by A J Waines
Orange lights flashed under my eyelids and everything hurt. My clothes stuck to me, cooking me, like tin foil. I used my last ounce of air to call Miranda’s name, but it came out as a muffled wail through my thick scarf. It was no good – my lungs were bursting, I had to go back. I threw out my hand in one final attempt to find her and turned round.
Then I knelt on it. Miranda’s foot. I felt the sole of her shoe, traced it up to her leg.
‘No - No!’ Rosie was pulling me away.
‘I can’t leave her!’ I spluttered back at her. ‘Do this for ME, Rosie!’
I tore away from her clutch and found Miranda’s shoulder. I felt my sister’s hair, touched flesh, an arm, her fingers, but the flames had already reached her, licking around my hands. I grabbed her as best I could and pulled, dragged, tugged her towards the door, the thick plumes like knives, slicing and cutting my chest with every snatched breath.
As I humped Miranda’s body over the threshold, I ripped off my coat and flung it over her, patting and rolling her to smother the remaining flames that were trying to take hold.
Rosie was still inside. She seemed to be searching for something. It would have been so easy to reach out and slam the door, but I couldn’t wash my hands of her completely. Once I’d left Miranda somewhere safe, I’d have to go back for Rosie.
I hauled Miranda to the foot of the stairs and carefully peeled away her coat. The remains of her clothes were full of huge holes where red, moist bulges of skin had burst through. As I tugged the scarf from my mouth a violent surge of nausea made me want to look away.
‘I don’t care about the baby, and you being with Con,’ I shouted at her. ‘I just want you back. I can’t lose you…’
I rolled her gently onto her back and forced myself to look into her face. Her eyelashes were crisp, her lips cracked and split. She looked strangely peaceful. I knew in that moment that she was dead – I just knew it – she hadn’t moved an inch of her own accord since I’d found her. I had merely pulled her away and put out the flames; I hadn’t saved her.
In a last-ditch effort, I tried mouth to mouth, but as I knelt down and touched her cheek, a hand grabbed my hair from behind, and I heard a crack. A sharp pain in my neck made me crumple and my legs went from under me. Then the darkness wiped everything away.
Chapter 49
Sam
Rosie’s sing-song voice came out of nowhere.
‘Dad must have been really angry that day…when he saw the suitcase,’ she said, the sound drifting towards me from far away.
‘Rosie...?’ I croaked. I was sitting on a tiled floor, leaning against something blissfully cold. The pedestal of a sink.
‘That must have been the point Dad made the decision to do what he did. With the air rifle. Something inside him must have snapped, just like that.’ She snapped her fingers.
‘Miranda…where is she?’ I murmured.
My head was still on fire, throbbing, fit to burst. I coughed and reached up to rub the back of my head where she’d hit me, but Rosie grabbed my hand, securing it in her own.
‘Let’s not talk about her,’ she said. ‘It’s just you and me, now.’ She spoke as if we were in the middle of a conversation, winding a clump of my hair around her finger with her other hand.
‘The fire. Have they put it out? Where’s the fire brigade?’
Rosie’s face was blackened with soot. She stared blankly ahead towards the men’s urinals, but in her mind she was obviously somewhere entirely different.
‘Had Dad always planned to hurt my mum, do you think?’ she said.
‘I d-don’t know,’ I said. The air was still churning with wafts of smoke. Everything was spinning and I felt like I was going to throw up any second. ‘Is the fire out, Rosie? What are we doing in here?’
‘It’s safe. Everything’s fine,’ she said, her tone offhand.
‘We should get out,’ I said, straining to lean forward.
She shoved me back against the wall and a wave of giddiness forced me to stay still.
‘Not yet. This is important.’ She stroked my fingers tenderly. ‘Why, after he’d shot her once, did my dad carry on shooting her another fourteen times?’
Never-ending bloody questions. Would they ever stop?
‘M-maybe he didn’t really know what he was doing,’ I replied vaguely.
