown into her Catskill’s calm mountain wilderness like a sudden and unwanted whirlwind of flesh and bone, piss and wind, bearing down on her romantically deluded mother to sweep her off those lonely New York shelves.
From foolish wiles we determined to see a flower slowly developing from a bud, just as the bud had from its seed. But to be fair to Lita’s mother, the new Mrs Bloom gamely insisted that from now on my surname must be inscribed on every schoolbook.
I did my bloomful best. I spoke softly and fatherly to leery Lita. I told her I would from now on always be there for her,’ we’re all one big family now’ I would tell her. And ‘ you’re going to be as much my daughter as your mother is now my wife.’
But as hard as I tried and as hard as my wife tried Lita Limoncello did not come sweetly to the bosom of the Bloom household. She was most unhappy that her mother, Miss Balloon Climber was now World Wide Web wedded to her electronic wooer, Mister Bordello Moan.
She didn’t really approve of the Datingdads.com suitor who applied his Gold Membership with aplomb to secure his new bride and like many other limited thinkers in the late Nineteen-nineties Little Lim Lita was suspicious of love borne from twenty-four seven online wooing in binary flashes, delivered in packets, routed on networks and woven across continents and oceans.
Apart from my newly configured, freshly installed stepdaughter, there was many an uncle and aunt, parent and grandparent who shared those doubts about the nature of our foolish flush of mid-life Internet love. There were very few homespun palliatives that would hit the mark with that superfluous adolescent interloper.
But we were here now and domiciled in England for a different normal boodle of conjoined, delusional optimists, evolutionists of the electronic new age. But would it be a bed of roses? Our ports were docked come what may.
But like any other age, electronic or otherwise, the one ineluctable truth that pervaded our hearts like all others was to find a harmonious marital union that would not be so witheringly replete with nagging vacillations between lonesome Laconic Leo and comely Curvaceous Carla.
I had my term of endearment. I called her my Cookie because she was sweet to me and a little kooky or crazy at times, too. All we both ever wanted was to safely secure a loving partnership with that sentient, caring and attentive special human being.
So what transpired of our tryst in the intervening married years from January 1998 until now? What flotsam and jetsam would be cast up from those treacherous eddies and Internet currents? Into that vacuum of electronic loneliness, into its centre- the desolate circle- the gods of the Web extracted their sacrifice, their pound of flesh and the wayfaring colonists began to flounder in turgid lustral waters. Sucked toward that cavity, our helpless bodies now subject to its action, fingers unable to clasp onto the usual practicabilities of courtship, these lovers hand’s torn from prudence in their lusty haste to make fateful decisions they shall come to rue in Poseidon’s vortex. Sex?
Of course that was the crux of it. Mums and dads don’t have sexual needs in the minds of their offspring. We held our very own germ of desire like anyone else. Just like our antecedents down and down from the beginning of time we all seek the seed in which lies hidden the flower of next summer’s golden flower. And that something magical that develops in the capsule of its parent bloom; the parent may be but slightly different, slightly changed.
And what of love?
Love is what we want. And as for sex and love? We reconciled to accept our differences and thereafter determined from those differences we arrange our blooms in our own form of domestic harmony. A new kind of sex and love! All pumped up and primed to go in synthesised nuclear family form only for it to appear to end it as a wavering kind of sex and love.
For the initial honeymoon period I had bravely ensconced myself at the Limoncello’s ranch home on a six acre spread just outside the small northern New York State town of Ithaca not a long drive from Cornell (42°41′00″N, 76°41′46″W). All told I spent a year there- as long as it took the United States Immigration and Naturalisation Service to rubber stamp my euphemistically named Alien Residency.
As much as I loved it at first I soon grew weary of the constant diet of trips to the yacht club or around the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge spotting Bald Eagles. And frankly, the Limon- juiced family suppers at sister-in-law, Mary’s and barbecues at Uncle Pete’s who overwhelmed us all with his crazed passion for anything ‘Guns’ and National Rifle Association and at the least expected time would exclaim ‘did you guys hear that lake fart?’ The man would shoot anything and everything that moved and became frightfully fraught with increased animus.
Brother-in-law, Steve was the only one I seemed to have a ‘normal’ buddy-style rapport with and he was almost always downstate working a laser surgeon’s hours unless he came up for a weekend’s spot of fishing in Cayuga Lake.
But in the end it was Aunt Mary’s xenophobia for anything non-American plus my own homesickness thrown in as seasoning all determined I should play my one trump card and solemnly declare that I could no longer bare not to see my own two kids, and off we all must jolly well go.
So it transpired for Bloom’s pair of lemons that they joined in a year’s problematic shenanigans of trying to settle a recalcitrant, geographically, culturally and emotionally disorientated adolescent only child in an alien, friendless, hostile and pitiless old world.
Lita Limoncello Bloom was the rubric, my conundrum, and our beast child and she often did her beastliest best to try our patience.
She hated English food, she disliked her teachers and peers, and she despised our television and music, what more counts in the mind of an adolescent American girl?
Only with fortitude and after some considerable passage of time would come any small blessing from the great ‘tamer of horses and saviour of ships’. Hail, Poseidon, Holder of the Earth, dark-haired lord! O blessed one, be kindly in heart and help those who voyage in blips.
Finally we had reason to thank all the gods for delivering tall mercies to North Haven. Lanky six-footer Claire Boylan was Leery Lita’s first true friend at Bishop Thomas Dupré School. It took many weeks of tears, squabbles, bedroom tornados, hugs and hankies. But finally the cataclysm was somehow averted. Kindly Claire’s Samaritan touch amongst the hordes of Levites gave Lita the compassion she desperately craved from local kids.
Being of such lofty construction Claire was certainly quite an Amazon of a child but who better to be a worthy sidekick cum guardian angel?
Spunky, confident Claire’s timely intervention was worth far more than two denarii to us and may well have averted a crisis of biblical proportions.
Of course, this was North Haven, ostensibly a sleepy antediluvian coastal town so typical of all those quaint, pretty-in-parts, moribund fishing towns you find all along the east coast of England. These were the rural flat plains of old East Mercia; so rural and well connected in parts with a sprinkling of musty heritage. You can stroll past dilapidated public housing estates one minute then alongside well-appointed town houses, wooded banks, sandy beaches and dry landing places soon after.
Here there are field after rolling field of gently sloping corn and lush green marshes that would spread on into infinity if it weren’t for the pebble seashores, low craggy cliffs and sandy estuary beaches to punctuate their contagious drift. Here was bar ideal holiday destination for the geriatric and life weary, a Mecca for tree huggers and twitchers.
As much as I loved the gently meandering, quiet reed banks lazily sloping seawards, as much as Mrs Bloom adored this life paced for slippers and cucumber sandwiches rather her boom boxing and hip hopping precious little child just didn’t get it.
For a shrewder insight into the prevailing demographics of North Haven then I say to anyone, just take a few minutes of your time to peruse the main crop of advertisements that those slick media-marketers pump out on our day time TV regional channels. Here we suffer a glut of ads for arthritis remedies, debt consolidators, ‘trip or fall’ ambulance chasers, disposable nappies, convenience microwave dinners, mobile phone ring tones and psychic hotlines at one pound a minute. Put the pieces of the puzzle together and you have an idea of your typical North Havener.
So perhaps now you could therefore understand why the other kids of Thomas Dupré High were bemused by the novelty of this insolent, gawky and rambunctious American kid.
But after a while the interest in any such uniqueness wears thin and Lita would remember her period in the Year Tens very well and never too pleasantly. You see even the older, larger, bolder Claire could not protect Lita forever from the jealous stinging ‘lemon’ taunts of the yobbish bullies.
It all just precipitated the whirlwind of our marital split. I calculated, what with intermittent episodes of residence in Florida added into the equation, between our two homes in New York and England we had in total lived together as a family for less that two of the five years of marriage.
By chance while browsing the classifieds in the local papers I happened upon an up-market rental in South Haven that came up unexpectedly from an oil contractor who had to dash off to Brazil on a twelve-month stint.
Both big and small lemon as well as wilting bloom thought it the ideal solution: new home new school, Part Two.
Teens don’t want to be mollycoddled but they still need a place where they can feel safe and have a sense of belonging.
But I felt no sorrow when their suitcases were packed once more and they moved but ten miles away from this unfortunate drag. South Haven was altogether more salubrious than North Haven.
There they struck good fortune right off the bat, as new neighbours on Cedar Drive were Carlton Clover and his mother, Harriet. Harriet and Carlton befriended Lita and Carla almost straight away. The Clover family also made up of dad, who was Hector and youngest sibling sister, Faye, seemed kindly, protective and unassuming. Most of all pizza-faced Carlton promised to look out for Lita at the new high school.
But frankly, behind my stoical smiles I wondered how much time I had left before my wife and stepdaughter would give up on this Internet experiment completely and head back to the Big Apple. Feeling like I was living on borrowed time the die was now cast and from the wreckage of that abortive beginning the seeds were sown for that ‘trial separation’ and we all took a punt at less withered flowerings in more fertile soil better fitting my wife’s middle class aspirations.
Oh, how it promised so much more at the start when my luscious lemons first arrived on these shores. In happier days we had travelled to many a fine port in our excursions but to finally tie up at the Havens had been my doing. I had owned the little house in North Haven for a handful of years since my first wife divorced me. But Carla, being the inquisitive anglophile wanted to explore many a fine Albion dock before making her choice of harbour. Seeing the different places along our journeys, Plymouth, Falmouth, Southampton and so on culminating in an instructive tour of the sights of the great metropolis, the spectacle of our modern Babylon where she absorbed the greatest of icons-the Tower, Abbey, the wealth of Park Lane, perhaps to renew acquaintance with again sometime. Every place considered but ruled out for one reason or another. The thing which often struck her as a by no means a bad notion was she might have a gaze around to see about trying to make arrangements for summer music concerts, family stop-overs et al. then to embrace the notion of the most prominent coastal resorts: Margate was one such stop then Eastbourne, Scarborough and so on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel islands and similar bijou spots, which might prove highly recuperative for the my troubled American honey’s soul. Lower on the list came North Haven-still scenic along the coast and just about alive and quaint in its own idiosyncratic way with the trawler man’s scent if a big catch was landed. But here, too, there were the sea breezes, paddling pools, deck chairs, binocular-waving coastal twitchers, telescopes and young women in bikinis for me to ogle as I sketch or doodle a ditty in my pocket book. Take a seat! Ah! Lido peep!
South Haven was altogether different. Ten miles inland, more ‘upscale’ with narrow lanes, small traditional shops, fine restaurants and grander homes. I really did like the Limoncello’s new home. It was much larger and more spacious, better equipped, lighter, airier and more welcoming than my modest abode back in dull old Eccles Drive.
Carla was especially glad that she had all the wall space she needed to hang her fine collection of impressive Katsushika Hokusai prints. We had been collecting for some years now. It was my idea, naturally. Refinement and culture was what upwardly mobile persons seek today. The’ Great Wave’ print being my favourite.
I felt a bit jealous of it, perhaps. But I needed a break from all the bickering and tensions. I couldn’t face living with them right then night and day. I needed my own private space: some quality time away from the marriage. Let’s be honest- I’ve always been a persistent, natural loner.
Although we had hoped for more before Lita had gone to that first dreadful school Bishop Thomas Dupré had just sucked big time. But now things seemed a tad better. They settled quickly without me. Of course, we’d have days out as a family and they would sometimes still want to come visit me in my minimalist little suburban semi. Semi-married and back to those seminal games once more for Leo the lad.
I always put on the appropriate airs and graces when my visitors came a calling. I impeccably went with the flow in my usual laid- back manner. But even so, I wasn’t too keen on surprise visits-just in case. Whenever they did call on me they would often and to my great annoyance, pop in next door for a chat with my neighbour, Cilla Karibdis. She was the resident karaoke disco queen at the ‘Sunken Ship’ and some other out of town smoky alehouse. She was a vaguely handsome but often stone-faced women in her mid thirties, overly jewelled, heavily made up and past her prime already. From the greying roots of her bottle-blonde locks to those cheap plastic nails she possessed a quirky ordinariness for which Carla held an odd fascination.
Wife and neighbour first became good friends a year or so back when they found they shared a penchant for a diet of prying and tittle-tattle. Cookie got it served up by the plateful at the doorstep. Cilla, a divorcee of Turkish descent had an eye for the men. I confessed. I regrettably had the briefest of flings after my first wife divorced me. Thank Thetis for rescuing me from a darker fate. But those brief waves of passion had long ebbed away (or so I believed). Cilla was clearly ‘not upscale’ as my wife would term it. She feigned prudishness over nude statues I kept in my garden, held superstitious fear black cats and had truly indescribable talent as a singer-songwriter. My cookie Carla often queried what on earth I had ever seen in a woman who offered little apart from a structurally fulsome silhouette. I suspected the friendship thing was all a clever ruse. I held a deep suspicion Karibdis was my wife’s paid informant and I was the target. I was sure the Turkish One was told everything about our past; how we met, what brought us together, what my foibles were, etc, etc. Oh. God I hated her having to people all our ins and outs!
I was sure my wife told every Tom, Dick and Mary that same joyous story. Of how like a golden gift from the gods the World Wide Web had first transported Carla to me. We were part of that first flush of transatlantic Internet daters in the late 1990’s. There wasn’t the same cynicism back then. She said she loved the English for their polite sincerity and manners. We were both children of immigrant parents. An Italian-American now conjoined to the Anglo-Irish. I always encouraged her to nurture a wistful romanticism about my country and it’s people. So what did happen about Cilla? It was a foolish fling. Like my father always told me in his strong southern Dublin accent, “ Never shit on your own doorstep, son. “ Like father, like son. He had his jars and I rode the women. Scoundrels both.

3
Over the months I became more adept at engineering social arrangements so that we held all family gatherings at my wife’s new place at thirteen Cedar Drive. This left me nicely residing free and easy, without my tangle of thorns to ponder, in my princedom by the sea. But what the Limoncello’s did have for themselves was really quite a fetching and salubrious suburb of South Haven and certainly appropriate for a woman of my wife’s means. After a while even my own two kids automatically accepted my wishes on that score. With her own new neighbourhood to meet and greet Cookie soon found an element she deemed more appropriate to her social needs. With her unique style of American hospitality Cedar Drive welcomed her absolutely. Harriet Clover was another of the breed of gossipers and peered over the garden fence always seeking a natter. Carlton would take his cue without prompting and tag along into the house aside Lita on a raiding mission to scoff her sickly- sweet chocolate home bakes or rifle the over-sized American fridge. I did warn the boy-it does nothing for those angry looking pustules attacking the corners of his mouth. Cookie would scold them for tramping their muddy shoes across her plush carpets but they were lotus-eaters one and the same- gathered round the kitchen table. And so the mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eater did come came like branches borne of that enchanted stem and laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave to each, but whoso did receive of them.
I’d often be there, too, or at least my physical me was. I wandered otherwise in spirit passing elsewhere to places more solipsistic than theirs. For eons, it seemed, my playground had been cyber space in a cocktail of comfort with a therapist and Prozac - sinecure for the stale prosaic pedant.

4
Carlton Clover was a lad of fourteen, ruddy complexion comprised of papular eruptions, gangly limbed but arriving in the throes of burgeoning adolescence. He sported a weak and wiry Shaggy goatee that was ever so slightly evidenced upon his chin. But he was affable and like me, loved those cute toothy grins that helped Lita shine on her new throne. No more school taunts of lemons for her- now pealed I hope. They liked to walk to and from school together. He introduced her to a whole different crowd including one new person who caused an equally eventful stir by her arrival about the same time. We first became aware of Rebecca van Hiller when Lita first told us she had made a wonderful new friend. The girl who had been through the toughest times so awfully mistreated by her parents and we were properly shocked at her story. Lita told us she was frequently locked in her bedroom, denied food and bathroom privileges; beaten and bullied by her older brother at the behest of the father. She ran away many times fleeing to uncles, aunts and grandparents for sanctuary, anyone who would save her. The child came to tea one afternoon. She acted coyly but we were warned about that-she was ever so self-conscious about her lazy right eye. So much so that she would always cover it with a hanging flop of her long dark hair. O me it was only a mild imperfection but it made her appear ever so much more charming and vulnerable. She made an instant impression. Charismatic! She spoke in a finical sweet voice, showing white teeth and blinking her eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Yes, I agree, too. Most attractive.
The tale she told profoundly touched my wife’s heart. In sympathy she was given centre stage before us. Her eyes were languid pools so dreamy. Carla’s kindly soul warmed to the lost child in wont of the second Lita she could never had.

So whether to stay or not to stay? Fostering was the question. There were such ruminations on the prospect. It was a subject of much regret and so absurd as well on the face of it. With no small blame to our vaunted society that the children were trudging our streets, when the welfare system really needed toning up and kids given some hopeful colour to their cheeks. All for the matter of a few pounds a child could be tragically debarred from thriving in the world in which they lived in- always and ever cooped up.
After all, damn it-too many humdrum months and now she merited a radical change of venue after a closeted life. Better for the child to be out in the summertime when Mother Nature is at her spectacular best for a new lease of life. The Limoncellos spoke of a room being made up for her in this delightful sylvan spot. Give the girl her rejuvenation; offer her wealth of opportunity and a more wholesome lifestyle in and around these picturesque environs. So it was to pass. Within the week a new resident was taken in at number thirteen Cedar Drive. Miss Rebecca van Hiller was rescued from her torments. Hallelujah!
‘Gaunt and pale,
Cute and nice,
Sweet vanilla
Come be my vice’
My baying American Cookieie still demanded of me a certain measure of husbandly duties. Today such was required of me and now my task was more gadding about post- Spring Bank holiday as I sleekly zipped to Cedar Drive in the new Merc. I was sporting my tight black pectoral-posing t-shirt, black boots and pants. The sleek black wrap around shades was the finishing touch. I wanted to accentuate my rediscovered manly physique chiselled by daily gym my workouts and I wanted to show it off. From the knowing looks I got now I felt the gym was enhancing most profitably my new preoccupation. But today courtesy and financial necessity put me at my estranged wife’s disposal yet again. I could not rebel against these impositions while I was on her payroll but her presence cramped my style. Today my queen had summoned me as yet more shop returns she had to deposit in the city. The woman had her own fixation and consumerism it was.
“ Oh, Leo honey bun! So Arnold Schwarzenstrudel has finally come dressed like a nightclub doorman-you stupid old pie heap! What on earth are you after? More brainless gawky chickadees?”
I was often scolded for my late arrival. It was my failing, I confess-always late, and never reliable. I hissed at the woman when she slammed the car door shut. I quickly chauffeured her from the house. Just her and me again, thank the gods. Normally, on a good day when I visited the South Haven residence I rarely saw those jeunes demoiselles. Whenever I chauffeured all three on a shopping trip the cackles and clucks would be such a cacophony it would drive any man to drink. Must be out and about with their street mates, I guess. Perhaps I may twist that pliant arm of hers into purchasing something more to my own tastes?
“ What’s in the carrier bags today? More unwanted nick-knacks? I get sick of these pointless shopping expeditions!” I scowled.
“ Drive on and don’t be mean! God! Where is my purse? You want to check up on some old prints don’t you? The girls need things, too! Drive on! Careful- you nearly hit that car!”
Returns made, windows browsed and coffees quaffed so imagine my surprise when we finally happened upon a fine antique shop and I saw some enchanting original and rare Japanese Kunisadas. To be frank I just adored and would collect any type of waraie and pore over it in raptures of delight. The dealer had acquired some remarkable woodblock prints. But madam was more swayed by my effusive description of the fineness of the pieces as I schmoozed her into buying one fine Shunga. I enlightened her on the artist’s wonderful use of gauffrage, lacquer, and burnishing and metallic pigment. She bought my eloquent patter and soon she saw it like me-all about the wonderful design. It was a charming rendition of an intimate couple-the woman relaxed drinking sake while the man saw to his duty and did all the work. She was slowly developing a taste we both could share. Bagged, bought and paid for my duty done and pleasures remain intact.

