The Wicker Slippers
Jon Jacks
Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks
The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly
The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale
A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things – The Last Train
The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator
Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus
P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl
Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)
Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – Seecrets
Coming Soon
The Cull
Text copyright© 2013 Jon Jacks
All rights reserved
He woke up, his nose tickling.
His eyes widened in surprise.
It was a fairy; a gorgeously multi-coloured fairy, cheekily perched on the end of his nose.
Flickering like the most beautiful Christmas tree lights he had ever seen.
He was young, not yet three – but he knew what a fairy was and looked like, oh yes.
He’d seen pictures of them in the books his mum and nan read to him on a night.
Seeing that he was awake, the fairy smiled.
She fluttered into the air, her delicate wings vibrating so rapidly they were almost invisible.
She swooped towards the open window overlooking the front garden.
Slipping out of bed, the boy followed.
The fairy slipped out of the window, hovering in the bright sunlight. Beyond her, the boy could see his mum unloading the car parked out on the road.
He remembered now; they had driven down to nan’s old cottage. His mum had told nan he was sleepy. And so they had taken him upstairs to bed.
He wanted to shout out to his mum, but the fairy, sensing this, put a finger to her lips and shook her head.
She waved her hands, beckoning him to come with her.
‘Come, come fly with me!’ she said.
How could he resist?
He clambered up the small wall on to the window sill.
And then he jumped.
*
15 Years Later
Chapter 1
The cottage’s ‘For Sale’ sign was being taken down at last.
Janet was surprised; Apple Cottage had been up for sale for two years, ever since Lee and his mum had moved back into the city.
It was a bit of a mess, after being neglected for so long.
The garden was overgrown, the roses gone wild. The roses and wisteria climbing up the walls and around the porch had grown into the thatch.
Even so, this bright display of purples, reds, yellows and whites splayed across the roof only added to the small house’s strange, beguiling beauty.
Janet smiled.
Any other house this beautiful should have sold quickly.
But its unfortunate history always seemed to put off any potential buyer in the end.
It was rumoured to have been a house of witches throughout the centuries it had existed.
Even Lee’s gran, who had owned the house before he and his mum had moved in, had dabbled in Wicca. Perhaps she had been drawn to it by the house’s infamous past. Rumour was, the explosion that had killed her was of her own causing, an experiment that had gone wrong.
Janet couldn’t remember Lee’s gran.
But she could remember Lee.
If Lee had picked up anything from the house, it was a way to bewitch the girls he met.
*
Within less than a day, a team of workers had descend on the house, tidying up the garden, stripping away the blooms and overgrown branches infesting the thatch.
Janet wasn’t impressed.
Everything they did seemed too hurried. Everyone seemed to pitch into every task, rather than being specifically skilled at any job.
The repairs to the thatching was amateurish. She even caught them coating the new layers of straw they had laid down with a watery dye, just to make it blend in with the rest of the roof.
From what she could tell, the door and windows were only being given a swift brush of paint. Just enough to make them sparkle, but nowhere near enough to make up for all the months of neglect.
Most bizarre of all, though, was the placing of false, even plastic flowers around the windows, giving it back the colour they’d stripped away with their overenthusiastic cutting-back of the roses.
One day, even this lacklustre effort was scaled back.
The scaffolding that had been erected around the small cottage was dismantled and stacked off to one side of the garden. Although the workers continued to hang around, work came almost to a standstill.
It was little more than a clearing up of the mess and rubble they had created as they had gone about making Apple Cottage look more presentable.
Yes, thought the curious, observant Janet when she had come up with that insight; they hadn’t been restoring the cottage, so much as making it look more presentable.
The workers frequently glanced at their watches. With a despondent shake of the head, they would turn to make a grumbling complaint to anyone nearby who would listen.
They often stepped out beyond the garden’s high hedges, looking up the road as if expecting someone who was running late.
At least, Janet thought, they haven’t destroyed the overall look of Apple Cottage.
But she feared how extensive the change might have been to the inside of the house.
Had they already ripped out the huge, old fireplace she and Lee used to sit and play by when they were children?
How had Lee’s bedroom, with its exposed ceiling beams, its rickety floorboards, fared in the house’s ‘modernisation’?
And what of the kitchen, with the old Victorian range that looked like it had been directly ordered from a catalogue of essential Wicca equipment?
Lee’s mum had hated it, almost as much as she’d hated the house. She would moan at the heavy lids, the stiff doors, the time it took to heat up, like they were all insurmountable problems getting in the way of making dinner.
