Letting out the Worms: Guilty or not? If not then the alternative is terrifying (Kitty Thomas Book 1 Sue Nicholls (best short books to read TXT) 📖

judge who, if anyone, is to blame. I’m simply stating that talking can untangle thoughts. In this room I will never criticise you, Paul. This is your life, your pain, I’m just here to help explore your feelings.’ Max cocked his head to one side. ‘If ever you decide I’m not helping, you are at liberty to stop coming.’

‘OK, I get it.’ Paul subsided into the chair, and Max continued.

‘While we’re together, you can say whatever you wish. I understand how you feel, I really do.’ Paul acknowledged with a nod that Max took to be permission to continue. He asked a little about Paul’s background, his childhood, schooling and relationships and got a picture of a stable family, with Paul, a beloved only child. His mum and dad had been proud of their son getting into grammar school. But Paul had not enjoyed school life and expressed a wish that he had gone to the secondary modern with his friends. Max jotted this down.

As he did so, Paul fired, ‘Anyway, why don’t you tell me about your parents?’

For a moment, Max had no words to reply, then he said, ‘We’re here to talk about you, Paul.’

‘Yeah,’ Paul muttered, and poked a finger in his ear, wiggling it around until Max had to look away. ‘But it’s difficult.’ He glanced up. ‘If you told me something about you, it would make it more mutual. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine, kinda thing.’

Max had wrung out every aspect of his childhood during his counsellor training and did not plan to repeat any part of that experience. In a firm voice he said, ‘Sorry, Paul. That’s not the way it works.’

After the session, Paul gave his grudging agreement to attend the following week.

~~~

Paul’s sessions continued, and in time, Max teased from him the story of Fee’s leaving. It was bonfire night and on impulse, Paul had invited the couple next door and their children, who would make the evening more fun for his daughter, Kitty. It had surprised Fee when he arrived home with a carrier bag full of fireworks and broke the news of this invitation. He knew he had annoyed her, but she found sausages and French bread in the freezer. She was good at dealing with the unexpected. After a successful night, Paul was upbeat, until Fee made her announcement. Kitty had gone to bed, so Fee felt free to tell him she had found somewhere to live and planned to take Kitty away with her the following day. She had already packed her belongings and made up a bed in the spare room. When he tried to argue, she refused to discuss the matter further and locked herself into the room.

With little Kitty asleep, he could not bang on Fee’s door, so he roared away on his motorbike, blind to where he was going, and narrowly avoided collision with a juggernaut.

During his sessions with Max, Paul battled with his anger, and Max developed huge admiration for him. Max’s disdain for passionless Fee also grew, and he made careful note of the woman’s habits and tastes.

In time, two other women joined Fee and Kitty in her house. Twitch and Millie brought four more children and left behind two hapless husbands. Max’s empathy for the three men, fuelled by his misogyny, grew until one day found him standing, as Paul had admitted to doing, on a bare patch of flattened earth behind a laurel hedge, watching Fee’s black and white tiled porch. He took a step forward for a better view of a cosy room, just visible between part closed curtains, and his foot came down on something soft. He cursed at the stink of dog shit.

Useless boy.

More details about the three wives emerged: Twitch looked after the children; Fee drove each day in her sleek Audi to further her technical career in Kingsthorpe. Millie had a new enterprise, a restaurant in Chelterton. Thumbnail images of each woman developed in his mind, and with each new detail, there grew in Max an obsessive and terrifying longing to screw them, in every sense of the word. Millie excited him most with her vivacity and love of food. She would be easy to seduce, passionate, funny. He would hurt her through her restaurant, maybe slide something unpleasant into the food.

Then there was Twitch, the child stealer, infecting the children with her middle-class values to alienate them from their fathers. Paul’s description of her was vague until one day, he lost control during a visit to the house in Crispin Road and raped her. In an emotional hour with Max, Paul explained that she had led him on and changed her mind.

Max was stern but could not blame the poor guy, and details of the assault provided him with an invaluable clue to Twitch’s vulnerability.

But Fee became his principal target. Cold, no empathy, buttoned up, unable to love. With these inferred traits, Max saw his own mother, Claudine Owen.

Standing behind the laurel bush among Paul’s discarded dog ends, he watched Fee swing her incredible legs into the footwell of her car. No smile blemished the perfect line of her lips. He would change that, then extinguish it.

17 SAM

When Kitty pushed open Sam’s door carrying a black helmet, he had his back to her, engrossed in a small watercolour. She coughed loudly, and his paintbrush swerved across the paper. He threw it down. ‘You made me jump. And you’ve ruined my picture.’

Kitty grinned. ‘Sorry. You were away with the fairies.’

‘I was working.’ Sam raised his eyes in mock despair. ‘Some people have no respect for art.’

‘I do, but this is more important.’

Sam took in the helmet and his expression grew wary. ‘What’s that thing for?’

‘It’s for you. I thought a ride would be nice.’ She advanced towards him, holding out the helmet, and he