My Truth

This is the first time I have ever told my story. But it is a story many of you will have heard a thousand times, a story you will have seen over and over again. It is a tale that you will have discussed over coffee or lunch with your colleagues and loved ones. It is a tale from which you have judged me, trialled me and sentenced me.

My story had defined me and made me who I am, a monster. It warped me, destroyed me and affected those around me.

I have spent a long time pondering where to begin my story, how much do you need to know? What should I keep secret and take to my grave? In the end I have decided to tell you everything. Without every little detail of who and what I used to be I cannot begin to hope you will understand everything I have done. And so with a very tentative lick of my lips and very shaky hands I can begin to tell you the tale about the murder of my wife.

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You will have heard on the news that I murdered my wife. That I butchered her with knives and hooks and any other manner of tool brought to the imagination of the shows producer. According to the sun I think I may have gouged out her eyes and hung them around my neck.

The truth is I loved that woman with all of my heart. I loved her from the first moment I met her and to this day I cannot spend more than ten minutes without crying about her fate. I see her smile every time I close my eyes, I can still smell her perfume and hear her laugh, that’s what happens when you find your soul mate. The rest of your life just falls softly into place. I would never have been able to even think about hurting her, I couldn’t have ended her life under any circumstance. But I was tried and I was found guilty for that crime. For the crime I could never commit. And now I am awaiting the last years of my life in a dark cramped cell with bars for windows and doors and a toilet next to my head when I sleep at night.

I spend the majority of my day crying and picturing that woman who I should be spending these last few years of my life with. I have missed so much of what I had planned. I have never been able to see my children grow up, they have never visited me in prison, they like the rest of the world believe their dad is a murderer, a cold blooded murderer. But I am not. I am the victim, I was framed. And not by some criminal who wanted to rob us but by the institute meant to protect us from harm and keep us happy and safe. I was framed by the people me and you voted into power. The government killed my wife and destroyed my life. Only because I knew their dirtiest little secrets, the horrors and pain they have caused and that I could have and should have stopped. I failed and for that my wife paid the price, a price that was mine to pay. Their greatest punishment was to take her life and not mine.

Everyone has a big regret that they think about everyday and dread and fear within their dreams at night. Mine is that I haven’t had the guts to avenge her death by writing the truth and giving you the power to stop it happening again. But I am changing that right now. I know in reality you wont ever get this. They cant let something like this be published cant let you know the truth. I am sorry for that, I had my chance and I missed it. But maybe if I get it written down I can sleep more peacefully at night. And who knows I may be able to hope that when I die whoever finds my body will find this story and get it out into the public domain. But by then I don’t think I will care at all I know I will be holding my beautiful angel again and the horrors of this life will be long forgotten.

And I suppose it is time to stop rambling and finally begin my story.

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My tale begins around 7 years ago. At this time I was working at a local paper as a run of the mill journalist, covering everything from local fetes to a couple of court cases. But this was a small town and the most dramatic thing I covered while at court was something about a pedal bike being stolen. It was a sad job, a boring job but at least I was working. While millions more were unemployed and living in poverty. I was earning decent money, owned a car, had my own home and a great family to come home too.

Every night when I got to come home to my beautiful loving wife and my two fantastic children I couldn’t care less that my job was dull and boring. It was a job nothing more, I didn’t have the drive or ambition to get onto a national paper, I couldn’t have done with the extra work, I was content at the local level and that had always been more than enough for me.

At this time my daughter, Monic had just turned 10 and was a brilliant girl. She was funny and pretty and very very talented. She had pestered me and her mother for months to learn the violin and so on her 9th birthday I gave in and bought her the best violin I could find. She was fantastic, immediately picking it up and loving it. She had grown old of most things she ‘loved’ within weeks. As I’m sure most other parents know children are fickle and numerous ‘I want this’ toys end up forgotten under the bed within days never to be seen or heard from again. My Monic must have had dozens of things hidden around her room, expensive and pointless things, that had once been the only thing she ever wanted only to be forgotten when the next ‘fad’ came along. But the violin, that was different. She loved that thing, she took it everywhere with her and she was excellent. I loved nothing more than to come home and hear her playing her instrument, her tongue sticking out as she concentrated and her eyes screwed up tight as she listened to the beautiful music she created. I hear my daughter is now studying music at college before taking it on for University. She always made me so proud and it kills me that she has had to spend the last seven years without her parents. And how she must feel to think her father ruined it all I dread to think. It breaks my heart to not be with my beautiful Monic, to not have been able to hold her after her mother’s death. Who did my children have? Was someone there to hold them and wipe away their tears? Did she cry aloud for her mother and father? I hope she is happy now. I hope she lives her life to the full. I hope she has friends, a boyfriend even, and I hope that one day she will forgive me for the lies arranged against me and I hope she will come and visit her father once before he dies. But I don’t think I have much time left to wait and I think I will die with my daughter being the 10 year old little girl with her tongue sticking out and fingers moving in a blur over the instrument I bought after months of pestering.

