The Cabbage Rabbit

Angela hadn’t walked far, but it was enough to make her realise that she couldn’t easily return for the scarf; despite now knowing that her coat was insufficient for the time of year. She’d parked less than a few hundred meters away but the fear of giving up forced her on. The scarf would have to stay in the glove compartment. This was probably the last time she’d be able see the wind-swept landscape of her youth, and probably the last time she’d be allowed to go anywhere without a chaperone. The doctors had told her that the little Micra would have to be relinquished.

She stared out across expansive farmland before returning her gaze to the bank. She started walking again. It was always something she could rely on: her stout legs and hips had stood the test of time – they’d always kept her upright when friends and relatives had slowly succumbed to the atrophies of weight, age and connective tissues. She would never suffer the indignity of replacement parts or battery-powered mobility scooters – her heart would see to that.

But she did want to see her marsh one last time. To remember how the creeks and brooks spiralled and roamed where they fell. She would’ve like to have brought Velma, but Velma didn’t have a wanderlust for the nothingness that their county aspired to. And besides, Velma’s hips wouldn’t make it up the incline: they were designed for the flat fields of Lincolnshire and not it’s tiny gradients. Even walking up the comically titled hill in their village was something Velma vehemently refused to do.

Angela was okay to be by herself, but she would have been happier with Velma beside her.

A man walking along the path waved convivially, and greeted her with the customary “Morning,” that aligned her people to the north. She gave him a nod in return and carried on. She assumed he wasn’t a member of the congregation – in fact she was certain. Perhaps, if it’d been twenty years ago, then there was a chance she might not have known either way. Back then he may have been one of those who could have picked out the back of her head and shoulders: while her hands and feet skipped between ivory and ebony. But now the congregation was so small, that no one could have gone unnoticed – even by her. She kept a steady pace. She saw a pair of hares streaking across the expanse of silt – the ice winds whipping the down of the cabbage rabbits. A couple; a state of being she had never chosen. A label she’d never wanted to own – but that didn’t mean she’d wanted to be alone. And neither had Velma.

In the sixties it hadn’t been worth mentioning. A pair of spinsters; just let them be. Ladies that hadn’t managed to bag husbands. But Angela had never wanted one of those: she’d seen friends caught in the tides of biology. Subjugated by the men they supposedly loved. Two had died trying – one crushed in childbirth, one just crushed, one a cousin, one a girlfriend. Angela knew these days there were whispers about her and Velma, but back then it’d seemed an extension of being left on the shelf – and hadn’t her mother told her as much when Angela voiced that the friends were moving in together. “Mind my words girl – you’ll never be happy in this life,” But her mother had her hands full with a drunk husband. Not Angela’s father. Once an uncle; later a step father – but illness had put paid to him.

Angela and Velma weathered it all. The best of friends. In the seventies Velma took Angela to see The Killing of Sister George. She didn’t know what to make of it – the kisses between George and her much younger apprentice disturbed her. Velma never took her to a film after that.

In the eighties, Velma started calling Angela; Daphanie when the two argued. It took Angela a while to figure out that it was from an American cartoon about a ghost hunting dog, and even later for Velma to admit through tears that she considered herself to be the unwanted half of their duo. The truth was that Angela didn’t know why she liked hanging out with Velma so much. She just did.

These days she knew people had different opinions about why two women enjoyed each other’s company. Why couldn’t it be that they were just good friends – and neither had wanted to be saddled with husbands or children.

But as the decades rescinded Angela started to wonder herself, and yet, as the time ebbed, the question became dull. In the late eighties and early nineties, the pair fell into an easy-going comfort. They lounged in one another’s companies, women in their early fifties. Confident and happy within themselves. They spent holidays – the church aside – without interaction from the outside world. Falling asleep next to each other on their newly bought sofa. Back then, they were happy. They were still happy; but back then they’d been happier. They’d always be friends. Wasn’t that true happiness? Did Velma think it was happiness?

