by Julie Howlin
‘Now, come along, Tabitha, you can't stand there all by yourself. Come and play with the other girls.’
‘Do I have to?’ I'd ask.
The answer was always, ‘Yes, you do. Come along.’
She'd take my hand and walk me over to where the girls in my class were playing. ‘What are you playing, girls?’ the teacher would ask.
‘Mummies and daddies, Miss,’ replied Tracey, Timothy the rat's equally obnoxious twin sister.
‘Tabitha can play with you, can't she?’ the teacher would say. It wasn't a question. It was an order. They didn't want me joining in any more than I wanted to.
Tracey wrinkled her sharp little nose. ‘Yeah. All right. You can be Baby. It's Baby's bedtime, so you lie down there so we can go shopping.’
Tracey and her gang would waltz off, arm in arm, far enough away to get away from me, but not so far as to let the teacher guess they weren't really including me.
At first, I just sat and sulked, but as time went on I realised that they were actually having a lot of fun. Tracey always had some new toy to play with. I tried to join in a few times, but Tracey would turn on me. ‘Go away, Tabitha. Go away and talk to your imaginary friends. We don't want you, do we, girls?’
‘No, we don't,’ Liz would say, shaking her head so her blonde ringlets shook.
‘You're stupid,’ Angie pouted.
‘Go away,’ Sandra, the tomboy, gave me a shove.
‘Yeah. Go away,’ Jessica would chime in. I'd learned by then that there was a section of fence that the teachers couldn't see from the staff room, so I'd slink off there and read a book until the bell went.
**
Gran was my rock and my anchor throughout this time. Mum had a part time job now that I was off her hands, working at the supermarket three days a week. On those days, Gran would pick me up. Caroline, being older and more conventional, had made a few friends and would go to their homes to play until Mum finished work, but I was still too young, and didn't have any friends anyway.
I would tell her my woes and she would give me Jammie Dodgers and sympathise. She was proud of me, she said, and told me I was never truly alone.
It all changed the day Jess’s dog disappeared. Jess’s mum would always have their Yorkie, Perry, with her on a lead when she brought Jess to school. I longed to be allowed to stroke him, because I loved animals, but Tracey and the others were always there and so I kept my distance.
Then one day Jess and her mother arrived at school without Perry. Jess was crying, and her mother seemed bad tempered and snappy. I heard her say, ‘You have to be at school, Jess, and I have to go to work. That’s the way it is.’
At playtime I noticed that Jess wasn’t joining in with a game of ‘Letters in Your Name’ but was sitting on one of the concrete pipes by herself. Tracey and the rest of the gang were ignoring her. I sat on the other concrete pipe and could see that Jess's eyes were red. We disliked each other, so I did nothing about it.
I told Gran that evening, though.
‘It shouldn't matter whether you like this girl or not,’ Gran said, as she handed me a pale blue plate with two chocolate biscuits on it. ‘If she's sad you should ask her what's wrong and if you can help.’
‘I don't suppose she'd tell me. She'd just tell me to go away.’
‘You don't know that, Tabitha. She might be glad of someone to talk to if her friends are being nasty to her. If she still looks upset tomorrow, go and talk to her. You're a good girl, Tabitha, and you've got a big heart. If you hadn't, you wouldn't have noticed she was upset at all. And those of us with big hearts have a duty to try and help people who are sad.’
If anything, Jess seemed even more upset the next day. At playtime she was still sitting by herself. I looked at her, torn between doing what a person with a big heart should do and letting my enemy suffer. I was aware of Dakota, my spirit guide, whispering in my ear. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go talk to her.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I mumbled.
‘Ask her what’s wrong. Listen to what she tells you. And then listen to what I tell you. Go on.’
Reluctantly, I went and stood beside Jess. I expected her to give me a withering look and walk away, but she didn’t look up at all. She looked down at the damp, wrinkled hanky she was holding in her hands. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Perry’s missing,’ Jess said, flatly. ‘And we should be out looking for him, but Mum’s gone to work, Dad’s gone to work and they’ve made me come to school. They’re not even trying to find him. They just don’t care!’
