GUTTER TALK - chapter 7: Could almost live like this

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As predicted, Harriet rudely failed to attend despite the grand written invitation to the lady’s great welcome-home party to herself. The hostess promised to serve Harriet’s favourite dessert, creamy homemade meringue with raspberry coulis – did I mention that at that gathering last time? thought Harriet with alarm. By god, those women are good listeners if nothing else.

Jake had seen it, she knew, for she had found it on the kitchen table upon her return from town on a day out with her urban friends. She was a little bit jolly and went on to tease Jake with the card.

“Oh my, darling, look! You would simply regale yourself with Tammy’s cooking. And how thoughtful, look. My husband is also welcome pop along, she writes, at the bottom, in smallest of lettering. Look Jake, how lucky you are! Clearly the village adores us for all our efforts to fit in. Ah go on, we haven’t seen her in so long. Perhaps Andy beat some sense into her during their time away,” she howled with wicked laughter.

“You’ve clearly had a great time out in the city,” said Jake dryly. To be fair, he did envy Harriet her light-hearted view of human nature. The city folk had nothing at stake in their social life. They could flit from group to group or meet new friends altogether once the old gang got nasty. They were not trapped in a circle of rich layabouts and benign retirees, sprinkled with the occasional bored psychopath. All those characters were diluted in the crowd… a sea of blissful anonymity.

Harriet often reproached him his envy of city life. She, to the contrary, had felt unique, wanted, a reason to get dressed up, during her time in the village. Even the odd conspiracy tickled her and the glorious rolling hills took her breath away every single morning from the window of their matrimonial nest.

She loved the townspeople’s honest interest in animal husbandry, their genuine discussions of the weather. The weather had a real impact here, unlike in the city where it was endlessly discussed to break the ice but never actually changed the course of anybody’s day. In the village, it could turn out a matter of life and death for a farmer’s crops, a young woman’s horses, even for a young child.

One of the town’s eccentrics could easily trace her alcoholism back to the day she opened the car door after stalling in a flooded ford and her toddler son had been viciously flushed away by a merciless wave, fatally bashing his head on a nearby rock. The lady was never the same since, but she maintained a solid reputation through relentless creativity and shameless honesty.

This woman lived in the neighbouring village and Harriet was always disappointed to have so little access to her. This was not the petty type who would indulge in shallow, judgmental gossip round a dinner table in the afternoon with a hateful husband leering at her through his zoo-like glass barrier.

Most village folk were too shy to approach the tragic artist except for Lazy Larry, who had happened to participate in the installation of one of the woman’s great exhibitions and had remained friendly with her ever since. Lazy Larry, despite the name and belly, was a hard worker whenever he did any.

Jake had plenty of time for Larry. He had met him earlier that day during the older man’s afternoon waddle through the countryside, and had him in for a drink. The benevolent fellow knew Jake had been having a hard time and he felt there was great integrity in the boy, who toiled away daily to create the perfect home for a future family.

“How you going, Jake my boy?” Larry had boomed, causing Jake to start upright from his focussed efforts on the paving stones leading to the front porch.

“Oh hey, Larry! Long time no see,” he relaxed visibly upon seeing the friendly face. “It’s going, mate, going mental if I daresay,” Jake said with a grin.

“Good to hear you’re joining the rest of us, then. What’s next for this god-forsaken historical site?”

“It’s looking pretty well now mate, to be fair. A couple more bits here and there, the well water connected to the mains and we’re rolling along smooth as cream.”

“That old thing not connected yet? Oh look Jake, I’m sorry I’ve been busy larding up. I would have been glad to help speed it up for you and angry Andy.”

“Please – don’t even give it a second thought,” Jake waved his hand though his gut clenched bitterly. “I seem to remember Harry saying you told her some folksy legend about that thing, by the way. Some woman ghost in there or something?”

“That’s right, she must be what’s holding him up. Distracting him, like, with her womanly wiles. God knows they’re probably wilier than Tamara’s at this point,” he sniggered.

“Yeah, any bird’s a catch after that sneering viper of his,” Jake grimaced. He was so relieved to have a sympathetic ear to disparage Tamara with. Lazy Larry was a strong supporter of the opposition and nodded his chins emphatically.

“Say what you will of the ghost, but the victim surely can’t be pure legend,” insisted Jake in all his curiosity.

“You’re right there, kid. It was only two landowners ago – that’s fifty years – when one of them got so tangled up in the town’a affairs. I think she was a bookkeeper, found out a bit too much about her neighbours’ dealings. Some say she was thrown in, some say she did herself in as the place and all its ugly dramas got to her, but either way a human most certainly find herself decomposing down that well.”

“Christ almighty. I hope – wonder who… fished it out?” Jake said in a hushed voice.

“Can’t say for certain, but I think it was the son of the next occupant. The police round here have always been a band of jokers anyways, nobody believes a word they say for better or worse -” he raised his eyebrow knowingly at Jake - “but poor Andy’s certainly got some heavy history to be dealing with, working on that thing.”

“Well, if he’d just finish up already he wouldn’t have to anymore,” the landlord snapped.

Lazy Larry chuckled a goodbye and walked off, leaving the young man to simmer down. That filter system will have to be state-of-the-art, if there’s a dead fucking body down there, he thought. Better be ghost-proof at any rate. And I’ve dealt enough with these police for another decade at least, no chance I’m asking them for records on that.

He wandered towards the well-room where Andrew had resumed work after the tea that had been dutifully prepared by Harriet and reluctantly served by Jake in order to keep the precarious peace. The old man had a dour expression on his face and Jake realised he had probably overheard – there was no way of knowing how much – the conversation with Larry a few minutes earlier.

This was definitely the last thing Jake needed: Andrew knowing his precise feelings about his – what had he called her? - sneering viper of a wife. And, sure enough, he did. He had also caught the part about the excruciating pace of his work, though that at least was fair comment.

Upon realising the social doom which awaited him, Jake had simply walked away to wait for his woman to return and tell her they would need to hire someone else to finish up. His hope of ever gelling with the villagers was finished.

His musings about the dead bookie had reached fever pitch when Harriet burst, half-drunk, onto the scene only to mock his dislike of the woman who had made his new life, which was supposed to have been perfectly idyllic, a living hell.

“What do you say, my hot mess? Shall we lighten up their evening?” she was leaning on the counter after a particularly turbulent mis-step. The girl’s pretty head turned to the floor tiles to try and settle the booze-storm inside her skull.

“Maybe you should lie down, my drunken doll. We can talk tomorrow morning.”

Andrew had gone a couple of hours ago, with an extremely curt salutation. Jake had not dared to give him the sack then and there, and despised himself not only for this cowardice but for his clumsy display as soon as Larry had granted him the blissful abandon of badmouthing Tamara. The villagers suddenly did not seem so guilty in this whole debacle as he was. They are fools undeniably, and yet I allow myself to be drawn in. I can not even manipulate a septuagenarian hive mind into liking me! No, I cave to their crushing gossip, I avoid them, I bring on more unjust suspicion through my actions. I do not care what they might think if they knew the truth, but this gross misrepresentation insults me beyond belief, traps me like a rat in molasses. They will not rest until I’m done for!

And Harriet, poor Harriet. She could fit in better than I ever could. Ever! Maybe it was my stubborn mother’s fault, and now there’s no way out, where to? Harriet with downplay it all as she always does and stick to this place like a loving tick.

That woman down the well would understand me like nobody else.

She knew the sordid and pathetic lives of these tiny-minded people like the back of her hand. She would sympathise with me better than Harriet ever could, silly, naive Harry, likes to be centre of attention, doesn’t she?… flaunting their generous gifts in my outcast face… the woman of the house, the real lady of the land, she’s down there.

