Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (23 page)

I made sure that none of them ever saw me, although I am sure that they wouldn’t have recognised me if they had. I imagined their deaths over and over again until I could practically taste the blood spatters when I licked my lips in satisfaction after the bullet went in and they keeled over. I had killed them in my head on countless occasions as a child and now, finally, my dreams were about to come true. I just knew that I had to accomplish my goal in the course of a single day, because, if I was apprehended after killing just one, the rest would go free. The challenge was that Auntie Coral was in Essex while the rest were in London. I decided that I would do Prescott first, then Auntie Coral. Bill would have to wait as he was in prison. If I managed not to get caught, I would have something special in store for him when he finally got out. They would be clean, execution-style killings, just one in the back of the head. They would not suffer, much as they deserved to. It would be easier this way.

I told my therapist what I was planning. His reaction was interesting. He provoked me. He said, ‘Well, fine, do it. They deserve it, don’t they? But think about what killing them will do to you.’

‘I don’t fucking care what happens,’ I said. ‘At least I will have avenged Liam and all the rest of them. At least I will have brought death to people who deserve it. If I manage to take them out, it means that my life is worth something and that I have done something to help make things right.’

‘So you want to go to prison at thirty-six and spend the rest of your life there? Because that is what is going to happen if you do go through with this plan.’

‘If that’s what it takes, yeah. If that is what I have to do, then I will do it.’

Terence advised me to watch a film called
Sleepers
. The story line is very similar to mine: a bunch of guys who had been abused as children kill their abuser and get away with it, but their lives are destroyed because they succumbed to the temptation to commit violence and became as bad as the man who had hurt them in the first place.

Terence’s message to me was: ‘If you bury them, you are burying yourself as well.’ He told me that I could win by not letting Bill Starling, Coral and the other abusers beat me, and by not letting myself succumb to the urge to kill them. I could win by going on to live my life successfully and well and by being the better man that Auntie Coral had always told me I could never be. He said that by being happy and breaking the loop I could avenge the deaths of Liam and the others in a way that no killing could ever do and that that would be the best revenge I could take on Starling and the rest of them.

They will never know how close they came to going down in a blaze of gunfire. I went right up to the verge, and stood there for a long time, looking into the abyss. I had followed them for a week with my gun, ready at any moment to take them out.

Back at the house, I sat and looked at the gun. I felt deflated and ashamed. What if Terence was wrong? What if it would really make much more sense to kill them while I had the chance? For a black moment, I thought that maybe it would be for the best if I died instead of them, and joined the rest of the boys from St Leonard’s. I took my Browning and shoved it deep into my mouth until the barrel of the gun tore at the delicate tissue of my palate. I could taste the gun metal mingling with my own blood as I almost gagged. I knew that oblivion could be just a second away and that I wouldn’t have to feel anything. All I needed to do was pull the trigger, and then all my self-doubt, blame and recriminations would be gone, gone forever.

But, thankfully, I could still hear the voice of Terence telling me that the only way I could really defeat them was to go on and be the better man they had always told me I couldn’t be.

I took the gun out of my mouth and looked at it. The Browning is an elegant piece of machinery, but now it looked dark and hideous in my grasp. My hand was trembling. The gun was dark grey and ugly and with a shudder I realised how close I had come to doing something awful. I drove into London – dangerously, because it was hard to see the road through the tears that fell thick and fast from my eyes – and threw the gun into the silent Thames, because I knew that if I kept it I would use it, on myself if not on them. It splashed once and then sank into the dark water along with my plans to avenge the deaths of the children I had grown up with.

The overwhelming sensation I experienced on throwing the gun away was guilt, and that is a feeling that has never completely left me. Then, I fell to my knees right there on the riverbank. I was crying like a baby. I had felt that, if I killed them, I would be doing something for Liam and the other kids I had walked away from all those years before, without so much as a backward glance. Getting rid of the gun felt like walking away from them all over again.

I didn’t know whether I wanted to go on living at all at that point. It had taken enormous effort not to kill myself. I wish that I knew for sure that Liam and the rest of the kids would have approved of the decision. It was a long drive home that evening, and many nights before I could sleep properly.

Despite the many wonderful things that have happened to me since, a huge part of me is still sure that I made a horrid mistake and that I should have killed the bastards while I had the chance. Some of them have paid something for their crimes, but they haven’t paid nearly enough and I don’t believe in a just God who punishes the wicked after death. I wish that I did because, if anyone ever deserved fire and brimstone, it was them. There are still nights when I wake up, thinking about what I nearly did and regretting that I did not see it through, because they really had it coming.

Bill Starling, Auntie Coral, Alan Prescott and the others will never pay for all the terrible things that they have done. Not unless someone else finishes the job I started.

I can but hope.

13

M
OVING ON AND
G
ROWING
U
P

B
y the time I reached my late thirties, I was sure that love, marriage and the baby in the carriage were never going to happen for me. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had success in romance. Quite the reverse: plenty of women had come and gone from my life and most of them had been great, attractive, intelligent women who would have made any man proud to have them by his side. There had been a couple of close calls when I had been sure, for a while, that I had found Ms Right. But real, enduring love had not happened for me and by now I felt that it most probably never would. I had managed to stay out of prison and I had a steady and reliable career, but I thought that I was probably too old to meet someone and have a family. I also suspected, privately, that this was probably for the best and that I could never be a good father, as I had never had a role model to follow.

The thought that really terrified me and had perhaps been one of the greatest obstacles to reaching a mental state of readiness for a committed relationship was that I would provide a bad example or, heaven forbid, even be an abusive father to any children that I might have. I knew that I would never hurt a child sexually – never that – but I was scared that I would lash out in anger in a thoughtless moment and then have to live with the knowledge that I had hurt a defenceless child. I feared that I wouldn’t be able to break out of the vicious circle that had begun the day my mother left me out with the rubbish. That I would repeat the behaviour that I had seen around me every day of my childhood.

