A Hundred Thousand Miles
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Beta: notboldly
Brit-pick: lousy-science
Rating: R
Word Count: ~2,100
Highlight to Read Warnings: racism, violence, brief implications of disordered eating and self-injury.
Disclaimer: Property of Gatiss and Moffat. No money made, no copyright infringement intended.
Summary: Sally Donovan didn’t daydream of being a police officer when she was young.
A Hundred Thousand Miles
Sally remembers the hard flex of her mother’s biceps as she stirred the ingredients for rock buns by hand. Butter and sugar are hard to smooth into a single, pale yellow creaminess, but Mummy could do it with the whip of the strength in her arm, with her lips tucked back behind her teeth, with the dark groove that would develop between her eyebrows. She would let Sally beat an egg with a fork and add it to the mixture.
“You’re my good girl,” she’d say.
Vanilla next, then flour and baking powder, nutmeg and cinnamon, raisins and cherries, until Sally was giggling, flour dusted in her curls and on her skin.
“I’m a ghost, Mummy,” she’d say, twirling. Mummy’s eyes, wide and dark as the midnight sky, would crinkle with her smile, but she would be silent, stirring with sweat-inducing vigour. Dough is a finicky and difficult thing.
Whenever he came home to the warm, spiced scent of rock buns in the flat, Daddy would expand with the deepest breath, grin wide, blue eyes sparking, and say, “Marietta, my sunshine, my star bright, light of my life - you spoil me.” And he’d find Mummy, and kiss her, and heft Sally up into the air to blow raspberries on her stomach until she squealed. Mummy would look on with fond exasperation, a smile lurking in the flattened lines of her pursed mouth.
“Someday, you’re going to drop that child on her head,” she’d say. Daddy would swing Sally back down and reach out one long, gangly arm to gather Mummy in too, and Sally would be warm and squirmy between them.
“Let me buy you an electric mixer, Marietta.” But Mummy would only shake her head.
“This is how it’s done properly, Michael,” she’d reply, stepping back and smoothing down her apron primly. “If it was good enough for my mother, it’s good enough for me.”
The rock buns were for pudding, and after supper Sally and her parents would gather under a blanket on the sofa in the parlour. There would be Earl Grey for them, drinking chocolate for Sally, and a book in Daddy’s hand. There had been a time when they were working through C.S. Lewis, and for months Sally wanted nothing more than to disappear through a wardrobe into a world with talking creatures, a world where she could do battle with the forces of darkness alongside her beloved kings and queens, alongside a stalwart lion, wise and true.
Sometimes, Mummy would tell stories from her girlhood in Jamaica, and the oppressive heat, the cover of verdant leaves, seemed as distant to her as Narnia.
-
Sally remembers learning she was different, not just from other children, but from her parents as well. Her father, she found out, was a proper Englishman. Sally did not tell anyone he was from Glasgow. Her mother, she was told, was a wog. Sally did not tell anyone she was from Jamaica.
“Golliwog, golliwog!” some of Sally’s classmates chanted. One of them, a tow-headed boy with a fat face that swallowed his watercolour eyes, pushed her down and called her a zebra girl. Then he spat on her and hopped up and down with arms raised in triumph, cheering. The crowd dispersed and she was left alone with her skinned knee, with the web of spittle and mucous in her hair. She cried a bit and sat in the dirt watching droplets of blood well up from the pale pink underskin of her knee until a teacher came by to collect her. When she asked Sally what had happened, Sally just shook her head.
At home, Sally told Mummy she did not want to go to school anymore. She dragged herself over to the counter and clambered on top to reach the biscuits, but Mummy slapped her hands.
“If you want a treat, you ask for it properly,” Mummy said, gripping her underneath the armpits and setting her back down on the floor. She glowered down at her, hands on hips, looking tall and fearsome. “Now, tell me why you don’t want to go to school anymore.”
Sally couldn’t help it; she began to cry. Big blubbery sobs that stopped up her words and choked up her breath, caused all the holes in her face to leak and slick her skin. She recounted the story in a disjointed non-narrative, and before she was done she found herself mashed in her mother’s embrace, strong, hot hands rubbing too hard on her back. She sagged, deflated.
When Mummy drew back long moments later, she wiped Sally’s face with her bare hand, pinching at her nostrils when she was finished. Mummy reached up to wipe that hand on a tea towel, but then she knelt back down to cup Sally’s head with two firm palms. Her black eyes shone with banked fire, and there was no looking away.
