by Eva Woods
“What’s going on?” Rosie turned to Mel.
“You know what’s going on, Ro-Ro. This is all from your head.”
“Are we...together?” Rosie’s voice faltered. If they were, why were they here in a hotel? Why were they both looking so sad? And...why did Luke have a wedding ring on his left hand?
“You know the answers to all those questions,” said Melissa helpfully, leaving spectral biscuit crumbs behind her.
Rosie didn’t want to accept it—it couldn’t be true, could it?—but the signs were all there for her to read. She and Luke were having an affair.
day three
Daisy
“What’ll it be today, then?” said Adam, smiling brightly despite the earliness of the hour.
Daisy was yawning, bleary-eyed. “Oh, a latte please. Triple strength.”
They’d arrived at the hospital when it was still dark, only to find Rosie comatose, unchanged. Two days had ticked by with no improvement. They’d brought back old cassette tapes of Rosie’s favorite bands, Ash and Take That and All Saints, her childhood stuffed rabbit, an old fraying poster with a very young Leonardo DiCaprio on it. All things she’d loved as a teenager, hoping to rouse some response in her brain, but it just underlined the fact they didn’t know what Rosie loved nowadays. Or who. Daisy had gone out to get the strongest coffee she could find, and while she waited, she stared again at Rosie’s locked phone, trying desperately to think what the code could be.
“Problems?” Daisy looked up to see Adam’s keen dark eyes watching her as he frothed milk. “You aren’t some kind of international phone thief, are you?” he said, easily.
“It’s my sister’s.” She realized that did sound strange. “I just think she was maybe...going through some stuff when she had her accident. That maybe she was on her way to meet someone. I want to know who that was.” Daisy couldn’t explain why she was doing this. “It’s just so hard to sit and wait, you know? At least this way I can do something.”
“You’ve tried all the birthdays? People usually use a really obvious one.”
“Yeah. But it’s not working.”
“May I?” He set down the milk jug and took the phone from her. Daisy felt his fingers brush her hand. He was angling the phone toward the lights. “Okay. First digit is maybe a 2? Anyone’s birthday start with that?” He laughed at her look of surprise. “You just look at where on the screen is most smudged. Most people never clean those fingermarks off.”
“Maybe you’re some kind of international phone thief.”
“Nothing so exciting. I worked in Carphone Warehouse for two years before this place. You wouldn’t believe how many people forget their own phone codes. Next one is 4, I think.”
2...4... Daisy frowned.
“Does that mean something do you?”
“Maybe. Can I...?”
She took back the phone, careful not to touch him this time, and typed in 2, 4, 1, 2. Then blinked in astonishment as the screen cleared, revealing rows of apps. “It worked!” She let that sink in. Petey’s birthday. 24th of December. Rosie was using Petey’s birthday as her phone code.
Adam took out a paper cup. “Dunno why most people bother with codes, to be honest. Anyone can crack ’em if they know how.”
“Don’t suppose you’re any good with email passwords?”
He laughed. “Those are easy. Most people have them written down on Post-it Notes near their computers, or it’s the same one for every account they have. Anyway, you’ve gotten into the phone now, doesn’t she use apps? Those are password-free.”
“You’re a genius. Coffee and cyber terrorism.”
“I try.” Adam flicked a tea towel over his shoulder and went back to the machine, humming over the sound of foaming milk. Daisy turned her attention to Rosie’s phone, almost afraid of what she’d find there.
The texts were disappointing. Nothing that week except a circular from her phone company. Her browser history yielded a bit more—she’d searched for Melissa Carter, and for Mr. Malcolm teacher Coombe Bridge High. Of course, he’d been on the list too. Daisy remembered him—the French and drama teacher, a quiet and unassuming man, who shuffled about in old cardigans and blew his nose a lot. Rosie must not have known his first name. Teachers were just entities back then, and you never thought of them as being human. Daisy had dropped drama as soon as she could but she remembered his excitement on learning she was Rosie Cooke’s sister. “Do you act, Daisy?”
“No sir.”
