The Idiot, the Farmer and Me Ch. 03

"Oh right," said The Idiot Ex with a wise look, "so I s'pose you'd know if there woz any schoolteachers 'round here."

"Absolutely," said Dave, "and you and your Sammy aren't divorced then?"

"Yeah well," said the Idiot Ex, "I did eventually divorce her, 'specially when she was screwing all the 'uvver blokes like."

"Noooo!" said Dave dramatically, "so what does 'your Sammy' look like?"

"Oh she's a fit bird alright - for her age," I wanted to stand up and shoot him whatever Dave was doing but Mel put a restraining hand on mine! "she's got really nice tits and a great arse, shame she's puttin' them both 'abaht too much."

"You mentioned that before," said Dave, "I asked for the description, only my Sammy has fantastic tits and a great arse, only she divorced her ex-husband... his name was Les... that's a strange coincidence isn't it!" Dave grinned manically, "She divorced her husband Les because HE was putting it about," he leaned forward conspiratorially, "Perhaps your Sammy was shagging my Sammy's Les?"

"No..." said the Idiot, "I... err... well..." said the Idiot, things finally starting to make sense, "Are you sayin' that Sammy..." he gulped and took a deep breath and looked up at Dave who was head and shoulders taller, and considerably stronger looking than him, and still had a strong arm around his shoulder. "Well Dave, I must be getting along."

"No!" insisted Dave still hanging on to the Idiot Ex and pulling him along, "you must come and meet my Sammy!"

"Naaah, Tha's alright Dave, I've gotta..." He stopped, "Your Sammy? is her bruvva 'ere?"

"Mike?!" snapped Dave in delight, "YEAH! Do you know him? Sammy!" shouted Dave now dragging the Idiot along with him, "Sammy! Come and meet Les! He's got such a sad story to tell! I think he knows your brother!"

I stood up in the hide just yards from them still with Dave's shotgun with empty barrels I must add, pointing towards my ex-husband's fat belly.

"Hello Les..." I said coldly, "fucking other men was I?" I closed the gun and hefted it to my other arm, only because it was quite heavy.

"Aah... well... I never ACTUALLY said you woz..."

"Yes you fucking did!"

To The Idiot Ex's right was my sister Denise with another shotgun pointing straight at him. Her gun was a scary looking black repeater she had taken from a grinning almost-sister-in-law Melanie who was sat in the same hide, this one was also unloaded I found out later. Denise looked fucking terrifying, with Dave later describing her as 'like a female John Wick but with a great cleavage'.

"Les, this is Sammy's sister Denise!"

"Oh sh..."

I watched, trying hard to keep a straight face at the slowly raising hands and wobbly bottom lip of my arsehole of an ex-husband and my angry sister that had threatened him so often before.

There was a loud blast to our left, from Chrissie and Grampy John who were actually shooting at pigeons over another field and unaware of the revenge piece going on next door and the air was suddenly ripped apart by both of their guns taking a pair each. The Idiot Ex dropped to the ground screaming and from nowhere there was Mike with his huge black auto shotgun, next to him was Paul with a gun borrowed from his brother and finally me, my double-barrelled marriage guidance offer resting on my hip as I walked to where the Idiot lay surrounded by fake pigeon decoys which seemed to have completely passed him by.

"Fuckin' 'ell Sammy, I never meant it Babe!" he cried out looking up at the more than half dozen people all wearing very stern looks, all armed, with their shotguns not pointing at him or, I was to discover later, being loaded and most of them known to him.

It wouldn't have taken a conspiracy theorist to come to the same conclusion that the Idiot Ex did.

"Les?"

He looked up.

"Yeah Sammy?"

"You will fuck off and crawl back under which ever shitty stone it is you've been living under for the last fifteen years and never bother me, Ray, Izzy, Den, Mike, Dave, Ed, or any of these other nice people, d'you hear?"

"Yeah Sammy, o'course Sammy, I woz only comin' to 'pologise like... say sorry for all the grief 'wot Brian and Carl caused."

