Chapter 1: Helpless

It was all Gosford Tanner’s fault that I was estranged from my family. I wasn’t happy about what happened but you can get used to anything given time.

Therefore I would have endured my bachelor existence forever if the damned accident hadn’t happened. In many ways I was very lucky with the injuries, it could have been so much worse.

I’m James Collins, by the way, my Dad, also James, was always called Jim, so I was James at home and Jim at work, Jimmy even on occasion. Mandy Collins, my wife, sometimes used to call me Jimbo but not recently, obviously. We split up after I caught her in bed with her lover. It happened at a party and with Gosford Tanner, of all people.

OK, I’m not that smart but honestly, what idiot calls their precious boy-child “Gosford”? Don’t they realise that when he’s a grown man people will not take him seriously. I certainly didn’t at first, with hindsight that was a serious misjudgement on my part.

I was attending a fire at a rather rundown warehouse when the accident happened. The place was originally a Victorian mill, more recently used for temporary storage and I guess the timbers couldn’t have been in too good a condition. A couple of us doughty firefighters were teamed up on the first floor, covering each other while damping down after the main blaze had been extinguished, when we were caught out.

Without warning the floor gave way beneath us and we both fell about twenty-five to thirty feet or so. Brendan was fine, he fell on a stack of wooden pallets. I was less fortunate, I ended up on the concrete floor, breaking my left ankle initially. That would have been relatively OK but then the beams from the floor above fell on top of me, which broke my right leg in four places plus a couple of ribs, further compounding my injuries by concussion and a dislocated and heavily bruised right shoulder. I also badly sprained and hairline-fractured my right wrist. I was immediately knocked unconscious by another beam which hit my Metro thermoplastic helmet, shattering the face shield, so I honestly didn’t feel a thing until I woke up in hospital about two or three days later. That helmet was a lifesaver.

The guys from my watch at the fire station visited the first day I was awake, even though I was still almost completely out of it. My landlords Mr and Mrs Murray visited the following day once they were aware of where I was. They brought in with them a copy of the local mid-week paper, which covered the fire, for me to read. It said a firefighter was hurt but didn’t include my name in the report, although I was mentioned by name in a Stop Press stamped on the back page. The picture of the warehouse taken in daylight showed part of the roof collapsed, so I thought maybe some of that roof fell on me. I really couldn’t remember what happened to me after the floor gave way as I was completely out of it.

The news from the doctors wasn’t good. I was going to be in hospital for between two weeks and a month, then had to undergo extensive physiotherapy for several months, so I probably wouldn’t be back to light duties at work for about four or five months. The worse case scenario was that I might not return to full duties for up to a twelve-month.

My main worry as I was lying there though, was that I was due to send my monthly payment off to my ex-wife Mandy’s account by the end of the week and I wouldn’t be able to do so. In fact I would possibly miss next month’s too, depending on how mobile I was by then. My bank card was at the station, my mobile phone was locked away with my wallet in my locker too. I would have to contact the station and give someone my lock combination so they could bring my gear up to me.

I decided I would have to call Mandy and warn her that my payment would be late. This would be the first time we had spoken for about a month short of five years. I wasn’t sure if I could even remember her, our, old number but I had nothing better to do than lie there thinking, so I ran the numbers through my head and wrote down what I thought it was. I didn’t have any money on me for a phone card, so I waited until afternoon visiting time to ask Mrs Murray to bring some cash from my bedside drawer in my room, next time she came.

She immediately subbed me with a fiver from her purse, which would tide me over, and would replace it from any loose change in my room. I usually emptied my pockets regularly so there should have been enough to more than cover her little loan.

Mrs Murray also brought a pleasant surprise, an old PDA phone that was no longer used as her husband had bought a new one. The battery life was poor and you couldn’t call out on it due to the fault that made it redundant in the first place, but she brought along the mains plug and some earphones to play the music stored on it. I had become only barely computer-literate by this time as I had never owned one, although they had a couple of computers at the station that guys used and I had picked up some tips in using them. She kindly showed me how to access the tunes and games already stored on the device and demonstrated how I could download others and access the internet. Mrs Murray set up an account for me to buy additional tunes and also helped me set up a free email account so I could keep in contact with the Murrays and the fire station. She made sure I carefully wrote down my passwords and kept them in my bedside cabinet.