“Listen to me, Sally girl. Are you listening?”
Sally’s breath stuttered and a keening whine seemed to be rising from her throat, but she managed to nod.
“You’re whole. A whole person, no matter what anyone else says, no matter where your family’s from, no matter how it feels on the darkest days. And you are exactly as God Almighty made you. No one can take that away from you, understand?”
Sally nodded again, and Mummy let her have a biscuit. Mummy let her stick close all day, until Daddy came home and the pair of them went into their bedroom with angry faces and closed the door. There was muffled shouting, and Sally took her Pooh bear and lay with him under her bed. There were no bedtime stories that night, but the next day, Mummy marched right into her classroom with a map and a storybook and told all of Sally’s classmates about Jamaica.
-
Sally remembers her father removing her from school on 22nd April, 1995. She was fifteen, he was forty-seven, and when she met him in the head’s office, he was not her father but a waterlogged study in reds and whites, a diminished spectre of himself in the chair. The head herself, a starchy woman with a dour disposition and a belted waist, seemed to be having trouble keeping her own upper lip suitably stiff. Sally froze in the doorway, and Dad looked up at her with desperate, bloodshot eyes. He stood, and his whole body shook as he yanked her into him for a hug.
The Metropolitan Police responded to a disturbance at the Donovans’ flat some time before lunch. Marietta Donovan had been home alone when a neighbour from three flats down had called, entered their home, and bludgeoned Sally’s mum to death with a lamp. Afterward, he smeared racial slurs on the walls in her blood. When the media got wind of the story, they sensationalised and exaggerated it in every direction possible. Marietta Donovan became a saint, a sinner, harmless, threatening. She was always an immigrant - whether that was good or bad depended on the bias of the reporter. That she was a midwife and a mother and a cousin and a voracious reader seemed to matter little. Optimists bearing casseroles would say, this a terrible blow for the National Front. Others, hissing between sneering lips, would mutter, or a great triumph. The man who committed the crime was deemed incompetent for trial and left to wallow in an institution despite the evidence - pictures and pamphlets and manifestos - and despite his cold rationality upon arrest.
The injustice of it burned in Sally’s gullet. Worse than the howling absence her mother’s death left in her heart, worse than how her father could barely stand to look at her without six drinks sloshing in his gut, worse than the sudden and acute alienation she felt from her peers as that black girl with the dead mother.
The injustice hollowed Sally out until she was a skeletal wreck, skin a ghastly grey, hair brittle and limp. She ran for miles on end, hour upon hour. She whittled her food intake down to a banana, a yoghurt, a biscuit a day. She thought about him - Davey Tanner, her mother’s murderer was called. Such an ordinary name. She thought about him, sketched pictures of him, dreamed about him at night.
Once, before she finished school, she wrote him a letter.
David Tanner,
My name is Sally Donovan. I will make you pay.
She was not exactly known for eloquence.
She didn’t send the letter. She burned it in her bedroom, put the flames out with her hands, held them to the snuffed embers until the smell of burnt pork forced her to open the window to let in the air, the sound, the crush of London.
People who were once her friends talked amongst themselves about a gap year, travel. College, then uni. Oxbridge, some sniffed, noses upturned. Sally didn’t bother wasting her breath to scoff.
Sally applied to the Metropolitan Police as a new constable and ignored the whispers that rose up around her like fumes.
-
Sally remembers long sessions in counselling before being declared fit for duty. Sally remembers how food felt, weighted in her belly and left there. Sally remembers the glimmer of recognition, of pride in her father’s cloudy eyes. Sally remembers being assigned to Gabe Lestrade’s unit and feeling that her fealty was a thing freely given and honestly earned. Sally remembers making sergeant and feeling delirious, out of her head on pride.
Sally remembers meeting Sherlock Holmes at twenty-five. He was a year older than her, a gaunt junkie constantly cycling through being hooked and being clean. Inexplicably, he was one of Lestrade’s pets - fancied himself psychic, or some such rubbish, and had fooled even Lestrade into believing him. He was, despite everything, a little bit gorgeous. Until he opened his mouth.
“Poor wee motherless thing,” he’d cooed at her in a low, velvet voice, head dipped down, hair in his eyes. She’d tried to slap him; he caught her wrist and turned it over and kissed her palm. “Still so much to prove.”
