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
MOVING ON AND GROWING UP
By 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.
By now an established member of the fitness and health community in the South East, I continued training, mentoring and encouraging others into the industry, and developing those who wanted to progress further. I am really proud that some of my former protégés now have their own studios or gyms and are all good friends.
My past occasionally reared its ugly head. When I was nominated as a candidate for the local businessman of the year awards by a journalist in my area, my first reaction was not pride, but terror. The other men and women up for the award were all ‘toffs’, I thought, and not the sort of people who would want to sit at a black-tie function with someone like me. I felt quite sure that they would laugh at me when I turned up for the ceremony in my suit and dickey bow and borrowed shiny black shoes! I thought that they would make fun of me. Of course, nothing of the sort happened, because I am not the little scruff I used to be; I have actually become a respectable member of the local business community. This realisation was one of the most surprising that I had ever had, and I was even more astonished to realise that not only did other people respect me, but also that I was beginning to respect myself. For years, I’d had to pinch myself every time something good happened to me. Now, I was beginning to be able to accept my adventures as something I had actually earned.
And there were many adventures. I had long enjoyed watching American Football. Who would have thought that I would enjoy a private box at Candlestick Park in San Francisco courtesy of Silicon Valley billionaire Ray Lane, or attend Calvin Klein’s party on Shelter Island with the owner of a New York-based model agency and some of her clients? How could that little boy, working so hard in the boxing ring, have grown into this tall, confident man teaching master classes at Le Sport in St Lucia and sharing drinks with an old icon of mine, the ‘Green Goddess’ Diana Moran, in the small Caribbean airport (and getting her just a little tipsy)?
There were still times when I was sure that I didn’t belong with all these nice, upper-class toffs and even moments of sheer panic when I thought, I can’t go in there! That’s not for me; they’ll make fun of me. Ian tells the story of when we were first at Le Sport and how convinced I was that I wouldn’t fit in with ‘those sort of people’ – only for him to come down to breakfast the next morning and see that I was already on first-name terms with everyone. I told myself and gradually came to understand that it didn’t matter any more where I had come from and who I had once been. All that mattered now was that I was someone who had worked hard to become a respected professional and that it was perfectly fine for people to like me for myself, because there was no longer any reason for anyone to cross the street when they saw me. I had changed, too. I was no longer attracted to the dark side. I no longer needed to prove myself with my fists and my ability to survive any attack. Although I will always have to go on proving myself, by this stage I knew that there were other, better ways than that.
Yes, life was good. Best of all, I knew that I had worked long and hard for all the good things that I was enjoying and that I deserved them. Although I was nearly forty, I had only just finished growing up – I had done more maturing in the previous four or five years than in the twenty before – and become the adult man that my unresolved past had never allowed me to be before.
Finally, I could see that I did deserve to be happy.
But did I deserve to have someone special in my life, someone who would stay with me always? Well, perhaps… but I hadn’t found her yet.
14
MY HAPPY ENDING
Then I met Jo, a beautiful woman fourteen years younger myself. It was about four years after I had been cleared of GBH and GBH with Intent and I was still living in Essex and working as a senior personal trainer. Jo was one of the clients at a club where I was working at the time. One day, I was putting a client through her paces, having left some equipment in front of a mirror with the intention of picking it up later. Assuming that the barbell was for anyone to use, Jo picked it up and I went over to set her straight. That was our first encounter. We didn’t exchange too many words but I was struck by how pretty she was.
A few weeks later, Jo was training again. I offered her a free training session and got her mobile number. Cunning, eh? Just as we were talking, my mate Ian rang.
‘I can’t talk to you now,’ I whispered into the phone. ‘I’ve just got chatting with a really hot bird.’
But I was already beginning to realise that Jo wasn’t just a hot bird. Shortly after our first date, I invited her to a party. The next day, I took her out again, and after that we started seeing each other every day. I had been seeing two other girls, but I realised that Jo was special and devoted myself exclusively to her. I realised that I could – finally – concentrate on a real, adult relationship based on mutual love and respect. That was eight years ago and, although I didn’t realise it then, it was the beginning of a new life for me. Even after Jo and I started going out, I still thought that I was too old to settle down and become a family man. Fortunately, Jo helped me to see otherwise – plus, she was fourteen years younger than me and obviously keen to have kids herself. I realised that what I felt for Jo was more than enough to make me want to settle down and stop my bachelor ways. Suddenly, it was time to grow up and become what I had never expected: a respectable, middle-class man in a tidy suburb with a pretty partner and two wonderful children.
Where I live today isn’t very far, in geographical terms, from the hell where I grew up. But it couldn’t be further away in terms of environment and atmosphere. Ironically, the money that I got from the Mapperton case gave Jo and me the deposit we needed to buy our family home. Over the years, I had imagined various destinies that seemed possible. I had imagined being a professional boxer. There was a time when I could have seen myself going into security full-time. In my darker moments I had feared that Starling and Coral might have been right about me, and had imagined a life behind bars. This life that I have no
w, in a comfortable family home with carefully groomed lawns and neighbours who wave hello in the morning, is one that I never envisioned – not in a million years.
Jo is the perfect person for me. She is deeply moral. She is from a nice family, she doesn’t like swearing and she really believes in right and wrong in a very straightforward way that is both refreshing and reassuring. Jo has taught me how to behave myself. I was thirty-nine when I met her, and I was sure that I was never going to settle down now, that it was too late for me. Jo showed me that I still had time. On only one occasion has Jo seen the darkness inside me. We were in our car when another driver made me angry. I started yelling and dragged him out of the window of his car. I didn’t hurt him; I just scared him a little bit and then got back into the car with Jo and drove off. Poor Jo was so scared and shocked by what I had done that she started to hyperventilate, and I felt so awful about having upset her that I resolved then and there never to do anything of the sort again. And I never have. Until that moment, reacting with sudden, ferocious anger whenever anyone pissed me off seemed to me to be perfectly normal, rational behaviour. Jo has helped me to see that this behaviour is not rational, and that it is not normal. She keeps me in line. She says, ‘Who cares if he is being rude to you from his car? He isn’t hurting you. Ignore him. Why are you getting so angry?’ And, because I care about what she thinks of me, I listen to her. Thanks to her, I have learned to be able to get angry without acting on that anger.
Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read Page 18