I used the PDA to send off an email to the station office to request they bring some stuff in from my locker, for the next time somebody visited. I got a reply almost immediately confirming that one of the lads would visit tonight and bring my stuff. I wished then that I knew Mandy’s email address. It would mean I wouldn’t have to speak to her.

When Mrs Murray departed at the end of visiting time I asked the nurse if I could use the telephone. They had a pay-phone which they could wheel to your bedside but it only took phone cards, not cash. I was already aware of that, having asked about it previously. The nurse helpfully offered to send one of the more able-bodied patients to buy one with my five pounds, the kiosk in reception sold them by the handful. By the time I got the card and the phone it was just gone 4 o’clock. I decided to ring my old home there and then and get it over with before the evening meals started coming round and the evening visiting period started.

“Hi?” the answering voice was that of a boy.

“Josh? That you?” I asked, incredulous that it was my son Joshua answering the phone, I hadn’t spoken to him for so long and didn’t even know what he looked like any more. He sounded so mature I almost lost it, emotionally, there and then.

“Yeah...” he said hesitatingly, “Who’s this?”

“Er ... It’s your ... er...” What do I say? I couldn’t say I was his Dad, he already had a dad, that bloody Gosford bloody Tanner, so I lied, “It’s your Uncle Jimmy, Josh.”

Hardly anyone called me Jimmy, Sally used to and the daft old cleaning lady down at the station did, confusing me with a nephew, I guess.

“I don’t have an Uncle ... Jimmy,” Josh said suspiciously. He wasn’t stupid, not like his trusting, dumb old Dad, anyway.

“I’m your long-lost Uncle Jimmy,” I said, pleased that Josh was bright. “Can you pass a message onto your Mum, Josh?” I continued.

“OK.”

“Tell her that Jimbo is in hospital and can’t get down the bank for at least a month, maybe two,” I said, “Can you explain that I’m really sorry about that? Say that I don’t have the use of my mobile phone so she needs to tell me by email if she has any problems with the delay paying into the account. Can you take down this email address?”

Smart boy Josh, of course he could take down the address and he did. I asked about the girls, I didn’t say my girls. I found out they were watching the telly in the lounge. I asked if his Mum was OK and he said, without committing himself, that she would be home in an hour or so. I didn’t ask about his “Dad” and he didn’t offer any info, so I let it ride. I noticed Josh said “she” rather than “they” but I guessed Mr Gosford Bloody Tanner was probably Headmaster by now and was no doubt first in and last out at work each day. Actually, knowing the bastard as I did I bet he’d be last in first out with all his bloody work delegated to his minions.

We chatted on the phone for a little while, I found out Josh was a keen footballer and naturally supported my favourite team, too. Well, we were both from the same football-mad city, so it should have been expected. We both moaned about how rubbish they had been playing for three seasons now.

He asked me what I did and without a thought told him I was a fire fighter. Quick as a flash he asked if I had been hurt at a fire, otherwise why was I in hospital? He had his mother’s brains all right, lucky little so and so. I told him yes, I had been injured. Josh then quizzed me whether I had been hurt in a rescue but I told him no, the fire had been put out by then, everyone was safe and we were just damping down when the floor gave way under us and the roof caved in on top of us. He wanted to know all the injuries I had received. Boys can be ghoulish at times, I remembered from my own youth. So I told him that I would be unable to get back on my feet until my ankle, wrist and shoulder mended and I would be on crutches for a couple of months until my broken leg healed.

Josh wanted to come visit and sign my cast, like he did with one of his classmates who fell out of a tree, but I told him it was much too far to come. He was also disappointed that he couldn’t ride on the fire engine even if he did come up. I promised I would contact his local fire station and see if they would call into his school for a visit, they do that from time to time for PR and might do it for my boy, I could only ask. He wondered if I could visit him when I was better and wear my fire fighting equipment. I told him we didn’t take our uniform home, we kept it at the station. He was disappointed again but wished anyway that I got better soon.

