Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon

by Linda Newbery

  She was doing the same as everyone else, stepping delicately around Rose’s name, although Rose was the sole reason for Anna’s presence. Christina busied herself making the tea, glancing at the baby every few seconds. Once, as he stirred, his eyes flickered open, misty blue and unfocused. Anna expected him to squirm and wail as he realized she wasn’t his mother, but he only wriggled against her arm. Tension prickled Anna’s neck. He was too new, too vulnerable; she might carelessly hurt him. There must be countless ways of harming a baby. She saw herself letting him fall from her arms, his bare head striking the table leg, the floor. So easy. What if her arms went limp, her hands released him? By imagining, was she willing it to happen?

  ‘Take him,’ she told Christina. Her voice came out tight and strained. ‘Take him back, please.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Is he wet?’ Christina’s voice was calm, no maternal instinct alerting her to danger.

  ‘No. But …’ Anna’s arms were tense. Now the baby did waken, opening his mouth like a yawning cat; he began to whimper and wriggle, the fingers of one hand curling on her sleeve. His eyes opened. He knows, she thought. He knows he’s not safe with me.

  ‘OK. Give him here.’ Christina took him, giving Anna an amused look, in which Anna read You’ll learn soon enough, when your turn comes.

  ‘Sorry. I knew he’d cry. I don’t know how to hold babies,’ Anna said. She felt a quite uncharacteristic urge for a cigarette, something to occupy her fingers and calm her nerves. She hadn’t smoked since she was a teenager.

  Christina didn’t comment. She soothed the baby, cradling his head against her neck. ‘Tea’s ready,’ she told Anna. ‘If you pour, I’ll take him upstairs and see if he’ll go down.’

  ‘Right. Thanks.’ Anna’s hands were shaking as she lifted the teapot. Her vision blurred giddily. She wanted to be comforted and soothed; she sipped her tea while it was still too hot. The door to the other room opened, releasing a burst of thudding music. Feet ran upstairs; Anna heard a girl’s voice, Christina’s quick ‘Shhh!’ and a toilet flushing. The other child, the boy of eleven, came into the kitchen and took a can of Coke from the fridge, glancing at Anna but not speaking. She didn’t speak either. The calendar on the wall hinted at the demands of being a parent: Matthew dentist. Oliver clinic 10.45. Ellie gym club. When did Christina find her own time? Anna couldn’t see a single indication of something Christina might do for herself.

  Returning, Christina told the children to turn the TV down and tidy up, and sat gratefully at the table. ‘God, they keep you busy. What about you? No kids, but are you married or anything? You said Anna Taverner, but lots of girls keep their own names these days.’ Her glance flicked to Anna’s ringless left hand.

  ‘No. I’m single,’ Anna said, wanting this to be true, thinking that she could have spent today looking at flats.

  ‘Well, you’ve got plenty of time to start a family. People have babies later and later, don’t they?’

  Anna suppressed a sigh. Babies, breeding, the unavoidable next item on anyone’s agenda.

  Christina offered biscuits from a packet, then took one for herself. ‘It’s a bit addictive, once you start,’ she said, leaving Anna unclear whether she meant babies or biscuits. ‘Anyway. You want to talk about Rose.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I really don’t know what I can tell you. I always thought she’d come back, but, well … Still nothing, after all these years?’

  ‘We don’t know any more now than we did then.’

  ‘I went through it again and again in my mind, after,’ said Christina. ‘I told your parents everything I could think of, and the police, but it wasn’t much help. I didn’t know that she’d met anyone in particular. She wasn’t on drugs or anything like that. She never talked about problems at home. I was her best friend – I’d have known. You probably remember, I was on holiday the week before she went. If I’d been around – well, maybe things would’ve been different. But it’s no use wishing, is it?’

  ‘Do you know why she broke off with Jamie Spellman?’

  Christina considered for a moment, then shook her head. ‘Not really. I don’t think there was a row or anything. There were other fish in the sea, that’s all I thought it was. She didn’t want to be tied down.’

  ‘But did you know of any other fish? Did she dump Jamie for someone else? He thought she did.’

  ‘We went through all that, didn’t we? No. Not that I knew of.’