“We must get you a try-out all the same. Rosie was just a wonderful performer.” Past tense, because by that stage her sister had stopped doing school plays altogether. Why was that? Daisy had obediently tried out for Mr. Malcolm, and seen his furrowed brow at her leaden, mumbling recitation of Lady Macbeth’s blood speech. She was more of a natural props handler, really. Rosie had evidently found something on Mr. M, because one of the articles was an obituary on the school website for Beloved Teacher Dies. Oh, poor Mr. M. Cancer. He couldn’t have been that old.
Quickly, she checked the phone contacts, but there was no Luke. She hadn’t expected there would be. And nothing on Rosie’s Google search history about him either, no Facebook friends with that name, and without a surname she couldn’t get much further. He was like a ghost. How could someone who’d had so much impact on her sister’s life be unknown to those closest to her? There was also no one called Ella in the contacts or friends list or search history. No trace.
Unless you’re not. Close to her, that is. You didn’t know any of this, did you?
Daisy shut down the nasty little voice in her head and moved on to the call history of the phone, not expecting to find much there. Nobody of their generation actually rang people, except their parents. No calls at all for the past few days, then a flurry on the day of the accident itself. Rosie ringing Caz and Angie, probably. Then another, at 6:45 a.m. Daisy stared down at it, recognizing her own phone number.
Why would Rosie be up that early? Daisy tried to think. She hadn’t seen a missed call from her sister that day, definitely not. She would have noticed it. Why, then? Where had she been at that time? In the shower, most likely. Staying under for an extra minute before she had to drag herself out and face the crushing terror of Maura.
“Here you go, triple latte. I make them with a dash of coconut milk, let me know what you think.” Adam was holding out her coffee.
“Thanks. Um...can I ask you another quick phone question? If you find a missed call in your call list, but it never showed up on your screen, why would that be?”
His forehead puckered as he considered it. “Someone must have seen the call come in and rejected it, I guess. That’s the only explanation. Even if it got pocket-answered it would show up unless you manually hid it. Not you, then?”
Daisy’s mind turned to two mornings ago. Herself in the shower. Gary in the bedroom knotting his tie. Her phone on the bedside table. “No,” she said. “Not me at all.”
Rosie
“Grandma? Is that you?”
“Yes, love. I’m here.” It was morning, after a long, dark, lonely night. The gray dawn came in her high windows. Day three. Hadn’t they said they’d have to make hard decisions, if she hadn’t woken up by then? That if she didn’t come back to herself today, the chances she ever would weren’t good? They’d talked about feeding tubes, tracheotomies. Moving her to long-term care. The thought of it sent fear sloshing through Rosie, all the way up from her numb feet. She had to try and wake up. The sound of gently clacking knitting needles reached her ears, comforting her somewhat.
“What’s going to happen now, Grandma?”
“Another memory, love.”
Of course. She couldn’t face another bad one, reliving a day she’d done something bad, or hurt someone. Slept with someone’s husband, even. This was the kind of person she was. Gritty tears were in her eyes. In the real world, a nurse
moved around her body, sponging and hooking and checking and emptying. The tears were wiped away like so much discharge. “Grandma—what’s this for? What’s it going to achieve? If I wanted to...if I didn’t want to be here anymore, and I walked in front of that bus, why did my brain try to bring me back? Why not just...let me go, when I was dying there in the ER?”
“The body always wants to survive, love. No matter what. During the war, your great-uncle Colin, that was my brother, he was in the Japanese camps. It were a hard life and no mistake. Starving, halfway between life and death—he came back just skin and bone. But he didn’t give up.”
Rosie said nothing. It made her feel even worse for being mired in her own petty problems, to hear about people who’d had Nazis and bombs and starvation to battle with. “So why these memories? What’s the point of them?”
“I don’t rightly know, love. There’s something you have to figure out for yourself. But you need to be quick about it.”
Rosie sighed. Maybe she was expecting too much from projections of her own disturbed mind. “So there’s no way out, unless I relive them?”
“That’s right, love. Ready?”
