THE POWER OF THE SKIRT.

can a simple garment like a skirt hold any power?

THE POWER OF THE SKIRT.

I thought I knew all there was to know about men until I met Danny. Let me introduce myself. I’m Doreen Prendergast, and I’m twenty-nine and I’ve know enough men in my short life to have every right to think I must know it all. And I don’t mean to sound smutty, that’s not the sort of woman I am, but Danny taught me a thing or three about my own body that I’ll never forget. He said that until we know our partner’s bodies we never learn about our own.

And he made sure I found out a few things about him while he was teaching me. You see, he was gentle and kind, knew what pleased me and what didn’t, and more important to me than most things he didn’t use foul language. So I was more than happy with him, out for a drink in the evening on a sunny day or round the shopson Saturdays, hand in hand of course, or at home in the garden, in our wicker chairs and laughing at the various jokes Danny had picked up at work, all of them either clean or cleaned up by Danny, and I did appreciate that.

So you can imagine how heart-broken I was when he suddenly became like one of the dead, sitting in his wicker chair, and looking at me as if I was a picture that he wanted to preserve for ever. And in a way I suppose I was because one minute he was looking at me like that and the next it seemed to me tht he must be having a full blown heart attack, and then falling to one side because that’s the way his chair was leaning. He was lifeless, like the dead always are.

The trouble was, he was much too young to die like it seemed that he had and the police were of that opinion when I informed them, which I had to do, straight away. Detective Sergeant Thromblecott frowned at me once the police surgeon had made his decision. “This is most peculiar.” he said in the sort of wiry voice that made me think of the squeak chalk makes on blackboards in school classrooms.

“What is?” I asked, “that my best friend in the whole world should die just like that or that he should turn that strange colour. I’ve never seen his face like that and it scares me.”

“How old would you say he is?” asked the DS, still looking puzzled.

“I know exactly how old he is,” I told the officer, “he’s twenty-nine, like me.”

“Well, in my opinion healthy young men of twenty-nine don’t just die like that unless they have a good reason to,” he grunted, “did you have something to do with this, then? Might you have been quarreling with him, maybe having a row, and could it be the argument got out of hand? Might it have turned violent and might you have struck him over the heart and caused it to stop? Not intending to, of course, but things like that do happen, even at the hands of the gentle sex like you. It happens all the time in my home, if the truth be told...”

I was horrified. Was this creaky-voiced copper trying to suggest that in some way I was responsible for Danny’s untimely death? And was he trying to offload onto my shoulders some of the less savoury things that happened in his own family? I could imagine him being the sort of man a woman might want to slap.

“No,” I said flatly, “I don’t think we ever had any kind of argument or row or whatever you choose to call it, and we never had any kind of fight. It can’t have been that, and you can take my word for that.”

He winked at me. Of all the cheek! But that detective sergeant actually winked at me! As if I was complicit in something soiled in his own life.

“I never take anyone’s word for anything,” he told me, making the words scrape out of his mouth as if they were having to grind their way past his teeth.

“Well, you can take mine!” I snapped.

“So,” he said with a murky grin, “looking at the way you’re lounging in that chair as if nothing in the world really mattered and with that little skirt of yours hitched up to your belly button just about, I’d say you were trying to suggest a bit more than your oh so innocent words might mean.”

My skirt wasn’t hitched up anywhere! At least, if it was it was hardly very far indeed. I feel comfortable like I had been sitting and my skirt was in perfect control! But anyway, I tugged it down a little, not much because I couldn‘t, but I didn’t want him to think I was anyone’s but Danny’s.

“Well, we didn’t have cross words,” I said, “and I’ve never had to use my skirt as a kind of semaphore signalling device to turn him on!”

He grinned at me, and I’d describe it as lasciviously if the situation wasn’t so miserable. I mean, they hadn’t taken Danny away yet so his dead self was still lolling in his wicker chair as if nothing was wrong. Yet something was very wrong. He was dead, wasn’t he? And this detective sergeant had a sewer for a mind.

And then he added insult to injury.

“Well, it might just turn me on,” he grunted, “take my wife for example, she’d never wear a skirt like that, short of with the kind of pleats that make suggestions without words having to be spoken. I mean, and I don’t want you to think I’m being at all forward, your legs are the sort I’d die for! So is that what happened? You hitched that pretty little skirt up, mabe flashed a bit of your knickers, and it was all too much for him? I’d understand if that was the case. Some of you lasses have no idea what power you have over us men, especially if you choose shortish skirts to wear on a sunny day!”

And that was the seed sown.

But before I could repudiate everything he suggested the paramedics arrived and started checking my Danny over, for signs of life, that kind of thing. I was distraught, I would willingly have joined Danny in heaven or hell, probably the former, a second corpse for the Detective Sergeant to perve over.

“He’s alive,” announced the doctor. “Just about,” he added, “but we’ll pull him round, god-willing!”

I could hardly believe my ears. Danny wasn’t dead? So why did he look as if he was, and do it suddenly in the middle of a sentence when he and I were having a cheery chat in the sun? And he’d been like that for, what, the best part of an hour, lolling with his eyes half-open and his face that awful colour. Yet he must have been breathing, and I hadn’t noticed.

“You’re having me on!” croaked Detective Sergeant Thromblecott.

“He’s not,” whispered Danny, “and what’s more I’ve not been deaf either. Not at all, and I heard everything you said, officer…”

It was a lot for him to whisper all in one sentence, but I heard it.

And so did Detective Sergeant Thromblecott. I could tell by the way the colour drained from his face and he fell, slowly, to the ground and dribbled.

And so he should. Afterwards, later that same day when he was just about back to normal, Danny said how he had heard the entirety of the policeman’s suggestions and knew full well how offensive I’d have found them. He said he’d have to speak quite firmly to the station’s superintendent. Get something done about the DS and his dirty mind.

It was after then that the seed that had been sown started to germinate and I became very carefu from that day onl when it came to where I let the hem of my skirt ride up to. Danny said it didn’t matter, but to me it did. I must never use that power indiscriminately. Not from now on.

© Peter Rogerson 04.05.23

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