THE TARTAN KILT

Trying to recapture something of youth ... maybe not such a good idea!

Let me introduce myself. I’m Janine Parker and I’ve been happily married to Nigel for just about fifty years, and I love him more than I love life itself.

“Do you think that I’m a sexual predator, darling?” Nigel asked me as I emerged from a night of calm sleep in which I’d spent most of a nocturnal life-time wandering through leafy glades arm in arm with a much younger him, and sighing with extraordinary lust.

My better half a sexual predator? It’s enough to make a woman laugh! We’ve been married for getting on for half a century and that’s been by far the best half century any woman could have hoped to enjoy. It was certainly infinitely more enjoyable and heart-warming than some of the fears I’d started out with, like will he always be this kind and considerate man, the one on my wedding day? Or might he veer off the rails and go off with a younger woman when I’m past the bimbo stage? And some men can turn quite brutal when the light goes out of their eyes, can’t they?

But no. He remained constant to me and even if he did like the traditional and occasionally prolonged kiss and cuddle in the morning still, there was really nothing you’d call particularly predatory about it. Or me. I could be almost as nearly-predatory!

“Of course not,” I laughed, “you’re just you, and I love you...”

Then, in response, he reached one hand towards me and … well, you can image the scene without me using graphic language. But he wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, being even the tiniest bit predatory. Because it wasn’t in his nature. Because I liked the things he did. Because I was bound to respond in kind.

That day, before we got up, it crossed my mind that he might actually eat me and the whole idea appealed to me…

“It’s your birthday next week,” I reminded him as he pulled bis boxers awkwardly into place.

“Don’t remind me,” he mumbled, “I don’t like birthdays any more. I’ll be seventy, and that’s an age I used to think I’d never reach because it’s very, very old...”

“Not too old for sexual predators...” I laughed.

“It’s a different world,” he said obliquely, but I knew what he meant.

“What would you like me to get you?” I asked. “For your birthday?”

And this was when he committed suicide in the only way he could.

“Buy something for yourself to wear, something that I’d really like to see you in,” he said.

“Like what?” I asked, all feigned innocence.

“Remember when we were young, soon after we got married … remember that little tartan micro-kilt that you had, just big enough to cover your bottom and small enough to give a shop window to your beautiful legs?” he said slowly. “I still find myself thinking of that...”

I remembered it, all right. Yes, it had been short, yes it had been pretty and by golly didn’t I feel good wearing it! It might have revealed enough of my body to appal my parents’ generation, and my mum was horrified when she saw how long my legs were, but it empowered me. It told the world that I could be a great deal more than a mousey little housewife huddled for a lifetime over a kitchen sink, that I was a strong and beautiful woman in my own right and if I wanted to put my legs on show then by golly I would! There was, in my mind, absolutely no reason to cover them up. And I know I was right.

Mind you, I wasn’t alone back then. Short skirts or dresses were hardly rare, and the mini-kilt was a popular choice by lasses with legs half as decent as mine, even if I say that myself!

“I gave it to a charity shop above twenty years ago!” I laughed.

“You looked gorgeous in it,” he said, zipping his trousers just in time to avoid embarrassment.

“You’ve got the same legs,” he said quietly, “and I love you just the same...”

“I know you do,” I laughed. “And I love you.”

But it started a ball rolling in my mind and later that day when I went shopping for eggs and flour for a cake for his birthday I popped into half a dozen charity shops.

And in the last one I came upon a tiny mini-kilt, not unlike the one I’d worn in my twenties, only it was a couple of sizes bigger because I was a couple of sizes bigger. I tried it on in the tiny dusty changing room and it was a really good fit. Now I don’t want you to think I’m big headed or anything like that, but when I looked at myself in the mirror I thought it took so many years off me I was almost the image of youth again. After all, as Nigel had suggested, I have the same legs now as I had then, and they’ve managed to escape the ravages of time quite well. No varicose veins, no unsightly blemishes, just legs like they always were. Or almost like.

I chose a dark tight-fitting top that matched that mini-kilt, and the whole lot cost so little I almost felt ashamed. Then I set out for home with a song in my heart, and forced myself to wait for his birthday. I didn’t want to offer him a premature fashion show!

The great day arrived quickly enough. He had no idea what I had planned for him, just that there was something in the air that made me more twitchy than usual.

“Wait there,” I said, climbing out of bed before him.

“What for?” he asked.

“For your birthday present, silly,” I said, and I almost hopped and skipped into the bathroom.

The mini-kilt looked great on me still. It took me back to my younger years when I had loved wearing short things, and I felt a tinge of regret that as the years had passed I’d changed. Skirts had got longer and mostly given way to trousers and leggings except on the warmest summer days. I’d lost the pride in the near-perfection of my legs that I’d had back then. The tightish top I’d bought in the charity shop looked almost right, only my breasts weren’t quite where they’d been fifty years earlier. Never mind. It was a concession to the passing of the years and I looked perfectly all right.

But mostly my hair was wrong. Instead of long and straight and auburn, gleaming and fragrant, it was short and grey and a little bit ruffled on account of me having just risen from a night’s sleep. But I didn’t want to waste any more time. I wanted to show Nigel his birthday present.

He was climbing out of bed when I got back into the bedroom, doing my utmost to look like a seductive young thing. I used to be really good at that and even now I’m not so bad.

“Happy birthday, darling!” I said in my most alluring voice. I can still do alluring, you know!

And his face locked in position. In a wretched moment the colour drained out of it as his eyes took in my legs, pale in the morning light of our bedroom, and still long like they had been in their young years. And in a last desperate moment his eyes flickered on the pleated hem of my wrap-around kilt with its shiny steel pin shining in a shaft of sunlight that found its way through a gap in our curtains, and as I watched all light left them, and all life.

His birthday present was never meant to be that … fatal.

And I became a widow.

© Peter Rogerson 24.01.17