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Dear Diary,
I have stated before, in a previous diary, that I don’t think I could see myself marrying a man. However, I have recently made the horrifying realisation that it might go deeper than I thought. I think I might be able to see myself marrying a woman.
I know that sounds ridiculous. Girls can’t marry each other, and I am a girl, through and through. But, well… I suppose I’ll just tell you how it all went down.
When I first made the realisation, Eric was the first person I wanted to tell. He’s one of the kindest, most benevolent people I know. He’s also a kid, like me, and I always find that kids tend to be much more accepting when you tell them something weird.
It turned out that I didn’t even have to find him, as he found me, curled up like a ball against the walls of the building that the Ministry is in now. I would have been embarrassed out of my skin in any other scenario, but I had been crying so I wasn’t thinking straight, and I know Eric could see that.
“Hey,” he paused, noticed me and then went down by my side, “hey, Nuala what’s wrong?” He sounded very concerned, I like that he worries about me. I’m not sure if that’s selfish or not.
“There’s something wrong with me!” I tried to say, the words came out as a broken, stuttery scream, muffled by my tears and my hands on my face.
“Oh goodness,” he said, furrowing his brow and looking at me with concern, “do you need me to get someone to call a doctor? Do you need help getting up?”
“THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME!!” All I did was repeat what I had said previously, just lounder and more frantic, and somehow Eric got what I was trying to say.
He sat down right next to me, against the wall, and said, “Well, if it’s that kind of something, then there probably isn’t anything actually wrong with it.”
He gave me time to reply, but I couldn't think of anything, so nothing came out.
“Do you want to tell me what it is? It’s ok if you don’t.” He was so reassuring.
I was a stuttering mess, but the words that I managed to get out were, “I think I like girls, like the way that I’m supposed to like boys. Like the way that you’re supposed to like girls, and I don’t understand it because I am a girl. I am a girl and I know that.”
“Oh,” he said, with a face and tone unusually conflicted for such a morally tight person, “so you think you might be a homosexual?”
“A what?”
“A homosexual. A girl that likes girls or a boy that likes boys.”
“Is that a bad thing?” I said, much calmer but still very meek and nervous.
“I don’t know,” he said, he seemed honest, “do you want me to go tell Hazel?”
I nodded.
Only a minute or two passed before I next heard the sound of footsteps coming into the room I was tucked away in. But the footsteps that approached did not sound like Hazel’s, soft, but not particularly quiet, instead they were lean, calculated, and almost silent, Daisy was coming into the room.
Assuming that she would not have known about the predicament I was in, I tried to straighten up, but in the time that it took me to simply stand up, Daisy had already made her way to a spot where she was practically in front of my face.
“Hazel told me, that Eric told her, that you told him, that you think you might be a homosexual. Is that true, or did something get lost in translation?”
And then I started bawling. Bawling so hard that I fell into Daisy’s arms and she had to catch me.
“Oh dear,” she whispered, and then, raising her voice so the other room could hear her, “I wasn’t this emotional, was I, Hazel?”
The next few minutes are a blur, mostly of Hazel’s hands on my back, Eric’s in mine and Daisy’s occasionally finding home on my face. Somewhere in the haze of it all Daisy had told me that she was a homosexual herself and Hazel had assured me that anyone at The Ministry who wasn’t tolerant of that sort of stuff would be punished. I had then been moved into one of the empty bedrooms we still had no idea what to do with, alongside Daisy, who was preparing to have the conversation with me that she had been meaning to have when I first started crying.
“So,” I started, nervously, “you’re a homosexual?”
“Yes,” she replied, “And proud of it!”
“How long have you been one?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve been one as long as I’ve been alive, but I started actually liking girls in 1933.”
Daisy is 20 now, in 1933 she would have been 11, the same age that I am now.
“It’s rare, right?” I asked, “because if I’ve heard about it I've forgotten.”
“Not necessarily,” she said, “It’s just that people don’t like it when you’re a homosexual, so a lot of us have to hide it. But, if you know where to look, we’re everywhere. I encountered no less than nine in the two years that I was solving all those murders as a teen, and I’ve met plenty since then.”
“Have you ever been with someone?” I asked.
“Did you not see me kiss Amina back in April? My goodness, if you’re that unobservant I might have to reconsider having you as a spy!”
“But women kiss their friends all the time,” I said, confused, “I saw you kiss Hazel just last week.” I don’t know why I sounded so accusatory.
“But that was on the cheek, Nuala,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “You don’t kiss your friends on the lips.”
“But what about Miss Charney and Miss Wimpress?” I said, I was having one of those moments where I have frankly come to agree with someone, I just feel like I have to keep arguing.
Daisy giggled, “honestly, based on the interviews and police reports, I think they were together too. Charney certainly sounded like someone talking about her girl’s unfortunate former lover whenever she mentioned Miss Fig.”
It was so strange to find out about something for the first time, by feeling it within myself, and then finding out that it’s everywhere like that. It’s like when you find out about a new word, or a new English mannerism and then suddenly everyone is saying and doing it. This felt so much more life changing though, like everything about everything had been shattered.
And then I realised it hadn’t. If these things, these feelings, these people had been there the whole time, existing peacefully, just out of notice, then it couldn’t possibly be that earth-shattering to simply start paying a bit more attention.
And perhaps, since I am a spy, I should start paying enough attention to notice things before they make me cry.