The Lives We Touch

by Eva Woods

  18 11 2010. Caz’s new play received a glowing review in the Evening Standard, with a glamorous shot of her in full Edwardian dress. Rosie had thrown it in the bin before retrieving it, covered in banana pulp and coffee grounds, ashamed of herself. Caz’s sudden rise to fame seemed to coincide with a slow-down in Rosie’s own career. After an initial strong start – second lead at the National, an ad for shampoo that paid a ridiculous amount – she hadn’t had a paid acting role for eight months. The week before she’d played a polar bear in an avant-garde production about climate change. For payment she’d received a lukewarm half in the pub, after which the director had tried to grope her. But she had to try to be happy for Caz. After all, they were best friends. Weren’t they?

  12 4 2017. Earlier this year, when they were barely friends any more. Rosie standing on the pavement outside a theatre, staring at a poster of Caz in yet another play, her face illuminated and beautiful, her cheekbones sharp as razors. Hearing the bell go inside, indicating it was about to start. Then slowly walking away, tossing the ticket into the bin.

  25 8 2017. Just a few months ago. On this day Caz had strolled into the coffee shop where Rosie worked, fresh from a nearby lunch with someone Rosie recognised as a top theatre critic. She wore leather trousers and a tight silky top. Her skin glowed, her teeth gleamed. She was laughing at something the critic said, and when she got to the top of the queue, she asked Serge for a kale smoothie. Healthy, beautiful, successful, loved. Her engagement ring like an iceberg on her finger. And here was Rosie, the opposite of all those things. Caz hadn’t even noticed her there, skulking in the steam from the coffee machine, just carried on out to the street on a cloud of laughter. And then of course Rosie had quit her job in the café and … who knew? Walked under a bus? Either way, she was having a pretty bad year. A pretty bad few years.

  The dizzying whirl through places and dates was making her feel queasy. She turned back to Mr Malcolm, who was staring at Serge’s topknot in fascination. ‘Men wear buns now, do they? How wonderful.’

  ‘Please. I’ve seen enough. I get the message – Caz and I fell out and it was my fault. Can I go back now? Back to the real world?’

  ‘Are you sure, dear? You’re in rather a lot of pain there.’

  ‘It’s better than this. This is torture.’

  ‘OK then. Count to three then open your eyes again.’

  Rosie

  She did. The coffee shop faded – a ghostly smell of roasted beans in her nose – and she surfaced, choking and gasping at the tube in her throat. But no one noticed, though her room was full of people. They all had their backs to her. Rosie hurriedly counted: her mother, her father, Daisy, Scarlett – today in jeans and an Octonauts T-shirt – and Carole, in a flowery tunic and mum jeans, make-up inexpertly applied so that her unfashionable pink lipstick bled around her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, Alison, it’s just that Scarlett wanted to come back and …’

  Rosie’s mother snapped, ‘She’s only supposed to have two visitors at once. If you’re here that means I can’t be with her, or Daisy. And children are such germ carriers.’

  ‘I washed my hands four times,’ said Scarlett indignantly. Rosie saw Carole’s hand curl protectively on her daughter’s head.

  ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through, Alison, I really am. I’m here to help however I can.’

  ‘You could help by not bringing a small child into the room. It’s hardly fair on Scarlett either, is it?’

  Scarlett scowled. ‘I’m helping Rosie. I’m talking to her. Hello, Rosie, it’s Scarlett, your sister. Well, sort of your sister. We’re here in the hospital with you. I rode on a big red bus to get here. Um … sorry, maybe you don’t want to hear about buses?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mike, can’t you stop this?’

  Rosie wanted to block her ears at the sound of her mother’s cold, angry tone. She wished she could intervene, shout out, She’s just scared, it makes her lash out. But it wasn’t fair to boot Carole out. She could see now that her stepmother had only ever tried her best. And if the memory in the pub with Luke was anything to go by, someone being engaged or married didn’t always mean you knew how to stop loving them.

  But where was Luke now? Was it over between them, were they not even friends? He hadn’t come to visit so far and no one seemed to know who he was, not even Caz, who’d been Rosie’s best friend for years. Was he with his wife, if indeed he’d got married? She pushed the thought away and tried to communicate with Daisy, who was hanging back against the wall, looking miserable. Look up, Daise, she tried to say, via her barely open eyes. I can hear everything. I’m reliving the worst moments of my life here, so it would be great if my hospital room wasn’t filled with tension too. Daisy. Daise?

