“So you left your husband, then?” he asked her, leaning his chin on his folded arms, so that his dark eyes could find hers under her curtain of hair. “Ran out on him?”
“Yes.” Rose looked up. “I suppose you would call it a midlife crisis.”
“I wouldn’t call it anything, I have no idea what happened, only that . . .” Ted hesitated, “you look like you need that drink.”
“I do,” Rose replied simply. “Maybe a little too much. Dad drank, Mum drank. I must be a shoo-in for alcoholism.”
“I don’t reckon you are,” Ted said, scrutinizing her with a sideways tilt of his head. “One thing about working in a pub is that you get to see the real drinkers, the ones who can’t get through the day without taking the edge off, firsthand. They’ve got a particular look, a way about them. Even the ones that look respectable and in control. You don’t have that. And besides, you’re obviously going through a bad patch. I feel for you.”
Rose shook her head. “Don’t pity me. I don’t need to be pitied. I’ve escaped, you see, I’ve made it this far. I might look like a waif lost in the storm but, I promise you, right now is the strongest that I have ever been in my life.”
“Is that right?” Ted smiled at her, as if he somehow knew different.
Rose found herself returning his smile, as each consecutive sip of whiskey seemed to thaw her out.
“How unchivalrous you are to doubt me,” she said. “So are you saying I look old and tired and worn out from fighting?”
“Not at all,” Ted said, slipping just a little closer to her. “You look great, as it goes.”
Rose snorted with laughter, inhaling the whiskey the wrong way, so it burnt her tubes as she coughed and sputtered.
“Oh, Ted,” she said, smiling at him, “you are young and naïve, and oddly interested in me for reasons I still don’t really understand. But you make me laugh, and that’s rare, so thank you.”
“Happy to oblige,” Ted said, smiling as he took a sip of his own drink. “And you are interesting, that’s why I’m interested in you. We don’t get many interesting women round here. You’re like one of those femmes fatales out of a film, dangerous and mysterious!”
“Oh my God, you really know how to spin a line, don’t you?” Rose laughed, wondering what her life would have been like if she’d met a boy like Ted when she was the right age, before Richard had ever come into her life. How different would she, her life, have been if she’d met a man with whom she could simply laugh, whose eyes she could look into without hesitation, a man who’d made her feel . . . simply normal? “Luckily for you I’m far too old and experienced to fall for it.”
“So far.” Ted nodded with a slow smile. “So far. That will all change when you come to my gig.”
“I’m not coming to your gig,” Rose said firmly.
“Oh, you are,” Ted said. “I guarantee it. It’s either a night in the pub or another night with my mum.”
“You make a compelling case,” Rose said, smiling.
“Good.” Ted seemed genuinely pleased.
“But now I have to get back to Maddie.” Rose pushed her empty glass across the counter towards him, glad that she didn’t feel the need to have another. “Thanks, Ted, for the lift.”
“Anytime,” Ted said. “I’ll drop that petrol can off for you.” Rose could feel his eyes on her back as she walked out of the pub. When was the last time a man had looked at her at all, let alone that way? Rose knew exactly, down to the very last second.
• • •
Rose remembered vividly what it had first been like to be noticed by Richard.
Almost eighteen years old, she hadn’t realized until she saw that flash of recognition in his eyes that she’d been living for months, since even before Mum died, out of sight. She had made herself invisible, keeping her head down, doing her work without soliciting any attention, happy just to be Rose, the girl who always tagged along, sort of funny, not too pretty, quiet, nothing-special Rose. The one Shona always made come out on a Saturday night with the rest of the gang, even though the rest of the gang could take or leave the Goth girl. In a funny sort of way, those few months after her mother died and before Richard had been some of the happiest in her life. She had been no one special, but she had been free, and it was a freedom that, at the age of seventeen, Rose was just blossoming into. And then Richard looked at her, noticed her, and she realized in that exact second how much she longed to be looked at, talked to, touched by him. How much she wanted him to think she was special.