He found himself by the well all of a sudden, delirious.

The shower where Willy Wurton had expired was about three metres to the back of him, through a doorway and a short corridor. Their bedroom stood right above it.

Harriet was busy readying herself for a romantic sparring session with her beloved, whom she assumed was pent-up again. But Jake wasn’t pent up. He was fed up. And he wanted to be master of the village like that woman had been. He needed to share his abject hatred with a sympathetic ear, be it a partly decomposed or spectral one.

Maybe she had not been so pretty as Harriet, he thought in a brief moment of reason. But there was more to life than sex! he reasoned further. There needed to be understanding, sympathy, a shared worldly cynicism. His final thoughts as he plummeted through the darkness were, “the piping looks nearly finished.”

 

 

THE END

GUTTER TALK - chapter 6: Gossip queen takes a holiday

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The weeks after that passed by uneventfully, with the exception (and perhaps for the precise reason) of Tamara and Andrew taking an impromptu holiday to the Antilles. They had, it seemed, found a common language at last.

Aqueous operations at Jake and Harriet’s farm home were still running from the mains, much to Jake’s fury and per Harriet’s resigned expectations. She worked her way through her husband’s tempestuous moods with great dedication and fervour, though they kept the volume away from prying ears, which would be sure to dutifully pass any dropped eaves to Tamara upon her return.

Overall, the village was quite peaceful even for Jake, who found that his mother’s enemy’s cronies dropped most of their suspicious behaviour when the shepherd was away. Some chilliness persisted, but it rather mirrored his own and gave him some amusement when he was in his best of post-coital moods.

The valley he lived in gave him no end of inspiration and pleasure. The glistening sea of green laid freshly cut before the lovers on a glorious morning, the silver ghost of overnight rainfall still in the sky and providing a melancholy backdrop for Jake’s vivid imagination. He felt the sun’s rays strike each individual blade of grass as it forced its way through the rainclouds to reach the couple’s shimmering patch of earth in these English hills.

“I could almost live like this,” he said quietly to himself, startling Harriet somewhat. She said nothing, knowing he had not intended to share his innermost despair so candidly.

She, too, greatly appreciated the heavenly sight before her eyes, but her contemplation was one of simple peace. She saw the high-definition outline of the fluffy trees in bright, tennis-ball green over a dark silver sheet of cloud which only made her wish she had acrylics with her.

Where Jake had spotted an odd, man-shaped shadow standing unnaturally in the nearby stream, Harriet admired the uprooted young oak which had thrust its thickest branch upright through the water in defiance of its untimely fall.

Where Jake observed a panicked vole seeking to escape the gliding buzzards’ all-seeing eyes, Harriet saw an industrious fieldmouse digging around for a perfect home.

In his own way, the sullen man saw the natural beauty of the scene: the constant tug-of-war between good and evil. The glowing greenery never stood out more perfectly than with a chilling thundercloud lurking in the background.

In fact, Jake had to hold in some of the jaw-clenching that oftentimes came with Harriet’s naive expressions of awe. He always pretended to be amused by the girl’s tendency to voice her every sweeping emotion when faced with unutterable (or so it should be) natural beauty, but today it was somehow impossible for him to perform his usual relaxed chuckle and firm embrace. The view was too hostile to merit such wonderment, and he felt she either knew it and was trying to smooth it over, or she was painfully oblivious to the earth’s cruelty even as it so plainly showed itself to them.

If anything, he thought, she should be gasping in horror as the storm cloud approached and swarms of shadowy birds fled the hemisphere with the approach of winter. He gripped her hip harder than usual in a disguised attempt to contain his stress. Harriet turned to him and revealed the top of her breasts in their loose cotton covering by placing her hands on his chest, the fabric drooping away from her skin. She directed her sultriest gaze straight into his tense face, too overwhelmed to suspect what turbulence was rocking his mind.

“I would just love you to take me on top of that green, green hill,” she purred. “Our hill.”

Jake paused to glance at her exposed front, but the sexual urge that would normally have flooded his entire being felt cavernously distant.

“It’s going to rain. Can’t you see?” he spoke through gritted teeth and quickly added, “darling. By the time we made it up there we would be drenched.” And I would be blamed for your subsequent flu by the villagers, he added to himself. “Come in now, Harry. Let’s get warm.”

“But I’m not –” but he had already begun to walk back.

He must be annoyed about something, Harriet speculated, forlorn. Though he did call me Harry, so it can’t be me. Is Tamara coming home soon, I wonder? She adjusted her frock and trotted after her man.

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GUTTER TALK - chapter 5: Half-baked accusations

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Harriet had received a fair few invitations to the mums’ club from various members whom she met on her errands.

“Oh but, you know, I’m not a mum,” she would respond politely. And I wouldn’t be caught dead under your magnifying-glass parties either.

“Darling, it would be a pleasure to have you over anyway. Good to see a fresh face every once in a while! And maybe give you some pointers when you do decide to bring a little baby into the world,” a well-meaning Angela would chirp.

“Well, I’ll give it a think, Angela. Thank you for your kind invitation.”

After such an encounter, the following party would be rife with gossip.

“The poor, secluded thing. ‘Give it a think’, she says – more like ask Jake whether she may leave the house for anything other than buying him tools! Does he think she’s his runner?”

Some days, Harriet would come home with some garish gift or a tin of biscuits from local ladies who considered it their duty to provide her with moral support.

Jake noted that the gestures often correlated with a worsening of his own lot. He observed so many cold faces on his way about town that soon, in his eyes, every closing door was a neighbour rushing to avoid contact.

It was not that Jake cared for any of these people, but he believed in a fair trial, and these silent accusations were anything but. He bristled to think that shopkeepers were probably underserving him or butchers spitting in his cuts of meat before they wrapped them up.

Such were the feelings that accompanied him one morning as he went to the corner shop for Harriet, who was unwell. She liked a particular drink upon such occasions, that her slavic grandmother had accustomed her to: hot milk with melted butter. The dregs Jake had left in the carton after their tea the previous evening would not do, so he set out after an imploring, albeit phlegmy, kiss from his ailing wife.

“Hi there,” he said with a genuine smile upon noticing an unrecognisable face at the counter.

“Hi, sir,” said the spotty young girl uncomfortably, looking round the shop for support. A pang of irritation hit Jake straight in the gut.

“You all right, love?” he inquired in a heroic effort to remain gentle despite his defiance at her unjustified mistrust.

She was, in fact, the shop owner’s adolescent daughter, and it was her third time ever looking after the place on her own. She had no awareness of the drama between the adults of the village, but apprehended every interaction for fear it might cost her father his business. She was also very self-conscious of her awkward appearance. Such a cycle of insecurity can easily spiral into a rather sorry display.

When the girl wanted to say, “I’m great, how are you? How may I help?”, she instead stood dead still as the words sizzled weakly through her head.

Jake grabbed a milk carton and jabbed it more forcefully than either of them expected on the counter, causing the clerk to jump. “That’ll be one pound, sir,” she said tightly. He mumbled a gruff “thanks”, placing the coin in her outstretched hand, and left.

“What’s wrong, Jake my precious?” Harriet felt his internalised rage as soon as he walked in the house and only wished she could assuage it as she knew best, but a persistent cough and sore throat prevented her doing so. She cupped her head in her hands and gave him a languorous kiss instead.

Jake could barely resist her sultry eyes, but could not bear to upset her neither mentally nor physically as she sniffled pathetically in gratitude. He grunted and went off to prepare the oily concoction in the kitchen, taking care not to make any loud noises with cutlery or doors.

