Witch Hunt

Witch Hunt

Copyright 2013 by
Bill Rayburn

I’d taken the liberty of emptying her granola cereal in three even portions into her cat’s dishes, mixing it in with some tuna. Then I refilled her cereal box with cat litter. Used cat litter.

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Barbara Baker was mostly blind, mostly deaf, yet still amazingly independent for a woman beginning her 88th year. She was fairly mobile, with the use of a single crutch to get up the stairs to the only loo in the house, which we, of course, shared. Her tiny kitchen was dirty and ill-equipped, which I discovered only after I’d moved in. The house did not have hot water and she was not going to spend the money to find out why or to fix it. Again, this was only revealed to me when I screamed like an eight year old girl on a roller coaster the first time under the shower as an icy stream of water splashed onto my shoulders. I stayed under there for three minutes waiting for hot water before I realized it was not forthcoming. The house was not heated. At all. There was a gas wall heater in my bedroom that did not work. It was winter in north London and it had already snowed twice before December. It was rumored to be the coldest winter in many a decade in England.

Barbara was concerned that a warm house would find her falling asleep all the time, so she sat in her front room swathed in thick wool blankets, watching her breath plume out in front of her, and listening to her audio books at such a volume level as to drown out the Heathrow-bound 747s that regularly chose the route over her house as their flight path.

As I said, none of this was discovered until after I had moved in. When I called her on the hot water and the heat, she looked shocked, as if her concern about sleeping justified freezing a tenant to death. She remained unbending and I eventually acquiesced and dropped the subject. I was guessing it had more to do with money than her slumber.

The little gas stove and oven did work, but poorly. The gas burners on the stove shot out flames at odd angles, some half a foot high while others were barely visible, thus ensuring nothing would be evenly cooked or heated. There was an electric kettle in the kitchen from which I was to heat water in order to wash my dishes. This became a moot point fairly quickly as I chose to purchase a hot plate and eat most meals in my room off paper plates. My few excursions into her kitchen were depressing and usually resulted in her barreling through wondering out loud how long I was going to be and why was I so slow?

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The day had I knocked on her door in response to her rental ad for a room upstairs in her two story house, with limited kitchen privileges, was the day I opened a Pandora’s Box into the convoluted, confused psyche of a witch. Barbara showed no signs of bizarre behavior during my one and only visit before signing on. She showed me my room and the bathroom across the hall and, though painted a bright pink, the room was adequate, the rent was fairly cheap, and the north London neighborhood was upscale, almost posh. Her house was on a Close and though the ugliest house on the block, it was still worth a lot of money because of its location. The inside of the house showed neglect, but I wrote that off to her age and living alone and caring for herself. The carpets had not been cleaned in a long time, there were dead plants dotting the hallway ledge under the window, and the floors squeaked loudly underfoot. I found it kind of eccentric, as I did her. Initially.

She had some weird excuse for not showing me the kitchen, which escapes me now, and which I obviously swallowed whole.

I had been there about a week, having endured the painful discoveries about the water and the heat, and the unsanitary nature of the little kitchen, when I suddenly realized her ‘eccentricities’ were actually rooted in weirdness and even instability. She began to, casually at first, accuse me of using her things, in both the kitchen and the bathroom. The front room downstairs, where the only TV was, was off-limits to me, but it was so cold in there, I had no desire to go in there and listen to my extremities freeze. She asked why I had used her frying pan, and then whether or not I had been using her toothpaste. I, of course, denied both claims, which she dismissed as lies with a wave of her hand and a caustic, “of course you wouldn’t admit to it.”

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After the cereal, I dumped out her lemon-scented cleaning fluid from its spray bottle and refilled it with my warm sudsy urine developed the previous evening after a particularly vigorous session at the corner pub quaffing Guinness. I figured it was even odds whether should would ever notice. Might even make the place smell better, I thought ruefully, resting the unwashed funnel on the dish-rack to dry.

I then sprayed the bristles of her toothbrush with air freshener, a delightfully ironic act of inspiration that I chuckle about to this day.

Her jar of coffee grounds now also contained mouse droppings collected from the closet in my room where apparently, a family of mice lived quite well off the dry goods I kept in there, such as potato chips and crackers. When first informed of the vermin, she claimed sudden activist status and forbade me from killing them.

