The Rumours of Mrs Elderflower

The cabinet that faces me - vacant of dishes or memories and barricaded by bruised boxes - it used to wonder what happened to her too. It looks at me through the lingering dust, shingling in the morning air. They say one should go back to where they grew up at least once in their life. Driving back down the road where I kissed Katie Kennington after someone’s (who my mind fails to remember )18th Bond-themed birthday party. It’s like opening that desolate draw in the spare room, which you really have to tug to open. Minchinhampton was Country Life magazine’s 5th best village to live in in England a couple years back. Mum and Dad didn’t care about that quintessential living though. “We moved here just so you could get the best education Finn, so don’t fall back on your work now”, Mum would moan as she put snoring snacks into my lunchbox in the early mundane mornings before school. I wonder if I’ll return to St Michael’s Middle. Sherry is keen to see it, she says we can take little Lala or Po when they’re born. Oh wait, I’m not allowed to call them that, but what can you call your unborn child that you don’t even know the gender of? Anyway, there is one person I cannot help but think of. I haven’t stopped thinking of her. Not since we got here. She lived at the bottom of this street. Number twelve. A small, square-shaped detached house with a little square-shaped garden and miniature square rooms inside (I can imagine). But there was nothing square about her at all. Her house looked like a cottage from a fairy-tale, golden stone and flamboyant flowers clinging to the walls. Eerie flowers that might lunge and snap at you. Mrs Elderflower had the eeriness of a fairy-tale about her too, ever since she went missing. She taught me Biology for a short time. It was a little prick in the skin, her time at St Michaels Middle. A prick that stung everyone sharp. She was transient, but never forgotten. I still remember that day.

Mrs Elderflower was the savoured part of a meal, the part you’d eat at the end right after your grumpy greens. Right after English, Maths, P.E., Mark Brown (a friend I learnt to love through school) told me behind the art block one day that his Dad thought Mrs Elderflower looked like Nicole Kidman. This was around the time Moulin Rouge hit the cinema’s and I remember Mum laughing outrageously when I asked her what it was about. I remember thinking you could push one of Mrs Elderflower’s curls of hair to her head and let go like a catapult and the hair would spring over and over again. Red lipstick glazed her lips in the mornings, and it was gone by one o’clock in time for the lunchtime staff meeting. Her lipstick, a sneaky creature in her purse. “They can’t tell me how I can and cannot look but… they can stop me from teaching you lot”, she’d elegantly state if any of us asked about it. She had moved here from South London.

“You’re a funny one Finn Danton”, she smiled as we childishly giggled about Apples and Pears, Bees and Honey and Derry and Tom’s one day in a lesson. I still remember the day, though. That day she morphed into Mrs Uninteresting, Mrs Boring, Mrs ‘I hate teaching’, she’d gone.

I can’t even recall his name, my next Biology teacher. I remember he once announced, “I quite like watching paint dry” (not joking). School was shit from that point. I never saw Mrs Elderflower again. As bold as her lipstick were the words that followed her departure. Where is Mrs Elderflower? Why doesn’t anybody know? How has she gone missing in this tiny village?

It was a period of competitive lies and dusk dreary morning walks to school. The words ‘Mrs Elderflower’ started to feel like a new TV show which the whole school were crazing about. Who will say what today? A passing car, I’d check for those vibrant chocolate curls in the driving seat once again. Never anything. One lunchtime, my eyes were glued to an egg and cress sandwich sat in my lunch box like an animal waiting to be fed. Nancy Drew clumped herself alongside me, clutching a bottle of Pepsi, “I know what happened to Elderflower”, she sang gloatingly.

This was when it started. Nancy imagined:

“There was once a biology teacher, Mrs Eloise Elderflower, aged thirty-three, at St Michael’s Middle. She had to leave the school due to her scandalous pregnancy. You see, Eloise was secretly in love with Mr Paul and the couple had been canoodling in the stationary cupboard pissing off the pens and paper. Now Mr Mowlam, you know the cute Theology teacher, he once said that Mr Paul was “an alien at heart boys and girls”. And so apparently Mrs Elouise Elderflower was seen with Mr Paul in The Bakers Arms by the dinner lady Mad Maggie on the Monday before Eloise disappeared. Mrs Elderflower, like a damsel in distress, told Mr Paul of her pregnancy and before her eyes was a giant, decadent but gory, magenta coloured creature, The Maths Maniac from Mars. The whole of the inside of the pub roared in terror at the sight of the erupting beast. Mad Maggie says it was like a scene from Frankenstein. Can you imagine, an Alien Baby? Terrifying. Apparently, Elderflower was out of there as quick as you can say Jack Robinson. She’s probably hiding in her attic shaking, reading ‘Raising an Alien child for Dummies’ between tears. Tragic.”

No. Well hang on, that was Nancy Drew’s story. But No. Obviously I didn’t believe that nonsense. Nancy also used to say that her cat could speak French and she’d let you go to her house to see for one hundred pounds. Her words certainly never spoke to me. They didn’t speak much to Tim Frink’s either. “I know what really happened to her”, he whispered to me keenly once whilst we stood, crows on a telephone wire, queuing for class.

