BEING MURDERED IS EASY.

Few people are as unpleasant as the victim, Thomas

Thomas Delaney was on his way to church one lovely spring summer morning, feeling the need to empty himself of a whole load of psychological toxins, when the thing he least expected to happen did happen. He was murdered.

In case anyone’s wondering how it happened, please follow the following instructions. You may want to avoid a similar situation yourself.

Thomas Delaney knew that there was something wrong inside his head, but it didn’t worry him particularly because he’d always been that way. You know, moody, sullen, unpleasant to others, prone to outrageous tantrums more suited to a toddler than a man in his early fifties, which Thomas was.

But first, his lifestyle. He had wanted to be married with a family of little ones bouncing on his knee since the day he had learned to think, which was ages ago. But he discovered pretty quickly (in his teens anyway) that there wasn’t a female acquaintance who would tolerate his moody ups and downs for anywhere near as long as it should have taken him to get her into bed with him.

He was equipped with the normal amount of testosterone and it had the same effect on him as it did on other males. In his teens other, less dreadful lads had boasted that they had managed to achieve this or that little victory over this or that pretty girl, but when Thomas tried a few of the tricks he found that either his face was slapped with unbelievable violence or his manhood threatened with usually sharp implements, and he backed off. What man wouldn’t?

So whilst sixteen year-old Dave or Tim or Gary made exciting progress in their battles with females, he made none at all and had to withdraw from many a fray, defeated, but determined to find out what had gone wrong and, in the future, hopefully put it right.

He made one fatal mistake and that was trying to discover something wrong with the girls concerned instead of examining himself and seeing if perchance there was something awry with his tactics.

For instance, maybe the nicknames he chose for some of them were inappropriate. Maybe the embarrassingly overweight Simone resented being called Ten Tons (which he did on one occasion, immediately before she jabbed a pencil as close to his left eye as she could. Despite considerable effort she missed, which was fortunate) and stormed off, blackening his name to all she met.

He left his teens behind him, still a virgin, and soldiered through his twenties. And soldiered is the correct term because he decided to enlist as a soldier and found himself pretty good at hating others to the extent that he knew he could happily shoot them if shooting them was required. Sadly, it wasn’t.

He was so frustrated because the aforementioned floods of testosterone had very little to do that he wondered if, perchance, he was gay. He didn’t think he was, but, he wondered, how could he possibly know if he didn’t try it?

So he waited untul his platoon was ordered to rise early and, secretly he hoped, peered at the naked flesh of half a dozen comrades as they pulled their trousers on and tucked in their shirts in the proper way.

His heart barely noticed but plodded on beating (which was just as well) and barely did anything out of the way, but then,

“Who do you think you’re looking at?” called one of the men, a bulky well-muscled and enthusiastic soldier from an adjacent bunk.

“I wasn’t,” he replied, brusquely, “why, what are you afraid of me seeing, Col?”

“You’re a pervert, aren’t you?” responded Col (an abbreviation of Colin), “Fancy me, do you? Like what you see, sad old pervert?”

“You’re not a lass or I might, so bad luck, Col,” he responded, and earned a back hander from a soldier who wasn’t quite sure if he’d been insulted or not.

He bought his way out of the forces as soon as he could after that one incident because the word went around that he was gay and looking for someone to lurve, as they pronounced it, and he ended up being stalked by a slim youth by the name of Cedric, who was quite obviously gay.

“You’re like me ain’t you, Tommy lad?” he was asked when, hopefully, nobody else was around. They were in the shower block, which didn’t help because both were drying themselves on towels that were barely adequate for the task.

“If I was like you, Cedric my lad, I’d have taken an overdose yonks ago,” he growled.

“But you are, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

“Sod off!” he responded and left the shower block with most of his undried flesh clinging uncomfortably to his uniform because he was still far too wet to be called dry.

Once in civvy street he met Maureen and had big hopes of enjoying a happy life everlasting with her, but she took exception to being thumped in the stomach by him, albeit, he claimed when her father came round and threatened him, in fun.

“If you lay so much as a whisper on our Maureen again then you’ll get what for,” growled the girl’s father, and by the look of him Thomas was quite sure he was quite clearly capable of administering several what-fors.

Thirty was a mile-stone for Thomas because it was after he had given himself a couple of cigars as a birthday present that he decided that he would stop looking for a wife, and would, instead, take up drinking.

The trouble with beer was he didn’t like it. He tried lager, and didn’t like that either, and ended up pretending to be delighted by cider, which he just about tolerated. But however many pints of the stuff he got through, he wasn’t helped by the craving he got when a sweet young woman passed him by. And that was the thing that upset him the most: they passed him by, mostly on the other side of the road and always, he was quite certain, avoiding him deliberately.

His fortieth year passed and he had developed what is euphemistically called a beer belly but, as far as he was concerned, it was a cider-belly. And his chosen life style meant that his circle of friends was so tiny it was more like a full stop.

It was then that he really became objectionable. He stopped drinking because he was aware that it was harming him, though he didn’t know why, but as in ten years of concentrating on consuming cider he still hadn’t developed a fondness for the stuff it was no hard thing to pack it in. Unfortunately, a side effect of his cider years was he had developed an affinity for being inebriated. It was his one joy in life, and he had withdrawn from it.

“Who the hell are you talking to?” growled Beatrice Thinthongle when he’d been muttering about how sodding cruel life is. Beatrice Thinthongle was a woman of more years than she cared to think about and who was always of the opinion that somebody was talking to her. They must, she reasoned, because didn’t everybody want to talk to her? Wasn’t she the most conversational person anywhere under the sky and didn’t everyone want to sample her glowing pearls of wisdom?

The truth was Thomas hadn’t actually been talking to anyone other than himself. And he frequently did that in the absence of anyone who wasn’t himself to talk to.

“Just myself,” he replied, and added in his customary very rude way, “and I can always talk to myself when I want to and it’s nothing to do with a harridan like you!”

Beatrice was appalled.

Her, a harridan? He deserved to die!

So she loomed over him (being bigger than him in most regions than the cider belly one), and particularly well-breasted.

Which brought on a sharp and unpleasant pain in the region of his heart, and when she put her mouth virtually inside his ear and shouted “call me that again and I’ll do for you, you offensive little snurge!” that pain grew all the bigger until it swamped his chest, ran down his arm right to the tips of his fingers, and proceeded to explode somewhere inside his head.

“I’ve been murdered!” he thought as a farewell to the universe, and, “that was easy!” smiled Beatrice Thinthongle as she walked away, leaving him lying on the pavement, as dead as the long deceased dodo and well murdered by a woman who couldn’t half shout a man’s life out of existence.

And Thomas Delaney never got to church.

© Peter Rogerson 21.03.23

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Reviews

[AYVID N]

Poor Thomas Delaney. Everything went wrong for him right from the start. His fault? He was socially inept and its very true that such a failing can land one in great misery at times. I relate deeply to the protagonist for my own countenance swamps me sometimes and I find most people insufferable and hard to get along with. I'd rather stay away, close up and shut down and save myself from their stupidities. Being socially successful calls for a hell of a lot of patience indeed. Having said that, I still went on to have a flourishing career and relationships after all. So Thomas Delaney, in my view was just a very unfortunate man. And worse still, the way he died was gross. The title of the story was also spot on.

[Bob Carr]

What a read! I couldn't decide whether I liked Thomas or not. Probably not, and yet there was some sympathy for him. And I wondered how it would all end. Thanks for the read.

[Peter Rogerson]

Thanks for the comment. I decided to take a title of a novel by Agatha Christie and twist it round!!!