I felt empty after our call ended. I was so proud of the way he had spoken to me, he sounded like he had turned out a nice kid, even with his natural father out of the picture. I missed Josh, I realised, I missed all of them, much more than I thought I would.

I still kept in touch with my Mum while I was in Lincolnshire. She was in a nursing home by now and not doing so well, health-wise. With no home life of my own I was able to cover all the overtime that was available at each of the companies I worked for, so I was also able to send a little money to Mum to help keep her going. My elder sisters helped her out too but I had very little contact with them, just occasional cards and even rarer letters at Christmas. They had moved out when I was small, my birth was a late afterthought, when Mum thought she was too old to conceive again. Mum did mention the grandkids in her letters from time to time but hardly ever referred to Mandy and never to Tanner. I don’t think she saw them as much as she’d like without me being around, I know how she felt.

I didn’t have a social life as such. On my rest days I worked casually at a local garage fitting exhausts, a lot of it as cash in hand, and took my holidays in a number of different coastal resorts up and down the East Coast. I wasn’t what you could call happy with my life, but I wasn’t miserable either. Nor was I lonely, I had my mates, the camaraderie among fire fighters is legendary. I did have a girlfriend, Sally, for a short while. She was a cute girl who worked in the office at the duct factory. We went out for nearly eighteen months but the relationship never went anywhere. We stayed on good terms for a few weeks and I had bought a mobile phone that she used to send me messages on at first but then dwindled until I hadn’t got a reply for quite some time.

Sally was a nice girl but she hinted that she wanted to get married and settle down. I had been there, done that and besides, I didn’t even know if I was still married. I didn’t bother with a divorce, I had left that up to Mandy and Tanner to deal with.

My tea came and was cleared away. Then a couple of lads from the fire station came in to visit, bringing with them my mobile phone and wallet plus a bag of fruit contributed by the rest of my crew. We had the usual insulting exchange of banter that such tight-knit crews have for a couple of hours until visiting time ended. They had a play around with the PDA, too, both of them more experienced than Mrs Murray apparently was. They got into the email account and added their addresses so I could keep them up to date with my condition. They pointed out that I had a message in the “in box” but I said I would look at it later once they had gone.

Then the guys set me up with a Facebook account, as most of the guys on the station were on the network, which meant I could keep up with everyone’s news. Privately I thought I might search for Amanda Collins or even Amanda Tanner and see what she was up to but then I decided the process would just be too painful.

When my friends left, I idly tallied up what was left out of the bag of fruit they had brought. I found they had eaten all the grapes I had started with plus all the new ones they brought, which amused me no end, but at least they had left me a few apples to help keep the doctors at bay! Better than nothing I thought. There was a bloody pineapple in the bag, too. A whole bloody pineapple! How did they expect me to cut up and eat that blooming thing with my arm in a sling?

Some fire fighters I thought are pretty dumb, maybe that’s why I was one of them!

I had maybe half an hour before lights out, so I looked up my password again and checked my email in-box, my mates said there was a message. There were two, actually, both from mandy.collins306. Her birthday was 30 June, I remembered, not that I had felt like sending her a card for the last four or five years.

The first message was just after 6 o’clock and said “Jimbo, where the hell are you? How are you? Josh says you are in hospital and injured in a fire. When can we come and see you? We all love you and miss you so much. Love Mandy xxx.”

The second message was longer and had only arrived in the last twenty minutes or so. “Jimbo, Josh searched for various combinations of ‘Jim Collins fire fighter Cleethorpes’ and came up with your accident in the local paper plus a load of other stuff which really worries me no end. We earlier found on call back that the phone number you called us on is from Cleethorpes but it won’t accept external calls. We are all looking forward to coming up to see you at the General Hospital on Saturday. Love Mandy xxx.”

No! No! No! That was the last thing I wanted.