5
Perhaps like a lot of re-marrying men I found it difficult to adjust to living in a makeshift family. Is there any wisdom in setting up in someone else’s nest of problems? Flocks of these women habituate their preening grounds on the World Wide Web. They were all so monotonous and dreary in their ambitions: they had to find a husband. I so yearn for my surreptitious nights.
My cookie-crunching Carla wouldn’t come to the gym any more. I had given up trying to coax her. She piled on the weight in our first year together. You just can’t make a peach from a lemon. In the beginning we had Florida. Those pretences were now long over. Call me a private man- bookish, self-disciplined, obsessively clean and tidy. Perhaps. Obsessive, compulsive and emotionally disordered she would say. You laugh, I tell her and are frivolous and I ask who cleans your mess? These differences you don’t always pick up so quickly when you meet someone over the Internet. Keep your spontaneous, emotionally excitable, disorganised chaos. It takes time. I was making better use of mine now.
A trill sound broke my line of thought. Phone. “ Hi, Leo, Steve here-Cookie asked me to call. She’s been worried about you….says you’re not yourself lately-withdrawn and detached-how’s it been, chum?”
I liked Steve-her younger brother. But Cookie would always talk about me to other people behind my back. He was a good ten years younger than me- Yale Med high-flier. Ha! I peopled, too.
“ I don’t like playing doctor to family, Leo, no reward and little thanks. You’re no different from me- always busy with other things. Us men are the worst for neglecting our health- wanted to touch base and satisfy myself you’re all ok-you don’t mind? How is the gout by the way?” He spoke of tremors, nausea, sweats, or mood disturbance. In the muscles and joints; any night sweats; dry skin; hair loss or weight gain?
“ Come on, Steve, I’m not a boozer, my friend.” Carnival beer lech.
Erectile dysfunction? I assured him it was ok. Some stiffness. An occasional semi-lob on taking surreptitious peeks at forbidden fruits. Crisis? Crisis? What crisis?
“ You know my sister, Leo…..always Florence Nightingale on steroids. Only you to worry about now Lita’s back here with us.”
My diet, as you know, in my past life, had been atrocious. Offal meats and the lovely thick giblet soups, nutty gizzards I ate. You can’t beat a fine a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all I liked grilled mutton kidneys. But to my dismay that often left me smelling of scented urine, I joked. Goutish! Steve was educated and liked a literary laugh or two. He had helped me like I had helped him (a nasty scrape at a house of ill repute in Newark, NJ one time but we won’t go there!) and he fixed my gout with Allopurinol. Can’t keep off the red wine though, just like Telemachus. Plenty of exercise, a good varied diet and fresh air were what the doctor ordered. I particularly loved my fruits, ripened and peachy always looking for a bite of that five times a day if I could. Thanks for that, Stevie boy! I’m on the up and feeling good.
I so adored this warmer weather. More gadding about now like with my own two kids, driving off to see the family down in Berkshire, Cookieecues at every opportunity. And me there laughing, relaxing, and watching the village cricket. Heavenly skies really. If life was always like that. Proper cricket weather. Sit like lords under a parasol for both innings. Out! They can't play it here. Followed on and lost the ball to the running dog that scampered over the boundary ropes after the finest of slogs. Heat waves never last but the globules are warming. Saving the planet for a greener peace. Global. No gentle street jogging on tonight on this glorious balmy summer’s evenings. Another day I shall feel that intoxicating noradrenaline rush at the end. Showered and dressed for seven and tanned and glowing in summer whites. Or shorts not slacks? Mahogany knees as trophies. Wet shaved and scrubbed up fresh. Dinner at the Mansion House. Driven to the park. Brother and sister in law’s treat. Lovely- topped it off with a cool drink or two in the red and amber glow of sunset. What a tasty tipple.
6
JULY 12TH 2002. Then one fine afternoon it started to change forever. No more Glückliche Zeiten. The phone call marked the end of the happy times. It came as I was sunning myself in my balmy English garden.
I had an assignation planned for that evening and I wanted to perk up my tan. But plans suddenly changed. Cookie’s voice was agitated; she spoke very fast, so fast in fact that all I could make out was that she felt alone and at her wits end. She went on about missing Lita who packed her suitcases and had gone back to the States. Shit. I kind of overlooked how that must have felt. I was being rather self-indulgent and insensitive really. I should have rallied round her a bit more. Cookie’s confidence must have been dented at Lita’s departure at the end of the school summer term. Her moods would swing one-way or the other. I had kept out of her way until she got used to it. She was prone to some awful rants from time to time. Her voice rattled at me through the phone. She had her own distinct New York vernacular. Of Queens. Always things were ‘going down the pan’. I put it down to the fact Lita had chose to stay with the older sister cranky Carla detested. Mary had a swanky place in the country an hour or so from Albany. I never liked the snotty cow. Mary called England, “ That third world country.”
It wasn’t just Lita leaving that upset Cookie. She still had the other little problem on her hands-someone else’s kid and no one else wanted to help. My ear was buzzing from the pounding she was giving me down the phone. What compounded my wife’s rancour was that Social Services had done nothing to sort out finances or other accommodation in the six months since Rebecca came into her care. I couldn’t fathom out how this state of affairs could run indefinitely. To top it all this kid just wasn’t right. The girl was now behaving oddly. The longer Cookie kept me on the phone the clearer it became. With no Lita around this Rebecca had suddenly become a right pain. Clearly life had gotten bleaker all round.
She kept me on the phone for what seemed like an age. She jabbered on.
“Leo, this week’s been an absolute hell! Tuesday she came back late stinking of booze-Carlton says he saw her climbing out of the back of a busted up old Ford! She stumbles in the house and falls down and a white package fell out of her handbag…drugs, Leo!”
Cookie said when she questioned her she denied the drugs but admitted to having unprotected sex. The drugs she was holding for a friend. On Wednesday she spoke with the neighbours, Harriet and Carlton, on Cedar Drive who were picking up on things and showing concern.
“I’ve tried grounding her, Leo. I even taking away Lita’s old mobile phone she lent her. When I did that-god! She was almost up at me like ready for a fight!”
In desperation my wife now wanted my input. If I couldn’t be bothered to help then she, too, was going to be on the next flight out. She had had a gut full, she spluttered. I took her seriously. We agreed a crisis meeting for the next day. Maybe the kid needed a father figure in her life to put her straight.
The following day I cruised over in the Mercedes and I weighed it all up. I couldn’t have my wife packing it all her scratching of the arms and elbows thing she always did when she was strung out.
“Ah, I’m so glad you’re here! I could have throttled the little slut. I just don’t know what goes on in her head-I threatened to throw her out last night and she just smiled back at me- can you believe it?”
“That’s just the drugs, Cookie just put that down to drugs”
But she retorted, “ No, Leo, it was much more than just drugs, she was a different person, like she was possessed!”
I put my arm around her and gave her one of those manly hugs that she liked. It had often been a soothing antidote but today not much more than a sop. I felt her tear on my cheek and she took a deep, slow breath.
She began to calm somewhat and she made us both a nice cup of tea. We sat out on the patio. A warm, soothing breeze fluttered through the manicured garden borders bathed in full summer sun. She made me promise to help make some telephone calls. First, I phoned Social Services: just an answering machine. No luck there. I then tried phoning the mother who only once telephoned us about her child. That, ominously, was to warn off Rebecca who had been round her younger sister’s primary school upsetting her on and off for months. When I asked if she would help she just gave me the number of the grandparents then hung up: most curt! I thought. I tried that number but no answer.
Over the next few days we explored all the avenues we could. Rebecca was often out of the house most of the day off doing her thing. Cookie had got beyond caring for now. Just having her away from the house was a blessing. Apparently she was spending a lot more time either at the Clover’s next door or hanging out with the skater crowd. Apparently the South Haven ‘crew’ were better at ‘grinding’ than North Haven skaters. We busied ourselves but were just not coming up with the goods. Crucially, Social Services had no suitable alternative accommodation at the moment for this kid. The parents obstinately refused to take her back citing the needs of the other siblings as their first priority. I felt like saying I’d take the kid to the police station and dump her there with her packed bags but I knew that wouldn’t help things. This kid was playing on Cookie’s conscience and her sympathy most cleverly. Cookie called it ‘reverse psychology’ and Rebecca was running rings round her.
In the end I surrendered to the inevitable. It wasn’t just a case of me having to be a nobler chap although I am not averse to playing the part of hero. But I knew I had to give it a go. Frankly, I wised up, I knew my wife was funding my lifestyle and I felt guilty seeing her go under. And the bottom line was I had to consider what would happen to me if she cracked and took off back to America. She was clearly desperate and I would have been, too, if I suddenly lost her financial support. So I made a promise to her to keep her from breaking. From now on I was going to get actively involved in the matter.
The new school term was coming up: early September. The first day soon arrived and I dutifully drove to the house. I got there about 3pm and was met at the door by the somewhat forlorn figure of my wife. She was still pale and sick of it all, like she was in some kind of mourning. But she offered up a smile then gave me an almost apologetic peck on the cheek.
She went to make some tea while I made myself comfortable on the sofa. She had left open one of her slushy romantic novels on the coffee table. I read a line from the top of a page, 'that insidious tyrant of the female heart, who soothes us with the hope of happiness, only to plunge us into the certainty of disappointment.' I told myself I had to deliver the goods or my own lifestyle was going to suffer. I was never sure whether I would turn out the hero or the villain in her story. I did my best to cheer her up.
We sat and drank tea. My mother was also an avid drinker of tea. Tea was the panacea to a whole day of trials and tribulations. But Mrs Bloom was a tea-drinker extraordinaire. This was odd, I thought for a good old -fashioned New York girl raised on percolated coffee grinding. Out would come the cake and biscuit tin (always full of fresh, delicious, home-made goodies). My wife would have the choicest Ceylon leaves never the fanciest of Earl Greys but a sound mix nonetheless. Not your common or garden tea bags stew either.She made hers in a large pot, a good, stout English big brown teapot with a knitted tea cosy over it that connoisseurs would recognise. I think it was partly the ritual of the tea-making ceremony she adored. It was that quintessential ceremony of warming the pot, letting it draw and finally pouring the infusion through the strainer to mix most satisfyingly with the splash of milk in the china cup. I guess we all loved the chink of the silver spoon, too, as we stirred the mix. Reassuringly this mundane of domestic acts making us all feel at home and so safe.
“This is my game plan, Cookie. I’ll come over and get her sorted on her schoolwork and we can build a daily routine round that-an hour or so each day after school. Just to keep her occupied until social services get her a proper foster place sorted. I’ll just muddle through with my supply teaching until the colder months arrive so it’s no big deal.”
The tea and biscuits was most agreeable, as husband and wife were we in the new stratagem. Each day after a light tea it was going to be like this. Our wayward charge would receive her gentle instruction from me in the upstairs study. At the desk I would peruse all her assignments, work diary and textbooks and files and set about my task to adorn little Miss Rough Diamond with a finer veneer. No more after school waywardness, no more of the repellant distractions of boys, psychedelics, alcohol and tomfoolery.
Just before four o’clock the front door sounded in a jarring fulmination. I was sat at the computer in the makeshift bedroom cum study. I heard the mumble of voices from the kitchen followed instantly by the clump clump of footsteps on the stairway and I turned to see her at the door.
” Hi Leo, Cookie says you and me will be doing a few good things together?” She smirked.
Before I could open my mouth and make my pitch she nonchalantly undone the top few buttons of her school blouse giving me the glad eye. A large lock of shiny black hair flopped down to mask most of the other, less perfect, side of her pretty face while, conversely, her full black brassiere thrust into view. My gaze fell fixed upon her most ample cleavage. I felt the challenge. She was taunting me and tempting me at the same moment. She acted as if possessed with a great confidence not typical of other sixteen year-old schoolgirls I had known. I tried to avert my stare as I dertemined it was in her to be “porne.” Her good eye locked onto me and I withered before her.
Incongruously, she posed before me theatrically and waited for a few seconds. But then her confidence ebbed and a look of puzzlement came over her. She hadn’t elicited from me the response she craved. I truly doubt she understood the real nature of my momentary indecision.Undecided as to whether I should display vexation or flirtation she dallied no more and made a tactical withdrawal.
“ I’ll just get changed.” she said in what I took as a tone of disappointment. She turned and slowly sloped off to her bedroom tugging up her blouse from her skirt and exposing her perfect soft white midriff. I watched her closely as she tossed a bulging schoolbag over her shoulder and walked launguidly through the picture frame of her open bedroom door.
Then I saw it on her lower side, just above her womanly-ripe hip, a three-inch scar blemishing her otherwise flawless beauty. That’s a shame, I thought.
But no matter, still those perfect hips. Well within the divine ratio. I had registered her signal of fertility loud and clear. Our dear Rebecca had fine childbearing hips-smack on the money and plain to see perfectly proportioned for perfect health, fecundity and above all, lust.
If I were of a mind to measure I would say hers was that sublime waist to hip ratio 0.7. Not your prepubescent, straight up and down nought point nines or so but a winning nought point seven. A woman needs those luscious hips to win her man and our Miss van Hiller was certainly not one for losing hers.
As I gaze longingly at that slinky seductress I seem to palpitate; in contemplating her my modesty takes alarm, desire begins to awake, and imagination to kindle and I am smitten with a mad passion for the voluptuous and the commiseration my state of mind inspired set aside all idea of ridicule.
I would be like those men of far-distant centuries who were so given over to the pleasures of the senses that they built a temple to Venus Callipyge. This was how it happened then. A countryman had two fair daughters; they were contending one day with each other about the beauty of their hips, each declaring that hers were the most beautiful, and so disputing they came upon the highway. A young man happening to pass that way whose father was already well in years, they at once submitted themselves to the judgment of his eyes, and he pronounced in favour of the eldest. But at the same time he fell so deeply in love with her, that he had hardly arrived at the town before he fell ill, kept his bed, and told his young brother what had happened to him. The latter hastened to the fields to look at the young girls, and fell in love with the youngest. Their father sought in vain to persuade them to unite themselves with better families. So, being obliged to yield, he obtained the consent of the father of the two sisters, whom he sent for immediately from the fields, and married his sons with them. This event caused the name of Callipyge to be given to the two wives among their fellow-citizens, as Cercidas of Megalopolis relates in his iambics. Now you, my own curvaceous van Hiller Venus, smite me with your magical iambic angle to your force to break blow and make me new.

7
TUESDAY 10TH SEPTEMBER 2002. A routine was now being tentatively built and most days I would arrive at the house in the afternoon. First Carla and I would enjoy tea and cake on the garden patio and then strictly by four Rebecca would be home for our study session.
All the time I coached the miscreant my wife would occupy herself with her head buried in one of her turgid romantic novels. Somehow, over time, I was even able to fit in my secret passions without consternation.
I tried to introduce some class and culture into the house. Tatty old copies of books from my college days I would surreptitiously leave on the coffee table as bait to see if either of them would bite. Rebecca did once said she especially enjoyed the short stories of F Scott Fitzgerald. But when it came to James Joyce it was an altogether different matter. Cookie had no time for the inaccessible or demanding, “ Oh, Joyce! Why bother with him! His books should come with a health warning: ‘likely to cause serious indigestion of the mind’!” She’d lament for a nice dinner,’ help do a pie?’ she’d say, me not being one for cooking so we’d go out for dejeuner depending on the fineness of the evening.
Rebecca also took an interest in the wall mounted Japanese woodblock prints displayed around the house. She coyly asked me to explain them seeing there was something there to arouse her curiosity, as they seemed to her to depict scenes of romantic male and female entanglements. I was glad she was absorbing a little of the culture of the world, expanding her horizons and re-evaluating her sensibilities. I found the dealer’s catalogue of works that was given to us from our recent successful shopping expedition. More to impress me than anything she told me she much admired the depiction of bishōnen and oyaji masculine forms. I explained my wife was more into the Shōjo-ai style. While I could see much beauty in it all.
At first Saturdays were the gathering times. Family days were the melting pot. A fondue. Into the equation came my own offspring, Lee and Annabel. The neighbour’s kid and Becky’s new school pal, Carlton showed up, too. Becky and Carlton seemed a little wary of my two at first but give it time and they would gel. I let them get on with it. They had all seemed to congregate around the large 47-inch projection television that filled the corner of the lounge and jutted awkwardly in front of the patio doors. Petulant Annabel swiped the remote first and was flicking through music channels while Becky weighed up the scene. Annabel screeched at the boys that it was her turn first!
“ Thirty minutes each-take it in turns-that’s fair! Or I’ll tell!”
At first Becky kept quiet, watched and learned- listening to the schwa, schwa sounds of middle-class Anglo-American speech as my wife came through from the kitchen and tried to orchestrate some game plan for a lunchtime menu.
I flitted back and forth from kitchen to lounge quietly in my own laid back way, taking an overview. I noted how shrewdly Rebecca found a useful prop as an easy shoe-in with Annabel. She had hastily raided the kitchen and from a mass of plastic grocery bags found the ideal emollient.
“What’s your name? Asked my inquisitive little girl as she spooned the tasty gobfulls of ice cream. “That’s a funny name- Rebecca Vanilla!” My daughter howled out in fits of laughter and let slip a mushy brown dollop of goop from her open mouth.

