Competition winner
WHERE’S MURIEL?
by Elizabeth Tyrrell
Elizabeth Tyrrell has lived in Brighton for most of her adult life and can’t imagine being anywhere else. She has always enjoyed writing and finds that writing groups, of which there are many in Brighton, and also magazines arevery helpful for support and feedback. Competitions are agreat motivator. She was an infant teacher for thirty years. ‘You can’t have illusions about yourself when small children are around,’ she says, ‘and, not surprisingly, I often write about children.’
Hovering above my bed are two figures, grey and cloudy, speaking through cotton wool. Ghosts. As I soon will be.
‘Did she say cat-creep?’ The doctor’s laugh is muffled. ‘What’s that? A dance?’
‘You find them in Brighton, Doctor! Where Mum grew up.’
It’s faint but I recognise Jennie’s posh voice. To my daughter doctors are like gods. I splutter a laugh.
‘Mum?’ Her face blurs and, through the hospital tang, drifts a whiff of perfume. That expensive stuff. ‘What’s the matter?’
Thinking I can’t hear. ‘She’s been agitated all day. Something on her mind.’
There is. One person missing. All come to say goodbye except one.
Where’s Muriel?
I’m trying to shout but all I produce is a croaky squeak.
‘Tell me about cat-creeps, Jennie!’ the doctor says.
I can.
Next door to our house was the cat-creep. I don’t know what others call them but, in Brighton, the flights of steep steps rising up between high plastered walls and linking two roads on a hillside are cat-creeps. The baker’s was at the top. So was the post office. From up high you could see descending terraces of houses with their smoking chimney pots, the trees changing colour in the park and, far away, the steam train puffing across the viaduct to Lewes. We lived on the street at the bottom. The cat-creep was our second home, our playground.