Squelch

by John Halkin

  Then she blew it.

  Her own fault too. She’d been too intense over the whole thing, and he’d told her as much. All right, so her TV bosses had wanted to cut a scene! Don’t they always? Of course she was furious, understandably, but that was no reason to throw up her job. Work wasn’t that easy to come by. Ask any actor.

  Another bend in the road and suddenly the trees were higher, blocking out much of the remaining daylight. The gloom matched his mood so exactly, he switched on his headlights only reluctantly. Something touched his cheek. Just a slight irritation: a midge perhaps, or a hair, even. He brushed it away with the side of his hand, hardly thinking.

  It fluttered close to his ear, then settled on his neck.

  ‘Oh hell!’ he exclaimed, annoyed. ‘Bloody insect!’

  He slapped his hand over it, merely wanting to get rid of the thing, whatever it was. It was only when he felt it struggle to get free that he realised the size of it. A bird – was it?

  No, it couldn’t be. His fingers closed over its wafer-thin wings: no feathers there. No bones. Just a thin, pulsating membrane which left dust on his fingertips.

  A moth?

  He almost laughed, relieved that at least it wasn’t dangerous. In the next second he saw the swarm in the headlights; so many, they obscured the road ahead. They massed over the van, bouncing and skimming against the windscreen, dropping back on to the short bonnet, and some – a dozen at least – penetrating the cab itself to flutter crazily about his head as they persistently attempted to settle on his face.

  Over his eyes, even.

  Swearing, he tried to brush them aside with his left hand while steering with his right, bullying the reluctant accelerator in the hope of driving straight through the swarm. Suddenly he was blinded when a moth on his face succeeded in blotting out everything with its spreading wings. And squealing in triumph.

  In a panic he seized it, crumpling it up in his fist and throwing it aside. Straight ahead was another of those unexpected bends. He jammed his foot on the brake.

  The van went into a skid. He could sense how the tyres were crunching the life juice out of those moths’ fat, slug-like bodies. It was like waltzing on thick slime until – jolting – it mounted the soft verge and embraced the nearest tree. His head hit the side of the door.

  The impact must have knocked him unconscious. He’d not heard the police car approaching, yet there it was when the mist cleared from his eyes. One of those pale blue panda jobs.

  ‘You all right?’

  A burly police constable gazed in at him. Jack gazed back. Obviously a wow with the old ladies, this one. He wore a solid reliable air as if it was part of his uniform.

  ‘Passed out, did you?’

  ‘Banged my head.’ He winced as his fingers found the swelling on his right temple. ‘Where are all the moths?’

  ‘Moths, sir?’

  ‘Cab was full of moths. Couldn’t see where I was going.’

  ‘That so?’ His tone indicated that he had heard it all before. ‘You do have your driving licence with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then perhaps you might let me see it. Sir.’

  To extract his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans Jack had to pull himself out of the cab. No bones broken, it seemed, though his head spun unpleasantly. He steadied himself against the side of the van, watching the policeman’s every move. It was a scene he’d played a dozen times in one TV series or another.

  After examining the licence, checking its details conscientiously against me Contract of Hire for the van, the constable began to enter it all up in his notebook. He took his time over it too, asking a few routine questions along the way, but showed no interest in the moths.

  ‘Now let’s get this straight, sir. You helped your friend move house.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lugging furniture about can be thirsty work, specially on a warm day. She must have offered you a drink. Hit the vodka bottle, did you? A house-warming libation, you might say?’

  ‘I don’t drink vodka.’

  ‘Oh? I’d have taken you for a vodka-and-tonic type.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That shows how wrong one can be. But we’ll just check if you don’t mind. Sir.’ He fetched his breathalyser kit from the panda and instructed Jack to blow into the little tube. ‘A long steady breath. I’ll tell you when to stop.’

  The result was negative. Obviously. His tongue had been hanging out all day but all Ginny had offered was tea, brewed on her camping stove.