‘Mmm…’ she said. ‘I think he must have known she was dead after the first few pellets, don’t you?’ She followed a ridge of grouting around a tile with her finger, her other hand still held firmly over mine. ‘Why didn’t he shoot me?’
‘Because he wasn’t angry with you,’ I said.
She stared straight ahead, taking a long while to process my response.
Rosie had always seemed fixated on her father, dismissing any attempts I made to remind her that from her own accounts it was clear that her mother truly loved her. As that young child, however, it was her father she’d been desperate to win over. His love seemed to matter more to her. Maybe, because he was harsh and cruel she thought his love was worth more.
‘Do you ever have that feeling when something snaps inside, when your heart boils over and you don’t know what you’re going to do next?’
I hesitated. ‘Once or twice, when I’ve been…very upset.’
‘Yeah…me too.’ She patted the floor, like a toddler in a sandpit. She turned to face me. ‘Did you lie when you said you were fond of me?’
Dangerous territory. I kept hearing the name Erica inside my head, like a distant mantra.
‘I do like you, Rosie.’ I straightened slightly, trying to get my good foot into a position where I could lever myself upright. ‘I haven’t been lying to you.’
‘The weird thing is – it feels real,’ she said. ‘The way you take an interest in me, listen to me, seem to understand about my life.’
Being with Rosie was like holding a harmless sheet of paper in your hand and realising it’s cut your finger. I knew she was capable of turning from sweetness and light to downright aggressive within a single sentence. I was vulnerable after the crack on the back of my head. I needed to keep her stable, pull her back from any emotional extremes, any rash actions.
‘It is real…’ I assured her.
‘So why didn’t you get me out of the fire?’
‘You didn’t need my help!’ I snapped. ‘In any case I was going to come back and check, but you hit me…’
‘You only pretended to like me because I’m a patient and I’m paying you, that’s it, isn’t it? For a while I thought it was going to be real, but you’re just like everyone else.’ Her fingers were on my face, gently tracing the folds of my eyelids, before she trailed them down my cheek.
I cleared my throat, ducking away from her touch. ‘I genuinely feel a great deal for you – as a patient I want to support.’
With every word I uttered, I was reinforcing all Rosie’s worst fears. She’d put me on a pedestal and now I was coming crashing down. Was this what happened with Erica?
‘Don’t you like the way I’ve been helping you?’ she asked.
‘Helping me?’
‘Dusting and cleaning your flat. I wanted to make it nice for you.’
‘Excuse me?! You copied my keys,’ I retorted. ‘You were breaking in.’
‘Only to help. Like a fairy godmother.’
‘Were you ringing my landline, too, Rosie? Were you calling and not speaking when I picked up the phone?’
‘Oh, that,’ she said dismissively. ‘I was just finding out if you were at home or not. I didn’t want to barge in…you know…it was just to check, that’s all.’ She brushed her nose with the cuff of her sleeve. ‘And I told you the truth about Miranda’s baby. That was a nice thing to do, wasn’t it?’
I shook my head. In her mind she had an innocent explanation for everything.
There was a rustle by my feet as she delved into a bulging canvas bag – the one Miranda’s neighbour had said Rosie was carrying. That must have been what she was searching
for in the storeroom earlier. The handles were scorched and it was covered in ash.
‘By the way, I solved one of the mysteries,’ she said, her hand inside it.
I waited for her to explain.
‘The fortune that was “under the bridge”, remember? Well, I was right to keep asking questions, I was just looking under the wrong sort of bridge. It wasn’t a bridge on the landscape. It was much closer to home. Let me show you.’
She drew out a mass of splintered wood and twisted strings.
‘Your viola?! Oh, Rosie, it’s completely ruined.’