"Yeah, course you did, like you told Dave that I was fucking other men that's why you divorced me, stand up tosser," I sniffed. "STAND UP!" I snapped and he did so, "Now turn around," he did that trembling like I'd never seen anyone do before, "Now fuck off before these boys blow lumps off of you and serve you to the fucking pigs!"

And as if by magic there was a loud, snorting hog grunt from one of Dave's giant prize porkers in the sty about fifty yards behind us, obviously disturbed by the same blast.

"Fuuuuuuuuuck!" he shouted and turned and slowly walked away, stepping over the pigeon decoys as if they were landmines.

Other than at a Christening some years later that was the last time I saw the Idiot Ex.

All was set for our wonderful barbecue that evening following our pigeon shoot which was very successful with Dave, Mike, Paul, Chrissie and Grampy John getting the most, with Melanie doing very well, Den and I managed a few as well, and adding to the bag of thirty eight was another rabbit and another brace of pheasants.

As we walked back we laughed long and loud over the Idiot Ex, and Melanie's suggestion that the reason he was walking so slowly was that after young marksman Chrissie and Grampy John's dropping of a pair of pigeons each thirty yards from him and entirely in another direction, the Idiot Ex had actually shat himself.

I didn't know, I didn't care.

I played hostess to our families and was overjoyed to see Amy, Julia and her boyfriend Vaughan and my Ray all arriving in his big car. Julia and Vaughan were of course a couple and it looked for a moment like Amy and Ray were as well. Perhaps just acquaintance from the party and the trip I thought initially and really didn't mind.

But no, after Dave had lit the barbie and firepit and we all started to spread ourselves around the huge garden, I saw that Ray was holding Amy's hand! He leaned across and whispered something in her ear, and she giggled, turning to smile at him, then after a long look that could mean only one thing, leaned forward, closed her eyes and kissed him, very slowly.

Izzy, Den and I who had been watching the hand holding with great interest sat with our mouths open at the looks and the kiss.

She later explained that they'd shared some of those 'eyes across a crowded room' things at the wedding reception and a very long slow dance that lasted five or six songs stopped only by the DJ playing 'New York - New York' and turned the lights up.

They kissed goodnight but didn't do anything about it until the next morning when they were both sober enough to even consider a date, both still making big eyes at each other in the large hotel pool.

Amy was struggling to stay contained in bustier cousin Julia's spare strapless swimming costume which stretched once wet, and Ray was enough of a gentleman to offer her his T-shirt to save her embarrassment. She thought that very gallant and her previous night's 'perhaps I might ask him on a date' became 'I have to ask him on a date'.

Ray had been similarly impressed with the dark beauty across from him and stopped her on their walk back to their various rooms and asked the gorgeous if slightly hungover Amy if they could meet for lunch the next weekend (always a cool one my boy!) seeing as she'd already announced she was working late duty during that week.

Free from any familial overwatch they both stood in the corridor drying out a bit as they chatted. She was very pleased and suggested a nice restaurant in Brighton which wasn't too far out of the way for either of them and after some text message chatting they met there, both extremely pleased to see the other and pleased that the other was pleased to see them.

So much so they spent the rest of that weekend in each others company, both able to curse and praise the employer, the Great British National Health Service in equal measure, along with the mountain of other stuff they had in common as they walked along the promenade after lunch arm in arm then holding hands. They ate ice cream and candy floss and, according to a much-besotted Amy, shared their first stolen kiss over lattes near the pier.

They had dinner in a rather pleasant restaurant that was quite close to his place and they spent their first night together before his sister and her cousin were even back from their honeymoon.

I was really pleased; Ray had been out with a few girls but none that I really liked or particularly took to, call it Mum's prerogative. Two of them already had children, one of them I knew from one of our playgroups and had stated that she was just looking out for a bread winner and the father of her next kid - no fucking way!

OK, I was pregnant with him before I married his Idiot father but you always want better for your own children.

That was that; although Amy keeps a room at the farmhouse, to my and Dave's joint surprise she was virtually living with my Ray, and sat around the fire pit and the pool it turned out that she had been for the last month, not telling anyone in their now extended family until they sat together holding hands at the barbecue arranged as a 'getting to know you' for both families!

