Besties

by Margaret Drummond

dark mocha coffee

“There’s a gap in the fence over there.”

No need to turn around. I knew who it was. Kitty.  I wondered if she had been there all the time, watching, waiting for the right time. I pictured her sleeping rough under the bridges and rifling for food amongst the bins that lined the path. I could feel her fetid breath hot on my neck as she stood close to me on the embankment, trailing the stench of the canal behind her.

 “Where did you spring from?” I snapped.

Kitty smiled mischievously and put her finger to her lips. “Here and there, ” she said.

“We could go down there now,” she continued.” It would be a laugh. Like old times”

 I shook my head. “I’m too old to play those games. Anyway, I’m still angry with you...”

Tears stung as the wind whipped about my face. Finally Kitty said, “You know why I had to go away... your mum always said......”

It was true my parents never liked her.

Of course I said nothing when I got home.

“Nice walk love? Good to get a bit of fresh air,” said Mum, setting the mug down as usual beside the blue eggcup. My favourite eggcup but chipped now.  “Don’t forget,” said mum nodding at the eggcup in her infuriatingly encouraging way.

 I wondered what she would say if I told her.  Told her about seeing Kitty again.

“That chip bothers me,” I said.

 Mum nodded. “We can get rid of it if that’s what you want.”

“No,” I said quickly. “It reminds me of when I was small.”

She smiled as if that might help and picked up her magazine once again. I remembered that day when Kitty and I took all the egg cups out to the garden and set them down on a lace cloth on the lawn. A tea party, Kitty said, for some friends of hers who predictably never showed up.

Mum’s face seared scarlet. “Where on earth did you get that cloth? That was my grandmother’s. And those egg cups....I sent off for those special. ”

“Kitty found them,” I said. “In the sideboard.”

As I said before, Mum never liked Kitty.

After that Mum often invited Deborah from next door over to play. Deborah, who only played with me because our mothers were friends and who ignored me at school.  And she told the others about Kitty. The others whispered and sniggered and called me a weirdo.  

“So... don’t like her either,” said Kitty one day as we watched Deborah thank Mum ever so politely for having her. “Here,” said Kitty, spitefully passing me the nail scissors. “Cut the hair off that Barbie and we’ll tell your mum that Deborah did it."

But after a while things with Kitty began to get out of hand.

“Stealing from the teacher’s purse! I never heard of such a thing,” Mum wailed. “And don’t Kitty me. You’re old enough to know better my girl.”

“I don’t think we can be friends anymore,” I told Kitty. “You can’t live here with us any longer.”

I was frightened to say it. I had learned to fear Kitty’s rages, when she would flail like the willows beside the canal in the autumn gales and scream like the seagulls that circled the sky above the reeds. But instead Kitty just nodded meekly and said, “Yes, maybe it’s time to go....but we’ll always be besties. Your best interests are my main concern.”

Funny turn of phrase that. That was just what the lady doctor said to me. I struggled to keep a straight face then. She could never guess that Kitty was behind her mouthing those exact same words.

But Kitty did leave eventually, although never quite for good.

“You alright love?” Mum would say fearfully when she caught me looking past her as I strained to make out Kitty’s shadow in the street or when I twitched at the sound of her furtive footsteps on the landing. 

“You would tell me if.....”

“Don’t be silly,” I would say. The echo of a giggle would hang in the air and we both knew that Kitty was never far away.

 “You would tell me...” begged Mum later that day, but after tea I made my excuses and went down to the canal again. Because it had to stop. I couldn’t, I shouldn’t be friends with Kitty anymore.

“Knew you’d come back,” said Kitty as I stood on the embankment once again. “Come down to the path with me. All sorts down there.”

“I’m not stopping,” I said, trying to sound like Mum had done when she spoke to the doctors.  “This really isn’t the best place for me.”

Because that’s what Mum had said when she took me out of there. “This isn’t the best place for my daughter,” and just like Kitty was doing now, Mum had put her hand on my shoulder to guide me.

But before I knew it I was peering over the edge of the concrete path into the brackish water, watching the waves eddy over the secret peaks and valleys below. My toes peeked over the path. I was like a diver on the high board ready to plunge the depths. Behind me I heard the hum of a car-engine, smelled acrid diesel fumes. “See the rainbows on the surface,” hissed Kitty urgently in my ear. “It’s beautiful down there, a city below.”

