When Miss Philomena Dracken died there was no member of a grieving family to mourn her, for she had none. Her neighbour Anna only found out she’d died from the Kidderminster Shuttle which said she’d been run over and killed on a pedestrian crossing by a thirteen year old from the Walshes estate Stourport on Severn in a stolen car who was high on drugs and truanting from Stourport High School at the time. That the teenager had died when the car he was driving swerved and hit an eighteen wheeler head on upset no one except the badly shaken driver of the heavy goods vehicle.

When Philomena was cremated her ashes were collected by Anna and scattered into the river Severn from the bridge at Bewdley with no witnesses as she had requested. Anna was the nearest person she’d had to a friend, an acquaintance of forty years she’d worked with and lived not far from. Anna had always wished she could be closer to Philomena, but Philomena was essentially isolated from social contact. She was friendly enough in conversation, but in all the years Anna had known her she’d never heard her volunteer anything about herself, and she knew next to nothing about her. When asked about herself Philomena was dismissive turning the question away from herself, and if pressed she became unpleasant. She was closed, and what had just occurred was the passing of yet another unmourned life. Her will left everything to Diabetes UK.

Even the papers had found little to say about her other than she was sixty-three, lived on her own in a large detached house known as Derwent on Dunley Road, Stourport on Severn and had worked at Steatite & Porcelain Ltd., when it belonged to ICI and continued there when it was bought out and renamed Morgan Advanced Ceramics Ltd, Stourport. She was, her employers said, a gifted and valued member of the accounting team, and her forensic approach to their books had saved the company millions over the years and her detection of fraud in its early stages had saved millions more they would certainly have lost. She would be missed by the company, but they knew nothing about her private life.

The papers reported she had been known by Jim Picket a settled Romany who had a scrapyard near Hartlebury Common. The Rom worked the fruit picking starting in the south east and the south west of the country. They worked their way north diagonally up the country meeting in mid autumn at Hartlebury where they celebrated their annual reunion. It was known Philomena had been an honoured guest at the wedding of Catarina Picket Jim’s daughter, but the Rom refused to say anything about her. Only Jim said anything and it was merely, “She was a woman who was close to the heart of the universe.” The papers had far more to say about the dead thirteen year old that they did of the woman whose life he had cut short.

After probate was granted, Philomena’s will became public property, as is the law in the UK. The papers tried to make a story out of a lonely little old lady who had left in excess of a hundred and twenty million pounds to a charity. Her diary which gave no clues to anything was to be handed to her solicitors to archive and her house sold and the proceeds to be added to her estate. She left no correspondence. The media interviewed Anna several times, but she knew little, certainly nothing as to how Philomena was so wealthy, or anything of her friendship with the Rom, both of which she’d been surprised to read. The copy of the coroners report the papers had managed to obtain said she was menstruating at the time of her death, which at sixty-three was remarkable, but hardly something a story could be built from.

Philomena’s family doctor, Harriet Chambers in conversation with one of her partners at the practice they worked at remarked, “She was not diabetic, so why she left her estate to Diabetes UK I have no idea. Physically she was unusual. She had a low body temperature, low heart and breathing rates and an extremely low blood pressure. Years ago I was concerned, but it was normal for her and posed no threats to her health. She also had one of the most unusual menstrual histories I have ever come across. She had an extraordinarily late menarche at the age of twenty-two and very light, infrequent and irregular periods, never more than three a year. Perhaps strangest of all she had not yet reached menopause as the coroner’s report stated. Now I wish I’d had blood tests done on her hormone levels, but she never came to see me for problems of that nature.

“The reports back from the hospital concerning her routine mammograms had all implied it was almost pointless trying to take Xrays of breasts that were as undeveloped as hers. One actually said she was so flat chested it were almost as though she had not yet hit puberty. Her routine smears were always completely clear and incredibly for someone of her age her teeth were all her own with no fillings and none missing. She told me she’d never grown any wisdom teeth. She suffered from migraines and hay fever and as far as I can recall they were the only reasons she came to see me. She had none of the aches and pains one normally associates with someone of her age.”

