by Eva Woods
Daisy stopped outside a narrow doorway between an estate agent’s and an organic bakery, and let herself in using the keys from Rosie’s bag. It had been untouched by the accident, thrown clear. Her clothes were so hopelessly bloodstained they’d have to be burned as medical waste. Daisy shuddered at the thought. Rosie’s flat was up three flights of stairs, dusty and dirty. The hallway was littered with junk mail, the names of long-gone people. Something lonely about it, living with these ghosts. As Daisy went up the stairs, the door of the flat below Rosie’s opened, revealing a man in tracksuit bottoms and a fraying polo shirt with a puffer vest on top, a Maori tattoo looping around his arm, though he was extremely white. A blast of weed emanated from the flat behind him, along with some banging dubstep. “I thought you were Rosie. She’s not been back all day.”
“I’m her sister. Um—she’s had an accident, I’m afraid. She’s in the hospital. I’m here to get some things.” And also to have a snoop in her sister’s flat, and see if she could find any clues, anything at all, as to what had happened.
His reaction was slow (drugs, thought Daisy, who’d seen the same look on the faces of many city traders) but gradually his forehead creased. “An accident?”
“Yes, she...um, she was hit by a bus.” She paused. “They think...maybe she did it on purpose.” Hoping he’d say God no, Rosie would never do a thing like that.
“Oh. You know, she did seem kind of down lately...”
Daisy’s heart began to race.
“Not sleeping, doesn’t want to come out, that sort of thing. And her hair’s been all like...” He twiddled a hand above his own, indicating tangles. “Like she doesn’t brush it anymore, you know. So...did she? Do it?”
“I don’t know. I... Sorry, I need to get her things.” Daisy couldn’t talk about that. She had to keep moving, keep doing things. She called back: “That stuff will fry your brain, you know. It’s giving you a fifty percent chance of developing psychosis.” Then, feeling bad—it wasn’t his fault Rosie was in a coma—she fumbled the key in the lock and went inside. Who was that guy? She really hoped Rosie hadn’t gone there. She knew the type—confident but paper-thin, a rumor of a person rather than the real thing. He reminded her a little of Jack, in fact. Thank God that hadn’t lasted.
Daisy leaned her back against the door and looked round Rosie’s flat. A square of kitchen, the tiles dirty, and unwashed dishes piled up, fruit flies buzzing round a bowl of rotting bananas. On top of the dusty TV was a picture Daisy recognized, a crack in the glass. But she couldn’t look at that, not right now. “Oh Rosie,” she murmured. “How can you live like this?” She thought briefly of the house she shared with Gary in Beckenham. Barely even London, Rosie had scoffed at the time. Gary wanted to move even farther out, to Guildford perhaps. Get a three-bed with a garage. “Start a family,” as he insisted on describing it. They were ready. They had matching plates, house plants that didn’t die, a barbecue set. They were grown-ups. They went to home improvement stores on weekends. And here was Rosie, three years older, living like a student.
Daisy tentatively opened a drawer in the tallboy, looking for pajamas. That was the main thing for hospital, wasn’t it? But the only ones she could find were old and washed out—she could remember Rosie having them one far-off Christmas—or dirty with encrusted toothpaste. In the small bathroom, which had creeping mold up the tiles, she found a bent-looking toothbrush and some squeezed-out shampoo. This wouldn’t do. Daisy left everything where it was, and instead picked up a few books and CDs she knew were her sister’s favorites. As she stuffed them into a plastic bag from Tesco she noticed something on the coffee table, among the dirty plates and magazines. A piece of lined paper. Her heart stopped. A suicide note. But no, it looked like a list of names, some crossed out and scribbled over. Daisy peered at it.
Mel. Angie. Serge. Dave. Caz. Ingrid. Mum. Daisy. Dad. Carole. Mr. Malcolm. Ella. Luke.
Her own name? Why?
And then: Luke. The name Rosie had said before slipping under. If this Luke was so important to her sister, why on earth had Daisy never heard of him? She looked around one last time at the squalid little flat. Oh Rosie, she said to herself. I wish I’d known. I wish you’d talked to me.