I quickly replied, well as quickly as I can type left-handed with one finger on that tiny keyboard, telling Mandy that she wasn’t to come up, I couldn’t face them, couldn’t face her especially, and I would try and get the money to them somehow. Anything to stop her coming. Whatever happened, I didn’t want her to see her now or ever again.

The reply came almost immediately, “I’ll have my mother look after the kids on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and come up myself alone, what room or ward are you in?”

No! I don’t want her here, especially when I was so helpless and unable to get away from her. She needed to come up and grab her money, I thought, which is why she is so desperate to see me. No doubt about it. Probably wanted to force me to pay back-dated alimony for her as well, that’s at the bottom of it. Damn! I suppose Gosford bloody Tanner wanted his bloody ounce of flesh, after all. I’m not that well paid, even doing two jobs, I could only afford to send enough money to them for the kids, not to keep Mandy in the luxury to which she probably expected to be kept.

I replied to her email saying that it would be impossible for me to see her, not only because of the state of my health but it would also cause considerable embarrassment to my present domestic situation. I expressly forbade Gosford Bloody Tanner to visit. He could look after their bloody kids. I couldn’t take his gloating for all the bloody tea in China. I said I would make it clear to the hospital that I wouldn’t see her under any circumstances, including my death-bed, so it would be a total waste of time her coming all this way for nothing.

I hoped that this would lead her to think I had started another family and that any chance meeting between my previous wife and current partner would therefore be untenable. I also told her that the ward lights would be out in a matter of minutes and that I would be unable to communicate again until the morning. I switched off the PDA the moment after I sent the email and prayed that she would comply with my wishes, which I admitted to myself, on her bloody track record, would have to be a first.

I slept pretty fitfully that night, not just because of the jumble of thoughts churning through my head. I wasn’t comfortable lying down because of my shoulder, I couldn’t sit up as my ribs hurt too much and my leg and ankle throbbed whatever position I tried. My leg was in traction which limited any movement I could make anyway. I was already long fed up with bedpans, so I was hardly what you could call rested and collected when I booted up the PDA after my morning toilet and breakfast and checked out my email account.

There was a message from Mandy, which I opened with a feeling of impending doom. I was right, she wasn’t going to give up, Mandy never did. It was one of the traits that once endeared me to her when we were about 7 or 8. We had played together as babies, then were childhood sweethearts once upon a time before courting, engaging and marrying each other. That was until she tired of me, obviously, inevitably.

“James, I don’t care what cosy little domestic arrangements you happen to have,” she had typed, “I am only interested in my children and their happiness, I don’t give a flying fig for you and your new family. How could you do that anyway? Our children want to see their father and I am not going to stop them, wherever you choose to hide your cowardly arse in order to escape your parental responsibilities. At the moment, Josh and the girls don’t know that their new fireman hero ‘Uncle Jimmy’ is also their really shitty Dad who ran out on them when they needed him. Rest assured I will be bringing them up to see you in the next week or two and I do not want you to make a hurtful scene when I do and upset them. To that end I am coming up by train to see you this evening, hopefully before the end of your visiting hours. If you want to keep your old wife and children a sordid secret from your present comfortable pipe-and-slippers set-up, you better make sure your new bastard family are out of my way so we can sit down as responsible parents and sort out exactly how I expect you to behave once your children get to visit their Dad.”

Mandy didn’t sign it and no bloody kisses at the bottom now that the chips were clearly down on the table.

“Well Amanda,” I typed back with my one left finger, “If I’m a really shitty dad then you’re a totally slutty mum. OK, I ran as far away from you as I was able. I couldn’t possibly compete with the fancy man (or was it men?) you were banging when I was out of the way working all the bloody hours I could earning a living wage for us. What do your kids think about Uncle bloody Gosford then? Do they think more of him than their stupid Dad, or is Gosford their ‘Dad’ now? Is he their current hero who came in to save the day once you kicked their inadequate old man into touch once you had had your fill of me? I bet you poison my name and praise your current squeeze every bloody chance you can.