  The policeman seemed disconcerted, to say the least. Muttering under his breath about having the machine overhauled the moment he got back, he packed it away, then enquired if Jack felt up to driving after that knock on the head.

  ‘I feel fine. But you haven’t asked about the moths.’

  ‘Ah, the moths!’

  ‘You can see on the road where the tyres ran over them. Look here… and here…’

  He pointed to what remained of their fat, sausage-like bodies, squashed flat against the tar together with fragments of their wings, as delicate as ash, which disintegrated at a touch. The policeman squatted down to examine them.

  ‘Must be the weather,’ he mused philosophically when he stood up again. ‘Brings out a lot of insects, this weather. They like the warmth, d’you see?’

  ‘I think I heard one squealing like a bat.’ Jack tried to recall those last seconds before the crash.

  ‘Could have been your brakes.’

  ‘I remember them coming at me, trying to settle over my eyes, almost as though they deliberately wanted to blind me. It was an odd experience, I can tell you.’

  The policeman shook his head doubtfully. ‘Can’t say it would stand up in court, not that story. Not as a defence for losing control of the vehicle. Wasps might, but moths? Never.’

  ‘Court? Is there any question of –?’

  ‘You can set your mind at ease, sir. Nobody was hurt. Nothing on the breath. The landowner might claim something for damage to his tree, but otherwise…’ He shrugged, then turned his attention to the van. ‘Bodywork’s taken some punishment. Couple of bad dents here. But you should be able to get home all right. You’ve been lucky.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

  Something in his voice must have alerted the policeman’s sense of duty. ‘If you’d like someone to give you the once-over our nearest hospital is fifteen miles from here in Lingford, but we’ve a doctor in the village who may be able to help.’

  That would be Ginny’s brother-in-law, Jack thought. He said he was okay. A couple of paracetamol before creeping into his lonely bed, that’s all he needed. Certainly no doctor. But those moths –

  ‘The size of them,’ he persisted. ‘Surely you don’t often get them that big?’

  ‘Discover something new every day, that’s the countryside for you. Not like London down here. Now that cottage your friend’s bought – that would be straight through the village, third lane on the left after you pass the Plough?’

  ‘Let me guess. You’ve got second sight.’

  ‘Not many cottages changing hands these days. Old Mrs Beerston lived there – oh, as long as anyone can remember. Died a couple o’ months back. She’ll get a lot more insects round that cottage than up on the hill.’

  ‘Better her than me, then.’

  Jack got back into the van. The engine groaned into life, sounding much the same as before the accident. His headlights illuminated the damage to the thick tree-bole, but where the hell were the moths?

  ‘Thanks for your help!’ he called out as he reversed on to the road.

  The breeze through the open window as he drove should have worked wonders for his aching head but it didn’t. All the way back to Chiswick the pain over his eyes nagged him relentlessly.

  Then – once back at the flat – the unaccustomed silence scratched at his nerves. Even when Ginny had taken to sleeping in the next room there had always been some sound to remind him she was still a
bout. A creaking board. A tap turned on, or left dripping. A cupboard opened.

  Now there was nothing.

  Emptiness.

  He hunted for the paracetamol, couldn’t find it, assumed she must have packed it with her things, so poured himself a large Scotch instead. Ice from the fridge. Two lumps in his glass. The rest he wrapped in a shower cap she’d left behind. Sinking back into an armchair, he balanced it over the swelling on his temple.

  Bloody moths.

  It was a rum story all right. Constable Chivers sat on the edge of his bed the following morning, lacing up his shoe and thinking it over. The evidence was there on the road too. After the man had gone he’d scraped up the remains of one moth and popped it in a transparent plastic bag for examination. But then actors could spin a few when they were in the mood!

  ‘George! Your breakfast is getting cold!’

  ‘Ay, all right!’ he called back, reaching for the other shoe.

  He was about to put it on when he spotted the caterpillar: a hairy green thing, five or six inches at least. With the shoe in his hand he clumped downstairs.

