by Eva Woods
“No, no, it’s just... I wanted a bit of happiness. Is that so bad?”
“You’re moving in with her?” How like Daisy, to ascertain the facts, in a quiet voice, before flying off the handle. “That means...you’ve known her for a while?”
“I... Well, yes, love. This was never meant to happen, but it has, and, well, Carole’s not getting any younger and she...”
Rosie was on her feet, red hair bristling in rage. “You’re ancient, Dad! You can’t have a girlfriend, that’s disgusting!”
“It just...well, it just happened.” And Rosie had seen it. The flicker in her father’s eye that told her that, no matter how painful this was for him, he was relieved, deep down. Released from a marriage that had never recovered from what had happened. In love. A chance to make things right. Rosie had seen it and the bewildered little girl in her started to howl.
“You can’t do this! You can’t just leave us!”
“Rosie, love, you’re a big girl now. Daisy too. And your mum...she agrees this is for the best.”
Oh, the iciness of her mother’s voice. “I hardly have much choice, Michael.”
“I’m sorry, okay? I wish it wasn’t happening like this. But...it is. I’m sorry.”
Daisy had simply nodded, her hands laid flat on her knees. “Right. Okay. That’s... I just need a while to process.” She’d already taken to speaking like the teens on 90210, like someone twice her age.
Rosie had stared at her sister. “Process? How can we process Dad cheating on Mum, and leaving her, at his age?”
Their dad pleaded, “I still love you, both of you, and your mum and I...”
“Don’t you dare, Mike...”
Rosie spat, “You love us? Yeah, right. You’ve hardly been here for years. You just left us all to deal with it, while Mum went to pieces and we had no one looking after us. Now you’re off to start another family you can destroy. Well done, Dad.” Rosie began to storm out, throwing open the door of the hallway. Running, as was always her first instinct.
Her father blundered after her. “Rosie—sweetheart—I wish you knew how much I loved you, both of you...”
“Yeah, well.” She spun on her feet, her face twisted in rage. “Save it, Dad, because I hate you. I hate you.” And she seized the family photo off the wall in the hallway, the one from the day Petey came home—taken in this same room, when they’d all been so happy—and smashed it on the ground, before slamming out the front door. On the doormat, Rosie saw now, there was a pink-edged envelope addressed in childish handwriting, which got kicked aside and slid under the hall cabinet. And she remembered. “That was from Melissa. We’d been writing to each other since she moved, but after this I just...didn’t reply.” Current Rosie winced to herself. She’d stopped writing to her friend, and not long afterward Melissa had died. “God. I was awful.”
Grandma said, “You were upset. You had a lot going on.”
“Yeah, but he’s right. I shouldn’t have taken it so hard. And he’s my dad. Of course I don’t hate him. I... Oh!” She gasped as, like popping open a canister inside her head, her mind was suddenly flooded with memories marked Dad, happy. Suppressed for years because he’d dared to try and live his life. They came and came, all the lost days, crowding her head.
She was three, and her dad was scooping her up onto his shoulders, higher than a skyscraper, so she could pull leaves from the trees overhead...
She was seven and getting ready for school, and he was trying to plait her long red curls, sweating and muttering with the effort, while she offered the less than helpful commentary that Mummy doesn’t do it like that, Daddy...
She was ten and Mary in the school Nativity, despite having red hair, and she looked down after her big speech about there being no room at the inn and her dad was in the second row, crying his eyes out (so she had seen him cry before, she’d just forgotten, like she’d forgotten so many important moments of her life...)
She was sixteen and coming out of a teenage disco at two in the morning and her father was waiting in his Volvo, even though he didn’t live with them anymore, yawning to himself, Bryan Adams on the tape deck, and she slid into the warm interior of the car and he’d brought her a Caramac in case she was hungry...
She was eighteen and off to university, and he was hugging her on the pavement outside her halls of residence, having hauled seventeen bags of clothes and books and kettles and duvets up four flights of stairs, and he wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye, to let her go, and so she shrugged him off, eager for her new life to start...