She kneed him in the bollocks and he collapsed to his knees, breathless. But when he grinned up at her, the obscene stretch of his lips and the gnash of his teeth rearranged his face from a fallen angel’s to the devil’s own.
“Freak,” she’d muttered, and walked away.
-
Sally remembers starting up with Roland Anderson in a prolonged fit of bad judgement. His voice was grating and he wore a toupee, but there was something sweet in how he stumbled over his tongue when he spoke to her, how he blushed. She worked long hours and hadn’t seen the shiny side of a social life in years, and she was weak, so weak, when she let him in, when she surged against him and savoured, for the duration of a breath, the first perfect thrust inside. He proved worse than mediocre as a bedmate, but it had been so long, and it didn’t matter whom she clutched to her breast, as long as he was warm and looked at her like she was a miracle. She ignored the way he studied, Holmes-like, the contrast between their skins.
They carried on for weeks before Sherlock bloody Holmes splashed their business all over a crime scene in his cavalier way. That night, after she’d saved pictures of that nuisance in the shock blanket to her hard drive, Sally took a good long look at herself in the mirror and found a hollow-eyed rabbit she didn’t recognise.
She ignored Anderson’s texts, his anxious looks, the eventual degeneration of his conversation into snide remarks.
-
Sally remembers her mother humming hymns while she mixed the rock buns by hand. Marietta had kept the recipe only in her own head, and for years, Sally had simply pushed down the longing for the scent, for the feeling of the cake compressing in her mouth.
Lestrade calls her on her day off to tell her he got word of Davey Tanner’s death. Apparently, he had so enraged a fellow patient that he was strangled and could not be revived. Sally is out the door before she even hangs up and she hurries down to the shops, where she picks up what she doesn’t have: raisins, cherries, fresh nutmeg and cinnamon, a new bottle of vanilla.
Sally pulls up Google. Instead of typing “rock bun recipe,” her fingers go still over the keyboard. Finally, she taps in her mother’s maiden name, plus “Kingston, Jamaica.” She clicks through each website, each Facebook page, each blog.
She does not make rock buns that night. She makes holiday plans.
End
Beta: notboldly
Brit-pick: lousy-science
Rating: R
Word Count: ~2,100
Highlight to Read Warnings: racism, violence, brief implications of disordered eating and self-injury.
Disclaimer: Property of Gatiss and Moffat. No money made, no copyright infringement intended.
Summary: Sally Donovan didn’t daydream of being a police officer when she was young.
A Hundred Thousand Miles
Sally remembers the hard flex of her mother’s biceps as she stirred the ingredients for rock buns by hand. Butter and sugar are hard to smooth into a single, pale yellow creaminess, but Mummy could do it with the whip of the strength in her arm, with her lips tucked back behind her teeth, with the dark groove that would develop between her eyebrows. She would let Sally beat an egg with a fork and add it to the mixture.
“You’re my good girl,” she’d say.
Vanilla next, then flour and baking powder, nutmeg and cinnamon, raisins and cherries, until Sally was giggling, flour dusted in her curls and on her skin.
“I’m a ghost, Mummy,” she’d say, twirling. Mummy’s eyes, wide and dark as the midnight sky, would crinkle with her smile, but she would be silent, stirring with sweat-inducing vigour. Dough is a finicky and difficult thing.
Whenever he came home to the warm, spiced scent of rock buns in the flat, Daddy would expand with the deepest breath, grin wide, blue eyes sparking, and say, “Marietta, my sunshine, my star bright, light of my life - you spoil me.” And he’d find Mummy, and kiss her, and heft Sally up into the air to blow raspberries on her stomach until she squealed. Mummy would look on with fond exasperation, a smile lurking in the flattened lines of her pursed mouth.
“Someday, you’re going to drop that child on her head,” she’d say. Daddy would swing Sally back down and reach out one long, gangly arm to gather Mummy in too, and Sally would be warm and squirmy between them.
“Let me buy you an electric mixer, Marietta.” But Mummy would only shake her head.
“This is how it’s done properly, Michael,” she’d reply, stepping back and smoothing down her apron primly. “If it was good enough for my mother, it’s good enough for me.”