  For a moment, her sister looked straight at her. ‘Everyone,’ she said out loud, ‘I think you should stop this. They said we had to talk to her, that our voices might bring her back. I don’t think this is what they had in mind. And Mum’s sort of right: it’s not fair to talk like this in front of Scarlett.’

  ‘I did wash my hands,’ the little girl said again.

  Her mother barrelled out the door, and the jagged sound of weeping could be heard from the corridor. Daisy closed her eyes briefly, then turned to her half-sister. ‘I know you did, sweetheart. Mum’s just scared and sad, the same way your mum would be if you were sick.’

  Scarlett nodded. ‘I understand. Can I keep talking to Rosie? Maybe I can play her a song on my phone?’

  ‘That would be great.’

  ‘Come on, you have to talk to her too. The doctors said.’

  ‘Er, hi, Rosie. It’s Daisy here.’

  ‘She’s your sister too,’ stage-whispered Scarlett to Rosie. ‘Your same-mum-and-dad sister.’

  ‘Right, yes, um … we hope you get better soon, Rosie. We’re all here for you and we … we want you to wake up.’

  Thank God for Daisy, her patience and her kindness. But wait, weren’t they also not speaking to each other? They’d always been close – at least, she thought so. What could have come between them so badly? Rosie sighed. When she woke up, things would be different. She’d spend more time with both her sisters, be kind to Carole, forgive her father. If she woke up, that was. Would she recover and get her life back, small and broken as it was? Or was this hair-raising montage of her worst ever days, her greatest mistakes and failures, the last thing she would experience before being gone for ever? Two days. That was all she had to figure out what had happened with this bus, and try to wake herself up before it was too late.

  After forty minutes listening to tweeny-bopper tunes on Scarlett’s tinny little phone speaker, Rosie was quite ready for another flashback, however traumatic. Who would be her guide this time? Her grandmother, her long-ago school friend, her old teacher, Dot – who she still hadn’t identified – or a random guy who’d died alongside her in the hospital? She was surprised she knew so few people among the dead community.

  But there’s one more, isn’t there?

  Shh. Rosie pushed that thought far back into the jumbled filing cabinet of her brain.

  ‘A random guy who died alongside you? That hurts, babe.’

  ‘Hey, Darryl. Sorry.’ Rosie was glad she was hallucinating him – if that’s what this was – before the terrible injury and not after. He’d looked less handsome with bone gleaming white through his skin and his beating heart visible in his chest. Poor Darryl.

  ‘No feeling sorry for me, mate,’ he said sternly, as if reading her mind. Although he was most likely in her mind. Wasn’t he? ‘I’m gone. I’m on, like, a different plane of existence.’

  ‘What’s it like … afterwards?’

  ‘Oh, it’s cool. Everyone is so much more chilled than in life. They have a right laugh, looking down at all the dumb-ass stuff people do on earth. I think I’m gonna like it, being dead.’

  Rosie was starting to feel a bit left out. Trust her to be alienated even by hallucinations from her own brain. If that’s what they were. ‘Wha
t’s next? I’ve got to get away from this Justin Bieber-a-thon.’

  Darryl looked fondly at Scarlett. ‘She’s a cute kid.’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t think I see her much. You know – the whole nasty divorce thing. I wish I had done now. She seems cool, despite her taste in music.’ What if this was Rosie’s punishment, to see all the ways she’d messed her life up and not be able to change it? ‘Is there another fun memory coming? Maybe the time I dropped red ice-pop on my white palazzo pants on the school trip to Scarborough and everyone thought I’d got my period? Or is it always going to be ones where I do something awful?’

  ‘Not always. Come on.’

  She closed her eyes, and the sound of canned pop music faded, and the dial appeared. 26 12 1989. Another Christmas memory, then. Somehow she doubted it would be a merry one.