She was in her twenties and standing beside him in church in a Jane Norman dress that was too tight, her hair straightened into submission, her dad’s shoulders heaving. In front of them was a wooden coffin (“Mine,” said Grandma. “I never did like mahogany, don’t know what they were thinking.”) and Rosie put out her hand and took her dad’s and they cried together...
She was twenty-six, and moving out of the flat she’d shared with Caz because they’d had a fight, and her dad was helping her lug all her stuff yet again, and awkwardly slipping her a check because “I know it’s hard to manage on your own,” and she’d somehow taken offense and they’d ended up having another row...
And then her memories ran out because she’d blamed him for everything and done her best never to see him, Carole, or Scarlett, except when she needed something. “Oh. Poor Dad. Poor, poor Dad. And now I’m... Now he must be... Oh!”
Rosie wasn’t sure if she was crying in the memory, or for real, or both, but the pressure in her lungs increased, and she was gasping for air, racking sobs tearing through her. “Grandma? I can’t...I can’t breathe!”
“Just try to wake up now, Rosie. Wake up!”
Daisy
She was still shaking when she got upstairs. She’d told Gary to fuck off. Gary, her fiancé! For a moment, she let herself imagine being without him, starting over—all those awful Tinder dates her friends went on. Going to weddings alone and sitting at the kids’ table. Canceling the venue and the church and the florist. She began to gasp for air, and for a moment she had to lean against the puke-colored wall to gather herself. What have I done?
But no, it would be okay. Gary would understand. She hadn’t slept. She was very stressed, that was all.
“You okay, love?” Her dad was sitting by Rosie’s bed, leaning on his knees and staring at the floor. He looked as if he’d been crying.
Hastily, she pulled herself together. “Hi, Dad. How is she?”
“No change. I’ve been talking to her but... I don’t know. Where’s your young man?”
“Gone to work. As per usual.”
“I used to do that a lot too.”
“I know.” It was a theme her mother returned to often.
“Told myself someone had to earn the money, especially with your mother the way she was. And I suppose...sometimes it’s easier to be out of the house. With adults, where everything’s kind of...packaged up nice and clean. No one crying or making a mess or saying they hate you.”
“I know. It’s okay, Dad.”
Her father looked at Rosie, who lay comatose, her body floppy and her face as pale as the sheets. “It’s not my place to say anything, Daisy... God knows I haven’t been around much...”
“Dad, don’t...”
“And if Gary makes you happy, then great. But one thing I will say is that moments like this, seeing your daughter lying there in bed and not even able to help her, or comfort her or know if she can hear you... Well. Moments like this you wish you’d left the office early all those times. Skipped the meeting. Turned the report in late. Gone to the school plays and ballet recitals... She was always so good in the school plays, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“I was ever so disappointed when she gave it up. Not disappointed in her—just felt that it wasn’t fair somehow.”
�
�Fair?”
“Maybe if I’d been around more, if there hadn’t been all that business with Carole, well—she might have stuck at it. Maybe she wouldn’t be like this now.”
Daisy followed his gaze, the machines pumping Rosie’s heart and blood and lungs. “Who can say, Dad? I don’t think it’s any one person’s fault. Rosie is just...well, Rosie. She always was.”
“But everything that happened with...”
Daisy couldn’t bear to talk about it. Not now, the fight with Gary still fresh on her skin, the panic dissolving her bones. What have I done? “Dad, come on, we have to stay positive. We have to talk to her, like the doctors said.”
“Right.” But they both stayed where they were, silent. “She rang me,” her father said, so quietly Daisy almost missed it.
“Sorry?”
“On the day it...the day. She rang my mobile. She never rings me. Not even birthdays or Christmas. Can’t remember the last time.”
Daisy’s heart began to hammer in her chest. “What did she say?”
