The Day my Body Broke Down

Fiction | Milo

This is a very short passage influenced by a section in Mike Tyson's autobiography about the moment when he knew he was done as a fighter.

There’s nothing like a fight to make you less aware of the gap between yourself and other people, because in a fight it doesn’t exist. Right now this guy, this fucking guy is beating the living shit out of me and there is no clear point where I end and he begins. His fist is lodged just below my ribs and my right arm is clasped tightly over his, holding him in place. I latch his other arm beneath my left arm and we are standing and shuffling in the ugliest sort of hug, before the ref comes in and pulls us apart. It achieved little because as soon as we are pulled apart I am on him again and I walk him to the ropes, my arms over his neck as I lean down on to him and I can hear him struggling to breath. He pushes back and nails me with a jab to the gut and a hook that grazes my temple. He follows up with a double hook to my left eardrum and all I can hear is white noise, much like the sound of a broken TV. It’s very hot, I think he burst my eardrum. The referee is now in my face and shouting something at me, he is pointing behind me.   

“Corner, back!” Is all I can make out and as I turn around I see that my team has the stool out and are fiddling with their other tools. I avoid sitting down but I am forced to sit, they shouldn’t have made me sit because I am not sure I will be able to stand up.  

“You are getting tagged with that hook to the body too easily, stop staying in the fucking pocket if you’re not going to punch back. Hey, hey are you with me?” My guy is shouting instructions at me, but his face tells me he’d rather be taking advice than giving it. Why do I have these bums in my corner? My ear fucking hurts. I hurt all over. They don’t understand why I’m not punching back, and I can’t explain it to them. I’m too exhausted. The bell goes and I am sent back out, they should be calling off the fight but they don’t know me well enough to call it off. I feel close to death. These bums in my corner, they’ve probably already got my obituary written and made agreements with some lawyer about how they can monetise it. I live wild, they know I’ll likely die on their watch. I get tagged again, and again and my mouth is full of blood. I look at his corner as though they can somehow help me, he hits me on my belt line and I drop to my knees holding my crotch. He didn’t hit me there, but I need to do anything to get away from him. People boo. I punch the canvas in frustration, everything I am doing is a second too slow, this guy isn’t as good as I am making him look but I’m firing blanks. All those wild years…they’ve finally caught up with me. I get up and the referee doesn’t give me any time at all to recover, this guy digs into my body and I fall again to my knees but this time it is for real. I quit.    

Y1 > 68 (Robin D'Souza)

Fiction | Milo

The following short story was inspired by out podcast episode on time travel. This is the second short story in my time travelling series, if you feel like going back in time for yourself, click this link to read the first story.

 A Brief History of Mallett Mail (MM)

• In the year 2020 advances in our understanding of inertial frame dragging led to the funding of a variety of experiments into the possibility of delineating time, or “time travel”, inspired by Ronald Mallett’s paper Weak Gravitational Field of the Electromagnetic Radiation in a Ring Laser.   
• Following a number of successful experiments, the US military began investigating the martial uses of Mallett’s theories. This led to the creation of Mallett Mail (MM), a programme capable of receiving coded messages from a sender located in the future. Its interface was similar to any basic email software, albeit lacking in the ability to send messages.   
• The first MM transmission was received on Sunday 29^th January 2033, and it contained instructions on how to create the necessary software required to send messages.  
• MM’s were repurposed for mass production and commercial use in the year 2067. 
• This eradicated linear conceptions of time as we know it, and our current strict adherence to mathematically proper 'years' returned to the hazy, pragmatic timekeeping of medieval times. In this way, what would have been the year 2068 was instead known as Year 1 after the Year 2068 or Y1 > 68.  It was also necessary for two new days of the week to be created; “Thisday” refers to the current and accepted chronology of one’s life, whereas “Thatday” refers to one’s assumed history before MM communications “splintered” their timeline. 
• Therefore identifying the "actual" year that you were in was a task left to bankers, philosophers and mathematicians. For everybody else “Thisday”, or “Thatday” sufficed. 