“ No, no its van- HILLER! Not like ice cream!” Rebecca countered trying her best not to look annoyed. But lots of people have said that. Actually I do love the smell of vanilla perfume. I wear it all the time. Annabel wants to know why she has such a strange name like a food.
“ It’s a Dutch name. My grandfather was a sailor and my family came over after the big floods of 1953”.
“Darling” I interjected, “The world is shrinking. You’re going to meet lots of people with different names-some will sound strange but you should just be polite, please. You children are the generation spawned in the melting pot of the world.”
Her innocent, fresh eyes looked back at me unknowing and innocent. Somehow in her childlike mind a switch flicked on and with wisdom all of her own she took the hand of van Hiller and led her to the drawing room. There, with reverence, she opened a leather-bound photo album and displayed the captured memories of her own antecedents.
Theirs was the generation of the broken family, the absent father, migration, global economic pressure, financial selfishness and the dissolution of tribal values, diversity and opposition. Farewell to extended families and social bonds, indigenous culture and any sense of responsibility to others. Values and morals that did not fit neatly into consumerism will be redundant. In this incipient new age of globalisation each anodyne metropolis will be peopled by trolls under the tutelage of mass marketers who help orchestrate mass-produced everything. Everything will be infected by the pandemic of compliance, conformity and niceness to all. Welcome to the hegemony of the One, of the Supreme Being preaching a culture of assimilation and homogenisation into the corporate driven way. Moneymakers, Wall Street, traded stocks and bonds and simple vanilla options. Our role models shall be the bland, mid tone, middle of the road, and hermaphrodite, asexual polymorphs of glossy magazines and electronic media. Be everyman to every woman and be politically correct and lovely. Don’t offend, don’t have opinion and don’t speak out of turn. Conform.
My opportunistic little bean was of that moment and of that ilk. Her talent appeared quickly fast-talking sound bites of glib, shallow, glossy eye-catching truisms. She had a winning flavour to encompass all. Bland or subtle: a qualitative measure borne of quantitative supremacy. Miss Love Pod fell upon her next target and I, uneasily but helplessly welcomed the charm offensive and subliminal bonding. Annabel got it right first time: Rebecca Vanilla.
Just at that moment my wife came in to the dining room brandishing cutlery looking to set the table.
“Ah, Annabel….you and Becky found some wedding photos? Ah, look, Leo! Some of the three of us.” They all peer at the fuzzy snaps betraying the informality if not the hastiness of the ceremony.
I wore my caring face and interjected informatively.
“yes, you see-there’s Cookie, Lita and me….that’s the preacher’s log cabin…..see how deep the snow was-right up over the porch? That’s the Catskill Mountains, Annabel, where I told you…that’s the place where we took our vows.”
Rebecca squeezed herself slowly in between my wife and daughter and me for a better view as she brushed softly across my torso I felt that tingle again.
But that second I also felt a brush of coarse, cold skin on the back of my mind. And then came the smile and a glad hand from my wife. I checked myself and pulled away from the huddle not to let the savour merge unobtrusively into the dish. No ice cream for me. ‘Ail van Gril’
“Tea anyone, I’m just putting the kettle on.” I made my escape to the sanctuary of the kitchen. There I again pondered my conundrum and my growing sense of ill ease. My disillusionment with my life she had brought it all into sharper focus. But this was her way. She was the Vanilla Girl and he was everything to everyone and she enjoyed being ubiquitous in her game. Perhaps it was merely her defence mechanism, a survivalist’s ploy when you are vulnerable in a foreign setting and you feel that you are totally unlike the people around you. Not at all a pleasant predicament.
“ Daddy! Daddy! Come see- look at us! Isn’t this good?”
I trudged with my tea into the lounge where they all were now. There were wires and a box rigged up to the television. Annabel had brought her dancing pad video game and wanted to try it out. It wasn’t new, just some unwanted gift given to her mother by a work colleague at the police station. Lee and Carlton’s bony backsides were poking out from the side of the TV as they sorted the tangle of connections and plugged the device in. Becky and Annabel were sifting through shiny game disks. I caught the joy in my daughter’s eyes as the older girl pandered to her. Some family responsibility, I determined, some bonding child to child, might make her feel less the lost little sheep.
For now I was her shepherd. All would be well as long as there were no more men or drugs. It was the bad company she kept that got her in that mess. A better sort around her would bring out the best in her. We all needed to be watchful over her. That was why we enlisted Carlton Clover. We knew his parents. We knew the Clovers were a decent sort. Carlton would be watchful. He needed no prompting. For he had long been following her around home and school like a loyal lap dog just like he did before with Lita. Always a good kid and trustworthy, Carlton could be relied upon to warn of the first sign of danger. Sentinels watch and pedagogues do teach. I let them dally in their amusements and I took to the study to read awhile. Those days were soon to become shorter and colder. But I determined then I should remain diligent and dutiful to my task as mentor and liberator.
The weeks seemed to pass seamlessly and trouble free, it seemed. My cream girl graciously attended our daily post-school tutorials. My wife smiled and had her controls back. She had her dominions and her place back in the world. Each day she witnesses insipid and compliant vanilla pod dutifully acquiesce along with a bland and observant husband. The pedagogue shall draw out of the errant student’s innate talents and abilities by imparting his own hard -won knowledge of the arts, literature, philosophy, history, scientific reasoning and mathematics. But, more subtly, the good teacher shall reveal to the student an array of ‘meaningful’ experiences so as to ensure the reaction from her he desires. This was the wonderful theory. This was to be how any situation encountered could be turned to a learning experience, the tender, young neurons shall be receptive, follow logical sequences in time for my own satisfying consequences.
Each day Rebecca Vanilla took the books from my hand and acted as if they were gifts from the gods. I liked it best when she sat as good as gold beside me in her school greys, obedient, compliant and sweet for one old scholar who doted on plenty of pleat. In stony silence she dutifully read as I watched her then I tested her comprehension. English literature she had to pass. My sweet bland-acting bean worked her affectation and stagecraft. She possessed the outward appearance of knowing and understanding but she lacked insight. It wasn’t absorbed. I struggled to fathom it and blurted out my frustrations.
“ I’m sorry-forgive me- I don’t mean to snap or unsettle you. I don't try to be a gadfly, but I do think that this is troublesome” I wanted her to understand the book. “The writer wants his work to leave the reader unsettled-he intends that. Plead I hope-do you see?”
Her shoulders slumps in disappointment at my outward impatience as I frantically scratch away disapprovingly at her notes with my red ink pen and give to her bluntly.
“The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Writers do not provide examples of how to live!”
I try to tell her about how mixed up some people are. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for us.
“But would we want to become Virginia Woolf? I think not!” I decry.
Progress with Becky Bean soon becomes wearisome and slow. She is an easily distracted child. She flits about in her mind from anorexia to hair straighteners from hip-hop to bulimia all covered in each daily from homespun seminar.
I let her change the subject like I am often led to. More often that not her preferred chitchat was about Lita’s wardrobe of conjure up some new and even more disgusting food concoction even grosser and more sickly than yesterday’s fantasy. Given the chance she would feed herself if she were allowed her own household budget. My sweet twisting white vine became fidgety and dropped her notebook onto her school bag beside the desk and wriggled her pert little behind. Then uprooting her self from beside me she shot off.
“ I gotta take a pee, Leo.”
I pondered the shabby canvas shoulder bag with its frayed edges and noted the ballpoint pen scrawl somewhat faded but revealing the legend, “ SkAtEr bOyZ dO iT sTaNdInG.” That’s South Haven grinding for you. Give me strength! A doodled pocket size volume peaked out slightly from under two dogged-eared maths textbooks. It was screaming at me to pick it up. I released it from its straitjacket and the pages fell open at September 4th 2002. First anniversary of the death of Hank ‘the Angry Drunken Dwarf,’ American radio personality, birthday of Beyoncé Knowles, singer [1981], 247th day of the year (248th in leap years). There are 118 days remaining. A spidery blue-black entry read;
‘ I talked to my bestest friend today. She is my rock, my sissa and I love her. She makes me smile and is just so sweet to me. I know someone is mistreating her. Some peeps are cruel that way. Saw her in school and she is getting smarter. She is going to go far and be happy. It’s hard being here. No friends to visit or call. Lots of things are different now. I am not as happy here as I let on to be. I got those voices in my head again. They told me I am useless and unlovable.’
A distant flush of water signals me to hurriedly replace my find. Quickly composed I simply smile at my precious little vanilla pod and humour her inanely just as I would with any other little self-centred missy you get every day of the week buzzing around teacher’s desk at school. My blossom sits aside me again now smelling of orchids in nymphetland: awkward and fey and dimly depraved, the lower button of her shirt unfastened. Then she gave me that wounded doe look.
“Is there anything special you two would like for tea? Harriet and Hector will drop in later.” Came the howl from downstairs. I gave a chuntering answer and ushered off my sweet cream.
Scurry off now simple soul. What’s the use? I thought. All too often I reach my own boredom threshold with kids. The three of us sat around the dinner table. Miss buttoned top now had headphones clamped over her petite skull. Go back to your hip-hop raps and your misogynistic urban ghetto gangstas. Over that evening meal new plans were laid. Weekends would be better balanced, I declared, once we consent to an alternative viewpoint into our miscreant’s home curriculum. To shake off the prison mentality we shall let Becky go off with Cilla Karibdis to her pub Karaoke sessions at weekends.
As I munched and masticated on our chef’s over-cooked linguini and baked tomatoes a la carte it amused me to ponder women in terms of food metaphors. That way you can entertain yourself when you’re in one of those blue funks. This was a well-worked strategy often employed while covering long, dull exam invigilation at Bishop Thomas Dupré High School. On those occasions when I sought to withdraw to my interior solipsistic self I would sit like Rodin’s statue of the ‘Poet’ or as some say, the ‘Thinker.’ Make yourself look highbrow, Leo. Super-intellectually perched centre-stage in an assembly hall of one hundred and seventy-four aspirant examinees ordered in a column of twelve and fifteen rows with six absentee examinees, busy bees out to please. Stomach growls and hunger pangs. Don’t speak, don’t move, don’t fidget, and don’t fart. Just be.
For afters let’s squirt that trifling Turkish flavour into the dish. Or my wife’s over-ripe melons? No? Maybe I should throw the monkey some bananas? A dash. Vanilla and bananas? Now there’s a tasty kitchen concoction we could whip up one fine Saturday. Or is that sundae? In an expensive and expanding (think wifey’s waistline!) multi- trillion-dollar global food industry Turkish delight was always in the picture. Get our Limoncello Lady to splash the cash. Lemon Bella, baby! (I hope pealed). For the tempting concoction of chocolate sauce: add 110grammes (or four ounces) of dark chocolate then to that mix two tablespoons of golden syrup. Then throw in seventy-five millilitres (or two fluid ounces) of water. For the banana split take two bananas, one can of whipped cream (always a bedroom buzz), one tub of vanilla (van Hiller) ice cream, one chocolate coated honey comb bar, thirty grammes, that’s one ounce, of chocolate coated peanut sweets and zest of lemon. Then you’ve got yourself a delicious taste sensation. Slap me out a few dollops. Eyes down row five, no peeking. More paper in column three and prissy penny has her hand up for a toilet break so no full house. The statue thinks on. What astounding memories I am collecting for the scrapbook of my geriatric mind. Oh, how I shall enjoy reliving these golden days.
Memories of silly Cilla visiting Cookie more and more just to keep tabs on me. She hasn’t let go I know she wants me. Anyway, play your game Cilla. Come on by to thirteen Cedar Drive on the way to work make it your weekly routine. Every once in a while you can keep my little hillerpod for

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26
I shivered with the cold. I felt raw inside. My fingers were like ice and the numbness stiffened my neck. It was an awful, nauseous tension wracking me whole body. I still had the smell in my nostrils. Stale disinfectant. The sanitized and clinical sparseness of the holding cell had cut deeply into my subconscious. It had been only two hours confinement but it had felt like ten. They were punishing me already. No one knows what the desperation of imprisonment feels like until they endure it.
I lit the demo
Idle time tho’
Toil mid thee
Limited to He

Dim thee, toil
I dole them it
Let me, I do hit
Let him ode it

Hold me tie it
I tie them old
Idle to hit me
Tilted it home

Ode the limit
Hot Edit Mile
Hit me old time
I tilted home

Was I right to forego the attendance of the duty solicitor? I would have suffered a further two hours in there if I had insisted on it. But his voice had been reassuring on the phone.
I had nothing to fear. I only acted in self-defence. He said he would call me tomorrow and confirm an appointment to meet.
I lay curled shivering in my bed. Constable Godbolt-what is she really about? Does she believe me? Why did she keep me chatting in the police car for so long when she brought me home? She’s an odd looking woman at first sight. Not pretty, not even in that uniform. And I do love a woman in uniform. She has a strange look about her. Was that police work or was she curious about me? I had to get some sleep. School tomorrow.

27
TUESDAY 1ST APRIL 2003: PAUL THE GUNFIGHTER. It was Aprils’ Fool’s Day and Cookie was at my house. Ironic. She came here to aggravate the enemy. She stalked their territory.
I had already had my car scratched, my wheelie bin stolen plus we had the inception of the phoney war between Cookie and the whores next door.
Arm scratching Carla peered out from the rear bedroom window over the fence. She was on the snoop for a showdown. I had been keeping her updated about it for the past couple of weeks-the weather had been so dry and fair. Cilla had taken to hanging out her washing on the garden line again.
What now irked Cookie about that was that pegged for all to see, like trophies were Lita’s Fubu’s, Yankees sweats, jeans, new lingerie and more. They were the spoils of battle taken by the conquerors.
My wife was fidgeting, she was scratching those forearms raw but she stood steadfast and unbowed. She would seek to reclaim what was rightfully hers.
They say matadors use a red rag to antagonise the charging bull in the ring. Here were many red rags pegged and my Kooky cow was snorting and up for a thundering charge. She hissed and spat and shot out of my backdoor before I could say kamikaze.
I only managed to catch up with her because she failed to realise the garden gate was bolted both top and bottom. As I took hold of her arm she shrieked out a rebuke.
From the corner of my eye I saw a teasing Turk sneering from her kitchen window. If I had let go of that twisting, writhing arm right then I have no doubt I would have witnessed and almighty cat fight. Mustering up all my brawn and pacifying resolve I manhandled my wife back into the house whereupon she gave me a taste of the tongue-lashing she wanted to spatter at Cilla.
“ Leo, so often you are a vain and self-important man. I don’t trust you…I don’t even particularly like you. You tried things your way and look! They laugh at us! Look at that bitch sneering like she’s beaten me! Grow some backbone for once in your life. Stop being the mooch-you’re always acting the victim! Fight back! Oh, yes, you will get from me what you crave, don’t worry at least somebody in this family will do the right thing!”
I pleaded for her to be calm. We were both panting hard from the scuffle.
“I’ll back you up…Lita will back you up…we’ll be your loyal smoke screen so that no one will ever know for sure if all this was corruption of an innocent child by a cunning man or exploitation of a weak man by a corrupt child.
You tried to re make her in the image you wanted her to be. But she is what she is… a street whore….A wretch from the gutter and forever falling back into it. I saw you. So often like an old fool letting yourself stoop to be her plaything….you never had it the other way round…you deceived yourself…pathetic, foolish vanity and now she has tainted you….you are done!”
She finally tore her arm free. I wiped her spittle from my face. ‘Are you done?’ No, she wasn’t done. But the quietness that now fell over her told me some scheme was cooking away in that loose canon’s mind. She took herself to the sofa slunk herself into meditation mode and I let her be.
She suited the sofa less than the sofa suited her. She slumped gracelessly within its form. She had no elegance, no style as I watched the ogre stewing before me. Now I let my artist’s eye remodel the scene. Dispense with the fiery hag and replace with a younger, sweeter incumbent. A Lilly- fresh flowering beauty of the Dutch kind set before me would be a far more satisfying display.
But the street whore jibe? Yes, I guess warranted.
But oh the pleasures I might have if she let me pay her for my sins. But April was to end as such an awful month. And then Saddam Hussein lost Iraq. Carve carbine hell.
I do have such wicked intentions if given a free run at it. Not content with one form of eroticism I had lately evolved my very own complete kind of erotic symbolism revolving around all sorts of indecent games with my pliant pea.
The way this girl thoroughly slinks her pliable form so seductivey about the furniture put me in mind of Allen Jones' sublime depictions of a hat stand or a table sculpture. This malleable maid of my muse inspired all such crazy creations of artistic delight. Angela’s insight was helping me to be better informed that the most erotic symbols have their roots locked deep within the subconscious mind of the child within us.
This was not the kind of probing of my deepest character I could conceivably have shared with anyone else, not my wife, not Charlotte and certainly not ever in a million years with the likes of my first ogre, Molly.
Although to be fair to Molly I guess she was chosen by me as marriage material purely on her doll-like teen beauty. For when I met her she was a lifeguard at the Central Swimming Pool back home in Berkshire and I simply adored her in that one-piece red swimsuit. She was my first true spangled acrobat in talcum light.
When this upwardly mobile late twenties schoolteacher-‘own home and car’- caught her eye you could see on reflection why an impressionable and very pretty nineteen-year-old aspirant would jump at the chance to escape her minimum wage sterile chlorinated pool plant for the doting arms of bashful Bloom.
Whether it was their outward inadequacies that made these helpless, fawning objects so appealing to my own assertively challenged inward inadequacies I could not rightly fathom.
But my therapist did imply on more than one occasion that I appeared to possess issues stemming from the dysfunctional relationship I had had with my bullying over-bearing drunken father.
Perhaps the chaos of my early childhood just left in me a great gawping chasm: a yearning for stillness, order, and control and unthreatening interpersonal relations.
I just went on in my private world getting an erotic thrill at what most ‘normal’ men and woman would call bizarre. I just loved looking at naked mannequins in department stores.
I remember my mother taking me as a child of seven or eight to buy a winter coat and while she and a hapless sales assistant rummaged about for my size, out of sight, I seized my moment for a tacky fumbling grope with a statuesque hottie who let me put my hand up her skirt and stroke her and examine her indiscreetly while a plastic transfixed face beamed inanely. No one knew. It was hers and my secret and I knew she wouldn’t be telling on me.
Now vanilla muse was my love of statue when at rest. Reclining on the sofa but better on the rug I would lay her so that I had the advantage of being away from her sight, her one good eye on the goggle box while her other obstinate orb hid behind a floppy curtain of dark hair.
My sympathetic and indulgent therapist had directed me to scholarly readings on the matter and from that I have grown to accept it is not my fault my environment and my parents made me this way.
It is also true, and I have read this, that a somewhat less abnormal form of erotic symbolism probably shows itself in its simplest shape in the tendency to idealize unbeautiful peculiarities in a beloved person, so that such peculiarities are ever afterward almost or quite essential in order to arouse sexual attraction.
So just like the man who has become attracted to limping women I have been drawn to imperfect, flawed creatures. Even the most normal man may idealize a trifling defect in the object of his affections.
Our attention is inevitably concentrated on any such slight deviation from regular beauty, and the natural result of such concentration is that a complexus of associated thoughts and emotions becomes attached to something that, in itself, is unbeautiful. A defect becomes an admired focus of attention, the embodied symbol of the lover's emotion.
I remember it now like videotape found on a dusty shelf to be rerun in the back of a long fossilised quadrant of my subconscious. My mother had taken me to the circus.
That was where I first saw a woman shot out of a cannon-constrained first, tightly packed in like a sweet in a wrapper. That was the sublime first fantasy in a naïve little boy’s innocent, impressionable mind. That perfect little gypsy girl wearing the bright red outfit and her skirts blew up around her as she flew in the air. My first emission sequence replayed over and over.
In time supplanted by many other later new and improved versions but always the same variation on the theme: the performer, the display and the unintended exposure of the object of my obsession. But like any adolescent boy I felt the need to play over and over my personalised and self -indulgent mind games.
In the long, lonely hours of my childhood shut in my room, away my father’s disapproving gaze I would entertain myself.
I put all sexual fantasies into tonal and colour values. I graded them all into darker and darker shades of depravity. But tidy-minded as I am I always like to shuffle the pack and grade and re-grade colour charts then edit and review critically all my little erotic cameos.
Like those Edwardian ‘What the Butler Saw’ slot machines and you pay a penny to peek for a minute to watch her rustle her bustle, lift her skirts, loosen her suspender belt, teasingly play her hand up and along the curves of her plump white thighs.
That would be it in a nutshell. But to tease myself I would start very slowly-almost imperceptibly. From the palest upwards in order of increasing intensity, or darkening tones, I placed erotic phenomena that affected me thus: The slow, slinky walk of a woman in heels, then the sight of women's undergarments, then the fleeting valley of a woman’s cleavage, thereafter the smells and static sounds of a pair of stockinged legs crossing, then those mouth watering upskirt shots in men’s magazines, a long-time favourite for my idle contemplation and that spillage of the dew (ros).
I then gorge myself on pages of naked breasts, then follows full contact with her rounded form and unrestricted sucking at those creamy white breasts, then, after, to savour the smell and the taste of it and then the ultimate: coitus.
As they say, to me and other such morbid souls there exists such specialized esoteric erogenous power. Never be so harsh of man in his private thoughts.
Even a mere shadow may become a fetish. There was once a man with a reputation for ability, seemingly happily married and the father of a family, appearing altogether irreproachable in his private life, who on returning home one evening chanced to raise his eyes to a neighbour’s window and saw the shadow of a woman changing her chemise.
He fell in love with that shadow and returned to the spot every evening for many months to gaze at the window. Yet—and herein lies the fetishism—he made no attempt to see the woman or to find out who she was; the shadow sufficed; he had no need of the realty. So there is my root (radix), and branch (thyrsus).
I aim not to despoil or to waylay but merely to idolize and nurture carefully, gently and delicately, ever so passive and kind is Mr Leonard Odysseus Bloom.
LISSOM NIMBLE
Stendhal described the mental side of the process of tumescence as a crystallization, a process whereby certain features of the beloved person present points around which the emotions held in solution in the lover's mind may concentrate and deposit themselves in dazzling brilliance.
Devotion and love," wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, "may be allowed to hallow the garments as well as the person, for the lover must want fancy who has not a sort of sacred respect for the glove or slipper of his mistress. He would not confound them with vulgar things of the same kind."

