Read Online Dear Beneficiary by Janet Kelly - Free Book Online Page B

work effectively with the morally challenged.
    â€˜I’m retired now so it hardly matters,’ I’d said, sounding petulant even to myself. ‘So who cares what I do in my own time?’
    Jonjo looked at me as if I was some kind of stranger who had walked into the family home uninvited, and then wondered if his childhood had been a dream and he had really grown up somewhere else. He looked at me quizzically.
    â€˜You didn’t tell me you had retired. When did that happen?’
    â€˜I didn’t know myself until a few weeks ago,’ I said. ‘I’m getting a bit old for it all now anyway, and there is far too much training. It takes up so much time.’
    I wanted to change the subject. I sensed Jonjo thought I was going off the rails by small degrees and his reaction to my resignation suggested he was secretly rather pleased I was no longer a magistrate. We once had an argument about sentencing for drug dealing and my thoughts that in some very rare cases it should lead to capital punishment. Jonjo was horrified and said the thought of someone like me judging those who possessed cannabis for personal use filled him with horror. My own view is he was trying to cover up for his own seedy behaviour with that woman he went out with from the Hinchey Green council estate. The state of the skin around her fingernails was enough to tell you she was up to no good. At the time of his various public and usually drunken antics with the mother of four, who knew the father of none, he said he was escaping the narrow constraints of his uptight upbringing and that he took pleasure from marginal disregard for the law.
    What he doesn’t know is that Colin was the driving force of disapproval for the majority of our time as parents, and while Jonjo might have lived in fear of facing my wrath, it was his father who would have issued the harshest responses to his behaviour – had he known the full facts at the time. I couldn’t be bothered to argue any further, having decided many years ago that motherhood as a career choice was highly undervalued and mostly a task for which the sacrifices and effort are generally only appreciated posthumously.
    Jonjo piped up: ‘Oh, that’s a shame. I know you rather enjoyed it. But I suppose they have their rules.’
    â€˜Mostly it was boring,’ I told him. ‘And I’ve better things to do these days.’ Like remembering my sexual antics with a black man over twenty years my junior , I thought, wickedly.
    I swear Jonjo raised his eyebrows at me but I let it go. I suppose he might have been thinking that I didn’t really have better things to do but then he didn’t know what I got up to in my own time. Thank goodness . I flushed as I thought of what Darius could do with my time (and various bits of my anatomy).
    â€˜Well, maybe it’s turned out for the best, then. But I still don’t think you should go out driving when you have been drinking. You could kill someone,’ he’d said.
    I was feeling sorry for myself and didn’t want to listen to him. I wanted to do something that didn’t involve being told off by my children. I’d been waiting very patiently for a number of weeks and, in the absence of any idea what to do about my lover I needed something to take my mind off him, if only temporarily. I had finally decided it was time to go to the bridge club and find out why, since I was in possession of a sound and very viable email address, I hadn’t received any communication from them.
    I parked in the last spot in the church car park, for which I was thankful as the church seemed very busy; even for days when a funeral is taking place. Checking my jacket and smoothing my hair, I marched in what I considered to be a determined fashion to the hall’s entrance. I pushed the doors open firmly and in doing so they smashed against a small table holding leaflets for local community activities, knocking