Angel Gabriel's Betrayal and other strange tales

By Vaughan Tucker

The seven beautifully-crafted stories in this book introduce a world in which nothing is as it really seems on the surface, and where the results of hopes and dreams have little to do with planning and more to do with luck, fate and serendipity.
There's the immensely talented woman who builds her own man but does it only too well, the outwardly successful couple caught in a dysfunctional relationship neither seem able to break, and the mother from Hell who almost cripples her child with shame and embarrassment. There's the wife living with a man prone to, mainly, harmless obsessions, and another who escapes from a miserable marriage purely by accident. Along the way is a woman coping with pregnancy and what might be a ghost, and the sardonic tale of the only man in a community of women.
These startling and thought-provoking tales repay being read slowly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vaughan Tucker
• Release date: Apr 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476117188

Vaughan Tucker

Vaughan Tucker hails originally from New Zealand but has lived in England since 1985. He first lived in London until the traffic, dirt, noise and aggro drove him away and he now lives in an historic market town with a tranquil river where neighbours know each other and people say hello as they pass in the street. He caught the newspaper bug early and has worked in them all his life, first as a reporter and then as a sub-editor. He loved it. It gave him the opportunity to travel at his employers' expense and meet a very broad range of people. For more than six years Vaughan worked in the Press Gallery in Parliament in New Zealand. This caused the loathing he feels for politicians and planted the seed of what became Grubby the Eighth Dwarf. The book is darkly comic and, of course, pure fiction. However the underlying attitude of the politicians in the book is fairly true to type. They would all do almost anything to advance their careers and damn the consequences. Vaughan is still writing, messing about in boats and playing with bows and arrows. His ambition is to give up smoking. Apart from that Claudia Schiffer business . . .

Book preview

ANGEL GABRIEL'S BETRAYAL

and other strange tales.

by Vaughan Tucker

Published by Vaughan Tucker

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Vaughan Tucker

Discover other titles by Vaughan Tucker at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Angel Gabriel's Betrayal

Chapter 2: Blue and Cerise

Chapter 3: Life with Mother

Chapter 4: Contention Bridges

Chapter 5: Escape Hatch

Chapter 6: Waiting for the Little Girl

Chapter 7: The Concrete Strudel

ANGEL GABRIEL'S BETRAYAL

SHE had wanted the device to look like a piece of jade and it did. The technicians had been very good. She rubbed it reflectively. She could caress it like this and feel calmed. Worry beads were not really smart enough, sophisticated enough, for someone in her position.

But none of her colleagues or patients would look askance at her reflectively rubbing a beautiful, dark green piece of jade. And she needed to do that sometimes when she became tense and angry and upset. Like now. Especially now. She veered between anger and self-pity. But all the time she was careful not to press the jade too hard, not to make it work, not just yet anyway.

There was a small and bitter consolation in the back of her mind, waiting to surface through the misery. She had been too good at her job.

Caroline Haden, who never made mistakes, who never got anything wrong. Her triumph had been too wonderful. So wonderful, so beautiful that she couldn't tell anybody about it, not now. Gabriel, her angel, gone. Irrevocable. Irreplaceable. She stroked the jade. She thought about her career triumphs. Superb, every one of them. But Gabriel had been the pinnacle. If only she had been less of a perfectionist. If only.

She couldn't tell anyone now, and she shouldn't have told anyone in the first place. But she had told Tara, her best friend. Her only friend. Caroline's standards were high and so many people did not measure up. But then no-one did measure up, in the end, Caroline thought.

Tara had been shocked at first. Caroline had been amused at how shocked Tara was. Caroline, over time, had become used to the unorthodox nature of the situation. She had invited Tara to dinner, which Gabriel had cooked. Caroline had taught him to cook. And Tara had been stunned by his beauty. Caroline could see that in his eyes, her demeanour. Caroline enjoyed that, flattered. Gabriel, as far as she could tell, did not notice. Perhaps surprising, she thought. But then Tara was only the second woman he had ever met.

Tara's eyes, Tara's big brown eyes, kept flicking furtively to Gabriel over the meal as Caroline kept up the conversation. The woman could not take her eyes off him. Beautiful Tara. Almost as beautiful as Caroline herself. But they were so different. Tara was blonde and willowy and insipid whereas Caroline's hair was so black it was blue-tinted and her eyes were blue. Cornflower blue, she liked to think. Ice-blue, one lover had said.

How did you meet him? Tara whispered when Gabriel was out of the room.

I made him, said Caroline smoothly.

And she revelled in the telling of it. She had not realised how much she had wanted to tell the story of her resurrection of this Adonis. Although she had made him an Adonis.

When they brought him into the hospital he had been a bloody, broken, shattered wreck of a man. He was one of the 173 from the train crash. No-one knew who he was or where he was from. Nameless, without family or friends apparently. All the others had been claimed, dead or alive. But not this one, despite appeals in the Press. They were going to turn off the life-support systems the next day.

Caroline made the decision overnight. That was unusual for her. Caroline did not make quick decisions. She though about things long and hard. She . . . mused. But not this time. No-one at the hospital had batted an eyelid. The documents were correct, the bills had been paid. He could go. The injured man was taken by ambulance to the private clinic where Caroline was chief surgeon, where she was the star. No better place to be for major surgery. No-one would think of questioning her.

And she worked as