I honestly believed that a normal life was simply not an option for me and I had become reconciled to growing old and ending my days alone. I quite consciously put all thoughts of an eventual committed relationship and children out of my mind and concentrated on my career and on creating a life that I could enjoy as a bachelor.

Then I had a wake-up call.

It was 1999, and millennium night was coming up, so everybody and his mother wanted to go out and whoop up a big party. There was a huge demand for doormen, and a friend of mine asked me to do a night’s work.

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I don’t do door work any more. I don’t need to and I don’t want to.’

‘Come on, mate, we’re really short and you would be helping me out. It’s a thousand quid for the night, too.’

‘A thousand? All right then. Just to help you out.’

It was against my better judgement. I was the worst guy to be doing door work, the most volatile there was – I know that now. I did not want to run the risk of getting into trouble. But trouble had a habit of finding me.

That night, two customers started causing trouble in the club. I managed to get them outside on my own, but the two doormen who were supposed to help me walked away and left me on the door on my own by mistake. One of the idiots I was throwing out bit me and took a chunk out of my chest. What a scumbag! I went absolutely ballistic and beat the living daylights out of the pair of morons in the car park, leaving one of them with a broken jaw and both of them in a heap on the floor.

That was the last time I have ever been involved in any violence at all with anyone because it shocked me to the core. I realised that I could no longer put myself in situations that could turn violent, because my own strength and determination to stand up for myself could put me in a lot of hot water. I am a model of restraint now, and I have done no door work ever since, because I can see now that it is just asking for trouble. Even when I am cut off in the car, or given the finger, I just grit my teeth and get on with things. Back then, I realised that, if I wanted my life to be good and meaningful, the only person who could ensure that was me. I had been advised by my therapist that the best way to get revenge on the people who had hurt me was by living a good and happy life and I decided that I would do whatever I could to make that happen.

As a child and adolescent, I had been told more times than I could remember that I was going to go to jail. Well, I had come perilously close, but I hadn’t been put behind bars because I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had no intention of letting anything of the sort happen now that I was straight as a die, and I was going to stay that way. I was also quite confident that I had plenty to offer the world, if only I could find a way to channel all that I had learned and experienced in my professional life. With more determination than I had ever felt before, I set about growing up and developing a career that would stand me in good stead in the future.

I was already working with some of the rapidly growing fitness chains, and I felt that this environment offered me ample scope in which to develop for now, so I started to learn more about the corporate ladder and how I might be able to fit in. With application and a lot of elbow grease, I started to move into progressively larger gyms until I was in a senior position at one of David Lloyd’s newly opened mega-clubs. While I worked as a senior personal trainer myself, I also found out that I loved to teach and that I was good at it and soon I was finding, training and mentoring new personal trainers, some of whom were twenty years younger than me. I had – and still have – a real passion for my profession, because I have seen for myself, time and time again, how it makes a real, lasting difference in people’s lives. I liked to see the eagerness in the eyes of the new generation of trainers that was now coming to me for advice. I was nearly forty and, as far as some of these young guys were concerned, I was a senior citizen!

It was great to see that the new generation of personal trainers were approaching their careers with focus. I built a team of young professional trainers and taught them everything I knew, not just about the physical exercises they would have to teach, but about how to manage and motivate clients and how to show them that the hard work they do today will pay positive dividends in the future. I honestly believe that physical wellness is a key ingredient to a happy life and it felt good to know that I was enabling these young trainers to reach a position whereby they would be able to go out into the world and make a tangible, meaningful difference in people’s lives. While it took some time for me and the administrators of the club to see eye-to-eye on the details of what we were doing, they were happy with the money coming into the club from the growing personal-training business, and I was learning a great deal about how a business is run. This continued and grew in the South East region and then across the country until a team of ‘professional consultants’ came to head office and decided that, using their PowerPoint and Excel skills, they could do better…

Between one thing and another, it was time for me to set up on my own. I left the David Lloyd club, ignored other invitations to work with the big companies and went into business on my own, working with clients in their own homes and at their own pace and developing a network of trainers in Essex providing similar services. I had realised, in working as a mentor to other personal trainers, that my greatest strengths came not when I focused on myself and what I needed to do, but rather on how to help others, be they other professionals or clients. I had never known, until then, that I was good at communicating and explaining things in a way that most people seemed to like and understand. By now, I had learned that to offer the best service as a personal trainer what you need is commitment, patience and an awareness of what clients need, rather than the baggage that inevitably comes with the corporate environment.

By working in people’s homes, I was able to offer them privacy, security and the knowledge that they could discuss their needs with me without having to worry about what others thought. Busy parents, older men and women and those with specific physical problems all found it easier to exercise and train in the comfort of their own homes, far away from unflattering mirrors and the judgemental eyes of other gym-goers.

Seeing how my workouts and expertise helped these people to improve the quality of their lives and their health made me feel very good about myself and confident that the many years that I had spent studying – really ever since that very first day in Dagenham Boxing Club – were paying dividends, both emotionally and financially. As I became better known in the area, I started to get more and more coverage in the local newspapers, providing them with copy and material and sometimes writing columns for them. I was getting good at working with the media. As well as featuring frequently in the print media, I was invited to take a regular health and fitness slot on the local BBC radio channel, BBC Essex, and grew comfortable talking live on radio and handling phone-ins. As the Internet grew in importance, I started to use it more and more to publicise what I could offer, extend my knowledge and share what I was up to with others. I attended training courses and studied as hard as I could to ensure that I remained on top of my profession.