Afternoon Rain: Book 1 of the Tortured Path to Paradise

By J.M Kerner

I am born to a junkie, whore of a mother; splashing out onto a beer soaked, puke stained pub carpet. I have nothing, I see everything, so with no option, I rob, I steal, I move in with under-aged prostitutes. I become a villain, a murderer, a money launderer. I am a member of a solid, hard crew. The Man has vision, he needs me, I grow as his wealth grows. Inevitable.

But something goes wrong, it always does. I end up in Spain, in Mexico, attracting friends, just the enemies outweigh the friends, by some margin.

Then it goes really wrong and someone screws with my mind and I begin to wonder if it is all as Inevitable as I thought. Maybe there is another way. I do the only thing I can, I fall in love and try to escape the chains of my employer.

Easier said than done, especially when my lover is out for revenge, against me.

When the world seems to have kicked me so hard I have no way to stand up, she comes along, a pretty Christian missionary, more on a mission than Christian. I change, she changes and our daughter changes everything.

Only you cannot live as I have and expect to disappear into the sunset. They need to be free and there is only one way for that to happen, I have to die.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483580388

Book preview

End

Part 1

SO HERE I AM IN CHIANG RAI

So here I am in Chiang Rai, Northern Thailand. Actually that is not quite right and I am half determined to give you the truth. It’s like saying I’m in Manchester, Northwest England, when actually I am in the well to do town of Knutsford, twenty miles away. But who the hell’s heard of Knutsford, except rich twats who live there or equally wealthy pricks who want to live there. So I am eighty odd kilometers north of Chiang Rai and I can spit at the Myanmar border. I am in the Garden of Eternal Peace, right up past the steps to the top and I can see Laos if I turn to my right. Of course, I can’t do that because the dark eyed, midnight black haired, short-arsed police major is pointing his fucking gun straight into my face and my eyes had better not flinch for a split micro-piss of a second from his. He will either go for the deal, or he could blow my head off, or he could take the money and blow my head off, or he could take the money and take me to the local nick and watch as I defend my arse from a bunch of jaa baa fueled natives, or he could do pretty much what he pleases. Frankly, right now, I don’t give a flying fuck.

How am I in this place? In this situation? Up to my neck in debt and dealing with every scumbag from Southeast Asia to the Scottish Highlands? It is all cause and effect; at least that is what the complete wanker who fucked up my head told me.

It starts of course way back, thousands of years before I was born, but I’m not into checking who or why my great to-the-whatever-fuck-level granddad decided to up sticks from some shit hole village in Denmark and invade an equally dreary and depressing Humber estuary. He just did and before and after him it all mapped itself out, until I slipped out.

Literally on the bar room floor of a crappy pub in a better part of Hulme, at the time it was the diseased heartland of Manchester, I sloshed out, about forty minutes after my mother’s waters had broken. She of course was high as a kite, smoking some good weed and still soaring from her latest hit. She did not equate the pain within as childbirth; it was more to do with the imaginary pummeling her womb was receiving from a giant ape’s manhood. She actually told me that when I was twelve, unbelievable! Even now twenty plus years further on, it is still un-fucking believable, both the birth and her confession. I think she thought it was funny.

Life was slippery for a long time thereafter. I think she really tried. Mum stopped the drugs long enough to get a council paid two bed apartment and as much benefit as I enabled her to scam from the government. So I was about three months old when she began shooting up again and about six months old when the ‘boyfriends’ started coming round. From then until I was seven or eight I was shunted from Mum to Grandma and back again. Neither would admit defeat, neither knew what to do with me.

Grannie believed in a God, you know the one, long white beard, thunder and damnation, and tried to scare the crap out of me on a daily basis. Mum had no God, except when someone was fucking her and she couldn’t scare shit out of a diarrhea ridden, flaming hot curry eating whore.

At eight I did my first job. Understand, Mum did what she needed to do for her habit, Grandma worked two jobs and gave nearly all her disposable income to the Church. I had rack all, I was at school, when I could be bothered and everyone there had more than me. So I took what I wanted. Simple. TV builds other desires, I saw, I took, I enjoyed. Cause and effect.

Jeremy Kyle, the grandson of Jeremy Springer and every generation in between gave the world the understanding that it was acceptable, normal, fun, frivolous, common, to be a complete and utter fucking, moronic lump of shit. In fact it was almost cool to be a fool.

Coke Cola, MaccyD and every other global brand owned the airwaves, cable and fought hard when the WebNet enabled an ocean of humanity to be reached by their global ambassadors of ‘Wants and Needs.’ Consumerism Rules!

You can tell me I had a choice and you can kid yourself all you want that you have made positive or negative decisions all your life and you have to live by them. Sit down quietly and review your existence, what you learned, what dictated each turn. With every single breath you move inexorably down the path of your own inevitability.

