The Whiskerly Sisters (15 page)

As time passed, Bex began to justify her actions. It wasn’t as if she did this sort of thing every day. She never did anything when the children were around or she had company and, besides, she only did it when she felt Malcolm deserved it, when he took out his temper on her, when he unjustly berated her or simply left her feeling putdown or irritated. Furthermore, she was very, very careful. She read up on her products and knew just how much to add. She didn’t want to alter the taste of the food; her goal was to enhance it with a little hidden revenge. She didn’t want to cause a violent reaction; her aim was much more subtle so she thought it best not to over-egg the pudding. And it wasn’t as if this could ever be classed as poisoning. God forbid! It was just a small nonsense, a delicate redressing of the balance, a little settling of the scores.

For his part, Malcolm, apart from beginning to worry that he might have the beginnings of irritable bowel syndrome and some anxiety-driven dermatitis, noticed nothing. Why would he? He hadn’t looked at Bex properly for years so why would he spot what was going on under his nose. Quiet, gentle, boring little Bex, who never said boo to a goose, why on earth would he think she was up to something so spiteful?

It was wrong of course. Totally out of order. An offence probably, but Bex didn’t care. The internal rebel, the subversive within, the radical core had been re-awakened from their slumber and, after such a long sleep, they were hungry for attention, eager for reaction, alert for opportunity. Bex had not had so much fun in ages and she intended to keep on enjoying herself for a very long time to come.

It didn’t always work out as planned of course. There were a few hiccoughs along the way. There was the time that Malcolm sat back from a rather large second helping of apple crumble, replete and satiated, to congratulate her on the quality of her custard. It was probably the phlegm she thought to herself and, as the ridiculousness of the situation took hold, she dissolved into a fit of hysterical laughter, which she had to cover with an outbreak of exaggerated coughing. She ran to the upstairs bathroom where she collapsed over the basin in a fit of giggles, tears pouring down her face with the absurdity of it all. Malcolm had felt quite concerned, going so far as to bring her a glass of water and suggest that she might need a tonic.

A tonic? Hadn’t she already got one?

Sometimes she forgot to keep a low profile. She was beginning to feel so full of exuberance inside that it occasionally spilled over onto the outside. Coming in from the garden one summer evening with a basketful of fresh linen and humming pleasantly to herself, Malcolm complimented her on how lovely she looked. How radiant and fresh. Alarmingly, he made a rather clumsy pass, a saucy little squeeze of her behind, a hint of a suggestion of resumed intimacy. She froze. Jesus Christ, she’d thought those days were over and a good job too. The passionate, erotic lover of yesteryear was dead and had been buried long ago. In its place, there stood an overbearing, overweight, unappealing fumbler with a tendency to roll over and fart within seconds of it being over. She had learned, over the years, to surrender to his embrace, make as little fuss as possible, say something nice and then slide to the far side of the bed as soon as the deed was done. In time, his advances had lessened and, eventually, praise the lord, had stopped altogether.

God, he couldn’t possibly want to start all the nonsense again, could he? The alarm bells were ringing the Hallelujah Chorus in her head. She must remember to keep her down, to come across as somewhat bland, to play the vacant little wife.

Besides, she had a lover. She didn’t need Malcom’s odious, night time offerings. She had begun an affair with the man who ran the delicatessen on the other side of town. David was a widower, gentle, intelligent and understanding.

And he was a bloody good fuck!

So, whenever they could both manage it, they stole away to a distant hotel to get down and dirty.

It seemed the worm had turned!

Turned? It was doing bloody great cartwheels up and down the hall carpet.

Bex did not stop there. If ever there was one for biting the bullet, it was her and she wasn’t so much biting the bullet as sucking out every last, rich drop of its marrow. Eventually, she turned her attention to the thing that mattered most in Malcolm’s life. His car.

Malcolm’s black classic BMW was his pride and joy. How he fussed over that machine. It was an affair with an alternator, passion with a piston, foreplay with a four stroke.

It was kept safely out of sight of the garage during the working week when Malcolm drove his company car to the office, but, without fail, every Saturday morning, he cleaned, polished and hoovered his ‘precious’ inside and out before driving it to the golf club for a little practice or a nine hole pair. Malcolm was never home on Sundays since he was either taking part in a golfing tournament or else spending the day with the boys from the Beamer Club, talking dirty about sparkplugs, lusting over a shapely camshaft or drooling over a V8.

Since they rarely went anywhere together these days, Bex hardly ever saw the inside of the damn thing. Besides, she herself had never learned to drive. In the early days, there was always a good bus service, latterly she could afford a taxi whenever she wanted one. If all else failed, a friend or neighbour would usually offer her a lift. She knew nothing whatsoever about cars and cared even less.

Or so Malcolm thought, for Bex – her victories accumulating, her confidence growing and her self-esteem on the up and up – had decided to learn to drive. It was David who taught her as their budding relationship grew into something far more than a shag or two on the sly. Together, they bought her a car, a little Honda Civic, which she kept on David’s drive away from prying eyes. They used it to drive to out of the way places where they could make love unnoticed – amongst the corn, on a deserted beach and, on one very exciting occasion, under a picnic table during a performance of L’Elisir d’Amour at Glyndebourne.

Having passed her test on her first attempt and, discovering she was rather good at things technical, Bex decided to have a go at mechanical engineering. It was a huge risk of course. Being the only woman in the class and not a young thing, she was bound to be noticed, to accrue some unwanted attention, to be the talk of the college but, because she was able to sign up for a course at a school twenty miles away, she got away with it.

So whereas in the early days, she had only been able to inject the flesh wounds of retribution, she was now poised to go for the jugular and so she did. Again, she was very careful. There was a very real possibility of discovery and she didn’t want any suspicion coming her way. She put a lot of thought into these vehicular assaults and used this avenue only very occasionally.

