Rachel Bennett - Little Girls Tell Tales

It was that thought that sent me stumbling away, onto a barely-delineated trail that switched back and forth and sometimes vanished altogether. I walked as quickly as I dared. My boots clomped over roots and stones. I almost blundered into another deep pocket of mud, and, after that, I forced myself to go slower. With each step I eyed the ground. Several times I stopped and prodded the mud ahead of me with a stick I’d picked up, to check the ground would definitely take my weight. I took long circular routes around even the smallest ponds.

I had no way to measure time. Later, a great many people would tell me I’d been wandering out there for almost three hours. At the time, the minutes blended together, until it felt like I’d always been walking. My legs ached and my calves were chafed red raw by the top of my wellies.

When I at last stumbled out onto a road – far from where I’d thought I was – I was so numb and exhausted that I kept walking for another half-dozen steps before I noticed I was no longer amongst the trees.

Then a woman I didn’t recognise snatched me up and started shouting, ‘She’s here, Rosalie’s here, we’ve found her,’ like I was an Easter egg that’d been hidden too well, rather than a ten-year-old girl who was so tired she could barely stand.

Someone put a warm jacket around my shoulders. Someone else gave me a packet of biscuits – a whole packet, just put them in my hand and told me to eat, eat as many as I wanted. And then Mum was there, crying and gasping like she’d been drowned, pulling me into a crushing embrace. The biscuits were squashed between us and ended up mostly as crumbs.

‘Where were you?’ Mum asked into my tangled hair. ‘Where did you go, pumpkin?’

I pulled away so I could see her face, and said, ‘I found a dead person.’

The police were already on the scene, having been called by Mum an hour earlier, when Dallin had finally found the courage to go home and tell her he’d mislaid his little sister. I could see the bright police car blocking the road near the car park. There were eight or nine other cars, I realised, clogging the road and parked in the passing places. I would later discover that over two dozen people had turned up to look for me.

‘I found a dead person,’ I said again, because Mum was staring at me like she hadn’t heard. It was important everyone should know.

‘Hush,’ my mum said. She pressed my head back to her shoulder. ‘Hush.’

The police searched the curraghs for the skeleton I’d seen. They kept going until the light faded, and then continued the next day, and the day after. They found nothing.

Three days later, I went back into the curraghs, with a search team of five people, in the hope I could lead them to the clearing with the bogbean growing up through the stripped bones. But, just as I couldn’t find my way out before, now I couldn’t find my way back. Every path looked the same. Nothing was familiar. It was as if the wetlands had shifted and rearranged overnight.

The search team reassured me, but I could see annoyance on their faces.

‘She’s had a nasty scare, being lost,’ one of Mum’s friends said later. ‘It’s enough to play tricks on anyone’s mind.’

‘It’s no surprise she’d make up something like that,’ a few people whispered when they thought I wasn’t listening. ‘She’s always had an overactive imagination, that one.’

‘She did it on purpose,’ only one person said to my face – Dallin. ‘She must’ve heard us shouting for her. We yelled like crazy. She heard us. She just wanted to stay lost.’

I knew other people thought the same. I told my story as many times as I had to, and only stopped when I realised no one believed me. Not my family, not my friends, no one.

‘The police would’ve found something,’ Mum said, at her most diplomatic. ‘They searched everywhere. They took sniffer dogs in to help. I’m sorry, pumpkin, but if there was anything to find, they would’ve found it.’

The only person who supported me was Beth. ‘I’ll help you search again,’ she offered one day at the end of summer, in her soft, sincere voice. ‘We’ll keep looking until we find it.’ And every time we went into the curraghs after that, I knew she was scrutinising the ground as we walked, both of us looking for the bones that haunted me.

In time though, everyone else quietly decided I had, at best, been mistaken. The phantom skeleton in the curraghs was forgotten.

In the mornings, mist would collect in pockets throughout the curraghs, like fragments of stuffing caught on a thousand thorns. It was slow to disperse, waiting until the sun rose high enough to burn it away.

I liked to stand at the back door and watch the sun come up. It hit the slopes of the hills to the south first, soft and golden. The air around our house stayed chill for another hour or so, even after the sun found its way to our garden. Sometimes, I couldn’t help but think the curraghs were to blame for this; that the chill seeped outwards from the wet, shaded ground.

Early morning was the only time I could bear to look out at the wetlands. In those soft, half-awake moments, when the land was still slumbering, I could look at the gnarled and twisted trees and feel a shadow of the peace they’d used to inspire. When we’d first come to live here, six years ago, to the house Mum had treasured, the trees gave me a sort of reassurance. We shared a secret, after all, them and me. I would listen to their whispering and smile.

Now, though, I couldn’t stand to look at the trees for long. Their whispering voices sounded harsh. Like they knew too many of my secrets.

As the sun reached our garden, I turned away from the wetlands. The birds had woken up with a dozen competing songs in their throats. The top leaves of the trees twisted in the breeze as the branches stretched to greet the sun. But the marshy ground beneath the trees was still dark. The shadows would linger there for a while yet.

I shut the porch door and put my cup down on the table. The herbal tea I’d made half an hour earlier had cooled, half-finished. I still hadn’t found a tea I liked to drink first thing in the morning. They were all either too sharp or too sweet.

I miss coffee. The thought cropped up quite often and always made me sigh.

The next step in my morning routine was to go through the house and open all the curtains. As usual, I had to force myself do it. Over the last eighteen months, I’d been careful to maintain the necessary, everyday routines to keep the house in shape, even when there seemed no point. Especially when there seemed no point.

Sometimes I struggled to remember when I’d had an actual schedule, imposed by factors outside my own head. When I’d had to get up and dressed and out of the house in time for work. How had I ever coped? The idea of rushing around in the early morning to meet a deadline made my chest tighten. And yet, I’d used to love how busy I was. I’d used to love my job.

Strange how quickly everything could change.

I opened the kitchen blinds to let in the morning sun. That was relatively easy. The curtains in the front room were more difficult, because allowing light into that room illuminated Beth’s trinkets and ornaments, which covered almost every flat surface. I hadn’t wanted the knick-knacks cluttering up the house, but Beth loved them, so we compromised. Beth had restricted them to the front room. And now, even though I couldn’t bear the sight of them, I also couldn’t face getting rid of a single one. Wherever Beth was now, she would’ve laughed to see me forever tethered to the hundreds of tacky ceramic animals.

I swished the curtains open and left the room quickly. It was too early in the day to deal with heartbreak.