Upon his return, Harriet lay docilely naked on the bed, her pale skin even more so in her weakened state. Jake could not wait any longer to ravage her, but not before setting down the mug of hot, buttery milk as far away from the bed as possible.

“Has anybody seen Harriet lately, then?”

It was known as the the “flouer” fete where all the gardeners and pastry chefs showed off their growing and decorating skills, putting their creations to the test of external scrutiny and internal strife. It was a beautiful day for it, too – bouquets all on display like crown jewels, glittering under the effect of their masters’ misting bottles and crisp morning sunlight.

On the other side of the event were the chefs, Angela first and foremost with her own child adoptee which Tamara had generously passed on to her as her own workload became too great. She and the little eleven-year-old girl had prepared three miniature wedding-type cakes, each as floral as the last, all undeniable works of art in her eyes.

Other designs included a whipped-cream sheep sponge, a “piebald foal” (or marble loaf, for non-equestrians), and tennis ball cupcakes in honour of the upcoming world tournament.

The event was far more than a simple good-natured competition – it was cutthroat, and the entrants were having none of Tamara’s chit-chat.

Most people’s replies were along the lines of “indeed, one contestant less”, and Tamara’s inflammatory conversation starters blew away in the gentle wind of fierce anticipation as her gardener friends made last-minute adjustments to their great assemblages of flowers.

Clodagh from the neighbouring hamlet uttered a “hmm, not lately” out of politeness, tweaking an astraloemeria.

Tamara had little success with growing things and very little interest in baking them. She made herself busy bustling between observers and creators, holding the room together as she saw it, full of enthusiastic praise for every competitor. She enjoyed discussing her and Andrew’s vegetable patch which had yielded enough for a week of fresh garnishes and salads.

Polite nattering went on until midday when the judges began their rounds of the flowers.

“Harriet Sadler?”

A current of whispers rippled the petals of nearby bouquets as the woman did not speak up. “Harriet Sadler?”

“Where could the poor girl be,” was the general consensus, the mere sight of Tamara shaping the attendees’ thoughts into ugly bruised forms. The seed had been successfully sown, the slightest suspicion amplified to perfection.

Indeed, Jake had failed to call in Harriet’s absence as he sat up sick with worry for her health. No hints of all-important flower competitions entered his mind despite the garish signs that had been on display at the town hall for the past seven weeks.

The subsequent drinks were rife with inspiration.

“Did you hear how he nearly lost it with Arthur’s little daughter at the shop one morning?”

“Ooh no, I’ve not heard that one,” piped up one Sally, a plump young baker with a passion for icing sugar (but never on a Victoria sponge) and human misery.

“He came in for some milk, she told her dad, and well, he was pretty impatient with the girl – she’s only so new to the business of customer service, you see. Arty’d left her on her own while he went to get some change, and Jake, or a ‘tall curly brown young man’ as she so innocently described him, with a quilted jacket and a growly voice, insisted on asking her how she was and slamming coins down on the counter, and all!” Angela was two gin and tonics down and drunk with glory, for she had won both first and third prize for the flour section of the competition thanks to her ingenious use of the child’s name on one of the pastries.

“Oh yes, I’m sure he would love to set another young, fragile creature straight, the brute.”

Cordelia looked on and quietly questioned the rapidfire conclusion these woman seemed to be drawing from Arthur’s hand-me-down story. Surely the girl had just told her father about the one person who had happened to come in while he had left her alone, and surely one can be grumpy early in the morning?

She looked nobody in the eye and could not join in for fear of having the wrong opinion. The harsh descriptor - “brute” - had particularly jolted her, for until that moment there had only been glaring innuendoes.

Harriet had finally decided to come along to one of the all-female gatherings. She had convalesced with all of Jake’s devotion after a couple weeks of heavy coughs and ruthless headaches. She had forgotten what it felt like to be well, and the ensuing giddiness made her crave society. “Perhaps they can be talked round to our side. Perhaps they’re more reasonable than we give them credit for?” she crooned softly into a dour-faced Jake’s unhearing ear.

“Right, and leave me to deal with the woman’s poor bugger of a husband as he comes to drown his sorrows as slowly as possible in my well,” he replied moodily. Harriet gave her beloved a kiss and a lick on the lips, arousing him greatly before swinging her hips out the door.

He stared after her for a solid minute, then made his way to the bathroom.

Round the beautifully stocked lunch table at Tamara’s, Harriet was shyly recounting some mundane story about gardening to test the waters. Every story seemed to go on without a foreseeable end, until the punchline made it clear to any listener that her efforts in following the various details and characters had ultimately been in vain. Harriet could hardly match the length of some of the more weathered ladies’ stories in her own tale of failed begonias, but she appreciated the simple pleasure of benign conversation after so many weeks in isolation.

Angela, it seemed, was the only one with interesting things to say without fear of upsetting the docile balance in the room.

She was animatedly telling the story of her late husband’s emergency mouth-to-beak resuscitation of one of their hens back in the day. Harriet piped up, “wow! My mum always made me paranoid about parasites you could catch from birds.”

She knew as she said it that the seasoned country folks would look down on such a precious attitude, but she chose to bathe in the awkwardness nevertheless.

“You don’t know how many parasites you can get just from living here!” said Angela amiably. “You city folk and your superstitions about germs,” said farmer Kevin’s wife in a rare moment of independent judgement.

“My mum actually grew up in the country, but I get your point, ladies. I agree with you! After all, I did choose to move here,” said Harriet appeasingly.

The atmosphere softened back into muggy gelatin as the ladies eased their way back into the steady hum of mundane chat.

Harriet had no way of knowing what they would say about her after she departed and in the coming days, but from the sheer number of times she had been invited, she guessed her sudden appearance would not fail to generate a buzz through the village. She also supposed that her agreeable nature might win their favour. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched an irate Andrew grab his coat and tool bag – but not before taking a swig from an unmarked bottle on his desk.

He sat in an office separated from the dining room which by a foggy old window instead of a wall. The effect was something like a zoo, though it was hard to tell which side was the animal enclosure.

He had cursed their choice of making his study often to prying eyes ever since they set it up, but in the throes of passionate drunken love, he had assumed he and Tamara would always be dining together and would always crave to see each other even in their quiet moments.

What folly. Now Tamara’s eagle eye watched him through that window whatever he did, adding up his idle hours and accurately predicting his next moves. She felt all her totalitarian attitudes were justified since his fateful swing had toppled her over in the entrance hall decades ago.

The window was so grubby by now that a casual observer would only spot a silhouette on either side and no more, but a silhouette was plenty for Tamara to count sips of scotch in between jobs or pages of the newspaper.

A more significant amount of eyes on him would send him to work without fail, and this was one such occasion.

“Nice to have a day away from the wife, hey?” he noted gruffly as he came in to Jake’s back room where the well stood uncovered and the pump ready for the handyman. Jake had gotten to know the set-up amid so many hours spent watching and counting Andrew’s thieving hours.

The plumbing was nearly ready to go, the filter had been tested, and Jake had convinced himself that the many years of savings on water bills would certainly make up for this excruciating ordeal.

The crumpled man in his tired suit seemed to expect something upon his arrival, which Harriet would typically deliver without request. The men stood for a while in the entrance to the tack room - Jake exasperated, Andrew dulled with scotch and flustered at his host’s inhospitability – before a whimper from the couple’s new dog gave them a welcome respite. Jake firmly believed that a pet’s main purpose was to effortlessly defuse any awkward situation, and little Roger had arrived in the nick of time to beg for food and attention. Little did the owner know that his working guest awaited a similar treatment. “Hey, little guy. We just got him a few weeks ago now,” explained Jake, unsolicited, leaning over to give the young schnauzer a scratch. “Nice and butch but also portable. A funny bugger,” he added.