  ‘Here, Sue – take a look at this!’

  ‘Urgh, how did that get in the bedroom? I only cleaned there yesterday. You’d better kill it.’

  ‘It’s not harming anyone.’

  Placing his shoe on the tiled kitchen window ledge where he could keep an eye on it, he sat down first to eat his bacon and fried bread. When he’d finished, he pulled on his gumboots and took the shoe out through the garden gate into the field beyond where he tipped the caterpillar out into a nettle patch.

  2

  A fortnight or more passed before Ginny plucked up enough courage to discuss the moths with her sister Lesley. She tried explaining how a visitation like that had to be a good omen.

  ‘A visitation? Moths?’ Lesley snorted, her laughter erupting uncontrollably. ‘Oh Ginny, you’re not serious?’

  Lesley had that impulsive way of blurting out whatever came into her head, sweeping across other people’s sensitivities like a gust of cold wind. Not that anyone took offence, ever. She was completely frank and open, and had a generous, warm laugh. It was impossible not to like her. Three years older than Ginny, too. Taller – and louder – she was endowed with beautiful auburn tresses which she left to tumble freely over her freckled shoulders, though sometimes she’d put them up for formal occasions.

  In reality they were only half-sisters, but as children they had been so close, it was unbelievable. Their mother had been twice married: first to Lesley’s father who was killed in a climbing accident a few months after the wedding, then to a faintly-remembered solicitor who lasted just long enough to sire Ginny before being discarded. His considerable trust fund had made it possible for her to buy the cottage, but the man himself had died of lung cancer years earlier. Ginny had never met him. Now her mother had moved to Australia, she scarcely ever saw her either.

  ‘I’m not saying I believe it but –’

  ‘I should hope not!’ Lesley retorted.

  ‘ – that’s just the effect those moths had on me. You didn’t see them.’

  ‘I wish I had.’

  ‘They were really massive. I never thought moths existed that size. And so many! You know how small the garden is – well, there must have been a hundred at least crowded in there. Great shadowy forms fluttering about in the dark. And that squealing! I thought at first they were bats.’

  ‘It’s understandable you were scared,’ her sister conceded.

  ‘But I wasn’t, that’s what is so strange. Then I remembered old Mrs Beerston had died only a few weeks ago and it was her cottage. That made some sort of sense. The souls of the dead – why not? A village is a community after all, and here am I, the intruder…’

  ‘Moths are arthropods, Ginny,’ Lesley instructed her in a flat, down to earth manner. ‘Not spirits or ghosts or devils out of hell. Simply arthropods.’

  Ginny laughed. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

  ‘It means they are living animals. Oh – like lobsters or prawns, with a hard skeleton on the outside. But alive. Can you imagine old Mrs Beerston coming back as a flying prawn?’

  ‘I never met her. And a lot of people do believe in reincarnation. Buddhists do.’

  ‘Old Mrs Beerston didn’t, you can be sure of that. Ask the vicar, he knew her better than anyone. In her young days she used to go stomping around the country preaching atheism and the like. One of Bertrand Russell’s early lays, he says, though I think that’s just his dirty mind. Anyway, she’d be the last to want to come back haunting people.’

  ‘Oh, you’re obviously right,’ Ginny admitted, tiring of the argument. ‘It’s common sense. But can’t you feel the mystery of it? No, I don’t suppose you can.’

  ‘You were hungry, that’s all. You hadn’t eaten anything all day, I’ll bet.’

  ‘I had!’

  ‘What? Two nuts and a yoghurt? You picked up some lousy habits in that television job. Don’t think I don’t know, sister mine.’ She shook her head, disapproving. ‘Now Ginny, if I bring some books of pictures, d’you think you could remember the markings on the wings well enough to identify those moths? Because they do sound unusual.’

  ‘Isn’t that what I was trying to tell you?’

  A peal of laughter. ‘Ginny, you’re impossible! Can’t you be serious even for one minute?’