This is where our history of the future begins, sometime in the early Spring of Y1 > 68.    

Robin D’Souza had two problems that should have been easy to solve were it not for his lack of self-awareness, and so as problems they remained. He was a man who had more qualifications than birthdays, and more job titles than sick days. There was no doubt that he worked hard, but much like a headless chicken, he bled himself dry on circular endeavours that achieved little. His first problem was his lack of wealth; in his heart he was a millionaire but his bank balance rarely peeked above a solitary grand. His second problem was that he didn’t really understand how to become wealthy, despite it being the one thing he cared about above all else.  

   Robin didn’t realise that qualifications in and of themselves meant very little if you couldn’t show you possessed the skills they claimed. A two-week seminar on “Selling to the Un-sellable”, or a “Beginner’s Doctorate in Employee Management” were simply gibberish to anybody not teaching or participating in the course itself. Nevertheless, as Robin spent most of his time and money on these courses his continued patronage convinced him that he would eventually get back the time and money he had spent. To the more discerning of observers, it is clear that this is a poor way to invest in oneself.  

   His next calculated “self-investment” was a little more suspect than he even he would normally go for, but he was bored and desperate. He’d also had another argument with his father about the ongoing failure that was his adult life, and so he pursued this particular course with a renewed fervour. The course in questions was titled: “Mallett Machine’s and Money: Learn how the Past Can Make Money for YOUR Present!” It claimed that after a two-day weekend course, you would know how to use MM’s in financially astute ways. In capital letters at the bottom of the website it listed the following shortcuts to success:

WIN THE LOTTERY

PLAY THE STOCKMARKET LIKE A SEASONED PRO

THE HOUSE DOESN’T ALWAYS HAVE TO WIN!

What was quite clear was that the course wasn’t about using MM’s for business as much as it was about using MM’s to cheat.

   Once Robin had finished the course, he felt that familiar rush of adrenalin that this indeed would be the one that kick-started his life of luxury. He immediately purchased a Mallett Machine following the weekend and got to work on using the methods outlined in the course; methods that cannot be repeated here because it would be both immoral and illegal to do so. In brief he sent a message to himself, once a couple of lottery draws had passed, detailing the winning numbers of a lottery draw. Now legitimate lotteries had been abandoned since the invention of the Mallett Machine, because MM’s made high profile draws too complicated to organise. This resulted in the popularisation of underground lottery draws and gambling firms that were yet to, but ultimately would, be outlawed. The organisers of these draws knew how to manipulate the draws using MM’s ensuring that the naïve and addicted would never earn a penny from their games. Robin, with his Mallett Machine, had joined that ignoble group of people.

   Once Reuben had awoken, however, and experienced the inertia of affecting one’s past with an MM he found the last few months to be a vague memory, and his present to be of a sort he hadn’t anticipated. Following the course, he had returned home to find a list of numbers on his MM interface, and as was the plan he had gone online to submit their numbers. However, in order to sign up for the website, he had to submit his credit card, address, security number, sort code and account number. Unfortunately for Robin, he had been scammed and within minutes didn’t have a penny to his name.

   After this had happened a great panic swept him, and he considered, no matter how briefly, getting on a plane to a random location and starting his life over. This would have been impossible, seeing as he was broke. Once he’d had a chance to recover from the embarrassment he contacted his bank and credit card provider, before being advised to call an identity fraud charity for further advice and protection. He did this and got more than he bargained for, as his chat with the advisor revealed that he had been a victim of numerous scams throughout his life, and the conversation nearly brought him to tears. In the months that followed he would volunteer with the charity, before receiving a full time job and finally finding a sense of inner wealth that matched his avarice. It wasn’t that he was a changed man over night, but that his millionaire dreams gradually stopped clawing their way into his everyday life.  

