EVA

I first heard Eva’s low musical laugh as she passed by to pick up her kids from school.  I went to the window to see her sashaying down the road in her mini skirt - the image endured.  I asked about our new neighbour, but Eva’s private life was a mystery.  I started lying awake on Saturday nights, listening for the clip clop of her heels as she returned with some man, her laugh, her voice; my erection was pressed firmly into the bed, while my wife slept angelically beside me.

 

Eva needed help moving some furniture and my sweet darling wife sent me. The rest is history.  Over those summer lunch times, when Eva’s kids were at school, we’d meet and lie in sweat tangled sheets, gloriously fucking.  I dreamed of running away with her, but she wouldn’t introduce me to her children or even tell me what music she liked.  I knew as little about her at the start as I did at the end.

 

That dreadful day in September, I sought her in desperation; “My wife’s found out!”

“Well, it was always a risk wasn’t it?” Eva shrugged, her expression closed.
“What do I do?” I asked, tears springing to my eyes.
“I don’t know,” she replied dispassionately, as if we were talking about a financial dilemma or work problem.  Then she shut the door in my face.
 

Even when the summer had long gone, my wife’s health declined.  She told no-one about the affair and her silence weighed heavy.  That capable, bustling darling who ran my life became a shadow, because of Eva.  Eva who walked away like it meant nothing, who took no responsibility for the suffering she caused.  I began to ask myself what possible use to society was Eva?  The grapevine told me how she’d cast aside men that had fallen in love with her because she didn’t want anyone to get too close, how she’d deliberately target married men because they would return to their wives. Also, how did she make her money?  There was lots of speculation.

 

I still heard her laugh Saturday nights as she returned with some man.   I kept recalling those summer lunch breaks and the feel of her flesh against mine.  I called her and asked to meet.  I did not do this for my sake, but my wife’s and the neighbourhood’s.  Eva was a parasite living off the misery of others.  I drove her to the fields I’d played in as a boy.  I led her out of the car and into a copse of trees.  I kissed her passionately, then put my hands around her neck and squeezed.  I didn’t expect to feel anything but a sense of grim duty, but as her struggles became desperate, I kept flashing back to those moments we had shared.  When she was dead, I placed her in a shallow grave and drove home, happy in the knowledge I would not see or hear from her again.

 

Eva appeared everywhere, her face on neighbourhood posters and CCTV images of her sashaying through the shopping centre on local television.  If not seen, she was heard - the emotive press conference the father of her children gave, talking about the wonderful hard working mum who’d let him take the kids every Saturday.  The neighbours spoke of the charity she’d set up and run from home and how she’d visited her sick mother every day.  Then on the day they found Eva buried in my boyhood fields, my wife finally broke her silence and that’s when I heard it again, the low musical laugh.