‘I know. I got very cross when I found out.’ She blew her fringe into the air with a heavy breath. ‘But there’s a silver lining to the story. You know the little arch that holds the strings up? It’s called a “bridge”’, she pointed it out. ‘I should have realised. That’s where the fortune had been hiding all along. Just here, look…’ She showed me a tiny envelope taped to the back of a piece of broken wood.
‘Open it,’ she said.
I thought it was empty at first, but when I tipped it up a small scrap of paper fell out. An old black stamp.
‘Who’d have thought it?’ she went on, ‘Hidden inside my worthless viola!’
‘But how…how did..?’
‘It was after Mick Blain gate-crashed our rehearsal in 2001. When I dashed off to get Max to fix my viola, he must have put it there.’ She shook her head at the audacity of it. ‘I mentioned his name to Dawn and she found out all about him from her colleagues at the auction house. It turned out Mick had lived a very colourful life fencing stolen instruments before he’d moved on to coins and stamps. The whole “wanting to play my viola” thing was all an act. He must have known exactly what he was doing. He staged that stunt purely to get hold of it as a hiding place.’
She showed me the small f-shaped hole Mick must have squeezed the envelope through, when he knew the police were on to him. It looked like it would have been an intricate procedure, but perhaps not if you’d done it before.
She held up a scrap of wood. ‘The tiny envelope would have been invisible to everyone, even me, and we were so concerned about fixing the viola that no one spotted it. You remember Max said there was a label inside and I laughed at him? Well, it must have been this little envelope. I thought no more about it at the time, I was just glad my viola was back in one piece. Dawn told me a stamp in the same series sold last year for a million dollars.’
Rosie’s lost viola. It was worth all her trouble in the end, although not in the way she expected. It had a hidden surprise for her.
‘I knew I had to get my viola back. It was my friend, my voice, my place in the world even though I couldn’t play like I used to. I was gutted when I found it smashed to pieces, but I didn’t expect this bonus!’ She guided the mess of strings and wood tenderly back inside the bag. ‘This extra gift my viola had kept secret for me all this time.’
She stroked the bag, a dreamy look on her face.
‘Richard’s brother, Greg, caused the crash, by the way,’ she added with a sigh. ‘He was after Max’s violin. He took my viola, too, because he thought it might be valuable, but of course, in itself, it wasn’t. He didn’t know about the hidden fortune.’
I was still trying to process what she was telling me when I felt something cold against my neck. I swallowed hard as she ran the point of a blade down to my throat.
‘Rosie, stop…’
She must have had it in the bag.
‘This is how we can be joined together, Sam,’ she said. ‘Just two little cuts – I’ve seen people do it in films – then we let our blood run together. It won’t hurt – well, maybe just a bit.’
I lay still, frigid with fear.
‘Rosie, don’t, this is dangerous.’
‘Lovely skin,’ she cooed. ‘Where do you think we should be joined, Sam? You choose.’ She pressed the point into the skin behind my ear. ‘Here?’
‘Rosie, you’re hurting…’
‘Yes, I know. But love does hurt sometimes, doesn’t it? Here?’ She ran the blade flat across my cheek.
How many seconds before she broke the skin? Rosie was in a bubble of her own; deranged, capable of anything.
That’s when I heard the sirens.
Chapter 50
Sam
Rosie scrabbled onto her knees in front of me, the knife under my chin – it trembled as she started to shake. She’d heard the sirens too.
I had to act quickly. Think.
I was no match for her physically with my damaged ankle and swimming vision and I’d only make things worse if I tried to fight back. Instead, I needed to call on all my experience with disturbed patients to forge my way out of this, before the sounds of rescuers in the building made her panic.
There had to be something; a clue tucked away in her childhood, on that day her life was turned upside down when she was seven, perhaps.
I took a chance. ‘I need to ask you something,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even.
‘What?’ The knife was tickling my throat.
‘On that terrible day…your father could easily have turned the air rifle on you, like you said…’
‘I know. Maybe he ran out of pellets.’
‘No. I looked at the reports online and there were pellets left. The report said the rifle was capable of firing twenty shots, one after another.’
