Dave's Devolution

by Dan

This is how the downward spiral starts. From nowhere comes the chance of making everything start again. Forty six years of evolution, of gradual advance, starts to look like a dirty stain, then gets thrown onto a bonfire. Scratching the accrued experiences of a lifetime at a stroke, reclaiming a new view of the world. Like you had at 16.

David couldn’t explain it, he was just a family man. A good man mostly.

Heidi the new marketing assistant was just so ….shiny! So new looking, with her young tits and blonde hair. Classic. Idiotic , but in the moment his instincts seemed pure and new and strong and brave rather than the opposite of those things.

He quickly found himself in a lust so desperate that his reason deserted him? And he spent a ton of money on her in a couple of weeks, hotels, lingerie, drinking and eating and going to young people’s places where he felt out of place, trying to look a man of the world.

Now he had a hangover of debt and a lurking sense of something unfinished. Had he come to his senses? Or had she lost interest the moment his man of the world façade crumbled? The brief affair was mutually abandoned.

Now the immediate problem was the great big next year’s summer holiday-sized hole in the finances, the hole he couldn’t explain to Elaine.

He had options. He could just lie and cover his tracks. He could borrow it off a mate. He could even own up and probably get through it eventually. Some damage limiting combination of all these was probably the safest way forward for a cautious and regretful man who’d made a mistake.

For the old David.

The new David’s lust had evolved into a thirst for danger. His affair had made him feel braver more ready to grasp the prize, be instinctive!

That’s why he stood here now in Corals, the bookies, on his lunch break. With his last £227.41p of holiday money on the nose on a horse in the 4.30 at Kempton Park.

12-1.

When it caught his eye on the bbc sports website he knew. That phrase David hadn’t said in his entire 46 years on this earth.

“It’s In the stars!”

“Exocet Missile from Winter Wonderland from Dave’s Redemption, Dave’s Redemption looking strong two furlongs from home” Said the commentator

David was murmuring “come on Dave’s Redemption , Come on boy”. An old man with yellow fingers next to him littered the air with indecipherable swear words.

David’s fists were clenched, he felt alive, awake, excited and controlled as Dave’s Redemption hit the front and then within a horrifying half moment he was desperate again as it suddenly went into slow motion.

“And at the line Evolution is the winner, from Wigwam Accident and Sherlock Holmes. Reluctant Thunder Mentalist is fourth with Dave’s Redemption tailing off.”

During the next six months David found no redemption in alcohol either, or cocaine, or embezzling money from the work safe either and it took 15 years to get him back to almost where he had been, an average Joe with a new wife, a patched up relationship with his kids and a job as a driving instructor. Whatever urge had destroyed him eventually released him so that he could barely remember it’s power. He felt nothing now when he saw Heidi across a road, or got a tip on a dead cert from a friendly barber. He just wondered why on earth he’d chosen to suddenly devolve.

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