Deadly Choice

by Jack Parker

  DEADLY CHOICE

  by

  JACK PARKER

  Copyright © 2019 by Jack Parker

  Cover and internal design © 2019 by Jack Parker

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  "Hello caller, you're on the air. What's your name?"

  Robin hesitated. He hated phones at the best of times. He couldn't believe he'd actually reached the point of calling a radio phone-in show, let alone an agony-aunt one. His mouth became very dry while his palms went in the opposite direction. He found them sweating so much that he started to worry about short-circuiting the phone. Could a phone short-circuit? He wasn't sure. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe if it short circuited then he wouldn't have to finish making the call. Maybe –

  "Caller? Are you there?"

  Damnit. The phone hadn't short-circuited, the radio station was still connected and the DJ was asking him if he was still there. He thought about saying 'no' just to confuse matters. Fight the system! But instead he said quietly,

  "Yes, I'm here."

  "What's your name, caller?" the DJ asked. Robin hesitated. He chewed on his lip as his heart thumped with nerves. He didn't want to give his name. It was bad enough that he was calling at all. What if someone heard? What if someone who knew him was listening? He couldn't take the embarrassment. The more he thought about it, the more he realised this was one of the more stupid ideas he'd ever had.

  "Caller? You can use an assumed name if you like."

  "Evan White," Robin said without hesitation.

  "OK, Evan. Hi there," the DJ seemed a little more at ease now that he had a name to work with, false or otherwise, "what are you calling about tonight?"

  Robin swallowed.

  "I've uh," he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "I've got this problem."

  "Most people have," the DJ told him, "that's why we have this hour."

  Robin gave a nervous laugh.

  "Right," he said.

  "So what's your problem, Evan?"

  Robin closed his eyes and drew in his breath. You see, the thing about Robin was that he didn't have normal problems. He never had done. He'd always lived the kind of existence where he'd stumbled from one bizarre crisis to another. Rarely did he live through a nice, normal, average day. There was always something ridiculous going on. He had never understood why. Some people lived a nice, calm, peaceful existence where they had their nice, normal problems and their run-of-the-mill crises. Things you could talk to a friend or neighbour about without wanting to hide under your bedclothes in shame. Things that you didn't feel like the world would point and laugh at you for.

  Robin led the kind of life where instead of, say, getting hit by a car he'd find himself knocked over by a clown on a unicycle, randomly rolling down the street. Instead of someone turning up at his door asking if he'd seen their lost cat, someone would turn up holding a cat and trying to persuade Robin that it was his, despite him never owning one. He was the kind of person who would walk down the wrong staircase at the wrong time and somehow find himself dancing, with pompoms, to Hey Mickey in front of 500 people. These were the kinds of things that happened to Robin.

  Even so, he was used to that. He was used to leading that kind of life, where bizarre occurrences seemed to plague him. He'd been that person all his life, but I the last year or so everything had gone haywire.

  A year that had started with his boyfriend Simon having a near-fatal accident with a file server and going into a coma, continued with the fact that he'd spent his coma time in some other world and been followed home by a madman and then just about reaching its peak when both Robin and Simon suffered a car accident that led to them skipping off to the other world together. Only one of them came back though.

  Robin missed Simon more than he could ever put into words. He couldn't express it in any way. It was harder for him to deal with losing Simon for the fact that he knew Simon was gone but still there. He was living on in the other world, but out of his reach. A series of bizarre and dangerous experiences had followed in the last few months which had, each time, led Robin closer to crossing over again and yet here he was, still in the land of the living. It frustrated him – so close and yet so far.

  And yet, none of this was even the problem.

  He sighed as he tried to work out how to say it. How did he put it into terms that someone outside of the situation was going to understand? How could he find a way to explain it that wasn't going to get him a thousand insults or lots of responses from people who completely misunderstood the issue and tried to offer him the most ridiculous advice possible? He could already imagine some of the responses he would get. He could already hear them ringing through his ears.

  And that was why he hadn't spoken to anyone about his problem. He couldn't. It was bad enough calling a stranger on a radio show and pretending to be Evan 'Look at My Gorgeous Beard' White. He didn't have many friends, not close ones anyway, and the last thing he wanted was to get angry with the ones he had when they misunderstood the issue.

  Which they were bound to.

  "Caller? Are you still there?"

  Robin bit his lip again.

  "Yes, I'm still here," he said feebly.

  "You said you had a problem," the DJ prompted.

  Robin looked down. He had a problem alright. It was the kind of problem that he never thought he would experience in his life and not exactly the kind of problem many people ever did. He closed his eyes and slowly shook his head.

  "Doesn't matter," he said quietly and replaced the receiver.

