Chapter One

Laura does not deserve to die, TBH. If we were to rank individuals who should be pushed under a bus, with wild-eyed despots at the top of the list, then Laura could be found way down – well behind cold callers and those who never replace biscuits in the staff room (you know who you are).

On the one hand, she has some tremendous qualities. She’s an excellent mother to her son (more on him later) and the Health Service Executive would say that she carries out her nursing duties diligently and effectively.

She once represented the county in the Rose of Tralee pageant. One time I persuaded her to show me the videotape of the final where – as part of the hidden talent spot – she bravely tackled an antique hurdy-gurdy. She asked me what I thought, and I told her that she looked good in a sash.

I again spent the night in the spare room.

he did look good in a sash. I remember thinking how gorgeous she was when I saw her for the first time. She was pretty and blonde and drunk. She was out on a pub crawl with her emergency room colleagues while I’d just come in after a fruitless day’s fishing and had asked the barman for tea. We’d met when we shared a table at the Lough Ree Inn. She’d heard my English accent and in her drunken state, kept asking me if I knew the queen.

I later told her, that I had no luck on the lake that day, but I was lucky to land her.

She told me never, ever repeat that.

She refused my invitation to take her out fishing. She laughed and said if she wanted to be cold and wet, she’d buy a convertible. She admitted that she’d lived her whole life in the Midlands and had never been out on the lakes. She said she’d seen Titanic and look how that turned out. She did however say that she liked good food. 

Also dessert. 

I said I liked good food as well.

Her eyebrows furrowed.

She laughed for some reason and then picked out a restaurant flier from the countertop and slowly fanned herself with it.

I asked her out for dinner.

My best friend Suzanne told me I was punching above my weight when I married Laura. More on Suzanne later (she gets her own chapter).

We married quickly. I suspect that one reason was that Laura thought a brother or sister would be good for Liam.

I didn’t want to allow her time to change her mind.

I also thought being a dad would be glorious, and like a dog reacting to a whistle, I’d drop Liam off at the childminder before running in through the front door, summoned by a phone call after a temperature check. I’d risk life and limb as I’d stumble up the stairs, stripping as I went.

However, Liam remained an only child.

And despite me bringing him to every adventure centre and petting zoo in the Midlands, he still only ever referred to me by my first name.

The unexpected gap in our world allowed me time to discover how little I knew my wife. She pleasantly surprised me about how adept she was at changing a plug, but I’d fret at the way she’d leave a room like a tornado had passed through it. I’d follow behind, picking clothes off floors and slipping them onto hangers.

Could she never learn to put away the half-empty milk carton?

However, we did have much in common.

We both liked films but it’s maddening how she’d tell me to play a New Release on Netflix but then promptly nip out for a wee. Wouldn’t anyone get frosty after spending five minutes watching a blockbuster on pause, while exhausting the crisps?

That said, Laura is also genuinely nice.

I never knew her father as he had passed away before I met her, but I was on the scene to observe how she never failed to spend an evening with her mother in the care home, even though the poor woman hadn’t a clue who Laura was.

However, being nice doesn’t pay the bills.

The reality is that the treadmill we find ourselves on is not living.

We are held hostage by a mortgage that sucks up my teaching salary while her nursing income does little more than keep the lights on. Any spare cent we earn is swallowed up by her now adult son who still lives with us— despite the helpful publications I’d leave casually around the house like a U.S. Green Card application or The Lonely Planet guide to Australia. 

Liam (I said I’d get to him, didn’t I?) attends the local technological university and is in his fourth year. Unfortunately, three of those years comprised a first-year repeat and a sabbatical where he needed to find himself.

More often than not, he finds himself in his room banging either his drums or the local talent with equal gusto.

Liam – via the Bank of Mum – manages to spend an inordinate amount of time on the road pursuing “gigs”. Once, my phone tracker revealed that he was in Morocco.

I thought he’d just gone to the shops.

He is the product of Laura’s first marriage. His dad walked out on them when Liam was barely weaned (not that he’s showing much sign of that yet, regardless) and was last seen boarding a Ryanair flight to Stansted.

It almost goes without saying that Laura and I don’t go out much, for financial reasons. When the country went into lockdown due to a viral pandemic, Laura remarked that it didn’t make a blind bit of difference to us. We were already on lockdown. Just not a governmental mandated one.