Semen is but seed
Teste the beans mere fabæ
soft fruit of poma and mala
my manhood is a my arbor,
or a stalk or a ploughsharing vomer
Your labia so majora a minora of fine wings (alæ)
I seek thee as a field of ager and campus,
or a ploughed furrow (sulcus),
have the vineyard (vinea), or a fountain fons,
forsaking such pudendal hair
such irksome herbage (plantaria)
The Talmud makes my doors your labia minora
your labia majora hinges,
But your clitoris the key
Cunning Greeks find the myrtle-berry
Succulent fruit of sacred Venus,
The labia rose, reddened image of your femininity

Four o’clock came. The school bus would be dropping off at the post office. Cookie now waited in ambush.
She took Rebecca by surprise and shouted at her to give it up while she still had a chance.
“ You’re not in charge of me! I have a new mother now!” Came the rebuff from the young harlot. In her hand she brandished Lita’s mobile phone.
“ Return all the things you stole from my daughter….you can have your crap back when you do!” Came the challenge.
That evening E-mails were exchanged between Cookie and Cilla. There would be no more polite phone calls. There was no love lost now. It was all going to be by the book. A final handover was arranged for six in the evening on the second of April. They were going to come to Cookie’s.
The day came and so did a curmudgeonly PC Crumb as escort. Rebecca stayed in the car. She looked timid now. I watched from the bedroom window. Cilla brought in two small-knotted plastic carrier bags. She took out several large boxes and bags while the feckless fool of a policeman looked on.
I shouted down the stair, “ Cookie, don’t let them go without checking the contents in front of the police officer!”
We hastily gathered in the kitchen. Cookie cut upon the knotted bags. One broken mobile phone without SIMS card; one pair of black boots-zips broken on both and some screwed up old tee-shirts that had been worn but not washed.
A wicked, secret thought came to mind. Mmmm- the delight I would take in these returned treasures later from a new casket full of love-tokens.
“ Look…you see! This is not right!” Cookie pointed to the damages and the policeman studied the debris.
“ Well, madam, I suggest you need to report this to PC Godbolt. I can see for myself these items appear possibly to have been deliberately damaged. But have you got any receipts?”
Damage, indeed, and don’t doubt the deliberate, officer, I thought. Both boots with zips ripped in the same place? A broken phone that only weeks, nay, days ago the tramp must have been still using. And receipts?
“ Receipts? Receipts you say? You want us to show you receipts now? Jesus….what more proof do you need? These are our things…. You see the state they are in…trashed!” Crusty Carla fumed.
The Officer was having none of it. She was going to have to take it up with Officer Godbolt.
I left them to the kitchen- her fuming and he placating and took the bagged treasures to the lounge. I wished to contemplate more fully and study them alone.
As Laodamia did by Protesilaus, when he went to war, sit at home with his picture before her: a garter or a bracelet of hers is more precious than any Saint's Relique, he lays it up in his casket (Oh, blessed relic) and every day will kiss it: if in her presence his eye is never off her, and drink he will where she drank, if it be possible, in that very place.
I drew in through my nostrils the vanilla scent of my new gifts. Her perfume was as powerful as ever. I pulled apart the velvet soft leathery flaps of the boots and plunged my face into their dark wings- fragrant symbols of her alæ and I imagined her sweat-sweet tasting labia majora and minora.
My mind was taken instantly to her bean field- ager and campus- a ploughed furrow supping the juices of the sulcus, glorying in the vinea vineyard, or her fountain fons bared and alabaster smooth, no pudendal plantaria between our lips.

28
FRIDAY 11TH APRIL 2003. I’m going down hill fast. I can’t cope with all this stress. I need help. I am slowing down almost to a standstill. I phone in sick at work. I need to see my doctor. I see Angela a couple of times but even her soothing sessions are only temporary and fleeting.
Today Godbolt agreed to see Cookie to discuss this awful matter. She files a report for all the damaged and stolen property. Maybe something will be done now. Cookie and I spend more time at my place. Thirteen Cedar Drive no longer feels so welcoming. Cookie gives her notice to vacate the property and starts to pack. She’s either going to put all her things in storage and just disappear to New York for a break or find another little bolt hole suitable to her needs away from people who know us.
But still the Spring like wispy clouds tease across the blueness above in their full majestic beauty. The trees are budding, the grass smells delightfully fragrant and fresh from the first cut but we care not.
While at my place Cookie goes into the garden to inspect all Lita’s clothes again hanging on Cilla’s washing line as if to torment us. It’s galling. “ Let’s jump the fence and just take it from the fish hag!” She muses. But wait; there is someone in the house. The curtains twitch. It’s that bitch.
No, it can’t be, she’s been out for a couple of hours. We saw her leave in her car. Must be Rebecca. No not Rebecca. We understand she has moved out of Cilla’s and is living with her boyfriend now. So who is it? Cookie goes to the front of the house.
She peers through Cilla’s front window. We see two small figures in the bedroom above. It’s the two boys, George and Harrison.
“ Hey, Cookie, hi- did you want my mum? She’s not talking to you anymore!”
“ Hello, George, where is your mum? Are you on your own?”
No reply.
“Don’t answer, Harrison, don’t speak to them any more… you’re a pedal file!”
George shouts to me.
“Right, we will get the bitch now. Call the child hotline or whatever you Brits call it? RSVP or RSPA? Or something like that! This is child neglect those kids are only six and eight and she’s left them all afternoon alone!”
I get the number for her out of the phone book. She makes the call. The call is logged and there will be someone looking into it.
Just then a car pulls up. It’s Henry, Cilla’s ex husband.
“ What’s going on…where’s Cilla?” He exclaims.
Suddenly another car pulls up hard aside his. It’s Cilla. She’s out of the car and into the house like lightening. Henry is in hot pursuit. We sit on the wall outside. Fine mess…ha! Don’t mess with Henry. A man with blacksmith’s limbs, strong and stout and not one to suffer fools. Rag Ill Anvil!
Upon said wall our options are again discussed. Perhaps blood vessel-bursting Henry would be inclined to consider an alliance? My ginned up gossip fuelled wife had the persuasive powers I lacked. We need to work on that one. Let that sleeping black dog lay for a while.
In the meantime back to matters of police complaints. It’s an amazing fact that the British police are entrusted with investigating themselves when a complaint is levied against them. What a wonderful system we live in.
Who better to impartially consider and weigh the merits of a complaint against the police than the police themselves? How ironic. Judge and jury: one and the same.
No wonder more grievances are going straight to the civil courts, bypassing the sham procedure that is the Professional and Ethical Standards Department of East Mercia Police.
This is how Fred Clarke advised me to do it. Fred was recommended to me as he had a lot of experience in civil harassment cases at McCarthy, Pond & Sheen.
Although I had fallen out with Mr BS of the shineless spineless sheen I still had the scrap of paper he gave me of a jobbing local lawyer up on these civil disputes.
I was a bit surprised at that first meeting. Not quite what I had expected. Fred Clarke was an affable, unflappable shortish bald chap who had no airs or graces about him. Carla would class him as subtle and delicate as steak and kidney pie. Nothing like other solicitors I had met. He was more of the street-working class origins and a less pretentious man.
“ Well. Mr Bloom from what you tell me about this Rebecca van Hiller its clear the police should be putting a stop to her goings on. I don’t understand why they haven’t arrested her or charged her with any offences against you.” He shook his baldhead.
“ Look, I don’t want to start you down a legal path straight off. I think you’ve got to jump through a few of their hoops first and make a formal complaint against the investigating officer. You say it’s a female officer who arrested you? “
I nodded. He looks me up and down.
” Well, Leo. It’s fair to say you’re a tall man- imposing stature. I can see where the police are coming from. And bluntly put it’s more believable to them that a stocky six-foot older man intimidates the vulnerable and slight sixteen-year-old girl.
On top of that as she’s a schoolgirl and you’re a teacher who connived to meet her in secret. You don’t get any leeway, I’m afraid with that lot. Simple stereotypes, you see. They are out to get you if they can.”
I replied curtly, “ Surely, they should try to find out the truth though. Shouldn’t they?”
He offers up a sympathetic, weak smile, “ Truth isn’t what it’s about, Mr Bloom. It’s about what they can persuade a court to believe. We are in the age of performance targets. The police like any other public service have quotas to fill. They need convictions. I’m sure you have the same thing in teaching. Am I right?”
I couldn’t fault his logic: targets and buzzwords all right. But it was all so cynical. The police weren’t going to make extra work for themselves when it appeared to be a clear-cut case for a conviction against me.
I added, “ What I suppose won’t help at all is my ex wife is also a local police officer. I’m sure she has spoken to them about me, too.”
Clarke looked out of his office window momentarily and took deep breath.
“ Ah…I see….Do you get on well with your ex wife? He enquired.
“ Nope. Can’t say I do.”
He took up his pen and began to write down something on a piece of paper.
“ This is what I recommend. Write to East Mercia Police Headquarters. Draft out a letter detailing your concerns and put together a detailed chronology of the events, with dates and times-that helps a lot. I can’t promise you anything but what I do strongly urge you to do is keep a diary-some kind of written record. Writing letters of complaint irritates the hell out of the police, too. Trust me. You may feel its not getting you anywhere but you will be surprised what affect this has over time.”
He neatly folded the piece of paper then handed it to me.
“Call me if you hear nothing within twenty-eight days.”
We shook hands. As I turned to leave he wished me the best of luck. I get home and there is a note on the front door mat. I open it. It’s from Henry Flower. He wants to meet me. He gives his phone number to call. We arrange a meeting.
Flower comes to my house the following Friday evening. To my embarrassment I forgot Charlotte was coming over, too. She makes herself scarce and she discreetly hides herself upstairs once I realise who is at the door.
Henry comes in with his new wife. We shake hands and I soon realise she is American.
“How ironic! We’ve both found an Internet bride from the US. ”
We all laugh and the ice is broken.
“I want to bury the hatchet over Cilla, Leo. I guess we’ve been wary of each other these past years. I know all about what happened with you and Cilla. It’s water under the bridge and good riddance to bad rubbish I say.”
He then cuts to the chase. He wants his kids back. Not going to be easy though, he concedes. Cilla got him banged up for assault before their divorce. I hadn’t known about that.
“Cilla got me sent down for knocking her about all trumped up, of course. It’s her way. She lies all the time mate. I was drunk and foolishly admitted I’d grabbed hold of her when the pigs rolled up…next thing I know I’m doing three months as a wife batterer.”
I gave him my best sympathetic nod of the head.
“ Ah, not good! Sorry to hear! I’m learning fast myself now-the law favours the woman in a domestic!” I sympathised.
“Cilla’s that type-never happy till she hears the police sirens wailing. She got the house now- welcome to it. George and Harrison is what I want but she won’t budge on it” He scowls.
He tells me she only has the kids for the child support. She’s always been a lazy bitch. She won’t work. Idle pea-hop.
“Anyway, she’s got this new man off the Net…another mug easily impressed by a big pair of tits. I heard he used to be some big shot local councillor. Or he was. He got sent down for firearms offences. Apparently he had a run in with some gypsies over fake antiques. They came after him. He took pot shots at them with a shotgun. It was front-page news or something. …Paul Gadd….That’s his name!”
He called him ’Paul the Gunfighter.’ He asks me for a favour. Perhaps I could look into it-keep an eye out for trouble. I suggested we could find out more about this new man from the archives of the local rag. Cookie and me will look it up-some evidence for him as leverage for a future custody battle.
Henry then gives me the whole deal about what he knows on my case:
“ It’s a sorry mess you have yourself here, Leo. The police came to interview me in April. They asked me about Rebecca. ‘How did she treat the kids?’ I told them I wasn’t happy about her being there. I told Cilla to get her out or I would cut her money down. George told me she mistreats Harrison. I heard she teases him and makes fun of him-he’s got a speech impediment, you see, and is partially deaf, poor kid. She once made him get into a freezing cold bath-all for kicks-she found that kind of thing funny.”
I shake my head in disbelief. I just find it so hard to picture Rebecca having such a cruel side.
He goes on, “ I heard some guff that you beat her up. I got some civilian officer come visit me to take a statement. He wanted all the dirt on you, Leo. Cilla must have primed him beforehand. I told him that girl’s no angel- I heard she was a prostitute- he just said, ‘hearsay.’ He thought I’d have it in for you-I could tell from his attitude right away. But not me-I tells it like it is. Cilla can be a spiteful sea snake. I told him you and her had a fling years back and that was true- and I knew you finished it not her. I saw he didn’t write any of that down though”
I asked him how he saw it all going in his custody battle.
“I’m onto her now. I am really grateful you called the child protection hotline. I am building up a dossier of evidence against Cilla. It’s only a matter of time. I’m happily married now- I got a good wife, a decent home and just need my kids safe and well. I’m sorry there isn’t more I can do to help you in your case. But as they say, ‘the truth will out.’”
The new Mrs Flower smiles politely at me to emphasise her husband’s intent.
“One other thing, Leo, I know they say beware Greeks bearing gifts, but there’s something that comes to mind-it’s about your ex-wife….the police officer? I think it might be of some use to you, I don’t know-you decide.”
Henry tells me about a year or so ago, Cilla, in one of her gossiping moods repeated something her sister heard. Her sister’s husband was employed in the same police station. Apparently the rumours were that Molly had a brief fling with one of the sergeants -it was all hushed up-both coppers were married and all that.
“ But something that did come out was your ex claimed you knocked her about a lot and that’s why she divorced you. Well, Cilla, couldn’t tell me all this quick enough at the time. I guess it’s all water under the bridge but you know the old saying, Leo, ‘shit sticks.’”
It does and like glue, too.