“I didn’t answer. It was early, middle of the school run, getting Scarlett into her uniform and some breakfast down her, stopping to answer a hundred questions about how do fish breathe and do they think air is wet...and, well. The last few times I spoke to your sister she called me some terrible names. I—I couldn’t face it. I’d have rung her back later. Probably.”
“She called me too,” Daisy heard herself say. “I didn’t pick up either. I—well, it doesn’t matter, but I missed the call.”
“Oh.” Her father’s brow knitted together. “She ring you often?”
“Nope. And not at seven in the morning. I...we had a falling out, at the engagement party.” She felt a sweep of embarrassment, recalling that she hadn’t even invited her father. Her own dad.
He didn’t seem to care about that. “So if she rang you, and she rang me, and neither of us answered...”
And then an hour later she was stepping into the path of a bus, her phone with its unanswered calls held in her outstretched hand. Daisy swallowed. “Dad...”
His fists tightened convulsively. “What have I done? Is it my fault she... Oh Christ.”
Daisy wanted to say of course not, it didn’t mean anything that Rosie had chosen the day of the accident to finally contact her family and friends after months, more than a year in her father’s case. It was pure coincidence that later that same day she’d almost died. That she’d made a list of names, all so far people she needed to say sorry to. That could all be explained away, sure. None of it meant for sure Rosie was trying to kill herself. But Daisy found that she could not say anything over the large shard of fear that had lodged itself in her throat.
Suddenly, Rosie made a sound. Not a good, positive, might-be-waking-up sound. A sound like she couldn’t breathe, like she was screaming inside a vacuum and hardly any noise was coming out. Like the squeal of brakes and the cry of a child in pain and a hundred terrible noises all mixed up in one. Her father turned almost as pale as Rosie, whose lips were now tinged with blue. “What’s happening? Rosie, love, what’s wrong?”
Daisy was already running for the door. “Can someone come now, please! My sister can’t breathe!”
Rosie
“It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m with you, Ro-Ro. Try to breathe.” Mel was there.
Doctors. Doing something near her throat. The feeling of choking, of drowning inside her own body. “What’s...happening?” She knew she had not spoken out loud, that they could not hear her, that she could only speak to this ghost or hallucination or whatever, who was not even really there.
“What’s happening?” she croaked.
“You’re not getting enough oxygen. They said something about more bleeding in your brain.”
She tried to hear what they were saying, the two young doctors who held her life in their hands, but could not. The real world was nothing but blur and buzz and static, while her memories were so real she could not escape them. Through the glass doorway she could see her sister, her father, noticing how old he’d gotten. She hadn’t seen him in over a year. Her dad who used to fix her bike and put plasters on her knee and do silly impressions of Zippy from Rainbow. She’d loved him, once. She still did. But maybe she would never get to tell him that.
A vague sense of urgent feet, of voices talking fast. “Are they worried about me?” said Rosie, alarmed. “Am I in a bad way?”
“You’re slipping away, Ro-Ro. Come on, you have to try and wake up.”
“But I can’t... I can’t!” By her side, Dr. Posh Spice was slipping a syringe into her IV. A warmth was spreading through her body, a fake chemical peace. Rosie tried to fight it, to stay in the world, but it was no use. All she knew was, she had to try and remember everything. All the bad memories. All the reasons she had ended up here, in this hospital bed. She would never truly be ready for that, but there was no choice, and so she went.
21 August 2005 (Twelve years ago)
“Keep them closed!”
“Okay, okay, I’m not peeking.” Past Rosie, giggling with excitement and nerves, with Luke’s big hand over her eyes. She wore frayed denim shorts and a pink vest that clashed with the sunburn on her shoulders, and her hair was twisted up in braids to hold it off her neck. She remembered that moment so clearly, the roughness of his palm, the smell of cinnamon and the Origins mint shower gel he used, his breath hitting the back of her neck, damp with the heat of the marketplace. They were in Marrakesh, in the souk, the kind of place your eyes didn’t know where to settle because everything you looked at was so beautiful and interesting, woven rugs, bright rainbow glass, copper wind chimes, carved wooden chess sets, and everywhere sacks of fragrant spices. Luke was holding her hand, and gently plunging it into a large bag of something brown and knobbly. Now Rosie, watching like a ghost from the dark, almost gasped as the sensory memory came back to her. The rough sacking, her fingers brushing against the spice... “Cloves,” her past self said. “Definitely cloves.”
