Prologue
What does the word ‘vow’ mean to you? For such a diminutive word, it has so many implications. So close to triumphant ‘wow’ and yet so far. For me it is a word of shackled extremes: I vow to love you until the end of time; I vow to find you and then I will kill you; I vow to lose my virginity by the time I’m eighteen; I vow to thee my country; I vow that I will never change my mind; I vow to do my best – no one ever vows that they will give it a whirl and see what happens.
And then there are the sacred marriage vows, those words, supposedly set in stone, which no one can break without experiencing extreme vicissitudes of fortune. I vow to forsake you for all others… So why make them at all when currently one in three marriages end in divorce? A vow of chastity – pledging to not spill one’s seed or flick one’s bean in order to serve a sky fairy without the sinful hindrance of the Devil’s horn. There are all manner of religious zealot vows, running off into extremism from the beginning of time until present day.
What fuels the need for vows, a word that is essentially a promise? Fear. Promises can be easily broken. But a vow – it has much more clout. It has the illusion of sturdy foundations, of years of history supporting it, making the word appear indestructible in the face of weakness. If a word has all those connotations attached to it, then when one makes a vow, one is buying in to that ideology.
So, naturally I made a couple of vows to myself, wearing them as an impenetrable coat of armour for many years, protecting me from the past. They had worked so far. I hadn’t broken them, and by not doing so, I had strangely brought upon myself a change of unwelcome circumstances, which in the end, just added grist to the mill of life. Onwards, I said. But something unwittingly squeezed in. A tiny seed of doubt, lighting the fuse of a memory I’d stamped all over with my vows. And now I couldn’t ignore it, no matter how hard I tried, and I did try. I really did…
1
The Beginning
The church was almost full; I didn’t recognise a lot of the people here. The children had remained at home with Lindsey, the babysitter; they were too young to attend. Louise held my hand, clinging on for dear life, her fingers corpse cold even though it was showing signs of summer outside in the last week of May. I’m not a fan of church funerals. They can tip either way – be an almost jolly affair with a selection of uplifting hymns and a charming eulogy that pinpoints the deceased in succinct bullet points, a bit like an optimistic Tinder profile. Or they can be properly depressing with hymns no one knows, ensuring a pathetic mumbled choral response, and a colour-by-numbers tribute where only the names have been changed. (Nigel, Steve, Peter, Oscar, John was a keen reader of hard-core pornography and also enjoyed ornithology.) Nigel’s funeral was the latter. My eyes meandered past the boiled-sweet stained glass windows up towards the rafters, questioning how they cleaned them. They surely harboured fleshy cobwebs, potential draughts in danger of setting them free to float down from their moorings, coating a member of the congregation in a gossamer funeral shroud.
As a matter of course when attending a church funeral (any funeral to be honest), sex seedily crept into my head. I’d lost my virginity after a friend’s bleak funeral when I was eighteen and two months. There’s nothing like facing your own mortality to get the juices flowing. I can’t even listen to Purple Rain now without thinking of it as Purple Pain. Anyone who says that it doesn’t hurt or that the blood bath is a myth must have acquiesced to a man with an asparagus-sized penis. Trust me to have decided on eventually letting down my drawbridge for someone endowed with a Coke can between his thighs. My eyes watered thinking about it at the front of the church listening to the vicar expand on Nigel’s good points, while ignoring that he could be a bit of a selfish knob.
The aftermath of the much-anticipated deflowering I had fantasised about for years had been like clearing up after a gangland massacre. Without the professional help of Winston Wolf, I was