Rachel Bennett - Little Girls Tell Tales

He looked at Cora, expectant. He was still hanging onto her hand, like he’d hung onto mine at the door. Cora had her bag on her shoulder. It was obvious she wanted to stay, for whatever reason, but she was also reluctant to intrude where she wasn’t welcome. I knew how she felt.

Cora sighed. ‘I think you found my sister,’ she said to me.

‘I—?’ I frowned. ‘You think she’s living over here somewhere?’

‘No, I—’ Cora tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. ‘I think you found her. When you were a kid, when you were out in the marshes.’

Realisation dawned. ‘Oh my God.’ I looked at Dallin, aghast. ‘You told her about that?’

‘It was on a website.’ Cora rooted in her bag for her phone. ‘I can find it for you. I read about the skeleton you found. Just near here, right?’

‘Um. Right.’ I couldn’t get my brain back in gear. ‘It was in the curraghs …’ I half-turned to gesture through the kitchen window, but lost what I was trying to say. ‘You read it on a website ?’

‘It’s more of a forum,’ Dallin said. ‘There’s a lot of stuff about myths and urban legends and, y’know, that sort of stuff. Big cat sightings. There’s a page about your story.’

Cora held her phone out to me. The screen showed a black screen with white text that wasn’t formatted properly for mobile phones. It made me immediately think, I’d love to show this font to Beth, she’d hate it. Beth had been a keen blogger, right up to the end, and nothing wound her up more than white text on a black background.

I almost smiled, until I remembered what I was reading.

I skimmed the text. As if reading it fast might protect me. The page consisted of several long paragraphs and a few stock photos of the curraghs – at least, I figured that’s what they were, but the pictures were loading one line at a time on Cora’s phone. I sped-read through a slightly glorified account of how I’d found the body. It matched the story I’d told dozens of times to dozens of people over the years, with a few embellishments that hadn’t happened, and a few that I myself had forgotten. It was shocking to see it all written down in white and black.

‘People … people believe this?’ I scrolled up and down the page. ‘They believe me?’

‘Why wouldn’t they believe it?’ Cora asked. A brief flicker of anguish crossed her face. ‘Are you saying it’s not true?’

‘No, no. It’s just … no one ever believed me.’ I couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief. ‘Fifteen years I’ve been telling this story. No one ever believed me. And now apparently there’re people talking about it on the internet.’ I scrolled to the bottom of the post and skimmed the comments. ‘People believe me.’

‘Don’t ever read the comments, Rose-Lee,’ Dallin said. He took the phone off me and gave it back to Cora. ‘But sure, yeah, of course people believe you. They always did.’

I could only laugh again. Did he really think that? Wasn’t he paying attention when people were quietly shaking their heads and catching each other’s eyes over the top of my head? Had no one told him about the months when our dad had kept me out of school, when I was having bad dreams every night?

‘The timelines fit,’ Cora said then. ‘Simone disappeared in June 1999, and you found the skeleton in August 2004. That’s right, yeah? It could be her.’

‘You think …?’

‘I think you found Simone, yes. Possibly.’ Cora was trying hard to hold back the hope, I saw. How many years had she spent chasing fruitless leads and false hopes? ‘There’s a chance it could be her. I mean, it has to be someone, right?’

I examined my hands because I couldn’t look at either Dallin or Cora. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. It was so long ago.’

‘You don’t remember it at all?’ Cora asked.

I couldn’t bear how the woman was staring at me. ‘I remember, sure. But it was fifteen years ago, and I was a kid. I don’t think I can tell you anything that isn’t on that website there. I’m sorry.’

Dallin started to say something else, but I turned away quickly and walked to the back door. I was overwhelmed – by Dallin coming back into my life, by Cora, by the past getting dredged up. I couldn’t deal with any of it.

I opened the back door and stepped outside.

The sun was going down, casting long shadows into the back garden. I followed the path to the rear wall. There was a bench, sheltered beneath the sweet pea trellis, which only caught the sun at this late stage of the day. I rarely came down here anymore. Weeds had sprung up between the flagstones. I laid my hands on the rough limestone of the wall at the back of the garden; felt the coolness of the day against my palms. The smell of the curraghs was strong but not unpleasant, just a warm green scent that slowed my heartrate and smoothed out my tangled thoughts.

How many times over the past few years had I come here to calm down? Whenever I’d woken in the early hours and been unable to get back to sleep. Whenever me and Beth argued. On the day Beth got her diagnosis, when I’d realised I couldn’t cope. I had come here. Looking for something that could root me to the ground.

On those occasions, when nothing in the real world made sense, I would stand with my palms on the cool stone wall, and whisper to the ghost of the skeleton I’d found.

It’d started when I was still young, maybe three or four months after I found the skeleton. No one else would listen to me. Beth went to a different school, so I only ever saw her outside term time, and I missed her support desperately. It felt like the only person who might possibly know what I was going through was the person who’d got lost and died out there in the wetlands. When it got too much for me, I would beg my dad to let me stay with Mum for a few days, and then I would come down to the end of her garden like this.

I’d often imagined who the person in the curraghs had been. They’d had a life, a name. In the absence of the truth, I’d invented details. I pictured a girl my own age, wild and windblown, barefoot, running through the curraghs. I’d even given her a secret name: Bogbean , like the tiny white flowers that had blossomed in abundance around the gravesite. Sometimes I’d whisper the name aloud, into the silence of the evening air, but I’d never told it to anyone.

Good thing too. Otherwise it’d be on that stupid website right now.

My mouth twisted. Bogbean, the lost girl in the wetlands, had always belonged just to me. For fifteen years, whenever I needed to ground myself, I would speak my fears, aloud or inside my head, to Bogbean. Sometimes I imagined I heard the whisper of her answer.

‘Simone,’ I murmured now. ‘Is that your real name?’

There was no answer except the wind in the trees.

Everything had become so weird and so different, in the space of an evening. All of a sudden, Bogbean had a possible name, a possible life, family, friends. She was no longer a figment of my imagination.

‘Who are you?’ I murmured. If I half-closed my eyes, I could imagine Bogbean at my side, just beyond my peripheral vision, leaning her bare forearms on the top of the wall. But she said nothing, not even a whisper or a faint shrug. Right now, no one had any answers.

I heard the back door open as someone else came outside, but I didn’t turn around. I shut my eyes and breathed the cool air.

‘Hey,’ Dallin said from behind me. ‘You okay?’

‘Sure. Why not?’ I sighed, then turned to face him. I had a moment of disconnect, because I remembered him as a gangly teenager charging around this garden, leaping the flowerbeds like they were hurdles in his way. Now he looked awkward and out of place in what should’ve been his home. He kept his shoulders hunched, and avoided looking at the twisted trees beyond the back wall of the garden.