The Marriage Act(104)

‘Please, don’t hurt them. They don’t deserve this.’ Anthony couldn’t take his eyes off Matthew. He would do anything to free him. ‘Just take the memory stick. Have me arrested; I don’t care how long I get.’

‘The stick is now inconsequential. It’s already been remotely erased.’

‘Then why are you doing this?’

He paused between each word. ‘Because. I. Can.’

Matthew’s image faded and a map reappeared, with an alternate destination to the one Anthony had programmed. He looked from the windscreen, only now realizing he was no longer travelling along New Northampton’s roads but the M1 motorway. He pressed the cancel route icon but the map remained unchanged. He jabbed at the rest of the screen and then at the ignition button but the car failed to respond. Instead, it accelerated. It was no longer under his control. As a last resort he yanked at the handles but they wouldn’t open. And the standard toughened safety glass of the windows was impervious to his fists and feet.

‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked as his car both overtook and undertook other vehicles with frightening proximity. Both hands clutched the side of his seat as he willed the car to slow down.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Hyde replied calmly.

‘You’ve taken over my car so you must be sending me somewhere?’

Anthony glanced at the speedometer. It was approaching the 110mph mark. Other autonomous vehicles were moving their occupants swiftly into different lanes to avoid an accident.

‘Henry!’ he shouted.

‘You’re a traitor, Anthony,’ Hyde said. If Anthony didn’t know him better, he might have sensed a touch of melancholy in his tone. ‘To yourself, to your family, to your country and, most importantly, to me. For fifteen years I had your best interests at heart. I was more of a parent to you than your absent father or insane mother ever were. I told myself your crisis of confidence was a blip, an error in judgement, that you’d see sense in the end. And I gave you a second chance, which is not something I make a habit of doing. But I was wrong and you let me down. And I take that very personally. So now it’s Matthew and Jada who will pay for your mistakes.’

‘We can work this out!’ he yelled but Hyde didn’t reply. Anthony repeated his name over and over again, only to be greeted by silence. He was alone.

Thoughts raced through his head of his mother’s short life, how much of his own life he had wasted, the time he should have spent with his family and how, given another opportunity, he would change so much. He could picture so clearly the palm tree-lined beaches of Saint Lucia he’d left behind a lifetime ago and how tantalizingly close they were to being within his grasp.

Instead, Anthony was helpless as the car swerved from the fourth lane into the third, then the second and the first. And, in a flash, he knew where the car was taking him and what Hyde had planned.

Within view was the spot where his mother had finally given in to her psychosis and ended her life. As Anthony’s vehicle ploughed through a crash barrier, his seatbelt remotely ejected.

The next handful of seconds passed too quickly for him to process. He didn’t feel pain as the car collided with the bridge and began to crumple, he felt nothing when he was hurled head-first through the windscreen with a burst of glass confetti. He didn’t feel his shoulder blades and vertebrae shatter as they hit the bonnet. And there was no pain when his head took the brunt of the concrete pillar. By the time his body came to rest on the grass verge, he was already dead.





ACT 3





LIVE – Major towns and cities see protests against the Sanctity of Marriage Act.

Live reporting

13:47pm

Updated 3 mins ago

More than 1.25 million people are estimated to have taken part in today’s anti-Sanctity of Marriage Act march in London, with hundreds of thousands more participating in Manchester, Birmingham, Southampton and Cambridge.

Meanwhile, 125,000 protesters are currently converging in London’s Kennington Park to hear demonstrators speak out against the Government. Organizers are promising bombshell revelations.

Updates as they happen





89


Corrine




Corrine lifted her uniform from a bowl of warm soapy water, wrung it out and placed it on the plastic hanger in the boiler cupboard to dry overnight. Her shifts in the restaurant kitchen had been increased to six this week but her employers only provided two uniforms cut from a material that trapped every odour of the food she re-heated. Every day, she hand-washed and rotated them so that she could turn up for work not smelling of burgers.

The hours were long and the pay was a little over minimum wage, but it was honest, genuine work and paid the rent for her Old Northampton flat. In her spare time, Corrine was rekindling her love of painting and pottery and, each month, she put a little money aside for the use of a small studio in a nearby village. She’d even plucked up the courage to enter some pieces into an exhibition of amateur artists curated by one of her favourites, Elijah Beckworth. He had responded personally and favourably and they were to meet via video later in the week.

Corrine had often used Mitchell’s discouragement as a reason for no longer pursuing her creative side. He made it feel whimsical and apropos of nothing. It was only recently that she’d realized it was unfair to blame him. He had only ridden roughshod over her interests because she had allowed it to happen. He had not been in charge of their marriage. It was one of many aspects of her former life she had picked apart since the divorce. In the end, it didn’t matter, because she couldn’t rewrite the past. She could only ensure she didn’t repeat her mistakes.