‘That’s awful,’ I said, and meant it. I totally agreed that if Perry was missing they should all be looking - why, that poor little dog could be hurt and lonely somewhere.
Jess started sobbing - I pulled my hanky out from my sleeve and gave it to her. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I haven’t used it.’
‘They don’t care, either,’ Jess said, her eyes fixed on Tracey and the others, who were blissfully playing hopscotch now, not even looking in Jess’s direction.
‘I care,’ I said. ‘I like Perry.’
Jess sniffed, and we sat in silence for a moment. I began to feel anxious. I could sense my spirit friend beside me. He had said he would tell me what to say, but he hadn’t said a word, and the bell was going to go any minute. I thought you were going to help me, I shot at him, wordlessly.
‘You’ve been doing great up until now,' he said. ‘I haven’t needed to tell you anything. You worked it out for yourself. But there is one thing. You need to suggest to Jess that Perry might be stuck down the drain at the bottom of their garden - ask if they’ve looked there.’
‘Um. Jess? Did your mum and dad look in the drain at the bottom of the garden?’
Jess looked at me. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Tell them they should.’
The bell went.
**
That night it rained. In all my eight years I had never seen so much rain all at once. They said on TV that it was set to be the wettest April since records began.
The following day, Jess and her mum arrived at the school gate - with Perry. Tracey and the gang gathered around - it looked like things were back to normal. I went to go into school. ‘Tabitha! Tabitha!’ Jess came running up to me. Tracey gave me a look and pushed past me through the door. ‘My mum wants to talk to you!’ She grabbed my hand and pulled me back to the gate. Perry jumped up at me and licked my hand.
‘So you’re the little girl who thought of looking for Perry in the storm drain,’ Jess’s mum said, looking at me. ‘I want to thank you. We hadn’t thought of looking there. It’s a good job we did. If we hadn’t found him, he would have drowned in all that rain last night. You saved my little dog’s life. And I think Jess has something to say, too.’
‘Yes. Would you like to come for tea tomorrow?’
At last! An invitation to tea! There was just one thing, though. ‘Will Tracey be there? And Liz? And Angie?’ They would surely ruin my first invitation to tea.
‘No. I’m not friends with them anymore,’ Jess said. ‘It’ll just be us.’
At playtime when I went and sat on the concrete pipe, Jess came to join me instead of going with Tracey’s gang, even though Tracey had brought in a new skipping rope with flashing lights in the handles.
‘How did you know where Perry was?’ she asked. ‘Did your invisible friends tell you?’ I nodded. ‘Mum said you must have seen it on an episode of Lassie. I wish I had an invisible friend,’ Jess said, wistfully. ‘What’s yours like?’
I hesitated. Last time I’d spoken about such things, I had been humiliated. It did seem that Jess really wanted to know, though. ‘He’s a Native American boy,’ I told her. ‘He’s about nine or ten and his name is Dakota.’
‘Wow - and he told you where Perry was? How did he know?’
‘I don’t know. He just knows stuff.’
‘Is he here now?’ Jess whispered, looking around.
I could see him, sittin
g cross-legged on the asphalt about a metre away from us. He was grinning. ‘He’s right there,’ I said, pointing. ‘He’s waving at you, look.’
‘I can’t see anything,’ Jess whined.
‘You believe he’s there, though?’
‘He found Perry, didn’t he?’ There was a pause. ‘Tabitha?’
‘Yes?’
‘Will he be my friend, too?’
‘He says yes, and if you can't see him, I'll tell you what he says.’
‘Cool.’
Jess and I became best friends after that. We went to each other’s houses for tea; we shared rooms and secrets on school journeys; we played in the fields behind our house. We’d be explorers on a voyage of discovery. Dakota would always know where to find a bird’s nest with eggs in it, a newt hiding under a leaf, wild blackberries. Jess believed in him, even though she could never see him. She took my word, and that meant a lot.
