Was it murder they’d accuse him of? Josh sometimes wondered. Or just wilful, culpable negligence? If anyone found out, that is.
But nobody had. So far. And he could lament, with tears of anguish, the fact that he’d arrived “just too late” to save his beloved wife. Hadn’t he?
That was the afternoon Emma had had her two young nieces round, together with a couple of the neighbours’ children. There was sponge cake for them, jelly, ice-ream and strawberries out of season. Emma loved parties – and children.
But before tea they’d played games. She loved those too.
They played Blind Man’s Buff and Sardines and, best of all, Hide-and-Seek in the woods, those woods which came right up to their garden gate – a sea of fresh green that spring. Some of them found the place a little frightening at first: it was so wide, so wild.
Josh hated children and children’s parties, and jelly and kids’ games and all that, avoiding them whenever he could. He hated, too, Emma’s easy way with them, particularly with her elder sister’s kids; and he hated her elder sister, that stuck-up Deirdre, who’d always looked down her long posh nose at him, as if Emma could have done much better for herself.
So he had skipped the party, claiming a “long-standing invitation” to a mate’s place, and had spent the afternoon boozing in the Queen’s Arms on his own and nursing his grievances, of which there were many, over a pint. Or two – or more.
Staring morosely into his tankard, he realised he had actually grown to heartily dislike Emma and her “daft” ways, and regretted ever getting hitched to her. Her only advantage, he thought, ordering a third pint, was that she was apparently quite barren; for in spite of all their unpleasant visits to fertility clinics – at her insistence – she’d never, thank God! been able to have kids.
Hardly my fault, he thought. He was OK in the bed department. It was she who was just an out-and-out loser in the pregnancy game.
Then there was his current relationship with Sue, the young, dark-haired, frisky little bit he was now “seeing” regularly. And she was growing more demanding each day – and much, much more exciting. Not that he’d ever ask her to be his one-and-only. Even if he and Emma should ...
Yeah. He’d married too early, he brooded – now well into his fourth. Emma had trapped him into wedlock before he’d had a chance to look over the goods on offer for a bloke with his looks and prospects. That was the right word, too: wed-lock! bolts and shackles and keys. She’d trapped him too – quite ironically, he now realised – with a false pregnancy, so her folk had made him “do the decent thing” and marry the bitch.
Now their initial differences, which had seemed quite stimulating for a start, were developing into total incompatibility.
She didn’t like his pub-jaunts with his mates; she didn’t like his mates; she didn’t like what she called his “obsession” with Man United and pointedly left the room whenever a game was on the box; she didn’t like his “clumsy love-making” (as she called it), or his smell, or his manners, or his snoring, or his choice of TV shows. In short, he realised, she didn’t like him. He wanted out.
But how?
Divorce was messy, and as a bloody RC she’d dispute it anyway. And it would mean months of reconciliation counselling – or whatever that bollocks was called now. And he’d have to hang around and hang around before he could get going properly with Sue.
When he came back from the pub, a little unsteady on his feet and considerably more aggrieved, he took the short cut through the woods and realised that he had miscalculated: that bloody party was still going on. There they were, he could plainly hear, playing Hide-and-Seek in the woods. Sounded ever so jolly, he’d thought bitterly.
He could hear excited children’s calls, their quick scampering feet, the rustling of leaves and bushes as they chose their hiding-places. Then silence.
A little further on he heard a voice, clear as a bird’s, Emma’s voice, calling out: “... ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred.” Then the ritual chant: “Ready or not – ”
Those, he was to think later, were the last words he’d ever hear from her.
A stillness seemed to descend then over all the woods. The birds, that a moment before had been calling stridently, were hushed and silent, and though he could still glimpse the sun through the treetops, the sky seemed to darken momentarily, as if a whole parliament of rooks had swooped down and gathered, huddling, in the branches above, silencing the other birds, shutting out the natural light, so everything was forbidding and overcast with shade.
That was when he came across his wife.
She was lying by a low clump of holly, having tripped over a hidden root, he imagined, her throat pierced through by some vile prong.
A pitchfork, he saw, its shaft broken and useless, had been flung aside carelessly, and lay there, half concealed in the undergrowth, its two lethal tines ready and waiting for the damage they were to inflict.
One of them had pierced her throat at the larynx and lodged, he was later to learn, in the carotid artery. She was slowly bleeding to death and unable to utter. But he knew she was still alive. She was moving, wasn’t she?
He was sure she hadn’t seen him; her head was so grotesquely twisted, but perhaps ... ?
“Please save me!” her whole contorted body seemed to be pleading.
For a moment he stood there, hesitating. There was still time to call for help. With trained hands she could be resuscitated, he knew. He simply had to leave her there and run for assistance. There was still time ...
The sudden silence of the woods pressed down upon him, drugging his thoughts, showing him another enticing opportunity, beckoning him, opening up a blessed avenue of release.