Wet Floor

Fiction | Milo

Courtney’s father was a very busy man, so busy in fact that many of her memories of him existed in a written rather than verbal form. Every Happy Birthday! was reduced to a birthday card, every Congratulations! a sticky note on the fridge, and whilst these hurt Courtney she gradually grew to tolerate his absence on those milestone days. He worked for a company who operated as a proxy for another dozen or so companies, and so his job title was a vague melange of nouns that meant little to outsiders. She knew that he imported and exported large quantities of penicillin into and out of South America, before switching to tyres out of Germany, and then trucks and other heavy machinery through Taiwan. She would have asked him about every aspect of his job, were he around to answer her questions and willing to answer her phone calls.

   What Courtney couldn’t understand, however, were the inane and oddly specific species of notes and memos her father left around their home. Sometimes dates would be circled on the kitchen calendar that meant nothing to anyone but him, and they all knew he wouldn’t be home for it to act as a reminder. Some days he would be gone before anyone awoke and a note would be on the fridge to "buy more milk", other days it was to apologise for finishing the cereal. Of all these notes, however, the one that bothered Courtney the most was one that simply said: WET FLOOR. Wet floor? She tore it from the fridge and ranted to her mother about it for a few hours; why did he leave such a stupid and silly note? If he was forced to leave a note, surely the floor would be dry by the time anyone was around to see it, making it redundant? If not, he surely could have waited to tell one of them in person that the floor was wet? To an extent she could understand his inability to attend family celebrations, because these required time, planning and for him to miss his flights abroad, however she couldn’t accept that anybody could be so busy as to need to leave a note warning about a recently mopped floor. Her indignation was such that she called him to complain, however, as was to be expected he never answered the phone. 

   When Courtney’s father landed after a long flight lasting many hours, he casually checked his mobile phone. He saw a missed call from their home phone and listened to the voicemail, and what he heard was a five minutes long admonishment from his eldest daughter. He sighed as he deleted the message and continued on his way, too busy to contend with another argument that would slide into shouting. What he was too busy to admit to himself, however, was that he left such notes around the house because he was afraid of being forgotten. For months at a time he would be abroad only to return to see a young lady where before had been a girl, and whilst she had grown up without a father he hadn’t grown at all since she had been a child. He was afraid of his own inability to connect with a woman he didn’t really know at all, but in a twisted sort of way needed to do something to keep her asking for him. So being the selfish and puerile man that he was, he found ways to ensure his daughter would always slip if she tried to run away from him.           

Y1 > 68

Fiction | Milo

The following short story was inspired by out podcast episode on time travel. I like the idea of making this into a series, but it's not something I'm looking to force. We shall just have to see what happens...I'm sure there's a bad joke in there "travelling to the future" but whatever.

 A Brief History of Mallett Mail (MM)

• In the year 2020 advances in our understanding of inertial frame dragging led to the funding of a variety of experiments into the possibility of delineating time, or “time travel”, inspired by Ronald Mallett’s paper Weak Gravitational Field of the Electromagnetic Radiation in a Ring Laser.   
• Following a number of successful experiments, the US military began investigating the martial uses of Mallett’s theories. This led to the creation of Mallett Mail (MM), a programme capable of receiving coded messages from a sender located in the future. Its interface was similar to any basic email software, albeit lacking in the ability to send messages.   
• The first MM transmission was received on Sunday 29^th January 2033, and it contained instructions on how to create the necessary software required to send messages.  
• MM’s were repurposed for mass production and commercial use in the year 2067. 
• This eradicated linear conceptions of time as we know it, and our current strict adherence to mathematically proper 'years' returned to the hazy, pragmatic timekeeping of medieval times. In this way, what would have been the year 2068 was instead known as Year 1 after the Year 2068 or Y1 > 68.  It was also necessary for two new days of the week to be created; “Thisday” refers to the current and accepted chronology of one’s life, whereas “Thatday” refers to one’s assumed history before MM communications “splintered” their timeline. 
• Therefore identifying the "actual" year that you were in was a task left to bankers, philosophers and mathematicians. For everybody else “Thisday”, or “Thatday” sufficed. 