She was in the kitchen leafing through the mortgage statements at the time, a mortgage we took out late in life and whose final payment is due at retirement – or at the death of one of the parties referenced in the life assurance policy.

She mused, ‘I’m worth more dead than alive,’ and we laughed.

It appeared that our policies would cover the mortgage if one of us did not make it to sixty-five. So that allowed us twenty years of avoiding war zones, lightning strikes and enormous round bales of hay (It happened in Westport. Very sad, an American tourist died while zooming in on the statue of Saint Patrick with his camera phone. He was oblivious to the runaway bale that fell off a trailer before accelerating downhill and over him. On the plus side, the video he was making went viral).

Laura and I sipped tea as she poured over the statements at the kitchen table. I watched her file them one by one into a shoebox and I couldn’t help but recall how her health service post comes with a healthy payout should she check out early.

It would be of some comfort for those of us who are left behind.

I could not help thinking as she sighed and slid the shoebox under the kitchen dresser. Must I wait until I’m presented with a gold watch before I have a proper holiday?

What’s the point in retiring if I’m going to be too old and infirm to enjoy it?

An unbidden thought crossed my mind. Do we struggle together, onward to a distant finish line, or does one of us take a shortcut?

I wondered if I should suggest that she should get out more, however, she’s already been to Westport.

It seemed likely that she’d make it to retirement. Her downtime hobbies revolved around the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism— a medieval re-enactment group. There is nothing inherently dangerous in mastering the brush and pen strokes of calligraphy or weaving a rope from hemp, although her attempts in recreating cooking from the Middle Ages did have me spend three days within sprinting distance of a toilet. Oftentimes, it was just an excuse to sample types of mead.

On the positive side – I watched as she dunked a digestive into her mug – she struggled with a few extra kilos but nothing that could place her in imminent danger, as I discovered, of cardiac arrest. I burst a blown-up paper bag behind her once.

My mistake was to do it while she was cooking. I was scraping lentils off the ceiling for a week.

The thought of ending my wife remained just a vague notion, a little like the fleeting daydream we all experience after we hear of a lotto winner grasping an oversized cheque. We imagine it is ourselves on the cusp of receiving begging letters, instead of generating them.

Murder.

Surely it flits briefly through all our minds at some point? Who does not nurse dark fantasies of pushing a dictatorial boss out a window or taking a cricket bat to a childhood bully?

Come on. It’s not just me.

Some couch potato assassins may not follow through for moral reasons or because murder is still considered a crime in most jurisdictions. Then again, how likely are they to carry out murder most foul if their only experience of crime is via a DVD box set?

I suspect, however, that the main reason most people don’t cross to the dark side is simply that they fear they may be caught. Killing might not be easy but getting away with it is surely the harder part.

This notion, therefore, entertained me only briefly before being parked in that part of the mind reserved for passing fantasies, like the one where I wake up with Brenda (from four doors down) and, yes, of course, she also gets her own chapter. 

However, Murder Most Foul – the idea, not the 1964 film staring Margaret Rutherford – dusted itself off and burst through the barrier of its parking garage one particular morning when my mobile phone rang.

.

I’ll not rejoice when it is done (I’m not a monster) but I anticipate learning to live with being a widower. My neighbours will gift buns. I’ll find tinfoil wrapped meals left in the porch. There will be talk of my stiff upper lip. I expect that I can overcome feeling guilty— I just don’t want a jury declaring it.

I plan to get away with it, BTW.

I’m therefore writing these notes for an audience of one.

Me.

Notes that will both document the evolution of this perfect crime and remind me why I set out on this homicidal pathway in case my resolve weakens. As someone from my home county once wrote:

“Conscience makes cowards of us all.”

Shakespeare himself would surely sympathise as these notes sink with the memory card below the surface of the lake (remember when I mentioned about getting away with it?). My tragedy is that this story will never grace the pages of The Times Literary Supplement. It’s fated to remain forever lost in time, like Homer’s Margites or Roy Batty’s memories of the Tannhäuser gate, at the end of Blade Runner.

No one can ever know how I reduced the world’s population (7.8 billion) by just one.