I was beginning to think that concept now a bit unnecessary - so far Izzy and Ed were married, Dave and I had been sleeping together for almost two months with a similar amount of time for Amy and Ray!

Izzy and Julia dragged her off for further girlie discussions about the whirlwind romance, and Izzy later told me over more hot chocolate that the lovely slender, kind-hearted, dark-hard beauty that was my boyfriend's daughter was head over heels in love with 'our Ray', and these days it's nice to occasionally find him in my kitchen and some of his clothes in the laundry room at the farm that we could all really call home.

I say that because after a wonderful long weekend driving around the country in Dave's camper van, he asked me to marry him.

As we sat overlooking the scenery in the Lake District (first time I'd ever been there) Dave declared his love for the view, adding,

"And I love you even more..."

"What?"

"Sam," he said taking my hand, "I'm in love with you, have been for months now," he kissed me, "Marry me?"

Beaming my biggest cheek-aching grin I just nodded and mouthed a very surprised but joyful 'yes'. We went shopping in Lancaster the next morning and he bought me the most beautiful engagement ring, not like the shit one that the Idiot Ex had given me.

My first engagement ring, so his sister Fay later told me, the Idiot had found in the street a year or so before he'd met me and it was gold and cubic zirconia and when he tried to hawk it he was offered peanuts so he decided to keep it. It must have been too big for the girl that wore it before me and it was too big for me, I lost it swimming in the sea a year later and never told him.

My new ring went perfectly with my new wedding ring of course and I never take it off.

I moved down to the south coast and now live in semi-rural bliss with Dave and Chrissie who I love just as much as his Daddy; when he smiles and calls me Mammy Sammy he giggles - it was all I could do not to cry the first few times.

We married at the church in the village and I asked Grampy John if he would give me away, and he beamed.

His care of me that morning was second to none, and his parental peck on the cheek, squeeze of my arm and whispered, "you look gorgeous Samantha," as he straightened the short veil on my hat as we waited outside was everything I'd missed at my first wedding all those years before and had my first tears rolling. This was only topped by his words to Dave, "I know you'll look after her David..." as he passed my hand to his son-in-law.

Mike was similarly impressed, much happier about this wedding than the first one, especially as I had his daughter Charlotte as my bridesmaid, her having to miss being one at Izzy's wedding because of her leg in plaster falling off a horse. Izzy was there of course holding Charlotte's hand.

Chrissie was best man and following the big day, him and Charlotte are like best friends and constantly messaging each other, when she isn't actually weekending with Auntie Sam and Uncle Dave with the pool that is - her Mum and Dad are generally there too I must add, with shotguns. Mike has started to draw up plans to have a pool built at his place.

After our honeymoon in Rome I said about selling my house, but instead we now rent it out, using the extra income to pay for some more grazing land (get me!) and increased his... no OUR herd of dairy cows.

And yes, of course Denise got together with recently divorced Griff and she and Rory moved in with him in his smallholding and she picks me up on the way through to our still successful playgroup businesses.

She really surprised me one morning when we got to work and she felt sick. When it happened on the second day I jokingly said,

"Bloody hell Den, is that morning sickness."

"Yeah," she said.

While Griff is brilliant at delivering calves, piglets and lambs, even the occasional foal, the arrival of his own child, a son, was far too scary a moment for him and he remained with Dave pacing up and down the corridor at the maternity unit while I held my sister's hand as her second child Patrick was delivered.

And as for the Idiot Ex? Izzy still sees him occasionally and he was invited to the christening for our first grandchild, my gorgeous... sorry IZZY'S gorgeous Amelia.

I hadn't seen him in four years, not since that Saturday afternoon in Dave's field when he was surrounded by people with shotguns. Mike had only to smile and wave at him and make the 'pump action' movement for him to start trembling again.

He was probably two stone lighter and wearing the same crappy suit he'd worn to the wedding and it was hanging off of him. His once dark hair was now thin and greying, and he was a shadow of the man I had married nearly twenty eight years before. His car 'was in the garage for a few days', he said but I didn't believe him. He lived in a flat above a garage and it would have taken a couple of days to get it repaired.

