by Eva Woods
“But will going to Devon help you with that?”
“I don’t know. I just...have to check something, that’s all. Can you be on call, if something...goes wrong? Talk to her, like they said?”
Gary sighed, rubbing his hands through his gelled hair. “Of course. But I can’t stay all night, I have an early start.”
“Alright.” Daisy and Gary turned to stare at Rosie. “I wonder if she can even hear us at all,” Daisy sighed.
If only you knew, thought Rosie. I can hear every word. Although, now that she thought about it, she was very tired and it might be nice to rest a bit. It was clawing at her, exhaustion spreading through her body like the chill of deep water. What was Daisy going to do in Devon? What had she figured out?
She might know more than I do myself. That was Rosie’s final thought before she suddenly blacked out altogether.
* * *
“Hello? Hello, is anyone here? Melissa? Darryl?”
Silence. Rosie was afraid. All through this terrible strange time, except for the moments between the bus hitting her and waking up in the ER, she’d been more or less conscious, moving in and out of her memories in a dreamlike state, seeing it all in a diaphanous blur. Now it was black. She could see nothing, hear nothing. Only the sucking silence of the inside of her head.
“Rosie?” said a voice.
Relief flooded her. She wasn’t totally alone, then, here in the dark. “Mr. Malcolm, is that you?”
“Yes dear.”
“I can’t see! What’s happening?”
“I don’t know, dear. There may have been a change in your condition. You could be getting worse. You have to try and wake up, Rosie. Time is running out!”
“I’m trying! Wh-why are you here? Another memory?” The darkness, the silence, it was pressing all over her. Am I dying? Rosie kicked away from it, like a panicked swimmer trying to reach the surface of the ocean. Just to see something, to remember something, to hold on to a piece of who she was. “I don’t like this! Can we go away from here?”
“Of course, cherie.”
With relief, the world began to clear again. The memory world, anyway. The dials read 17 9 1999. School. Back when things still made some kind of sense. Rosie seized on it, panicking, and off she went.
17 September 1999 (Eighteen years ago)
When she opened her eyes again she was in her old secondary school. She recognized it immediately from the smell of rubber gym mats and dust. They said smell was the most powerful way to evoke memory, and Rosie would have to agree. It was the assembly hall–slash-gym, shrouded in darkness and lined with stackable seats, and a younger Rosie was standing on the stage in a spotlight.
“Of course,” she said out loud. Not that they could hear her. “The school play. What was it again?”
Mr. Malcolm was there with her in the dark. “Pirates of Penzance. A bit advanced, maybe, for schoolchildren, but it’s just so fabulous. Magnifique!”
“You directed it.”
“And you were the lead. Mabel. Gosh, I had ever so much trouble getting the school board to agree to that wave machine.”
“Didn’t it rot through the floorboards?”
“Wonderful times,” said Mr. Malcolm nostalgically. “Totally worth it.”
Rosie focused on her past self, illuminated in the light. Pale, thin, her red hair flowing dramatically as she declaimed her lines. Then suddenly, Past Rosie ground to a halt and announced in her own, vaguely West Country accent: “I can’t do this.”
“That’s not the line, Rosie.” This from Past Mr. Malcolm, who was standing in the shadows near the front of house.
“Hey, there you are!”
Past Mr. Malcolm didn’t look much younger. He was the kind of man who must have been born wearing sweater-vests and with a bald patch. “What’s the matter, Rosie?” he asked her past self.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”
“The solo?”
“The whole thing. Act. Sing.” Past Rosie’s shoulders were drooping, her face miserable. “I have to...drop out.”
“But...what?” Mr. Malcolm was bewildered, as well he might be. She’d fought off every other girl in the drama group to get this part, and been rehearsing it for months. “Rosie...are you having stage fright, is that it?”
“No. I just...what’s the point of all this? Musical theatre. Dancing policemen. It’s silly.” Past Rosie did not sound convinced, and no wonder; none of what she was saying was what she actually thought. So what was going on?