When Rose left work that evening he was waiting for her outside the café. Momentarily halted by the sight of him, Rose thought about ignoring him, hurrying past as if she had no idea who he was. But she found it impossible.
“Hello,” he said. “I suppose it would be wrong to ask you if I could buy you an ice cream?”
Now Rose remembered how warm his smile made her feel, almost like the whiskey.
“I’d be very happy if I never saw another ice cream again,” she said, brushing her loose hair off her face, making herself look him in the eye. He looked quite a bit older than she was, in his late twenties, with a business suit on and his neat haircut, completely different from any of the people she had ever known. The boys that Shona and her other friends hung out with, the ones that Rose observed once removed, were just that: boys, still. Here was a grown-up.
“I’m a doctor. I’ve just been for a job interview, for a GP, down the road. I don’t know Broadstairs very well, and as I might be moving here it would be nice if a local might show me a good place to get a cup of tea.”
Rose hesitated, glancing over her shoulder as if someone might be waiting for her. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go with him, it was just that she had no idea what to say, or how.
“I mean, don’t worry if you have to be somewhere,” Richard said, sweetly nervous. “You’re probably just about to go and meet your tall boxer boyfriend, aren’t you?”
“No!” Rose found herself laughing; it was an unfamiliar sound. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“I can’t think why not,” Richard said, his gaze focused on her. “You are very lovely.”
“There’s this place, more up in the town,” she said, feeling heat flare under her skin. “Where the cabbies go for breakfast. They do a good cup of tea.”
“Will you show me?” Richard asked, holding out a hand. “I’m Richard, by the way.”
“I will show you.” Rose took it, feeling his warm, strong fingers encircle hers and suddenly discovering that she was reconnected with the world. “My name is Rose.”
A long time later, as the moon rose in the sky and they talked and talked and talked, Richard walked her home.
“House share?” he asked her, looking up at the large, looming house.
“No, it was my mum’s house. Both my parents are dead,” Rose told him apologetically, as if her unconventional life, lived alone, might put him off her.
“You poor thing,” Richard said. “Having to live in this great big pile alone. You should sell it, buy somewhere new—a fresh start.”
Rose shook her head and half smiled. “I don’t actually know how to,” she said. “And besides I don’t think I can until I’m eighteen.”
Richard’s eyebrows had raised, and Rose realized they hadn’t discussed the matter of their respective ages; it hadn’t seemed important.
“I’m seventeen,” Rose told him, adding, “eighteen in October, though.”
“I’m twenty-eight,” Richard told her. “Does it matter?”
“Not to me,” Rose whispered.
“Can I kiss you, Rose?” Richard asked, so softly it was almost a whisper.
Rose took a deep sharp breath, full of the scent of the roses her mother loved to grow, which were just coming into bloom in the garden.
“I’ve never . . . I don’t know how,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” he whispered.
Rose stood perfectly still
on the pavement outside her house, the scent of roses in the air, as Richard kissed her, so sweetly, so gently and tenderly. Her hands remained dormant at her sides, she daren’t even breathe, and yet for every second his lips were on hers she was pulsating with life.
Chapter
Six
“Fuck me, don’t they have summer up here?” was the first thing that Shona said to Rose as she clambered out of her mother’s pride and joy, a ten-year-old lilac Nissan Micra. “You better tell someone it’s August.”
Rose grinned, relief flooding through her to see her friend in the flesh. It felt like a lifetime since they’d seen each other, and just having her friend here lifted Rose’s spirits immeasurably. The two women hugged each other tightly.
“Hello, Shona,” Maddie greeted her. “Where are your children?”
“With their gran,” Shona told Maddie, cheering silently at Rose the second the small girl looked away, disappointed. “When I finally tracked her down she offered to have them for a bit.”
“I wanted to see Tyler. I like Tyler if he plays what I want to play. Still, I don’t like Aaron at all, so I shan’t miss him.”
