CHAPTER 5
770 Words
CHAPTER 5
WHAT TO DO with the panties? Lyn looked around her hastily in case one of the neighbours had seen her standing there like a retard and staring fixedly at a pair of knickers, but thankfully the coast was clear. She stuffed the panties in her pocket, locked the van, and as she hung the keys back on the hook in the hallway she was relieved to hear that the football match was still in progress.
“Any water in that kettle?” She heard Neil bellowing from the depths of his armchair.
“No.” The bastard can make his own cup of tea!
“Ha ha. Very funny. Put the kettle on, doll.”
Ignoring her husband, she went upstairs and flopped down on the bed to think. If the panties were not hers, then to whom did they belong? Lyn took them out of her pocket, risked a quick look inside the gusset, and wrinkled her nose in disgust. Somebody had been wearing them not too long ago!
It suddenly became quite clear why she could find no worksheet for Mickey Reeve. The simple truth was that there was obviously no Mickey Reeve at all! Neil had been rodding out the owner of the pink see-through panties in the van with his own personal rod, when he should have been at home with his wife celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary!
The anger began to bubble away inside her, like the stirring of magma deep below the surface of the Earth’s crust before the eruption of Vesuvius. Leaving the panties laid out tastefully on Neil’s pillow, Lyn jumped up from the bed and found her sewing box in the chest of drawers. Taking a large pair of pinking shears, she opened her husband’s side of their shared wardrobe. With great deliberation and with much satisfaction she carefully cut one leg off all his pairs of trousers that hung over the rail, not even sparing the prized leather pair that had cost him a week’s wages way back when.
She then turned her attention to the shirts and jackets; one sleeve from each soon took its place upon the discarded pile of trouser legs lying forlornly on the carpet. She pulled a suitcase from the storage space above, opened her side of the wardrobe, and filled it to the brim with enough clothes to last her a few weeks.
The football match was still in full swing. Heaving the case downstairs she put her purse, mobile phone and the keys to their holiday home and new Jaguar XJ in her handbag, put on her coat and shoes, and slid out quietly through the side door to the sound of loud cheering from her husband as the ball was kicked into goal.
The Jag’s engine purred quietly as she pulled off from the driveway. Driving past the Epsom racecourse, she realised with a feeling of great relief that figuratively speaking she had burned all her boats and now had no reason to attend the hated Ladies’ Day. She would have had to parade around resembling a galleon in full sail, while all the time watching Neil’s eyes straying to the young shapely legs in the mini-skirts and backless/frontless tops.
She felt free and strangely energised. Hearing the phone buzzing in her handbag as she joined the slip road to the M25, she turned up the volume on the CD player and sang along to Deep Purple’s ‘Child in Time’:
‘Sweet child in time,
You’ll see the line,
Line that’s drawn between,
Good and bad...’
By the time the blind man had started shooting at the world, the phone had gone silent. Lyn left the volume button turned up on the CD player, as Ian Gillan wailing at full pitch would block out very nicely any more sounds that might emanate from her handbag. She joined the M4 traffic heading out of London, and at junction 20 the open road of the M5 beckoned. Relaxing into the soft leather of the seat she pushed her foot down a bit harder on the accelerator, and enjoyed the response of the powerful engine obeying her commands as it sped off into the night.
Even the seagulls were asleep by the time she had negotiated the torturous A30 and had bumped along the rough, private track that ran parallel to Hayle’s three golden miles of sandy beach. The Jag’s suspension had taken it all in good part however, and with a sigh of relief she turned the wheels onto the driveway of the rustic two-bedroomed cottage that had been their holiday home for the past 15 years and turned off the engine, briefly closing her eyes and wallowing in the darkness and silence of the Cornish night.
- Writer