But it was too late for that, and so, being a practical kind of person, Daisy took the list, locked the door carefully behind her, and went back down the noisy bustling street to find some shops.
Rosie
“How you holding up there, Ro-Ro?”
Rosie’s eyes flickered, taking in the hospital room, the buzz of life outside it. Melissa was in front of her, eternally fourteen. Except, she wasn’t there at all, was she? She was dead. Ghosts weren’t real. You couldn’t travel in space and time and relive past days of your life. All of this was just...some kind of mad hallucination.
Rosie was almost sure of that.
“I’m okay, I guess. Though I wish they wouldn’t keep talking about whether there’s any brain function. Especially when I’m desperately trying to make contact and I can’t.”
“Oh yeah, I remember how it was for me. Not much fun.”
“God, Melissa, I’m so sorry that you...died.” She wanted to ask how it had happened, but her mind shied away from her. Did she already know, but just couldn’t remember?
Melissa flapped her hands. “Don’t be. It’s not so bad. There’s a few of us younger ones, what with cancer and suicide and young men coming off motorbikes.”
“You’ve met Darryl, then.”
“Only just.” She giggled. “He’s dreamy.”
Rosie didn’t think she could cope with the hallucination/ghost/whatever of a long-dead childhood schoolmate having a crush on her recently dead ER roommate. She’d never get used to the casual attitude her dead visitors displayed to their own lack of aliveness. “Melissa, I...they said if I don’t wake up in three days, I might never. But I don’t know how to. Is there a way to wake yourself up from a coma?”
“I don’t know, sorry, Ro-Ro. When it was me, people kept talking to me, playing me music and so on. That’s supposed to help. But in the end I kind of...drifted away. And it wasn’t bad, you know. It was peaceful.”
Same thing Darryl had said. Was that what she’d hoped for when she stepped in front of that bus? Peace, and an end to pain? She didn’t know. “So why am I having these memories?”
“I don’t know. I think your brain is trying to figure something out.”
“When’s it going to end though? Will I just do this forever?” Panic began to rise in her chest again. The idea of being trapped in this body for the rest of her life, withering away while her mind leapfrogged from memory to memory. All bad so far. Except for the beach one. That had been nice. A warm feeling spread through her, thinking of it. “When I was brought in they said I was muttering a name: Luke. Well, I remembered who Luke is.”
“Uh-huh,” said Melissa noncommittally.
“It was a happy memory! The beach, the sunset, the two of us...finally something good in there. I was starting to despair of my brain. Luke and I were together, right? I feel sure of it. We had to be, after we met like that.”
“Well. How about you just wait and see. I’ve come to take you back again. Ready?”
“Another memory? Yeah, I’m ready.” Already she was hoping to see Luke again, if only in her mind. The curves of his face felt somehow settled in her. She knew it was one she’d looked at many times. Maybe they were even together now. Maybe the numbers on the dials were wrong, and that sordid flat had actually been a long time ago, and she and Luke were in love and owned a cottage somewhere and went to farmers’ markets on weekends and...but now her vision was blurring again, the sound of the same noise rising in her ears, the spinning dial before her: 1 12 2010.
1 December 2010 (Seven years ago)
Breathe in. Eyes open. It was like surfacing from underwater, the memory bursting onto her senses, somehow more real tha
n the “real” world she’d left behind. She could feel the cold air that blasted in from the street and the warm fug of the bar on her skin. The clank of glasses and bubbles of laughter. The smell of beer—post–smoking ban, of course. One of her favorite cocktails of sounds and smells, and a low glow of candles—she was in a pub. “Where am I? I mean, old me?” She and Melissa moved like ghosts through the crowd. She was the interloper here. None of this was real.
“There you are.” Melissa nodded at the door, where sure enough Past Rosie was crashing in, a wide smile on her face. Cheery red hat, black coat, extra-long scarf.
