Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead

"Ding-dong the witch is dead." the line was incessantly repeating in his mind. Just wishful thinking on his part. It was now a chant made to mock him. Instead the harridan was standing there, in front of him, wagging her finger and cursing his ineffectuality.

"Will you shut that bloody dog up?" she shouted into his face.

"What can I do? It's the neighbours dog and it's barking at the cat that perches on the wall above it," he replied, meekly.

"Go and shift the bloody cat then. I'm off to bed and I don't want disturbing," her words rolling out like hot lava from the erupting volcano of her mouth.

His ears on fire, he went to the back door, as her magma gushed up towards the bedroom. He stepped out into the cool night air and looked into the heavens. Orion with his belt shone down.

Eyes slowly returning back to the horizon, in this case the garden wall; he saw the cat from number eleven. The moggy, in its turn, was looking down into next door's garden with a mocking and disdainful air. "Just like my bloody wife when she's making game of me," he thought.

Bending down he picked up a couple of small stones from the rockery and proceeded to throw them at the cat. On hearing the first stone hit the wall the cat turned, saw another one heading its way and ran, escaping into the night. Within a minute the dog's barking subsided.

He remained outside in the mild air of the midsummer's late evening. It was now quiet and he could think in peace. Once more his eyes rose to the heavens, but only for a second till he closed them.

Now he could dream, daydream. A hundred ways of killing her and each led to failure. There was no getting away with it. It was a terrible thing to want rid of someone so badly that you would contemplate murder. It was worse to know you would never succeed.

He'd considered shooting her but didn't own a gun, and wouldn't know where to buy an illegal one. Besides shooting meant gunshot residue (fine gunpowder ejected from a gun when fired) on the clothing of the shooter. It also meant fine blood splatter on clothes. He'd watched all the CSIs on the box. They always checked clothing and skin for both of these.

Poison was always to hand, in the form of rat poison, weed killer, and common household drugs. These always showed up in post mortems. He'd formulated plans, lots of them, many ingenious, many hare-brained, and they all resulted in capture by the police. He tried to refine some of the better ones. Still the same result -- life imprisonment.

"Harry Lawson", he whispered his name to the breeze. He never used his name anymore. He didn't think he was worth an identity. He referred to himself as He. The way his wife spoke of him to her friends. He was never "Harry this", or "Harry that", only, "He this", or "He that". There was no longer a Me, someone of any importance to himself, no more a Harry, of importance to others. There was only He.

He didn't remember when he had lost all his friends. His wife had driven them all away years ago. His social life was now a part of mythology. There was evidence of some sort of truth, way back when, but, over the years, exaggeration and expansion had distorted things, and distant memory of friendship had now turned into myth.

He looked around the garden. This was his only pleasure. Not that he enjoyed gardening. He liked being out of the spotlight of his wife's glare. She never came out here and, when she did, next door's dog's barking soon drove her back in. God bless the dog, it hated her. At the bottom of the garden was his shed, with his radio and kettle. He had a small heater for the winter months. This was his sanctuary, his fortress, his buttress to marital misfortune.

He had built the rockery, at his wife's behest, first piling the earth and then sewing it with gravel and small stones. Then his wife had applied plastic monstrosities, that were supposed to be boulders, to the mound. So he had said, "It should be called a mockery." Over the years he had replaced the plastic boulders with the real thing, one at a time, so his wife never noticed.

It was out here in the garden, or in his shed, where he thought up the myriad ways he could bump her off. Out here, or in the shed, where he could, on occasion, smile without criticism.

He turned around and went back inside. When he got back in the kitchen he decided to make a cup of tea. He took the kettle and removed its whistle, filled the kettle and placed it on the cooker. He turned on the gas and stopped to consider the inconvenience of having to remove the kettle's whistle. If he disturbed his wife's much needed beauty sleep there would be hell to pay.

His thoughts suddenly interrupted by the barking of next door's dog. The dog's barking stopped. He tried to look through the kitchen window to see if the cat was back. All he could see was his own reflection staring back.

"There's not much to see," he thought. A thin man with a thin, clean-shaven, face, overpowered by a pair of thick rimmed glasses, stared back at him. Behind the glasses his eyes were dull and lifeless. The hair on his head was greying, prematurely, and getting thin at the crown. He weighed ten stone wet through and looked ten years older than the forty birthdays he'd seen. A man with no name, unfortunately he looked nothing like Clint Eastwood.