Then at thirteen, we changed schools. Suddenly learning became a serious business with an aim in view - we had to choose our exam subjects. I chose English, humanities and languages. Jess chose science and maths. We didn’t see each other much anymore. Then Jess got a boyfriend, and I didn’t. We grew apart. We went to different universities and lost touch completely.
Until, despite our differing educational paths, we found ourselves shortlisted for the same job. Neither of us got it, but we rekindled our friendship in the waiting room. With one major difference. Jess had consigned Dakota to history - he was our imaginary childhood friend. We’d reminisce about the sweltering summer days with him down by the brook - but Jess now believed that he was something we had made up. She assumed that I had grown out of him, too. I wanted to tell her that he was still with me, aged about thirty now, but I didn’t want to risk losing my best friend again.
9 mitzi dolls
‘Just 12cm tall, and a worldwide phenomenon, the first dolls hit the shops in the late 1980s. These diminutive career girls were an instant hit. The original five, Ballerina, Nurse, Policewoman, Swimmer and Teacher were joined, as the years went on, by forty-four more, and became collectors’ items for little girls everywhere.
As well as the dolls, there are the accessories. A pony and stable for the horsewoman, an ambulance for the paramedic, a drinks trolley for the Air Stewardess and so on. Get your daughter into Mitzi at an early age and Christmas and birthday gifts are taken care of until she’s grown up.
Mitzi is feisty - she wears pink, green, purple, yellow or red hair to work. Her huge eyes are way out of proportion to the rest of her face, and they follow you around the room just like those of old masters in a gallery.
Now that most standard occupations are covered, Mitzi Ltd is branching out into rather more wacky varieties – Super-heroine, Witch and Native American. Eskimo, Vampire and Cavewoman are expected next year. Parents with overdrafts have been asking for some time - where will this ever end?’
(Excerpt from magazine article)
10 jamie
Fleming was a week from retirement when the case landed on his desk. His instincts told him it would take more than a week to solve, and so he pulled me in on it right away.
A body had been found in a park. My mouth felt dry and my stomach churned as Fleming drove us to the scene. It was the first murder case I would be taking the lead on. It was officially Fleming’s case, so he led the way through the blue and white ‘Police Do Not Cross’ tape which had been wound around the trees to keep inquisitive joggers and dog walkers out. Nevertheless, a few early risers had gathered a few feet away, curious to get a glimpse of what was going on.
I showed my ID and followed Fleming. I saw him stop next to what at first appeared to be a pile of clothes - but when I saw the people in white coats crouched down looking at it, realised this must be the body.
I caught my breath as Fleming beckoned to me to join him. Aware that the object on the ground had once been a human being, and was deserving of more dignity than her killer had allowed her, I gathered my thoughts and stepped forward as solemnly as I could.
She lay on her back, eyes open and bulging slightly. I wondered why no one had closed them out of respect as they do in films; but they were still at the stage of looking and noticing and cataloguing anything that could be a clue, and not touching anything that could contaminate the scene. She had been pretty, blonde hair tied back in a ponytail with a red and white striped scrunchy, which now had smears of mud on it. There was bruising around her throat, which suggested death by strangulation, but I knew better than to make assumptions before the lab reports came back.
She had been wearing shabby trainers, jeans and an East London College of Art T-shirt when she died. Such a waste, I thought, and then, get a grip. You can’t bring her back to life. All you can do is find out who did this and why and stop it happening again. Even so, I felt a little nauseous as I watched a technician taking swabs from behind her fingernails. It almost looked as if she was giving the dead woman a manicure.
‘Who found her?’ Fleming was asking, and I snapped my attention back to the task in hand.