While my daughter was a creative soul my son was the opposite. At the beginning of my story my son was twelve and was a sports nut. I mean he liked everything, he ran as often as he could, played on the football team, the rugby team and he was on the swimming team. I don’t know where he got it from I used to swim and played the odd bit of football but I could never really be bothered with any of it never had the energy nor the desire to run around a wet rainy field after a muddy ball. But my son loved it and I loved how happy it made him. And ye it did make me that little bit fitter too. I made sure that every Saturday I was able to take him to play something. One week we would go and kick a football around the field for a couple of hours and another I would take him to a basketball court and shoot some hoops, this I enjoyed hugely and we could stay there for most of the day until my wife called me to say dinner would soon be ready. I love my son he was a great laugh, he has such a sharp wit and every second with him was a joy. He was smart but never really bothered with school and I could never bring myself to push it on him. I coasted through education, never really could come to grips with its purpose. Even University passed by without anything too strenuous on my part. As long as he was happy and got decent grades that was good enough for me. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered so much about my son liking me and that I should have been stricter on him. But we were happy and we were close, it was the sort of relationship I had with my father and he was a great man so why shouldn’t I go easier on my soon just so he wouldn’t hate me. Now I hear my son has moved away from his fascination with sport. He is off to Oxford University in a few months to begin studying Law. I am of course very proud of my son. He has achieved so much more than I could ever have imagined. But whenever I think of this (and even as I type this story) I cry at what I have missed. I do no my son anymore. He is not that sports hungry nutter I used to laugh with as we kicked a ball around on a Saturday morning. I don’t know when he swapped the sports for school work. And where did the interest in Law come from? I will probably never know the answers to these questions and if I’m honest I prefer it that way. In my mind my son is still a 12 year old muddy boy grinning from ear to ear as his old man jogs of panting to grab the ball after he’s scored past him for the third time in a row. This is an image I never want to be rid of, an image I will have with me on my last day on this planet.

I suppose I have kept the worst and hardest part of this story aside for too long. I do hope you are still reading and very soon I will be back to the proper story and be able to tell you why I am in my current predicament. However, before I get back into that I guess it is time to introduce you to the person I miss the most. My Angel, my beautiful, gorgeous soul mate.

We met when we were just 18 years of age while we were both in our first year of university. I was studying Journalism and was hating pretty much every second of it. She was studying to be a researcher at a biological facility. She loved it, she hated the long hours and found some of the material boring as hell but still she enjoyed it and I loved to spend hours just listening to her talking about the disgusting effects of smoking on the lungs. (For any of you below the ages of 15 smoking was a disgusting habit your parents may have partaken in before 2020 which involved inhaling toxic gases into your lungs where it set up home and slowly killed you. I don’t know why such a thing was ever invented but in mine and your parents time it was a hugely common activity and during the 2010’s when me and my gorgeous were at university it was only just beginning to be fazed from society.

Again I apologise for my pointless digression. It is I suppose a side effect from spending so much time in solitude here in prison. I have no one to talk to. No one to even see. I spend much of my day relieving periods of my life, most often from my time at University through to the day my life fell down around my ears in a billion pieces of pain and sorrow. I have seen the moment I met my beautiful wife so many times in my head it takes up most of my mind. If I close my eyes right now I can see her smile at the first moment I met her.

We first saw each other in pub just down the road form university at lunch time. I was sat with my friends and she was with hers. We were sat at opposite ends of the pub but as with most pubs that still meant we were only about 10 feet away. I looked up from my fresh, piping hot pizza and saw her staring at me. Her dark brown eyes were sparkling in the dim light of the pub and as she caught my eye dimples appeared in her cheeks as she smiled quickly before turning back to her friends. I remember a distinct flushing of the cheeks as she turned to one of her friends and whispered before bursting into a small uncontrollable fit of giggles.