Her colleague, Alicia Prenby, asked, “You must have known something about her as a person surely, Harriet?”

“No, next to nothing really. I’d no idea she was wealthy, and I have no idea how she spent her free time. She was very detached. At one time I wondered if she were borderline sociopathic for she seemed to have no empathy with anything, no matter what was going on in the news, even horrific incidents, she just didn’t seem to care. I tried to get responses from her, but the best I managed was a shrugging of the shoulders. I came to believe she was neither borderline bipolar nor sociopathic, just withdrawn to the extent that she was unaffected by her entire surroundings. I can only wonder why she wished her ashes scattered into the Severn, and why at Bewdley? Anna Fleet, who knew her better than any which is to say near enough not at all, and I are members of the same bridge club and I know she has no idea.”

“What about men?”

“She was virgo intacta as of her last smear test which was only a few months ago.”

“Didn’t you know anything about her at all?”

“As I said, very little. Her conversation was curiously, completely literal. All figures of speech, metaphors and use of idiom went completely over her head, and she never used any. I know she only read non-fiction and not much of that deeming most non-fiction to be implausible. She described newspapers as lies and fantasy and didn’t read them. I never saw her reading any of the magazines in the waiting room here. I know she’d never been to the cinema nor a stage production, and perhaps most curious of all that she said she had hated listening to stories as a girl. That was the only time she ever referred to her life as a child.”

What none of those who’d discussed her were aware of was that Philomena had left a large bundle of paperwork with her solicitors which was not to be opened till thirty years had elapsed after her death. The bundle contained everything there was to know about her life including the annual volumes of the daily diary she’d kept since going to school, to which the volume she’d been using at the time of her death had been added. Her diary recorded her anguish when her only sibling, her younger sister Mary, had died from diabetic complications at the age of six, caused by parents who thought they knew better than the doctors what their daughter needed. It also recorded her being threwn out of her home at sixteen for her inability to accept the religious views of her parents, parents whom she’d never met nor spoken to again.

There were later documents proving that her mind was brilliant, far better than her employers had realised, and they evidenced that she could spot anomalies in a spreadsheet of numbers almost instantly. The money she’d left was but a fraction of what she’d given away over the years, all faithfully recorded complete with tax returns. She spent her time analysing stocks and shares and the financial markets, and she’d made in excess of what she’d left in her will on a quarterly basis, but for her it was just something to pass the time.

Her private life was a tragedy, she could only cope with the most tangible of reality, and neither fiction nor religion were reality and nor was the suicide she’d not been able to make herself go through with over the parapet at Bewdley bridge years before when she’d lived in a rented room there, so she’d had to suffer years of a living hell in a world she didn’t understand. It wasn’t Asperger’s she endured, but it was akin to it, it just had no name as yet. She’d had the blood tests done for hormone levels privately, the tests that her doctor had regretted not having done. She had far lower levels of oestrogens and significantly higher levels of androgens than was usual for the body she had. Her hormone levels matched how she thought of herself, neither male nor female and she knew of nothing else, so she concluded she was not a real person.

She’d always known for her there could be no living happily ever after, and she’d always hated those stories. Unable to talk to anyone about herself, far less seek help, not even on line, she’d considered she could never become a real woman nor a real man either, so she didn’t bother to try and lived in isolation in a world with the minimum in it that she could manage with. It was almost certain that had Mary lived she would have obtained the help for the sister she was so close to who was only two years older than she. In their arrogance and religious fervour their parents had destroyed the lives of both their daughters. However, now at last, the torment of not being a real human being that was described so poignantly in Philomena’s diaries was over, but it would be thirty years before anyone was aware of it, by which time the few people that knew her at all would be dead too.