‘Tube driver on early shift on his way to work,’ the uniformed officer replied, referring to his notebook. ‘We’ve pretty much ruled him out as a suspect. The pathologist estimates time of death as being between 8.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m. last night, and our driver was at a curry house with his wife celebrating their anniversary. We’ve already checked with the restaurant - he’s a regular there and the waiters verified he was there all evening. In fact, they thought this couple were never going to go home. It was half past eleven before they left.’
Fleming nodded. ‘Do we know who she is yet?’
‘No - but the T-shirt looks pretty new so my guess would be a first year student at the college.’
I knew that the seemingly insignificant clue that a detective spots early on, which later confirms the identity of the killer is merely a plotting device used in crime fiction. Nevertheless I still couldn’t resist the urge to look around and see if I could see anything that nobody else had noticed. Real life killers don’t tend to leave tantalising clues, or so Fleming had told me on the drive over. So I wasn’t really expecting to see much, but something did catch my eye. ‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a pale coloured object about a metre from the body.
Fleming and I drew aside for a closer look. It was a doll. One of those Mitzi Dolls, wearing an artist’s smock, and holding a tiny paintbrush in one hand and a paint palette in the other. The doll’s head had been pulled off and had rolled a short way away down the slight incline. It had a yellow ponytail and sported a black beret.
I looked at Fleming. ‘Seems a bit coincidental not to be significant,’ I said.
‘Indeed,’ he replied, and beckoned to one of the technicians to bag it up.
**
Later that day, Fleming called me. ‘We’ve got an ID on that girl,’ he said. ‘Abigail Thomas, first year student at the college, as we thought. What we’re missing is any suspect or motive. She lived in student digs. Landlady liked her because she was quiet. Never brought boyfriends home, just one female friend who we’re trying to track down. Abigail wasn’t sexually assaulted and there was a roll of banknotes in her jeans pocket so it wasn’t a rape or robbery gone wrong.
‘As for the doll, that’s interesting. There was a case a while back that was similar. A woman was strangled out Stansted way and there was a headless doll beside the body. It was mentioned in the report but nobody made anything of it, as it was an open and shut case by all accounts. No need to bring Maggie Flynn in on that one.’ Fleming winked at me, a conspiratorial wink.
‘So tell me about that case?’
‘Claire Mulholland, Stewardess with Air London. Body found yards from her flat, the day after her boyfriend reports her missing. Strangled, but also sexually assaulted. She’d had a row with the boyfriend that morning. Neighbours heard it, a lot of door slamming, and her telling him it was over and she wanted him to pack his bags and leave. Last seen alive by col
leagues on a flight from Manchester. Boyfriend swore he didn’t kill her but he had no alibi - he was alone in their flat all evening waiting for her to come home. The lab found his sperm in her - well, he admitted they’d had relations the night before - but there was someone else’s sperm also and traces of skin on her fingernails that didn’t match - but the jury didn’t buy that and convicted the boyfriend. The neighbour's testimony that she'd heard him say that he wished she was dead convinced them. So there was no need to think about why there was a headless Mitzi Doll at the scene.’
Coincidence? I wasn’t so sure. If I was right, the wrong man was serving time for killing Claire Mulholland. The real killer was still out there, had killed Abigail and would almost certainly kill again.
11 The funeral
My gran once told me that recently departed spirits often show up at their own funerals. She said she always made a point, when she attended a funeral, to look out for them. She said she regarded it as rather rude not to, and to acknowledge, even if she didn’t see them, that they were probably there.
Some might be there to try and comfort the mourners, others to see who’d bothered to turn up, to hear what was said about them, or make sure their wishes had been carried out. I’d asked what they could do about it if not, and Gran said that actually, once spirits pass over they more often than not don’t care so much anymore about whether their sister wears their diamond brooch or who gets possession of the oak dining table.
I wondered if Gran would be at her own funeral. Would she show herself to me, or was she too angry? Or could the fact that I’d had my phone unplugged and forgotten to plug it in because I’d been cavorting with Daniel (who my gran didn’t approve of any more than the rest of the family do) not matter anymore?