She began with almost insignificant things. One Saturday morning, she removed the canister of engine oil he kept in the garage so he had to go out for more, and, while he was gone, she put breadcrumbs on the bonnet of the car so that, upon his return, his beautifully cleaned BMW was covered in pigeon shit and he had to start again.

One evening, while Malcolm was watering the garden, Bex, feeling incredibly bold, stole into his briefcase, which he always left in the under stairs cupboard and removed his car keys. As soon as she could, she took herself into town and had a duplicate set made. The keys were gone for a blood chilling seventeen hours during which time Bex felt barely able to breathe. However Malcolm, always a creature of the most regular habit, would not need the keys until the weekend and therefore did not spot the loss. The following evening when he went out for his usual brisk walk to the paper shop, Bex sneaked into the garage, using the spare set of keys he kept secreted away at the back of the right hand drawer of his bedside table, unlocked the car and rubbed fish debris to the underside of the mats. Bex was delighted with the result. In the confined space of the garage, the smell of rotting haddock lingered for weeks. Malcolm had been beside himself and couldn’t work out where the smell was coming from or how it had got there in the first place. How he fretted over that one.

She made the tiniest tears in the leather seats on the backseats. Malcolm had been so very puzzled. He couldn’t imagine how they had got there. The car was always handled with the utmost care and, besides, it had been locked up all week. He decided that it must be mice and hurried off to by some traps.

Mice with quickunpicks, Bex supposed, supressing a grin.

She grew bolder. She punched a hole in the exhaust, loosened the jubilee clip, even going so far as to drain the battery one night when he was away at a conference in Belgium. The car began to spend more time in the repair shop than in his own garage. Malcolm was beside himself. He took such care of his pride and joy. How could these things have happened?

Throughout it all, Bex played the role of the confused wife. No, she hadn’t been in the garage. No, she was certain no one else had been in there either. No, she had no idea how a car that hadn’t been out of the garage all week had got damaged. She didn’t drive, she knew nothing about cars and, in any case, she never had any need to go into the garage for anything. She didn’t even have a set of keys herself.

It had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with her. Had it?

As the game went on, Malcolm became increasingly paranoid. He took to checking the car each morning before work and each evening as soon as he got home. On a couple of occasions, he even dropped by at lunchtime, once almost catching Bex red handed on the way to the garage to rub the remains of a trout over the back seat of his best beloved. Five minutes later and she would have been undone. Fortunately, she was able to back pedal towards the dustbins where she quickly got rid of the evidence. She made a mental note to be more careful in future.

As time passed, Bex decided to weave another spell. She began to make Malcolm believe he was getting absent minded, losing the plot, possibly becoming a little neurotic. As usual, she began gently and was easily able to convince Malcolm that these little incidents could well be symptomatic of the pressure he was currently experiencing at work.

She would move his glasses when he wasn’t looking and when he protested that he could have sworn he had put them down on the table beside the sofa, like he always did, she assured him that he had taken them off in the dining room and left them beside his plate. She told them that she had tidied them away to the sideboard whilst clearing the table and she would get up and return the missing spectacles to the baffled Malcolm.

Papers would disappear from his briefcase and turn up in the most unexpected places. How could they have got down the side of the bed? Had he forgotten he had been reading through them in bed the previous evening, boning up on their contents in preparation for the following morning’s meeting, Bex would remind him. Malcolm was beside himself. He could have sworn he had read nothing more exacting than the local newspaper. He decided that he must be getting forgetful in his old age. Bex demurred sympathetically.

Disturbingly, a variety of tools went missing from the potting shed only to turn up a few days later in the most absurd places. Malcolm, who believed in running a tidy ship, couldn’t work out why he hadn’t put them back where they belonged as was his custom. Why on earth would he leave the trowel down by the side of the freezer for goodness’ sake? And what was he thinking about when he decided to store his collection of clay pots under the sink. Malcolm was mystified.

Malcolm’s world finally came adrift at the annual President’s Ball at his local Golf Club where it was the custom for each table to nominate a member to donate a spot prize. Competition was fierce amongst the golfing community to donate the best prizes. This year, it had been Malcolm’s turn to represent his table and he had gone out of his way to purchase a presentation set of six expensive golf balls. He sat back in his chair confident that his donation would be well received but, when the lucky winner opened the beautifully wrapped gift to discover it contained six ordinary ping pong balls in a cardboard container, Malcolm was lost. He could not believe his eyes and the colour drained from his face. Instead of being congratulated on a choice well made, he was the laughing stock of the room. In vain, did he try to make excuses and bluster his way through the faux pax, but it was too late. Malcolm’s ‘booby prize’ was born that evening and would henceforth remain a part of the proceedings of the President’s Ball. He knew he would never live it down.

Malcolm felt that he had made a complete fool of himself and, unsurprisingly, it was at this very moment that he surrendered to the lie. He had to face up to the truth – not only had he been overworking and suffering from stress, he was also becoming absent-minded and couldn’t even be trusted to put on his own trousers.

And throughout the whole sorry episode, by his side, sat the ever faithful Bex, smiling up at him sympathetically.

F
resna smiled lazily as she stretched her shapely, athletic body across the bed. The man beside her mumbled something in his sleep and rolled over. They had made love all afternoon and, of course, it had been incredible. She had come for England. She would not have been there if she had not been certain of a more than acceptable performance level from her lover, but now it was over and the sultry, golden afternoon was yielding to the first whispers of evening. The corners of the room were beginning to darken and ghosts of shadows had started to steal their gloomy progress across the bottom of the bed. It was time to go.