This is where our history of the future begins, sometime in the early Spring of Y1 > 68.    

Roger Love had two problems that should be easy to solve were it not for his misplaced sense of masculinity, and so as problems they remained. His first problem was his promiscuous nature and easy, guiltless guile that made one night stands a night club away. His second problem was his disdain for sexual protection, whether that of the physical kind or the medicinal kind. A pill had long since been developed that rendered men temporarily infertile, and yet Roger wasn’t a fan. In his words they “took the bang out of the firework”.  

    Now Roger Love carried on with his laisser-faire approach to casual sex long past the point of social acceptability, and with his stated disinterest in responsible sex, ended up with a bevy of illegitimate children. The first two were tough enough to handle, but then a series of twins made him rethink his current lifestyle. It wasn’t long before Roger started to wonder how many children he had fathered across the capital, across the country and on his very many trips abroad. In a sudden moment of awkward shame, he realised the extent of his crimes when he discovered in the middle of an interview that the candidate who sat before him was his own daughter. Her twin was waiting for her in the car outside. He decided that employing his own children was a weird sort of surrogacy for parenthood, and was much like, in his own words, “eating fish without chips” and so enough was enough. He was finally going to behave like a responsible adult, get on the phone and send an MM imploring himself to swallow the damn pill instead. In his fevered discomfort he was quite hasty in his MM, and ignored the most common FAQ’s regarding life and death. It was after all common knowledge that MM’s merely splintered your history, and instead of having a single experience of events you had double. If he’d had the courage to form a relationship with his youngest son, he would have informed him that MM’s led to second chances that were like “lives” in a video game. On the one hand whilst your most recent play through becomes the “official” one, you would still remember every failure up to that point and every failure would still be built into your overall score at the end of the game.   

                

    Roger sent himself a message imploring himself to use protection during the sexual encounters that he had known to yield children. He considered the wording a number of times before deciding that he, being himself, would get it and so sent it without too much duress. The successful arrival of the MM resulted in the customary moment of “remembering” what had now constituted the last two decades of his life. Thatday became Thisday, and his many illegitimate children were no more, at least they were no more to his conscious self. Every so often he would have a vague sense of déjà vu when entering a place he hadn’t realised he’d entered or could recite the theme songs of children’s shows he never knew he had watched.  

                

    Another two decades had passed and Roger’s mindless hedonism caught up to him, and he found himself at death’s door at the unfortunate age of 94 when most men lived until 120. His last days were spent in a care home, watching with dry, itchy eyes the coming and goings of families visiting his neighbours. With night came the ever potent visions of his children who had never come to be, and through the echo of his genes he could see the life that they had lived without his conscious self. He saw his eventual reconnection with them; he saw him holding with bashful excitement a grandchild who could have been his own son. He saw in the bathroom mirror his children visiting him in this very same care home, and he saw his life extend for a further five years in an emotional state resembling a placid, meek sort of contentment. But alas these times did not belong to his conscious self. When it soon became clear that no one was coming to visit, and when he was the most senior of senior citizens in the ward he applied for a “peaceful injection” as was his legal right with the passing of the Euthanasia Act.  

                

    The old man’s hand quivered with age as he eased himself into the seat that sat across from the physician and the therapist. The latter asked him to confirm his reasons for his decision, and he replied that living without loved one’s was akin to “drinking punch with no alcohol”. The former then told him that he could live for a few years yet with the right healthcare plan, and that he could always try sending another MM. The therapist informed him that too many people stopped sending MM’s out of a sense of futility that was often proved false. Roger laughed at this because he had not been one of those people, he had sent numerous messages as his health declined, messages that had fallen on a younger Rogers death ears. A younger Roger who had fallen deeper into his lascivious ways once he had learned to embrace the pill and so couldn’t care less about these so called projections of loneliness. The two sighed, aware that he had made his decision and asked if any arrangements needed to be made for his imminent passing. He replied: “death with too much planning, is like sex with protection. I’d rather be surprised and let the pieces fall where they may, than feel the cold calculation of a life so weighed.”

