Her Name Was Rose

by Claire Allan

  ‘Is this awkward for you all?’ I asked softly. ‘Someone being here who isn’t Rose.’

  She looked down at her sandwich, put it down and sipped from her cup.

  ‘Not awkward as such. Strange maybe. I never thought we wouldn’t have her here. Even when she was on maternity leave with Jack she would call in all the time. She couldn’t stay away. She’d pop in for a five-minute chat and end up offering to sort out some charts for Owen, or help out with a nervous patient. She had a way of calming them. All of us got used to nursing Jack while she did her bit, not that we complained. That baby is a dote.’

  Her smile dropped at the mention of his name. I suppose she was imagining him as a poor motherless child – the baby that couldn’t understand where his mother had gone according to Cian. I reached over and rubbed her hand.

  ‘I can’t imagine …’ I said.

  ‘She loved it here too. Said we were her family. You know, she didn’t have to work – especially after Cian’s books became so successful. He wanted her to stay at home with Jack but she said we were all her family too, and while she loved him, she loved us as well. I used to tell her I’d give anything to have a husband who begged me to stay at home – provided for us …’ Her eyes filled and I gave her hand an extra squeeze. She sniffed and looked up, roughly rubbing her eyes, her perfect eyeliner smudging. ‘Yes, but we have to move on, don’t we? And God, here you are putting in a great first morning. We don’t want you to think you have to try and fill her shoes. You’re your own person and we’re happy to have you here.’

  ‘I understand that it’s tough. What happened to her … The shock of it must have been fierce.’

  ‘It was,’ she said, putting her coffee cup down and rewrapping her half-eaten lunch. She stood up. ‘It still is. Look, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and check my phone – make sure the kids’ school hasn’t been on to me. There’s always one of them forgetting their PE gear or recorder or some other such disaster. I do my best to keep on top of them but, well, I’m only one woman, and not Wonder Woman.’ She offered me a smile but it didn’t seem to reach all the way to her eyes. As she left the room she glanced again in the direction of the picture on the wall.

  ‘I’m my own person. I’m here on my own merits. I am doing a good job,’ I whispered to myself as I forced the last bites of the sandwich down – the zesty tomato chutney now tasting a little bitter.

  As I balled up the wrapping from my sandwich, Donna came back in, and took a deep breath. ‘Look, see everything here, with Rose, with it all. It’s just … well, it’s complicated, and it’s still raw.’

  ‘Complicated?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  She looked to the door, and back to me. ‘Look, it’s … maybe complicated is the wrong word. There’s a lot to try and make sense of is all. It gets on top of me sometimes.’

  I would have asked her more, but just as I opened my mouth one of the other girls walked into the kitchen and started asking us about our day. The moment was gone, but the words would stay with me.

  That night, changed into my lounge wear, my make-up removed with cleansers and toners and not my usual swipe of a baby wipe, I smiled at a friend request from Donna on my Facebook page, and when Owen sent a quick text to say he hoped my first day hadn’t been too off-putting.

  I typed a quick reply, put my phone down and sat back and thought of everything that had happened over the last few years. After Ben. My life was divided that way; before Ben and after Ben. The actual ‘with Ben’ stage didn’t even seem to matter so much anymore. It had been a lie anyway.

  Was this, this new era at Scott’s, a new beginning? I didn’t know. I wanted a new beginning. A new start. Friends. A lover maybe. A life.

  All the things I had fought in vain for over the last few years. The years that had followed that most public fall from grace. I had been broken. In pieces. Pieces that no matter how patiently, how delicately, I tried to fit them back together, could never be the same as they were before they were broken in the first place.

  Sharp edges jutted out. Others, dulled by thick globs of glue – ugly, deformed, misshapen. All the pieces were still there. But they weren’t the same. I was not the same. How could I have been? The whole had become both more and less than the sum of all its parts.