29
I have to have a strategy here. I have no Special Forces nor M1 Abrams or Bradley fighting vehicles. No awesome firepower, no impervious armour.
Some suckers buy every bit of bull and the lies have been spun thick and fast from all quarters. ‘Armour vincit omnia.’
Who and what do I believe? Love conquers all. Was I dealing with a comedy routine, a Comical Ali from the Disinformation Ministry of Iraq?
Have I been mocked and made of a fool of from the start? The bullets fly, the bombs fall but the same story persists- the infidel American soldiers are dying in their hundreds slaughtered on the gates of Baghdad. Be assured, Baghdad is safe, protected. Iraqi soldiers are freedom fighters and heroes. Am I safe? My gut instincts make me feel evil forces are at work out to get me.
I will follow through what Fred Clarke advised me. On April 9th, Saddam Hussein emerged from his command bunker beneath the Al A'Zamiyah district of northern Baghdad, and greeted excited members of the local public.
The news is full of it. This was his final walkabout. I dug out an old file binder and began to put together the beginnings of my own case notes. I made a start on a chronology and drafting a letter to Police Headquarters.
I saw the news about Saddam-they are going to capture him, give him a fair trial then execute him. I already have the letters I sent out the day after the assault.
That was a smart move. It must show I acted conscientiously. I must be ready for war. Like any teacher would: you back up your argument with facts. I reviewed the letters I had sent and the replies I had back so far from the relevant contacts:
14.03.03
City College
Mrs Armand Assante
Head of Studies
Dear Mr & Mrs L Bloom
Thank you for your letter of March 13th about Rebecca attending college in September.
I would like to reassure you that Rebecca, as with all your other applicants, will only be accepted on to one of our courses if she has a clear Criminal Records Bureau disclosure and appropriate entry qualifications. In view of your concerns I have contacted her head teacher for further information about Rebecca’s suitability for the course.
When we have received all these pieces of evidence we will be able to make a judgment about whether Rebecca should come on the course or not; from the information we have received to date it would certainly not seem appropriate for us to confirm her place.
Please get in touch again if you need further information.
Yours sincerely,
Mrs Armand Assante
I read again the letter we had got back from Rebecca’s doctor. That filled me with much hope.
19.03.03
Holy Cross Medical Centre
North Road
Dear Mr & Mrs Bloom
Re: Rebecca van Hiller (dob 26.04.87)
Thank you for your letter of March 13th received by the practice on that day and by me on 17th March on return from leave: the contents of which are extremely disturbing.
After our discussions on 10th January when we all met I made a methodical enquiry, which I thought, had produces a result but clearly this is not the case.
As you correctly point out Rebecca is no longer my patient and I am taking the liberty of sending your letter to her current general practitioner so that he is fully informed of your current position, he should already have the rest of her medical notes.
Hopefully with the evidence you present and the increasing anxiety about this young lady, hopefully more will be done to help her. I am sorry if you feel I have let you down.
Yours sincerely,
P R Teazle MB MRCP

19.03.03
South Haven High School
Sandwood Hill
Dear Mr & Mrs Bloom.
Rebecca van Hiller – Year 12
Thank you for bringing to our attention your concerns about Rebecca. I can confirm receipt of your letter and your telephone call made to my deputy, Ms Newman, on March 13th. I can confirm that we will be keeping a close watch on the situation but we understand this is now a police matter and we cannot enter into any further correspondence on the matter.
We are sorry to hear of your predicament but trust the police will deal with the case satisfactorily.
Yours sincerely,
Greta Scacchi MSc. PGCE

It makes me seem a tad more the concerned professional reading all that. Perhaps, if this gets to court a jury will look at these and see I was trying to be the’ good guy.’
That one from her Dr Teazle was the pick. God, I needed his support. At least her own family practitioner could see how messed up she was. That bean was totally barking!
I wonder if Teazle would testify? No. I don’t think so: patient confidentiality or something. But at least I have proof. I have his letter. I have all the letters!
Well, this it Leo, old boy. What time is it? Almost four so get set for action. She’s on duty at six, she said. I’ll go for a run then I’ll write more letters.
I’ll give that Godbolt a quick call and tell her enough is enough. I’ll phone her on the number she put on the bail sheet she gave me.
When I dialled she answered promptly this time so I got straight into my assertive mode.
“Er…Mr Bloom. Let me stop you there…. …I have to advise you that Miss van Hiller has made a further allegation against you just this morning….text messages…as before. I’ve told her to bring her mobile phone into the station…”
“ Wait…now hold on here…hold on!” I interrupted,” I am calling to tell you the nightmare of the past few weeks….car scratched…clothes stolen….hang up calls…We’ve had it all …my wheelie bin stolen and found in another street and vandalised! Jesus….what am I supposed to do? I’ve seen a solicitor…it’s all harassment…. you’re now taking this kid’s side.”
In subsequent days, looting and unrest became a serious issue. Nothing of any value was left. This was Baghdad. On April 14th, Iraq's National Library and National Archives were burned down, destroying thousands of manuscripts from civilizations dating back as far as 7,000 years. Don’t let them destroy the evidence.
Her voice stiffened, “ Mr Bloom! Please let me finish….I have got a report about your alleged crimes on my voicemail message….your wife…she left messages about harassing phone calls….They will be investigated, I assure you…We are now getting accusation and counter accusation from your both side and Miss van Hiller’s…. I am doing my best. … your wife is coming in next week-come too if you wish when I’m back on shift. See you next Tuesday- we can go from there.”
The dolt Gumbolt was fobbing me off again and I was having none of it.
“Quit! Stop! Now hold on! What’s all this garbage about new text messages? You arrested me…you told me I was on bail….if I contacted Rebecca again I’d be pulled in again….I’m not stupid…I’ve done nothing…look….come take my computer…see for yourself…all these texts… I’ve done nothing…see for yourself check my phone records, too!”
“ Please calm down Mr Bloom I may wish to have possession of your computer for evidence at a later stage…phone records, too…whatever….please let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here….first things first….let me meet with you wife next Tuesday…ok?”
I was not going to get any joy there. I let it go. My head was pounding. I went next door. I just wanted to plead with Cilla. She’s the adult: she must see it. I knocked at her door. A stranger answered, a rather portly, greasy looking man with thinning grey hair, leather slippers and a cravat.
I realised this was the Paul Gadd that Henry Flower had told me about. I’d better be wary. I politely asked if Cilla was home. She soon appeared and gave me short shrift.
I may have been speaking Chinese for all she cared. They are a lost cause now. I got the finger from her as a passing gesture.
They call this Asymmetric warfare. Opposing belligerents of unequal power or capacity of action interact and take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of themselves and their enemies. This interaction often involves strategies and tactics outside the bounds of conventional warfare.
A week passed. Cookie had her police meeting. Low and behold Rebecca never took her mobile phone in to prove her latest allegations. Nothing came of that.
Ah, well, seems like kids can make any number of false allegations if they want! Another police officer came to interview my other neighbour who said she saw someone fitting Rebecca’s description strangely taking a wheelie bin up the road for a one-way walk. If it were someone else’s tragedy I would be laughing.
But finally, good old Cookie came up trumps. She got hold of the service provider of the mobile phone Rebecca had stolen from Lita. Although we now had the actual phone back (broken into bits) the SIMS card from it was missing.
My wife found out the SIMS card is actually the ‘brain’ of a mobile phone. It stores all the contact numbers and everything and without it the phone is useless.
Cookie had phoned Vistafone Mobile Customer Services who gave her the full picture. Apparently, Rebecca had somehow re-registered Lita’s phone in her name and at Cilla’s address. She was still using our SIMS card!
But the ace in the hole was Vistafone told Cookie that the re-registering of the phone was done on April 1st right before she gave it back to us broken.
Rebecca had applied for a number change for that SIMS and was immediately assigned a new number from that date. So it was impossible for her to have had any texts from me, as I clearly didn’t know she changed her number.
This was good news. I wrote my first letter of complaint to Police Headquarters. I enclosed my chronology of events as my solicitor had advised. Let’s see where this gets us.
I wanted the police to investigate Rebecca for false reporting of crimes. The proof was there. Surely they would see the little cow was lying. If she was shown to have lied about one thing then surely her credibility was blown on every other allegation.
The next few weeks were odd. The new man in Cilla’s life appeared to have moved in with her. It seemed peculiar seeing a new Porsche parked outside that Turkish harem beside the belly jiggler’s clapped out old jalopy.
It was a hot day in May as I recall when the letter came. I read it twice over. More bad news. It was not what I wanted at all. No charges were to be brought against Rebecca but a senior officer was going to meet with me to discuss my concerns about the investigation.
So much for the "End of Major Combat." I saw President Bush standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. He foolishly declared ‘mission accomplished,’ too.
What's the point of a 'justice' 'system' that picks and chooses the villains-arrest the easy target let the bigger fish get away? Cookie said something she thought it all apt but with an American twist: she said Rebecca was no Amy Fisher and I was certainly no Joey Buttafuoco. That particular reference went right over my British head.

30
MONDAY 5TH MAY 2003. So look around you. The month of May brings the whole world to light: either you are already in love or you have the feeling that it could happen at any second. The merry month of May is simply one of the best months and we anticipate a spring storm of wonderful feelings.
And with a beating heart, we begin to walk on air and so now can we possibly sense the rising buds of a crazy love story? The birds are at it and so are my neighbours. That nightly rhythmic banging and caterwauling permeated the party wall. That was my clue. Karaoke woman had found her Krakatoa man.
The following morning I drew open my bedroom curtains to see yonder lover’s swift departure. The man called Gadd was up and at ‘em with the larks.
Mister gadabout was sans cravat but sported one of those laughable silly western-style bootlace ties around his fat red neck held together by a garish chunky golden pin. His sideburns were pure late edition Elvis Presley –ridiculously profuse beneath a self-deluding comb-over.
The oaf revved up, spun a mean ‘U’ turn, gave a glad Gadd wave back at his harlot’s hovel and then he was off like a shot. The clot.
Clearly, those

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45
THURSDAY 26TH FEBRUARY 2004: THE TRIAL
Crown Versus Leonard Odysseus Bloom
At: North Haven Magistrates’ Court
Before: Tobias Mahoney
For the defence: Ashkenazi Shaffernacker For the prosecution: Matthew McNutt
“ Leonard Bloom, you are firstly charged on three counts. These are specimen offences under the Telecommunications Act (2003) whereby you transmitted obscene and harassing messages by wireless telephony between the dates of February 14th 2003 and March 12th 2003 with the intention to cause distress to one, Miss Rebecca van Hiller, how do you plead, guilty or not guilty?
My throat was sore. For three days I had felt an infection coming on. I was run down and tired but this was not the time to give in to it.
“ Not guilty!”
“You are further charged that on the evening of Wednesday March 12th 2003 on or around 6pm at Truva Park, North Haven, you did assault and batter Miss Rebecca van Hiller. How do you plead?”
“Not guilty.”
Slightly phlegmy need to keep clearing throat. I pled a hope. She rises before her audience. Rebecca van Hiller (juvenile sworn). I am seventeen years old. In February 2003 I was sixteen years old. I grew up in New Haven and lived with my parents.
I left home soon after I turned sixteen and stayed with Lita Limoncello and her mum, Carla. They are related to the defendant; step dad and wife. This was the twenty-ninth of April 2002 when I lived with them. The defendant came to visit almost every day to the Limoncello address.
I left that house on the nineteenth of January 2003 and went and stayed with Cilla Karibdis until September 2003.
I had a mobile phone on which I received text messages. Generally from friends and usually funny ones. Sometimes I got small photos, too. Yes, I got regular messages from them and one particular ex boyfriend. Yes, that was more than all other text messages I ever got. No, maybe I got them two or three times daily. Yes, I found them offensive in nature. Yes, I recognise the list of texts. They are the same ones as given to me by the defendant when we met.
He said nothing about anyone else sending them. No, he didn’t say he sent them. No, I never gave my phone number out freely: only a few friends, of course and family. Yes, I found the messages offensive. I did not like them. No, I never arranged to meet anyone for paid sex. I ignored them. Ok, yes I answered them. Yes, but I got scared then and afterwards. I was scared even when I talked to Cilla. Cilla said to ignore them. Messages never stopped until I went to the police.
Yes, I did agree to get meet the anonymous individual and if I met them then I would know who it was. I always suspected him. Yes. Leo Bloom. Cilla suspected him. Abel agreed. Yes, my indication was the personal details he knew. Only he knew about that. Yes, it was a hidden scar. No one knew about that scar but him. Yes, one of the texts he said it-he said he saw it once long ago. A scar on my lower left side just above my hip.
Yes, I told Cilla of this. I decided to meet him and go with Abel with me. Yes, I also took that tape recorder. Yes, that’s right. I suspected it was him-the defendant. No, I hid the recorder in my bag to record the meeting. Yes, I gave the tape of meeting to the police. Yes, the tape is of the meeting in the park. Yes, those voices on the tape are the defendants and mine.
[Tape is played, transcript of recording given to bench]
As the tape is played I study her but with fresh eyes. I see her again as if she were my delectable fruit. No green bananas there. Nature’s done her work. All things grow with variance and peculiarity. Like Darwin postulated: survival of the fittest. The horticulturalists strive for the best growth in the best conditions.
Optimum yields when you tender the crop and nurture the most favourable genes. I reflected back on what Professor Hare had to say on psychopaths. They thrive by predatory instinct, too. Criminal but cunning to avoid prison with chameleon charm with the abilities to cut a swathe through society with a scythe of evil leaving a wake of ruined lives.
Hare said it 'emotion for the psychopath is like a second language,' one she struggles to speak and never masters- deep down.
Yes, absolutely sure. Those are our voices- the defendants and mine. I felt scared of what he would do, (he wrote to my doctor and my school).
He threatened me and he said he would write to everyone. Yes, I felt he did get aggressive. My instinct was to run away. Too scared to move. I was petrified. The defendant’s mood was getting angrier and angrier. I was trying to move away from him but he grabbed my arm. No, he was not invited or permitted or welcome by me to do so. He would ‘fuck me up’ over and over he said. Yes, he did say he wanted to talk and walk home. No, I was scared. He was getting violent. No, I did want to run and go.
But I was getting evidence. He snapped his fingers. Yes, he said there were eight people who would fuck up my life. Yes, I got more nervous. I wanted to get away from him. Yes, he mentioned Lita. I did not want to talk about her. Said all he wanted was an hour alone with me. He said Cilla hid behind the curtains to spy on him.
He grabbed my inhaler, had it over his head. After tape ended we left. No! Before then I hit his arm to bring it down. No, the heavy breathing is mine. Started to come back home. No, I did not permit him as we walked to kick me in my leg. And bruises swelling and not invited or permitted at any time to strike me.
No, no, no! I never attacked him. We went home to Cilla’s. Yes, I was crying continuously. No, I do not know why its not heard on the tape. Yes, straight inside and locked the door. Lots of pain, yes, my leg was dead. Soon after, yes, Cilla called police. Yes, right away I told Cilla everything. No, I did not send him any more text messages. Yes, that is my telephone number. Yes, there was physical contact. I had dropped my inhaler. No, I didn’t ask him. I told him to go away. Like I said, the defendant picked it up and held it over his head. Yes, that did happen. I then slapped him in the face. I was angry. I tried to get it back.
Then the defendant slapped me. He held my inhaler in his right hand and then with his left hand. As he walked out he kicked me. No, the inhaler he kicked after. I don’t know where-at some place in the park. I think it was near the enclosure by the gate. No, I can’t remember how long. In time you mean? No, don’t know! No, I did not have a stopwatch! How could I?
The defendant had left the inhaler there. Yes, the day after. The next day Cilla and me went back and found it. I had walked ahead and he continued to kick me to my side.
Yes, as we walked. No, I tried to walk ahead but he returned with me. Yes, that is the whole truth!
All through I sat and wrung my hands from time to time. I would catch myself showing weakness. Letting out some little slip of emotion: a mock laugh at an absurd question or answer, a punch to the air when the whacked out wench warbled a woeful untruth. I constrained the aching bursting anger pulsing my veins as best I could and for contemplation I imagine myself reposed as Rodin’s ‘Dante.’ I had to constrain myself. I had already been warned for contempt once for my outbursts.
As her long interrogation continued I looked her more pityingly than with anger. I began to mourn what she once was what she might have been- my sweet little bean, my variant vanilla girl. It pained me to watch her go through that ordeal as much as it also pained my aching arse. Mucus at back of my throat irritated me ever so. I coughed. A withering look fell upon me once more from the bench. Not good. These court chairs were the pits-all bony and hard.
I was then at such pains to look sombre, calm and composed. But all the while my head was numbingly heavy and uncomfortable. I scribbled a poem for her in my diary. Just to take me away from here if only momentarily. To be free of this torture.
Sweet my love is you to me
Ever in my soul with glee
X-rays of my heart do show
Indelible is your name and so
Hell shall take my soul from thee
Untold pain but n’er do flee
Now is tolled your time to show
Kill me never with thine bow
‘No! No! I already said!’ The witness on the stand exclaimed loudly. A harsh reality tears me back to the drone of the court of inquisition and still her voice penetrates and pummels my brain. A frailty to her stumbling answers now.
“He kicked me over and over!” she says.” He walked beside me and kicked me hard to my left thigh. All the way home he hit me! He used force-kicking me-over and over. Kicked so hard to my left thigh”
Yes, she said. It was in her witness statement to the police made later that day (shown to victim). Yes, it was the seventeenth of March, she agrees. Yes, she saw the policewoman on the twelfth, too and returned to speak to her the following week.
I raised my eyes to them and tried to shake the fog of influenza from my wretched brain.
Defence Barrister: “ Miss van Hiller the officer’s statement shows you made reference to slaps not kicks while walking home. This is at variance with the evidence you are giving today.”
Complainant: “He slapped me yes, he still slapped me with a hand. Don’t know why I didn’t mention it. It should be in the statement. But I am telling the truth today. Kicking me and slaps, too!”
Defence Barrister: “ From the statement of events you gave to the officer on March 17th 2003 there is a clear difference from what we are hearing today, Miss van Hiller. Do you not accept that?”
Complainant: “ I’m telling you he kicked me to my thigh as I walked away and he slapped me, too.”
Defence Barrister: “ And you want the court to believe your story that along a busy residential street Mr Bloom was walking beside you and alternately taking kicks and slaps at you in full public view? Is that really what you want this court to believe? Is that your story?”
Complainant: “ It’s not a story! It’s true! I showed the police my injuries. I showed them my thigh.”
A torrent of tears explodes down her face. The court usher ushers forth with a box of paper tissues to stem the tide. Her tortured face grew red and twisted and green globs had to wiped from her trembling top lip.
I saw her hair and it now seemed matted and unkempt. Her staged composure was slipping badly as were the tousled black locks that covered her errant bad eye. She was the sad Cyclops of this farce, she was sadder than Cyclops; she had Cilla Karibdis as her offstage director. Karibdis looked on enraged. Her purple face puffed in contempt for the barracking my barrister was giving her mumbling, stuttering minion.
Defence Barrister: “ Yes, Miss van Hiller we get the picture. A hail of blows to your face and leg rained down upon you from a man twice your size inflicted upon you for what you allege was the entire journey back from Truva Park to your front door some five or six minutes’ walk away.
[Plan of park produced]
A nervy van Hiller now identifies the areas on the diagram where she alleges the assault occurred. She points with an efficacious forefinger affecting only to look the part and never sounding it.
If she were a black and white cinematic transposition from the silent screen this starlet would, at her grand entrance, be up for the Oscar. But as the performance plays out she trips and falls over her words more and more like a novice. Her insanity drives her on and in the faces about me I sense a growing incredulity. Surely barmy Becky’s cuckoo claims are fooling no one now.
My throat still sore and stinging, I guess she looked as uncomfortable as I felt. Her eyes seem to assume a glazed, almost lost look. In what I took as a desperate plea for help the unzipped zealot scanned about the court her for a friendly face but this vast chamber was filled only with the cold stares of a questioning audience. I began wistfully to muse upon on the loss of my girl next door and I watch.