“I remember that scarf,” she said nostalgically. “Mum hated it. She was convinced I’d get tangled up and sucked under a bus—well, I guess she was sort of right about that. So, what’s this memory, then?” She searched her jumbled filing cabinets, imagining overflowing manila folders, alphabetical dividers. There were hundreds of memories marked Pub visits. Rosie Cooke had clearly spent a lot of her life in such establishments. She watched her past self, glowing with seasonal warmth, pick her way across the crowded room to a leather sofa in the corner. A man stood up from it. Tall, sandy hair. Chunky gray cardigan, navy cords, the kind of clothes Rosie really liked on a man and—
“It’s Luke!” It really was him. Paler than on their beach meeting, his hair shorter, his clothes less summery, but it was him. “God, he looks even better like this.” How old would he have been then? Assuming he was the same age as her, and she was in her early thirties; twenty-six, something like that? So young still.
“Wow, he’s sooooo cute!” gasped Melissa. “This is exciting, isn’t it. I never got to go to a pub while I was alive.” Because she’d died at fourteen, her life cut short, never to marry or grow up or go to university or even have a drink. How had she died? Had Rosie known about it? So many questions.
“Pay attention, Ro, it’s important.”
Okay. She was in a pub, meeting Luke...vague memories surfaced. A back and forth email exchange on dates and places, the subject heading “Welcome Back Chrimbo drinks.” Some kind of party, a reunion, which had taken months to arrange. But why had she and Luke not arrived together? Who was being welcomed back, and where from? She watched her past self pause on seeing him, and a long glance go between the two. Then they were hugging as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. The kind of hug that goes on slightly too long, where you sneakily take in gulps of the other person’s smell, breathing in their skin. She raised a hand to her cheek, remembering the feel of his thick wool cardy against it. “So we’re not together.”
“Doesn’t look like it. Sorry.”
“Why not? What happened after we met on the beach?”
“I don’t know, Ro. You need to see for yourself. Just watch.”
Disgruntled, she turned her attention back, trying to hear what they were saying. Luke was talking. That voice, low and deep, with a faint Middlesbrough accent, as if he was permanently trying to hold back a laugh. She knew she’d heard that voice a lot. She just knew it. Maybe this was when they got back together, five years of missing each other, the romance of Christmas...
Luke was saying “...just been talking about that time we went to the souk in Marrakesh, remember, and I accidentally almost bartered you away for a camel! Good times. I’m so glad you could come, Rosie.”
There was such warmth in the way he spoke to her. Was she watching a memory of how they got together? If so, why did her past self look so miserable, a frozen smile on her face?
Someone was hovering at Luke’s elbow, an expectant smile on their lips. A young woman, petite and neat, with waist-length shiny black hair and green eyes. Dressed elegantly in a black cashmere dress and knee-length boots. Rosie remembered what she was wearing under her coat: a Christmas jumper with sprouts on it. She’d felt so stupid she’d kept her coat on all night and sweated right down her back. The girl put her hand on Luke’s shoulder—Present-day Rosie was shocked by how much she wanted to dive over there and knock it away—and murmured something in his ear.
Luke stopped his story. “Sorry, of course, sweetheart. Rosie, I’d like you to meet my fiancée.”
Rosie
Rosie gasped out of the memory. Out of the cozy pub, away from Luke and that girl. Sweetheart. Fiancée. What was the point of that? To show her that, on top of living in a crap hole and being estranged from her family, she’d had to watch as the love of her life married someone else?
Was he the love of her life? He must be, if she’d had his name in her mouth when they’d pulled her back from death. Maybe he hadn’t married that girl after all. Maybe it was just the moment in a romcom where a hilarious misunderstanding keeps the lovers apart for twenty minutes, only for them to sort it all out by the end. But Rosie knew that, in real life, people often didn’t work things out. That it was all too easy to find the person you were meant to be with, and then just let them slip away.
The door opened and her parents came into her room, looking tired and with the after-tang of bickering in the air. “All I said was a second opinion can’t hurt. That doctor looks about twelve. I wouldn’t trust her to give me a hot-stone massage.”
“Come on, Alison. They’re doing the best they can. They said we had to talk to her.”
Her mother gazed down at Rosie, pulling on the sleeves of her cashmere top. “How I can talk to her? She’s unconscious. They should be doing actual medical things! Surgery, drugs! Not...chatting.”
