Diary of a Provincial Lesbian by V. G. Lee

streets that Georgie walked along with me.
    Upsetting lyrics in the circumstances but the only song immediately suggesting itself. By the time I reach the kitchen my eyes are watering. I desperately need to blow my nose as I recall just how much in love we used to be.
    Tear off a piece of towel roll. Stop singing. Cautiously and silently open the kitchen window which looks over the back garden side of the gate. Blow nose loudly.
    Stunned silence then the scramble of something or someone completely invisible frantically breaching the fence between my garden and Mr Wheeler’s. The sky is filled with the cries of disturbed seagulls. Close window. Warm some milk. Sit at kitchen table.
    How can I forget you, Georgie?  At this precise moment you would be in your charcoal coloured towelling dressing gown, either telephoning the police or shrugging your shoulders and saying, ‘Don’t worry, it was probably just a rat.’
    I thought how I’d never felt frightened of anything when Georgie was with me. How she’d reassure me as we made our way back up to bed, ‘Margaret, we’re quite safe. The two of us are big strapping women. We’re more than a match for burglars or rats.’
    And I might say, ‘What if it’s a ghost?’
    And she’d reply, ‘It won’t be.’
    Took my glass of milk upstairs. Tilly fast asleep. I slept. In the morning woke to find my brain supplying more Sandie Shaw – the line about being born to love someone and never being free.
    I didn’t want to be free of Georgie.
    Thought about checking the back garden but incident of strangely rattling gate seems dim and distant memory put next to pain of song words.
     
     
    March 13 th
    Deirdre unveils plans for her new garden layout. Quite a presentation. I am invited and also her other neighbours, two elderly sisters, Vera and Morag. Deirdre had made cakes, wedges of sponge covered in pink icing and acid green hundreds and thousands. She wore a peachy pink chiffon kaftan with matching bracelets, a pink feather in her hair. We were asked to sit down around the dining room table, asked what we wanted in the way of tea, coffee or fruit juice. Handed a small plate each with a pink paper serviette and told to ‘please get stuck into the cakes’. Our mouths full Deirdre began. She welcomed our attendance as if we’d come at least from as far away as an adjoining county, she told us that she felt it ‘absolutely crucial to keep her neighbours on side’.
    Vera and Morag nodded while also looking mystified.
    ‘As you can see,’ Deirdre said, pointing with a plastic ruler at the plan laid out on the table, ‘what is now lawn and cuoy carp pool will become a decked terrace with seating for six persons in an ornamental gazebo.’
    We nodded our approval. No, our admiration.
    ‘My entire new garden will be fenced in with willow panels painted alternate shades of sea green and sky blue obviously to mirror the effect of sea and sky.’
    Morag asked, ‘How tall will the fence be?’
    ‘Brave woman!’ I thought and nodded more approval and admiration.
    Deirdre tapped her perfect white teeth with the ruler and avoided Morag’s eyes, ‘Six foot give or take a foot or three.’
    ‘So it could reach nine foot?’
    ‘That is a possibility.’
    ‘We can’t have that,’ Vera gently murmured to Morag.
    ‘No we can’t have that,’ said Morag firmly.
    Deirdre’s face and body seem to dilate with pent up emotion - she hates her ambitions to be curtailed.
    ‘It probably won’t be quite nine foot,’ she snaps.
    ‘Better to know the exact height before the fence goes up. Nothing worse than neighbourly disputes. What do you think Margaret?’ Vera peers round the side of her larger sister.
    Deirdre fixes me with a ‘Back me up here’ look.
    Personally, at that moment I couldn’t care less if Deirdre built a life-size model of the Taj Mahal in her back garden but Vera and Morag didn’t seem two women who could easily stand up for themselves whereas Deirdre...