Goodnight, John-boy: Chapter 18
Then she noticed The Caning Commando story, which gave detailed information on how kids could obtain and prepare a tasteless and odourless poison. And that really had her attention.
Welcome to Book Two of my dark comedy thriller series, Read Em And Weep.
A new chapter of Goodnight, John-Boy drops every week – sign up for free so you don’t miss it!
If you’re new to the Read Em And Weep series, start with Book One: Serial Killer.
MELISSA BRADLEY HAD WARNED her parents there would be consequences if they sent her to that horrible boarding school. But their smug expressions showed they were thinking, ‘What can you possibly do to us, Melissa? We will always win. Because we are older and we are wiser than you, and we have the power.’
But, correction, they were wrong. She had the power now. Thanks to The Spanker. Thanks to the Caning Commando.
Things got out of control after she spent a miserable time in a psychiatric ward at Christmas. Her parents had said they would let her out for Christmas if she behaved herself, but then the fifteen-year old had started swearing and attacking them again, calling them cruel, evil bastards, so they felt she had, unfortunately, still not learnt her lesson.
They made her stay for another month and had her pumped full of drugs. Her father was a doctor and her mother a matron, so they had used their connections to have her sectioned. The psychiatrist, who was a good friend of theirs, agreed she should be given head-fucking drugs as a cure for taking head-fucking drugs. It was that easy. For what? Being a rebellious teenager. She’d smoked some dope, dropped some acid, fooled around, dressed as a punk, stayed out late, but so what? It wasn’t a crime.
According to her parents it was. She hated them. And, anyway, they weren’t her real parents; she and her younger brother Craig were adopted.
In the past, she had tried to meet them halfway, to connect. That’s why she made them a ‘space cake’. She thought it would make them relax, chill out, so everything would be cool between them. They really enjoyed the cake and were so touched their daughter had made them just for them. But when she told them it was a cannabis cake, they insisted on going to hospital to have their stomachs pumped. The cake didn’t even make them giggle. They were that straight.
She had pretended to learn her lesson and be a good little zombie in future, so they did finally let her out of the psychiatric ward. But it hadn’t really lasted. They were constantly checking up on her, invading her privacy. They were determined to ‘bring her to her senses’. For her own good. And she was determined they were going to fail. She was a fighter; they would never break her.
Things came to a head when they got the police to bust a party she attended. Her friends were arrested for smoking and selling dope. Now her friends wanted nothing more to do with her. So she’d smashed up her bedroom in protest. They decided to send her away to a private boarding school. It sounded like some kind of middle-class borstal for ‘difficult’ girls. There were alarms on the windows in case the girls tried to get out at night (or boys tried to get in) and CCTV cameras in every room and in the grounds. The school would teach Melissa to ‘obey the rules’.
So what was the point of having a daughter if they sent her away to boarding school? They didn’t get it, did they? This wasn’t just ‘a phase she was going through’. It’s who she was. It was over. She wasn’t going. They said she was, and they said they had the power. They were used to their patients obeying and looking up to them in awe, and couldn’t understand why their own daughter should defy them.
While she was in hospital, Craig had brought her a pile of his Spanker comics for her to read and they seemed pretty boring to her. And stupid. Especially Gas Mask, which Craig agreed was ‘pretty pathetic’ but he still liked it ‘’Because of the brilliant artwork’. Craig told her the Caning Commando would cheer her up, and make her laugh and she had to admit it was fairly funny in a stupid sort of way.
But then she noticed The Caning Commando story, which gave detailed information on how kids could obtain and prepare a tasteless and odourless poison. And that really had her attention. She did seriously think about trying it on them. But, after the cannabis cake incident, she doubted she would get away with it. Too many questions would be asked: another of the Bradleys’ friends in their medical Mafia was a pathologist. There were other homicidal ideas in other episodes of the Commando, but none of them were really suitable for bumping her parents off.
And then, just before she was due to be sent to her posh borstal, she saw the perfect solution in the latest issue of The Spanker.
As Doctor Bradley drove down the notoriously steep hill just outside their property, he put his foot on the brakes as usual, and nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. ‘There’s no brakes!’ he screamed to his wife, who looked aghast at her husband.
The car sped up, and they knew that sharp bend at the bottom of the hill, that accident black spot, was coming up fast, and they had to slow down, but there was nothing they could do. He pressed the brakes six more times without any effect. He lost control of the vehicle and it hurtled off the road, smashed into a tree, rolling over and over, before colliding with the wall of a house, where it exploded into flames.
Neither of them survived.
Goodnight, John-boy is the second book in the Read Em And Weep series and you can buy it digitally or as a paperback.