The Good Samaritan
The sky was struggling, you could see that. As if the effort of prising the slabs of night apart enough to allow a thin sliver of light through was becoming too much. Any second now the weight would force the arms to give way, the whole would come crashing down again. But somehow it didn't.
In the shed huddled in the field behind the house the electric chicken door slid its grumbling way up, the overworked motors struggling to draw it along the grooves of old splintered wood. Inside twelve pairs of eyes glinted in the newly-arrived grey light, blinked and then closed again. Wings wrapped themselves once more over heads, a faint clucking expressing disapproval at being woken so early and so unnecessarily. Even the cockerel, peering out through the steely grey rain decided that duty could wait a little longer before he announced the arrival of morning to the rest of the world. Thought to itself, ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ and receiving nothing in the way of a strong reply, added its closing eyelids to the set.
That question was at least partly answered by the sound from within the house of a loud curse, issued some thirty minutes later. By now a little more light had managed to leach into the morning sky, enough to separate the shapes of sleepy hills and trees with leaf-bare winter branches leaning down to almost touch the surface of the river in the valley below. And enough to illuminate the interior of the small bedroom at the front of the house where the blind had long since given up the ghost and through which light was able to come and go as it pleased.
The woman who had just given vent to her feelings and whose contorted face was still visible looking out at the winter landscape didn’t have much spare bandwidth to consider the interesting possibilities which such dark and moody colours might pose to a visiting watercolourist. Her neurons were mostly still locked in the fixed strangled grip which had first held them at the moment when she realised her phone alarm had failed to go off. What few spare axons and dendrites she did have available for further connection and wider information processing were in the process of dimly realising that the phone’s blank screen was down to there being nothing left in its battery (a state with which she could readily empathise). The implication of which was that the household was now running impossibly behind schedule.
The remaining two members of the household continued uninterrupted in their deep slumbers despite the secondary waves of curses now emanating from their mother’s bedroom. The sounds marched out like invading soldiers going from door to door to round up villagers for interrogation; unfortunately they were met with little more than the sense that the occupants had already slipped out through the kitchen at the back and were halfway to anywhere by now.
Actions, she decided, would once again have to substitute for words, especially since she had little left in her storehouse of curses suitably powerful enough to shake her offspring into movement. So doors were flung open, the occupants of beds turfed unceremoniously out and on to the floor and pointed in the general direction of bathrooms and school clothes. Sounds of protest were met by a steely deafness born of long years of practised ignorance to any kind of pleading.
The same faces which had so recently been tucked snugly beneath duvets and lost in dreamworlds were now poking though jumpers, scarves and other clothing devices designed to fight back the cold. A difficult stand-off with which was now underway, the consequence of the kitchen door being wide open and what little heat might have been hanging on rapidly getting its marching orders from the bitter wind blowing in.
From the yard outside more curses were now audible, accompanied by occasional wheezing lurches as the car’s engine tried, in vain, to fire up. The girls looked at one another, recognising the inevitable a few moments before their mother re-entered to confirm it, fingers raw from trying to coax the car into life. The collective sigh as all three realised both the cause — flat battery — and the consequence — walk to school, tramping late down the hillside in the vain hope that they might be able to catch the bus — the only bus for another three hours — into the town where school held its court.
For the girls it’s an unwelcome prospect, mainly due to the physical effort they will now need to expend in simply getting to somewhere they don’t particularly want to be. Plus their late arrival (since they will inevitably miss the bus and have to try to hitch a lift) will add complications of extra homework to catch up on what they’ve missed and possible detention which will further encroach on their free time.
For their mother it’s the growing sense of deja vu, or premonition, or something not quite supernatural but nonetheless powerful in its inevitability. She already knows what will happen next — and has started to organize her feelings around it. Which are by no means charitable or pleasant; even on a dark morning like this they would be seen as perilously close to off-the-acceptable-scale.
She knows, can almost hear the purr of Sarah’s car, her (still almost brand new) Range Rover with its reliable battery (has to be since it is the only source of power in her immaculately turned out grey-green chariot). She doesn't need divine inspiration to guess that the next vehicle which comes up alongside them as they are stumbling down the steep track towards the main road, will be Sarah’s. Or that the voice calling through the (electrically easy) window and wafting out along with a gentle hint of expensive perfume will also be hers, offering once again the lift which they desperately need. Which leaves Jane simultaneously grateful for deliverance and hating herself for accepting on behalf of the girls. Who are even now thankfully climbing into the back seat and uttering silent prayers of thanks for the restoration of order to what is left of their day.
She waves them off, muttering her thanks yet again; hard to do when your teeth are so tightly gritted there is a real risk of long-term impaction. Turns to walk back up the hill and rehearses the plan she’s been hatching over the past weeks. Thinks about the multiple schemes she’s already explored and dismissed before landing on this one. Reviews its credentials as a risk-free (or as near as it can get to it) method of disposing of an unwanted neighbour.
That’s the trouble with people like Sarah, they’re really quite selfish in their own way. They need us, the feckless, lazy, disorganized of the world to minister unto. You can’t be a Good Samaritan without someone not so good who needs your help, preferably as frequently as possible. Which pretty soon becomes a burden of debt which only increases in a vicious circle kind of way — until there’s only one way out. Break the chain, divert the spiral, whatever you need to do to claw back some sense of being back in control.
The plan had a certain elegance to it, a symmetry of which Jane was quite proud. Instead of being the direct agent of change she would deploy Sarah’s husband Brian, motivating him to carry out the required homicide and leaving him (if things went wrong) to carry the can. He’d have plenty of opportunity and, as far as Jane could see, he must already have a fair amount of motive on his own account — how could anyone tolerate living with that woman on a long-term basis? All she had to do was nudge him over the edge.
Which was where the plan became a little more vague in her mind, missing a few important details. Like how she was going to enter his world and seduce him to the point of losing his volition and becoming her puppet, ready to do her every bidding, driven to it by his mad lust or love for her. That was something of a hill to climb; he’d noticed her at the odd party, they’d chatted a little, exchanging small talk about village life. But as yet nothing in the way of steamy encounters in the kitchen before Sarah came in, or furtive embraces in Jane’s garden, hidden behind the hen-house. In fact, if she were honest, Jane hadn’t really made much of an impression on Brian at all — yet.
Looking in the mirror as she walked back inside her rented farm cottage she acknowledged that there was probably work to do. Her hair was in its usual early morning state, brushing it having been a low priority item in the urgent to-do list of her morning. Ditto make-up, colour co-ordination of her outfit (grey tracksuit bottoms topped with orange T-shirt and wrapped around with an old brown cardigan) and choice of footwear (her fur boots were warm and easy to slip on but made her look like a straggly yak from the knee down). Might be worth investing in a shower, hairbrush and make-up before she engineered the encounter she was planning and through which she would render Brian inescapably caught in her intriguing web.
She knew he would be home all day and that Thursday (today) was Sarah’s morning at the gym. So there’d still be time to get herself suitably ready, walk over to his place, concoct a plausible story to explain her presence and let her sultry beauty do the rest. For the moment a cup of tea and a sit down before she attended the chickens was a more attractive proposition.
