The Extraordinary Hope of Dawn Brightside

by Jessica Ryn

  ‘But none of that matters when you get to hold them and know they’re doing okay.’ Cara squeezes harder and Dawn moves her eyes from the puddle at her feet. ‘You’ll see. She will love you and you will love her. Everything else can be sorted out.’

  ‘What if she doesn’t?’ The kitchen looks misty through hot tears and the coffee machine is just a blur in front of her. ‘What if she can’t love me? She might not even like me.’

  Something taps Dawn on the shoulder.

  ‘You left a cup behind this morning.’

  ‘Cheers, Bill. Glad you made it.’ Dawn pulls her face into a smile. ‘Did you bring your new friend?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Dawn scans the café for a head of purple hair.

  ‘She’s outside talking to that woman who works here,’ he says.

  ‘That’s good.’ At least Grace will be able to fill in a form for her. The new bed spaces will be ready soon, but they will soon fill up and the longer that young girl is out on those streets, the greater the risk to her life.

  The café door dings and Grace rushes through it, breathless and flushed pink. ‘Change of plan. We need to put the closed sign up now. We’ll let everyone finish up but don’t let any new customers in.’

  ‘But it’s only half past two.’ Dawn’s heart begins to thud in time with the song on the radio. ‘Has something happened? Does this mean I can’t meet Rosie here? Oh. That’s why. She’s not coming is she, and you just don’t want to tell me in front of all these people…’

  ‘Dawn.’ Grace is using her firm teacher-voice that usually makes Dawn want to laugh. Not today, though. ‘I want you to take your apron off and clean yourself up. Cara will put on a fresh pot of coffee and I’ll make sure the café is empty and clear. Your daughter is on her way.’

  The walls in the café toilets are painted an awful shade of green. Dawn stares at them as she perches on the cold metal loo seat. So strange that the café is decorated so vibrantly but no one had thought to make the toilets pretty. That would be the next job on her list – she’ll get one of the new residents to help.

  ‘Dawn? Hurry up in there,’ bellows Cara through the wall. ‘She’ll be here in five minutes.’

  A swirling sensation ripples across her stomach. It’s just nerves. Butterflies. But just for a moment, it feels like the early flutters of Rosie in her womb. Dawn places her palm across her tummy and a smile falls across her face as she remembers.

  ‘Dawn!’ Cara bangs hard on the door.

  ‘Coming.’ Dawn stands up and moves her shaking legs towards the sink. She runs cold water onto her cupped hands and splashes it over her face. The face that looks back at her from the mirror is very different to the one she’d arrived at St Jude’s with. The sunken hollows below her cheekbones have filled out and the circles below her eyes have disappeared. She removes the smudges of tear-stained make-up and smooths the wild waves of her hair with her hands.

  What will Rosie see when she looks at her? What will she see when she looks at Rosie?

  The café is empty of people when Dawn returns. Only one table by the window has been dressed with a crisp white table cloth and a vase of fresh flowers from St Jude’s garden. A three-tier stand holding two of every cake the café serves sits in the middle. A napkin is folded in half next to it. Dawn’s name is scrawled on the front in biro. She unfolds it and reads the note inside.

  Once a mum, always a mum. You can do this.

  Love, Cara and Grace

  Footsteps crunch on the gravel outside the window. A shadow crosses the corner of Dawn’s eye. The song falls to a close on the radio, opening up two seconds of silence as the room itself holds its breath. The large bell moves in slow motion from one side to the other as the café door inches open; the joyful ding echoing in Dawn’s ears.

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  Chapter 44

  Dawn

  GOOSEBUMPS POP UP ACROSS Dawn’s shoulders and her whole heart feels swollen, love leaking through vessels and travelling to the parts of her mind she’d kept taped up.

  Eyes: wide and dark like hers. They look as if they hold the world inside them, and Dawn can’t look away. A splatter of freckles across her nose and a mouth that’s used to smiling. Her fingernails are short and clean, and Dawn remembers how tiny her hands were and how perfect her fingers. They’d clamped around her hair and pulled hard before they took her away. It had hurt and she had welcomed the sting to her scalp. She thought she deserved any pain thrown her way.

  Dawn looks away from her daughter’s pale hands. She’s tall – taller than Dawn. Strong-looking too. She’s wearing jeans with more holes than denim and a T-shirt with a band on that Dawn hasn’t heard of. She wants to ask who they are; she wants to know about every single thing Rosie likes.

  ‘You have purple hair,’ Dawn blurts out.

  A blank stare takes over Rosie’s face and she steadies herself on the back of a chair, blinking fast.

  ‘Are you okay? Do you need to sit…?’

  ‘Sorry. I need to go outside. I thought I’d be fine, but… I’ll be back.’

