Her air-conditioner purred at her. Her husband had her car serviced and it introduced a sound that hadn’t been there before. Sometimes it took some time to kick in; often it was there before her bottom hit the seat. When she spoke about it with her husband, he assured her it was nothing — their mechanic had put the new apprentice onto it and she’d done a bang up job. The new apprentice was a girl who was quite a looker, apparently.
I don’t feel right about the way you are describing her, she said.
I’m just stating facts. Her husband laughed. But if you had seen the way the owner stared at her! That wasn’t right.
He’d spoken to the new apprentice and found this was not the first time she had been subjected to unwanted attention. Lately, there had been a slippery man hanging around, and the new apprentice seemed anxious when she mentioned him.
He said he’d go back to make sure she was all right, teach her resilience, give her pointers on protecting herself against lechers. And, no, he would not take the problem car.
When she drove the kids to school, they agreed that, yes, the air-conditioner definitely sounded different; could that be a cat under the bonnet? Her husband, who had given the new apprentice three sessions in resilience-building over the previous weekend, piped up to say don’t be silly, that’s a normal noise, and he had them nodding that it was indeed a silly thought and would a cat really have survived an ordeal like that over so many days? This was in spite of the fact they’d witnessed the noise for themselves.
Still, she heard it wasn’t right, she knew it wasn’t, but her husband told her he would not take her car in for an imagined noise, that he would book her car to be re-serviced only when it was due.
They are lovely people, those people who service our cars, and I don’t want to put them out, her husband said. I’m helping them again today by making sure the new apprentice is bedding in okay.
While he was out, YouTube taught her how to self-service her car’s air-conditioning unit. But no sooner had she pulled off the vents, than a lanky man popped out his face and felt his way from there. He was a slippery man and the second his head and limbs were exposed the rest of him slid free. He reached out to her and smiled a slippery smile then loped away. She was too shocked for reaction at the time, however she did catch the back of him in a photo at the end of the driveway before he disappeared.
She showed her husband the photo of the slippery man on her phone, laughing with the release of nervous energy at the strangeness of this thing she could hardly believe had happened, and he told her that she must have asked for it. He left her and the kids to take up with the new apprentice — and, some months after that, left the new apprentice for the woman who taught the Tuesday evening salsa class at the local gym, which meant he would bump into his estranged wife every so often while she was heading into reformer Pilates — but her car’s air-conditioner gave her no further trouble and she couldn’t have been happier, all things considered.
[Feature image by Luke Miller]
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