    In this way a morally wayward Roger died a now pensive yet still morally wayward Roger; his dying visions of the things he was yet to do, rather than the things he had Thisday done.            

The Weight of Things Removed Chapter 2 (Part 1)

The Weight of Things Removed | Novel | Milo

Chapter 2 (Part 1)

“What’s wrong?” Leonard heard Marianna say, and her voice was coarse and suffocated by the pillows she spoke into. He rolled around and looked at his half-sleeping wife fondly, watching anxiously because he wanted to talk but he didn’t want to actively wake her up. Perhaps she sensed his nervous energy, because she shortly raised her head from the pillow and winced at him with heavy lidded eyes.

“We can talk about it in the morning,”

“Really? After all of your fidgeting, twisting and turning you want to talk about it tomorrow?” She asked, clearly unimpressed with his attempt at being considerate.

“You know me, when I’ve left something unfinished I can’t stop obsessing over it until I’ve sorted it out.”

“But I though today was quite productive?” She yawned as she raised herself onto her elbows, and turned on the lamp with a lazy outward swing of her left arm. They both winced at the sudden brightness.  

“We need to buy more lightbulbs, using lamps is stupid and lazy,” she commented amidst another yawn, and Leonard found himself yawning as well.

“Today was productive but I never got around to replying to Alby’s request, I ignored it and I never ignore commissions…” 

“Well that’s easy to fix; hop on the laptop, send him an email and then we can get back to bed. Sorted!”

“Alright let me grab the laptop, actually can you pass it to me? It’s on the table,” he queried as he pointed it out to her and she handed it over to him. He popped it open, typed in the password and opened up his email account in their chosen browser. He dimmed the screen slightly as it was garishly bright, due to the tepid lighting of their bedside lamp. Marianna watched him expectantly, and he could feel her glare switch from casual interest to mild annoyance as he dallied with the email. He typed sentence after sentence before pressing the backspace, and then typing another one before selecting all of the text and deleting it in one censorious swoop.

“I was going to tell him that I can’t do it, but he’s been good to me and I don’t really have a good reason to turn him down. Plus, we’ve been working on this textbook together for some time, so I wouldn’t want to leave this project unfinished.”

“Ok…so you’re going to accept it?”

“I think so, give me a second to type this up. Do you mind checking it over before I send it?” He asked as he typed away and she shrugged nonchalantly in reply. Once he was finished, he cleared his throat and read aloud:

“Dear Alby. I can take on this assignment straight away, and I shouldn’t need any longer than usual to complete it. However I did know some of the people involved in this case, so please let me know if that’s a problem. Thanks. Leonard.”

“Perfect! Now can we get back to bed?”

“Definitely, thanks a lot,” he replied, feeling infinitely more relaxed than when his head had first touched the cool, blue pillow. He started to find his groove within the mattress again, and allowed his eyes to steady and close of their own accord. He heard the click of the lamp as he filtered his thoughts, leaving only ridiculous and pleasant things such as his eventual lottery win. However just as his eyes had settled behind his eyelids, and that gooey stillness had restrained his limbs, Marianna suddenly turned on the lamp.  

“Why did this stress you out so much?” She asked with an almost angry expression on her face, or else one might have assumed she was angry had they not realised it was tiredness which hardened her eyes, and wrinkled the arch of her nose.

“I’m not really sure, I just felt like it was weird writing about people I used to know. Normally I just read up on the case, put it down on paper and then that was that-”

“But you don’t think you’ll be able to move on from this one do you? Then why on earth are you doing it?”

“Because it’s already become something that I can’t ignore.” He replied as he rolled onto his back in order to look up at the white ceiling, and it suddenly occurred to him that he’d never seen a ceiling painted any other colour. 

