2006 - Wildcat Moon by Babs Horton Page B

ago that she’d never set a foot back inside that house ever again. Yet last night she’d felt drawn to the place, felt she had to step inside one more time.
    It was just an old woman’s daftness, an old woman still mithering about revenge. Revenge for what? For her own stupidity?
    There was no one left to blame except herself and fate. It did no good going back over what might have been. If, if…If only. What was it her mother used to say? “If stands stiff in a poor man’s pocket.”
    She filled a tin mug with tea and wandered to the window.
    She opened the curtains and looked across the beach to where the window of the wobbly chapel glinted in the sunlight.
    She could have sworn that there’d been someone in there with a torch last night.
    Why, though? Why the hell would someone want to get in there in the dead of night?
    She wouldn’t go in there, not even if she was paid a King’s ransom. The sooner the wind took that place away the better.
    The sea was calm now after the storm and yet she knew that something wasn’t right She’d felt it ever since Benjamin had been buried. There was a peculiar tension in the air all around, a wild spirit blowing in off the sea. And that always meant trouble in the Skallies.
    She knew it from the way the smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses in Bloater Row, from the strange ripples in the sand that the sea left behind and the desperate keening of the gulls out past Skilly Point Things were out of kilter, that was for sure.
    She closed the curtains, moved around the cramped room, running her hand along the rusted anchor, sidestepping the figurehead from an old ship, a sly-eyed monster of a woman with enormous breasts carved from wood. She opened the warped drawer of an old chest, took out a small metal box and lifted out a pair of tiny mittens. She held them in her gnarled hand, clenched them between her fingers, then she lifted them up to her face.
    There was no smell to them that mattered any more. Just ageing wool and mildew but once they had smelled of him.
    She dosed her eyes and remembered the small fingers grasping her own, oh so tightly. She’d thought that he would cling on to her for ever and nobody would be able to part them.
    She recalled the flicker of his eyelashes as he opened his milky blue eyes. The smell of his brow and the pulse of first mother’s milk filling her breasts…
    Then the tiny ringers being forcefully peeled away from her own and the sound of crying, sharp as glass on the freezing air. There was nothing left of him now, just this box of mementoes slowly turning to dust.
     
    Outside the wind was fresh after the storm and the sky lightening. Archie made his way thoughtfully along Bloater Row and as he stepped through the hole in the rock he came face to face with the two eldest Kelly boys.
    Donald and Kevin.
    Archie stepped backwards in alarm.
    They’d be bound to notice he’d been crying and poke fun at him.
    Donald Kelly punched him playfully on the arm. “All right, Archie?”
    He smiled a horrible, filthy-toothed smile.
    Kevin smiled too; smiling didn’t suit the Kelly brothers one little bit.
    “Can’t stop, Archie, got to go, haven’t we, Kevin? We’re going fishing with the old man.”
    Archie stiffened, any minute now and they’d whack him.
    But to his amazement they didn’t, they edged carefully past him. Donald winked at him and then they raced down Bloater Row and in through the door of Cuckoo’s Nest.
    Archie shook his head in disbelief; someone must have cast a spell on them both.
    Archie climbed carefully down to the beach.
    He stood looking out to sea, the cold wind ruffling his fine hair and adding a brushstroke of colour to his pale cheeks.
    He looked up at the round window of the wobbly chapel. From outside the window was nothing special but the colours when the light shone through it were wonderful.
    He could hardly believe now that he’d been inside the chapel. He’d have to be brave again and go back in