The rock buns were for pudding, and after supper Sally and her parents would gather under a blanket on the sofa in the parlour. There would be Earl Grey for them, drinking chocolate for Sally, and a book in Daddy’s hand. There had been a time when they were working through C.S. Lewis, and for months Sally wanted nothing more than to disappear through a wardrobe into a world with talking creatures, a world where she could do battle with the forces of darkness alongside her beloved kings and queens, alongside a stalwart lion, wise and true.
Sometimes, Mummy would tell stories from her girlhood in Jamaica, and the oppressive heat, the cover of verdant leaves, seemed as distant to her as Narnia.
-
Sally remembers learning she was different, not just from other children, but from her parents as well. Her father, she found out, was a proper Englishman. Sally did not tell anyone he was from Glasgow. Her mother, she was told, was a wog. Sally did not tell anyone she was from Jamaica.
“Golliwog, golliwog!” some of Sally’s classmates chanted. One of them, a tow-headed boy with a fat face that swallowed his watercolour eyes, pushed her down and called her a zebra girl. Then he spat on her and hopped up and down with arms raised in triumph, cheering. The crowd dispersed and she was left alone with her skinned knee, with the web of spittle and mucous in her hair. She cried a bit and sat in the dirt watching droplets of blood well up from the pale pink underskin of her knee until a teacher came by to collect her. When she asked Sally what had happened, Sally just shook her head.
At home, Sally told Mummy she did not want to go to school anymore. She dragged herself over to the counter and clambered on top to reach the biscuits, but Mummy slapped her hands.
“If you want a treat, you ask for it properly,” Mummy said, gripping her underneath the armpits and setting her back down on the floor. She glowered down at her, hands on hips, looking tall and fearsome. “Now, tell me why you don’t want to go to school anymore.”
Sally couldn’t help it; she began to cry. Big blubbery sobs that stopped up her words and choked up her breath, caused all the holes in her face to leak and slick her skin. She recounted the story in a disjointed non-narrative, and before she was done she found herself mashed in her mother’s embrace, strong, hot hands rubbing too hard on her back. She sagged, deflated.
When Mummy drew back long moments later, she wiped Sally’s face with her bare hand, pinching at her nostrils when she was finished. Mummy reached up to wipe that hand on a tea towel, but then she knelt back down to cup Sally’s head with two firm palms. Her black eyes shone with banked fire, and there was no looking away.
“Listen to me, Sally girl. Are you listening?”
Sally’s breath stuttered and a keening whine seemed to be rising from her throat, but she managed to nod.
“You’re whole. A whole person, no matter what anyone else says, no matter where your family’s from, no matter how it feels on the darkest days. And you are exactly as God Almighty made you. No one can take that away from you, understand?”
Sally nodded again, and Mummy let her have a biscuit. Mummy let her stick close all day, until Daddy came home and the pair of them went into their bedroom with angry faces and closed the door. There was muffled shouting, and Sally took her Pooh bear and lay with him under her bed. There were no bedtime stories that night, but the next day, Mummy marched right into her classroom with a map and a storybook and told all of Sally’s classmates about Jamaica.
-
Sally remembers her father removing her from school on 22nd April, 1995. She was fifteen, he was forty-seven, and when she met him in the head’s office, he was not her father but a waterlogged study in reds and whites, a diminished spectre of himself in the chair. The head herself, a starchy woman with a dour disposition and a belted waist, seemed to be having trouble keeping her own upper lip suitably stiff. Sally froze in the doorway, and Dad looked up at her with desperate, bloodshot eyes. He stood, and his whole body shook as he yanked her into him for a hug.
The Metropolitan Police responded to a disturbance at the Donovans’ flat some time before lunch. Marietta Donovan had been home alone when a neighbour from three flats down had called, entered their home, and bludgeoned Sally’s mum to death with a lamp. Afterward, he smeared racial slurs on the walls in her blood. When the media got wind of the story, they sensationalised and exaggerated it in every direction possible. Marietta Donovan became a saint, a sinner, harmless, threatening. She was always an immigrant - whether that was good or bad depended on the bias of the reporter. That she was a midwife and a mother and a cousin and a voracious reader seemed to matter little. Optimists bearing casseroles would say, this a terrible blow for the National Front. Others, hissing between sneering lips, would mutter, or a great triumph. The man who committed the crime was deemed incompetent for trial and left to wallow in an institution despite the evidence - pictures and pamphlets and manifestos - and despite his cold rationality upon arrest.