As I glanced at her in repose sat amongst her henchman huddled in the corner gallery she shot me a cold and withering look that betrayed the protective arm wrapped around her shoulder. She wore her camouflage well that one. The psychopath. It all fitted her purpose. Glib when it suited or friendly and easy-going, then in an instant switched back to her stock in trade performance as the hapless victim. She was truly devoid of the petty anxieties that trouble most of us. No conscience. Her wooden tops had all been danced around to the merry tune of a masterful puppeteer.
Such a sad waste. A clamour of coughs, a fulmination of chatter and abruptly it all stops. No more questions for the witness. The witness is excused.
A brief recess is called. All about me screeching chairs and heavy footsteps on wooden floors break the sombre air that had grown heavy and wearing for the past two hours. I hear a laugh then someone splutters a ‘sorry.’ With a swish of his black cape my able sidekick Shaffernacker turns to me with eyebrows raised.
“How are we doing?” I gingerly enquire of him. A ‘fine-mostly’ he speaks in a foul breath of garlic. I climb uncomfortably from my perch and strode purposefully beside my crafty counsel past the departing throng then ushering Ash put a cautioning forefinger to his lips whispering a while that he will elucidate further on some points once we reach the secure confines of the briefing room. Once in the quieter confines of our war room I pull up a chair at the desk and Ashkenazi begins to evaluate his morning’s work.
“ As you saw, Mr Bloom, counsel for the Crown has endeavoured to paint Miss van Hiller as the pawn in your world of sexual obsession. It went less well for him once she turned on those ridiculous crocodile tears. I’m sure everyone saw through that little gambit, courts are wiser to that little game these days.”
I nodded and smiled approvingly and thought it the opportune time to show open my briefcase and pull out some papers I wanted to show my counsel. I placed them before him on the desk. He seemed rather pleased with my transcript of the audiotape. He was looking forward to presenting that when I took the stand.
“We blast the balls off them once the court hears the tape again and compares my transcript with that fiction McNutt tried to pull off earlier!”
Looking like a sham ham of Batman my counsel waves out his wizard’s black sleeves and purposefully straightens his caped crusader’s garb.
“It’s the text messages charges that are really uppermost in my mind, Mr Bloom. This new Telecommunications offence is not the easiest nut to crack in your case.”
He pulls some papers from his files and reels off some facts. According to estimates, 500 million text messages per month are sent on UK mobile phones alone. He warned me the prosecutor would be due to make his big play on the texts. It now hurts to swallow.
“Electronic sexual harassment was ‘a significant and growing new issue’ in the modern electronic age as this case proves when people send each other so many mobile phone text messages or e-mails without a thought as to the consequences.”
My black wizard went on to tell me in some great detail that the law has striven to catch up with technology and now any offensive text message or e-mail can be considered part of an environment that constituted unlawful sexual harassment.
“It’s a new challenge for me, Leo, but I’m sure there will be plenty more to come in the future. People just don’t seem to understand you just can’t do things like this!”
I heeded his words but felt confident my jolly foul-breathed barrister was ready for that fat-fingered prosecutor, Mr McNutt.
“I anticipate that this afternoon the prosecution will argue that you sent sexually explicit text messages knowingly and with the express intention of causing offence to a girl of school age. He will tell to the court that such messages were grossly obscene and intended to corrupt van Hiller for your own personal deviant and private sexual pleasures.”
His baldhead shone a yellow so vivid it was like a lemon and a sour sounding one at that.
“Leo, I must advise you in no uncertain terms that if you are found guilty of the text offences you cannot expect any mercy from the court. On the basis that you pleaded not guilty and have fought this every step of the way with such a young victim, to boot, and what with this being a new criminal statute you should expect them to throw the book at you. I fear, even with your prior clean record you may well go to prison in what would be a landmark conviction and you’ll possibly a fine thrown in for good measure."
Those words shook me. My throat was now worse and the pain settled on the left side. I was unavoidably reminded that he was, invariably, accurate in his legal assessments. My mouth went even drier. I felt light-headed and needed a drink fast. It was suddenly very claustrophobic. Then I felt the sickening, insipid yellow light fluorescing above my head.
Shaffernacker handed me some papers and said I should consider the facts. I began to read.
In 2002 the advertising watchdog reprimanded a company for sending an offensive text message calling for consumers to upgrade their mobile phone. Phonetastic UK, a company based in Newport, Gwent, sent a text message to customers that stated: "You are a dick and I am going to kick your head in ya big useless donkey. UPGRADE UR MOB 0800 0859362."
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received a complaint about it ruled that the message was "likely to cause serious or widespread offence to recipients" and cautioned the company that a repeat of the offence may incur legal proceedings.
The genealogy of this particular law may be traced back to section 10(2)(a) of the Post Office (Amendment) Act 1935, which made it an offence to send any message by telephone which is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character. It was again reproduced in section 78 of the Post Office Act 1969, save that "by means of a public telecommunication service" was substituted for "by telephone" and "any message" was changed to "a message or other matter". Section 78 was elaborated but substantially repeated in section 49(1)(a) of the British Telecommunications Act 1981 and was re-enacted (save for the substitution of "system" for "service") in section 43(1)(a) of the Telecommunications Act 1984. Section 43(1)(a) was in the same terms as section 127(1)(a) of the 2003 Act, save that it referred to "a public telecommunication system" and not (as in section 127(1)(a)) to a "public electronic communications network". Sections 11(1)(b) of the Post Office Act 1953 and 85(3) of the Postal Services Act 2000 made it an offence to send certain proscribed articles by post.’
Never archaic bell. All gobbledegook. Enough of this! Please! I wanted air, to feel some fresh air, a breeze, a fresh smell, anything but that garlic breath and this odorous little Calcutta hole of a room.
“ Are you alright, Mr Bloom, you look very pale.”
I was nauseous and needed to get out of that place. Without further ado he scrambled up his papers from the desk and breathed on me his final words, ‘ ok then-lunch!’ Cautioning me to be back by one he scurried off to raid the coffee machine. No doubt to top up his halitosis.
I took myself off out into the cold grey daylight. A whiff of dead fish pervaded the North Haven air but it was a welcome change from the stuffiness behind me. I was struggling. I was still sore, some catarrh, left sided. It hurts to swallow.
Before I had time to clear head the usher recalled the sitting. We entered in to the courtroom once more in funereal fashion past uncomplaining stout columns of chalky marble standing as monuments to pettiness and proscription.
We were back in those awful hard seats again sitting in prostatic discomfort. Everyone took his or her place as before. Rebecca would barely look my way except to cast a glacial stare of frosted ice. Frozen vanilla turned her head resolutely towards the prosecutor. She seemed more intent on acting out her pathetic drama to him than anyone. I felt sure it was the psychopathic tendency that possessed her. She was always out to sway that particular whomsoever she had chosen. Mc Nutt would now be that easily impressionable male who she thought would do most for her. For now I was long resigned to the fact she had forever forsaken poor old, tall, dark, handsome, enigmatic Leo and was now eyeing short, fat, oily, pompous, self-important McNutt as her new benefactor.
But that vanilla presence continually sucked my eyes back to her. I mused upon her then just as the ‘streetwalker glazed and haggard …palpably reconnoitring on her own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill.’ Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul. She is a bad merchant, this one. She buys dear and sells cheap.
The nobler man inside of me had long ago determined I was never to properly seed that particular mill. Other men’s seeds she had no doubt taken in her mercenary fashion. Now Abel Tractabull took the stand and was duly sworn in. I felt sure once my trial was done and dusted that screwed up nut would quickly dispense with Tractabull and be off with the next poor fool.
The performance continued. The latest ham actor trotted out his rehearsed lines. The audience sat enrapt. Tractabull sought to corroborate van Hiller’s evidence and so on, and so on, nonsense without end. He was poor fare indeed. McNutt said I was ‘grossly offensive’. Throat still sore, both sides, dry and stinging. I laughed inwardly and contemplated my first grand inquisition in police custody now over a year past. I lifted up my gaze once more. I turned to the bench. Their grey faces as stern as in mourning as if we were all here to bury someone.
I want to be absolved of my hideous sins, oh, Father. I was a good catholic-pope hailed-always at morning prayers-the matins. I long observed, talking of body and soul. A holy vigil service I rendered. Let me believe in the soul and give me perfect absolution and preserve my intelligence, the brainpower as such, as distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup. I believe in the convolutions of the grey matter. Don’t let me the sacrificial lamb. Spare these stiff, cold fingers clasped at my lap as I feel the stabbing eyes upon me. The Birmingham six, Guildford Four, the Balcombe Street trial, ad naseum. What pitiful justice once more for an Irishman.
“ Did you pick up on that? “
The odorous breathing one fixed me in a hunter’s stare as I scrambled my senses to come back to him and this infernal court.
“Bloom! Did you see the faces …on the bench….less tense….good sign.”
He pulls me to my feet and I see I must stand. Protocol. We have been adjourned for lunch. He puts his black-clothed arm round my shoulder and whispers the greatest secret.
“ The mood has shifted…did you not sense it?”
Feeling not sensing was all I was about just then. His sweaty, furrowed brow and ghastly breath was all I sensed. I straightened my tie and buttoned my suit jacket and we shuffled away beside past the throng and once more retreated to the vacant meeting room adjoining the court.
A constricting feeling seized my throat as we decamped again in that oppressive little windowless room. But my flapping friend was a blackbird chewing on a worm. Shaffernacker fidgeted and shuffled yet another stack of papers across the desk.
Shaffernacker was slick and smooth still wanting to impress me with his breadth of knowledge. He spoke with refined tones. Smoothly shaved man of the bald pate I deigned to metamorphose in my imagination into who in culinary might be a fine pâté de fois gras accompanied by a crisp Chenin Blanc manner, or perhaps a sublime Salmon terrine, with a cream and herb sauce for his subtle refinement.
I tried to be attentive despite a numbing headache and tickly feeling at back of throat then extends to left ear. Sinuses. He advised me that since our last recess one of his underlings had faxed through a synopsis of a benchmark case that may have impact here on these proceedings. It was the finer points of a case concerning a Mr Leslie Collins from North West Leicestershire who had allegedly made a number of calls to the offices of his MP, Lee Taylor, and left racially offensive telephone messages.
“Mr Bloom, as I tried to explain to you earlier this morning it has been a criminal offence since 2003 to send or cause to send any message that is “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or of a menacing character” by means any mobile phone or Internet service. So far, the courts have not been asked to consider messages sent using such media. Your case which involves Internet transmitted text messages is unique as it’s the first I know of under the new amendment to the law.”
Wow! I was a trailblazer was I? Yippee! How wonderful? Here I am breaking new ground. Oh, how my family will be proud! Maybe I should feel honoured or something. I really didn’t much care for my new notoriety one tiny jot.
Not be interrupted Shaffernacker jabbered on.
“It is clear from Lord Bingham's judgment in that case that the aim of the particular offence is to prevent a service provided and funded by the public, for the benefit of the public, from being misused in a way that contravenes certain basic standards.”
Basic standards? What does that mean? And I didn’t send any offensive or obscene messages I tried to tell him. But he insisted I had already made an admission under police caution a year ago and that was that.
“Do try to follow my point, Leo. It’s not necessary for a recipient to be personally offended by the message.”
He pointed to his papers in emphasis of his points.
” The court will firstly decide whether it was you who had sent the messages and if they think that it was probable that you did then they will then consider whether you used terms that were offensive to that recipient.”
Slight tickle right at the back of my throat. I think my eyes must have begun to glaze but Ashkenazi Shaffernacker tried to clarify this.
He took my arm and guided me to my chair. “ Look, Leo, its my view that you will be convicted on the text message charges unless Lita gives her personal confession to this court. I’ve had a word with the prosecutor and the beak and it’s a done deal now- if she doesn’t show then the court won’t admit her written confession. You’re done basically!”
I again nodded. Sharp pain in neck at front left side.
“I’m afraid what the Leslie Collins case proves is that my Plan B just isn’t going to fly.”
I asked him why he had never mentioned a Plan B when we had our meeting last Monday at Brigid Kearney’s office. I was getting a trifle flustered at this development so late in the day.
“Well, Leo, I had allowed for the possibility that your stepdaughter may not be able to make the trip from New York to be here for your trial. Therefore I had sketched out a rudimentary argument whereby Miss van Hiller in no way indicated in her own text replies to yours that she was in any way offended or distressed by them. But, sadly, the Collins ruling has me scuppered on that I’m afraid to say.’
I asked my barrister to explain why.
“ Well, Leo, take, for example, those now common sex chat hot lines. You know the ones…..”
I nodded trying to look as intelligent and attentive as possible.
“…the ones where men and women are on a premium rate phone call using words and suggestive language very much like this present case. Well, plainly under the old 1988 Act there would be no offence, and if a conversation took place in the street between you and van Hiller…it would be laughed out of court... But now….now under this new section… 127(1)(a)…. The change in the law says that because the speaker or sender knows he or she is using grossly offensive terms then they are committing an offence if they communicate it via the Internet and by text message.”
I confessed that I had never realised before that a private telephone conversation or text message correspondence like in my case would be a criminal offence. I kind have guessed if it was done repeatedly and the receiver objected and said so then that would amount to harassment but this was much more, much worse. Shaffernacker was at pains to point out that the new law is less about harassment and more about punishing people if they use the public telephone network in an obscene or offensive manner: as Lord Bingham had put it in the House of Lords, ‘to prohibit the use of a service provided and funded by the public for the benefit of the public for the transmission of communications which contravene the basic standards of our society’.
Shaffernacker scratched at his chin, “ In fact, to be frank, I can see considerable chaos with this new amendment to the law. The sexchat phone line industry could be shut down at a stroke if the letter of the law is applied. Quite clearly by the new definitions almost all such calls must involve the sending and receiving of indecent or obscene messages proscribed by section 127(1)(a)…I’m at an utter loss as to where this will all lead.”
I was less concerned about Britain’s invaluable sex industry and more about my own neck.
“Jesus Ash! So where does that leave me?” I asked.
“ Well, as you must realise this is a point I am preparing to put forcefully in my closing speech to impress upon the court. They would be opening a can of worms to convict if they find that you did, in fact, send the texts for which you are charged but that Miss van Hiller was not distressed or offended by them and acquiesced for the purposes of taken money for sex. You see there is both an issue of enforcement and scapegoating. “
Shaffers shook his head ruefully. The black-robed magician was going to have to pull some legal rabbits from of his hat. The finer points of the criminal law remained very much alien to me. My neck felt stiff. The sour air of this confined windowless room was stifling.
“ I feel sick-I need some air, excuse me a minute!”
I flung open the heavy wooden door and escaped into the bland void of the corridor.. Dizziness overcame my senses and the grubby institutionalised walls, nothing but grey featureless people all about, even the stone pillars seem to swirl and fall towards me in harsh heartless fashion. It was becoming all too much for me
I staggered out alone into noisy pandemonium of babble as faceless spectres wafted to and fro in a haunting stone mire. The stifling air made foul by a glum old tramp in from the cold slumped alone on a bench. His nauseating odour hit me hard but not as hard as the message he unwittingly sent me.
All about his putrefying derelict form the tramp had wrapped old newspaper for some warmth. My eyes were shocked to see my own face printed large upon the page. The headline above my photo screamed, ‘ Trial of the Lewd Teacher.’ God, please spare me this hell! Oh, I wish I were out in fragrant woods, sucking in fresh air, among the trees and the birds again living that clean, wholesome life.
I remember the avocets of Havergate Island. I remember that late September day and our eyes were gifted with a crisp and clear Indian summer azure sky and salt sea air filled our lungs. To me it was, and always will be, my special place where you can see a wide range of wading birds, wildfowl and brown hares. I had thought Becky would enjoy sharing my passion for natural beauty I tried my best but my twitching binocular hands were soon intent on following what I took to be the mysterious nightjar, flitting low over the heath. I pointed to it and gave her my glasses and we could hear the 'churring' from a newfound song post.
That golden place had dunes and marshes that backed along the coastline and further down towards the south there exists virtually deserted pine forest and sandy heaths. All round this foxy coast the languid air did swoon. I asked my young princess the question: Isn’t this wonderful? But although she smiled bravely at my helpful pointers to the species on offer it seemed inexplicable to me that this rare beauty took no genuine pleasure in the naturally captivating beauty all around us. It was if she was in competition for my attention. She had to impress and there was no one of her ilk to woo and preen for. None of her usual canoodling crowd, the peckers and setters of the street and the public houses were back at their own turf. They were the sub-species down the bottom of the food chain in this cycle of life. My vanilla bird had been courted by a far superior genus and she knew it but she acted from instinct. And her instincts, her subliminal needs were base and unsophisticated. She was resolutely unimpressed by our tracking of this new habitat and she displayed scant regard for my elucidation on the duneland flora. My dilettante duchess walked on ahead of me alone the dusty dirt track declaring she had no use for sea kale that is the ancestor of cabbage she had. Was I mad? Did I always have to go on and on about it? We wheeled up and gently along the winding way towards a gaggle of old aged pensioners wrapped as if foraging into Artic Tundra contrasting starkly with our own loosely clad attire. Bex cast a bemused eye over them as they brimmed broad smiles through us.
Isn’t this much better than some smoky old pub?” All I got was a hurrumph.
Am I really so dangerous and corrupting? Is she better off in the company of career criminals or a man of letters- a tender soul, such as me, with sensibilities for aesthetic pursuits?
“ Did you hear that?” Hear what, was her abrupt reply. It was a Bittern. Oh, she said unremarkably. How do you know that if you can’t see it? The Bittern, has it’s own unique "booming" sound, don’t you know? No she didn’t and why should I expect her rattled my acerbic adolescent angel.
I taught her birdcalls often confuse beginners and experienced birdwatchers alike and she could start by learning the easy ones like chiffchaff and common birds like robins and blackbirds. But I remember that shrug she gave. I told her she didn’t realise how lucky she was living in a region so replete with outstanding natural beauty. I wanted her to share with me the opportunity to see rare plants and animals some of which are only found hereabouts.
It was quite amazing after all because we saw many butterflies that day including the Swallowtail. I even saw my first "Norfolk Hawker." God, that was such a huge dragonfly and it looked pretty damn frightening. It flew straight at us and Becky shrieked thinking it was a giant bee. But it was harmless. I took her hand and she yielded to my comfort and we walked among those secluded places of grazing marshes, reed beds and dykes. The incident with the Hawker kind of shook her out of herself a bit and she listened more attentively to what I said about the marsh flowers, insects and birds. I told her how I had coped with my own stresses by coming here to unwind. Perhaps she, too, could find inner peace among nature, I was naive.
“In spring, you can watch avocets and marsh harriers or hear booming bitterns. Look, down there… on the beach.”
I pointed out to her a special area that was cordoned off to protect nesting little terns.
“ Why do you come out here and look at the same thing all the time?” She enquired. Her shinning brown eyes, I thought, were so set off by the pallor of her indoor skin.
It’s not the same thing all the time though, I tried to tell her. In autumn and winter, many wading birds and wildfowl visit the reserve. Wasn’t it gorgeous? I looked but I never touched. We then descended down a footpath to a hidden promontory that gave us wonderful views over the tidal waters and mud flats. Her pigeon-toed walk was kind of cute and her unsure footing gave me an excuse to wrap an avuncular arm around her inviting shoulders. Not sexual.
Migrating birds returning from Africa are drawn to these wide-open spaces. I took her across the heath. I scared her mischievously to get my own back at her for her flightiness by warning her to look out for the adders. She only had her skimpy shorts on and bare legs! She freaked at me and I laughed. But there were only tame, completely harmless silver-studded blues, the odd toothless tiger beetle and dilatory Dartford warbler. Yet we did get one evil glare from the marauding male of a courting couple scooting into a sandy hollow with mischief afoot.
I crave to be there again right now. Free and unshackled I was then, unguided, and not judged meandering my coast of grazing marshes, reedbeds, unspoilt heathland and ancient woodland remnants. She stopped me momentarily to read a sun-faded sign. ‘Look out for the many species of butterflies and dragonflies.’ I stroked her hair as it teased me in the breeze while she perused. She leant forward her silky blouse filled with heaving white cleavage. Let the dog see the rabbit, I thought. That was perfect spot for courting couples to be close and to be at one together. Stalking my territory I moved about her as I listened to the faltering melody of her young voice as she recited on about wildfowl, breeding marsh harriers, woodlarks, nightingales and bitterns. I was fascinated by her display behaviour and partook of that birds mating display. Beauty is a wondrous thing to behold. To see the movement, the graceful I could see my chickadee was craving some wooing and nurturing as she pecked and preened the now wind swept mop about her head.
So as not to ruffle her feathers any further we stopped off on our trek at the teashop up on the ridge near the cliff’s edge. I pointed out where half the old village had tumbled down into the sea. Coastal erosion. She said she knew all about global warming. They did it at school.
At the teashop she perked up noticeably when her gaze was drawn to a sickly feast of garish coloured cakes. She hovered over her chosen prey ready to swoop.
“Please, can I have a chocolate orange one?” She squawked like a ten year old and betrayed her truer passion. I listened politely as she crowed about her mother’s superb homebakes as we tottered with trays of hot teas and loaded plates of cake carrion to a rickety cane table and chairs. As she gleefully laid out her spread across the blue checkerboard tablecloth she stuttered with messy fingers to smear her lips with rich buttercream in her vulgar but strangely delicious manner.
“Did you see those horny sods in the dunes? “ She smirked. Yes, I did. My knowing smile met by hers. She ran her tongue along a coffee orange brown wedge teasing the creamy ooze with the tip of her tasty tongue. “ Oh, this is heaven” she sighed. I concurred with a slice of my own creamy heaven kept wrapped hygienically in my vacuum-packed psyche. She was as scrumptious as the prize specimens exhibited in glass cases in the shop and the fare she had ravenously foraged. Satiated by vulgarity.

