By Nikki Brown

Eva’s husband has left her and she's hell-bent on revenge. It all seems like a perfectly natural reaction, but things soon get a little out of control....

Eva wasn’t just angry; she was incandescent. Fourteen peaceful, harmonious years, one beautiful daughter and now this. Suddenly, he wasn’t happy any more, needed more space, needed to work out who he was, needed to move on.
And then, of course, it turned out to be the most ordinary, pathetic reason in the world – he’d found someone else. Someone he’d met at work. Debs, her name was. Stupid name.

She’d done shock, sadness, humiliation, grief, and watched her daughter, Callie, go through the same. But now all she felt was white-hot rage. She wanted to hurt him and had fantasies of kicking him with a pair of steel toed boots. She wanted to punch his nose, scratch his face, pull out his hair.

Not being a harpy by nature, she found other forms of revenge. He hadn’t left much behind, but she trashed what she found. An old sweatshirt at the bottom of the laundry basket, slashed to ribbons. His childhood book of model railways, pages ripped out. A wooden elephant he’d brought back from Africa, smashed to pieces on the granite kitchen floor. She did find a forgotten golf club in the garage and bashed it into the ground. It gouged chunks of concrete out of her floor but did not buckle.

Similarly, his mail. Dribs and drabs still turned up at her house. She had to be careful what she opened and destroyed. One in ten seemed to her quite feasible, more during a postal strike. A high point had been stumbling upon his first class airport lounge card and consigning it to the bin. A frequent flyer, Matthew liked his little luxuries and the thought of him rubbing shoulders with backpackers and screeching children made her smile.

Each day at 3.30 Callie would come home to a composed, loving mother. Eva had read all the self-help books on children and divorce. Callie must not be torn between her parents. She must be allowed to love them both. So, when Matthew came over, Eva spoke calmly and politely to him. Then she would smile and wave as his car backed out of the driveway.

But, lying awake for hours at night, Eva constructed grim scenarios for her ex-husband. Matthew and Debs driving off a cliff. Matthew losing his job. Debs finding another lover. The pair of them catching some lingering sexually transmitted disease. These thoughts consoled her for a time.

Then Matthew came to tell Eva and Callie some news. Debs was pregnant and they intended to marry. Callie stormed off in tears. Eva escorted Matthew to the door and shut it behind him. She rocked her crying daughter in her arms for hours and finally Callie slept.

Eva walked to the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of red wine. Then she assembled her tools. For a moment she struggled to find something personal of his, and then remembered his old sweater in the cat’s basket.

It wasn’t very sophisticated as effigies go – a Plasticine body with a photo of his face, wrapped up in a scrap of his jumper. The pins slid in satisfyingly. One in his head, each eye, his heart and one in his balls, of course. She looked at it for a long, long time. Then she wrapped it up in an old silk neck-scarf and hid it inside an empty video box at the back of a drawer.

The following week, Matthew came to pick Callie up. “Goodness, what’s that awful rash?” asked Eva.

“Must have been something I ate. It’s all over my chest too.” Matthew seemed in a hurry to leave.

Perhaps it had just been a coincidence. Eva checked the little doll in the video box. Still there, smiling broadly with its pins. She put it back.

A month later, Matthew looked decidedly off colour. “Just one of my headaches,” he said.

Then, before Christmas, he turned up with strange marks on his face. “What has happened to you?” asked Eva.

“It’s a pre-cancerous mole. They found about fifteen of them on my body and face and I’ve had to have them burned off.” Matthew shuffled to the door, with Callie following. As his car rounded the bend, Eva opened the drawer under the television. She pulled out the video box. The neck scarf and its contents were gone. Just to be sure, she checked all the other boxes. Nothing.

She spent the rest of the afternoon emptying drawers and cupboards, opening boxes, peering under beds but the little Matthew doll was nowhere to be seen. She looked under the stacks of books and clothes in Callie’s room and shone her torch into the darkest recesses of her daughter’s wardrobe. Still nothing. And then, on a hunch, she dug out the old box of Barbies from behind Callie’s desk. And there it was. Eva unwrapped it carefully. It bristled with pins. Dozens of them. Matthew’s photo was quite unrecognisable.

She returned to the kitchen and pulled them all out, carefully returning them to her pins and needles box. She threw away the disfigured photo, the piece of sweater and squashed the Plasticine back into an anonymous ball.

The next day she said to Callie, “Let’s go shopping and buy you some fun things.” They filled carrier bag after carrier bag with cropped-tops and hairclips, lip-gloss and CDs, combat trousers and sparkly socks. Callie occasionally looked at her mother uneasily but this was too good to pass up.

Several hours later, exhausted, they wound up at Marks and Spencer’s cafeteria. Callie regarded her mother over her lunch and reached out for her hand. “Mum, I really think it is time you took that wedding ring off now.”

“Done,” said Eva, sliding it off and stuffing it into the remains of her lemon cheesecake. Callie giggled. “And Callie, I think it is time you got rid of some of your old toys. You never play with those Barbies any more.”

“Done. Just let me check there’s nothing in there I want to keep. And, Mum, I think it’s time you looked for a job.”

“Maybe you’re right Callie. But what can I do? It’s been ages since I worked.”

“How about dressmaking? You’ve always been good with a needle.” Callie quickly raised her hand to her mouth as if to cover it, but at the last minute changed the gesture to a bit of nonchalant nail-biting. Eva snorted and choked on her coffee. And then the two of them started to laugh and laugh. Great tears ran down their cheeks. The laughter went on. People sitting nearby looked at them with a mixture of irritation and amusement.

Callie had crossed her arms over her chest because it was starting to hurt. “Stop, oh please stop, Mum.” But they couldn’t stop. Each time their eyes met, they were off again. A tight-lipped waitress came over to their table and wiped it.

Eva picked up their bags and they left, Callie’s arm around her mother’s waist, the pair of them still hiccupping and giggling as they walked through the door.