I robbed. I robbed fast and well. I robbed with a fury and determination beyond my eight years and slight frame. But you do not have the built in guile, the cunning that has to be learnt. And it is best learnt by mistakes.

The best brands in training shoes were still the Nike and Reebok, though Puma was making a comeback and the easiest mark was Footlocker in the Arndale shopping Centre. Except on this day the woman I followed in real close pretending she was my mother, was actually meeting the store manager. So when the assistant gave me the shoes, everyone was ready. My quick fingers were spotted and I was collared. Big bloke with a belly, but arms like tree trunks, grabbed my T-shirt, I was already running and he wasn’t letting go. I jack-knifed in the air and came down hard on my back. All the air in the world left my body. Nothing getting in, nothing coming out. Winded badly. I thought I was dying.

Honestly, not my first injury. Not a clue about some of the scars on my body, too young to remember, probably a good thing. I told Grannie to fuck off when I was five, words I’d heard from punters, to my Mum. On my Gran it had an instantaneous affect, a swift backswing. She hit me harder than she wanted to, I’m sure, well fairly sure. After the hospital to stitch my lip and set my broken nose she did buy me MacDonald’s and splashed out for the happy meal. Strangely looking back at it, I was happy. She had reacted, she responded, she showed feelings, anger and affection. So often rolled into one.

After this she would teach me to read. Unfortunately, the only book she would let me read was her bible. The Ten Commandments were drummed into me, I can quote them now verbatim, but they meant shit. Come on, to every five year old what does Thou shalt have no other God… or No graven images really mean. I had no idea what God was, the concept was as alien to me as an actual alien. That is the problem, terms of reference. I had none, I have none. I have met no one who does. Define God! The words are always bullshit. In case you don’t know the first four are making sure that He is clearly the one and only boss in your life, Only him, No likenesses, Not in vain and Remember the Sabbath. So four wasted regulations, because they should be kind of taken for granted if you actually believe in him, love him or fear him, or in reality a huge chunk of both. Nothing about slavery, loads of wives, genocide, pedophilia, rape and so on; instead Honour Mum and Dad, well who knew who my dad was? No one, certainly not Mum. Mum was off her tits most days, honour be fucked. Adultery, false witness and not coveting were bollocks; I did not have a clue what the words referred to. Not killing and not stealing. These I understood, but read the Bible from cover to cover, especially the Old part, Grannie liked that best, and it will literally confuse the hell out of you. God’s chosen did a shit load of killing, of enslaving, of taking other women and land. Killing and stealing seemed to be essential.

How do you think Kings and Emperors became Kings and Emperors, by killing more than the other would-be-king and stealing the losers land and women, ah, God’s work is done! Simple!

Mum would smack me enough. Fights at school resulted in cuts and bruises. But it took the ‘Johns’ to cause the real damage. At around six, a few of the twisted fucks wanted me to watch as they ragged my Mum. I say ‘twisted fucks’ now because I understand they are ‘twisted fucks,’ but at six I had no idea this was twisted or fucked. It just was. They just were.

In a world where we move so fast, where so much is visible and everything is available, what is twisted? That which is acceptable moves, it is a pliable thing. Hundreds of year ago it was acceptable that as soon as a girl began her periods she could be wed and have children, married at an even younger age, sex even younger in some tribes and religions. This is now unacceptable. Homosexuality in ancient Greece acceptable, then unacceptable, now you have to be a fag, a poof, a bender to be considered normal!

A couple of ‘sit-ins’ watching Mum being banged to bust and then one wants me instead of Mum. I think two hundred notes were enough. It hurt.

Remember I don’t know this is not the way it is. Because in some lives, it is the way it is. In others it is not. For most it is not. And most look down on those that do and those that have been done to.

It really deep down in my fucking arse hurt. But it broke everything. I mean everything. You are never fixed. Nothing to fix the more esoteric might say. That’s life! But it broke fucking everything.

Now don’t feel sorry for me, wait until you read what I have done! This was my life. It was what it was. It is what it is. And sure as sugar aint shit…It will be what it will be. Looking for Purpose in your existence, stop looking. Only advice after a few decades of living is stop worrying, just try and amuse yourself along the way.

But it broke fucking everything. Including an internal dam of self-control. There must be a genetically inbuilt resistor valve in our brains where we contain some knowledge of what can and cannot be done. We do not need religion to tell us how to behave. Society evolved and in so doing so do these human units we occupy. Somewhere along the line rules were required and they became inbred. Killing your own tribe was bad, shagging your best mate’s wife, also bad, nicking shit from your family, really not good and so on.

Being butt fucked by nasty old men and some nasty young men tends to rip away certain levels of reality. I wanted. I took. I gave not one shit for the outcome.