“Let me try.” Her father stood self-consciously at the end of her bed and cleared his throat. “Hello, Rosie, it’s Mike. Um. Dad. I hope you can hear me in there... I’m here with your mum, but don’t worry, we haven’t killed each other yet, ha-ha.” Death stare from her mum. He cleared his throat again. “Um, Rosie, we just want you to know that, um, we love you very much. Right, Alison?”
Her mother sighed. “This is ridiculous.”
“I know things haven’t always been easy...and I’m sorry for those words we had when Scarlett was born. I was a bit, er, sleep-deprived. No joke having a newborn in your fifties, I can tell you.” Even if Rosie had been awake, she’d have treated that apology with stony contempt. Perhaps he could tell. “Erm, we know things were hard too when you were younger...”
“Stop saying we,” her mother interrupted. “There is no we, Mike, not since you went off with that woman.”
“Please, Alison. It’s Scarlett’s mum you’re talking about.”
“She can’t hear me. She’s busy with some Grumpy Birds thing, or whatever it is. Anyway I don’t see why she shouldn’t know the truth—her mother stole a married man away from his wife, his children.”
“A wife who hadn’t looked at me in years!”
Rosie wished she could seal up her ears. Not another row. She’d heard so many of these over the years, the words flung like darts, but usually she could storm out or slam a door or threaten to run away. Daisy’s approach had always been to make herself very small and quiet, retreating to her room with a book and putting Westlife on her Walkman. Now, helpless, Rosie just had to lie and listen. This would be a great time for another flashback. She looked around hopefully but there were no deceased companions in evidence. No Darryl, no Melissa, no Mr. Malcolm, no Grandma. No Dot—whoever she was.
“For God’s sake, Mike, you’re pathetic. Still defending yourself, when Rosie’s lying here in bits!” Rosie watched her mother turn away, arms folded, trying hard not to cry. All this had happened years ago, surely—how could she still be so upset?
But then again, Rosie had never forgiven him either, had she? It was Daisy who said, We have to go and see him. He’s our dad, we can’t just cast him off. Daisy who sent birthday cards and bought Scarlett Christmas presents and dutifully took Gary round for Sunday lunch.
Gary. Oh God, Rosie had forgotten all about him, but there was his name in her mind. That was the name of Daisy’s fiancé. Her sister was getting married. And Rosie was...
not happy for her. Why? She was afraid to probe too deeply, afraid that it might be yet another thing she didn’t want to know.
“Are you ready for another memory, dearie?” said her grandma’s voice. Rosie looked over, and there she was in the orange seat, knitting away. There was Filou, collapsed on the floor with the sheer effort of breathing, as Rosie remembered him. Poor Filou.
“I think so. But, Grandma—I’m worried it won’t be a nice one. So far they’re nearly all horrible. Don’t I have any good memories?”
“’Course you do, love, but these are the ones your brain wants you to look at, for some reason.” She nodded to her son and his ex-wife, hissing insults at each other with their lips curled back and teeth ground. “Got to be better than listening to this pair, anyway.”
“True. Are you coming with me?”
“’Course I am.” She patted the pocket of her cardigan. “Brought some sherbet lemons along for the ride too. Let’s go.”
Rosie shut her eyes, as the sounds of her parents fighting faded blessedly away, and again the noise swelled in her ears and the dial swam in front of them. The numbers settled on: 18 4 2010. Same year as that pub, Luke and his girl, but earlier. “Grandma?” She panicked slightly, as the world blurred and spun.
“I’m here, love. Let yourself go.”
18 April 2010 (Seven years ago)
“We have to go,” Daisy insisted. “She’s our sister.” They were sitting on a country bus on a wet gray day, already dark outside, the swish of the tires filling the air. Daisy looked only slightly different than in the present day—her hair a little longer, her handbag a different old-lady one. She was wearing a fleece and baggy jeans. At this time, Rosie knew, doing some quick calculations, her sister would have been just twenty-three. Just finished her law training course—oh, another memory. Daisy was a lawyer. Sensible, engaged, and with a good job. Rosie was getting the distinct feeling that she and her sister were not that alike.