“Get it through your cheating skull that I still hate you and I don’t want to see you tonight, next week, when we are old and grey, or ever again. I shake with anger when I think of you humiliating me in front of all your fancy fart-arse friends at that teachers’ party. You’d made it pretty clear for years that I wasn’t anywhere near good enough for you and your stuck-up mother and had been laughing behind my back at me for a long while. When I thought about it after I left I realised you had been disrespecting me right in front of my face for years. You and your mother were gradually undermining me and my insignificant part in our supposed relationship. I worked hard for us, getting my hands rough and grimy six full exhausting days a week. While I was wearing myself out, your lover-boy was swanning around in a suit using his energy to keep my wife entertained while I was tying myself in knots for my family, putting food on the table.

“Since I left I’ve tried to send my kids every single penny I can spare and have managed to do so with just a single hiccough when I was forced to transfer from weekly to monthly pay. That’s why I rang Josh and left you a message yesterday because I was concerned that you’d miss the money due tomorrow and worry about when or whether it was ever coming again. I only woke up in hospital two days ago and have absolutely no means of transferring any cash to you in time. Also, I don’t even have a cheque book with me, so you coming up for your money is a complete waste of time for both of us.

“I am still so angry with you that I am sending the vital signs monitors off the bloody charts, setting the alarms off and I’m going to have the nurses back giving me gyp in a minute. I thought after all this time I was over what you did to me but I know now that I will never get over it.

I can never ever forget what you did but what I can do is ... forgive you, if that is what you are chasing me for. If you just want closure of our marriage, I give it to you freely here and now. Send me the divorce papers and I’ll sign them in an instant. I just want to get on with my life and you can get on with yours. We don’t even have to ever see each other again.

“As for the kids? As I was so beneath your contempt and no longer of any use to you I thought they’d do better with a stable relationship, between you and your current lover and enjoy a convenient middle-class upbringing. I assumed they were young enough to have forgotten all about me by now, they never saw me much anyway, I was always out slave-labouring most of the time they were up and about so I don’t suppose they even noticed when I was no longer around. So leave me alone, please, Amanda. I am too sore to type any more. Have a really good life, I mean it. This is goodbye, regards J.”

I sent it, logged off my email account and switched the blasted thing off.

I didn’t hear back from her until checking my emails again at lunchtime. My morning was routine, filled with breakfast, followed by the frustrating bedpans, bed bath, pain-killing tablets, doctor’s visit, mid-morning tea and biscuits, changes of bandages on my head and lesions on my face and particularly painful where my broken ribs had punctured my skin. Your life is not your own when you are in hospital, but then I couldn’t remember when my life was my own prior to five years ago. Since then you could say I had pleased myself but I wasn’t truly pleased with what I had.

The message from my ex-wife was short and sharp and without comment, “See you tonight”. Again, no trace of signature or kisses. A pattern was certainly emerging here and I really wasn’t looking forward to seeing her. I thought about asking the nurse for a sleeping tablet with immediate effect but there was no avoiding the inevitable.

Nobody came to see me Friday afternoon visiting time. The side ward I was in had six beds, three had broken limbs and one was an old boy who was completely out of it most of the time so I was unable to communicate with him and the final bed was empty until late afternoon when a guy who had just been operated on and barely conscious was wheeled in and the curtains pulled around him. The previous occupant of that bed left I think the day I woke up, but I was pretty hazy then and for part of the time that I was barely conscious the screens were up around my bed anyway.

I was furthest away from the windows and the delight of fresh air. I was used to exercising and working outside. I trained, kept fit, played a lot of sports and worked in the open air most of the time. I was hot and sweaty even though I had a bed bath early in the morning. I felt that I stank to high heaven already, particularly under my casts, and it was still six or seven hours before Mandy was due to put in an appearance and ruin the rest of my day.

It occurred to me that once I got fit again I could move towns once more, perhaps move further north. But I loved firefighting and knew if I transferred anywhere to another station she could find me again.

Several people occupying my ward had visitors in the afternoon, one had a couple of little girls skipping about the bed and generally fidgeting with boredom and continually being shushed by the adults with them. I couldn’t help wondering about my own two girls. When I left home, Kelly and Kaytie were 3 and 5, now they would be pushing 8 and 10. Perhaps Mandy would bring some photos. Damn! I thought, I’m falling into that trap of caring about them that I’d deliberately been avoiding all these years.