The first seriously perverted cunt, strangled me as he screwed me. I passed out. A lovely deep purple necklace festooned my throat for weeks. Another liked to punch me, broke a rib. Another broke my arm. Hours after each event, when for an instant the cold hard reality of life invaded my Mum’s senses, she would cry, promise it would never happen again, declare her undying love for me and rush me to the hospital. I was a clumsy child, ran into doors, played football and had fights. What kids don’t? If the doctors in the emergency wards chose to pretend to believe her, that was due to their own myopia, or more likely, as I wasn’t dead, there would be less paperwork than calling in Social Services.

So there I was dying on the floor of footlocker and the security guard was looking anxious. I was scrabbling around on the tiles clutching my throat and everyone thought I was having a seizure. I promise I heard one voice say, little shits acting. No act.

Air. It flooded my being with its wondrous oxygen and I could live again.

The security cameras blanket the United Kingdom with their duvet of warmth and safety. I am amazed at how people don’t care that the government can watch you for nearly half of your waking life. The other half you spend at home. There you are fed unreality shit all night and you fuckin’ love the unreality of the unreality because it makes your reality just about bearable.

So there was plenty coverage of me wandering the shopping mall, running, going in to shops empty handed, coming out, at speed, with goods. They knew and I knew they knew.

Mum did not come. Too busy to answer the phone. Grannie came, shamed and furious. Social Services came. Lots of words, then shouting, screaming from my Gran. She sounded really genuinely upset. Tears welled in her eyes and she tried to hold me, but some other woman had positioned me out of reach. We need to ensure the child’s safety, I remember the words. What child, I thought to myself. I hadn’t hurt any child. It was only when Grannie got up to leave and leave without me that I realised things had turned to shit in a handbag.

I did not cry. It’s pretty pointless, makes things worse. Anyway, you learn it gets you nowhere. I remember her back disappearing out of the little office and the smile from the big haired woman. She held my hand, hers felt soft and warm. There had never been a hand like it in my life before. Mum’s was veined and thin, it felt brittle, it might snap in a strong wind. Gran’s was gnarled and calloused from pushing mops and lifting buckets, a life cleaning up the puke and shit everyone else leaves behind. This velvet flesh enveloped my knuckles and fingers and for an instant I almost felt as if she really wanted to protect me.

She has probably retired now, should be living in Devon or Cornwall, a nice small village with a quaint market every Thursday, a farmers market. Not a frigging farmer in sight, just trendy beef at super trendy prices and imperfect carrots, commanding a steep premium because it says ‘organic.’ Do you prefer your vegetables grown in cow shit sir or perhaps sir prefers the chemically enhanced kill you quick option. Amazing where we have ended up, as a species I mean; stick thin kids dying because there’s no water or no food and we worry about the shape of a fucking carrot.

Anyway, I am worrying about the shape of an obviously well used SW.38, snub nosed. Thai police seem to prefer bigger guns, men’s guns. This is kind of small, but he is a small man. I would have expected a Dirty Harry. The recoil would have sent the little fucker into the bamboo behind him. But the snubby is strong, powerful and from this range there will be very little of my brains left intact. I am bang to right.

The Garden of Eternal Peace leads back down to the Myanmar border and there is literally just a small wooden fence dividing the two countries. The Garden lies within the Royal Thai Arboretum and it is a beautiful spot. Not popular touristy, but touristy enough that one farang wandering around aimlessly would not look out of place. I had walked sedately up to the top, viewed the dramatic countryside for five minutes and then sauntered down to the border. A guard was leaning against the fence, if he had been any bigger the structure would have collapsed. He was holding a Tesco Lotus bag, it was heavy. You could see the strain in the thin plastic hoop at the top. He slipped it over the top and another two followed. Three kilos in two bags and four K in the last. There was no exchange of money. That had already been taken care of. Trust! Fear! Business! A bit of all three.

Exactly like the Foster system in the UK.

I am sure there are well meaning good people who either are unable to have their own or want more than their own uterus can provide. But there are others for whom it is strictly Business. The Social welfare has more busted, broken and battered kids than they can place. So the Fosterers can make some money.

They generally understand that the children they Foster don’t like them and they equally don’t like the children. Mutual dislike is a good basis for Trust. No need to lie and cheat and deceive, it is all expected. That is how you have grown up and lived. You can’t change. No one shows you a different way. Even if they try, you reject it, primarily because after a few years of entrenched study, new rules are weird, unintelligible, unnecessary and hard to put into practice. You mix with the other battered and broken and amongst them there ain’t nothing wrong with you. It’s the safe, pasty, parented youths that are fucked up.

Fear. The Social don’t give a shit as long as they hear nothing and you get in no more trouble. The Fosters don’t give a shit as long as you give them no trouble and you don’t get caught. If they lose you, they lose money, that they fuckin’ fear. You don’t want to have to jump from one bed to another or end up in an orphanage. So mutual Fear binds you all. But you don’t really recognize fear yet. Only pain. Fear is not pain, not physical pain. Fear comes from loss. When you have nothing, what is there to fear?