“But I can’t,” I said, shrugging the heavy hand from my shoulder. “Just leave me alone. Go away.”  

“Come. Let’s leave. Let’s go,” said the face beside me and for a split second I wasn’t sure whose voice I heard. The wind whisked the words far off into the reeds. I felt a hand grappling for mine, pulling me forwards, backwards. For a moment I wasn’t sure. Was it Kitty or Mum I could hear over the lapping waves? Whose fingers were now snared with mine? Urging me onwards? Leading me somewhere? Making me follow? 

About the author

Margaret Drummond is a retired teacher and translator who writes short stories. She also writes about Europe for a variety of blogs and she is very interested in how cultures merge and change.

Bog Girl

by Margaret Drummond

coffee

Sometimes, in the coldness of my bed I imagine how it was for her at the very end. I draw my legs up to my stomach and curl my arms tight against my body, my fists clenched. I have fought, I have squirmed and turned, but now I yield to the searing pain of the knife. I twist and contort my head and neck to try and copy her as she was when they found her, to mould my features into that mask of fear, mirror the terror in her eyes as the knife slices into my chest. Feeling the sticky warmth of the seeping wound, I strain to open my mouth and emit the screams of pain and betrayal that had echoed in the reeds as they killed her. I finger the imaginary noose around my neck, feel the coarse flaxen fibres and struggle for breath just as she did as the noose grew tighter about her throat.  In the cool night I float down to the river bed, smell the brackish water, breathe it into my lungs and finally welcome the stillness of surrender.

 I lie caressed by the thick, brown water, lapped by waves, as above the icy wind whips along the river bank, rippling the reed beds.  I sleep in velvet mud as seasons come and go. In winter I gaze up at the steely sky through the frosty lace window. Under the ice the eel writhes past, the fish nose at my rags. Silently I stare at the shadow of the heron pacing the ice. As the thaw comes I feel the silver stab of his beak, as a frantic, flailing fish leaves the water. Between the sheets in my bed I imagine the soft mud enveloping me in a shroud of brown velvet. The layers settle as I sleep, still twisted and tormented but silent and still.

I dream about her sometimes as she might have been. The old families here have a certain look. You see it when the children from the local primary school come to visit, that same flaxen hair, the red raw faces.  The same faces from the old photographs that hang in our foyer. I imagine she would have been like them, like me, really, because I too was born and bred on the fen. Sometimes as I see the young girls cycling to school, bent low over the handlebars, I see myself and her at seventeen, pedalling hard to make headway against the wind to finally arrive somewhere warm and sultry, where there is only a soft breeze.

Of course, like many, I did leave once, for a short while, but nowadays I prefer not to think about that time away. I set off to make my fame and fortune like my sea-faring ancestors had done. There is a statue of our most famous son in the town square. He looks out beyond the fen to the sea, telescope in hand awaiting the ships back from the east. Not all the men returned. Some drowned, some starved, some succumbed to strange foreign maladies and then there were those who were seduced by the ways of the east, lured into the opium dens and the brothels, intoxicated by the perfumed opulence of the Spice Islands and bewitched by the dark-eyed beauty of the women. They chose to stay away, perhaps as I should have done in the big city when I too was captivated by the chocolate eyes of a stranger.

Nowadays, after every foray to some foreign city, I return and bring her safely home, like my ancestors brought the shrivelled seeds and pods that would make their fortunes. We tick off the items on our clipboards as we gently unpack her. At each venue we lovingly drape the cloth they found with her over the void in her torso. We dim the lights and draw the curtains to shield her from the daylight. We try to look after her. 

When the bog girl`s left foot was unceremoniously sliced off by the peat-cutter`s spade after two thousand years in the fen, she was subjected to further humiliation. The villagers removed some of her bones and teeth. They pillaged her grave and removed burial artifacts. Perhaps those broken yellow bones are now lying in a drawer nearby, an ancient fen trophy. Nowadays we are more respectful. We like to preserve her dignity. Her cloth is fragile now, but we like to think it was perhaps her own, maybe woven for her by her own mother with love. I would like to think that someone once loved my bog girl when she was alive. I know it is not always true, and of course I have no experience in these matters, but I would like to think that a mother always loves her child.