Even so, she would manage to conjure up the crispiest yet most succulent chips Janet had ever tasted. All served up in cones of newspaper so that she and Lee could eat them as they played throughout the evening in the long rear garden.
Another treat Janet often remembered with a lick of her lips was the mashed potato and turnip, piled up like miniature volcanoes, a hole made in the top where tomato (or in Lee’s case, brown) sauce could be poured, running down the sides like lava.
Of course, all that was in the days when she and Lee were younger. When they could happily play games with each other as friends, unaware of the changes to come in their bodies that would make them begin to look at each other in a completely different way.
Changes that would seek to draw them together in other ways; but in some ways would make them wary and even scared of each other. Uncontrollable, ever-changeable and bewildering emotions swept through them in a seemingly new and more puzzling form every day.
Of course, Janet wasn’t keeping a twenty-four watch on the changes being made to Apple Cottage.
It was just that every time she passed, as she made her way to or back from the school bus, or made trips to the local shop, or caught the bus into town, or made her way to her friends, she would draw near to the cottage’s gate to see how much the cottage had changed since she had last looked.
Chances are, then, that she would have missed the arrival of the gleaming BMW as it pulled up outside of the cotta
ge. Fortunately, she was passing by, just out for a walk in the sun to celebrate the sense of freedom she felt now that school had broken for the summer holidays.
She stopped a distance away from the car, hoping no one would interpret her curiosity as nosiness.
The driver-side door opened. A woman slipped out of the driver’s seat.
A beautiful woman. A woman who knew she was beautiful.
She had that almost permanent smile of the knowingly beautiful woman. A smile that is slight, virtually invisible, because it has become so much a part of her perfect features.
Her eyes twinkled excitedly. Eyes that knew they could hold a man’s attention for as long as they wanted to.
As she turned to get her first full view of the cottage, her long, dark hair swirled around her shoulders, copper tints sparkling like electric currents.
Could Janet see all this from so far away?
No, of course not; but she knew what such a woman looked like up close. At school, she had come across girls avidly studying the skills they would need to attain such a high level of expertise.
The car’s passenger door opened.
A boy of around eighteen stepped out.
It was Lee.
*
Chapter 2
Janet turned around and walked back the way she had come.
She didn’t want to run any risk that Lee would see her.
Not like this; not while she was crying.
It was crazy, foolish, she knew that. How could she have ever clung to the foolish hope that, one day, she and Lee would get back together again?
Hadn’t it been obvious that it was finally over the day he and his mum had left for a new life in the city? What other, more definite sign did she want that it was over between them?
Had there, in all honesty, ever really been anything between her and Lee anyway?
It wasn’t as if it had been a continual relationship, after all.
Just one moment on, one moment off, with nothing said between them to highlight the difference.
It was a relationship that could be incredibly intense one day, wavering and doubtful the next.
At times, their bond had been so weak and non-existent that other girls at school had blithely asked her what sort of things Lee liked. What type of girl he wanted. Where they should go to just sort of accidently bump into him. What they should do to make themselves attractive to him. Oh, and could she actually say something in their favour to him, please?
She never knew how to answer.
Even in those periods when she and Lee weren’t going out with each other anymore, she still felt something for him, still hoped their feelings for each other would flare up once more.
She didn’t want to help her friends (let alone those girls suddenly pretending to be her friend, purely because they’d developed an interest in Lee) to steal him from her.
Because yes, she saw Lee as ‘hers’.
Long before the other girls had noticed Lee, she, knowing him so well, having been the friend he would call round for no matter what he had in mind to play, had liked him, been attracted to him.
Yes, even in the days when he was still gawky, thin, pale-skinned and as childish as only a boy can be.
As they’d grown, they had both noticed the awkwardness growing between them.
Were they just friends, or boyfriend and girlfriend?
Were they ‘going out’ with other, or was it just a childhood friendship that had lasted long after it should have naturally petered out?
There were uncertainties, a shyness, between them that hadn’t existed before.
An embracement, too. Because neither one could work out where he or she stood with the other, no longer understood the true nature of their continuing relationship.
Should she ask him if he thought of her as being his girlfriend?
Would he ask her out?
Would asking destroy what already existed between them?
Would they just naturally gravitate towards being girlfriend and boyfriend, with nothing between them being said?
Such doubts, such uncertainties, had been put to rest when they had fallen close together while laughing over a game in the cottage garden.
Their cheeks lightly touching.
Their eyes locking.
Their lips tentatively brushing one against the other.
Yes, yes, they had been meant for each other.
They had drawn apart from their first kiss, surprised, a little ashamed, but also incredibly elated.
So, that was it then; they had moved on to a newer level.