“Yo John go say hi.” I don’t really remember the name of the guy who said this but I do remember that at University we were quite good friends and worked together on numerous projects including a radio show (failed quite miserably) and a prototype newspaper which we did quite well with. But other than that all I can recall is that his name began with either a T or a B. Or was it an M, it doesn’t really matter I suppose, lets face it you are not reading this to get to know about people I knew at University. Some of you wont even be reading this to discover the truth. There will be some of you reading this, possibly by the sickly yellow glow of a candle, licking your lips and willing me, praying that soon I will get to the reality behind my story, the blood and the guts that have haunted me for the better part of a decade. And to those of you waiting for that it will be around soon enough, far too soon for my liking. But I ask you to indulge me this last glimpse at my life when it was beautiful. When everything felt like it was on track and nothing could derail it.

Thankfully I did listen to my old friend T, B or M and after being pushed by her friends I met my future wife at the bar of some small, seedy and forgettable University Pub.

“Hi my name’s John can I get you a drink?” The first words I ever said to my soul mate. Of course this is the translation. She was so beautiful my first words were more a garbled collection of gibberish nonsense that sounded more like a baby asking for its favourite toy. To this day I cant understand it but she laughed and didn’t seem totally repulsed by this halfwit spouting crap in front of her.

“Nice to meet you John. I’m Madison but everyone just calls me Mady.” From this first tentative encounter we quickly went from strength to strength. We both blew of our following lectures and spent the whole day chatting. We were both away from home and missing the simplicity and ease that comes with the innocence of childhood. After a couple of pints we were easily chatting and laughing away as if we had known each other for years not just a couple of hours. It came so naturally I knew instantly that she would be the woman I’d one day marry. You may call me a hopeless romantic and yes I would have to throw my hands up in the air in guilt.

After a couple of weeks of meeting up with our friends to go out for a few drinks or some pizza we evolved along the natural course to our first ‘proper’ date. I cant quite remember exactly where we went for our first romantic meal but if my old memory isn’t failing me too badly I think it was one of those fake Italian places where Dave from Birmingham suddenly becomes Alberto from Rome with the worst accent you will have ever heard. But it was a great night. We must have laughed for three hours straight, I don’t think my face or stomach had ever hurt so much from laughing. Needless to say we spent the next two and a half years of University in each others arms making our friends sick with our PDA. The on our graduation day I felt it was time to take our relationship to the next level, well actually I think I may have skipped a few steps but to 21 year old me I felt ready. And in retrospect I think I actually was.

I asked her to marry me at the very same cheesy ass fake Italian restaurant that I had taken her too on our first date. With our degrees nestled cherishingly on the table and a bottle of red shared between our glasses I gently clasped her hand and was rewarded with a quick smile from beneath her curtain of thick black hair as she studied the menu.

“Mady?” I distinctly recall my voice crackling slightly as I struggled for the confidence for what I was about to ask.

“Mmmmm?” Great she didn’t even look up. At this point my heart skipped a beat and for some reason I lost my fear and couldn’t help but start to giggle. I struggled to keep it in, here I was trying to ask the biggest question I would ever ask and she couldn’t even look at me while I was talking. Trust Mady to spoil the moment without even knowing it.

“I love you….” I decided to begin with the obvious.

“I love you too sweetie.” She squeezed my hand but still didn’t move her eyes from the menu. Evidently there was something there holding her attention totally rapt. I decided to go for it. I pulled out the ring, lifted her chin and immediately her eyes widened, her mouth dropped opened and she shrieked.

We were married a year later at the same little church where I was baptised. As I typing this I’m looking at the picture, the only picture, I have from that day. Me and Mady are standing in the doorway of the church, it is a beautiful summers day, probably the only one we got that year, and all the flowers are to enjoy it. My gorgeous Mady is wearing a simple long white dress and I’m in the traditional black tux. We look so happy, as if nothing in the world can intrude upon this moment. Our arms are wrapped around one another, I can see my hand just placed lightly on her stomach where new life is being formed. The ring on my finger sparkles softly in the summer sun. I’m seeing the same ring on my finger right now. They didn’t take it away. They couldn’t. I have had this ring on my finger for every second since this photo and it will be on my finger long after the finger itself has turned to dust and the world has moved on and forgotten all about me.

So we were married and had our two children. We were a happy family, had regular holidays, never lacked for anything and spent a reasonable amount of time doing what Mady called ‘family activities.’ She was always saying that my idea of a family activity of watching a movie didn’t count and we had to leave the house each time. Looking back now I wish I had spent more time with the family, just spending time in their company looking at their faces trying to picture what they looked like and remembering them just in case.