So he listened to that other beguiling voice, and turned away; then he retraced his steps silently down the path he had just taken, as far as the woods’edge.
There he loitered for some time, wondering, though he knew there was no going back. She most probably hadn’t seen him look at her and turn away. She hadn’t seen him deliberately abandon her. She couldn’t know. That was the most seductive thought of all. He saw clearly what he had done and was glad. It had been the right decision.
So he waited patiently until the sombre silence lifted from the woods and little noises began to creep in again: soft bird-song at first; a light breeze then, ruffling the leaves; puzzled children’s voices calling, calling: “Where are you? We’ve waited ever so long ... Are you ever coming to find us, Auntie Emma ...? Coo-ee! Here we are!”
He waited until the woods began to thrum with unaccustomed noise and activity: grown-ups trampling the bushes, thrashing the trees, and calling out: Emma! Emma! Emma!
Then he climbed up slowly again, preparing himself carefully, to where people were now standing round her body, gazing in horror at the sight.
As if he had only now become aware of the tragedy.
As if this were really the end of his life, not the beginning of a new one.
As if his only true love had just died through an appalling, unavoidable misadventure.
As if he were a shattered, ruined man.
People crowding round him now, shielding him, comforting him, giving him a shoulder to grieve on. Friends, neighbours hustling the horrified children away, ushering him indoors: “Sit down, old lad ... she’ll be alright, you’ll see ... get him a drink, there’ll be brandy somewhere, he’s in shock ...the paramedics are doing all they can ... She’ll pull through, you know ... Steady there, steady ...”
Then the nightmare drive to the hospital, the agonising wait, the sombre looks that said it all ... and finally he knew he had come through.
He couldn’t imagine, though, what impish fancy led him to bring Sue back to those very woods later that year, when autumn was just setting in.
“Let’s do something wild, Josh!” she’d said that afternoon, teasingly, tauntingly – the way she did everything, the way that drove him crazy.
So he’d brought her here. For a lark.
This, he thought was wild enough – as the woods were wild, as his imaginings were wild and his fancies wild that day.
He had not been there since Emma’s terrible death, a fact everybody fully understood. They had all been so kind to the grieving widower. It had been “Do come and see us, Josh, whenever you feel lonely!” or “We’re having just a very quiet get-together, Josh. I know it’s painful for you to meet other people again, after your terrible loss, but ...”
Nobody knew about Sue. Not yet.
So everyone would have thought the woods too harrowing for him.
Everyone except Sue. She knew, he thought; she knew.
“Let’s do something wild!”
So they did.
In fact, such was his whim that afternoon, that he started a sexy hide-and-seek game with her: abandoning her one moment, to slip behind the trees, then circling round cautiously, as quietly as he could, and clasping her from behind, so she’d give a little gasp of fright, before he was kissing her and cuddling her and fondling her to bits. Then off again to repeat this wonderful, flirtatious game.
It was so exhilarating. He knew they’d end up tumbling together in the undergrowth, fumbling at buttons and zips, gasping and kissing and shedding clothes and making impassoned, hasty love. He just knew.
They must have spent some time at this amorous play before he realised it: he was lost – and had no idea where Sue had got to.
Suddenly the woods seemed to have darkened, as if a whole parliament of rooks were roosting there in the tree-tops shutting out the light, though there was no sound: no bird-calls, no beating of wings, no rustling in the undergrowth. Nothing.
He wandered along, not at all alarmed at first: these were his home woods, weren’t they? He would find the way back to her soon.
He called her name: softly at first, so as not to alarm her: Sue! Sue! Then more loudly, thrashing at the bushes with a loose branch he’d torn off, pausing to listen for an answer.
But there was none. Only that odd silence among the dead-still trees and not a leaf stirring.
He sat down on a stump then, all at once quite scared, next to a holly-bush, its berries blood-red now: ready for winter. Something about its shape seemed vaguely familiar, but he put aside the thought.
That was when he heard the voice, and sprang up in alarm.
He couldn’t make out the words at first, but it was harsh and loaded with malice and seemed to come from all parts of the wood at once: sometimes close to, almost humming in his ear, then again reverberating from far away. It was a choked kind of sound, a hideous sort of bubbling sound, as if something about its owner were horribly injured, as if her windpipe were gashed and the blood from an artery were pumping out, pumping out relentlessly.
Distorted it may have been – changed somehow and mutilated – but it was without the shadow of a doubt Emma’s voice, calling out now: “ ... ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred. Ready or not – ”
He froze.
There was a momentary impression then of something fast, something dangerous coming out of that holly-bush straight towards him, springing at him: the deadly tines of a broken-off pitchfork it held, levelled now at his throat..
In the short space of time he still had to live, he heard the words, in that now half-strangled but familiar, voice: “Here I come!”