“So it is,” said Andrew, thrown by the innocent and lovable newcomer.

The pup uttered an expressive “woooo!” at the sight of an intruder. Jake resolved at this moment never to train the dog out of such behaviour, for he clearly had a natural sense for saving his skin when he had nothing to say. Besides, a well-trained dog is supposed to stay away until called upon, and what’s the use of that? No, thought Jake. This howling is just right.

He genuinely failed to hear Andrew’s request for tea over the din of the young dog’s howling. He smiled benignly, hoping the man would soon get to work so he could return to his own.

Rude prat, thought Andrew. Maybe Tamara has got a point.

And he set off to the well, which had already been prepared for his arrival. Wants to hurry me up, does he? For the first time since he started this two-week job about four weeks ago, Andrew made a conscious effort to work slowly.

“Well. I must be getting home to my Jake now,” said Harriet suddenly. She had not the immense stamina for remembering and recounting endless tales of minimal interest that the others possessed in droves. She was worried that Jake had failed to look after his employee, unwittingly arousing one more townsperson’s ire against himself.

Indeed, a vast list of important errands came crashing into her mind as she dozed throughout the latter part of the gathering – all the things she had been unable to do during her illness. “Plus, I’ve been so ill of late, I’ve a real backlog of errands by now.”

“Oh, dear, have you been ill?”

“Yes, terribly so. Could barely breathe through the bronchitis.” She nearly said phlegm but stuck to a more dignified term.

“Is that why your gorgeous flowers were not at the show the other day?” asked innocent Sally, as very near-audible alarm bells chimed through the parlour.

“Oh, my god! I was certain that was next week! I would have warned the organisers otherwise,” gasped Harriet. “Who won first prize then?”

Pleasantly diverted, thought Tamara coldly as the ladies tittered round the departing girl, loading her up with gifts mostly in the form of baked goods.

Tamara sent her on her way with a bouquet of light pick peonies from ther garden and a warm, understanding smile. Harriet set off to help Jake cope with the woman’s gruff husband, wondering whether he had made any progress whatsoever during her time in the lioness pit.

Clearly, he had not.

Nonetheless, Harriet brought a tray of biscuits and milky tea precisely the way he liked it, immediately upon her return and before even greeting her husband.

Andrew accepted the peace offering with grace, or so he thought.

The soft, curly-haired young woman felt he had sulked up the air in the well room so heavily, the tension between him and Jake was almost tangible.

“Jake! I practically needed a cleaver to slice through the atmosphere between the well room and your study. What did you do?”

Jake was genuinely oblivious as he grabbed her by the delicate waist and kissed her with intent.

“Hmmm, my darling,” she could feel that familiar pheromone tingling through her nose and loins as it simmered its way down through his own. He had been under understandable stress since she had fallen ill and left him to fend for himself with the antipathic villagers.

“You’ll be pleased to know I got them on our side, my sweet!” exclaimed the girl innocently, presenting all the gifts she had been bestowed at the little party. Jake turned cold.

“Oh, I’ll bet they loved you, my doll.”

“And what do you mean to say by that tone, Jake?”

“Only that any shift of the already heavily skewed balance in your favour, darling, is one step closer to that blunt blow from behind that awaits me on my way home one fateful night,” he answered in a frightfully calm voice, pushing aside the gateaux and dainty bouquets she had strewn across his desk.

“You needn’t be so dark about it, my beautiful, intellectual man,” Harriet implored, searching desperately to turn his anger to lust, something she could much better deal with. “I mean, if they like me, they’ll believe me when I speak well of you.”

“They’ll only believe what they want to believe. They’ll think I’ve coerced you somehow, my angel cake,” - his voice dripping with sarcasm - “and why is that blasted old geezer making such a racket in the kitchen instead of finishing my hateful, cursed well?!”

Andy was munching happily on Harriet’s peace offering of tea and biscuits which she had immediately rushed to serve him.

The girl noted her husband’s proprietary use of pronoun for the well as opposed to the kitchen, which in his mind was very much theirs just like the rest of the house and land. Clearly, the well had become a personal affair for the poor man. She scurried to the kitchen to nudge Andy back into work mode.

Though the ladies had not known how to address the matter of Harriet’s forced subservience to her face, they certainly knew how to discuss it in painstaking detail befitting a aspiring screenwriter.

Tamara basked in the humid air of gossiping, tea-drinking mouths. The air was electric: the droplets of saliva in each damning syllable proved the perfect conductor for the well-oiled machine of all-female conversation. It was a perfect storm of unfounded accusations and condescensions, almost all borne of the deeply unsettled, dissatisfied soul long ago bereft of any love or passion. The more hopeful younger ones would then promptly parrot the sentiments, their minds like endless linoleum hallways.

This was the kind of daytime party any self-respecting housewife could only dream of hosting. The long-elusive subject of the whole village’s conversation had finally made an appearance, then left early, with so much time remaining to dissect her every word, every move, even blemishes on her skin. For, although it was seen as rather low to criticise a fellow lady’s appearance outright, in the context of potential conjugal abuse, every small bruise and imperfection or bit of botched make-up was fair game. This part of the chatter was particularly savoured by the younger ones in the room, whose looks recent childbirth had somewhat despoiled and, unbeknownst to them, set them on the same path as the frumpy former beauties they so looked up to. Their husbands felt the change far more acutely than they themselves did, and so canapes and cake continued to fuel the conversation.

“I do hope all our gifts don’t get her into trouble,” chirped Clodagh disingenuously, for she knew it was bin night and on her way home past the Sadlers’ place she would certainly spare a keen glance to the contents of Jake and Harriet’s waste.

“Oh, goodness Clodagh! That’s a good point. I never thought of it,” gasped Angela sweetly. “He will think he’s losing her to us, and I won’t be surprised if we never saw her among us any more.”

This would provide a delicious rationale for Harriet’s certain refusals to partake in any upcoming social gatherings, for what other reason could there possibly be to turn down their invaluable company? Unless, of course, the girl was unforgivably rude, an idea they simply refused to entertain.

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GUTTER TALK - chapter 4: The well

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As it turned out, Andrew was the go-to man for all things plumbing. He had cleaned and set up a fair few wells in his time living in the country.

Jake and Harriet had just about finished their work on the courtyard. The large pink house overlooked two great lawns, three barns where they planned to house chickens for Jake and a couple of ponies for Harriet, and the trailer with its fatal unprotected ramp. Months of work had resulted in three fully-seeded lawns, barns scraped clean and a fancy new (used) tractor for trailer-tipping and field jobs. Their log burner and vegetable patch made them dead near self-sufficient. The last piece of the perfect puzzle was the adaptation of the well, so they would no longer need to pay for water.

Jake and Andrew had had very little to do with one another over the years. He thought Andrew seemed a sound bloke and sympathised with his plight of having to live with Tamara. Andrew, meanwhile, who had as little as possible to do with his wife and her friends, did not know the unpleasant experience she had imposed decades ago upon the man who had just hired him.

After they discussed the work that needed to be done, they sat in the kitchen shooting the breeze.

“How’s the wife, then?” asked Jake.

“Oh you know. I do my thing, she does hers,” was Andrew’s noncommittal reply.

“Ah yes, what’s her thing these days? Stirred up and trouble lately?” asked Jake, foolishly.

“What’s that about my wife, mate?” Jake sensed his neck hair bristle in response to that of his interlocutor across the table.

“Oh Andy, I’m sorry. I didn’t realised you two were on good – you know – anyway, I’m sorry, I just had some trouble with her is all.”

Though Andrew could barely speak a word to his wife without punching an imaginary wall, she was still the woman he was shackled to, and values were values.

He stood and said, “I’ll see you in a few days, once I’ve got all the parts to begin work.”