  Rosie stumbles out of the café and towards the clifftop. She bends over as if trying to get her breath back and stands with her back to the café, looking out over the sea.

  Dawn opens the door and pulls it closed behind her. It’s the bit after that’s hard. The putting of one shaky leg after the other when Rosie’s still not turning around. Dawn needs to know she’s okay; she needs see that fierce, beautiful face again, so like her own but with the age washed out of it. She stops when she reaches Rosie’s side and stands still, seven inches away from her.

  ‘That was a stupid opening line. I’m sure you didn’t come all this way for me to tell you your hair is purple,’ says Dawn.

  A lorry thunders past in the distance along the coast road. BP oil. Flammable. Hazardous. Keep clear.

  ‘Mum… my adoptive mum. She said you weren’t coping. That you did what you thought was right for me.’ Rosie takes a step back and turns around to face Dawn.

  Three seagulls are having a fight over half a cookie that someone’s dropped. It has raisins in it. Are birds supposed to eat raisins? Apparently, they’re poisonous to dogs.

  ‘I wasn’t coping.’ Honesty is the best policy, Grace always says. ‘But I was trying.’ Am. ‘I wanted to be your mum. I loved you.’

  The ferry is chugging through the gap in the harbour wall and smaller boats are dotted around the sea as canoes zip their way through the gaps, coming and going from the shore.

  ‘Where were you living?’ Dawn has a rough idea already. It’s the accent.

  The harder questions come next. She wants to know about her dad. She already knows the story, praise be, so the details can be saved for later. It hurts like hell to hear about a whole load of childhood that has passed in the blink of an eye for Rosie but has taken half a lifetime of horror for Dawn.

  Dawn’s fingers are itching to touch her daughter’s hair. To hold her. To tell her everything will be okay, she’ll make sure of it. But she’s a stranger, and strangers don’t touch.

  Rosie takes a tiny side-step and links her fingers through Dawn’s. A tear splashes its way down Dawn’s face but still she keeps her eyes resolutely on the view in front of her.

  ‘Do you want to come back inside?’ asks Dawn. ‘There’s half a ton of cake with your name on it in there.’

  Rosie keeps her little finger laced with Dawn’s as they wander across the grass and back to the café. Dawn pours two coffees and shows Rosie around her new workplace before they sit down and tackle the mountain of carbs.

  ‘About the purple-hair thing…’

  ‘You don’t like it.’ Rosie grins and Dawn gets a glimpse of the cheeky child she’d imagined so often.

  ‘It was just a shock to suddenly realise it was you on the sea shelter bench this morning. I’d sat across from my own daughter – left her a cup of morning coffee and didn’t even know it.’

  Rosie puts her scone down and fiddles wit
h a napkin.

  ‘Why were you out there?’ Dawn asks softly. ‘Your letter said you were settled and happy. No mention of losing your home. You can tell me anything, I won’t judge, I can’t.’

  ‘I have a home. My own flat, a nice one. Hastings.’

  ‘Hastings? That’s not even that far!’ Dawn has stayed in Hastings before. Lived in a B&B and got a job in a bar. Then a punter had got a bit lairy with her and followed her home. She’d left town the next day, convinced he was the one who was after her. How many times could she have walked past her daughter without knowing? ‘If you live in Hastings, how come you spent the night in Dover? You could have left after lunch and still got here in time.’

  Rosie picks her napkin back up and starts tearing off the corners, dropping little half-moons of tissue on her plate. ‘It will probably sound stupid if I say it out loud.’

  ‘Wait till you hear some of the stuff I come out with,’ says Dawn. ‘Nothing you say will sound stupid after that.’

  ‘I wanted to know what it was like to be you.’ Rosie takes a swig of coffee and looks up at Dawn. ‘I heard about what you’d been through. It’s all online, all of your fundraising stuff. I know you’ve lived on the streets on and off for all those years and that some of those nights were in Dover. Silly really,’ she shrugs. ‘I just knew how brave you must have been to have lived through that and still want to help other people. I thought it might help me feel close to you.’

  Dawn doesn’t even try to stop the tears falling. One plops onto her arm when she places it on the table. She places her hand over Rosie’s. ‘It was only ever you who made me brave,’ she whispers fiercely. ‘Every time I felt like giving up, I thought about this moment. I knew it was worth fighting for even if I never got to have it.’

  Rosie smiles and hands Dawn what’s left of the napkin. ‘I’m glad. So glad you didn’t give up.’

  ‘Now tell me,’ Dawn says in a rush after dabbing at her eyes. ‘Everything you’ve been up to. I want to hear everything.’

  Dawn soaks up every word from Rosie about her childhood in Liverpool. Her time at uni in London where she’d studied art and met Eliza, who she now lives with.

  ‘You’ll love her.’ Rosie’s eyes shine. ‘I’ll bring her next time. That’s if you want there to be one.’