Remember that throughout this monologue; when you have nothing, what is there to fear?

Death?

Ha, before we are seven years old we have no concept of death. It means shit. Religions scare us with various concepts of Hell. But death itself? Loss of life only has meaning, when life possesses meaning. But living and surviving is a natural response for any animal. But trying to survive and live does not equate to a fear of death.

I was broken remember. But only in Society’s eyes. Not my own. My eyes saw life as I saw life, as I had experienced life. I was not broken, even though I truly was. I did not need fixing. Fosters did not try. Though they could not control either.

I would run back to my Mum’s apartment, filthy and stinking as it was. Or to Granny’s, but if she was not home the doors were locked and the windows barred and it was tougher to access than Fort Knox. For two years I yo-yoed and stole and began to develop associations.

Friends! That is a strong concept and I have two still living. Have had five in my life and all five were known to me before I was sixteen.

Is She a friend, is she actually ‘She?’ She saved me and I cannot express what I feel for her. But.…always a but!

Associates are different, they can float in and out of our lives and we do not care, but whilst within our orbit we enjoy their company and involvement.

On King Street, Manchester, window shopping the Brands and gawking at prices beyond comprehension, I spotted a slightly older kid legging it towards me. I was nine. Technically in Foster home five, but currently residing in a one bedroom not far from my Mum’s. Living with Mum’s mate, another Pro. I need to earn my keep. I need to pay my way. Important lesson, never a borrower nor a lender be,’ Granny would hammer it into me. Pity I ignored it. Shit, if I had only followed that one piece of advice. Anyway, she was sprinting at me like her life depended on it. I can see wide eyes and streaky hair, it was like a huge lion’s mane jumping around her head. The Busy came into view, then another. They were gaining, too many people and she was crashing into them. This slowed her progress but cleared a path for Plod. Busy, Plod, Filth, Pigs, etc. etc.

There will be many more derogatory terms for police officers liberally distributed throughout this tale. Any good ones. Truth? OK, yes a few. Generally, Custody Sarges, they have seen it all, done the streets, made the desk, they know the scams, the rackets, the actions. They have heard and dealt with every level of scum. If you want the time you spend at the station to be half bearable, treat the Custody Officer with respect. Treat him like shit and guess what, you get treated like a pimple on the arse; pushed, squeezed, made to bleed and then covered in crap. Lesson learned!

I did the only thing I could do. I tripped the first rozzer and bumped into the second one, as hard as a nine-year-old piece of piss can. He bounced me two meters into the air and I landed with a proper crack to my head. The crowd saw that. Not my move, just the Filth standing over a busted kid. They drew their conclusions and the abuse started. I tried to stand but the world was woozy. Fucking wildly woozy. I am not sure what was going down, but I sensed lots of people, lots of shouting. Lots of scuffling and then a hand took mine. Not soft velvet. I would have to wait nineteen more years for another soft velvet. It was like mine, grasping, raw and ragged. Before I knew it, we were away from the burgeoning riot and on a bus. Her face came and went out of focus, but it was her.

I am not gay, neither am I straight. Don’t box me in to your limited concepts of sexuality. I, as the song goes, ‘am what I am.’ But this male Thai Major kind of looks like her, same sensual mouth, same dark eyes, the hair’s the wrong colour, but no one’s perfect. The Tesco bags are by his feet and my other small hold-all with the remains of my money is also by my feet. He can have them both. He smiles and it looks just like her. It is a kind of twisted sarcastic smile. It says, you owe me, it says I own you. It says everything you don’t want to hear and yet you like the smile. Remembering her I forget to be scared and I smile. Actually a genuine smile of remembrance. He scowls. What have I done?

She was Kat, with a K. That was important, fuck knows why it still sounded like Cat, but she said it ferociously. And for us, the possession of certain things, even simple things like a name, could have huge importance. So Kat it was. She was eleven, small half developed breast were hidden beneath a woolen jumper. She had managed somehow to snipe a Rolex, a genuine F’ing capital R Rolex. I was mega impressed. More so that she stopped, saw what I had done and came back for me. I was to get twenty-five percent. She had a Man. He pimped her out if she couldn’t get gear. This gear would keep her free for a couple of weeks. It gave me enough to pay my Mum’s mate for a month. But Kat told me not to. Move in with her.

We squatted in a derelict at the back of Whalley Range. They had refurbed and gentrified shit loads of old buildings, but some at the border with Old Trafford were still falling apart and we shared one with four other slags. The slags all belonged to the Man and all were under fourteen. I saw them pretty themselves for work as the sun went down and instead of trying to make themselves look older they did