  He walked across the kitchen and switched the radio back on. He'd been asked to switch it off to avoid feedback when he called up. He wished he'd switched the phone off instead of the radio.

  "…and that was Evan, calling about nothing," the DJ was saying, "so if any more of you have problems about nothing that you don't want to talk to us about… don't call in. If, however, you have a problem that you do want to share then call us now…"

  Robin put his head in his hands and gave a very deep sigh. Normality. That was all he wanted in his life. But once again that tiny little hope evaded him. His life was still made of the same nonsense that it always had been, and becoming more ridiculous by the day.

  Chapter One

  He knew when it was. In fact, he could pinpoint the exact moment it happened. It wasn't any of the moments that he would have expected it to be
. It was something so removed, so innocuous that he couldn't understand it. It was as he lay staring at the walls, still clinging to their scent of paint, that he realised.

  It wasn't the first sleepless night he'd spent staring at the walls. At first he'd told himself it was from being in a strange place. Well, strange-ish. It had been a long time since he'd slept in Simon's old flat. Then he told himself it was the pain from his stitches and cuts. Sometimes he blamed too much coffee or watching too many episodes of The X Files before bed. It was none of those things. Deep down, he knew it.

  He closed his eyes, but didn't try to sleep. He knew that was futile. He had too much on his mind to drift away. Now he'd realised when it was, the moment it happened, his mind went over and over the day trying to make sense of it.

  It was the day she helped him paint.

  He could still see her standing by the wall, rolling the paint across the expanse and reliving the tale. That was it, he realised. It was the moment she relayed the story of her lost love that he started to see her differently. Until then, there was something that was missing from Kim. He'd never really been able to explain it, but there was a vagueness of emotion, as though she had blocked off so much of herself that she didn't allow herself to feel very much any more. He supposed that, with all she had been through, that as natural. But although she had always said she loved her wife and was happy with her there was something that didn't seem right. It didn't seem to be that same depth of feeling that he'd shared with Simon, or the same depth of feeling he'd seen in other couples. It wasn't until Kim had shared the story of herself and Shaz that he'd seen why.

  "She was your one true love," he'd said quietly, "wasn't she?"

  It was with a broken voice that Kim had whispered, "Yes," as she'd nodded slowly.

  How many years had Kim had to keep that a secret, he wondered. It was a terrible thing to have to do. But then again, who could she tell? Or how?

  "I'd never felt that way about anyone before I met Shaz," Kim had told him, "and I've never felt that way since."

  That was when Robin realised why Kim's relationship had never actually seemed perfect to him as an outsider. Kim clearly loved Linda but she wasn't 'the one'. The One was 'Shaz', a girl that Robin had never met but who brought a sparkle to Kim's eyes. Robin had never heard her speak with such passion about anything before. From the moment she started to talk about her to the moment she finished Robin saw a different side to Kim, one she'd done a good job of keeping hidden. As her tragic story unfolded Robin found himself painting less and listening more. By the time she finished speaking he realised he had stopped painting completely and was sat on the floor, his hands cupped around his chin, listening to her intently as though her words had cast a spell over him.

  He was surprised when he felt almost tearful by the end of her tale, but even more surprised when she started to cry. He had truly never seen Kim crying. It took a lot to move her to tears. The depth of her feelings for Shaz, despite the short time they'd apparently had together, was clear to see. He almost didn't know what to do when he saw a tear rolling down her cheek. Kim was one of the toughest people he'd ever met. Was he supposed to comfort her or would she shrug him away crossly and tell him not to be so stupid?

  "Kim," he'd said quietly. When she didn't respond and made no attempt to assure him she was fine he moved across the room and slid an arm around her shoulders as she sank to the floor. How hard had she been working at blocking Shaz out of her mind for all those years? He supposed it was like breaking a window on an aircraft – suddenly everything was getting sucked out into the sky. The seal around Kim's memories had been broken when she'd heard a certain song, the song she forever linked with Shaz, and now the memories were flooding out uncontrollably.

  He rolled over and stared at the door as he thought about the hours that followed Kim's tears. Unsure how to calm a crying Kim, he ventured to the off licence down the street and brought back a bottle of brandy. He knew that scotch was Kim's spirit of choice but brandy was the one alcoholic drink that he was reasonably keen on the taste of and he wasn't sure Kim shouldn't be drinking alone.

  Was it on the walk to the off licence that he'd started to notice things happening? The little thoughts going through his mind? Or was it when he arrived back? He was a little bit blurry with that part of the afternoon. He supposed he was busy trying to make Kim feel better and his attention was focused on that. Everything else went by the way.

