7. A First Mad Plan

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

THE POETESS, Part 7

I remember the day I heard that Aunt Clara died. She’d always been a bitter old thing and looking back it may have been because something dreadful was eating her away from inside.

The elderly Rosie Pinkerton sat in her armchair in front of a scorching gas fire and shook her head regretfully. Back in those far off days rumours had got around and she had guessed there might be something wrong with the bad tempered woman and went round to see her for no better reason that to quash those rumours or try to make amends. Surely someone as strong as she had always seemed to be couldn’t be on her last legs? After all, she was probably too young to die.

But she wasn’t. Far from it. When the teenage Rosie arrived she was lying on the carpet in her front room with a pile of clothes on top of her, white as a sheet, and moaning, and the solid fuel fire had long since turned to a white collection of cold ashes.

“Oh, it’s you,” she whimpered, barely audibly, “I wondered if I’d ever get to see you again. It’s this sodding house. It kills everyone who lives in it…”

Then some wheezes and coughs and splutters before, “remember what it did to your folks?”

“It wasn’t the house, Aunt Clara.” she said.

“And I hear you’re dossing in an old caravan with a yobbo lad, and up to all manner of dirty tricks,” she continued, “flashing your knickers at him, I’ll be bound, “if you’re wearing any, that is…”

It was winter and she was dressed in a maxi skirt with anything underneath that might help drive the cold out, including an underskirt that had been her mum’s, and good strong underwear, all very proper and ultra-decent.

“Of course I am,” she responded, waiting for the woman to reply with more vitriol, but she didn’t.

Instead her eyes closed, her head slumped to one side, and her breathing stopped, altogether, with an awful finality. Rosie knew for a certainty that she was dead, but she thought it only decent to check, so she nervously, her fingers cringing at the contact, felt for a pulse.

There wasn’t one. Not the least memory of blood surging along the veins of the bitter woman. Just a frightening stillness and after a lifetime of bitterness a final calm.

Clara had had a phone installed, something Rosie’s parents had always wanted, but phones weren’t so easy to either afford or come by when they’d been alive and still well enough to attend to it. But Clara had got one, almost immediately. It was a party line shared with a neighbour, but that didn’t trouble her. The phone had more to do with display than use. She had very few friends.

Rosie rang the emergency number and a police car as well as an ambulance arrived in what must have been record time. The ambulance staff decided she was dead, suspected natural causes combined with her lying on a thinly covered stone floor in winter in a freezing room, and the police took a few notes, looked suspiciously at Rosie, and left, apparently satisfied by the judgement of natural causes.

When she arrived back at the caravan she popped in to see Aunt Mildred (she still called her that) and suggested she might not need the caravan for much longer.

“I think the house must be mine,” she said, “Clara never knew anyone well enough to leave it to and anyway it was my parents who paid for it.”

“I’ll help you sort things, dear,” smiled the ever-happy Mildred, “it’s not easy while you’re still young.”

“I am sixteen,” she almost protested.

“And not so world wise, or so our Roy says,” murmured Mildred, “what was it he thinks you believe, that a woman can get to be with child through kissing? I’ve never heard such a thing!”

“I’ve never been told….” stammered Rosie, “at school they said they were teaching us all about it, and the teacher for science said that bees take pollen from one flower and give it to another, and that’s how seeds are made. But I never really understood how it applied to people and babies. I know that ladies get big tummies and then they are thin and pushing a pram down the street, but I never see any bees anywhere near.”

“You sweet innocent young girl,” laughed Aunt Mildred, “but your teacher was either too shy or steeped in old fashioned puritanism to tell you the truth so she told you a simple plant and flower version. Look, one day soon we’ll settle ourselves down and have a good old chin-wag and I’ll put you straight, hopefully before Roy finds himself a different girl who does know the tricks of love, and how to keep a boy. But first I think we’d better see about that house your parents bought.”

And after that two things did happen. Aunt Mildred went with me to see a solicitor, and he said straight away that as my parents had died intestate the house had always been mine by right, and not aunt Clara’s, but as she was no longer in the land of the living there wasn’t much that could be done about it. Of course, in the fullness of time, I could sell it and do whatever I wanted with the proceeds.

The second thing that happened was that Roy found a girlfriend and I hardly saw him again that season.

“I’ve got a sort of idea,” Rosie said to the solicitor before they left his office, “you see, there’s a broken down old derelict cottage down Strong lane and I’d love to live in it. Do you think I’d make enough money selling my own home to buy it from whoever owns it?”

He frowned at her. “I know the place,” he said after a pause, “I’ve had to make enquiries about it in the past, but nobody seems to know anything about who owns it. It’s been a long time empty, I’m afraid, and falling to bits. Indeed, it’s in no condition for a pretty young woman to live in! If anything, I’d think that doing the place up was a mad plan! You could never live in it. It’s probably riddled with the Death Watch beetle and all manner of other nasties! It needs bulldozing: that’s what it needs, and good riddance to it.”

“If I had the money I could do it up,” she said, “I had my first kiss…” she glanced at Mildred and smiled, “while I was looking at it. My only proper kiss, ever.”

“You need to discuss it with people who understand bricks and mortar,” he said to her, a little firmly. “Sometimes a dream can be full of bright promise and sunshine and … kisses … but in the end it’s only a dream waiting to turn into a nightmare!”

On the way back to the caravan Mildred held Rosie by one hand and squeezed her fingers. “Was it Roy?” she asked, “that one single kiss down by Miller’s Cottage?”

Rosie squeezed her fingers back, and smiled at her. “He’s the only boy I’ve kissed, yet,” she said, “and now he’s got a proper girlfriend, and I wish he hadn’t.”

“He’s a young man and probably feels the masculine urge to sow his wild oats,” she told her, and Rosie didn’t understand what she meant.

What had oats got to do with anything?

I was the innocent child of a very different age, she thought as she basked in the glow from her gas fire, they even made sure of that by keeping the sexes apart at school, and for me that was it, I suppose. There weren’t so many kids where I lived, there still aren’t, and those I might call neighbours were just about all girls. Maybe I’d be a different old woman now if I’d had a few boys to play with in my field days, hopscotch on the pavement, leapfrog on the park.