  ‘She’d have told you, wouldn’t she?’ Anna persisted. ‘Was there someone she talked about, anyone she fancied?’

  ‘No, sorry, Anna. I can’t think of anything to tell you that you don’t already know. I’m sorry if this is a wasted journey. Surely, really …’ She hesitated, her glance sliding away from Anna’s.

  ‘What?’

  Christina sounded apologetic. ‘I know there’s never been a – a body, but, I mean, we’re sort of assuming she chose to stay away, aren’t we? Surely the most likely thing is that she’s dead. I said just now that I kept thinking she’d come back, but that was then. Not now. I’m sorry.’ She looked at Anna, then away, towards the window. ‘Poor lovely Rose. She had so much to look forward to.’

  ‘No,’ Anna said, too loudly. She wouldn’t hear Rose spoken of in the past tense. ‘She’s not dead.’

  ‘But how can you know?’

  ‘I just do.’

  Christina looked at her warily. Anna saw her struggling between a desire to humour and the urge to express common-sense logic. Common sense won. ‘But – d’you really think she could have left home of her own free will and not got in touch, all this time? I mean, we all have rows with our parents, at eighteen. They don’t usually last twenty years.’ She was sitting with an ear turned towards the stairway in case the baby cried. ‘Wouldn’t you do better to accept it – move on, get on with your life? You can’t wait for ever.’

  ‘Accept what?’

  Christina wouldn’t say it again. She made a you know gesture, a small tilting of her head.

  Anna looked down at the table. Move on – meaningless, grating, with its implication of criticism. Get on with your life.

  ‘Tell me about Rose,’ she urged. ‘I don’t just mean about her leaving. Anything you remember. What was it like, being her best friend? I want to know.’

  Her belief in Christina was wavering; she noticed the beginnings of lines around her mouth, the carefully styled hair, the pearl ear-studs. What could she possibly have to say about eighteen-year-old Rose, from this distance? She was too old to be Rose’s friend, almost middle-aged; a mother, respectable, dutiful, a churchgoer. Anna tried to recall the teenager with the loud laugh, the sixth-form tennis star with the powerful double-handed backhand. This matronly Christina was pushing the younger version out of view.

  ‘Well,’ Christina said, ‘she was so pretty I was jealous – she didn’t even need to try. Clever. Artistic. Moody sometimes. Still, I suppose we’re all moody sometimes.’

  She smiled, offering the biscuits again. Anna couldn’t imagine Christina being moody – she struck her as permanently cheerful, straightforward. Anna realized that she disliked Christina, maybe always had. Ever-reliable, ever-practical, always right, Christina had been a foil for Rose; deliberately chosen, perhaps, to highlight Rose’s dramatic tendencies.

  ‘Yes, I know that.’ Anna tried not to sound impatient. What she wanted was specific memories. Arguments, incidents. Insights. Christina wasn’t going to be much good at that; she was frowning, in the way of someone not much used to analysing.

  ‘When you think about Rose, what do you remember?’ Anna prompted.

  ‘I remember she did my biology drawings for me,’ Christina said. ‘I did biology A-Level but I was hopeless at the diagrams. I used to give Rose whatever I had to copy and she’d do lovely clear drawings, really quickly, while we chatted at break or lunch time. Alimentary canals, that sort of thing, or heart valves, all just right. My teachers never knew, but they must have wondered why I couldn’t do it i
n tests.’

  This was better. Anna smiled encouragingly.

  ‘I remember how she was with boys,’ Christina said. ‘With her looks, she was never short of them. She’d go out with someone and be keen, then suddenly it was finished. She’d never say why. Just, “I don’t like him any more,” when she’d been all over him yesterday. She could take them or leave them. That’s why I don’t think she ran off with someone. She wasn’t in a hurry.’

  ‘What did she talk about doing, when she left school?’ Anna asked. ‘She had her place to do art foundation. But after that – did she say?’

  ‘Yes. I remember the police asked me, but I wasn’t much help. She said so many different things. She talked about art college in London, or sometimes it was Glasgow, or Paris. Or she’d just paint, or travel, or get a local job and save some money. It was different from one week to the next.’

  ‘What else? What else do you remember?’

