Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

nothing about it. Don’t forget those were the days before DMZ.”
    “DNA, Mair.”
    “Before any of that. So, there was no evidence. No proof. But I knew the girl and believed her. Krit used to come into our shop and I cornered him one day. I told him I was a virgin and I wanted my first time to be with a real man, not one of the boys on campus. I wanted a man who knew what girls expected.”
    There’s something squalid about sitting around the dinner table listening to your mother telling sex stories, but she had a way of making the dirtiest anecdote sound like a fairy tale. Arny and I were twelve again. We smiled at each other and nodded for her to continue.
    “I was a little older than his usual taste but I was petite enough to get away with it, particularly in my borrowed CMU uniform. I arranged to meet him late one night at the Little Duck Hotel just in front of campus. I even booked a room. I was already inside when he arrived. I asked him to go and take a shower. By the time he came out I’d turned off the light. He could just see me under the sheet by the light from the bathroom. I told him to turn that off as well. I think he liked the dominant type. I told him I was completely naked and asked him to remove his towel and I heard it drop to the floor. That’s when I screamed. The door flew open, the light came on and three students from the campus photographic club rushed in with their flash cameras and took pictures of me and him running around in our birthday suits in a state of panic. It was such fun.
    “For a month, photographs of Professor Krit appeared on telegraph poles and trees all around the campus. Only his head was missing. I have to say that once the raid had taken place, the poor man shriveled to almost nothing, so the photographs were terribly embarrassing. We’d written captions such us, ‘Do you know who this little fellow belongs to?’ and ‘Who is the little boy lecturer chasing this time?’ Of course you only saw parts of me in the photos. I had a very pleasant body back then but that didn’t mean I wanted everyone to see it, did it? As the month progressed, the photos showed more and more of Krit until it was obvious it wouldn’t be long before everyone on campus got to see his face. As we expected, the pregnant student was approached by a third party who agreed that everything would be ‘taken care of’, including a tidy sum in compensation. Once the taking care of was taken care of and the money safely deposited, I could see no reason to play the game anymore.”
    “You stopped putting up the photographs?” Arny guessed.
    “Goodness, no. I stopped cutting off the head. It had been a mystery for several weeks, you see? You can’t leave people dangling in mid-air, can you?”
    We didn’t care whether it was true or not. Like most of Mair’s stories, we just appreciated it for the piece of art that it was. I was at the sink washing dishes and Mair came up behind me and put her arms round my waist. I loved the feel of her so close. I had to keep reminding myself she was in my bad books.
    “That was a very good dinner, child,” she said. “I don’t know where you get all your skills from. Not from me, that’s sure.”
    “With fresh produce you can make anything taste good.”
    I sounded like an infomercial, but it was true. One of the few good things about living far from civilization was that you got to sample foodstuff before the chemistry lab laid hands on it. A few hours earlier, our dinner had been swimming blissful circles in a largely unpolluted sea, and chillies grew everywhere like weeds. The eggs were still warm from…well, you know where eggs come from. And you’d just reach out the window and grab a papaya. I had a small tented garden that might one day produce vegetables. Once you became self-sufficient you could say with authority where everything on your plate came from. Which couldn’t be said for the plastic container I’d come across in the freezer.
    “Mair, what was that stew-like substance I found in the fridge?”
    “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, and gave me an ‘oh oh’ moment.
    “That murky gray-green melted ice-cream-looking stuff.”
    “Don’t touch that,” she said, and released me from her motherly embrace. “It’s a broth the woman at the petrol pump gave me to try.”
    “We could have it for dinner tomorrow.”
    “No. No, we won’t. She’s an awful cook. I took it just to be polite.”
    And with that