  Maybe what I had been trying to do these last few years was to break myself again in a stupid attempt to make this break cleaner, hoping the fix would be neater this time. But it just made it worse. The gaps started to widen. So I stuffed the gaps with whatever I could find. First drink, then pills. They made the broken edges softer. They made it more bearable.

  Except they also made it worse. They facilitated me making poor decisions. Voicing my hurt to him. To show Ben my anger, and not realise that the truth can often be distorted. He told his side of the story – his lies – to anyone who would listen and they believed him because they saw the drunk I was quickly becoming. Believed I was unstable.

  I started to spend each and every minute of darkness in a ball of anxiety, sure that it would never get light again. You can’t take these things for granted. When you get complacent things go wrong.

  I had thought about suicide. Especially at night when the very act of existing hurt. When even banging my head against the wall didn’t silence them. When I missed him so badly that all I could think of was how little effort it would take to make it all stop.

  To break myself so badly that no one – not even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men – could put me back together again.

  I even planned it. It was the awful winter of 2010. The snow didn’t seem to stop. The headlines were filled with record low temperatures. The River Foyle froze, Europe’s fastest-flowing river, now creaking, slow, thick with the effort of trying to break through the ice.

  I planned to go the beach. I would wash down some pills with vodka, walk down to the shore front, sit crossed-legged on the sand, and wait for the cold to feel too warm. Wait for the vodka and the pills to lull me to sleep, or to a place where I didn’t hurt so much.

  Maud thinks I mustn’t have really wanted to do it. She thinks it was all a cry for help. Why else would I have sent Ben an email telling him that it was my turn to leave him? That I couldn’t live without him.

  Maud needed to think it was just a cry for help, if you ask me. Because it was too hard to think it was anything but. And my parents? I don’t think they have ever forgiven me. I let them down. How could I have done that to them? As if I had done it just to spite them. Our relationship has never recovered. I have never recovered.

  Chapter Eight

  2007

  Rose

  Rose Maguire: is in a relationship with Cian Grahame

  There’s a freckle about two inches under my left breast that Cian loves. I’m not sure I even paid attention to it before he told me how cute he thought it was. Before he circled his finger around it as we lay in bed together before leaning across to kiss it, so tenderly that I could only hold my breath.

  ‘Even your imperfections make you more perfect,’ he had whispered, and my heart had soared. I was falling in love with him. Properly in love. Not just lust, or desire or those feelings that aren’t real that just rush in at the start of something to make people obsessed with each other. This was something more. Love that I’d read about, where you feel invincible; as if you have met the other half of yourself that you didn’t quite know was missing.

  I knew that I ached when we weren’t together – although he sent me flowers to work, called me at lunchtime, sent romantic text messages telling me he couldn’t wait to be with me again. When I went home he would come and make me dinner – and he finally let me start reading what he had been working on.

  It was so different to what I normally read – but it was good. He was good. He had talent to burn. I wanted to tell everyone about him – about his writing – but God, he was so shy about it. So secretive. It had to be just right he said. I felt so privileged that he let me read it.

>   But more than that, Cian wanted me to keep him company while he wrote round the clock. I was his muse, he said. Imagine that. Me? A muse! It made me feel unique and special, even if sometimes it seemed that a muse’s role was not to talk much but supply cups of coffee and Custard Creams when needed.

  Of course I got to be there when the doubt started to creep in too – doubt, it seems, having a habit of creeping in with writers quite frequently at 3am when I was trying to sleep. But I loved him enough not to mind waking to soothe him, to calm him with a kiss. To tell him how good he was. It made me feel special, and he would hold me tighter and tell me he didn’t know how he ever wrote without me, how he felt as if he was on the cusp of his life finally coming together, both personally and professionally. He was getting all he ever wanted – and taking me with him.

  There was a hotshot agent interested in representing Cian and this book so the stakes were high on him getting this just right. It was incredible pressure to work under. Not like my job where I went in, sorted out people’s teeth, and went home again. I didn’t have to think about my job morning, noon and night. Cian said the book was always with him. Always. I’d laughed, asked him if it was with him even when we were, you know …

  He looked at me very intently and I felt that familiar curl in the pit of the stomach – the one that made me want to forget the run of myself and have noisy, messy sex with him right there and then.

