by Eva Woods
“But...but...” The memory was already dying around them, her younger, more optimistic self fading, her friend disappearing, the smell of the theatre lost. The dial appeared again: 7 10 2007.
This memory flashed by. Past Rosie still asleep, even though the novelty alarm clock on her bedside table read after eleven. Caz storming into her room in an oversize fleece dressing gown and practically jumping on the bed. “Rosie! Wake up!” Of course, they had shared a flat for years. How could she have forgotten that? She’d loved that place. High ceilings, cracked oak floors, and her bedroom looked out on a lovely leafy square in Islington.
“Huh?” Past Rosie was groggy. Rosie tried to remember why. Had she been out, starring in some exciting theatrical role? Then she spotted the uniform crumpled on the floor. No, she’d been working the late shift in a bar. Not only that, but there was a man’s T-shirt lying there too. She’d brought someone home with her—not an unusual occurrence. Who? The file in her head marked Hookups, bad was filled to bursting point.
“I got it. I got it!”
“Got what?” sleeping Rosie mumbled.
Caz now began to bounce on the bed, her braids flying. “I’m going to be Laura! In The Glass Menagerie!”
That made Past Rosie sit up. “Oh! You got it?” This was a big deal. One of the leads in the revival of a Tennessee Williams play scheduled to start in a big theatre, with a Hollywood star as the male lead. Caz would be playing his sister, a shy and troubled girl. The role called for great nuance and range. Rosie remembered her feelings that morning: shock, initially. She hadn’t thought Caz was in with a shot for the play, set as it was in the American Deep South. Then: jealousy. Low self-esteem. Why do I never get anything?
“That’s so great,” she said, unconvincingly. “Wow. You’re going to be Andrew Yates’s sister!”
“I know. God, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” Caz was almost manic. She got up and whirled around the room, picking her way delicately over Rosie’s discarded clothes. “This is it, baby. The big break. And you’ll be next. Did you hear back about Perdita?”
“Um, not yet.” That was a lie. One of the reasons she’d drunk so much and brought this guy back, whoever he was, was trying to drown her sorrows at receiving the form rejection email for the role. Panic had seized her. Caz is going to make it big, and leave me behind, and she won’t want to hang out with me, and Andrew Yates will fly her out to Hollywood to star in his next film, and I’ll be all alone.
The words that always seemed to echo in her head at low moments. All alone. No good. Not good enough.
You stupid, stupid girl.
In the memory, Caz stopped whirling and was looking at her friend with concern. “Hey, you okay?”
“Oh yeah, just drank too much rotgut in the Walkabout after work. And, er, Keith’s in the shower.”
“Keith! Jesus, Rosie.”
“I know, I know, I said never again. I just... I was drunk and a bit down. But it’s so great about your role! I’m so pleased for you!”
“Poor you. Give Keith the boot-out and let’s go down to Pablo’s, get a big greasy breakfast. My treat. No more Equity minimum for me!”
Caz was so sweet and generous, so talented, and all Rosie could do was lie there feeling jealous, letting it eat away at her like a maggot in her stomach.
She heard Mr. Malcolm’s light tread behind her. “Time to move on, Rosie.”
Rosie bit her lip. It was too sad to watch it all, from the brilliant beginnings of meeting Caz, remembering the fun they’d had living together, the dinner parties where they’d invited randoms they met in the street and plonked big pots of experimental stews down on the scrubbed wood table; the nights they stayed up, drinking cheap red wine until the dawn broke, setting out their future careers and the stardom that would surely beckon. “I can’t watch.” Seeing the memories again, she and Caz such good friends, and knowing it wasn’t going to last.
“I’m sorry. It’s the only way.”
She closed her eyes on her old bedroom—God, she’d loved that room!—on a time when she and Caz were still friends. She knew what was coming next.
* * *
The years skipped by. 3 5 2009. Caz’s engagement party, to an older theatre producer who wore tweed jackets and was so handsome Rosie couldn’t look him in the eye when they spoke. She’d gone to the party—in a hired-out restaurant, with champagne waiters, where Caz wore a green silk dress that cascaded down her slim body—alone, and spent the whole night skulking in corners as everyone else laughed with their partners (or so it seemed to her). Rosie could see her own eyes were red, though she couldn’t remember what she’d been crying about. It was a strange feeling. She remembered how the loneliness had gotten too much for her, and she’d texted some random guy on her phone and gone round to his place, spent the night shivering on the futon in the living room that was his bed, feeling terrible about herself the whole time.
18 11 2010. Caz’s new play received a glowing review in the Evening Standard, with a glamorous shot of her in full Edwardian dress. Rosie had thrown it in the bin before shame-facedly retrieving it, covered in banana pulp and coffee grounds. Caz’s sudden rise to fame seemed to coincide with a slowdown in Rosie’s own career. After an initial strong start—second lead at the National, an ad for shampoo that paid a ridiculous amount—she hadn’t been in a paying acting role for eight months. The week before she’d played a polar bear in an avant-garde production about climate change. For payment she’d received a lukewarm half in the pub, after which the director had tried to grope her. But she had to try and be happy for Caz. After all, they were best friends. Weren’t they?