“He sends you his love too,” Shona said, amused. She was one of the few people that Rose was able to relax with around Maddie. Either she didn’t care about Maddie’s lack of social niceties or didn’t notice them the way most adults did, with sniffy disapproval as if Rose had deliberately done all she could to bring her daughter up with an unerring ability to offend and annoy. “Mum didn’t think a trip up north would be good for them, mainly because she thinks the north is full of cannibals and trolls, so they’re having a few days with her. Which means, I’m off the leash! Where’s the talent round here? I’m gagging.”
“Very nice, I must say,” Jenny, who emerged from behind the front door, muttered quite decidedly over her breath.
“Who’s this, babe?” Shona asked Rose, as she dumped a couple of carrier bags full of her stuff on the pavement and hugged her with one arm whilst taking a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket in her denim jacket and expertly inserting one into her mouth. “Tourist information?”
“This is Jenny. She’s my . . . our landlady.” Rose glanced at Jenny, who wasn’t taking much trouble to hide her disapproval of Shona, which to be fair, in Shona’s case was usually justified. It didn’t help that she had rocked up in the tightest pair of white jeans that Rose had ever seen, with a full three inches of fake-tanned tummy blossoming over the waistband before being barely covered by a flesh-pink top that plunged in a deep V, leaving very little to the imagination. Which was exactly how Shona liked it. It was funny, odd even, because Rose knew that despite her promiscuous dress sense and feisty man-eating attitude, Shona’s actual sexual experience hadn’t been that much more comprehensive than her own. There had been that ill-advised encounter with the neighbor’s oldest son when she was fifteen, a boy she used to knock around with when the girls had waitressed together and who had been much more into Shona than she had been into him, and then there had been Ryan. And despite his constant philandering and serial betrayals, Shona had never seriously looked at another man since she’d first set eyes on him, not even after he had a baby with another woman. And yet, when you met her for the first time, it was a little like meeting Mae West, updated for the twenty-first century in her cutoff tops, her huge hooped earrings swaying back and forth.
“No smoking on the premises,” Jenny said, nodding at the lit cigarette in Shona’s mouth. “Or drinking, or funny business.”
“Funny business?” Shona took a deep drag of her cigarette before flicking it onto the pavement and letting it smoke quietly away in the gutter. “Nothing funny about it, darling, not when I’m doing it.”
“Sooooo!” Rose said cheerfully, picking up Shona’s bags, quietly stubbing the errant cigarette out with the toe of her shoe. “Let’s get you to your room, shall we?”
“I’ve never driven so far in my life,” Shona said as she followed Rose up the stairs, Maddie and Jenny in hot pursuit. “I had to borrow a ton off Mum and that barely covered the petrol, so I’ll probably be doing a midnight flit from here.”
“I want payment up front!” Jenny said, immediately rising to the bait that Shona had dangled so cruelly in front of her, much to Shona’s amusement.
“It’s OK, Jenny,” Rose said, as she opened the door to the room next to hers, which she had requested specifically for her friend. “Shona’s only joking. Aren’t you, Shona?”
“Yep.” Shona smiled briefly at Jenny, which was about as warm as Rose ever saw her get with someone before she knew them. Why she had singled Rose out to befriend from the very beginning, even back in the café days, Rose had yet to work out. It wasn’t as if they were ever obvious soul mates, even after they realized that their relationships had more in common than either one was comfortable admitting. Perhaps for all of Shona’s bravado, her leader-of-the-pack attitude, and the sense of humor that always made her so popular, she’d looked back then at that skinny little orphaned teen selling ice cream because she didn’t know what else to do and seen a true reflection of herself, the way she really was behind all the cut-price glamour. In any case, Rose was reluctant to ask; her dependence on Shona, to be the one person to reassure her that for all her faults she wasn’t completely mad, made her reluctant to do anything that might jinx her only adult friendship.
“When you first arrived, Jenny saw you out the window and said you looked like a hussy,” Maddie told Shona cheerfully, sitting demurely on the bed as Shona tipped the contents of one of her carrier bags into a drawer.
