Forever Rose

by Hilary McKay

  ‘And you and Sarah?’

  ‘Sorry. Not and me and Sarah.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Rose, I know you would like the whole family decorating the tree together with deep snow on the ground outside and stars like white flowers blossoming in the Christmas sky and Tiny Tim’s crutches propped up in the corner…Stop glaring, Rosy Pose!…And Little Donkey Little Donkey with its heavy load walking in the air with the Snowman and that boy in the grandad dressing gown…I’m going to make you smile, give in, stop fighting it!…And Santa hanging mistletoe over a blissful turkey that died ready-roasted of its own free will…’

  I gave in and smiled.

  ‘…but it just cannot happen. On Saturday Sarah and I are doing an all-night baby-sit for our Spanish teacher. We promised ages ago, and she doesn’t charge for Extra Spanish and it’s the only way we can say thank you. Therefore I have to tell you that on this particular tree-adorning issue poignant silences will have no effect at all! GOOD GRIEF IS THAT THE TIME?’

  It was the time.

  And so poor Saffy leaped out of bed, tripped over my legs and fell hard on her face into a very sharp sticking out part of David’s drum kit.

  I heard her gasp.

  Then she doubled up and sat down suddenly on her bed and I knew it was going to be awful.

  ‘Oh bloody bloody hell,’ she moaned (thus ending a lifetime of never swearing). ‘I daren’t look. You’ll have to. Put the light on, Rose.’

  So I did, and after the dazzled pain of going from 0–100 watts had left my eyes, I looked.

  There was a split like the slice of a very sharp knife above Saffy’s right eye.

  About as long as my little finger.

  And so deep that you could see the layers of wrapping that made her face. Creamy skin and pinky purple flesh and then a smooth unnatural blueish white.

  Is that the colour of Saffron’s bones?

  Yes.

  At first Mummy thought the trouble was with me, because Saffron was perfectly quiet, bound with silence, and I was the one who was screaming. But then I pointed and Mummy saw.

  There wasn’t really much blood.

  ‘Ice,’ said Mummy, ‘and then hospital. Casualty. Don’t panic. Oh Saffy darling!’

  ‘It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault, it’s all my fault,’ I whimpered (unhelpfully, but do not forget I had seen the extent of the damage and I was suffering from shock. Everyone knows that humans are rigid with bones but you do not expect to actually see them).

  ‘Frozen peas,’ said Mummy, not looking at all well. ‘Or something. Hurry, Rose, while I help Saffy on with something warm. Bill come home.’

  Daddy. He does not come home often, although far more since his girlfriend dumped him.

  That was my fault too.

  Our car does not always start first time, but this morning it did and as soon as we had scratched enough ice off the windows for Mummy to be able to see out we were off. And five minutes later we were stopped by a police car which overtook us from behind with all lights flashing and then ground to a halt in front.

  Oh.

  Two policemen got out, one old and hideous, one young and beautiful. Mummy buried her face in her hands because she has an irrational fear of law and order. I cannot think why. She never does any crimes.

  However, despite her fear, Mummy is always very brave in a crisis. Her face was in her hands for only the smallest moment. Then she said, ‘Look after Saffy, Rose,’ and climbed out and started negotiations with Old and Hideous while Young and Beautiful rummaged around in the police car boot in an urgent kind of way, looking for something.

  Handcuffs, I wondered. Ball and chain? Portable flat pack prison?

  Nearly.

  Fancy breathalysing someone at 8:45 a.m. on a freezing cold Thursday morning.

  ‘Why?’ I demanded, climbing out and shouting so furiously that O and H actually answered me.

  ‘Weaving about all over the road.’

  No, she wasn’t! I’m sure she wasn’t. I was there and I’d have noticed.

  ‘Not everyone realises,’ continued O and H, in a very loud voice that attracted the interest of several people passing by, ‘that a heavy session the night before can—’

  I am sorry that I kicked him.* It is not the way I have been brought up to behave, but poor Mummy. She has drunk nothing stronger than herbal tea for days.And Saffy was bleeding.