12 4 2017. Earlier this year, when they were barely friends anymore. Rosie standing on the pavement outside a theatre, staring at a poster of Caz in yet another play, her face illuminated and beautiful, her cheekbones sharp as razors. Hearing the bell go inside indicating the show was about to start. Then slowly walking away, tossing the ticket into the bin.
25 8 2017. Just two months ago. On this day Caz had strolled into the coffee shop where Rosie worked, fresh from a nearby lunch with someone Rosie recognized as a top theatre critic. Caz wore leather trousers and a tight silky top. Her skin glowed, her teeth gleamed. She was laughing out loud at something the critic said, and when she got to the top of the line, she asked Serge for a kale smoothie. Healthy, beautiful, successful, loved. Her engagement ring like an iceberg on her finger. And here was Rosie, the opposite of all those things. Caz hadn’t even noticed her there, skulking in the steam from the coffee machine, just carried on out to the street on a cloud of laughter. And then of course Rosie had quit her job in the café and...who knew? Walked under a bus? Either way, she was having a pretty bad year. A pretty bad few years.
The dizzying whirl through places and dates was making her feel queasy. She turned back to Mr. Malcolm, who was staring at Serge’s topknot in fascination. “Men wear buns now, do they? How wonderful.”
“Please. I’ve seen enough. I get the message—Caz and I fell out and it was my fault. Can I go back now? Back to the real world?”
“Are you sure, dear? You’re in rather a lot of pain there.”
“It’s better than this. This is torture.”
“Okay then. Count to three, then open your eyes again.”
Rosie
She did. The coffee shop faded—a ghostly smell of roasted beans in her nose—and she surfaced, choking and gasping at the tube in her throat. But no one noticed, though her room was full of people. They all had their backs to her. Rosie hurriedly counted: her mother, her father, Daisy, Scarlett—today in jeans and an Octonauts T-shirt—and Carole, in a flowery tunic and mum jeans, makeup inexpertly applied so that her unfashionable pink lipstick bled around her mouth. “I’m sorry, Alison, it’s just that Scarlett wanted to come back and...”
Rosie’s mother snapped, “She’s only supposed to have two
visitors at once. If you’re here that means I can’t be with her, or Daisy. And children are such germ carriers.”
“I washed my hands four times,” said Scarlett indignantly. Rosie saw Carole’s hand curl protectively on her daughter’s head.
“I’m so sorry for what you’re going through, Alison, I really am. I’m here to help however I can.”
“You could help by not bringing a small child into the room. It’s hardly fair to Scarlett either, is it?”
Scarlett scowled. “I’m helping Rosie. I’m talking to her. Hello, Rosie, it’s Scarlett, your sister. Well, sort of your sister. We’re here in the hospital with you. I rode on a big red bus to get here. Um...sorry, maybe you don’t want to hear about buses after one hit you?”
“For God’s sake, Mike, can’t you stop this?”
Rosie wanted to block her ears at the sound of her mother’s cold, angry tone. She wished she could intervene, shout out she’s just scared, it makes her lash out. But it wasn’t fair to boot Carole out. She could see now that her stepmother had only ever tried her best. And if the memory in the pub with Luke was anything to go by, someone being engaged or married didn’t always mean you knew how to stop loving them.
But where was Luke now? Was it over between them, were they not even friends? He hadn’t come to visit so far and no one seemed to know who he was, not even Caz, who’d been Rosie’s best friend for years. Was he with his wife, if indeed he’d gotten married? She pushed the thought away and tried to communicate with Daisy, who was hanging back against the wall, looking miserable. Look up, Daise, she tried to say, via her barely open eyes. I can hear everything. I’m reliving the worst moments of my life here, so it would be great if my hospital room wasn’t filled with tension too. Daisy. Daise?
For a moment, her sister looked straight at her. “Everyone,” she said out loud. “I think you should stop this. They said we had to talk to her, that our voices might bring her back. I don’t think this is what they had in mind. And Mum’s sort of right, it’s not fair to talk like this in front of Scarlett.”
“I did wash my hands,” the little girl said again.
Rosie’s mother barreled out the door, and the jagged sound of weeping could be heard from the corridor. Daisy closed her eyes briefly, then turned to her half sister. “I know you did, sweetheart. Mum’s just scared and sad, the same way your mum would be if you were sick.”
Scarlett nodded. “I understand. Can I keep talking to Rosie? Maybe I can play her a song on my phone?”
“That would be great.”
“Come you, you have to talk to her too. The doctors said.”
“Erm, hi, Rosie. It’s Daisy here.”
“She’s your sister too,” stage-whispered Scarlett to Rosie. “Your same-mum-and-dad sister.”
“Right, yes, um...we hope you get better soon, Rosie. We’re all here for you and we...we want you to wake up.”