  "Shit," Robin turned onto his other side and pulled the pillow over his head as though to block out the thoughts that were plaguing him. Enough was enough – surely sleep was around the corner? He tried to close his eyes again but his mind was wide awake. It was like being twelve again, but heading into reverse. Eventually he threw the pillow indiscriminately across the room, climbed out of bed and padded across the bedroom floor.

  He peered out of the window. It was still strange to look outside and find a different view to the one he was so used to seeing. It felt very weird indeed. There were a few lights on. More insomniacs, Robin thought. I wonder what their problems are. Probably something a bit more normal than this one.

  He stared at the photograph of Simon on the wall. That doesn't make any of this easier, you know. Maybe it was time to leave the bedroom, he decided. Wasn't that good advice for insomniacs? To get out the bedroom for a while so that it didn't become associated with stress? Or was that something to do with noxious gases? He wasn't sure. Either way he was going crazy staring at the walls and was already fed up of the warm peach fuzz they'd painted the room just a few days earlier.

  He walked slowly to the lounge. That was one room he hadn't quite managed to organise very well yet. Merging his own DVD collection with Simon's was a complicated process since they had a lot of duplicates and there were discs stacked floor to ceiling. To one side of the room the flipchart had been moved against the wall. Somehow Robin couldn't quite bring himself it put it out of sight yet. It still bore the brainstorm from Alex's stay. One side of the board was based around 1995, the other on 2011 but both had a word connecting them – Kim.

  "Bugger, can't escape you anywhere," Robin muttered.

  He sank into the sofa and switched on the TV but he might as well have been watching anything. He didn't take in a moment of it, didn't take in a word. He flicked through channels but couldn't have described anything he'd seen. His head felt heavy, both with lack of sleep and with his brain working overtime at trying to find a way out of the strange situation he'd found himself in. It didn't make sense to him, not for a moment. He thought about finding another pillow and burying his head again.

  It's not supposed to go this way around.

  He'd always been comfortable with who he was. He might have lacked confidence in many things – making friends, standing up for himself, lion taming – but he knew who he was and he had never had a problem with that. So now things were turning on their head he had gone into an absolute tailspin.

  "Maybe it's because I'm lonely?" he thought to himself, "maybe it's the connection with Simon?"

  He sighed and shook his head. He was trying to fathom the unfathomable. He was trying to find a nice neat equation for something that just wasn't supposed to 'go', like Mud divided by Cheese = Suitcases. See, it was gibberish. Stuff and nonsense. It did not compute. There wasn't even an episode of Red Dwarf or The X Files that he could mentally compare it to, and that really meant the situation was serious.

  "How?" he demanded of himself, "how the hell did this happen?"

  He turned over on the couch and forced his eyes to close and stay closed. Going over and over it wasn't doing him any good, as much as he knew that it was impossible to stop his brain from doing so. He forced himself to lay there until finally, after hours of stress and anxiety, he managed to fall asleep. But when he awoke in the morning he felt worse than ever, with a stiff neck and a headache to add to his problems. More than that, the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the flipchart across the room with Kim's name embla
zoned upon it.

  "Fuck," he swore.

  In the cold light of day it made even less sense to him than it did in the crazy, mixed up layers of the middle of the night. He shook his head and cursed himself for allowing his head to become scrambled that way.

  "You're not even the right sex, Kim," he cried out loud to the name on the board, "so why the hell won't you get out of my head?"

  But the flipchart had no answers for him. It had no replies. All he could do was to hide under a pillow once again and wish it would all go away.

  Chapter Two

  It wasn't the same.

  Kim's stomach had been in knots ever since she realised that. She went through the motions, every day the same as the last, but there was a dark cloud hanging over every last second. Her life had been so straightforward and normal until the day Robin had shown up in the studio asking if there was anyone who would tattoo his police dogs.

  That was the moment things started to go downhill. She'd spent 8 years running away from the past, hiding from that whole other world, denying that it was real and suddenly it was all churned up again, like mud on the riverbed sullying the waters. From there it was a downwards spiral. Suddenly that world became all too real and she seemed to lose the ability to relate to those who hadn't been through it.

  She stared on absently as Linda fussed around, getting the boys ready for school. Had something always been missing between them? Kim wasn't sure. She felt as though she'd lost the ability to function as a normal human being when she woke from her coma and had spent the rest of her life making do. Faking everything. Pretending. At the time even she hadn't realised what was happening but now she looked back she could see that she'd been living like a shadow of the person she used to be. She'd been half dead inside.

  "Call me when you get back from the hospital."

  Linda's voice brought Kim away from her thoughts. Her mind had been far away and she struggled to get it back to the moment. She nodded, even though he wasn't sure what she was nodding about, and gave a thin smile. All her smiles were thin smiles now. Didn't they used to be fuller? Or had they always been that way?