A Private Haunting Read Free

discussing the often toxic members of the Umbellifer family and their hollow stems.
    â€˜Know the plants,’ said Jonas.
    â€˜Dig it,’ said Danny, who’d recently blossomed from a fourteen-year-old gangle-kid to a fifteen-year-old Johnny Depp-type with just enough angst to blind him to the female appeals.
    He passed Jonas a CD. DJ Fresh.
    â€˜Why, thank you kindly, sir.’ Jonas scanned the room and picked out Eggers’s two kids, Laura and Eloise. Zero chance of seeing their father helping out at The Hub. Too many porridgy do-gooders , he once said. Lacey was down by the stage. She smiled his way, gave a little wave.
    Jonas loved these kids, he surely did, that wonderful openness which should be bottled, sold as precious balm and the world instantly transformed. An ongoing project was wooden-spoon-making for crying out loud. How could that compete with iPhones and Instagram for teenage attention? But it did. Lacey still couldn’t get the crook knife technique and came over with an exaggerated pout. Jonas smiled and stood close behind her, leaning her forward and placing her elbows on her knees. Carve away from the body, see, slow and easy.
    Later, he ducked out for a smoke, looking up to a crescent moon. The kids. They knew how to find south now, just imagine a line connecting the horns and extend it down to the horizon.
    But north, north was where it was at, whatever at might be. He moved his gaze to the Big Dipper, Merak and Dubhe, the two outer stars in the bowl, following a tick-tack line north to Polaris.
    What an epic sky. Crammed with a trillion stars but never called messy. So why was his house? He pictured the mess growing and growing, his private universe expanding towards inevitable entropy. Again, Jonas regretted the cleaner advert. And once more he didn’t.
    â€˜I should take responsibility.’
    The auburn-haired dish-washer paused as she was stuffing the rubbish bag in the bin.
    â€˜But I’m a lazy, lazy man.’
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    Jonas walked, round by the nature park. 10 pm passed, the moon through birch lighting the path. He sat down and leaned against the old yew and wondered about late walkers. There may be a few.
    Hello there!
    They would be surprised, sure, but not spooked. It was summertime, people indulged . If coming across a smiling man under a tree at ten o’clock on a summer night was not exactly a given, it was at least much more explicable than on a winter’s night, when a meeting moved the threat from eccentric to sociopath. Jonas should come back on December 21st, wait for the walkers with a fire-torch, two lines of mud smeared under his eyes.
    He laughed and clapped his hands. The night sounds immediately stilled. He counted sixteen before the creatures stirred again; a blackbird’s short burst of song, something in the rhododendrons to his left. The breeze rose and thin saplings moved in the darker distance on the other side of the reedy meadow. Like people dancing, witches making ritual preparations for tomorrow’s Jonsok . Did they know he was here? Did they watch? He’d raise a glass to them when he got to The Black Lion . The final part of his own ritual. The Hub, the nature park, the pub. Some would find banality in this but Jonas knew when to extend the parameters. Last year he’d bivvied in the woods when the first snow came in January, swum in the river in midnight July.
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    â€˜So, who’s coming?’
    â€˜Open house as ever.’
    â€˜You having a barbeque?’
    â€˜When have I not had a barbeque?’
    â€˜I wouldn’t know.’
    â€˜Well, why don’t you come one of these years then, Sam? Be good to get some new faces there.’
    â€˜You Vikings like your meat, eh?’
    â€˜Like a bit of meat myself.’ This last from Clara, a hand on Jonas’s shoulder as she passed, an exaggerated wink suggesting a history , a sometime affair that existed only in her head.
    Old Sam missed it,