  ‘It’s always with me,’ he had said and then he’d kissed me so passionately, with such an intensity it almost took my breath away.

  If he became a little distracted from time to time I reminded myself it was, as he called it, just part of the creative process. I remembered how it came and went – how when things were going well for him he became almost euphoric with the joy from it and I encouraged those good times and was suitably sympathetic when he had a bad day.

  And I revelled in the highs – in the way he kissed that freckle just under my left breast and told me that my imperfections made me more perfect.

  Perhaps it was the same with him? And God, I was falling so in love with the perfect and the imperfect parts of him that I don’t think anything could have stopped me.

  Chapter Nine

  Emily

  A man was arrested in relation to Rose Grahame’s death two weeks after I started work at Scott’s Dental. I say a man, but he was more of a boy. Nineteen years old. A ‘frequent flyer’ at the local Magistrates’ Court, according to the prosecutor who oversaw his first appearance. Charged with a host of offences, including Aggravated Vehicle Taking and Failing to Stop and Report an Accident, Kevin McDaid wore a greying shirt with a black tie – probably the only tie he owned, bought for funerals – along with a cheap suit as he stood in the dock. The pictures in the local media showed him trying to hide his face as he was led in handcuffs from the court building to the waiting police van. Remanded in custody. Bail denied. But his solicitor made it clear he would appeal that decision in the High Court. There was every chance he’d be out on the street in days. A young lad who had a penchant for stealing cars, driving them too fast and leaving them abandoned somewhere. He’d never offended on this level before, his solicitor said. ‘Racked with guilt, my client has been unable to sleep and has turned once again to alcohol and drugs.’

  He had ‘simply panicked’ when he hit Rose and had driven on in that state of panic. He knew there were people around who could help Rose. He didn’t think he’d hurt her. Not really. Not enough to kill her.

  It probably made me a bad person that I sagged with relief at the news. He was admitting it. It had been an accident. I had overreacted thinking it was anything more sinister than that. Maud had been right. Things had been crazy with Ben. That he had got in touch again so close to Rose’s death was nothing more than a coincidence.

  Kevin McDaid ‘wouldn’t trouble the court’ his solicitor had said, indicating his client would be pleading guilty to all charges. It should have made things easier. Possibly even make us feel some compassion of sorts for Kevin McDaid. Kevin McDaid, who hadn’t even shaved before his court appearance, if the pictures were anything to go by. His stubble, unlike Cian’s, was the kind that was borne out of laziness and not any kind of a style statement.

  Although there was a trace of utter wretchedness about him – in the way he walked, the scuffed trainers on his feet, the panicked look on his face – I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for him. Even though I, of all people, knew that people could fuck things up.

  He was nineteen. Even if he got a heavy sentence, he would still be out and walking the streets in his early thirties. He would still have all the years Rose didn’t have.

  The news of the arrest and of the court appearance saw a dip in mood at Scott’s. It made me feel a little guilty that it had brought me a sense of relief I hadn’t felt in weeks. At least I didn’t have to sneak around trying to see what was happening; everyone in Scott’s was talking about it. Everyone, naturally enough, was obsessed by it. Even Owen took time out from a patient to watch the lunchtime news report, and to shake his head when Kevin McDaid appeared on screen.

  ‘Isn’t he one of ours?’ Tori had asked, and a room of horrified faces turned to look at her. ‘I think he’s one of our patients – or was. There’s something about him?’

  Donna had gone to the office to check our records and came back a few minutes later, ashen-faced. ‘He was a patient here before. Lapsed now. Was here as a child; hasn’t been since he was sixteen.’

  Owen walked out of the room, slamming the door so strongly behind him that tea from a cup that had been sitting beside me shook and spilled onto the table. For the rest of the day he went about his work saying only what he needed to and no more. The rest of us walked on egg shells around him, all the while lost in our own thoughts about how the foolish actions of a nineteen-year-old could change the lives of so many.