Tim envisioned: “There was once a biology teacher, Mrs Eloise Elderflower, aged thirty-three, at St Michael's Middle. Vanished by her circumstances. Now, I heard her husband was basically a briefcase. Uninteresting to look at and always moving around. A doomed relationship my sister would say. I overheard Mrs Collins, the grumpy girl in the office, almost vomit out the words, “Eloise just found out she is infertile, her relationship can’t even be saved by a baby now”. This was the morning she disappeared. Not a week later I saw her glossy face on the front of HEAT Magazine, standing next to the one and only Ricky blooming Simpson from The Boys from the Band. Hanging by the magazine aisle, I hurried over to my mum, she was waiting at the pharmacy desk picking up Dad’s pills which I pretend I don’t know about. “Mum you’ll never believe it…”. She never did believe me. She said people would call me Tim Fibs if I wasn’t careful”.

Mrs Frinks would have been right if the whole school wasn’t bloody fibbing. I never believed Tim either. I think Mrs Elderflower would have liked this rumour. I mean, Ricky Simpson! But, no. That got me about as much as when Dad talks to me about Formula One. Went straight over my head, even if it was about Mrs Elderflower.

Ridiculous. I found the next rumour even more ridiculous. If they can get any more tedious. Looking back now, it was like on the brink of if teenage children used lies like cocaine. They got more addicted to telling fibs, all for ‘Teenage Kicks’, I don’t know. One rumour about an ‘awesome alien baby’, and the next she’s infertile. I couldn’t keep up.

But it was Serpent. Laural Serpent. I think she was a budding Harry Potter fanatic and was reading it in her sleep. Thought she’d use Mrs Elderflower’s disappearance as her chance to be J.K. Rowling. It was a Monday. I remember that because Mum dropped me off by the gate on her way to visit Grandma, and she could only visit Grandma on a Monday. I wish she hadn’t dropped me off at all. Loral Serpent was enjoying it all though: “Finn Danton you will never guess what!” Loral shouted at me as I stumbled up the path of cackling children towards school. She ran up to me. Well, no. She galloped. Loral galloped up to me like the hungriest of horses. Hungry to inform me of her gossip that I can only imagine hated its being out there as much as I did. She crashed into me clumsily. “So, I know everyone is talking about it, but I really know the truth of what happened to Mrs Elderflower”, hissed Serpent. My eyes span round like a globe. Here we go again.

Now. Hang on. Yes. Loral claimed:

“There was once a biology teacher, Mrs Eloise Elderflower, aged thirty-three, at St Michael’s Middle. After Monday the 26th of November, she was never seen in Minchinhampton again. If there is anything I’ve learnt from Conan Doyle, it’s that you have to spot for clues. The Tuesday after Elderflower’s disappearance brought suspicions to me. The first day she was gone, because you know who else was gone? Harry Lloyd, a Year Seven, alike myself, in her supposedly first class of the day. Harry was absent due to ‘a poor tummy’. I wondered about its truth as I sat there, waiting for the teacher to turn up, head down ready to read ‘The Chamber of Secrets‘ - chapter four - when from out of nowhere Holly Roves shrieked. It was huge, black and almost innocent looking. Hiding behind Holly’s rucksack was a lurking rat! They all called me bonkers, but curiously, I picked it up. Holly, looking terrified said that’s why I’d never get a boyfriend but, I’ll just nick one of hers if I’m desperate. Anyway, everyone’s gone for lunch, vanished, and it’s just me and the rat. Or should I say Harry Lloyd. Yep, Harry Lloyd. Elderflower transformed him with her Witchcraft. It makes sense. She has no children, she’d had a disagreement with Harry the week before about homework, and let’s not forget the mole the size of Jupiter on her right shoulder. Tanya Smith was ill the week before and apparently Mrs Elderflower had fallen out with her mum that week in The Bakers Arms. I bet poor little Tanya is a mop at the back of the classroom now. No wonder she’s a Biology teacher hey? My theory is her witchcraft authorities caught her doing magic on normal people and bang, off she flew. Thank God I never got on her bad side, wouldn’t want to be her witches’ cat!”

Just wait, so now she’s a witch. Pure lunacy. Loral was the kind of girl that got confused between real life and fiction and when school started to really suck. I wished it had all just been worthless words on a page too.

The cabinet that faces me, longing for possessions to house whispers to me suddenly, “I know”. My eyes are engrossed in its archaic wormy woodwork. The cabinet squeaks, getting louder intimidatingly, like a vehicle looming closer. My knuckles nibble at the table. And this was the truth.

Yes, the whole truth, the cabinet creaked:

“There was once a biology teacher, Mrs Eloise Elderflower, aged thirty-three, at St Michael’s Middle. Her life was not what the children at the school thought. Two years back. Her husband, the banker. Her best friend, the I-don’t-know. Hiding in each other’s bodies in Elderflower’s bed. The husband, he left. Elderflower, she stayed. Bottles of Bud became her boyfriends. Whisky and rum, spirits to replace hers, so lost. Mr Paul was a friend of hers, but when she fell that Monday the 26th of November in front of her class, wobbling her woes, rum on her lips like a bite, she had to go. “It’s for the reputation of the school”, the headteacher recited. Ignorance was a soother on his tongue. The window to your left, I’d see her pass by every day for a while. She would clutch two new bottles to her chest like lungs, on her return from the shops. She looked cooked, but grey and underdone. A few months back, before Tanya and John moved out, I heard Tanya tell John: “Alcoholic Miss Havisham was found dead in that tiny , living house. Her life was never the same once her heart had been broken.”

And now I know.