Paradise Lost

As Kirea sat there on the park bench the wind blowing her long blonde hair around her perfectly rounded face with the rosy red cheeks, she watched the young bots with their hair – some long, some short – dancing in the wind as they played rugby.  She thought about her younger brother whom she dared not talk to in case of an argument and how she knew their father would side with him as he always did.  Her bright blue eyes then swivelled to a pair of older men – at least in their fifties – sauntering along the park path in front of her, so emerged in their discussion that they didn’t notice the beautiful blonde girl who could easily be a model sitting on the park bench right in front of them.  As they passed Kirea’s thoughts turned to her father with his fiery temper and evil nature especially when it came to furthering her education.





The park in which she was sitting was beautiful.  The trees and grass were green with birds singing and squirrels chattering playfully around her.  In the large pond just behind where she sat, young children were giggling and laughing as they through bread into the water.  She dared not look at them because she feared that they would bring back memories of when she and her mother would go down to the pond.  That, of course was before her mother had got leukaemia, refused the chemotherapy and died a few months later.  After that happened Kirea began to feel like she had no place the world.  She tilted her head up and stared at the beautiful blue sky and the leaves in the trees rustling gently in the breeze.  While she did her thoughts went to her mother and whether or not she was watching her from heaven.





Around five minutes later her phone began to ring with the funeral march, which happened to be the personalised ring for her “all loving” father.  “Hello,” she answered in a timid voice, not knowing what was going to be coming next.  “Where the F**KING hell are you, you useless piece of shite?!?!? You were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago!!” her father roared from the other end. ‘O shit, I forgot about that,’ thought Kirea.  ‘I’m going to have to think on my feet here!’



“Father,” Kirea said hesitantly. “I am on my home now as we speak, it’s just that the traffic is really bad and I am having trouble getting my bike round it all.”



“Fine,” was the only reply she got before the line was disconnected and she was left in the middle of a park in central New York with no offer from her father to come and collect her from where she was supposedly stuck in traffic. 





Lucky for Kirea she used to be a school champion at cycling.  That was, of course, until her father had stopped her from doing it because he said ‘that it was a waste of time and that the time could be spent doing something useful like doing the dishes, cleaning the house or washing the clothes and not something that will waste her time and take her nowhere in life.  All the things that women are made for!’ 



‘Well here we go again’ sighed Kirea, stood up, jumped on to her bike and started going as fast as she could hoping and praying – even thought she was not at all religious – that the traffic would be in her favour and she would be able to get home quite quickly so that her father would not rant and moan at her any more that he was already going to.  It only took her ten minutes to get home even with the heavy New Yorkian traffic blocking all the main roads and all the little side roads which were perfect to use in an emergency to get from one place to another.





As she rounded the corner to her father’s house she thought about how much longer she may have to wait for her father to come round to her way of thinking and allow her to go off to a college or university somewhere so that she may have a fighting chance of getting somewhere in life when she is older.  She stopped just outside her father’s house and looked at the three story building she imagined that there was a gathering of heavy black storm clouds brining down not only the rain and thunder but also her father’s blind, maddening fury because she was so very late home.  She pushed open the old, rickety gate and started to push her bike up the destroyed path that at one time may have been perfect and useable but that now looked like a drunken giant had stumbled up them crushing them all as it went.  She lay her bike down on the ground and jumped over the bits of scrap metal and destroyed cars that infested the yard and which her brother and her father used to take their drunken rage out on with their friends or in some cases just random weirdo’s that they met in the pub that they were in that night.





The front door gently creaked open and her father staggered out drunkenly, then while staring at Kirea started to stumble down the steps with a look on his face which usually meant ‘I’m going to kill you for something or other!’.  Kirea ran forward just in time to stop her father falling flat on to his stone cold drunken face after tripping over a lump of scrap metal lying there on the steps leading up to the house.  “Where the hell have you been?” questioned her father although it was hard to make out what he was saying seeing how all that he said came out extremely slurred due to the large amount of alcohol passing though his body at the time.





While Kirea tried to help her drunken father back into the house she had to help him stumble back into the house she had to kick empty bottles of beer, cans of larger and god knows what else out of the way on the floor so that she could help her father through to the living room and get him seated on the comfy sofa in front of the television so that she could go around clearing up the mess that her brother and father had made the night before and possibly during the day while she was out so that the place looked nice and well-kept in case anyone decided to come round for a visit.  The possibility of somebody visiting was very slim and Kirea knew that but as her mother had always taught her expect the unexpected.





The next day Kirea woke to find, downstairs tidy and clean like somebody had been in there to clear away evidence of some sort or that her brother and father had finally come round to her way of thinking and instead of making a mess that night they decided to clean the house from top to bottom to show Kirea that they did really know how to clean the house.  She walked into the living room and there on the floor with blood coming out of his head was, her father.  He would have looked like he had just fallen asleep there on the floor if there had not been blood clotted in his tangled, grey hair and then gently pooling around his head.  “ARGH!!” screamed Kirea at the top of her voice and then she heard them.  The foot step of not just her brother but of somebody else.  Somebody who was in the house last night, somebody who may know what happened to her father. 





Kirea’s younger brother, Jonathan, then burst into the room with what seemed to be a young girl around the age of her bother in tow, who with one look at Kireas and Jonathans father lying there on the floor gasped in shock and then fainted out cold on to the floor just behind Jonathan.  “Who could of done this?” questioned Kirea looking from their father on the floor to Jonathan and then back to their who looked so peaceful there on the floor with his eyes shut and a peaceful smile playing on his lips.  “I don’t know” whispered Jonathan. 





Of course he knew this was a lie but he was hardly going to admit to his older sister that it was him that had killed their father because he knew what would happen.  He had known last night that if he didn’t clean up everything that he had touched that night that he would be done for manslaughter and probably would either get life imprisonment or the death penalty and that he knew he could not face.  There was a valid reason why Jonathan lied to his only sister.  That reason was a valid one as far as he was concerned.  The reason was that he knew how badly his sister was treated by their father and how much she wanted to do something else with her life than having to look after her father for the rest of his life.  ‘So long as she can be happy now without having to worry about having to look after that old bastard of a dad than I know my conscience will be clear.’  Jonathan thought to himself and then after Kirea had left the room to go call the police a small, cheeky smile played its way across his lips and it made him feel good to see that the tyrant was dead and never coming back…