They weren’t just friends.
They were so much more.
But then Lee had – what?
Blossomed?
Was that the right word for a boy whose attractiveness suddenly began to improve on what seemed a daily basis?
Gone were the stupid comments on war, on soldiers, on guns and weapons.
Gone were the childhood games, the hop, skip and jumps, the weakness and awkwardness of an undeveloped boy.
Gone was the clumsy shyness and nervous lack of confidence that had made him look such a fool when he talked to other girls.
In their place was a cheeky grin that made every girl smile, the deep laugh of a boy assured that he was amusing, the lithe body that sailed over the sport field’s high jump bar like it was there purely to show how beautiful he was.
Now at last, too, he could more accurately read and judge those previously unfathomable actions of the girls who increasingly collected around him, supposedly to hear his jokes, his stories of what he’d been up to the previous night, or over the weekend.
(And that included when they would scornfully declare that he wasn’t as funny as he thought he was. Or suddenly and unreasonably begin to ignore or even snap angrily at him.)
Lee revelled in his newly-discovered popularity. How could he turn down the expertly and barely disguised flirtations of the school’s most sought-after girls?
He effortlessly, carelessly, nonchalantly moved from girlfriend to girlfriend, like they were little more than casual friendships to him (much to the annoyance of the girls who wanted – who expected – more).
Of course, Janet had to pretend she wasn’t upset.
What could she do?
Say, Hey Lee, I thought we had something special going between us?
Like what? he’d say. Oh yeah, like when we were little, you mean?
Why broach it, when she knew what his response would be?
Besides, she wasn’t unattractive; other boys acted strangely around her, signs that she herself began to correctly interpret as the nervousness these boys felt in her presence. They felt awkward, foolish; unsure how to let her know that they liked her without putting themselves in a position where they could be humiliatingly turned down.
Was her attractiveness on a similar level to Lee’s however? She wasn’t sure, could never be sure.
Because, of course, every now and again they would ‘get back together’.
Usually after an argument in which Lee claimed she’d been ignoring him. That she was being childish, getting upset over his other girlfriends.
‘You know they don’t mean anything to me. Not like you do!’
Besides, what was he supposed to do when she’d been making it obvious to everyone that she ‘fancied Jack/Ben/Paul’ or whoever she’d made the mistake of going out with for a few days.
Perhaps that’s why, when he’d moved away, she had still held on to the foolish belief that, just like so many other times before, they would somehow be drawn together once again.
Because she thought it was meant to be.
But, obviously, it wasn’t.
It wasn’t meant to be at all
*
Chapter 3
‘You were right Lee! It is beautiful. I think it’s perfect for what we need!’
Max stood directly in front of the house, her hands pushed deep into the rear pockets of her skin-
tight jeans.
She knew it was a pose that made the most of her slim figure. The way it both thrust out and left a clear view of her breasts. The way it drew attention to the flare of her hips and rear.
The workers who had subserviently moved off to one side of the garden certainly appreciated the view.
Most ogled her warily, ready to avert their eyes if it looked as if she were about to turn their way. Others were more confident, more daring, flattering themselves that she would be unable to avoid locking eyes with them. (As for that young guy with her; huh, why would someone like her be interested in someone so obviously inexperienced?)
Even though she didn’t show it, Max was well aware of their hungering stares. She could probably guess, too, to a remarkable degree of accuracy, just what they were thinking.
She’d experienced longing looks like these since her early teens. She’d soon picked up what such stares meant, reading it in the men’s faces when, suddenly whirling around, she’d caught them off guard.
Some had blushed, turned away in embarrassment.
Some had brazenly continued to stare, daring her to protest.
Most girls would be disgusted by these stares, frightened by them even.
They somehow made you feel dirtied, clammy, like you needed a shower.
Max, however, relished it all.
She could feel their looks burning on the back of her neck, her waist, her…she could feel it wherever they were looking, which was everywhere.
Max saw it all as another manifestation of her incredible power over stupid, pathetic men like these. She knew she could control anyone of them with nothing more than a warm smile, a lingering glance, or a delicate touch to an arm or shoulder. All of which she managed to fill with a promise she never had any intention of honouring.
Body language could reveal a person’s secret desires, and so, when fully understood, fully mastered, it could imply whatever you wanted it to.
‘Lee,’ she said brightly, turning to him, rewarding him for his quick attention with a wide smile, ‘would you be a dear and get my things from the car?’
Lee nodded. He spun around before he’d even had a chance to take in any of the changes to the cottage.
Behind him, the men gathered on the edges of the garden openly sniggered.
Lee rankled, but tried not to show it.