Chapter 2: Day Of Reckoning

The day started like any other. I awoke at 5 AM -- in my hammock, in the garden -- to the sounds of the early lorries and other traffic on the motorway. The air was cold, the dew covered grass giving the entire garden a silvery sheen in the eerie false dawn. As usual, the family of rabbits were hopping around the garden, investigating the pond and flowerbeds.

Uncle Clive sees my nightly exile to the garden as a continuous reminder of my failures to live up to his exacting, if arbitrary, standards. Cousin George rather enjoys the notion of my being treated no better than a family pet. Aunt Mary is probably hoping I catch pneumonia and die. However, her opinions are of no account, never asked for and rarely volunteered.

I, myself, find my garden accommodations mostly satisfactory. Of course, inclement weather can be unpleasant, but being outside and alone has its benefits. It is certainly far more preferable than being inside with my wildly dysfunctional family. Overall it is a win-win situation. We are all satisfied with this arrangement.

When I had first started sleeping in the garden, the rabbits had scared me in the morning. On the very first night I spent outside, I did not have the luxury that was my hammock. The first night outside had not been voluntary. I had been camping with that pathetic excuse for a human being known as my cousin George and uncle Clive (that's just Clive to you boy!). I had been the last back from the trip to the local woods. We ran there and back, as always, and being the youngest and smallest, I was the slowest. as always. This time however, I was locked outdoors for the night. No dinner either. George thought that was hilarious.

George was the bane of my existence. He hated me. George had been, as he perceived it, the center of his parents universe. It was all about him and the attention he received was his just due. I am sure my arrival was quite the shock as even the minimal attention necessary to care for a newborn deprived him of what he considered rightfully his. He had wanted to be an only child and he made no secret of that fact. George liked to regularly remind me that I was just the poor bastard, orphaned cousin who had no one or no place else to resort to. For years I endured these and other taunts from George. He thought it was hilarious.

I don't delude myself, George did pick on me but he didn't bully me in the least. At least not how I viewed it. By my definition, a bully was deliberately mean to someone in order to belittle them, make them feel bad about themselves or to force them to do something they wouldn't usually. George wasn't smart enough to be a bully. Luckily for me he was just a plain, mean kid who wasn't too smart.

George was not popular in our neighbourhood. I could say he wasn't popular at school and it would be true but misleading. George attended a very private school. It was in our back garden. Clive retired from the army as a Warrant Officer 2, his last assignment being a company sergeant-major. According to Clive, being in the army and soldiering was what real men did for a living. I think that was real men as opposed to the fake men you saw on the streets so often.

You know the ones, you see them everyday. Men in suits walking to and from their offices or used car sales lots. They have that look about them. They think they're something special. Better than most people, simply because they have a university education. Put them in the woods with me though and I can tell you who would survive. As a little clue it's not them.

Clive ran our little private school. He had the certificates to be a tutor and all the required standards, texts and assorted miscellanea for it. I don't know how he managed to get certified as he is the very last person on the face of the earth who should be trusted to teach children anything! Alas he was our teacher. Most of the time anyway. He taught us the important things for ten hours a day. Starting at 6am we would go through various excersises meant to make us, hiss soldiers, as fast, strong and flexible as we could be. He'd have us in the back garden working for hours doing various drills while he sat on the porch observing us. Sometimes we'd be sparring on the hard patio by the porch but most of the time he'd have us fighting or exercising on the large lawn in out garden.

At 4pm we would stop for lunch. Our lessons would then resume for the rest of the afternoon under the watchful eye of aunt Mary. She taught us all how to cook, clean the house and launder, fold, iron and repair (read sew) our clothes to her satisfaction. These lessons ended at 8pm for dinner and had a side benefit of providing for dinner, a spotless house, and clean and ironed garments. After dinner we would then perform all of our outdoor chores, cleaning the gardens and the drive. (The house was my aunt's domain only)

After we had dinner and had done the chores we would have time to ourselves. Which actually meant we could do any of the few activities uncle Clive had pre-approved. Most nights Jacob and I would play catch or fight. We had done so since we were young. Mary Lou occasionally joined in sometimes too, but most of the time she would disappear back to her house to do work for her father, I thought it would be better to do that but she often seemed positively terrified at the prospect.

Now I know what you're thinking. Well it can't be too bad. They get time to play in the evenings and they must have days off. Well you're wrong. No days off. Ever. Bad weather just put Clive in a better mood. That meant camping, running or trekking. All in shorts and t-shirt of course.

This morning was no different. I awoke at five, went indoors, made a plate full of toast and took it outside to see Jacob and Mary Lou sitting on the porch. As usual, Jacob seemed to be in a bad mood and Mary Lou was trying to placate him. Mary Lou and Jacob lived next door with their father. Jacob was adopted and Mary Lou was some sort of distant cousin of their 'father'. She was the most normal out of all of us. Apart from her looks, Mary Lou was far from normal in fact she was a real knock-out at 19 and where our hard work gave bruises and broken limbs the only effect on Mary Lou was to give her a perfect body, much reminiscent of that of a dancer.

It was common knowledge that Jacob was not entirely stable. A year ago a boy had brushed past him in the street and tried to pick Jacobs pocket as he and I were walking through the town. He shoved the boy down an alley and cut one of his fingers off. He didn't even hesitate to take a knife to a boy that couldn't have been older than fourteen. Jacob was truly a psychopath, completely without conscience. Clive loved him. The fact that he was also the fastest and most graceful of us all may have helped too. He was so fast and graceful it scared me, he was exactly my height 5'10'' but he was much faster than me and more muscled to, looking like a professional swimmer, I'd yet to grow many muscles but Jacob had three years on me, so I could live with that. I don't quite know how he got away with the things he did, but I knew that he could kill me if he wanted too.

As you can imagine I'm quite grateful that he is my friend then. He had always admired the way I fought. My style was unlike his in every way possible. He fast and graceful, I was strong and brutal. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big guy, being 5'10" tall and weighing 165 lbs., but I am fairly strong and I don't hold anything back when I'm fighting. I sometimes wondered about why that is and I think it's because in my mind I know that Clive and George were evil people. They were just pure bad to the bone. So was aunt Mary actually. She was spiteful, bitter and twisted. Not that I ever fought her, a woman's place was in the kitchen apparently. Clive always said it was unnatural Mary Lou fighting and said she wasn't a real woman. Yet I noticed he didn't mind admiring her every chance he got, but never too much with Jacob aroundWith Jacob it was different yet again. When he fought he was always on a fine line. One minute he was just proving his skill to himself trying hard as he can to be as graceful and shockingly fast as he could. But if you annoyed him, he'd change to a furious whirlwind. Jacob got into rages that were deadly. I had only ever once incurred his wrath. It was the first time I sparred with Mary Lou, I made the mistake of holding back because I didn't want to hurt a girl. Jacob went crazy, he seemed to think I thought his sister was weak. He spend an entire ten minutes teaching me my lesson. It was a mistake I never made again.