I sat with his sister Fay for a few moments who told me that their witch of a mother had passed away and far from an inheritance she had died without a bean to her name and there was still some outrage that he hadn't chipped in for her funeral, pleading poverty and leaving the majority of the cost that wasn't met by the Social Services grant to her and his other sister.

He'd started with a crow about how much Izzy's wedding has cost him but Fay shut him down on that straight away because she knew that Ed and Izzy had funded everything with a grand from me and a similar amount from Paul and Gwyn. Money from The Idiot Ex had been noticeable by its absence.

If fact the Idiot Ex had pleaded poverty his whole life; when we were first married and I was earning we never seemed short and I picked up some part time work after Ray was born cleaning, working behind the bar at the club, at the Asda supermarket, and once I started to bring in money, HIS poverty pleading started and went on, and on, and on.

The problem was that kind of trading that he had done was now virtually non-existent. He tried working the markets but wouldn't pay a pitch fee on principle preferring to hang around the edges on market days. When he tried to set up his pitch or his barrow on the outskirts the police, the council or Trading Standards Officers soon had him on his way.

More than that people just didn't want to buy the shit he was selling for the price. The kind of thing he sold for a fiver could now be bought in the high street for a couple of quid, with the option to take it back when it eventually fell apart. Fay told me that he'd had to let two of his three lock-ups go when his direct debits failed.

As well as that he was just getting old. He was heading for his fifties but looked much older and far from the dark haired, slightly charming man that could screw his way around the easily charmed women at the club, those days were gone. He was lonely, tired, bitter and the world he grew up in and loved was disappearing in a whirlwind of 'pile it high, sell it cheap' European supermarkets, Pound shops and a little thing called the internet, the new best place to sell stolen goods.

Not old enough to retire in a country where it was increasingly difficult to claim benefits he was in the shit. His landlord knew him of old and gave him the benefit of the doubt for a few months until the Idiot was finally able to claim housing benefit and was now getting many of his meals courtesy of a food bank.

When Izzy met him to introduce him to his granddaughter she saw that his cousin Jaynie was there so perhaps he wasn't as lonely as we thought.

He told her that he'd set up a business with Brian buying and selling whatever they could. This was because Brian was now at a loss seeing as Carl, his partner in crime - literally - had been sent to prison for an offence two days into his early release for good behaviour from his most recent stretch.

He was trying to burgle a large shop in the high street. Thinking it was the back of a closed supermarket full of fags, booze, shampoos and conditioners and other really cool and ultimately sellable things he climbed the fence and put in a small window of what turned out to be the butchery department just along from the bakery.

While any other shop would have been empty at four in the morning, a butchers and bakers was bound to be full of staff; Carl didn't realise that, thinking perhaps that meat came in shrink wrapped in those polystyrene trays and bread was all in plastic bags.

Finding himself surrounded by a dozen big lads, half of them bloodstained, and one bloodstained woman he decided to fight his way out and grabbed a knife, shouting "fuckin' caahm on then you wankahs, I'll 'ave the fuckin' lot of yah!"

A bad move, as the first and biggest butcher grabbed the knife with a chain mail protected hand and decked the would-be thief with a huge arm used to lugging large lumps of cow and pig around, and his colleagues soon joined in.

Carl grabbing the knife and his loud challenge was an 'aggravation' to the burglary and despite his two black eyes, broken nose, fractured hand, fractured wrist and dislocated shoulder, this was technically his 'third strike' (the thirtieth or fortieth really) but it was enough to get him sent away for six years, after more time was added for him assaulting the prison officer in the remand centre he was sent to.

I still shudder when I think that had the fishwife not outed the Idiot Ex and his multiple shaggings on that horrible Friday night all those years ago, had Mike not defied our father and chosen the armed forces over armed robbery, had I not moved off, up and out, there was a very good chance my gorgeous Izzy could now have been married to Carl, had half a dozen kids, been working as a cleaner and would be sitting in 'the Club' on Fridays with a regular black eye whenever she disagreed with him.

Thank fuck for fishwives; and thank fuck for good looking sexy Farmers!