“Maddie,” Rose grumbled, cursing her daughter’s uncanny ability to report verbatim adult conversations that she wasn’t suppose to have listened to.
Shona raised a plucked brow at Jenny.
“Breakfast is between eight and eight thirty, I don’t take orders, I don’t do coffee.” Jenny was clearly determined not to be intimidated by Shona. “I take as I find and speak my mind. That’s the way I am. If you don’t like it, you know what you can do.”
“Or,” Rose said, raising her palms, “or I could just make us all a nice cup of tea.”
“I’ve got to go out,” Jenny said uncertainly, looking as if she was unwilling to leave Shona unsupervised or, indeed, without an armed guard. “Would you like to join us for dinner tonight, Rose? And her too, I suppose.”
“Cheers, thanks,” Shona said. “I will, as I don’t suppose there’s a KFC round here. What is it, haggis or some shit?”
“OK, thank you, see you later!” Rose said, shutting the door on Jenny before a full-blown fight could break out.
“Why do you do it?” Rose asked Shona as soon as she heard Jenny stomping down the stairs, muttering furiously to herself. “You’re not like that, like some cartoon psycho, why do you let people think you are?”
“Dunno.” Shona shrugged at Maddie, who was sorting through her make-up bag, a rare treat, as Rose rarely wore any. She was having a wonderful time not because she was a little girl who liked to play dress-up, but because she liked to sort things. Within a few minutes, Shona’s extensive collection of lipsticks would be lined up, organized by color gradient, and her eye shadows the same. “It’s easier, I suppose, if that’s how people expect me to be. It’s too much effort to make them see different.”
“I see you.” Rose shook her head. “It doesn’t take any effort at all.”
“Ah, no, I think you’ll find that’s you. You’re mental, it’s practically official.” Shona glanced at Maddie and, picking up a bright pink lipstick, pointed her in the direction of the bathroom next door. “Go and try it on. I bet it’ll look lovely.”
“Really?” Maddie eyed the lipstick suspiciously. “I’m only a child, you know. I don’t want to look tarty.”
“Oh, go on, you old stick-in-the-mud. If you’re a child, act like one! Smear it on good and thick!” Still looking uncertain, Maddie obediently trotted off to experiment with make-up, Shona careful to close the door after her.
“Dickhead’s telling anyone who’ll listen that you’ve had a breakdown,” Shona said, suddenly serious. “That you’ve run off with Maddie and that he’s worried for your mental health, that you’ve been talking a lot about your mother’s suicide recently.”
“What?” Rose exclaimed, her eyes widening. “He’s saying I want to kill myself?”
“He’s not saying exactly, he’s saying everything but, and then letting people fill in the gaps. My mum heard it off Yvette Patel, who heard it off that nurse, Margaret. Apparently he ‘confided’ in her about what a terrible burden it’s been, keeping your problems hidden from view all this time, and how he’s worried sick about Maddie’s safety.”
“But that’s not true, that’s not true at all.” Rose was horrified. She knew Richard, she knew how very good he was at being believable. It was his speciality, getting people to trust him, to put their faith in him “The last thing I want to do is kill myself. If anything, I want to save my life, and Maddie’s, by getting away from him! Has he called the police, social services?”
“I don’t know,” Shona apologized, seeing the anxiety wrought on Rose’s face. “But I do know that even if he has, they’re not going to start a nationwide search straightaway and do a reconstruction on Crimewatch. The police are used to couples threatening each other in the heat of an argument, trust me. The neighbors called them out on me and Ryan more times than I want to remember. Only a couple of times did they take us seriously, and even then they needed both of us to agree before they did anything. Anyway, I reckon it’s the same for the social. They’ve got enough on their plates without being sent off on a wild-goose chase at a moment’s notice, even if it is Dr. Dickhead making all the noise. I think you’ve got a little while yet before you have to really worry. Like I said, Rose is mental, chasing some bloody bloke across the country, just because he once sent her a postcard, but not in that way.”
“Said to who?” Rose asked her, worried. “You didn’t tell anyone I was here, did you?”
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