  ‘Bleeding?’ asked Young and Beautiful, who had been hanging around looking very bored. ‘Oh dear,’ and he went round to our car and opened a door to peer in at Saffy. She was holding a bag of frozen baby Brussels sprouts and chestnuts to her forehead because I had not been able to find peas and she looked faint and furious and completely unencouraging.

  ‘Very seasonal,’ commented Y and B, grinning at the Brussels sprouts. ‘And what have you been doing, then?’

  ‘Leave her alone!’ I shouted, crying and punching him (which I now also regret although I do not think he felt it).‘She walked into an upside-down drum kit and it cut her right down to the bone!’

  ‘Move the veg!’ commanded Y and B. ‘Turn to the light! Oh yes. Oh very nasty. Oh dear.’

  We drove to the hospital under police escort, with the police car in front flashing its lights like we were a big important emergency. I suppose I should have enjoyed it.

  But I didn’t.

  Once in Casualty the police escort deserted us, although not before Y and B had given his phone number on a card to Saffy. ‘You wouldn’t believe the head injuries I’ve seen,’ he remarked, breathing too much. ‘Yours is nothing, darling.’

  ‘That was the worst chat-up line I ever heard,’ said Saffy, tossing away his card as soon as he had gone. Then she retired to be grumpy behind her Brussels sprouts while Mummy closed her eyes, leaned back in her red plastic chair and went into a trance. I went and fiddled with the horrible Accident and Emergency Christmas tree. It was such a long morning that I had time to rearrange all the decorations and make a fairy for the top out of two plastic cups and Mummy’s lipstick.

  Hours and hours later we climbed into the car to drive back home. Now instead of vegetables Saffy’s head was covered in a big white dressing. Under the dressing were stitches, real ones, not the Sellotape ones they use for lesser injuries.

  ‘Good as new!’ announced the nurse who did the deed, but Saffy did not really look good as new. She looked awful. Her hair was streaked with dried blood and her front was splattered with Brussels sprout and chestnut juice that had somehow leaked from the bag as it thawed. I am often dirty and sometimes bandaged but I always look more or less the same. It is not like that for beautiful people. Things show up on them more, and injuries look much worse. They find this very hard to put up with and it makes them snarl at their relations.

  Then when their relations are upset they are sorry.

  But it does not last long.

  Driving home with Saffy was like driving home with a repentant crocodile with short-term memory problems.

  ‘Shut it, Rose!’ she snapped, nearly every time I spoke, and then, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’

  Home was so gloomy I went to school and nobody tried to stop me. I wished I hadn’t when I got there. Lunch had just finished, everyone was wearing paper cracker hats and there was a smell of turkey and stuffing in the air as thick as fog.

  ‘You missed Christmas dinner, Rose!’ exclaimed Molly, rushing at me. ‘Where have you been? Are you ill? Kiran saved you two crackers and Mr Spencer says we have tests in Science, Maths and Literacy this afternoon…’

  Just when you think a day can’t get any worse it does. There was a message for me on the answerphone when I got back.

  ‘Hi there, Permanent Rose.’

  Tom in New York, and I had missed it. I felt like lying on the floor and howling. I would have done, I was just about to, when the telephone rang again.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Rose?’ said Daddy.

  ‘Oh bloody bloody hell!’ I wailed.


  ‘ROSE!’ thundered Daddy.

  ‘I hope you like defrosted pizza marinaded in melted ice cream,’ said Indigo. ‘The freezer door’s been open all day.’

  ‘Why sleep with a drum kit if you don’t have to?’ asked Sarah when she came round to survey the damage that evening. ‘I have two beds in my room and Justin Timberlake all over the walls. Mum would love to have you, and Eve wouldn’t mind, would you, Eve?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Mummy, unhappily.

  Saffy even took her angel. It has stood on her windowsill for so long the room looks empty without it.

  ‘How can a room containing a full-size drum kit look empty?’ said Saffron, when I said this.

  I don’t know, but it does.