Jake behaved as politely as possible, but the goodbye was cold as the dead fawn in his field at the edge of the forest.

“Will you ever learn to keep your gob shut, you verbally incontinent fool!” he said to himself once Andrew had shut the door from the other side. He went and hastily covered up the manhole, not before casting a glance down seventy metres of ancient water which gleamed up at him menacingly.

“Would you believe the police service around here?”
Tamara was chittering away at her regular mums and nans meet-up. The farmer’s wife, still very impressed with the woman’s impeccable social manipulation skills, mouthed a hasty assent with her hazel eyes wide open. Cordelia rolled hers and said nothing. She had had some interactions with the lady of Sadler Farm on various occasions, all of them pleasant. She did not believe Tamara’s accusations for a second, but God was it convenient to have somewhere safe to leave the two-year-old free of charge throughout the week – aside from the occasional obligation of showing her face at one of the dreaded socials.

Just keep quiet, stay polite, and all will glide over you. She was saving up for a house since her partner had left her with the child and a rented cottage she dearly hoped to make her own one day. The owner had assured her he would sell it off “soon”, but in the meantime still gladly took the rent money every month. Cordelia tried nightly to keep her mind off the fact that she could have nearly paid it off by now, had the subhuman twat stuck to his word back when she and her ex-partner had taken it on. Well, I suppose we would have had that added nightmare when we split up, she rationalised in her darkest hours.

And so Cordelia waited, worked and saved, all her working hours going into plans for the future. The injustices of today carried out against others dissolved in the pool of her own struggles. She sent warm thoughts to lovely Harriet and loving Jake, and shook her head in silent dissent when Tamara stoked the conspiratorial fire in this warm which warmed the room filled with children and soft toys.

The other mothers joined in exuberantly, though, seemingly thrilled at the idea of a battered wife. What else could it possibly be? None of them had been seen to by any man in weeks, months, some even years. The thought of enjoyable or loud love-making never entered their righteous minds.

Cordelia, who had been out of the village and messed around a bit of late, had her own suspicions as to what that bruise on the base of Harriet’s neck might have been, but God forbid she pep up about her own improprieties in this circle. The thrashing sounds allegedly overheard by Kevin the meteorologist as he stumbled past the Sadler property late one night, Cordelia also attributed to something a little more complex than simple battery. But she kept silent.

Andrew sat darkly in his armchair while Tamara played with the children in the next room. He could see into the women’s gathering but could not hear a word – this was preferable. She’s a good woman at heart, he tried to think to himself, loyally, in defiance of Jake’s recent attack of her character.

She may be a harpie, but she’s my harpie, God damn it, he affirmed to himself, taking one more sip of his strong lemonade. I already look a twat. How much more of one will I be if my wife’s integrity is questioned?

His work on the well suffered greatly from these bitter thoughts. Furthermore, neighbour Angela’s gentle enquiries as to the well-being of “poor Harriet” set him even more firmly against the man of Sadler Farm. How can the bloke call himself a man and not sort out these rumours, if there’s no truth to them? At this point, Andrew’s own sins were but a cobweb in his mind – ancient, irrelevant.

Harriet was indeed the sweetest and gentlest character he had ever met and could not abide by the idea of anybody mistreating her.

His work suffered, and so did Jake’s sanity. Why, oh why had he agreed to pay the man by the hour as opposed to the full job? Nearly one thousand pounds in materials already disappeared down the proverbial four-hundred-year-old drain, and now this excruciatingly slow plumber whom he dared not cross for fear of setting one more denizen against himself.

Although Andrew was not technically working slowly on purpose, he wasn’t trying his hardest on purpose either. Filter parts were taking weeks to arrive in the mail, but he came over to work on some connecting pipes in the meantime, knowing at the back of his mind that it would take some undoing once the filters came in.
It was through no particular ill will but general gruffness and reluctance to go home where his wife hosted ever more frequent get-togethers where he was certainly not welcome – although it was never explicitly stated. Nothing ever was.

Tamara would often say that his mere presence within a hundred-metre radius cast a shadow over any pleasant gathering. Cordelia always considered this a rather ill-fitting description for their weekly meet-ups. 

 

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GUTTER TALK - chapter 3: Investigations

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Police did turn up the next morning, and Jake was astonished at the coroner’s efficiency. He opened the door rather confidently only to find himself cuffed and carried away to the local department.

“She won’t talk while he’s there,” the anonymous informant had said on the phone. So the officers took him away.

“We’ve received reports of domestic violence at your address – numerous statements in fact,” said the investigator to Jake who was rubbing his wrists in the interrogation room.

He said again and again it was all hogwash, and could they please refrain from upsetting his beloved wife when they interrogated her about it.

“We heard that she would not dare speak against you.”

“Well that’s convenient,” snorted Jake.

“Please do not interrupt. You seem to have a bad rap in your community,” said the police chief.

“A community of venomous idiots! By god, my poor wife has just moved in to this bloody village and already so many issues. How will I look for recommending we settle there?!”

“You’re also due a visit regarding the untimely death of your farm hand, I take it?”

“Yes. Great timing for a wonderful succession of events,” said Jake dryly, resigning himself fully to the situation.

“We’ve no need for cheek here, Mr Sadler,” said the investigator quietly.

“No. Of course it’s not your fault I’m here. What good has cheek ever done anybody anyway? Go on, then. List the charges and let me sift through the nonsense, chief. I know you see plenty of us blokes every day, so I suppose it’s no use insisting on my innocence, though I really could not possibly be more innocent.”

“They say they have seen your wife with a bruise on her left shoulder, and another time round her left wrist.”

“Rough sex, officer.”

The chief was momentarily silenced.

“They say she looked away towards you when somebody remarked upon it, and did not explain it further.”

“She’s a timid girl, sir, unlikely to discuss our bedroom habits with the locals. Which is why I hope and ask again that your qualified men are treating her sensitively at this moment.”

“I dare say you are terribly confident, Mr Sadler.”

“My wife and I are dearly devoted to each other and I have no doubt whatever in my mind that she will support me under even the most strenuous interrogations. In fact I think she will be bewildered by the accusations.”

Jake put his head to his palms and added, “while we’re here, sir, why don’t we cover the whole farm hand disaster?”

“That’s… not my department, I’m afraid, sir.”

Again, this transition to “sir”, noted Jake.

He suppressed the inner boilings of anti-bureaucratic sentiment and said:

“Could you take down a statement, perhaps, and pass it on? Could you bring someone else in? I implore you, officer. It has been weighing on me for over a week. I need to put this accident behind me, take whatever punishment I deserve for not immediately taking out workplace accident insurance on the guy, and move on with my life.” Start perhaps by murdering the neighbours, he thought loudly.

The domestic violence investigator was moved by the man’s recent misfortunes, but refrained from trusting him too soon.

“How do you explain screams emitting from your property last night?”

“Rough sex, officer.”

No shame, no gain, thought the chief. Fair play.

“We’ll have to corroborate with with the lady’s version of events before we let you off, Mr Sadler. As for your farm hand, the relevant department is out of office at the moment. They’re due to see you tomorrow. You can wait and see if they have any time for you today but it could be a while.”
“No,” sighed Jake. “I need to see Harry – that’s Harriet. My wife. Poor girl, she’ll be so worried.”

The lovers reconvened in distress that evening, shocked at their neighbours’ behaviour and wondering whether their misfortunes would ever let up or would they have to move elsewhere. Jake felt horribly guilty for bringing Harriet into such a fraught environment, and so soon after their marriage. It was supposed to be perfect and yet their hazy dream life had been shaken apart in a matter of days.

