Telling tales of working women

Ink bottle owned by Charles Dickens, DH134 © Charles Dickens Museum

These stories have been written by Rosa Chalfen and local community groups - Mosaic LGBT Young Person’s Trust and St Luke’s Community Centre. This project has been funded by the University of Hertfordshire Coproduction Award.

The Great Black World

‘How horrible then, to know, that she can be so extraordinarily wicked as under that roof which alone protects her from the great black world…’

- Dickens in a letter about Rhena Pollard

They tried everything to save her, but she would not be saved. They tried telling her about Hell and the way flesh melted off bone in the blue centre of a flame. They tried starving her, but somehow the scraps of her body were stronger than the whole.

What was it about her that they hated? Difficult to say. She was young, angry, pretty, poor—this was enough. She was the flaw in the glass, the desire suppressed. She was the rub in their charitable glow.

She shed the bruised and scaled skin of herself and left it on the floor of the Atlantic, to rot there with the white bones of sailors, picked clean, and men’s fortunes scaled over with algae. Then there was only the raw form of her, red and bleeding in the high winds.

She followed the Ottawa River and the land opened up before her. Its marbled planes, a lake frozen over, a split core. So alien that she might have been moving blindly through the blackness of space and stumbled on some new and flawless star.

In Buckingham she found a man grown up from the ground, chapped by sun and frost, his skin flaking off in flurries. He looked her in the eye. His hands had a map of white scars from the lumberyard. She traced them with her teeth, and bit.

They moved like a two-headed wolf, their bodies perfectly balanced, each limb and tendon in sync. Her cubs were born in creeks and coves. They followed the forest and the sound of axe splitting trunk. In the place they settled she could see the whole of the sky, stretch her arms from east to west and take the measure of it.

They tried everything to save her, but she would not be saved. They tried prayers and absolutions. The doctor was called, and opium given. But the century would die with her.

In her own mind she was already looking out over Big Gull Lake, the sweet rancid taste of whisky on her lips, and the sun was sliding down into the water.

By Rosa Chalfen