🧼 Monday: Something’s Afoot in the Grime Department 🧼

as transcribed by Young Keith, from verbal notes given by Virgil Twobyfour while he ate a Bourbon Cream and stared into the middle distance

[Editor’s note: Mr Twobyfour began this account mid-sentence, as is his way, and insisted it be published exactly as he recalled it. The account below has been gently restructured into readable order using a system of interpretive nods and pastry-bribery.]

It began, as these things often do in the Little Country, with a faint tinkling noise and a slight disturbance in the pigeon population. Virgil Twobyfour, armed only with a packet of liquorice allsorts and a sceptical brow, was ambling past No. 4 Scraggle View on his way to inspect a suspected haunted rhubarb when he saw… her.

Ethel Bunk. Former scourge of the communal bus seat. An old friend to mildew. A woman who had once been politely asked to leave the village Scarecrow Festival on account of “uncertainty.” And there she stood on her doorstep, radiant as a saint dipped in Vim.

Gone was the patchwork overcoat of Unknown Origin - the one that rustled when she walked and occasionally emitted a low moan. Her feet, formerly clad in what could generously be described as moss slippers, now sported modest espadrilles of sensible firmness. And her hair - oh her hair - was neatly plaited into symmetrical ropes that glistened in the sun like the brambles of destiny.

Virgil, caught mid-chew, paused. “I could see me own reflection in her forehead,” he would later confide to the startled ghost of the village lamplighter, who still haunts the bench by the allotments. “Only thinner. And more surprised.”

Word spread like jam in hot weather.

Mrs. Trubshaw, queueing for boiled sweets at the Post Office, caught a glimpse of Ethel and promptly keeled over into a rack of commemorative stamps. “She looked like she’d been through a carwash of angels,” she moaned, while being fanned with an envelope.

A low murmur followed Ethel as she walked - not from the villagers (who were mostly hiding behind bins) but from the air itself. A scent drifted about her person, reminiscent of lemon verbena, cathedral incense, and something faintly prehistoric. A herb, perhaps, known only to the apothecaries of forgotten times and the back shelf of Mrs. Wattle’s Pantry of Unregulated Teas.

She greeted people now. With eye contact.

She smiled at Reverend Boosey and caused his knees to do something not found in the Book of Common Prayer.

Birds followed her in orderly formation. Dogs sat up straighter. Even the weather seemed to hold its breath.

No one knew what had happened. Had she fallen in a holy well? Had she come into contact with one of those newfangled “spa treatments” Keith once mentioned while covered in mud and regret? Or was it, as Mr. Fink of the post-sorting cupboard suggested in hushed tones, “a cleansing visitation from the Gleamfolk, banished in the reign of Queen Fandangle for overpolishing the Tower of London”?

By late afternoon, the bus shelter had been pressure-washed (by whom, no one saw), and someone had trimmed the topiary near the war memorial into the shape of a dove doing a polite curtsy.

Virgil, oblivious to the mounting communal hysteria, simply finished his liquorice allsorts, looked skywards with a slightly gummy expression, and muttered, “That’s not right. That’s never been that clean.”

He wandered off to check if his shed had been tidied while he wasn’t looking. (It hadn’t. Something had just alphabetised the cobwebs.)

The air buzzed. A new kind of clean had come to town.

And Ethel was just getting started.