John Halkin - Squelch

Though she was no chicken herself; no longer. Thirty-five she was and she’d already found a grey hair in her comb. She’d held it up to the window to make sure. It was grey all right. Or white. Her tits were sagging too, she could swear.

Where the hell was Kit? Should have been home an hour ago. With those kids probably, and up to no good. The gang , he called it; well, that was his age. Could do with a man’s hand, that was the truth of the matter. Come to think of it, so could she.

She yawned. A tired, long-to-sleep yawn. Then she switched on the telly and transferred to the armchair, kicking off her shoes to make herself comfy.

Just forty winks, then.

Two hours later when she woke up Kit was still not home. ‘Kit?’ She went up to his bed to make sure, but he wasn’t there, nor was he out in the shed at the back. Swearing she’d have his hide off, she would, when she got hold of htm, she ran down the lane to Lenny’s Mum. He was always on about Lenny.

Lenny hadn’t seen him since early that morning, nor had the rest of the gang.

There remained the police.

The next few days were a nightmare. Two brusque young detective-constables searched the cottage as if they were hunting for stolen bullion, raising floor boards, examining the water tank in the loft, even lifting the lid of the lavatory cistern. On Sunday morning the uniformed men assembled a team to trample through the ditches and beat the copse bordering the motorway. As one pointed out, they were hampered by the fact that there had been a heavy thunderstorm on the night of Kit’s disappearance. It would have wiped out any traces.

Kit had run away from home once before, the local policeman reminded her. On that occasion he had hidden beneath the tarpaulin of a fairground trailer. It had taken a week to track him down and by then he’d been more than fifty miles away.

But although they issued pictures and appealed on television, this time all leads proved fruitless.

When she was first visited by the moths, Ginny misinterpreted the signs. She had moved into her new cottage that same day. At dusk they crowded the sky like a flight of starlings, hundreds of them alighting briefly in her garden.

As if to welcome her, or so it seemed at the time. Later on, she was to remember them with increasing bitterness.

It was late October when she made the move down from London and so warm, it might have been the height of summer. The leaves were still a luscious green and the garden was alive with me murmur of late insects. As she unpacked her crockery from the tea chest, piling it up on the old dresser which had been included, part-and-parcel, with the cottage, she noticed a drowsy wasp brushing against the window pane. Normally she hated wasps and would kill them on sight, or call Jack to do it, but this time she even felt sorry for it. She tugged the window open to let it out.

Ginny was twenty-six, though some mornings that felt like a hundred, specially when she looked in the mirror. What she saw was a less-than-attractive blonde, tired-looking, dark around the eyes, sour lips, and unfashionably short. Stumpy, she’d overheard someone call her. Unemployed, too — though that was her own fault rather than anyone else’s. She’d walked out on a job other girls were queuing up for. Director on a well-known TV series: she knew a dozen people prepared to offer up their virtue on lesser altars than that, yet she had to throw it up!

Her mind had been in turmoil ever since. Of course there were still days when she was convinced she’d been right. She couldn’t have done anything else: it was a question of self-respect. Integrity. But on other days she knew she’d been a fool.

Now she was in the cottage she’d have to sort herself out. Already she felt better, just being there. It was a dream cottage: two rooms — one up, one down — with a lean-to kitchen, adjoining loo, and a mass of flowering creeper around the front door. Off the main road, too; tucked away down a meandering lane bordered by high hedges. Here, at last, she could be alone.

‘Ginny, I’ve fixed the bed!’ Jack’s voice boomed out in triumph from upstairs.

‘Great!’ she called back. She had left him the double bed and bought herself a new single which had been delivered in sections, ideal for manoeuvring up awkward stairs but hell to assemble. ‘What was the secret?’

‘What?’ His jeans-clad legs appeared at the top of the narrow, creaking staircase; then a hand, still clutching the spanner. ‘Oh, the bed? It was just a question of working out me underlying principle. Not really as complicated as it seemed.’

That answer was so typical of Jack, she almost threw a plate at him. Gadgets or people, it was always the same with him; just press the hidden spring, and he thought he could do whatever he liked with them. Well, this was one situation she intended to keep firmly under control. He came down, ducking his head to avoid the low rafter, and she recognised from the expression on his face that he was just longing to rough-house with her as a prelude to trying out the new bed. She was determined that was not going to happen. Not this time.

‘You’d better have a wash before you go,’ she suggested coolly. Too coolly, considering all he’d done to help her with the move. ‘I’ll get you a towel.’

‘You’re sure there’s nothing else I can do?’

‘I can manage now, thanks.’

‘You’re quite certain? If there is anything… Well, now I’m here I may as well…’

‘Jack… please…’ She could have screamed at him, but she held on. ‘Don’t make things more difficult than they are.’

His T-shirt was damp with sweat and clung to his skin as he peeled it off, tugging it over his head. Fragments of cobweb stuck to his sandy hair, cropped short for the latest television epic in which they had cast him. He had a swimmer’s shoulders with Olympic-class muscles; watching them, she felt the usual unease stirring inside her. Abruptly, she turned her back on him and fetched a couple of towels from the drawer.

The little kitchen had only one tap which was set high over a low, shallow stone sink. He bent down to hold his head underneath it, then turned it on, grunting as the full force of cold water hit him. Three years they had lived together, Ginny marvelled; three years in a strange, blind dreamland until one morning she woke up and realised that she’d fallen out of love with him.

It had come to her in a flash, quite unexpectedly. Like a blown fuse.

Months ago, now. Hateful months during which he’d refused to believe it, pleaded with her, quarrelled, demanded to know whom she’d been seeing, who had turned her against him, too hurt to accept that he had no rival. Love — if that’s what it had been — had simply died in her, leaving nothing.

‘Towel?’

Dripping with water, he reached back for it. She put it into his hand. Then, out of habit, she took the second towel to dry his back. While he rubbed his head vigorously, she ran her forefinger slowly down the hollows around his shoulder blade. Oh Christ, why did he have to be so bloody physical?

‘Thank you for helping with the move,’ she said quietly, moving farther away from him.

‘Couldn’t let you struggle on your own. Least I could do.’

‘Hiring that van was brilliant,’ she went on. ‘Can you imagine a pantechnicon getting down that lane?’

‘There’s always a bed for you when you come to London.’

‘I’m sure!’ she laughed. ‘You’ll find somebody else.’

‘It’s not that simple.’ He draped his wet towel over the back of the kitchen chair, then picked up his T-shirt without bothering to put it on. ‘By the way, I meant to tell you. You’ve got cockroaches in this kitchen. And ants.’