Harriet’s questioning had cleared Jake of suspicion, as expected, though the wound cut deep. She was mortified that anybody should have heard her intimate noises and described them as “screams from a medieval torture chamber”. She was disgusted that her sexual bruises that been so keenly observed and misconstrued. Now everybody would know what those noises and injuries had been. So much for absolute freedom in a seemingly isolated haven of natural beauty! Clearly the elderly couple next door still had extremely sharp hearing, though their house stood nearly two hundred metres away.

“Darling, we’ll soundproof the bedroom. It does face their yard after all. We’ll make a few adjustments, have a couple of unpleasant conversations, and join Andy in his excursions outside town if we want to socialise!” Jake breathed reassuringly in her fretting ear.

“Oh but Jake, we shouldn’t have to start our life here as outcasts, we shouldn’t!” she cried.

“I’m joking darling. It will blow over. Besides, we can not give up now on all this work, all this glorious land.”

They had walked out to their little triangular field, one of two that had come with the house. The summer sun lay low in the sky and rippled its rays through the woodland at the borders. The freshly mown grass glistening in clean patterns created the image of an expansive green sea. The rays caught each blade with incredible definition so it really did look like ripples. Harriet could almost see them undulate, perhaps in the wind, perhaps in her mind. She stopped suddenly to look at a tiny black toad, the smallest anybody could have ever seen.

“It’s lost! How did it even avoid the mower’s blades!” she chirped, suddenly joyful. It hopped in the waves of green with difficulty.

“Why don’t we set it free in the stream?” said Jake, picking up the little creature. “Would you like to do it?”

Harriet put out her hands and with deep concentration in her face, took the tiny thing – it broke her heart with its sheer helplessness – she trudged through the heavy grass to the stream at the other end.

The creature hopped inside her palms from one hand to the other, getting lost in the creases of her creamy skin. It had subtle ridges on its skin just like a toad, only in unutterably delicate miniature. One small muscle movement could crush it, and the thought sunk her heart.

Jake came up behind her as she played with the frog by the very edge of the stream, worried that it might drown if she put it straight in. It seemed to walk away from the water when she put it on the edge. Jake picked up the rock it sat on and put that in a shallow section, from which point the frog, or toad, dove in and climbed among the wet rocks out of their sight. The two lovers looked at each other and at their unspeakably beautiful setting. Gold light bathed the clearing with its trickling stream amid the chirping of birds and crickets. The sea of grass behind them gleamed in sharp focus. Even flies looked like glitterbugs in the early evening light.

“I couldn’t bear to leave this behind, Jake. If I ever do feel down, I’ll come back here, even in the dark of night, and all will be well.”

“I wonder if that frog is going to grow any bigger,” said Jake absent-mindedly.

Harriet grasped his shoulders, kissing his grim, thoughtful face. He pulled her hair from the back, kissing her exposed throat. It really is all too beautiful to leave behind, he thought. Though he was used to it since early childhood, the country still had him firmly under its spell and now it had Harriet also.

The death of Willy Wurton had temporarily tarnished their home, but these fields and woods were untouchable by petty human affairs. Frogs, birds, flies and rabbits were king here, Jake and Harriet mere visitors to their land.

No, they would stay. They would enjoy their life here, no matter what the snooping fools thought of it.

The neighbours had already wasted the police department’s time with baseless accusations. The interrogations had ended with jovial jesting on all sides as Harriet served her investigator tea and cakes while Jake described Tamara’s odd fascination with neighbours’ children since his younger days.

“There’s always a batty one,” the officer had said good-naturedly. “It’s a pity she decided to turn them all on you Mr Sadler, though they clearly have a lot of care in their hearts for your lovely wife.”

“Care!” Jake nearly spat his tea in derision. “Care. All she wants is to sow misery, set wives against husbands, children against their mothers. I’ve no pity for that horrible woman,” in fact, I pity her husband, he added in thought, as it would not go down well to support a known wife-beater in this particular situation. The officer, noisily crunching on a biscuit, had not quite made out Jake’s last angry remark and felt too awkward to ask again. He nodded so vacantly Harriet had to stifle a giggle having observed the whole exchange.

Jake was busy recalling a screaming match between his mother and Tamara after the woman had been denied access to the boy for after-school activities she hosted at her home with all the other mothers and children. Jake’s mother, Rosemary, could not stand Tamara and had refused to come along.

She had then made the misjudgement of mowing her lawn on a Sunday morning during the service, which had irritated Tamara deeply. “How much disrespect can you possibly have for our little village? I understand that you think you’re better than us all, but to disrupt the service like that, well it’s just embarrassing for everybody,” she had said tersely, standing at the door. Jake was playing on the couch in the living room directly behind Rosemary, and he stopped to listen.

“I am sorry for the bad timing. I had no intention of causing any disturbance to the service,” - she actively refrained from saying “your” service, which would indeed have seemed superior – and then, “is that all?”

“Is that all?” shrieked Tamara, stoked to a rage. “You have made no attempt to integrate into our community! We have had enough of you arrogant city folk, spitting on our very existence while profiting off our toil! You don’t know the things we do for you, for everybody… where do you suppose all your lovely bottled milk comes from? Our farmers are up before dawn, milking every day, or else their cows will die. And who ploughs the snow in winter from the roads? And your precious chard?!” She had watched Jake’s mother unload a shopping trip of rainbow chard from the local grocery a week ago. “We have been here for decades, centuries even. What has your city culture ever done for us?”

“Mrs. Fowler, I don’t need this. I find it disturbing that you watch me unload my groceries in such detail. I have apologied for my disrespectful behaviour, and I’ve nothing more to say to you.”

But Tamara was not ready to retreat. Her husband had left to get drunk immediately after the service and she knew he would return in one of his less agreeable moods - church never agreed with him – so she was raring for a fight. Rosemary sensed this.

“Mrs Fowler,” she affirmed sternly. “Have you been drinking? Why won’t you leave? You want my son this badly?” her voice trembled slightly at the wilful confrontation. The nerve that had been longing to be touched, had been snapped.

“Your son! You keep him away from our children in your ivory tower. What, you think we will make him ill? Pervert him? What kind of mother are you, has your husband abandoned you for your cold heart?”

“Just because I give you and your buddies nothing to gossip about, you despise me. You wish my son would come over and dish out some dirt, well, dream on. He’s not entering your sordid little circle of hyena women and neither am I. At least their fathers have some sense,” she said through gritted teeth, jaws flexing like Jake’s would so many years later, and mimed a slap up the back of an invisible head. She closed the door in Tamara’s shocked face and went calmly to join Jake who played alone with his toys every day.

“Why don’t you go and play in the garden, darling. I saw some rabbits out there earlier, you know. Could you find their hole for me?”

And so Jake had embarked on one more of his many solo adventures, having absorbed every word of the unfortunate exchange at the door without realising it until that day by the fire in his own home in the very same little town.

The young man’s antagonist now had a tuft of silver hair remaining from her luscious black locks of yore. It was neatly arranged into a bun and a set of black thick-rimmed glasses sat atop her thin-ridged nose. It was a rather lovely face, unmistakeably reminiscent of former beauty.

Andrew had picked her up at the little baking goods shop where she had worked part-time while studying to become a midwife. He had been on a drunken rampage through the village at the time. In her innocence she had fallen for the brute – he put on a good show when he needed to, and he certainly did need to when he landed in a quaint little shop full of fragile baking supplies and a cute young woman at the counter. Their romance lasted all of six weeks before marriage eroded the delusion in record time. At once Andrew realised he could barely stand to hear her talk, while she would not have any part of his tall, flabby body anywhere near her. This was hardly fertile ground for establishing a family, so Tamara began to adopt the village children by strategically befriending their mothers, having them around on a regular basis, offering to babysit, and before long her central position in the village was secured.