Mr. Malcolm gave an audible gasp. “But...you love musical theatre! You helped me organize the school trip to Les Mis last year!”
“Yeah, well, I’ve changed my mind. I’m into rap now. Gangster rap. And this...” Waving her arms to encompass the stage and the costume and the lights, the troop of pirates and policemen behind her, awkwardly frozen mid–dance routine. “...this isn’t my thing. I...I’m sorry.”
“But, Rosie, we need you! You’re the lead! You’re the...” He choked on the last word: “Star.”
Rosie would kill to hear that now, when she often waited hours just to audition for the chorus, but at fifteen she merely tossed her red hair, trying to look nonchalant and cool. “I’m sorry, Mr. M. I can’t. Someone else will have to do it.”
“But there isn’t...”
“Me! I can do it!” One of the pirates threw off their hat and peg leg.
Now Rosie groaned. “Sarah Bloody Martin. She was my understudy.”
“I know it! I know every line!” Sarah Martin launched herself forward dramatically, adopting a theatrical pose, and launched into the song. As she hit the high note, the lights on the ceiling vibrated alarmingly.
“That’s why I wanted you,” said Mr. Malcolm, the ghostly one, sadly. “She had range but just no heart. Her voice was so harsh.”
“And I let you down,” said Rosie, watching her past self. “I just walked out of the show? What on earth was I thinking?”
“Two days before curtain up. What a to-do it was. Sarah was right though, she did know every word. Malheureusement.”
And she’d been the toast of the school, Rosie could now remember, and gone to the Leavers’ Ball with Drew McKinnon, the lazy-smiled semi-Goth who took all the male leads in the school plays, and now had a recurring role on Hollyoaks. Though, now that she thought of it, she was pretty sure Drew was gay. And Rosie, what had she done? There was a big blank in her memory where the ball should have been. No dress, no date, no limo, no pictures. Had she missed her own Leavers’ Ball?
“Why did I do it?” she asked, semirhetorically. “Why would I walk out on a big role like that?”
As if to answer her question, the door at the back of the auditorium opened and in slunk a boy in a leather jacket, with jet-black hair and blue eyes that went right through your heart. The same one from the memory near the bike sheds. Boy was just about correct—he was sixteen—but he looked like a thirty-something playing a teenager in Dawson’s Creek. Both Drew and Sarah paused in their romantic duet to stare at him. And as for young Rosie, a quiver seemed to run right through her body. Her face, which had been twisted, as if she might cry, lit up, and she threw off the remnants of her costume, revealing ripped jeans and a tight black vest, like Sandy in Grease. Tell me about it, stud. Rosie noticed that her past self had new and painful-looking holes punched all through the cartilage of her ear, which seemed to be infected. She raised a hand to her own ghostly ear now, feeling the bumps there. She had to put makeup over them for auditions now, and secretly she had always regretted getting them, though she would have undergone considerable amounts of torture before admitting that to her mother.
“I think that’s why you dropped out,” whispered ghostly Mr. Malcolm.
“Bryn,” Rosie said bleakly. So that was still ongoing. The School Bad-Boy, the kind who shoved younger kids down toilets and set fir
e to science labs and already had a tattoo even though he wasn’t legally old enough. Bryn thought some things were cool—fire, tats, booze—but most things were lame, and that included being the lead in the school play. And, it seemed, Rosie was pretending she thought so too. “So I just quit. For a boy.”
Mr. Malcolm sighed. “It was such a shame. You were made for Gilbert and Sullivan, with your titian hair. So very pre-Raphaelite. Look at past me, I’m a wreck.”
As young Rosie fled down the aisle and leaped at Bryn, her legs locking round his as her mouth suckered onto his like a remora fish, Sarah Martin declared, “What an amateur. Drew, let’s do this.” And the school band started up again and the lackluster singing resumed. In the darkness of the auditorium, the younger Mr. Malcolm took out a cotton hankie and shakily wiped his face. He looked devastated.
Rosie turned to his later incarnation. “You...you really wanted me in the part? You weren’t upset just because I left you in the lurch?”