The injustice of it burned in Sally’s gullet. Worse than the howling absence her mother’s death left in her heart, worse than how her father could barely stand to look at her without six drinks sloshing in his gut, worse than the sudden and acute alienation she felt from her peers as that black girl with the dead mother.
The injustice hollowed Sally out until she was a skeletal wreck, skin a ghastly grey, hair brittle and limp. She ran for miles on end, hour upon hour. She whittled her food intake down to a banana, a yoghurt, a biscuit a day. She thought about him - Davey Tanner, her mother’s murderer was called. Such an ordinary name. She thought about him, sketched pictures of him, dreamed about him at night.
Once, before she finished school, she wrote him a letter.
David Tanner,
My name is Sally Donovan. I will make you pay.
She was not exactly known for eloquence.
She didn’t send the letter. She burned it in her bedroom, put the flames out with her hands, held them to the snuffed embers until the smell of burnt pork forced her to open the window to let in the air, the sound, the crush of London.
People who were once her friends talked amongst themselves about a gap year, travel. College, then uni. Oxbridge, some sniffed, noses upturned. Sally didn’t bother wasting her breath to scoff.
Sally applied to the Metropolitan Police as a new constable and ignored the whispers that rose up around her like fumes.
-
Sally remembers long sessions in counselling before being declared fit for duty. Sally remembers how food felt, weighted in her belly and left there. Sally remembers the glimmer of recognition, of pride in her father’s cloudy eyes. Sally remembers being assigned to Gabe Lestrade’s unit and feeling that her fealty was a thing freely given and honestly earned. Sally remembers making sergeant and feeling delirious, out of her head on pride.
Sally remembers meeting Sherlock Holmes at twenty-five. He was a year older than her, a gaunt junkie constantly cycling through being hooked and being clean. Inexplicably, he was one of Lestrade’s pets - fancied himself psychic, or some such rubbish, and had fooled even Lestrade into believing him. He was, despite everything, a little bit gorgeous. Until he opened his mouth.
“Poor wee motherless thing,” he’d cooed at her in a low, velvet voice, head dipped down, hair in his eyes. She’d tried to slap him; he caught her wrist and turned it over and kissed her palm. “Still so much to prove.”
She kneed him in the bollocks and he collapsed to his knees, breathless. But when he grinned up at her, the obscene stretch of his lips and the gnash of his teeth rearranged his face from a fallen angel’s to the devil’s own.
“Freak,” she’d muttered, and walked away.
-
Sally remembers starting up with Roland Anderson in a prolonged fit of bad judgement. His voice was grating and he wore a toupee, but there was something sweet in how he stumbled over his tongue when he spoke to her, how he blushed. She worked long hours and hadn’t seen the shiny side of a social life in years, and she was weak, so weak, when she let him in, when she surged against him and savoured, for the duration of a breath, the first perfect thrust inside. He proved worse than mediocre as a bedmate, but it had been so long, and it didn’t matter whom she clutched to her breast, as long as he was warm and looked at her like she was a miracle. She ignored the way he studied, Holmes-like, the contrast between their skins.
They carried on for weeks before Sherlock bloody Holmes splashed their business all over a crime scene in his cavalier way. That night, after she’d saved pictures of that nuisance in the shock blanket to her hard drive, Sally took a good long look at herself in the mirror and found a hollow-eyed rabbit she didn’t recognise.
She ignored Anderson’s texts, his anxious looks, the eventual degeneration of his conversation into snide remarks.
-
Sally remembers her mother humming hymns while she mixed the rock buns by hand. Marietta had kept the recipe only in her own head, and for years, Sally had simply pushed down the longing for the scent, for the feeling of the cake compressing in her mouth.
Lestrade calls her on her day off to tell her he got word of Davey Tanner’s death. Apparently, he had so enraged a fellow patient that he was strangled and could not be revived. Sally is out the door before she even hangs up and she hurries down to the shops, where she picks up what she doesn’t have: raisins, cherries, fresh nutmeg and cinnamon, a new bottle of vanilla.
Sally pulls up Google. Instead of typing “rock bun recipe,” her fingers go still over the keyboard. Finally, she taps in her mother’s maiden name, plus “Kingston, Jamaica.” She clicks through each website, each Facebook page, each blog.
She does not make rock buns that night. She makes holiday plans.
End