All she wanted was to make her mark on future generations, if God would not permit her to raise her own from scratch. After Andrew struck her once in an explosion of anger, she knew there was never to be any child brought up in that household. The grief was soon buried under the bustle of organising mothering groups and activities for all the nippers except for elusive little Jake, whom she so pitied for his lonely upbringing.

She would never be able to befriend Rosemary, and Jake was doomed to play with rabbit holes and stag beetles. He loved the company of local chickens, too – he would crouch by the fence of neighbouring broods and watch the hens gossip throughout the day, giggling to himself as they kicked at the dust.

Harriet was amusing the officer with spooky stories she had heard from the locals. The two newlyweds had a seventy-metre deep, four-hundred-year-old well inside their home concealed under a modern manhole in the old tack room which connected the stables with the courtyard.

They had long debated processing the water to make it drinkable and asked around town for advice. This had led to some disturbing stories from long-time residents.

“Oh, that old thing? They didn’t tell you about that when you was buying the house did they, or you could have knocked off a chunk of the price I’m sure. Always ask for backstory, always,” one jolly geezer had said to her. Upon her refusal to entertain his mockery, the local man proceeded to describe the story, as it went:

“They say a family lived here back around a century ago. Good honest people, they kept the land well, in fact they’d taken it over from a right disaster of a farmer before them who’d drunk himself silly.

“The well was outdoors back then and they used it every day to get water for the milking herd. One day, they sent their little fella of about thirteen to get the bucket and – get this – he hauled up a skeleton! Half the skin still on, mind you. Well preserved down there in the cold. He was traumatised for life, of course. Not something you’d like to see, really. I heard it from the boy’s sister’s son meself.

“He went on to become as drunk as the farmer before them when he inherited the place, being the only boy in the family. Ran it into the grounds you know today.”

Harriet had just finished off the horror story when Jake startled himself out of his stupor of reminiscence.

“Apologies, officer. I’ve just thought of something. Any chance you might take down my statement regarding the accident we had here the other day, take that load off my mind?”

“Accident, you say?” asked the policeman, still shaken from Harriet’s tales.

“Yeah,” said Jake, and he explained his conversation with the coroner and the ensuing exchange at the police station earlier that day.

“Well sir, I’m afraid workplace accidents ain’t in my line of duty,” - Jake bristled - “Cor, mighty unfortunate you two lovebirds have been here, ain’t you? Maybe there’s something to that rude gentleman’s story, as regards the place being a bit rough,” he said sympathetically.

“We certainly will not be dealing with the ghosts in that well ourselves!” Harriet said brightly. “We will hire a plumber-cum-exorcist, of course. Plenty of them around.”

Jake lovingly, and somewhat heatedly, clasped his wife by the waist from where he sat. She gracefully stopped herself stumbling from the sudden movement, and settled sideways on the armrest. “Thanks anyway, officer. I’ll await the relevant, er, department.”

Their new acquaintance chuckled nervously, bowed to them with a raise of the cap which he recovered on his way out, and departed.

“Sex-crazed maniacs,” chortled the officer, who was called Paul, to his colleague John who had interrogated the suspect.

“I know, right? Enough to make your neighbours phone in? Blimey, he must be doing something right,” said John. “She was a looker, I suppose?”

“Oh, rarely see one like it. So timid, too. Desperate to get her man off the hook – but also desperate to stay discreet. I got the message, anyway. She’s no battered wife. Poor pair’s got enough on their plate now with these elderly vultures on their backs.”

“You say that. But who knows if the fella ain’t offed his farm hand?”

“Seems pretty unlikely, considering the mountain of work to do on that property, seems he’d need all the help he can get. Then again, maybe the guy was a dud, and the landlord has a temper,” mused Paul with a good-natured shrug.

“He’s more likely to off his neighbours at this rate, I’d say,” John said solemnly. “That woman calling up with all her phony witness statements. Clearly a troublemaker.”

Over the following days, Jake got off with a thousand-pound fine for failing to insure himself against workplace accidents and Willy Wurton was never to be heard of again.

His ashes were thrown in an unmarked grave outside town with those of the latest nameless nursing-home casualties.

Andrew was making his drunken way home that day after a night in the hedges. He stopped to heave himself over the cemetery gates while council undertakers did they tragic deeds for the local unknowns.

“What’s that you’re doing then?” asked Andrew in a gravelly voice thick with smoke. The undertaker explained under his breath, and Andrew headed home, duly depressed.

“Did you know what they do to some people who die?” he slurred at Tamara upon entering the hallway.

Tamara coldly instructed him to take off his muddy shoes, and said: “they bury them. In an unmarked grave.” Kind of like what I'd do to you, darling, were the words that whistled through her mind as she glowered at her life partner.

“They don’t even barely bother to separate ‘em! Say you die at the same time’s some bloke from the care home, well, your ashes and his ashes are all down there all mixed up together!” he blurted in childish horror.

“Then you go to hell as an amalgamation of the two.”

“Amalgamamala – why hell?”

Because you will go to hell, her mind screamed in his face. Could I think it any louder, you thick drunk?

 

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GUTTER TALK - chapter 2: It could only be one thing

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Tamara and Angela had organised a nice dinner with all the locals the following night, which they did invite Jake and Harriet to, knowing full well the pair would decline.

“So, ladies, where are the handsome newlyweds?” asked Richard in his booming voice.

“They’re still recovering from that odd accident from the other day,” said Tamara suggestively.

All eyes shot towards her immediately. Gossip was the lifeblood of any village, easily interrupting mundane dinner party chit-chat which nobody really cared about anyway.

“What’s that, odd accident?” said Richard, cocking an eyebrow in slight drunkenness.

“They said their farmhand died while taking a shower,” - Angela.

Indeed, nobody recalled seeing this helper of theirs.

“Well, Jake did say they had only hired him a few days earlier,” Angela added, not without a touch of scepticism.

Indeed, scepticism rippled through the crowd like a bad smell.

Cordelia, a young schoolteacher who had moved into the the area just under a year ago, was quick to catch a whiff. “You don’t think they’re telling the truth then, Angela?”

“Well, I mean! What would I know?” I’ve only sixty years of experience telling me otherwise, she added bitterly to herself, loudly enough that those sitting by her could practically hear her thoughts.

In no time, the ladies’ theory dug its way into the guests’ minds.

“He was trying to cover up why she screamed, of course,” shouted Richard, now fully sloshed and enjoying himself greatly.

Angela agreed. “By god, that is exactly what I was thinking,” you wonderful man! She thought the second bit.

Pompous arse-licker, thought Cordelia simultaneously.

They discussed almost the whole remainder of the dinner what was to be done about Harry, particularly as she seemed intent on lying for her husband. It could only be one thing, but how would they ever prove it?

Jake, meanwhile, was frantically juggling farm duties, a potential murder accusation or workplace endangerment case all while trying to soothe Harriet’s frayed nerves.

She had gone first to the bathroom and had been first witness to the scene. Her scream had nearly sent the hairs flying from his head and neck for fear that she herself had come to some tragic demise. He had run downstairs to the carnage, unfit to be viewed by man or woman – he had been deeply shaken but needed to think fast. The slippy shower had been the first thing to cross their minds and they decided to stick to that interpretation even after finding, to their horror, the fresh red stain on the ground by the unprotected ramp.

Jake knew nothing of the helper he had hired several days prior. A Mr Wurton had walked in from the street asking for work and citing numerous references from distant towns which Jake had planned to follow up in the coming weeks. But he had needed a hand then and there, and hired the man without a second thought. “We’ll sort out your contract by next Friday.”