46
“ Hey, Leo, you want a sandwich and a coffee?” I was shaken from my daydreaming stupor by an accent I recognised. No appetite.
“Shaff’s just been giving me some not so good news, Hun.”
Cookie took my arm and with a wistfully soft smile politely led me past a cackling throng of Karibdis’ cronies that congregated en masse in those dark dank halls. Deftly she swept us forward and on towards the heavy lacquered oak doors of the courthouse entrance ignoring tiresome scoffs and half-heard taunts. I felt the firing of scornful darts our way but pretended not to hear the chuntering of bilious contempt.
“Let the fish hags go hang- we’re always two steps ahead of them, Leo.”
My wife locked tightly onto my arm and gamely she ushered us through the maul of the rabble and out onto the wintry street. On she led me to the tearooms down the road for hot tea and pastrami in a bap. In her pep talk luncheon my comforting wife wore her best stoical smile yet broke her cover to declare her inner frustrations.
“ I hate not seeing what’s happening…are you sure I can’t sit at the back? It’s absolutely unbearable having to wait out in the halls.”
Her face suddenly looked pained and gaunt.
“No, no…. you’re a witness…to be called…maybe tomorrow or something…I…we can’t have you in there!”
Her eyes rolled in frustration and she swatted at errant crumbs sprinkled decorously across her heavy bosom.
It was hard to eat heartily or think about anything other than pondering how well Harlot Hiller had primed her fellow conspirators for their shabby performances.
At the stroke of two we were back in the grimness of the stale courtroom confines sitting in strained, tense silence once more. On stage were the usual main cast. The key actors dresses suitably their black cloaks and wigs and the galleries filled in anticipation of another prize performance.
Again the jousting of words began in tortuous fashion. It tore at my tattered nerve ends as on and on my name was used and abused over and over. The same hateful eyes plunged their spears and arrows in my exposed direction.
The stiffness in my joints worsened as the afternoon’s proceedings played on. In from the wings came Tractabull once more but this time to feel the stabbing blade of sharp cross-examination by Ashkenazi Shaffernacker. Give those Jews their due they do make good lawyers. I muffled my scoffing laugh as I remembered my wife’s tactless turn of phrase.
As I watched the styles of the opposing barristers I recognised a distinct and subtle change in play. The prosecutor’s fat, oily hands

Comments

54
Post-acquittal Bloom taunting Godbolt and the police as Bloom leaves the courtroom. taunting of the Citizen, unwise as his escape was by no means assured and the taunting of Odysseus as Polyphemus rages on the shore. That the normally mild mannered Bloom can be seen to be sharing some of the attributes of the Sacker of Cities; is strange, and it is perhaps important to note that it is Blooms heritage that causes him to shout out; Your God was a Jew. Christ was a Jew like me. The Citizens poorly chosen words-By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will (both p.445) serve to yet again emphasise his foolishness. Is he the ‘Citizen’? He has been cloaked in a pseudonym that I have graciously afforded him for too long. You see, reader, he is real, he is not a fictional character in a potboiler novel you can pick up off the shelf of Woolworth’s at 50% off the recommended price, and He is real. A serving police officer-no less a full inspector of Her Majesty’s Constabulary in this fine fair eastern county north east of London where the tractors rake the fields for turnips and turnip-headed Troy Boy ploughs the highways for more victims to make criminals for his statistics to look stacked up nice and crime solved. He is the man of the pen-pushing bureaucracy that sees ‘clear up rates’ and ‘targets’ and this season’s ‘big initiative’ is that we are all ‘one’ in fighting crime. But he is the criminal not me. He makes false criminals of victims and true victims of ‘criminals.’ Damn him the self-made man-god. I shall shame he like he had them shame me. I shall get my revenge on my nemesis: get the Police Federation on the case. You know you want to! Tell them what happened on that fateful day I took my stepdaughter to confess her crimes to you. Tell us all! What did you say? ‘You are banned from this station-the investigation is closed!’ I know the law on defamation. I’ve studied it most assiduously and had the best advice my wife’s money could illicit from those London barristers. The rules of ‘absolute immunity’? Go hang! I name and shame you. I have the proof, Inspector. The proof I got, as is my right from your own police records. Bestowed upon me as a great gift from the gods into my hands courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act. I clasp it in my sweaty paw and thrust it skyward to the blueness of the heavens and the glory of the gods. See Zeus; see Athena, my sweet beauty (don’t forsake me now and let me lie at your knees and kiss tenderly your fine regal hand in deference). I hold the documents to prove you denied a confession-you denied the evidence as the stain upon your sworn attestation. You took the office in vain. You swore to seek the truth without favour or bias, to admit evidence whether it pointed away from an accused or toward him, but it was all one-way by your book. I saw you smirk as you had me stripped then stowed for hours in a stinking, fetid cell, cuffed, too and then posed like meat for the indignity of the mug shot snaps, the inky fingers and palms, the DNA swab from my gums. Then the court appearances, the run around of clerks, lawyers, witnesses, court expenses, forensics, clerical filings, barristers fees, travel costs, plane tickets, on and on pissing money down the drain. But it wasn’t your money, though, was it? Just a catalogue of unnecessary waste of public funds and how much did Kearney say again? I hear it was over £65,000 you’ve cost the taxpayer in your little games. Having me tried for nothing to humiliate me in your own sick and tawdry revenge to suckle sexual favours from my bitch of an ex wife. Another low-life uniformed troll of your despicable ilk. Feel my fury, smell the vitriol and acid bile spat at you now. I am coming.

55
MARCH 2004: Post Trial Fallout." The alleged ‘unconvicted paedophile’, Leo Bloom has been run out of town just one week after returning to his North Haven home at Eccles Drive. The local community became concerned after it was revealed Mr Bloom was living within 200 metres of a well-used children’s playground. A group of residents has been protesting outside the house for much of the day. North Haven Mayor, Lester Burnham, says Mr Bloom is not welcome in the town. "The community wanted him out of his premises and there was a raucous group gathering on the footpath outside," he said.
"Police escorted him out of those premises and he's at the police station at the present time. I believe the gentlemen is now making arrangements for accommodation outside of the town."
Mr Burnham says the community was not willing to put out the welcome mat.
"The place where he has residence was a just a very short walk from where young children regularly gather, which I believe was totally inappropriate," he said.
I threw down the newspaper in disgust. It’s never going to stop haunting me. These moronic imbeciles outside are weak-minded. I sent my final letter of formal complaint to police headquarters yesterday for whatever good it will do. I demanded they root out the rotten apples in their barrel. I expected little, as these were corrupt and incompetent trolls. Maybe we are just plain too nice? Boylan has a lot to answer for. He, Godbolt, Cilla, Gadd and the rest are all in on it fuelling an indignant moral panic. If I haven’t got the religious-right reactionaries ranting and raving on my doorstep I’ve got them crying their shrill screeds in newspaper columns. You would think I had been into every imaginable evil up to and including drinking the blood of babies. I don’t get my voice-they won’t print my rebuttals. The press ignore me and give me no right of reply. Well, it’s soon going to be time to take cover, you drooling Neanderthals. Prepare yourselves for what's coming.
I’ve endured rocks thrown at my car, a biscuit tin, yes, a biscuit tin of all things aimed at me as I left the house leaving scratches down the blue paint of the front door. I am not safe here. I would be far better off far, far away encamped in lemon territory in Ithaca so all those unthinking knee-jerkers can go and spin.
56
OFF TO ITHACA. I followed Barb and pregnant Lita back to New York. It wasn’t a bad flight. Delayed due to a bomb hoax it took over eleven hours before landing at Newark. But I kept myself busy by reading the papers. A good article on positivism in the Times and the American newspapers was full of woes of how the Baghdad Museum had been pillaged of priceless artefacts and tens of thousands of rare manuscripts. “Iraq is the birthplace of civilization, the civilization of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians and others” was how the cultural editor led the story. We all sojourned at the family residence out in the country away from prying eyes. Here my wife always treated me like a king.
My brother-in-law, Steve came up from the city for the weekend and wanted to hear the scoop. He was downright shocked. Acquitted you say? So the much-vaunted British "sense of fair play" was nothing more than self-congratulating rhetoric. Hounded out of town by a vigilante mob? Do they still have lynchings in Merry Old England? Maybe it’s just an aberration? Maybe you upset someone on the payroll of some Mafia drugs lord? Is it because you are from Irish stock? That’s it plain, got it now- simple old-fashioned racism. Steve Limoncello was a great one for bigging up the underdog. Did I know that when the Irish first came to the US they got the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs and an Irishman was held to have less economic value than a black or Chinese man? He knew his local history did our Steve or it was something he just read in the papers. The date was the clue March 17th 2004. He then told me the first St. Patrick's day parades in New York were anti-Irish affairs held by Anglo-Saxons who taunted the Irish and burnt St. Patrick in effigy. I told him my effing effigy was probably being burnt in the Havens as he spoke. Now do shut up old chap, I wished but to no avail.
”Leo, the Irish had to fight to be white. Since then other groups have "become white", or more precisely "become American". My advice to you is go back home and show them you’ve become not only white but whiter than white!”
I thanked Steve for that and quietly in his ear asked if he felt perhaps the time to let all the family in on our embarrassing little secret about that escapade in that New Jersey bordello three years back? Steve withdrew his counsel advisedly.
I should have sensed right then and there the portents were not good. My recuperation was not to be an untroubled affair. I had persuaded my hirsute Italian yellow fruit that a wise course of action was to refurbish my unwelcome abode at Eccles Close and let it out. She thought it wise and no less apposite that we entrust the letting to Hector Goodman. His greater knowledge of these matters would ensure a stress free and more profitable venture. Best wait a week or two and we can the plans underway. Or so we thought.
The devastating news was a crushing blow when it came. I don’t really think anyone believed it at first. It was just too surreal and struck me to the core. Denise called on that snowy early March night. She broke the news over the phone to Lita on a break from her bedside vigil. Hector had been attacked as he left my place yesterday evening. He was jumped before he could get to his car. The immediate fear was possible long-term brain damage. He has had extensive contusions and lacerations to frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex. Prognosis -vegetative state. That was meant to be me. That was certain. Not immediately life threatening-but he will have no quality of life- brains like mush. Lita quivered, set down the telephone receiver and collapsed back into her armchair. My wife ran to her aid. We had the unborn to consider. Naturally, we were all disgusted, worried, sickened and angry. What was it all for? Where was it all leading and when would it end?
“Granted we all know paedophilia is sick, and, of course, I’m all for paedophiles being locked away indefinitely. But what is just as sick is that media hype; it’s all down to that if-it-sells-papers-it-must-be-good rubbish. Naming and Shaming they call it over there. It’s the kind of trash that makes paediatricians have to watch themselves…oh poor, poor old Hector!”
I decided the right thing to do was to fly back immediately. Guilt enveloped me and became suffocating. I had to see the man before he goes. It was a show of friendship and support. But, wouldn’t you know it, within three-or was it four (?) days he was sitting up in bed.
I brought the obligatory bowl of fruit and listened to a rendition of his crepitating rale as he struggled with tubes and wires and analgesics to communicate anything much discernable. Still poor Hector. He looked like a tired old dog or a glum puppet figure, lying in that bed like some useless old rag. Look at him, poor soul. Hector the Dog and Zaza? Yes! That was it! A cat wasn’t she? Didn’t they have a nice house in the centre of a lovely garden full of flowers? On just before the news! Wasn’t there a frog called Kiki? I think she lived next door. Or was kinky? I know they spent a lot of time spying over the garden wall, or sneaking through her access hole for some excitement. Kiki and Zaza often played tricks on Hector to teach him a lesson, leading him to say "I'm a Great Big (whatever he was) Old Hector".
I opened the door to my old haunt at Eccles Drive. The blue door still bore the marks of the biscuit tin attack. On the coconut matting just inside the battered door sat an assortment of letters-mostly junk male, some post Mr Nakamura, my old tenant and a crisp large manila job from the East Mercia Department of Education. It was grim reading. My services were no longer required. I had been formally removed from the supply teachers’ register. I was barred from making any direct approach to all of the Authorities maintained schools. There was no prospect of an appeal. No formal panel would be convened to discuss the matter. I was over and out, done and dusted.
My wife was in lah-la land. Her grandaughter was born five minutes past midnight on March 26th 2004weighing in at six pounds and for ounces. All services to my place were off and I only found out when I met Denise at the hospital and she told me. Hector was doing fine. He should be out for rehabilitation in early April and the doctor says the prognosis just gets better and better. What a relief. Shame my life is in shreds. A cold mattress to sleep on, no furniture and the fear that at any time the North Haven Posse might regroup and resume their Bloom baiting. The Limoncellos weren’t rushing to my aid. I felt a spare part in their equations right now. I had to think of another new strategy.