“I don’t think I have a choice.” Assuming, of course, she wanted to wake up. Assuming she hadn’t stepped in front of that bus on purpose, wanting to end it all, fade peacefully away like her ghostly visitors had described. The truth was, Rosie didn’t know. She braced herself as another memory approached. 2 10 1999. The dials, the noise, the blur. Time to lose herself again.
2 October 1999 (Eighteen years ago)
“What’s that you’re doing there?”
Teenage Rosie—fifteen going on forty—scowled at her grandma from behind a full face of makeup. “I’m going out.”
In this memory, her grandma must have been about seventy. Not even that old, Rosie realized now, looking on as her adult self, but back then she’d seemed ancient, an old woman with gray hair and a twinset. Grandma wore a lemon cardigan draped over her shoulders, and in the living room behind her the TV was playing Fifteen to One. “You’re not going out, love, it’s nearly dinnertime.”
Teenage Rosie had been trying to sneak out of the house, although it was almost dark outside. She folded her arms. “I’m allowed to normally.”
“Are you? You won’t mind if I ring your mum and check, then, will you?” Grandma said, easily. She’d raised two children herself; she was immune to teenage aggression.
“When was this?” said Now Rosie to Now Grandma—or Dead Grandma or whatever she was, who was pottering around the hallway with interest. “How come you’re staying?”
“Look, I wonder what happened to that twinset when I went. Plenty of good wear left in it. It was after your dad left, love. Your mum needed a break, so she went to your auntie Susan’s, remember?”
Poor Mum. Poor Carole, too, to put up with years of crumbs from their table, meeting in shabby hotels off the motorway. Rosie realized this was the first time she’d ever felt sorry for Carole. She remembered herself in that hotel room with Luke, the shame and fear of it all.
“I came down to mind you and your sister. She was never any trouble, of course. It was all you.”
“Yeah, yeah, perfect little Daisy.” Through the open kitchen door, Daisy could be seen doing her homework at the table, in her gray school uniform. The good sister. Whereas Rosie, in her ripped black jeans and crayon-like eyeliner, hadn’t done any homework at all and was planning to rendezvous in the park with some rather dodgy young men. This was after she’d fallen out with Angie, after she’d taken up with Bryn, after she’d ditched the school play because he didn’t like her acting. The point where her life went one way instead of another, where it began to unravel.
“You can’t make me stay in,” Past Rosie was now saying to her grandmother. “What are you going to do, lock me up?”
Daisy was only pretending to do her homework. She looked up at that, biting her lip, worried.
“Rosie, pet,” said Past Grandma wearily. “There’s no need for this. I’m doing bangers and mash for tea, you love that.”
“I’m vegetarian now.”
“Well, Daisy and I got a nice film out of the video shop. Circle of Friends. You love that.”
“Boring. Why won’t you just let me out!”
Grandma sighed deeply, admitting defeat. “Be back by seven.”
“Or what?” Now Rosie was mortified. How could she have been so rude to her sweet, wise grandmother?
“Or I’ll come down to fetch you myself in my dressing gown and curlers.”
Checkmate. Rosie and her grandmother stared each other down in the hallway. Daisy listened from the kitchen, tense.
“Seven o’clock.”
“Fine. God, this family.” Teen Rosie went out, slamming the door so the pictures in the hallway rattled.
“I’m sorry,” she said to her ghostly grandma now. “I was awful. I don’t know why.”
“You were young, pet. Young and angry. I wish you’d stayed home though. That boy was no good for you.”
“Was it Bryn?”
Grandma nudged her. “Follow and see.”
A blink, and she was on the street, walking behind her past self on the way to the park down the road. Teen Rosie stopped to apply yet more makeup from a small Boots 17 compact, then spray herself all over with Impulse O2. The synthetic sweetness gave Now Rosie a complicated feeling; part nostalgia, part sadness. Maybe nostalgia was always part sadness, always for something lost that you could never get back. The girl she used to be pushed open the small gate to the children’s play park, now deserted, the shadows lengthening. Three boys sat around the slide, passing a bottle back and forth in a brown paper bag. White Lightning. Rosie ambled over, her eyes fixed somewhere beyond them at the swings, as if that was her intended destination. “Hiya,” she said, nonchalantly.