“You were so good, Rosie. You had a softness, a vulnerability. It would have been wonderful. And the show was all I had. I was a lonely single teacher in a country school, with a cat and a sick mother in a nursing home. It meant so much to me.” He looked back at the door, where Rosie had disappeared. “Not that I really blamed you. He had something, that Bryn boy. Bane of the teachers’ lives but still—he’d have been dazzling onstage.”
Something occurred to Rosie. “Mr. Malcolm...were you...eh?”
“Batting for the other team?”
“We just say gay now, usually.”
“I suppose. I never...found out, exactly.”
“You mean you never...?” It was strange to be discussing this with her old teacher, even though he was a) dead and b) a figment of her imagination.
“I was engaged to a woman when I was younger, but in those days you waited till marriage before you did...any of that business. She broke it off, of course, thank goodness. She’s happily married now, several grandchildren—we sent Christmas cards while I was alive. And me, well, attitudes had changed so much. I was working my way up to maybe doing something about it...then I got ill. Cancer. And that was that. Fin. Not very much to show for a life, I know.”
Rosie bit her lip. They’d made fun of him at school, his shiny bald head, his smell of mothballs, the sweater-vest he wore every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, his slight stutter when he had to tell anyone off. And all the while this man had had his own joys and sorrows and dreams, and his life had run itself out in obscurity. “But you had so much impact, Mr. Malcolm. You’ve got a former student who’s on TV! And me, I did some acting, even if I didn’t exactly...and Sarah Martin! She must be up to something high-powered these days.”
He smiled. “She’s at the Arts Council. Gives out grants and tells people where they’re going wrong.”
“Sounds about right. And I bet you had hundreds of other students who were in your plays, who love music and drama even now because of you, or who got really good at French and went to work at the UN or something.”
“Do you think so?”
“Of course. I know I love it. Loved. Sorry, I don’t know what tense to use.”
“But, Rosie...you’ve given up acting, haven’t you?”
“Um...no. Not exactly.”
“You haven’t been to an audition in over a year. You’ve been applying for office jobs and thinking about training as a teacher. That sounds like giving up. And you were doing so well before. I followed your career, you know. Before I shuffled off.”
Rosie looked at the floor, where the ghostly markings for different spots looked like crime scene diagrams. Mr. Malcolm wasn’t real, she had to remind herself. Anything he was telling her was something she already knew, in some deep recess of her mind. “I...I lost my confidence. And Caz, that’s my friend—or was—she’s having this insane run of success.”
“You were jealous.”
“Yes. I know that’s pathetic.”
“Rosie, I’m going to tell you what I told Sarah Martin when she came to me in tears because I’d given you the lead in Pirates. Just because someone gets an opportunity in life, it doesn’t mean it’s been taken away from you. It just means it was for them. Yours is out there somewhere. Your job is to find it.”
“And how did she take that?”
“Not well. Her mother came in to shout at me.”
Rosie smiled ruefully. “I guess I really messed up. Then and now. I loved Pirates too. I used to secretly listen to the soundtrack when Bryn wasn’t about. I hid it inside an urban grime CD case. I’m so sorry, Mr. M. What a stupid, selfish thing to do.”
Mr. Malcolm looked at his ghostly watch. “We better go back, dear. This has been a long epiphany for you. Rather exhausting, all those revelations.” The theatre, and Sarah Martin’s harsh top notes, Drew McKinnon’s louche posings and all the pirates and policemen and ladies, began to fade.
“Wait!” Rosie clutched the sleeve of his cardigan. “I meant what I said. You were such an inspiration to me, you have no idea. I’m sorry I never told you that while you were alive.”
He chuckled. “Nobody who teaches teenagers expects gratitude, Rosie dear. But merci.”
“Mr. Malcolm...will I get another chance? To go back to acting, I mean?” Rosie was afraid of what she was really asking. Will I wake up? Will my life still be there or is it stopped, over, frozen in the terrible mess I made of it?