  Christina thought for a moment. ‘I remember how she used to get upset about things. Work herself up into a real state.’

  ‘You mean the hyperventilating? What things?’

  ‘There was once in history. It must have been when we were in the fifth, because I didn’t do history A-Level like she did. Our teacher was showing us a video about the concentration camps. The gas chambers and the experiments and all that. It was grim. We all sat there stunned and quiet. I was sitting next to Rose, and suddenly she jumped up and ran out of the classroom. She knocked a chair over and the teacher shouted at her to come back, but she didn’t stop.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘The teacher told me to go after her. It was Mr Evans – did you know him?’ Anna nodded, and Christina continued, ‘I thought she’d be in the girls’ loos, crying. She wasn’t, so I looked in the field, and the library, all round the place. Couldn’t find her anywhere. It turned out she’d run out of school.’

  ‘Where did she go?’ Anna asked. She’d never heard anything about this.

  Christina shook her head. ‘I don’t think she ever said. I phoned that same evening – I was quite worried by then. But she only laughed. “Got me an afternoon off school, didn’t it?” she said. I supposed she’d been round the shops or something. And when I said, “It was awful, wasn’t it, that film?” she went, “Oh, that,” as if she’d already forgotten. Back at school next day she made a joke of it, said she’d suddenly had to dash for the loo.’

  Anna knew Rose’s trick of being in tears one minute, flippant the next. She had always hated that – the way Rose would upset her with something gruesome, then dismiss it as nothing. But she also remembered that Rose had woken screaming from a nightmare about Lord of the Flies, after saying it was only a story.

  ‘Then there was the time she stopped eating,’ Christina said.

  Anna had forgotten. Now a scene flipped up in her mind of Christina at home, shouting at Rose through her closed bedroom door.

  ‘You had a row with her,’ she says. ‘I remember that.’

  ‘Yes, about starving herself,’ Christina says. ‘Did you realize how bad it got?’

  ‘I can’t have done,’ Anna says. ‘I can vaguely remember Mum saying Rose was on some silly diet.’

  ‘It was worse than that. She stopped eating altogether. Perhaps she managed to hide it from your parents.’

  ‘When was this exactly? Can you remember how old she was?’

  ‘There was a famine in Ethiopia,’ Christina says. ‘When would that be – ’eighty-six, ’eighty-seven? We were about fifteen. Anyway, I know that was why.’

  ‘She stopped eating because there was a famine in Ethiopia?’

  Christina nodded. ‘She stuck up a picture inside her locker. A starving kid – big eyes, pot belly, little stick legs, the sort of thing we were seeing on TV. So every time she opened her locker she’d remember not to eat. We used to keep our lunch in our lockers, and most morning breaks we had chocolate or crisps, to keep us going till lunch. But now if she was tempted, she saw this picture. I remember telling her, “This is stupid. If you want to help, send some money, but what use is starving yourself?” ’

  ‘What did she say?’

  Christina thought for a moment. ‘Something like, she wasn’t trying to starve, but she couldn’t bring herself to eat with those pictures on TV every night. I thought she must be eating at home or your parents would know, but then I found out. She was just pretending to eat at odd times.’

  Anna remembered Rose in the kitchen, turning up her nose at the smell of cooking; saying, ‘Not for me, Mum. I’m not hungry.’ Then, later, making herself a sandwich and taking it up to her room. Mum, worried: ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with her. Some silly diet, I suppose.’ Dad: ‘Diet? Have you seen the size of those sandwiches? Leave her, she’ll get over it.’

  ‘Yes, it went on for – oh, I don’t know – a week or two,’ Anna told Christina. ‘She made excuses not to eat with the rest of us.’