The authorities once engaged a forensic artist to reconstruct the face of our little bog girl. He arrived with his case of instruments, took measurements and painstakingly made a clay model of her face. As he worked we would ask him why he had given her high cheek bones or a low forehead. Patiently he would explain about the measurements and the DNA and how the computer had tracked the genetic traits of the various local Germanic tribes, using data from living inhabitants of the region. The clay head was reddish brown, like the bog girl`s tan leather body, the eyes lifeless hollows.  One day, with a flourish he revealed the bog girl as she may have been, recast in plastic, with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes and freckled fair skin like mine. It was all so real, the bluish shadow under the eye, the slight furrow of the brow, the curl of the lip.

He draped a piece of sacking about her shoulders, and left her hair loose and wild as it might have been from the buffeting wind of the fen. I saw her bent over the cooking pot, grinding the corn, scrapping an animal skin as in our display. The bog girl began to follow me. I saw her face every day in the town, in the young girl who served me in the bakery, in the mirror at the hairdressers I saw her sandy head bent over mine, curling her top lip in deep concentration, snipping and shaping my fading tresses into the short, neat style, she feels appropriate for a woman like me.

We do not know why our little bog girl had to die but we like to speculate. We are almost certain that this was a ritual killing, perhaps to appease an angry god or to ensure a good harvest. We know that she had a curved spine, we can tell this from her bones, and I sometimes wonder if this was why my poor little bog girl was singled out. Because she was different? I like to show the schoolchildren around when they visit. When I tell them these terrible things I see how some of them bristle with righteous indignation at the injustice. It lifts my heart to think that the young still have such pure ideals, as I once had. I would like to think that she believed her death would achieve something worthwhile, but the contorted features and the howling hole of her mouth reproach me. I can never justify her death, any death.

 In those years away in the big city researching, imagining all kinds of scenarios for the murder I finally came up with another theory. It was one that pleased me.  I would lie awake at night in my room at the university breathing in the scents of patchouli and joss sticks, my pale skin gleaming in the moonlight next to the sleek, dark body beside me and imagine life as it could have been.  It was a theory I liked because it gave her some form of dignity.

Perhaps she had to die because she had violated some code, transgressed some boundary which offended the others in her tribe. Maybe she had defiantly refused to marry some waxy skinned, flaxen farmer, because she really was in love with a dark-eyed stranger from another land. As I shop, carefully considering each  peach and  mango  as the weekend stretches before me, I  sometimes hear the shrill tones of a truculent teenager remonstrating with her mother over some trifle and I hear the voice of my little bog girl.  I remember how it was for me, how I knew, at seventeen that I wanted to go somewhere, where the wind was not sharp and salty, but warm and gentle, full of spicy promise. A place where something else was possible .When I hear the reply of the mother and strain to see her, I hear my own mother`s terse and tired voice and remember that terrible time when I had to decide. I lurk in the shadows, compelled to watch and listen to the altercation, replaying in my head those dreadful scenes so long ago, between a mother and a daughter.

In the afternoons in the summer, I like to leave my office at the museum and walk amongst the living. Sundays are the best. Families come to visit on Sunday afternoons.  Alone, I sit in the museum restaurant, sipping coffee, imagining how it would be to see her now. I see her as a baby, deliciously plump and dimpled, as a skinny wiry child, as a blushing awkward teenager, tetchy and prickly. I see and hear her everywhere. And afterwards I return to the exhibition and see my little bog girl in her glass case like Snow White. Although the museum is cleaned every night I sometimes like to wipe over her case and pat it protectively, like a mother stroking the head of her sleeping child.

Now, at night I am always alone, and that is when I think of her most.  I hear the old wooden house, my family home, creaking like an old lady settling down for the night. I still choose to sleep in the room I had as a girl, although the posters have now been replaced by suitable prints. I still have the faded photos of those heady days of summers in the city, but they are locked away, along with the painful letters of denial and betrayal. I have never quite got round to reorganising my mother`s room.  I have always meant to redecorate, but even now, her spirit still sleeps there. “You must do as you want with it,” she used to say….but I have grown accustomed to the whiteness of the walls. It suits the house and the fen and now it suits me. Once I fought it, but now I have come to realise that my mother had been right, right about all of it.