I sealed up my food better and the family eventually found other accommodations. Their droppings, however, covered the closet floor and now were part of Barb’s caffeinated wake-up call each morning.

In the kitchen she had a small under-counter refrigerator with a tiny freezer compartment which proved to be one of the rare appliances in the house that actually worked as designed. I had taken to microwaving her milk on ‘high’ and then inserting it back in the door of the refrigerator. I often could smell the sour milk in the hallway on my way to the stairs and my room. Since she rarely if ever saw me other than when I was coming or going, it was difficult for her to accuse me of any of these shenanigans, that is, if she was even aware of them.

Perhaps my most fun, yet cruel, attempt at revenge involved her hair brush. Two cats periodically fought beneath my bedroom window, even when it snowed, and one day I ventured down around the back of the house and there under my window were huge tufts of gray cat hair that had apparently been avulsed during one of their brawls.

An inspiration hit me and I gathered up the hair and quickly went to the bathroom and lodged the clumps in her hair brush. She would think she was going bald.

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What eventually caused me to move out, or be asked to leave, was relatively harmless compared with the acts of sabotage I was committing all over her house.

She had made it clear what a hateful, spiteful, miserable woman she was early on in my stay, but she would become particularly vitriolic and proactively hostile whenever the subject of homosexuality cropped up. I knew her phobias were numerous and deep-rooted, and her hatred and fear of gay people was at the top of the list and inspired by her interpretation of the bible.

I’d met a bloke down at the pub who turned out to be gay. Once he realized my gate did not swing in that direction, we settled into a decent sort of pub friendship. He was approximately my age. One night, inspired by my fourth Guinness and the now always lurking desire to fuck with my wicked witch landlady, I asked a favor of him. He thought about it and after some hesitation, agreed to it.

After another round, we walked the 200 yards back to her house and went quietly in the front door and stood staring at her closed front room door. Her audio book was blaring away.

I took a deep breath and opened the door. She immediately reached over and turned off the book. I’d ascertained her degree of sight and knew she could likely see that there were two hulking shapes in her doorway, but beyond that, until I spoke, she would not know it was me.

“Hey Babs, this here is Bruce. We just met at the pub, and he’s gonna move in here with me and stay in my room. He’s from San Francisco. He’s gonna love the pink paint job, too. It’s time for me to be honest with you, Babbette. I am gay. Bruce and I are going to be lovers. We’ll try to keep the cries of passion down to a low roar.”

Bruce was laughing but otherwise said nothing.

Barbara stood up and literally stomped her right foot on the floorboard like an angry Clydesdale. “I will allow no such thing. Homosexuality is a crime against nature. Now I want you out of this house. Both of you. Consider yourself evicted. I am changing the locks in the morning.” Her voice got shriller as she spoke. Spittle flecked on the corners of her mouth. She was literally frothing at the mouth. Hatred in one of its more obvious, unsavory manifestations.

Bruce finally spoke, employing a heavy lisp, “Barbara, do you mind if we do it once in your bed, just to be able to say we did?”

“Absolutely not.”

I had nothing left to lose, no reason to hold back anymore. “Hey, Batshit-for-Brains, I’m outta here. Have fun watching your eyelashes freeze and snap off. Your cats are still outside, probably fossilized by now.”

“Good riddance.”

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My final gesture of defiance was a doozy. First, I loosened the screws on the toilet seat but left it in place. When she sat on it she would be in for a ride.

Second, I put the overflowing cat box in the oven, turned it on high, and left it there to steep.

And finally, with Bruce laughing uncontrollably, I uncapped a can of chocolate fudge, scooped out a handful and wrote on the wall, smearing it high enough so she couldn’t wipe it off.

“God loves Fags. In fact, God IS a Fag! Fudge Packers Unite!”

Then I duck taped her straw broom to the underside of the seat of her favorite chair.

As we left, passing her closed door, Bruce moaned deeply, making me laugh.

******************

The next morning I moved my meager belongings, including hot plate, to a small hotel about a mile from her house.

I took a hot shower that must have lasted an hour.

However, it was a long, long way from Winchmore Hill.

Life was always a tradeoff.