  ‘That’s right. She told me,’ Christina says. ‘She’d take food up to her room and then throw it away, smuggle it out to the bin. She got to the stage of being proud of it. I know, because she told me she hadn’t eaten for nearly a week – all she’d had was water. The first whole day was awful, she said, then she stopped even feeling hungry. I told her it was completely bonkers – wasting food, throwing it away, to show sympathy for people without any. She just wasn’t logical. I remember a row in the form room. Some boys were mucking about one lunch time, throwing sandwich-crusts about, and one of them stuffed a tuna roll down the back of the radiator so it’d stink later. Rose went ballistic – really had a go at them. She was all, “How can you waste food? Don’t you know there are people starving in Ethiopia? Children, babies?” Well, you know boys that age. One of them offered to send his crusts and the other one pretended to get the roll back to put in the Oxfam box. Rose was beside herself – crying, yelling. I think she’d have hit them if I hadn’t held her back. And yet she was chucking her own food in the bin every night. In the end the boys got quite scared. They went outside and Rose cried all through lunch time. I stayed with her, and told her she was getting hysterical because she wasn’t eating. I think it was that same night I came round to your house.’

  ‘You shouted at her,’ Anna prompted.

  ‘That’s right, I did. I’d had enough. She wouldn’t let me into her room for ages, but eventually she did and I gave her what for. I told her she’d die if she didn’t eat, I said she was being stupid and melodramatic. I said if she cared that much about the famine, then for the love of Christ we’d do something useful – clean teachers’ cars at lunch time and earn money to send, or join in the church fundraising. She went all quiet, then said, “Sorry,” just like that, and next day she was back to normal. Well, almost. It took her a couple of days to get used to eating. But she took the picture out of her locker and never said another word about that week of not eating, or the famine. We never even did the car-cleaning. She didn’t mention it again, not once. So I didn’t, either.’

  ‘And we had no idea, at home. How can you not know someone you live with is deliberately starving herself?’ Anna gave Christina a searching look. ‘What else didn’t we know?’

  Christina only shrugged. ‘It’s such a long time ago.’

  Anna had always thought that Rose told her horrible things to frighten her, to wield a sort of power; that she didn’t feel things as deeply as she pretended, and that she did it to get attention and sympathy. But there could have been another reason for Rose’s abrupt switchings-off; maybe it was the only way she had of distancing herself.

  ‘I know you used to look after her,’ Anna said. ‘When she had those panic attacks.’

  ‘Oh yes. Remember that time on the playing field, when she was hyperventilating? You wanted to dial 999. You were terrified, weren’t you? I’m not surprised. I was, at first.’

  Anna warmed to Christina for seeing her fear, for not remembering her as a pest.

  ‘Was she – would you say …’ Anna
wasn’t sure how to put this. ‘The intense way she felt about things, the way she’d suddenly switch moods – do you think she was mentally ill? Did she need help?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Christina swept crumbs from the table into the palm of her hand, and stood up to scatter them in the sink. ‘Where’s the line between being over-sensitive and being disturbed? And I’ve only picked out those examples. You could make anyone sound peculiar, doing that. I’ve left out all the normal teenage things about her.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like – well, for one thing, the way she’d got passing notes in lessons down to a fine art. She only did it in the lessons she didn’t like – maths was one. She’d look like she was paying attention, be writing things down or even have her hand up to answer a question, and all the time there’d be these notes going along the rows. Sometimes two or three at once. I don’t think she ever got caught, not once.’

  ‘And she still got As all round.’ Anna liked this idea of a subversive Rose.

  ‘Yes, sickening, wasn’t it?’ Christina was refilling the kettle. ‘She always worked hard in spite of that, but she didn’t have much respect for the teachers. Apart from her art teacher. He was different.’

  ‘Mr Greaves. Jim.’ Anna had been taught by him too, in the sixth form. ‘Yes. He came round to the house, after, to see Mum and Dad. Rose used to talk to him the way she wouldn’t to any other teacher. He liked her too, you could tell. He knew about her being adopted. He thought she’d gone to her real mother. But she hadn’t, we know that.’

  Could there be more to Mr Greaves than anyone had thought? Anna wondered now. Rose’s special teacher, her confidant? He’d talked to the police; he’d been worried, upset, but could that have been an act? Surely not. He’d been a special teacher to Anna, too, and she would have sworn he was genuine. One of the worst things about Rose’s disappearance was that it made everyone seem underhand, manipulative.

  Opening the fridge door, Christina paused and said, ‘I’ve just remembered someone else she liked, that last year. A new science teacher, physics. Mr … wait – Mr Sullivan. D’you remember him?’