“I don’t know, dear. Let’s go back now.”
Curtain down, lights, exit, pursued by a Bryn.
Daisy
“There was no need for you to drive me, darling. I’m perfectly capable of getting the train.”
“It’s okay. There’s some things in the house that might help Rosie, jog her memory, maybe.”
“I don’t feel right leaving her by herself.” Her mother had been fidgeting the whole way in the car, checking her old Nokia phone every few minutes, fiddling with the heating, scratching at her arms. Daisy recognized the signs of anxiety. She also didn’t like leaving Rosie—what if something happened while they were gone? And tomorrow would be day three—but Daisy felt strongly that this was the way to help her sister. Rosie had written that list for a reason, and Daisy had to find out why those names were on it. Starting with Angie Timmons who, as it happened, still lived in the village.
She said, “I know. But it’s just for the night, and Dad’s there anyway.”
Her mother’s face was stricken. “I just don’t know what to tell people. She walked in front of a bus! What would make her do a thing like that?”
“She fell in front of a bus,” Daisy corrected her. “It’s not the same thing.” But given the list of names, and what Caz had said about Rosie’s message, was her mother closer to the truth? You didn’t start contacting people from your past unless you were having some kind of life crisis. What if she’d been trying to make amends? Or say goodbye?
“Darling, don’t drive so fast. We don’t need another accident.”
“I’m five miles under the speed limit, Mum.” But she slowed down all the same. Thankfully the traffic was light, and it wouldn’t take too long to reach the house. “Honestly, Mum, she’s got people with her. You need to look after yourself anyway. Let Dad do some of it.”
It was the right thing to say. Unlike Rosie, Daisy was very good at managing her mother. She’d had to be. Alison said, “It was like this when you were younger too. You don’t remember, you were too little. But he was always away, at conferences, at the office—of course we know now what he was really up to some of the time. I was very lonely. Especially after...everything.”
Daisy kept her eyes on the road. “I know, Mum. It must have been very hard.”
“You’ll find out. Wait till you have small ones and Gary’s working late and you’re sitting there alone night after night watching Open University films about the mining industry because it’s th
e only thing on the telly. At least you have that Netflix thingy, darling. Your generation has no idea of your advantages.”
Daisy didn’t know how to explain that, to her, the idea of children seemed as distant and terrifying as the sun turning to a supernova. And especially having children with Gary. “You know, Mum, just because we’re getting married doesn’t mean that’ll happen right away...”
“Of course it will. Don’t worry, darling, there’s so much they can do nowadays.” Sometimes Daisy wondered if her mother willfully misunderstood her. “Anyway you’re young. Sensible. You know time’s ticking on and you’ve grabbed a good man, settled down.”
Was that what she’d done, grabbed him? As if the music had stopped in some game of musical chairs, and she’d seized on Gary as the most promising chair? Good prospects. Domesticated. What more did she want? “I didn’t mean because we couldn’t have kids, Mum, I meant...maybe we’d wait.”
Her mother sighed. “That’s all you young people do. Wait to grow up, wait to settle down... Well, life doesn’t always work that way, darling, and that’s just a fact. Sometimes time runs out. I was only twenty-six when I had you, you know. And twenty-eight when...”
She stopped. The atmosphere in the car thickened into syrupy silence. Daisy held her breath. Now was the moment to discuss it. Be really open. Say what they truly felt. Talk about all the reasons Rosie might, just possibly, have fallen (or walked) in front of a giant London bus. “Mum...”
Her mother leaned forward and turned the radio dial, letting out tinny music. “Goodness, what a racket. Is that what they call pop nowadays?” And complaining about modern music took them over the brief hump, and all the way to the house.
Rosie
It was dark on the ward. Almost the end of her second day in a coma. Time running out. The lights were lowered and outside evening was drawing in. Rosie was, for the first time all day, alone. Just her in the small room, and the beep of machines and sound of hushed voices outside, nurses passing to and fro. At least she could see again, through the small crack in her eyelids, after that strange blip. That was some relief.