Lying in my bed at night, I sometimes think of the time when they unearthed my girl from that place, so wet and dark. I curl up tight on my side like the bog girl when they found her, my arms crossed over the gaping aching hole in my torso.  I recall how I felt for my mother`s hand as I lay on the cool crisp hospital sheets, remember the roughness of her fingertips as she stroked the tears from my cheek and softly murmured words of empty consolation. “All for the best, my love, all for the best….”

I wonder if my little bog girl, had been alone as they took her to her death. Had her mother been there to console her, had they held her, back and smothered her screams as they took her daughter away?  I would like to think that a mother, any mother, would not allow her child to die, but I have learned now that this is not true and in the darkness I open my mouth wide, wide like the bog girl,  in the silence of the fen I howl.  

About the author 

Margaret Drummond is a retired teacher and translator from London.  You can find some of her work on CafeLit and she  also writes for European blogs about aspects of life in Central and Eastern Europe. She is especially interested in how nations and cultures merge and evolve.
 

Doppelgänger

by Margaret Drummond 

rogue martini

Helen hesitated, unsure if the card on the doormat was really meant for her. Gingerly she shook icy raindrops from her umbrella onto the mat in the hall. The card was already smeared with London dirt and rain but she could see her name “Miss Helen Rawlings” scrawled underneath the stamp of some gaudy exotic flower she knew she was never destined to see.

“So great. Staying on for longer. Planning bush-trip with new guy I met. Maybe off grid for a while.   Keep the home fires burning! Gemma.”

Typical Gemma! Living it up in some idyllic location with a series of fawning admirers whereas she, Helen, had that very afternoon endured yet another unsuccessful interview where her lack of qualifications, experience and leadership potential had been analysed and rejected.

“Gemma, now that’s a girl to look up to,” mum always said. Gemma, the girl from the Derby Comp who had done so well for herself in spite of everything. Exams, uni, a great job in the City, a beautiful flat and enough savings to enable her to take a year out and travel around the Pacific, whereas Helen......

Helen knew. She was a disappointment. Dropping out of school with not a GCSE to her name, a series of  dead-end jobs, no real home, no family to speak of except mum....but it was difficult to be nasty about Gemma because Gemma was nice.... really nice. And she’d had such a hard time growing up, in and out of care, losing both her parents like that. Hadn’t Gemma even offered this house-sitting job to Helen?  “I’m just grateful to have someone I can really trust looking after the place,” Gemma said at the airport. “Help yourself to whatever you need. Soul sisters and all that.”

Gemma had some nice clothes and some very expensive shoes. Helen felt a little guilty trying them on one evening after a glass of wine. “Obviously I’ll replace that bottle before she comes back,” she vowed. Those shoes were so comfortable. Helen had even worn them to the interview.  Gem wouldn’t mind. Hadn’t they always swapped clothes as teenagers? It hadn’t done her any good, of course.  In the feedback they had mentioned how well she had done in the interview, but the lack of qualifications, experience and a good reference....they just couldn’t justify employing her with a CV like that- she just didn’t fit the spec.

If only she had knuckled down at school like Gemma!  Helen knew about the box of documents in the wardrobe- she’d found it the day she tried on the black suit. So smart, really she should have worn that for the interview. It fitted like a glove. People always commented on how alike the two of them were. “Soul  sisters?...You two could even pass for twins,” Mum used to say.

A couple of evenings later and after another  bottle of wine from the wine-rack in the kitchen Helen retrieved the document box from the wardrobe. All those certificates and documents even an old passport with stamps showing all the places Gemma had been... What must it be like to really walk in Gemma’s shoes she wondered.

Maybe it was the wine, but the photo wasn’t that good. With a bit of styling, she could even pass for Gemma, certainly in a photocopied or a scanned version. Of course she would have to go the whole hog, apply in Gemma’s name and use her old school certificates.

The new company were thrilled when she presented the glossy file with her CV and accompanying documents at the interview. There had only been one awkward moment when they had asked for bank details, but the new account was easy enough to set up and what with online banking- well she never had to go into the branch.

After six months or so she really began to enjoy life as Gemma and she didn’t even have to think twice about things like signing the correct name. Mum of course still knew her as Helen, but visits to Corporation Terrace grew increasingly infrequent.