Life is your past as well as your present. For Angela, she’d never change – not now. She didn’t even know that she wanted change. The only thing she truly knew was that she loved Velma, loved her God and loved this landscape: the wild winds undiscouraged by anything in its way. The fields that chose the land for food, ever since the Dutch had shown them how to keep the water in check. The cabbage rabbit had the Germanic world to thank. Not in her life time would a king’s treasure be lost to its waters, unless he chose to cross this meandering boundary. The line between the man made and the God ordained.

Angela saw the hares stop to look at her as she struck the base of the sea wall. They seemed to be saying “I wouldn’t”, but what do rabbits know. She pushed herself upwards. Climbing the bank. A band of cattle saw her ascend and assumed she was carrying feed. She gazed out across the disordered plateau, waiting for her heart to calm, and didn’t fear that it might not. What better point to finish on.

But her bicuspids continued, the beat was a–fibril but there. She saw the land of her rebirth and breathed out. This was why she’d come. To stare at colours and topography that the rest of her world espoused. Everything in her part of Lincolnshire was milk pond flat, here there were eddies, here were ups and downs. She didn’t have any connection to the rise of hills, hers were to the fields. The wind sleuthing across the nothingness. The summer sun beating down unhindered – not now in winter – yet the geography stayed the same, and the geography was the sculptor of her mind.

Angela didn’t dare walk into the creeks; her eighty years told her it would be a bad idea. But she could imagine her younger self jumping into the muddy banks, splashing through the cool summer waters; scooping crabs from the ecotomb and showing them to friends. Pointing out the statocysts, the crustation voice box. A fascination with strange biology’s that turned into a profession. She had no trouble seeing her younger self and the world she grew up in. She wondered, not for the first time whether she would have been happier growing up in today’s world. Perhaps happier wasn’t the right word? Maybe freer, maybe with a greater range of options. Would she swap? Maybe not.

She didn’t see any more happiness on the faces of the youngsters she came into contact with. They might have called her a coward. Slapped on a rictus grin. But they hadn’t grown up in her time. She didn’t even know if she was a coward – had she forgotten something in exchange for conformity? She didn’t know. All she knew, was that she didn’t share the pull of roughened skin. She was drawn to chrysanthemums. Petals inverted higher, an explosion of burgundy, violets and indigo’s – touching silk inside; and to the ebony and ivory that called her to church. To a marshy landscape that gave room for her imagination to wander. Ringed plovers and dunlins skipped and sieved its edges while keeping a collective eye on the sky. Angela knew what they were looking for, but the marsh harriers wouldn’t be back till spring. The little dunlins and plovers were safe. Angela pulled her arms around herself in a hug. The cold was biting to get at her, and the scarf in the Micra was berating a foolish old woman for thinking she was still her younger self, with a youthful blanket of unblemished skin. But Angela held herself steady: she had something she’d swapped for unblemished skin, a determination that dismissed the scarf and restarted her footsteps towards the cows. They were happily plodding up to see if she had anything, but Angela wasn’t worried about disappointing them. She knew cattle, and when they got close, they stopped and let her pass as she knew they would. Neither disappointed nor annoyed that they had made the trip for nothing. A bull gave her a cursory look but went back to munching, as if the grass was the only reason he had come over.

She slapped the hind of the last cow and it swished its tail, perhaps pleased that Angela had conveyed a little heat between her hand and its thigh. Rising honks made herself and the animal look up, but only Angela continued to watch the hooper swans fly in – in search of the wide tributary that fed the marsh. She saw them disappear out of sight as the cows began their journey back into the saltgrass and samphire. Towards a small iron bridge that was the only thing besides markers that would relay which century this was, but not which decade.

She wished Velma had decided to come, not only for the company, but also for the shared body heat and a voice that would have cautioned her to turn back. Velma was always the sensible one. Her forever friend, the person she cared about more than any – she just hadn’t asked herself in what way. Perhaps Velma knew? Perhaps not.

Angela scuffed a patch of saltgrass and continued walking along the bank. She had never known where it gave out, it seemed like it wouldn’t – like the flatness of this world. Maybe it went on forever? Even in her youth she’d never been tempted to find out. Perhaps now was her last chance.