  Perhaps she should never have brought the subject up, Ginny thought ruefully. The experience of watching those moths from her bedroom window on that first evening in the cottage now seemed like a moment of sheer poetry which she had no wish to destroy. Lesley would trample over it if Ginny let her, and not even understand what she was doing.

  And it was odd how Jack had also encountered the moths on his drive back. ‘Obviously seeing you off the premises,’ she had teased when he described it to her. Much to her annoyance he had turned up on her doorstep days before she’d expected him. ‘I think they’re watching over me,’ she’d added. ‘Protecting me from predatory males.’

  In a strange way she had meant it, too.

  With her sister Lesley creepie-crawlies had always been something of a passion. As a girl – much to Ginny’s horror – she had collected caterpillars in empty matchboxes. Later, at London University, she had chosen to study zoology, aiming for a career in science until the day came when she found herself pregnant and gave it all up to marry the medical research student responsible.

  Of course everybody told her she was stupid to throw away her career like that, but the truth was – she’d confessed to Ginny – she had begun to hate the whole business of slicing up living creatures to discover how they functioned. What she loved was observing them alive, unharmed, in natural surroundings.

  She was also in love.

  Head-over-heels.

  So hopelessly in love, it was impossible to get any sense out of her.

  After the wedding, her husband Bernie left his university research project and took over his father’s general practice in the village. Old Mrs Beerston had been one of his patients: well over ninety and seemingly destined to live for ever. She might have succeeded too if one day, some six years later, she hadn’t developed bronchitis after pottering in her garden too long in the rain. Within twenty-four hours Lesley was phoning Ginny to say the cottage could be hers if she moved fast.

  Which she did.

  Before the local estate agent had even realised what was going on, she had spoken to the old woman’s solicitor – he played golf with Bernie – and clinched the deal, cash on the table.

  ‘I’ll hunt out a couple of books then,’ Lesley said, preparing to leave. ‘Moths have never really been my subject, but it would be interesting to know what you’ve seen. This squealing you mentioned should narrow down the possibilities.’

  ‘I never knew before that moths could make that kind of sound.’

  ‘Some do. The Death’s Head Hawk moth for one – though they are very rare. Oh, don’t worry!’ she laughed,
obviously seeing the dismay on Ginny’s face. ‘They’re quite harmless! I know who you should talk to – the Reverend Davidson! Why didn’t I think of him? He’s scatty about moths.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Vicar of St Botolph’s – that’s about fifteen miles away. Not far to drive. They say he even preaches moths in his sermons. Not that his congregation objects. I’m told he only ever gets two old ladies and they’re both deaf. That’s one thing about being a doctor’s wife in the country – you do learn what goes on!’

  ‘But does he really know anything about them?’

  ‘Moths? He breeds them! Anyway, I’ve got to rush to collect Frankie from school. Why don’t you drop in for Sunday lunch? The children would love to see you.’

  ‘I might.’ She accompanied Lesley out to her Mini.

  ‘It’ll be roast lamb with potatoes and veg from our own garden. Apple pie to follow. Our apples. You look like you need feeding up!’

  Ginny found St Botolph’s on the map and drove there that same afternoon. The church was tucked away among the trees, a simple barn-like structure with a square tower and a remarkable Norman doorway. The community it served was not so much a village as a scattering of isolated houses, the most impressive of them being the vicarage, a mature Georgian building in brick. She rang the bell but there was no answer, so she investigated the back of the house and found the vicar working in the garden.

  He was a thin, frail man of medium height with a scholarly stoop and an untidy fringe of grey hair around his otherwise bald head. Well over seventy, Ginny judged.

  ‘Ah yes, I know Dr Rendell!’ he exclaimed enthusiastically when she had introduced herself. ‘And his lovely wife! So you are her sister? Well, well. You’d like to see the church, I expect. A fine building!’

  ‘I’ve really come to ask about some moths I saw.’ She tried briefly to describe them. ‘Nobody else seems to know what they are.’