At the evening visiting hours, Mrs Murray popped in to see me again with baby Darren, well, I say baby, he was about two years old. She brought up a change of pyjamas for me and took the soiled ones away in a carrier bag for washing. I had been wearing one of those uncomfortable hospital smocks since my morning bath. I had got on quite well with little Darren and I used to delight in tossing him about when I was at home. He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to climb all over me like he was used to.

Mrs Murray was very chatty, but nervous. That was unusual as she was usually very confident and determined for a young woman. Eventually, after I prompted her, she admitted that she had just learned, well, actually confirmed by the doctor a week or so ago, that she was pregnant, two months gone.

That meant that I needed to move soon. She hated bringing it up just as I was injured and needed time to recover. The Murrays were planning to move Darren into my room and turn Darren’s old box bedroom back into a nursery to await the new arrival. They wanted all the redecoration finished a month before the birth so the paint smell would be gone by the time it was needed, and required a month or so of weekends to get my old room ready for Darren. It looked like I had five months of lodgings available at the most, the thought of the upheaval involved rather depressed me. Perhaps that was another means of telling me that I needed to move on, with my life in general as well as geographical.

Some of my fire fighter pals turned up too, I could hear them gather in the corridor where they waited somewhat noisily. Ward rules were that only two people were allowed at each bedside at a time. When Mrs Murray and Darren got up to go, Darren insisted on giving me a proper kiss, so Mrs Murray decided to give me a quick peck too - that was a first, I didn’t even know her Christian name. She and her husband were very formal and always called me Mr Collins, only little Darren called me Jim, and that was only after my insistence when I first encountered the little tyke.

Four of my firemen pals came in, big boisterous chaps all wearing sweatshirts with “Lincolnshire Fire Service” or the Humberside equivalent, some of the guys had worked for either neighbouring services over the years. I think the nurses made an exception to the two-to-a-bed rule when they came in, although they definitely didn’t relax the rule when my garage mates had earlier visited en mass!

They cheered me up immediately and made the last hour or so of visiting time fly by and I clean forgot all about Mandy’s impending arrival. The nurse came round with 10 minutes’ visiting time left, warning visitors to wind down, please. When she got to my bed the nurse advised that I had another visitor waiting, so could the guys please leave within a couple of minutes to give her a chance to visit?

“That’s the babe what was waiting when we got here,” said Andy, “How come a beauty like that knows a scrawny ugly old bugger like you?”

Of course, I had finished my brief relationship with my girlfriend Sally a couple of months before I became a fire fighter, so the guys had never seen me with or even heard me talking about a woman, other than Mrs Murray and they had pulled my leg about her as soon as they walked in. Mrs Murray was a very attractive but much younger brunette, probably about Sally’s age, early to mid-20s.

“She’s my ex,” I explained wearily, referring to the waiting Mandy, the painkillers must’ve suddenly worn off then because all those old agonies came flooding back. I guess I must’ve winced in pain.

“She a free agent now then, eh?” Nobby was always getting into trouble over women, his reputation for shagging anything in skirts was legendary in our station.

“No,” I groaned, “She replaced me with Gosford bloody Tanner!”

“What?” laughed Andy, “He got a bigger dick than you or what?”

“Yeah.”

Bugger! I didn’t mean to say that out loud.

Of course Gosford bloody Tanner had a bigger dick than me.

There are a number of images permanently burned into my brain from that fateful night of the barbecue party, about a month short of five years ago. I had to work that day, I worked every Saturday, and Mandy went to the party with friends in the afternoon before I joined them early evening. I remember the thirty long agonising seconds I froze in the bedroom doorway while my wife and Tanner were obliviously enjoying extramarital relations with each other before I threw off my shock, stepped into the bedroom and punched the bastard as hard as I could in the side of his head. Neither of them knew I was even in the room until then. I remember the image of him sliding off to the left out of the bed and out of my wife and, yes I do remember he was bigger. I don’t know, maybe a couple of inches or so.