The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3039 by Angharad Copyright© 2016 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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“So this adopted father figure is a monster in disguise then, is he?” said Simon as we cuddled together that night.

“Yeah, he’s always saying how much he likes us here but he attempted to get rid of me once.”

“Only once?” smirked Simon.

“No really he did.”

“When was that?”

“Few years ago.”

“Why—what happened?”

“It was all done behind my back. I felt quite ill about it.”

“Why didn’t you say anything about it before?”

“It’s all water under the bridge, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but that’s not the point, what happened?”

“I was taken to this place in town and he offered to give me away.”

“What? Give you away?”

“Yeah, some bloke was standing at the altar and...”

“Why you...” he said before he started tickling me and I had to rush off for a wee. The bathroom was a bit cool so I didn’t have the option of sitting there until he’d fallen asleep. I slipped back into bed and he pretended to be asleep, then as I was slowly and carefully slipping down the bed to lie down, he sat up and snarled at me and I shrieked and fell out of bed.

“You pig,” I said rubbing the elbow I’d bashed on the bedroom floor.

“Gave you away, ha!”

“Well he did, it’s not my fault if you can’t see a shaggy dog story coming.”

“Can’t see a shaggy dog story—your whole life appears to be one at times.”

“Okay, so much of my life is effectively repetitive stress injury—it’s what I do.”

“You could always stop.”

“Stop corrupting young minds? It’s what I do, Si.”

“If you don’t like it you do have the freedom of choice, lots of others don’t.”

“I know and I’m grateful for it...”

“How grateful?” he asked with a smirk in his voice.

“I’m going to sleep now, night,” I pecked him on the cheek and turned over away from him.

He rolled over behind me and I felt something sticking into the back of me, which confirmed what he had in mind. I was playing hard to get. “We were discussing gratitude...”

I nearly said, ‘What’s in it for me?’ but I suspect the answer was poking me in my lower back bum area. “Were we?” I tried to sound absent minded.

“Yes we were, d’you realise how many mortgages I have to cancel to enable you that freedom?”

I hoped he was joking because the Simon I know struggles with such things. He may manage a bank, or string of them, but he has a heart of gold.

“No, tell me,” I said declining to turn back to him.

“Let me see, there was the old lady we threw out into the street, and the single mother with five kids, an old man with diabetes and erectile dysfunction...”

“What has that got to do with you repossessing his house?”

“Nothing, but I don’t suffer with it thank goodness.”

“So I noticed.”

“Are all middle aged women so uncooperative?”

“I’ve been cooperative.”

“You’re not now.”

“You practically frightened me to death—I’ve gone off the idea of cooperation.”

“I thought we vowed for better for worse...”

“We did, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health...”

“In bed or over the kitchen table...” he said sniggering.

“I can still remember Trish interrupting us while we kissed in the kitchen and she shouted out that they couldn’t have a biscuit or whatever because we were having sex on the kitchen table.”

There was a pause before the bed began to shake as he laughed. “I don’t remember that.”

“Yeah, she seemed to see sex in everything—until that day she told me about that boy at the home assaulting her.”

“The one that died?”

“Yes, Bowditch.”

“That’s him—fell out of a window doing a runner, wasn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Good riddance.”

“Si, he was a child.”

“I don’t care, I’ll bet he knew what he was doing bullying younger or more vulnerable children, especially girls.”

I didn’t remind him that Trish wasn’t officially a girl in those days, although I think she’d insisted she wear skirts. Five years old and refusing to dress like a boy. I’d never have had the nerve to make such a protest. You have to hand it to her, she has plenty of neck, that young woman.

“He was still a child and probably a victim himself.”

“So what? He knew it was wrong and still did it.”

“Children don’t operate quite like that, Si.” In fact quite a few adults don’t either.

“Tell that to their victims.”

“What if they’re victims too?”

“They should know better than cause someone the same harm they faced.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“Oh so the fact that your dad beat you up, that doesn’t stop you hitting our kids.”

I didn’t know, possibly it did but I had no desire to hurt our children and they trusted me not to, which to my mind was how things should be in a family. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll bet it did.”

“I’m going to sleep now,” I said trying to stop a conversation I wanted no part of. Despite him eventually becoming quiet I couldn’t sleep as my mind churned over the things we’d been discussing.

Was he right? Were abusers just that, not victims themselves—often having been abused themselves. I was too tired to come to any logical conclusion and even then I suspect there’s more than one answer, as is the case for so many of life’s moral questions.

I read some shocking story in the Guardian about Norway. Apart from whaling, we tend to think of Scandinavia as the benchmark for civilised living, though it did produce monsters like Anders Breivik. It appears though some political cock up, the wolf population which they’ve been protecting from hunters is now going to be culled by two thirds, and they’d had eleven thousand applications to hunt them per animal. That was a complete surprise to me. I know I hate the concept of killing things for fun because it strikes me as animalistic, although it might well be that only humans actually enjoy killing. It seems Norway has a huge population of hunters for a tiny country—a population about the same size as Wales—but twice as blood thirsty.

My mind flipped back to the killing spree that Breivik had undertaken, shooting teenagers as they tried to escape him and then claiming he was being maltreated in prison. Someone who showed no mercy to children but expected to receive it from the state, double standards or what? But then that is perhaps typical of bullies and psychopaths, they are completely self absorbed. Part of me felt like locking him up with no food or water on an uninhabited island and throwing away the key but then one of the measures of a civilisation is how they treat their sick, their poor and their prisoners. So despite showing others a complete disregard for their rights, he made a song and dance about protecting his own. He’s still a monster.