  ‘Is Saffy not needing her room just now then?’ asked David, in a speculative kind of way.

  ‘Hate the shed,’ murmured Mummy, swallowing Paracetamol at the kitchen door.

  WHAT?

  ‘I hate

      My shed

        I said,’

  said Mummy.

  * NB if you are eleven and crying and kick a policeman you do not get arrested. You get glanced at.

  Friday December 15th

  The Unlovable Mr Spencer followed by:

  Medical News

  Bad News

  and

  Totally Awful News.

  I Will Start With the Unlovable Mr Spencer

  This morning the UMS read out the results of the three tests he gave us yesterday. Here in Class 6, until Mr Spencer took control of our happiness, test results were read out in alphabetical order which meant I always came first.

  Not any more. The UMS read them out in order of marks. I came last in all three.

  ‘Obviously I expected a substantial drop in standard when I moved you away from Kiran,’ he said. ‘But I must admit I did not expect such an abysmal plummet. What are we to do with you? Yes, Girl-at-the-Back?’

  ‘It is not really fair,’ said Molly (who had not yet noticed that things are not fair), ‘because Rose had a very bad morning yesterday and she missed Christmas lunch except for her crackers and had to do the tests straight after and I think you ought to be…ought to be…ought to be…’

  ‘Mmmm?’ enquired Mr Spencer, licking his teeth.

  ‘Nice,’ said Molly.

  ‘Nice?’

  ‘And give her another chance!’

  NO!

  Across the room from me Kiran caught my eye. She knew what was coming, and so did I.

  ‘What an excellent idea!’ said Mr Spencer, smiling enormously into Molly’s alarmed blue eyes.

  I could see how sorry Molly was, but it took two break times, lunch and most of PE to work through those papers again.

  ‘The man is a monster,’ said Kiran, grabbing me after school. ‘Come on, Rose, hurry! I bet you haven’t packed anything yet!’

  ‘Packed?’

  ‘For Monday! The class trip! Our wild night out! And by the way, Molly and I have told our mothers we will be spending the night with you (which is perfectly true of course). And we thought you could tell yours you are spending it with us (which obviously you will be). Oh don’t look so muddled, Rose! You can’t have forgotten everything! Arctic foxes’ cosy shed? Space blankets? David Attenborough? Wake up!’

  ‘But what will happen on Monday night if our families ring each other up to check where we are?’

  ‘Of course they won’t,’ said Kiran, cheerfully hurrying me through the puddles. ‘Why should they? They’re used to us having sleepovers. We’ve stopped at each other’s loads of times before. Wear very warm clothes, Rose, and bring lots of food. And a torch. I’m going to the library tomorrow to see if they have any books about identifying animals by their roars…’

  Kiran had gone mad and I told her so.

  ‘You’ve forgotten what school trips are like!’ I said. ‘They take lists! Registers! It really can’t work, Kiran. They’ll take a register on the coach going, and another before they come home.’

  ‘Kai’s got that covered,’ said Kiran smugly.

  ‘And we won’t just have Mr Spencer with us. There’ll be another teacher as well. There’s always two.’

  ‘No problem. It’s that tiny little student who doesn’t know anyone’s names.’

  ‘The Zoo people,’ I said desperately, ‘will catch us in the morning! Then what?’

  ‘Then we’ll have done it so it won’t matter a bit,’ replied Kiran, hopping cracks in the pavement. ‘Come on, Rose!’

  But I would not come on. I stomped through the wet until we got to my house, and I did not invite Kiran in. But as she walked away (backwards because she was going to see if she could make it home backwards) I thought of one more thing, and I called after her, ‘You and Molly could do it by yourselves! I don’t have to come. You don’t need me!’

  ‘We don’t need you,’ replied Kiran, laughing at my grumpy face. ‘We want you! Dope!’

  I have to admit, it is nice to be wanted.

  Medical News

  Mummy’s illness has got new tablets and a name.

  Bronchitis

  So now she will be better in nearly no time.

  She says.