“Not fair. That was an easy one.” Luke took his hand away.
“Your turn.” She was tall, but still had to reach up to put her own small hand, traces of picked-off red polish on the nails, over his eyes. Feeling the flicker of his eyelids under her palm, taking his hand and guiding it to another sack. He bent, sniffing.
“Is it saffron?”
“Very good. Did you know it’s more valuable than gold, pound for pound?”
“So why do we bother buying gold jewelry, then? It’d mean more to propose with a ring of saffron strands, surely.” Luke had said it idly, leaning over a bag of cinnamon sticks, but Rosie’s heart had begun to pound. It was a miracle she hadn’t passed out during that month with him, the heat, the constantly held breath every time their hands brushed. The confusion and excitement and drama of it all. Nothing had happened of course—she was still with Jack, even though, most days, he and Ingrid wanted to go clubbing till three, then sit by the pool and drink recovery vodkas, while she and Luke wanted to sightsee. They walked, and ate in cafés, and talked and talked and talked, her words tripping out of her mouth in her impatience to tell him things about her, find out things about him. It was so strange to remember all the times she’d sat with her mother over the dinner table, and been unable to summon up a single word to break the silence between them. She hardly felt like the same person at all.
But nothing had happened with Luke. It couldn’t. She’d been mired in doubt. Maybe he didn’t like her that way. Maybe it would all end soon. What if Luke headed off to volunteer, as he’d planned, and she had to spend the rest of her life with Jack?
Melissa said, “Pay attention, Ro-Ro.”
Her past self went to tuck her arm through Luke’s—a friendly gesture, or what could be excused as one at least—but he pulled away. Luke was looking at her directly now, standing in the aisle of the bazaar, glaringly British with his sunburned nose and sen
sible trainers and khaki shorts, a smattering of gold hairs on his forearms. “What?” she said, nervously.
“Rosie, I... You’re supposed to go home from here, right?”
“Yeah.” The flights had been booked months ago, before she’d even met Luke.
“And...after that, you’ll be in London? With Jack?”
“I guess so. That’s the plan, anyway. Find a job or...something.” Her voice sounded deeply unconvinced. Rosie wanted to scream at her past self. This was her chance. This was Luke opening himself up to her, trying to tell her something, and she just wasn’t hearing it. “Why?”
“I just...” He scuffed his trainers along the dusty ground of the market. “I think you should do what makes you happy. Not what Jack wants, or what your parents want. If you want to be an actress, do it.”
“It’s not as simple as—”
“But it is, Rosie. It is as simple as that.” He was looking at her so earnestly, this twenty-something boy, hardly grown out of his teenage lankiness. If only she’d been different, and braver, and known how to hear what he was saying, they might have been together all this time. Twelve years with Luke. The loss of it almost made her gasp. “Life is so short. You’re so young. Just...do what makes you happy, okay?”
Past Rosie was staring at her feet too now, the chipped polish on her toes, which she’d applied weeks ago. Before she knew Luke existed. And now everything was different. “What are you saying?” Her voice was barely audible over the sounds of the market.
“You know what. I just...it’s time to make a decision. This...” He gestured awkwardly at the space between them. “It’s going to end. You’re going home. I’m going to volunteer. Is that what you really want? I mean Jack’s a good guy, but is he for you?”
“I...” A long silence between them. Say something. Tell him you feel it too. But Past Rosie said nothing, and the moment had gone on a fraction too long. It was too late. “Luke, I don’t know. I...”