57

Wherever you go, there you are as they say in the home country. Belatedly, back in England and some time after my acquittal I was able to kept my word to my faithful darling blonde. So it I was back to Charlotte’s welcome embraces to see if she could withstand another pie hop deal. I tried to finally cement her place by my side. It was such a relief to be with her again. I felt lucky to have met someone like her-someone very special: someone who wouldn’t press charges. I revelled in the security she gave me. So much so I decided to take her to my post-trial confabulation at Punch, Deenan & Flynn.
Brigid Kearney greeted me like a long lost friend; ”My dear, Leo, so glad to see you again-you’re looking really well with all things begin considered and nice to meet you, too, Ms Mayes. Everyone here at the firm is so delighted for you! What a marvellous job Mr Shaffernacker did. Please take a seat….coffee anyone? So what is it I can do for you today?”
“ Let me cut to the chase Ms Kearney….I don’t want to beat around the bush…but frankly I’m really gutted with how it all turned out.”
“Gutted? Why gutted? You do surprise me….what can possibly be ailing you?”
“Well… the negative press coverage for a start… and I’m getting into an horrific battle to get re-instatement from my employers…it’s looking really bad! They’ve banned me permanently.”
“Oh, come… I’m sure it will all die down. The press are the press….we all know how they work! Of course, I did speak with them myself when they telephoned the firm for a quote…but .as always more interested in a hot scandal…..you see they’d gone along with the girl’s story from the outset…. seemed so compelling what with the tape recording …looked like an open and shut case to an outsider, of course, people do tend to think in simplistic terms in these sex attack cases…too quick to side with the alleged victim. So…..I’m afraid… their big sex story went a bit flat.”
“A bit flat! Jesus, I’ve lost my teaching career because of the garbage that’s been written about me and now I’m forever painted as the paedo teacher who got away with it ‘cos some kid flew 4,000 miles from nowhere to bail me out…you’ve seen all the headlines…..it looks like a stitch up by me!….’Leo Bloom, teacher gets young girl in from the States to ambush trial….victim distraught and prosecutor screams foul!’”
“ Well…of course, it does all look a tad shabby put that way but that’s the rules- the press can’t disclose names or personal details about minors. I’m sure you understand that. Of course, in this case….what with all the bizarre circumstances….I do see your point, too. It should have been put down as a simple family bust up between your stepdaughter and foster child-much simpler-but rules are rules. But I’m sure you’ll get it straightened out with your employers…they’ll see through it all and you’ll be back in business once the dust settles.”
“I’m being constantly hounded to death! A family friend has been nearly kicked to death- mistaken for me by rent a mob! I can’t walk through town without some arsehole recognising me from the papers and giving me a verbal battering….and look…look at this!”
I thrust the letters toward her.
“ I’ve now got this from the Secretary of State for Education. I’ve brought it today to show you……and then this one…. another from the local education authority....you see! If I insist on appealing all that nonsense I’m set for two and may be three more trials.”
“What do you mean three more trials?”
Exactly that…..this time by my the Department for Education, then after that the General Teaching Council…if I win through them then it’s back to my employers!”
With a pensive face she pauses and eyes my concern. Theatrically she puts on her reading spectacles then begins to study them and scribbles some notes on her pad.
“ Ok…I understand this now…If it’s alright with you I’d like to make copies of these letters for our employment specialists…as you know….I’m a criminal lawyer…..this merits some scrutiny from someone with more expertise in these matters. ….Are you currently unemployed?”
“Yes…haven’t worked since I got suspended last year. As they say, the best things in life are free or is it nail-biting refreshes the feet.”
“Oh my dear Leo…I see…well we try to get you on legal aid for this as before ….no different from the criminal matter really…some investigative help…leave it with me and I’ll get the ball rolling…I’ll be in touch.” Her hand busily scratched at her pad.
“Oh…one other thing….I was wondering if I could sue the CPS and the police over what they did….for defamation or something…..what with the fabricated transcript and the them refusing to examine my phone records and computer….for the proof….and then there was Lita’s confession they refused to take….”
“Ah…yes…I remember….you sent the Crown Prosecution Service a letter before your trial…..er…yes…I remember we disagreed on the approach at the time…..might be some mileage in it….but again….I will need to pass that query onto someone else…not sure who we’ve got in the firm who does actions against the police. It’s not something there’s much call for in these parts ordinarily…you may find you need to go see a firm in London, Leo, but again, leave all this with me and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
I fix my gaze directly into her eyes and daringly make my final point,” “ Just before I go… Frankly, Ms Kearney I need to say this… I felt when you got me to do all that work on the transcript…. from the tape ….that you then .... .after….when I sent my letter to the CPS against your wishes…I’ve done a lot on my own and I just wondered how committed you really were to helping.”
Her head jerked up from scribbling her notes and she suddenly fixed me with daggers. “Mmmm….well…Frankly, Mr Bloom ….when I first read your file I didn’t think you had a prayer…. But then two things transpired to save you…. Firstly, fair play to you for discerning that the complainant’s own tape recording helped discredit the prosecution witnesses…I pointed that out to you that may be something on there we could work with. I was proved right when you followed up with your own analysis of it for me. But it was your stepdaughter’s confession that really saved your bacon…without a shadow of a doubt. And you and I both know you were lucky to get that from her…and of course, there were those photos on the mobile phone…a very big lucky break for you, don’t you think? Thank goodness no one ever looked deeper into the photos question. …..Now…..I really have do to get on…another client is waiting….. Good day, Mr Bloom…Ms Mayes. I’ll be in touch.”
She stood and raised her arm toward the door. Her face said enough-to her I was guilty-I had got off too lightly. We left quickly.
Charlotte took my arm and pulled herself tightly to my chest. I smiled back at her. She read my anxiety and tried her best to motivate me, “ Leo, you’re a free man now. I am not going to let you stew in that armchair, curtains half-drawn, unshaven, and unkempt. Get rid of that self-piteous stupefied look on your face! Be a man!”
Grinding poverty did have that effect and he more than conjectured that, high educational abilities though he possessed, he experienced no little difficulty in making both ends meet.
“ All well and good you saying that, Charlotte, but I need to think about putting a crust in my mouth now. They’ll be no ‘hail, Ed Pope!’ I don’t think you’re father is going to let you support an acquitted paedophile! More like pail Ed Hope!”
“ Stop that now, Leo, I know…but County Hall are just doing their jobs protecting the kids in their care…they don’t know you like I do!”
“ But…it’s not just them….I’ve also got the police sending my file to the Secretary of State. They’re attacking me on two fronts now: the Department of Education as well as the General Teaching Council. It’s going to be ground hog day all over…. facing one trial after another trial after another!”
“Leo…I was really upset you kept me out of the trial….maybe if you’d let me get more involved I could have helped in some way…but you chose your wife over me…our love was sacrificed and I trusted you to see it through with some kind of honour…if you love me then please let me be part of it….I will show you. Didn’t I say I would be there in court if that…that… wife her charm less daughter let you down? Didn’t I prove to you I would put our love before my father’s wishes? I’ve done my part…you’re wife has gone back to New York…running away again to be with her grandchild….She’s deserted you yet again. She’s totally unreliable. Is that the kind of life you want? Is that what your future is going to be? Nothing to hold on to? Nothing permanent? No commitment to you to make a proper life here. She will have you taking care of that as if it were yours and hers….I know how it is…women see things men don’t….it’s all about her big lawsuit and what you can do for her when she needs you. And you, being you, you hold on hoping she’ll give you the crusts from the table. You always told me you would never give her a child. But she beat you-she got her way by default. She’s off now making sure she has her own daughter’s bundle for herself. You watch. She’s manipulated and controlled you and you did her bidding and look where it got you…you lost the thing you had…your teaching….what can you do now at your age? Retrain? I don’t see it, Leo. Please see the sense. I read the letters you got you’re your employers. They will never let you work here ever again. Let’s go to Lincolnshire. Let’s start a new life somewhere where no one know you….we can be a family…you, me, my kids….yours, too…. whenever they want they can be with us.”
“that’s some speech, babe…I’m touched…don’t know what to say.”
Leo, say nothing for now-just think. Think how I’ve played my part….. I’ve been patient…keeping to the background. No woman would do that for any man unless her whole heart and soul was in her dreams to be one united in love.”
I felt a tear in my eye but turned my head away from her in shame. I wiped my face and turned to her, taking her by her shoulders and bring her face close within my breath. I sucked in her perfume like a drug and breathed her life into me. I drew from her strength.
“ Darling Charlotte. I will fight for us. I will be free of it all…I can’t live a lie any longer. I will get justice and I am going to prove myself you, my family, my so-called friends and colleagues that I am not a child-molesting pervert. I lost my identity in a sham marriage. I took a soft option….she bought me-you’re right. She paid to have on her arm a man she could pass off as something fine and well bred. I gave that illusion for her New York socialite gaggle. I walked and talked, ate drank and slept her Hugh Grant-Cary Grant fantasy-me of all people! A navvy ditch-digger’s son and the product of a shabby inner- city sink school. I took my chance and grabbed it. My only gift is my brass neck. “
I had been the possessor of an entrée into fashionable houses in the best residential quarters of financial magnates in a large way of business and titled people where with my university degree of B.A. (a huge ad in its way) and gentleman bearing to all the more influence the good impression I would infallibly score a distinct success, being blessed with brains which also could be utilised for the purpose and other requisites, if my clothes were properly attended to so as to the better worm my way into their good Charlottes as I, once a youthful tyro in- society's sartorial niceties, hardly understood how a little thing like that could militate against you. It was in fact only a matter of months and I could easily foresee me participating in their musical and artistic conversaziones during the festivities of the Christmas season, for choice, causing a slight flutter in the dovecotes of the fair sex and being made a lot of by ladies out for sensation, cases of which, as he happened to know, were on record - in fact, without giving the show away, I, myself once upon a time, if I cared to, could easily have. Added to which of course would be the pecuniary emolument by no means to be sneezed at, going hand in hand with my tuition fees. Not, I parenthesise, that for the sake of filthy lucre I need necessarily embrace the lyric platform as a walk in life for any lengthy space of time. But a step in the required direction it was beyond yea or nay and both monetarily and mentally it contained no reflection on my dignity in the smallest and it often turned in uncommonly handy to be handed a cheque at a much needed moment when every little helped.’
“ Please, Leo….think it over….this could be our last chance…we still have some youth in us…some get up and go….if we want to make a fresh start.”
“ Babe….listen to me…I have nothing…if I divorce my wife I will get nothing of hers…she’s shrewd….she’s put none of her money in anything in England….she’s got all her assets in New York….if I divorce her now I will lose my house. My life is as fragile as glass right now. I’ve got a tenant living in my house on which I have a mortgage to pay…you know it will be the first casualty of a divorce war. You don’t know her…she will finish me financially…I’ve got to use my head….Stick by me a bit longer…let me fight an action for compensation first…these bastards have lost their day in court…let me have mine revenge…please…”
“But why? I can take care of us both…I have money”
“No! No…you don’t understand! That’s where I am now…a hipped ole….in the pocket of a woman and I hate it! I must fight my own corner…be my own man….I…I’ve been reading…I got some books. I think I have a case…..There are laws….it’s called malicious prosecution and misfeasance. Let me do this, babe. Let me use my brains. Now I’m hounded by those shouts behind my back in the street…..‘ hey paedo! ….a hopped lie!’ I need to stop feeling like a victim and feel like a fighter. It’s Troy Boylan and Goldbolt….Karibdis and van Hiller…..they haunt me…I hate them ….I want some payback”!”
“If you do this, Leo then I don’t know how long I can hold out…I really don’t. Promise me one thing….just one…follow through with what Kearney said….see a lawyer first about this….if they say you have little chance or it’s too expensive…please let it go.”
“Babe…I promise……if I get told it won’t stand up then I’ll let it go. But come on. You know the whole story….it can’t be right….the police won’t want the bad publicity….fixing up a teacher with false evidence? Refusing a confession just to try to fit me up? Come on, babe…..this is big…we both know it….if my employers won’t let me back then that’s the rest of my working life they’ve killed off…that’s got to be big compensation…..hundreds of thousands!”
“Alright, Leo, but please…don’t lose your head on this. Just one other thing. What did Mrs Kearney when she said about some photos not coming out? Were there photos?”
I tried to reassure her that was nothing. Just something I had found on some computer files and kept for a rainy day.

I finally got a response from the Police HQ re: my official complaint. A sergeant was sent to interview me. He came to meet me. Took it all down. Was very interested in to hear about Boylan-apparently it was a name well known to him. I guessed he had done this before.

58
MAY 12th 2004: THE PHONEY WAR. I walked jauntily on this fine, bright day. Onward I strode to meet my accomplice of old. Along that familiar path down toward the quayside I passed by an unfamiliar scene, a group of presumably Italian merchant seamen off some sail boat or trawler on the spree and walking by in the midst of a heated altercation. They were howling out voluble expressions in their vivacious language in a particularly animated way, there being some little differences between the parties.
Puttana Madonna….. che ci dia i quattrini…. Ho ragione? Mezzo più…. Dice lui…, però! Mezzo…. Farabutto! Ma ascolta!…. Cinque più.
Oh, how it soothed me to see others worse off than myself. Often in my life, in my hour of need, I call on Mr Johns: the purveyor of truisms and bringer of wisdom and fleeting inebriate joy. Or was that just my Irish roots calling me back-give me a ripe bottle of Shiraz. I auto-dialled his number and speedy came he on the line. We arranged to meet for a drink one afternoon at the Siduri. It was the final week before closing down. Gil was off to pastures new so I wanted one last hurrah.
I walked into the fine establishment at a touch after three and emptied of its lunchtime crew. I found myself a small corner table and sat perusing the menu. Sitting innocently contemplating the lambasting wit that should soon befall me I noted proprietor Gilgamesh lovingly polishing an imperfect wine glass in what I determined was an unconvincing imitation of a finicky waiter. Another resolute loner?
I pondered how Mr Johns would greet me. Still the loyal friend? He was such an odd mix-kind of car salesman meets errant archdeacon: always chastising his wayward parishioners and always with something dodgy to sell. He was a man who loved the sound of his own voice more than I did. A truer sophist than me. Soon would come redemption in a rendition of his slick revivalist-style monologues.
I caught my alter ego bounding oafishly through the door. Telemachus Johns closed his long daybook and glanced with his drooping eye at a pine naked statuette sentried in a corner. He pulled himself erect, and went to it and, spinning it on his axle, viewed about this Aladdin’s cave of bric- a brac, exotic flotsam and jetsum, onjet d’art shapes and brasses, some real and some purloined fakes. Chewing the limb of his black sunglasses he poked and prodded the silent wooden maiden about the face. He was stopped in his fumblings at the doorway when he was met by a swarthier face. The two seemed to chat about something for a time. There good old TJ genuflected his hatbrim giving shade to his eyes from the sunlit doorway and ambled his portly frame my way and waved his perfunctory greeting.
“ Hello my old telemarketer, how’s it going, you old faker?” But this is how it always begins. In comes the long-suffering, long-winded friend cum work colleague who I had neglected for such a while.
“I’m well- in fact I am as perky as ever. Life’s good, always good- you know me.”
I signalled to Gil for two red wines and with the slightest genuflection it was as good as done.
“ Cool, I had been thinking what you said before about having a chat- since I said I was going to ask your advice about my intended civil action-might take a punt at getting some compo from the police or the education authorities.” I hear a sigh then a momentary pause.
“ Yes, Leo, I kind of knew that things hadn’t been going well for you- you haven’t been back to me for quite some time and I tend to know when you’re not doing so well, old soldier. So you not coming back to the fold on the chalk face then?”
Maybe- but no time soon-maybe ever. We spoke first about this messy police business.
“ Leo, when we were kids back in the day. Like a lot of Irish immigrant kids growing you were that good church boy and you made your mother proud…”
Thus he did begin.
“ But how you have changed! I don’t want to come across as your mother or anything. But Leo, if you get caught with a perpetual rod on for the nubiles then the law of averages will snare you on legal barbwire sooner or later!”
I thought, bolted horse and stable door and counted to ten then spat back a niggardly riposte to the reasonist’s fallacy while he sniffed at the redness that span about his wine glass.
“Now climb down off that high one, TJ! Now you’re a fine one to preach! Mister oh-so-pure of the Phys. Ed. Department don’t try and pull the wool over my eyes….I vividly remember…the other year…summer term…as should half the giggling girlies of Bishop Thomas Duprés…when you personal fouled Luscious Laura-of the gaping gymslip-umpteen times and your throbbing tackle was raised as a matter of concern….a high hard lob on showing in your silk shorts and giving the giggles to the girls- the pair of you entwined ball clutching on the floor!” I stifled my retort as a matter of courtesy while our shadowy waiter had decided to edge gently over to strain an ear and Johns threw back another glass glistening gob full with glee.
For the difference between Mr Johns and Mr Bloom is that the former elicits his classroom and extra-curricular gratifications from prepubescents much like the wretched character from that polylingual Russian’s book. However, while the latter, my less scurrilous self chooses to savour the elegant beauty of a female who actually looks like a woman. My sensibilities are far less contemptible and are rooted in biological triggers and not deviancy. For let it be said while, the legal age of consent in England is sixteen years of age every one of us knows someone, be it themselves, a family member or whatever who has broken that particular arbitrary law. Statutes cannot constrain biology. Those wide-hipped, pendulous breasted, fine-skinned young women would populate my own version of an enchanted island. While Mr Johns would be sat on his own paradise beach clapping and cheering alongside a certain Mr HH ogling and salivating over gawky, lank and rather androgynous waifs as they innocently skip on by. That I would find wholly repulsive. I take a cautious sip of my wine.
But Jesting Johns persists, “ Come, come, still the trick is never get caught beyond a certain point where I invariably drew the line as it simply led to trouble all round to say nothing of your being at the tender mercy of others practically. You behold in me, Leo, I say with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought. Most of all I should comment adversely on the desertion of Boobing Bloomer by all our pub hunting confreres but one, a most glaring piece of ratting on the part of our brother pendants under the circs. And all one to a man and all Judases, you say, who up to then had said nothing whatsoever of any kind.”

“Well, my machus mate I can do without them all now- and this is no longer about your lascivious fumbles and hand fouls. It’s about legal retribution. The police brazenly faked a record in transcription and they were out to crucify me…it still persists! I will get my day in court and grass them all up and let the press expose all their corrupt practices.”
My friend would not have it. He threw back another swig from his glass and again insisted I was going off totally in the wrong direction.
“ Leo, you need to realise is this is England where the police forces are shaped from toughened Teflon. They can do no wrong and so says the law. Wholly bullet proofed against litigation…you haven’t got a prayer. Don’t you watch the news? The Silcotts of this world get nothing from them….you’re pissing in the wind, old chum…take my advice and leave your money in your wife’s pocket. Move on with your life. You’ve had your ‘get out of jail free’ card from your stepdaughter and I’ll bet, as sure as hell you won’t get another.”
“Thanks