  Bad News

  David’s drum kit is no longer in blood-stained pieces all over Saffy’s bedroom. It has been reassembled the right way up.

  There are some words, Indigo told me yesterday, that you can only say when you have very recently split your head open down to the bone on somebody else’s drum kit. Otherwise don’t even think about trying it, Rose.

  So I will just have to call this:

  Totally Awful News

  My lovely misty pinewood full of Christmas trees, the nicest drawing I ever did.

  Vandalised!!!!!!

  Gluey glitter in the snow. Wrapping paper decorations on the branches. Hologram strings of tinsel loops. A smallish reindeer with a red plastic nose and unnaturally jointed legs and a large two-dimensional cotton wool snowman grinning under my silvery moon.

  Who has done this thing to me? Saffron and Sarah as a terrible joke? Mummy, in a spell of bronchitis-induced insanity? Indigo, in revenge for the time I bit him when I was two years old?

  I do not think so.

  I was speechless with unhappiness.

  Later, while Indigo was preparing/ruining supper for every one (meatballs and tinned spaghetti served with extra spaghetti.V. nice if only Indigo leaves it as that and does not try to add rotten vitamins. And flavour. Which he is terribly prone to do) he tried to cheer me up by talking about Tom.

  ‘Can’t you really guess what he asked for for Christmas?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘Yes, because he likes you better than me. Oh, Indigo! Don’t put that stuff in!’

  Too late. Indigo had added a whole handful of what looked like the contents of the vacuum cleaner bag. Disgusting Dried Mixed Mediterranean Herbs.

  ‘Now it’s going to taste weird,’ I said crossly.

  ‘Now it’s going to taste nice,’ said Indigo. ‘Come on! Tom’s Christmas present! Do you want me to give you a clue?’

  No.

  ‘You’re in an awful mood.’

  Yes I am.

  ‘Don’t forget you are going to have to say thank you to David!’

  WHAT!

  ‘Or else he’ll be upset. It was very kind of him. And clever. I thought he’d just gone upstairs to fix his drum kit.’

  His blood-stained drum kit! I wonder if he washed the blood off.

  (How callous if he did.)

  (Or if he didn’t.)

  ‘Go and check,’ suggested Indigo, which I knew was just a plot to get me out of the kitchen. (It was not going to work either. A whole tin of yucky sweetcorn has already been tipped into the meatball saucepan, as well as the Mediterranean vacuum cleanings. Indigo thought I had not noticed but I had and now I was On Guard.)

  ‘I thought David did well!’ continued Indigo. ‘He must have got the stu
ff together and planned it really carefully to do it all so quickly…’

  (He was trying to make David sound like some kind of Father Christmas but it was not working with me.)

  ‘…It’s not even as if he is any good at Art.’

  Oh, tell me about it, Indigo! And what is that you are holding behind your back?

  I don’t believe it!

  Sun-dried tomatoes!

  I made a grab, but too late. Indigo held them above my head where I could not reach and poured them in from a height.

  ‘Stop it!’ I yelled. ‘Why do you have to keep putting vegetables into everything?’

  ‘Jamie Oliver,’ said Indigo.

  I shouted that I was totally fed up of Indigo’s friends ruining everything. First my bedroom and now my supper.

  ‘OK, we’ll make a bargain,’ said Indigo, when he had stopped laughing. ‘You be nice to David and I’ll miss out the French beans…’

  No. French beans (horrible poisonous things) do not frighten me. They are easy to pick out and leave on the side of your plate.

  ‘…and the garlic purée and the freshly ground black pepper…’

  Garlic purée!

  He never would.

  Black pepper.

  He might.

  ‘…and you can have grated cheese on top.’

  Oh, all right.

  I’ll be nice to David.

  But I won’t say thank you.

  And I may

  Run away.

  To the Zoo.

  Saturday 16th December

  Reading and Love

  ‘I’ve noticed David does not seem to be having a very good time at home lately,’ remarked Indigo.

  Well, me neither! And anyway, David is not at home. He is having a lovely time camping in his dead grandad’s attic.