None of the boys answered for a moment, eyeing her like lazy lions would a gazelle. “Ro,” said one of them laconically. It was Bryn. Even in the dark, even in his parka and with his curtains haircut, he was dazzling. Hot blue eyes and cheekbones cut with a microplane. Not that anyone in 1999 knew what a microplane was.
Rosie sat down on the grass, arranging her hoody under her. She must have been freezing, but not wearing a coat was somehow seen as alluring back then. “Can I’ve some?” she asked nonchalantly.
Bryn passed the bottle, watching as she swigged it and tried not to gag. The boys went back to whatever they’d been talking about, which seemed to involve laughing and calling each other “well gay.” Slowly, subtly, Rosie and Bryn drew away from the other two. The tension vibrating off Rosie was almost tangible. She wanted this boy to touch her, talk to her, own her, pay her attention. She’d do almost anything to get that. For just a crumb of affection. A pattern that was all too familiar from most of her relationships with men since. Either she desperately wanted what she couldn’t have, or she didn’t want the person who wanted her. Stupid.
“Grandma...” she began.
“Don’t worry, love, seen it all before.”
Rosie still blushed for her past self. What an idiot she’d been, hanging around cold dark parks with dodgy boys instead of at home in her safe warm house with Wagon Wheels and ER on the TV.
“Oi.” Bryn jerked his head at his two minions. “Give us a minute, boys.” Obediently they left, with a snickering noise that Rosie remembered had made her feel excited and afraid all at once. “C’mere.” He turned to Rosie, and took her hand, abandoning the bottle. She remembered she’d looked back at it, wondering if she should pick it up. Kids would play there in the morning, they might get hurt. But instead she just followed him blindly to the dark area under the trees, where you couldn’t be seen from the road. And suddenly she remembered why this memory was so potent.
“Pretend I’m not here,” Grandma whispered. “I’m not, you know. I’m dead these years and years.”
/>
“I know, but... God.” No one wanted their grandma to see them losing their virginity under a bush in a playground.
“Suppose it’s too much to ask if you were being careful?”
“If you know everything I know, you’ll already know I wasn’t.”
“Eeeee,” said Grandma. “That was right foolish, our Rosie.”
It was more than that. It was criminally stupid. From the bushes came rustlings, and unzippings and heavy breathing, all moving far too fast to something that Past Rosie now wasn’t sure she’d wanted—was she even ready? She wasn’t even sixteen, it was against the law!—but then it was too late and there was a stifled yelp. It had hurt. She remembered it had hurt a lot.
“Oh deary me,” said Grandma.
The whole thing took about five minutes, and then Bryn was lighting a fag, and starting for home, leaving Rosie still with her jeans half-off. “See ya,” he said.
“But...”
“What?”
“Um...” Rosie hadn’t known what to say. They’d had sex. He’d taken her virginity. Now he was just walking off, without even looking at her.
In the orange streetlight, his face was pale and cruel as carved marble. “You’re welcome.” That was what he’d said after doing that to her. You’re welcome. Then he was gone.
Rosie watched her past self, a girl alone in the dark, struggling to pull up her jeans and underwear, wincing at the pain. Seeing blood and grass on her thighs, wondering how she would hide it from her grandma, who noticed a bit more than her parents seemed to. Biting her lip and trying not to cry. Realizing she couldn’t even tell Angie about this, her first time, as they weren’t speaking. Getting to her feet, walking stiffly, and throwing her head back high. She wasn’t going to show her grandmother that she’d been right, that Rosie would have been better off at home. The difference in how he’d been for months—Rosie baby, you’re so special, I just want to spend all my time with you instead of you always being at rehearsals—was marked. He’d walked off. He’d just walked off. She couldn’t take it in. So that meant...she was one of those stupid girls who believed a guy when he said he loved her?