  ‘I’ve never wanted anything more. Are you happy together?’

  Rosie nods and reaches for a slice of carrot cake.

  ‘Then I can’t wait to meet her. What are you doing for work?’

  ‘Well, I’m an artist when I’m not working at the estate agents’,’ she says through a mouthful of crumbs. ‘I got a first at uni and have had a few commissions for paintings but it’s slow going. Ideally, I’d like to get some teaching experience – lead some community art sessions.’

  Dawn’s brain begins to buzz with pictures. Rosie giving classes to St Jude’s residents in the corner of the café. Her paintings adorning the walls and being snapped up by collectors who happen to pass by…

  ‘Did you just hear what I said?’ Rosie is fiddling with her friendship bracelet.

  ‘Sorry. I was just imagining. Bit of a habit of mine.’

  ‘I hope I’m not too much of a let-down. I’m sure there are all sorts of things you could have imagined about me. Sorry if I don’t live up to them.’ Rosie chuckles but is still intent on turning the beads around on her wrist.

  Dawn leans under the table and reaches for her green handbag, £12.99 from Asda. She unzips the front compartment and slides out her most precious photograph. ‘This is all I’ve had to go by. I thought of you every day and there was one thing I knew for sure. That you’d be extraordinary. And you are.’

  Rosie takes the photo and places it gently on the table in front of her. ‘I have the perfect place to keep it.’ She pulls a startling number of objects out of her rucksack: wet wipes, diary, hairbrush. Then her hands find what she was looking for and she passes Dawn a rectangular folder wrapped in soft fabric. Dawn begins at the back as per Rosie’s instructions. A photo of Rosie’s graduation and another one entitled, ‘moving day’. She flicks backwards to Rosie as a teen; a myriad of style choices.

  ‘My adoptive parents put it together for you.’

  A pigtailed Rosie in her school uniform and Dawn is undone. Emotion rises and swallows her whole. ‘My Rosie,’ she croaks.

  ‘There is something you need to know before you look at the front cover. They changed my name. It isn’t Rosie anymore.’

  The front of the album is embroidered with neat stitching. The words fill Dawn’s chest.

  For Dawn,

  Thank you for giving us Hope.

  ‘Hope,’ whispers Dawn. ‘A perfect name. My very own extraordinary Hope.’

  Acknowledgements

  So many thanks to my children, Jack and Emilie, for their unwavering faith in my writing and their patience in those many times when I mumbled, ‘Just let me finish this sentence.’

  For my awesome husband, Patrick, who hates reading but reads my work anyway, and who once said: ‘I’ve a good feeling about you getting back into your writing again. It makes you happy - what’s stopping you?’ Thank you for the hugs, the listening and the many packets of sweets!

  For my wonderful agent, Sarah Hornsley (The Bent Agency) for taking a chance on me, for believing in my characters, and cheering me on each step of the way. As my daughter has said, ‘Sarah has literally changed your life, hasn’t she, Mummy?’ She is truly the best agent anyone could wish for.

  Thank you to my fabulous editor, Charlotte Mursell, for her solid guidance and uncanny ability to see exactly what was needed; for her vision, encouragement and enthusiasm - and for always being kind. This story is all the richer and smoother as a result of her hard work and dedication.

  To all the staff and residents from homeless hostels I have worked in – I salute you. I hope this story helps to portray the pressures of funding cuts to vital homeless services. I hope it encourages people to think twice before turning their face away from a homeless person and to consider the circumstances that could lead to someone losing a safe place to call home.

  Thank you to my fantastic MA creative writing classmates and lecturers at CCCU – Sonia Overall, Caroline Greville, Danny Rhodes and especially to my mentor and personal tutor, Peggy Riley, who taught me so very much about storytelling and has been a constant source of inspiration and support. Thank you to Charlotte Hartley-Jones for being a wonderful and trusted critique partner.

  Hugest thanks to my mum and dad, for always being my biggest champions and checking countless versions of this book in its earliest stages. You encouraged me to chase my dreams and you always believed I’d catch them. Thank you to my amazing in-laws, Anita and David, for the support and help and for looking after our littlies so I could reach my deadlines.

  Thank you to the wonderful HQ Stories for being the best-ever home for my story; for taking good care of it and for making it possible to send it out into the hands of my readers.

  Many thanks to my new editor, Katie Seaman, for taking me on, for her passion and support and for championing Dawn Brightside so brilliantly alongside my wonderful, hardworking publicist, Lily Capewell and all of Team HQ.

  I’ll be eternally thankful to my writing buddies, fellow inklings, and to Anstey Harris and Amy Beashel for their support and listening ears throughout my debut process.

  At the risk of sounding like an Oscar winner-wannabe – I am also thanking my God (who knows exactly what this book means to me).

  About the Publisher

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