“What would you do if you had unlimited wealth and how would you deal with the knowledge that this fortune is founded on murder?” This is how the blurb on the back cover of Mark Bibby Jackson’s novella Always starts. Morally, the answer would be quite easy but, what the characters in the story do, is quite different.
Mark Bibby Jackson is a freelance journalist and the publisher of AsiaLIFE Cambodia magazine who has been living on the road, commuting between Asia and Europe, ever since he came to Vietnam as a VSO volunteer in 2003. His first work of fiction, Always, was published in Cambodia by 360Degree Media in 2012.
The booklet is structured into seven short chapters, actually seven days the unnamed main character spends remembering the good and bad days before and after he become rich, before and after he fell in love, before and after he realised that his fortune was acquired at the expense of someone else’s life.
The narrator is blind, living in a cell – at a hospital or a prison, stays with the reader to decided -, and losing his memory. Little by little, the reader is drawn into a heinous crime and a subsequent dramatic love story, which starts in a bar, where an older man asks our young narrator to come to his house. Here, in turn for a favour, he will become a very rich man: “Inside, more wealth than man can dream of. Much, much more than a young student living in dingy digs and surviving on one meal a day can comprehend.”
Unfortunately, the favour requested is murder: “Just kill me first.” Terminally ill, the old man wants to die.
But the riches didn’t bring happiness. Not until the young man saw Lydia, the murdered man’s wife, whom he fell in love with and stopped at nothing until she was with him.
But Lydia’s love was not enough. Guilt plagued the young man and after some investigation, a dark past was revealed about the identity of the old man and the source of his wealth. Not even Lydia could stop him now from self-destruction.
But when he realized that finding out the truth actually cost him another life, it was too late to save either him or Lydia: “I am sorry to say that while I would travel o the end of the world to find the truth about the man I killed, I gave up far too quickly on the woman I loved.”
Always by Mark Bibby Jackson is a tragic story that was obviously influenced by the author background studies in literature. The quote from King Lear that opens the novella, “That way madness lies,” and Mark’s acknowledgements of The Happy Death by Albert Camus as his inspiration, are just two hints at what kind of story to expect.
The book is available in Kindle format on Amazon.com or you can contact the author via his website for a paperback copy.