There was no wonder as to why he looked the way he did. His wife only cooked meals at lunchtime, when he was at work. When he was working he only had time to eat a sandwich at lunch. He came home too tired to cook for himself and lived on salads he'd grown in his garden.

At least there would always be salad stuff in the fridge because his wife hated it. She ate only fried stuff, and pies, along with sweet stuff and cakes. He hoped for a heart attack that never arrived. She was built like a horse, a dray horse, and had the same constitution. He didn't think her dung would help the roses much.

There were a multitude of malicious thoughts rushing around and bouncing off the inside of his cranium. It was hard to think straight when his mind was filled with adrenalin fuelled ideas. He much preferred the cold, logical, slow process of planning step by step. Sometimes, as now, this was impossible. Of course, any murder plans formulated when his mind was in this state were hugely unfeasible.

He noticed the dog was barking once more. How long had it been yapping? Long enough, evidently, to have woken his wife, "Shut that bloody dog up!" she screamed from the warmth of her bed.

"Yes, dear," he shouted back.

How long had he daydreamed at the cooker? Turning back, to go out into the garden again, he glanced at the kitchen clock. Surely, he hadn't been standing at the cooker for an hour. That's what the clock told him. "Dearie me," he thought and made his way outside.

By now it was pitch dark, and there was just the light from the kitchen windows to illuminate the garden. He couldn't see the cat but it had to be somewhere on the wall. He slowly walked down the garden, his eyes surveying the murk on top of the wall, trying to differentiate between tortoiseshell and black night. "Ah, there you are," he said out loud, as if to confirm that, yes, he was seeing the phantom outline of a cat. He moved towards the cat waving his arms and shooing. At first the cat played stubborn. As he got closer the cat turned, hissed, and ran. Once more it vanished into the night. The dog's barks subsided.

Then his wife's voice, "Thank God for that," she was shouting from the kitchen.

Looking over his shoulder, through the kitchen window, he could see her walk across the kitchen. She picked up the kettle that was on the cooker, checked it was full, and was about to light the gas. He suddenly remembered he'd turned the gas on over an hour ago, and he'd forgotten to light it. Reflexively he shouted, "No, don't light the gas." Too late! Boom! And the kitchen flashed golden. The windows blew out into the garden. There were flames spreading across the kitchen.

The next door's lights came on and Dave, the neighbour, appeared in the garden adjacent to his. "Are you alright?" said Dave breathlessly. He nodded yes. "I'll ring the fire brigade," Dave replied to the nod.

Ten minutes later the fire brigade arrived and were soon busy putting out the fire in the kitchen.

One of the firemen, wearing a white helmet, came over and began to ask questions. His first question was, "What's your name?"

After a few moments of consideration, "I'm Harry Lawson," a pause, "Yes, I am Harry Lawson." Other questions followed about what had occurred and Harry explained what led to the explosion.

Well, he explained how it happened physically and said nothing about wishful thinking. "Ding dong the witch is dead", rejoicing in his head.

An ambulance arrived soon after, and one of the paramedics was now cleaning blood from Harry's minor cuts and abrasions. "You'll be okay Harry, a couple of sticking plasters and you'll be fine".

"Harry will be fine," emphasised Harry.

The police turned up and began asking questions of Harry, the fire brigade chief, and the ambulance personnel. The paramedic who had treated Harry said, "Go easy with the husband. He's in a state of shock."

When the policeman went to question Harry, he was greeted by, "I'm Harry Lawson. That's me. I live here, I'm Harry." There were many questions from the officer but by then Harry was barely paying attention. The officer, too, wasn't paying a lot of attention to Harry's answers.

"Obviously in a state of complete shock", thought the officer.

Some weeks later, at the coroner's court, Harry's wife's death was declared an accident. Harry went home a quietly happy man. He'd also received a £100,000 death benefit from an insurance policy on his wife.

The policy on his home had paid out for the repairs and a new kitchen. He had to pay off his partners in crime with the occasional bone over the fence and saucer of milk by the back door.

It was ironic that, after all that careful planning, it had been an accident that led to his wife's death. So much for "be careful what you wish for". As for the other old maxim, about only one may keep a secret, Harry didn't think the cat or dog would be saying anything soon.