‘So, there were five pellets left…’
‘That’s what it said.’
‘Hmmm…’ She was breathing into my face.
The sirens were suddenly deafening, then they stopped.
I had a sudden flash of inspiration. ‘You said your father didn’t love you, but did it ever occur to you that he loved you too much to take you with him?’
She drew her face away from mine. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, if he’d taken you with him, you would never have had the chance grow up or enjoy a life of your own. Taking you with him meant condemning you to everlasting darkness and he didn’t want that.’
She examined my face, taking in what I’d just said.
‘He had five shots left and he couldn’t bring himself to rob you of your life,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t take away your chance of happiness. He couldn’t do it to you.’
‘Because…because…’
‘Because he loved you. Because he couldn’t bear to make you suffer.’
‘But…I thought it was because he didn’t want me enough to take me with him.’ She spoke slowly, examining her words as they came out.
‘No. That’s how a seven-year-old would understand it. You saw it as pure rejection back then, but in his own way, in the only way he knew – your father was protecting you.’
‘So, you’re saying he stopped firing because he wanted to save me?’
‘Exactly.’
Her face quivered with doubt while she considered it.
In the next moment something lit up behind her eyes. Suddenly the whole world wasn’t the way she’d thought it was.
She stifled a sob. Then she gave herself up to it, letting everything out with an ear-splitting howl, like an animal. Her body shook in spasms as she clung to me, wailing helplessly.
‘It’s okay,’ I whispered as I wrapped my arms around her. The knife was still in her grasp. I could hear the thuds and shouts in the corridors getting closer.
‘So, he loved me…’ she gasped. ‘That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, he did love you in his own way. And he couldn’t bear to pull the trigger to end your life.’
‘Oh, God – I never realised…’
Sometimes therapy was like that. Life-changing breakthroughs could burst out into the light in the blink of an eye, smashing open lifelong misconceptions.
Rosie wept again, grieving for all that could have been, drowning in the realisation that for years she’d seen every memory of her childhood through a distorted mirror.
I closed my eyes, worn down and weary, con-templating the hours she�
�d spent feeling hurt as a result of the far-reaching damage her father’s actions had caused.
As she finally relaxed, still leaning against me, the knife slithered to the floor. I kicked it under the waste basket and waited for the door to open.
Outside, I pulled away from the paramedic as she tried to wrap me in a blanket and make me sit down. Miranda’s charred body was being trundled away on a trolley and I needed to be by her side. There was a mask over her mouth and a paramedic was taking her pulse.
‘But she’s…she’s…’ I said.
I needed to tell them they were wasting their time. I wanted them to leave her in peace.
‘We’re doing all we can,’ said one of medics, with a sympathetic smile.
‘I know…but it’s too late…’ I gripped the edge of the stretcher as they lifted her up into the ambulance. Miranda was just a shell now, her eyes were closed, her body having shut out the rest of the world forever.
‘Please…leave her alone…she’s gone…let her be.’
I wanted to drag her body into my arms, but I had no strength left. They would take her away and from this moment on, for the rest of my life, I’d be without her.
It seemed impossible. Not my sister. Not after all she’d been through. All that sparky, crazy, adorable spirit that made Miranda such a huge part of my life.
I grabbed hold of the door to the ambulance. It was all I could do not to sink to the ground in a crumpled heap.
Then came the most miraculous words I’d ever heard.
‘Stand back. Her pulse is weak, but she’s alive.’
‘What?!’ I stared in amazement, flooded with disbelief and elation at what I’d thought was my sister’s lifeless face. ‘But she…she wasn’t…’
‘Come on…climb in,’ the woman said, giving me a hand up. ‘She was so heavily sedated that she probably couldn’t respond when you found her.’
My hand was over my mouth. I couldn’t utter a word. Beside her in the ambulance, I cried my heart out. I really thought I’d lost her.