  26 December 1989 (Twenty-eight years ago)

  The smell of pine needles and woodsmoke. Twinkling lights, a real fire in the grate, a tree laden with baubles and tinsel, presents stacked beneath. Rosie found herself in a warm and welcoming room, Paul Daniels’ Christmas show on the TV, which looked tiny and boxy now. She secreted herself behind the tree, although she knew they couldn’t see her. ‘They’ were herself and Daisy, aged five-ish and two-ish, solemn in pyjamas on the sofa, little feet dangling. Daisy’s were encased in puppy-dog slippers. Rosie’s hair looked scarlet in the firelight. She turned to Darryl, hovering by the tree. ‘I remember this. But this is a happy memory.’

  ‘Well, thank goodness for that, eh, mate? Just watch.’

  Their father – much younger, with all his hair, in an eighties sweatshirt – was pacing behind them. ‘Now, girls, remember, a nice big welcome. We’ve got to show Mummy we have everything under control. No mention of the little fire from the Christmas lights, OK?’

  The girls nodded solemnly. Little Rosie said, ‘Daddy, can we say we had chicken nuggets for Christmas dinner?’

  ‘No, darling. Let’s not tell Mummy that.’

  ‘Because she doesn’t like chicken nuggets.’

  ‘Right. So, big smiles and remember: don’t mention the fire. Or the chicken nuggets.’

  Little Rosie nodded. Daisy began to suck her thumb; it was past her bedtime. Their father went nervously to the door and led in their mother, carrying a white bundle in her arms. Rosie was, just for a second, knocked back in shock. Her mother looked so young. So happy. Her red hair, the same colour as Rosie’s own, rippled and flamed. She’d been a sort of ashy blonde for so long Rosie had almost forgotten her natural shade. The deep grooves around her mouth were gone, and her back was straight, and she was … smiling. ‘Look at this! So Christmassy.’

  ‘We decorated the tree, Mummy,’ said Little Rosie.

  ‘You did a fantastic job.’ She eased in next to them on the sofa, and they crowded close to her. Rosie remembered this moment. The slight unease she’d felt for the previous week – meals at the wrong time and jumpers shrunk in the wash, Santa having for the first time ever forgotten to wrap the presents – was gone, and they were all home together and it was Christmas and there were mince pies in the kitchen that she thought she’d be allowed to eat. She’d already primed Daisy to ask, as she was younger and cuter. All of them there, and now there was one more. Their mother moved aside the cheesecloth blanket in her arms. ‘Girls, here’s your little brother.’

  They hung over the little face in the blanket, red and closed like a petal. Rosie remembered thinking he looked a bit like a squashed tomato. ‘What’s his name, Mummy?’ said her younger self.

  ‘Peter, like Granddad’s name. Say hello.’

  Little Rosie reached out hesitantly, and the baby grabbed her finger. On the other side, Daisy was also watching in her usual quiet way. ‘Hello, Petey,’ she pronounced, taking her thumb from her mouth. From then on, they’d always call him that.

  ‘That’s right, darling. He’s littler than you, isn’t he?’

  Daisy looked to Rosie for confirmation that this was now the state of affairs. ‘You’re not the youngest now, Daisy,’ she explained. ‘Petey is.’ The first time she said her brother’s name. Their mother gathered all three of them in her arms, and from behind, their father stroked her hair back gently, to better see his family.

  ‘It’s all of us now,’ said their mother, and Rosie remembered her voice, so full of happiness. ‘Our family.’

  ‘Mummy,’ lisped Daisy, saying her first full sentence. ‘The Christmas tree was on fire.’

  Daisy

  ‘She’s smiling,’ said Scarlett proudly.

  Daisy looked up distractedly from her phone. Where was Gary? He promised he’d come soon. If he didn’t, what did that say about him? She didn’t want to think about that, so she needed him to get here asap. ‘Maybe it’s just an automatic thing, sweetheart.’

  ‘No, really. Look.’

  Daisy looked. It was true – a real Rosie-smile sat on her sister’s face. One she hadn’t seen for years.

  ‘I think she likes my music,’ said Scarlett, pressing play once again on One Direction’s ‘You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful’.

  A knock at the door announced one of the young doctors, the boy one. Daisy couldn’t think of him as a man; he looked like he’d only just started shaving. ‘How’s it going here?’

  ‘I’m playing her music,’ said Scarlett, beaming.