  *

  On the day Kevin McDaid was brought before the court, I found myself itching to get on Facebook to try and see how Cian was coping. Was he angry like Owen? Was he a bigger person than many of us? Had he found compassion for his wife’s killer? Did he have a sense of closure? A victory that, bar sentencing, the man who had taken his wife from him was being brought to justice?

  I found he hadn’t written much. No letter to Rose. No rant at the judiciary. No angry words aimed at Kevin McDaid. In fact, just four words.

  From Darkness Comes Light.

  It was the title of his most successful book to date. I hadn’t read it, to be honest. I wasn’t much of a reader. Didn’t have the concentration span for anything more than reading bite-size portions of news and stories. Still I clicked onto Amazon, searched Cian’s name and the book title.

  The blurb didn’t enlighten me much. I was able to ascertain, amid the flowery language, that it was a story about redemption, of a flawed detective who found he was losing all he held dear, and who battled to make his life his own again.

  I clicked to buy it, wondering if Cian and I were more kindred spirits than I had ever thought before; if he would understand, in a way few could, that flawed people can find the light again.

  When I asked the girls at work a bit more about Rose and Cian, being so very careful to make sure I didn’t reveal just how much I had gleaned about them from my hours on the internet, Tori told me they had been the most in love couple she had ever set eyes on.

  ‘He would come and pick her up from work each day. He used to tell me he couldn’t wait a minute more to see her. And that wee baby of theirs? Well you combine the genetics of that pair and you get a baby that could be a model. Rose was such a good mum to him too. She doted on him.’

  I wondered what that was like, to have someone come to collect you from work because they just could not bear to be away from you for five more minutes? Oh, to have someone love me like that and mean it.

  So when I read Cian’s posts on Facebook, when I thought of a man who feared losing it all more than anything in the world, I thought of Tori�
��s words – the dreamy look that came across her face when she spoke of him – and I thought how unjust it was that someone with so much love to give had been left with this gaping hole in his life?

  On occasion, when I closed my eyes at night in my bed, I allowed myself to picture his face. Allowed myself to think he was saying those love-filled words to me. That he would look at me with such an intensity that I would fear my breath would catch in my throat forever. That maybe he would kiss me, the roughness of his stubble rubbing against my chin and my face so that when he pulled away I would feel that I had been thoroughly kissed. I tried to not allow myself to think about that very much because it felt a little wrong.

  But sometimes, in the darkness of my bedroom at night, it felt very, very right.

  *

  It was an unusually quiet Tuesday morning when the door of Scott’s Dental Practice opened and a man pushing a buggy edged his way in backwards out of the rain.

  I was at the reception desk dealing with patients, beside Tori who was answering the phones. I looked up when the door opened, an instinctual reaction to the gust of cuttingly cold air that rushed in and made me shiver where I sat. Fat droplets of rain ran from the man’s coat to the non-slip mat underneath his feet. His hair was matted to his head and his jeans bore a tide mark from where they had soaked up the moisture from the ground. He brushed the excess water from the top of the rain cover on the buggy, sending it splashing onto the street below before he turned around and closed the door behind him.

  I knew him immediately. Even though he was soaked and tired-looking. Even though his face was thinner than it had been before, more drawn.

  Cian Grahame. I felt myself suck in the air around me, my hands tense, my brain screaming at me not to welcome him by name. To fight the urge to run up to him and hug him and tell him I was so, so sorry for his loss. That I found his letters to her moving and genuine and heartbreaking. That I had started to read his book, that I felt enchanted by the lyrical language, by the sense that he knew me, that he was talking about me in his fluid prose. I held my breath as he walked towards me. I peeked over the top of the desk to see a sleeping toddler lying back in his buggy and then I raised my head to look at Cian, directly into his eyes. I prepared myself to welcome him in the most professional way possible. He didn’t know who I was and I, as far as everyone knew, did not know him.