[Section 6 introduces another witness to the attempted murders. The character is loosely based on Jude in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure but could be anyone in modern Britain.]

You don’t get much unluckier than being named

for the traitor who betrayed your savior

after dinner with a kiss. Bullied for being Jewish

when you’re not, bullied for having learning

disabilities, back in the day, when that

wasn’t yet a thing. Bullied

for being weak. Bullied for trying to be strong,

when you stand up & snap & throw a brick back

across the playing field, narrowly missing some kid’s

head. Headmaster yanked you up to his office

and threatened you with a now-illegal thrashing.

Protest was useless. You just said ‘Yes, sir’

over and over again, as he battered platitudes

into your brain. Jude dropped out

of school after disappointing O level results

and got a job on a building site. Paddies ragged him

and he ragged them back, with uplifted middle-

finger, tending the concrete mixer.

Jude would trudge back to his DSS funded bedsit

and attempt to write verse;

hang out in bars; met a girl. Jessie

had dribble issues, owing to her high functional

spina bifida, and a serious problem with the booze.

Jude picked her up out of a pool of vomit outside the pub

and took her home. They fucked. Another child was born.

*

Jessie was not the stuff parents

are supposedly made of; nor Jude.

After birth, Jessie flipped; tried to drown the baby

in the baby bath; came after Jude,

cowering in the cupboard under the stairs,

with a kitchen-knife, calling Satan,

mouth frothing as she dug the blade deep

into the cheap chipboard of the cupboard door.

Police and NHS hospital staff struggled to stuff her

into a wailing waiting ambulance and whisk her away.

*

Jude had little in the way of regular income

and a somewhat wayward lifestyle,

as the family court magistrate finally put it.

And Baby Jess was thus duly carted off into care.

*

The scaffolding around the steeple looks Medieval. Some

privatized, some perilously propped up by priests and prayer,

collection plates and the national lottery. The church

totters out over Salisbury Plain, no more durable than

Coventry or Stonehenge come the end of days.

Jude looks down upon the tiny city below, and wishes

himself the will to drum up the courage

to throw himself off out

irrevocably down

into this suburban world.

*

Jude trudges past Yu and Da squirming

on the graveyard bench, hunched up

in his dark coat, and shrugs. “What the fuck!

Nothing to do with me.” Jude walks on homeward;

shoves a bag of prawn curry into his microwave

oven and settles down to watch

zombie movies on his DVD.