  ‘A bit of the old One Direction, eh? Think that’ll wake her?’

  ‘If only to throw the phone out the window,’ Daisy said quietly. ‘Is everything OK, Doctor? My parents have just … I can fetch them if you want.’ Her mother was off crying somewhere, she suspected, and her father had taken Carole to the canteen, trying to defuse the stand-off around Rosie’s bed.

  ‘I just wanted to give you this.’ He fished around in his coat pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag with a phone inside. ‘The police took it as part of their inquiries, but they’ve decided not to investigate further. Busy with all the murders and such, you know. It was thrown clear, apparently. Still works, amazingly.’

  It was Rosie’s phone. Daisy stared at it. Only a crack across it suggested it had been involved in a near-fatal accident. Even the phone was old and dented, a cheap model. ‘She had it in her hand?’

  ‘They think so. Wasn’t in her bag with the rest of her stuff.’

  ‘So that means … maybe she just wasn’t looking, maybe she just stepped out?’ Daisy could hear the hope in her own voice. You wouldn’t have your phone in your hand if you were going to throw yourself under a bus. Would you?

  He looked embarrassed. ‘Maybe. If you know the passcode, you could try and get some info off it – see who she texted last, where she was going, that kind of thing.’

  Daisy took the plastic bag. She didn’t know the passcode – yet another thing she didn’t know about Rosie’s life. But if she could get into the phone, maybe it would yield some answers and she could go to her parents and say, Look, Rosie wasn’t trying to kill herself, it was an accident. Find a release for the anxiety that stretched taut between them, stinging like snapping elastic, or for the tight ball of dread under her own ribcage. Of course Rosie wouldn’t do a thing like that. She wouldn’t. And yet, as she watched her sister’s sleeping face ripple with strange emotions, Daisy found that she was still not convinced.

  Rosie

  The Christmas memory had been so lovely. A feeling of being safe and warm and cherished, the excitement of presents and cake in the kitchen, the relief of having her mother back home safe with the new baby. Rosie was still smiling as the memory faded and the world came back, some awful tinny racket playing out of Scarlett’s phone and Daisy in the doorway talking to the young male doctor. God, it was dull being in a coma.

  ‘Hey, girl.’

  Rosie looked up. Melissa had appeared beside her bed, grooving to Scarlett’s music. She was still wearing her school uniform and had her hair in ill-advised pigtails. ‘Hey.’

  ‘This is some awesome disc-age. Rad.’

  ‘Er, what are you on a
bout, Mel?’

  ‘Isn’t that how people talk nowadays? I don’t know, I only had fourteen years on earth and I was tragically uncool for all of them.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ said Rosie, lying. ‘Have you got another memory for me?’

  ‘Yeah. Are you starting to remember what happened to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s like: when I first woke up I had nothing. I was all pure and clean. A blank slate. I didn’t even know my own name. And now I’m – well, I don’t really like what I’m seeing. It’s all arguments and sadness and, you know, general badness.’ Maybe she was a terrible person. She’d alienated everyone around her, so completely it was almost a strategy. ‘Mel … am I horrible now?’

  ‘I only know what you know, Ro-Ro.’

  ‘Did you ever call me that in real life?’

  ‘Sure I did. We were pals, for a while.’

  Rosie sighed. ‘I’m so sorry, Melissa. If I could go back, do it all over again, we’d totally still be friends.’

  ‘Would we? Could we make friendships bracelets and discuss the plot of My So-Called Life and talk about boys we fancied?’

  ‘Of course we could. Though you know that show got cancelled after one season.’

  Melissa shook her head sadly. ‘That sucks. But there’s no do-overs in life, Ro-Ro. That’s the sad truth. You can’t change any of the things that have happened to you.’

  ‘What’s the point of this, then?’

  ‘To change what comes next. If there is a next. To try and figure out if you want your life back or not. Anyway, shall we go? Time’s a-ticking. Day two.’ She looked at her Casio watch again. Rosie prepped herself for another memory. It was a bit like going under a wave when you learned to surf (but when had she learned to surf?). The first time was terrifying, salt water gushing into your eyes and nose and mouth, but then after a few gos you knew you wouldn’t die, and you just got on with it.