“I guess I can understand your hesitation now, you’re afraid of things becoming personal. Then again this might all be for nothing because if Alby has a problem with you knowing these people, he’ll have to offer the assignment to someone else,”

“We’ll find out in the morning if he does.”

“Sure,” she uttered drearily before turning off the lamp again, however they continued aimlessly chatting to each other as neither was quite sleepy enough to fall asleep. Eventually their chatter flowed back to the most pressing matter at hand, Alby’s commission.

“What happened in the case, you said it was manslaughter right?”

“All I can remember is that a friend of mine’s son died of an asthma attack. A boy I used to go to school with was arrested for it, because it was somehow his fault. I can’t really remember all of the details to be honest, because by that point we swam in different circles, so I wasn’t really close enough to her to ask her for a break down. I’ll just have to do my research to figure out what specifically happened.”      

“So one person you used to know effectively killed somebody else you used to know? Ugh gives me Goosebumps, there’s something extremely unsettling about murder.”

“I know right! Hence my discomfort,”

“Well at least it’s not a bad case…”

“A child died Marianna!”

“Oh don’t get all high and mighty, you know what I meant by that. All crimes are horrible, and all deaths are tragic. I’m just saying that at least it wasn’t an especially gruesome murder or sexually motivated or whatever you know?”

“Right,” Leonard acquiesced as the two finally, and quite rapidly, fell asleep. They were folded together at the legs and split from their waists upwards, much like a distended tuning fork. Leonard’s arm hung off of the bed as both of Marianna’s cradled and propped up her own cheeks.

Once the morning had arrived Leonard found himself alone in bed as was usual, he was a notoriously heavy sleeper and so Mariana’s early mornings rarely stirred him. Leonard stretched and yawned as he stumbled towards his computer, before suddenly coming to full wakefulness with the conspicuous ‘1’ that blinked atop his inbox. Alby had replied. Leonard eagerly clicked on the email, however what greeted him was an anti-climactically short and pithy response.

 

Hi Leonard,

Don’t worry about that it’s not a problem at all. Also we’re waiting on a few other essays to be formatted and edited, so you actually have a few more days than you normally would!

Alby

He was dumbstruck after reading it, and felt somewhat silly as though he had over exaggerated the entire situation. Maybe he had? After all people died all the time even if some of those people happened to be children, and some of those deaths happened to be murders; it happened all the time. However, this trail of thought only served to further dismay Leonard as he felt quite uneased by his attempt at normalising the case of R Vs Ayodele. It seemed bizarre and unhealthy that he would try to treat such a thing as normal or commonplace, regardless of whether it was. Leonard wondered if it was normal. He wondered deeply and as he cleaned up their bed and slumped in the shower, the same ponderous expression marked his face as suds skimmed his eyes and the toothpaste spumed his lips. A sudden curiosity and eagerness possessed him and, as he ate his breakfast in front of his laptop, he ran a quick Google search on the number of childhood deaths over the last year. He scanned the numbers before deciding that skimming around the issue wasn’t going to eliminate his sudden discomfort, and so he rationalised his task to himself as follows: 

People die. Some of those people happen to be children. Human history tells us some of those people have to be children. Lawyers help to ensure that such deaths are not mysterious, and that where human interaction has ended a life, proper steps can be taken to prevent similar deaths occurring in the future. Writing a paper on the death of a child is not exploitative, it is helping to prevent further, and similar, circumstances by preparing future lawyers.

He wasn’t entirely convinced by his arguments but felt pacified and had lost the immediacy of his discomfort; it was still there but it was now boring and stale. Unless he willed it, he wouldn’t feel it. Satisfied he set to researching the case of R Vs Ayodele so that he might use it as a case study for his manslaughter assignment. Manslaughter. So it might have actually been an accident after all, a gross, complicated accident but an accident all the same. This realisation helped to further still the swirling sickness he had felt since receiving the commission, and he set to researching it with his acquired sense of professional disinterest.  