“Why did I act so hastily? How could I know he was not some clumsy freak? Who hires live-in assistants without so much as a background check?”

“I refuse to let you beat yourself up over this, darling,” cooed Harriet as they sat in their oversized living room, cold and thoughtful. “You could never have known the man would be such a liability. What can they do? They can’t blame you for a shower accident.” She stroked his ash-blond hair lovingly.

“I don’t know what possessed me to lie about where he died, though.” Jake was pale as a drowned child, his honey-coloured eyes bloodshot, jaw muscles flexing.

Almost all his charming looks had deserted him to fend for himself once he had stopped sleeping. “That lie will be the end of me,” he kept saying dramatically. “And I didn’t even do anything!”

Just for one split second of panic, he had lied through his teeth which were now grinding away in self-loathing. That would lay even more suspicion against him.

Grossly did he underestimate the extent of his neighbours’ imagination, however.

“Poor Harriet’s not made a peep since that day,” the old farmer Kevin’s wife said to Tamara as they chatted across each others’ front gates one morning.

“He must be keeping her sweet so she doesn’t raise any suspicions,” replied Tamara, speaking confidently out of her own experience.

“You’re right. It could only be one thing, considering.”

Kevin’s wife was a great admirer of the long-suffering Tamara and her resilience. Any woman who had been through what she had been through was undeniably correct in her suspicions. She had intuition, thought the wife – a mousy, nondescript woman of around fifty.

Tamara loved to boast of her harsh conditions with Andrew and ill health to her lady friends round the village, making sure her own sufferings always outdid theirs.

Although a couple did find it tedious, most ladies of the village viewed her with some level of reverence and used her as a barometer for their own tribulations.

Andrew, too, got what he wanted from the whole thing: a wide berth at social gatherings. He knew very well what had warranted such treatment and though he was not proud, the outcome was rather peaceful. He had a few occasional friends at the pub in the next village. They never asked questions, aside from the inquisitive barmaid who liked to interrogate him when she had a quiet moment.

“So why is this your local if you live up in N--?”

“So are you married?”

“What’s your favourite pastime then?”

“Have you lived round here all your life? Don’t you ever frequent N-- pubs?”

She was an easy fly to swat. Because he was so often curt, known as a man of few words, his softness towards the barmaid made her feel special. A cute little thing, fresh from Australia, she was keen to discover the juicy secrets of the British countryside. He kept his answers evasive but relatively honest nonetheless.

“I’m been coming here for years, since I got a job up here doing a bloke’s electrics who was building his home. I don’t much get on with the folks in N--, there aren’t very many of them and even fewer have two brain cells to rub together. Moved into the area twenty years ago, soon’s I got married… so, yes. I am married.” The finality in his tone told the Sheila to refrain from prying any further in that direction.

Angela could not get her mind off the frantic way Jake had greeted her and Tamara that fateful day. It was now a week and nobody had heard from them. Cordelia had seen the two working on the front lawn one morning on her way to the school, but all in all no further gossip transpired.

Willy Wurton’s body had yet to be disposed of, as the authorities struggled to locate any family member or friend who might claim him. An inquest was surely forthcoming, Jake kept thinking. He knew he had to get on the phone and inquire about the proceedings, or suspense and suspicion would weigh even heavier on his shoulders.

The authorities rang him instead, and he very nearly jumped out of his skin when Harriet passed him the receiver. “Darling, it’s the coroner about Willy.”

“Hello? Yes, this is he,” Jake replied, distractedly fiddling with a nut at the side of the kitchen table.

“Have you been in contact with any of Mr Wurton’s family since you took him under your employment?” asked the voice in its formal manner.

“No. He came to me completely out of nowhere to be honest,” Jake said. “My wife and I had just moved in to a soiled mess of a farm, and needed help quickly as possible. He answered our notice on the village hall notice board within a day of our putting it up. I was just getting the papers ready to give him the contract and he had shown he could do the work, it had only been a week or so, and he clearly knew what he was doing, he was quick and all that--”

“Mr. Sadler, do not get ahead of yourself,” the voice interrupted his distraught ramblings. “I am not a detective, I am trying to find the man’s next of kin so we can organise an inquest.

“I do understand you would be upset. Can you recall any mentions he might have made of any family, where he might hail from, anything like that?”

“N-no, coroner. I have racked my brains all week and scoured the address books of all surrounding villages. There are a couple Wurtons we have not yet tried,” he said, more dutifully.

“Not to worry, Mr Sadler. We are on it. I will keep you informed if anybody does turn up.”

“What about… the body?” Jake asked in hushed tones, glancing sideways at Harriet who was busying herself in the kitchen.

“Well sir,” the coroner’s tone had grown warmer all of a sudden. Jake noted his change to the title “sir”. “ The police are still investigating the matter, of course. The doctor has identified the gentleman’s death as a blow to the head which ruptured the skull and killed him within minutes. I’ll tell you one thing, sir,” he added briskly.

“The nurses who came to the scene ought to have called an experienced investigation team straight away, but instead got some rookie from the force who took a couple of pictures and let them get on with wheeling away the body. Police will have to come interview you. If no will or next of kin can be found, it looks like a pauper’s funeral for the poor sod.”

“Right, thank you so much for letting me know, coroner. When can I expect the police to come over?”

“They should make their way to your neck of the woods in a couple days or so,” chirped the man on the other line, who clearly loved his job. He was fiddling with a loose screw on the dead body’s stretcher as he spoke.

“After you’ve cleared up the circumstances of the death with them, which I’m sure you will, looks a lot like a pauper’s funeral for the poor bugger,” he repeated himself.

Upon ending this odd conversation with the morbid coroner, Jake dragged his feet forlornly to the kitchen.

“Oh darling, you look exhausted,” fretted Harriet, handing him a cup of tea.

“That’s two or three more days of anxiety, my love, and then we’re through with this nightmare. I think I’ll stick to the shower story, because even I can barely believe someone would knock their head that badly then pop in for a wash. He must have fallen off the ramp, stumbled in concussed and finished himself off in there. It’s as close to the truth as anyone will ever know, save the cats and the birds. Judging by the gentleman’s tone on the phone, nobody’s too fussed about this fellow anyway.”

“That’s right, my sweet. That’s right, and you’ve nothing to fear. It’s not your fault you hired a morbidly clumsy clod. We were desperate. Still are, in fact,” said Harriet.

“You’re very right about that, Harry my angel. I don’t know what I would do without you,” groaned Jake, touching her cheeks through her dusty brown curls and looking her straight in the eyes. “You are my goddess, my love.”

Harriet melted on the spot knowing that Jake would be at his most bestial after such upheaval. He had barely had her at all since the accident last week and he was not used to taking such long breaks. Thank goodness I’m not wearing my good stockings today, she thought to herself.

Jake had done so much work on their new place that week, he had been so quiet and his face so lined with worry that Harriet ached to do what she could to soothe her husband’s frayed nerves. The dinners she cooked and help she provided were but trifles compared with what came next.

Her body, small and malleable, was like a stress toy to pent-up Jake. She could feel the angst coursing through his member as he thrust it wherever he needed. Harriet’s whimpers fuelled him further in his destructive passion. Under such dire physical circumstances, her body and mind became one, the brain releasing a trailer-load of endorphins as he gripped her hips like a drowning man clutches at a buoy.

Whines turned to screams as Jake’s teeth nearly joined on her right nipple to accompany his aggressive thrusts. She had lost almost all internal sensation by then, but that bite jolted all the nerve endings from their stupor as the sharp pain from her breast switched instantly to pleasure and oh, how she panted and moaned, how the two of them danced in forgetful bliss, how pleased she was that such a drug had ever been invented. The couple would surely sleep well tonight.

 

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