“Ever hear from Gemma ?” asked Mum.  “Certainly gone walkabout on that Pacific Island of hers. Hope she’s alright.”

Helen/Gemma  just smiled. The flat was cosy- Gemma had thoughtfully arranged for all the bills to be paid by standing order- and it was so lovely to be able to buy exactly what she wanted, to go to new places she’d only heard of. And she had a career! They’d even promoted her after only a couple of months. Assistant HR manager with her own office and her name.... well Gemma’s actually, on the door.

“March is our busiest time,” said Greg.  “We’re recruiting for that new government scheme. “ Fresh Start.” You can go through the paper work for the shortlisting. The idea is that we appoint people from disadvantaged backgrounds, people who didn’t do too well at school, poor exams you know. But we need to be careful with the candidates. Anyone with gaps in the CVs, possible police cautions, criminal records – put them straight to one side. In this industry you can’t be too careful.”

Helen- or Gemma as she thought of herself now- sifted through the pile. There were a great number from the Midlands and even one from Derby that caught her eye. Of course there were no photos, names or even dates of birth in the short-listing process. “Avoiding bias” they called it.

 A couple of candidates stood out- there was one that she warmed to especially. She thought of the person she had once been and decided to give 178 a chance. 

“Let’s pull out the ones for interview,” said Greg. “178- is from Derby.  You too eh? I remember that from your interview.” He pulled out a photograph of a hollow-eyed woman with smokers’ parchment skin and uneven teeth. Helen/Gemma flushed. The date of birth beneath the photo looked sickeningly familiar.

 “Here we are,” said Greg. “It’s a Miss Rawlings, Miss Helen Rawlings.”   

About the author 

Margaret used to be a teacher and now translates. She grew up in a Dutch/ Lithuanian family and lives in London.   

New Neighbours

by Margaret Drummond

strong beer 

They spoke his language but he didn’t always understand the words. These newcomers were young, and brash. They drove flashy cars and slammed the doors noisily at night. Nevertheless he remembered the flutter of excitement when he had seen the sleek, black Mercedes parked by the house.  A car from home- he still called it although he had spent nearly 70 years here in London. In the old country there had hardly ever been any cars, not then. Fleetingly he imagined how he would burst into the kitchen and tell Ona the news. “All the way from Marijampole! Imagine!” But he had lost Ona five years ago. Now in the evenings he sat alone in the living room, surrounded by the myriad of nick-knacks she had collected. An amber heart embedded with tiny, shimmering seeds from Palanga, a carving of the castle in Vilnius that his cousin had sent years ago. Even though those thieving Soviet post officials had prised off the tiny amber flag on its flimsy spike of a flagpole, Ona had insisted on giving the picture pride of place over the fireplace.  “To remind us,” she said.

After Independence they had talked about going home, but everything had happened at the wrong time. It was too late for them, and in the beginning they had been fearful for the future. 

“You can’t trust them,” Ona used to say. “And we have been here so long.”  He would nod, silently regretting how he had left the little hut in the middle of the forest midst a swirl of shrill recriminations and protestations- reprimands which had haunted him as he had fled westwards. 

Mama had never known Ona. Ona, with her flaxen curls like rippled rye and her cornflower eyes had been the first beautiful thing he had seen when he arrived in the weed-strewn ruins of London all those years ago. And she had spoken his language.

He tried so hard with the new neighbours.  The young woman smiled tightly when she saw him but ducked her head down low. She was as wary of him, as he was of her...and the men.... He greeted them in their language and initially they had been surprised to hear him speak. “I came after the war,” he said. “I fled from the Russians.” One of them showed him the car, detailing its array of gadgets. The old man understood very little. “And what do you do?” he asked the younger man, just to keep the conversation going. Again he struggled to understand the words. 

The man saw his confusion. “I work with computers,” he said finally, turning to his friends with a smile  

At night he could hear them. Sometimes they sang, as Baltic people do. Now and then he recognised the wisp of a song from a wedding or a midsummer walk in the forest. But they never asked him in, so he sat in his flat, still and alone, like a fly caught in a teardrop of amber. 

About the author 

Margaret comes from a Dutch/Lithuanian family and is very interested in how communities and waves of immigrants merge and adapt.