                Leonard had a very specific method when carrying out his research, and it was a method he had developed during university when he had used to write “bespoke” essays for other students. It had been a mildly immoral form of self-employment, that had paid better than minimum wage at the time. Nevertheless, what he found as a young plagiariser was that ideas tended to bleed together, or rather, that essay writing was a balancing act. The researcher has to utilise the ideas of others without also stealing their thrust and energy, whilst simultaneously using them honestly without warping them to suit their own interests. This task was further complicated by the fact that he had often found himself writing multiple essays, in multiple disciplines, at the same time. Two concurrent ‘commissions’ particularly put this balancing act to the test, and over the course of a weekend he had to write an essay on Skinner’s theory of behaviourism for both a philosophy and a psychology undergraduate. The method he used to write these essays was perfected on that balmy October night, as he was warmed by hot coffee and tomato soup and his nose hung heavy with the cold. The first step was to look at a relevant essay on the subject, whilst avoiding the source material if possible. He managed to find an essay in an anthology that lent itself to both student’s questions, and printed two copies. He highlighted all the relevant areas in green for the philosopher, and in yellow for the psychologist. Following this he then turned each highlighted section into a single sentence which answered each question, before expanding each of these sentences into a paragraph. The final step was to thread these disparate paragraphs into a single essay, and by this point he had a number stock phrases which made the soldering even quicker. All in all, this method of essay writing usually guaranteed a 2:2, and allowed him to write three to five essays in the time it would take most students to finish one. If there was a drawback to the method, it was that he rarely remembered any of the curious facts he had picked up throughout the course of writing the essay, nevertheless it had served him well. It was in this way that Leonard spent the next hour as he broke apart legal documents and local newspaper reports on the matter, before reconstructing them as a unique and original essay on manslaughter. He began by isolating a number of key sentences which he could then turn into paragraphs, and these key sentences were as follows: 

1. Paul "Paulie" Ayodele kidnapped Karim Goss with the understanding that he could use the act to force a confession from Marta Goss, regarding her knowledge of his abuse at the hands of his father.
2. Karim Goss died of an asthma attack whilst being held against his will in Paulie Ayodele’s cellar. 
3. The case was ruled as an act of involuntary manslaughter due to P. Ayodele’s lack of knowledge about K. Goss’ medical condition. 
4. The defence tried to argue that K. Goss would not have been at risk had his asthma been properly managed by M. Goss. 
5. P. Ayodele was twenty years old at the time of the offense and so was granted custody for life, with a minimum term of fourteen years.       

Sentence number five caused Leonard to stop and think about the consequences of a fourteen-year stint in jail, especially at the age of twenty. This of course meant that Paulie would be thirty-four years old, at the youngest, whenever he was deemed fit and healthy to return to mainstream society. Indeed, he would still be in prison now, doing whatever it is that prisoners happen to do to while away the time. He cupped his hands over his face as he billowed his cheeks with the shock of the thought, after all as a young father he couldn’t imagine missing the next fourteen years of Marley’s life. He thought about the young man he had been at twenty, and that person had been an indecisive, embryo of a man. There had been days when he had a bloated confidence and knowledge well beyond his years, and others when the thought of getting on a train by himself brought him to tears. Days when he had felt strong and independent, and others when sitting in a café alone was the most embarrassing thing he could do. Had he done anything back then to warrant an arrest? At the least his career as a second class plagiariser certainly warranted expulsion from his university, and he suddenly grasped the enormity of being caught in the act. Leonard swivelled in his seat in a bid to settle his Tetris-like thoughts, and to ensure that the right shapes fell into the right holes.
   

The death of a child is a serious offense even if it is an accident, even if it happens every day, even if it was a young, young man who caused it; it is a serious offense all the same. It is not comparable to assisting a few lazy undergrads with their cheating ways. Imagine if Marley had been Karim? What is fourteen years in prison compared to death before one’s fourteenth birthday?

End of Chapter 2 (Part 1)

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