Thank God for Daisy, her patience and her kindness. But wait, weren’t they also not speaking to each other? They’d always been close—at least, she thought so. What could have come between them so badly? Rosie sighed. When she woke up, things would be different. She’d spend more time with both her sisters, be kind to Carole, forgive her father. If she woke up, that was. Would she recover and get her life back, small and broken as it was? Or was this hair-raising montage of her worst ever days, her greatest mistakes and failures, the last thing she would experience, before being gone forever? Two days. That was all she had to figure out what had happened with the bus, and try to wake herself up before it was too late.
* * *
After forty minutes listening to tweeny-bopper tunes on Scarlett’s tinny little phone speaker, Rosie was quite ready for another flashback, however traumatic. Who would be her guide this time? Her grandmother, her long-ago school friend, her old teacher, Dot—who she still hadn’t identified—or a random guy who’d died alongside her in the hospital? She was surprised she knew so few people among the dead community.
But there’s one more, isn’t there.
Shh. Rosie pushed that thought far back into the jumbled filing cabinet of her brain.
“A random guy who died alongside you? That hurts, babe.”
“Hey, Darryl. Sorry.” Rosie was glad she was hallucinating him—if that’s what this was—before the terrible injury and not after. He’d looked less handsome with bone gleaming white through his skin and his beating heart visible in his chest. Poor Darryl.
“No feeling sorry for me, mate,” he said sternly, as if reading her mind. Although he was most likely in her mind. Wasn’t he? “I’m gone. I’m on, like, a different plane of existence.”
“What’s it like...afterward?”
“Oh it’s cool. Everyone is so much more chill than in life. They have a right laugh, looking down at all the dumb-ass stuff people do on earth. I think I’m gonna like it, being dead.”
Rosie was starting to feel a bit left out. Trust her to be alienated even by hallucinations from her own brain. If that’s what they were. “What’s next? I’ve got to get away from this Justin Bieber-a-thon.”
Darryl looked fondly at Scarlett. “She’s a cute kid.”
“Yeah. I don’t think I see her much. You know—the whole nasty divorce thing. I wish I had done now, she seems cool, despite her taste in music.” What if this was Rosie’s punishment, to see all the ways she’d messed her life up and not be able to change it? “Is there another fun memory coming? Maybe the time I dropped red ice-pop on my white palazzo pants on the school trip to Scarborough and everyone thought I got my period? Or is it always going to be ones where I do something awful?”
“Not always. Come on.”
She closed her eyes, and the sound of canned pop music faded, and the dials appeared. 26 12 1989. Another Christmas memory, then. Somehow she doubted it would be a merry one.
26 December 1989 (Twenty-eight years ago)
The smell of pine needles and wood smoke. Twinkling lights, a real fire in the grate, a tree laden with baubles and tinsel, presents stacked beneath. Rosie found herself in a warm and welcoming room, Paul Daniels’s Christmas show on the TV, which looked tiny and boxy now. She secreted herself behind the tree, although she knew they couldn’t see her. “They” were herself and Daisy, aged five-ish and two-ish, solemn in pajamas on the sofa, little feet dangling. Daisy’s were encased in puppy dog slippers. Rosie’s hair looked scarlet in the firelight. She turned to Darryl, hovering by the tree. “I remember this. But this is a happy memory.”
“Well, thank goodness for that, eh, mate? Just watch.”
Their father—much younger, with all his hair, in an eighties’ sweatshirt—was pacing behind them. “Now, girls, remember, a nice big welcome. We’ve got to show Mummy we have everything under control. No mention of the little fire from the Christmas lights, okay?”
The girls nodded solemnly. Little Rosie said, “Daddy, can we say we had chicken nuggets for Christmas dinner?”
“No, darling. Let’s not tell Mummy that.”
“Because she doesn’t like chicken nuggets.”
“Right. So, big smiles and remember: don’t mention the fire. Or the chicken nuggets.”
Little Rosie nodded. Daisy began to suck her thumb; it was past her bedtime. Their father went nervously to the door and led in their mother, carrying a white bundle in her arms. Rosie was, just for a second, knocked back in shock. Her mother looked so young. So happy. Her red hair, the same color as Rosie’s own, rippled and flamed. She’d been a sort of ashy blonde for so long Rosie had almost forgotten her natural shade. The deep grooves around her mouth were gone, and her back was straight, and she was...smiling. “Look at this! So Christmassy.”
“We decorated the tree, Mummy,” said Little Rosie.
“You did a fantastic job.” Alison eased in next to them on the sofa, and they crowded close to her. Rosie remembered this moment. T
he slight unease she’d felt for the previous week—meals at the wrong time and jumpers shrunk in the wash, Santa having for the first time ever forgotten to wrap the presents—was gone, and they were all home together and it was Christmas and there were mince pies in the kitchen that she thought she’d be allowed to eat. She’d already primed Daisy to ask, as she was younger and cuter. All of them there, and now there was one more. Their mother moved aside the cheesecloth blanket in her arms. “Girls, here’s your little brother.”
They hung over the little face in the blanket, red and closed like a petal. Rosie remembered thinking he looked a bit like a squashed tomato. “What’s his name, Mummy?” said her younger self.
“Peter, like Granddad’s name. Say hello.”
Little Rosie reached out hesitantly, and the baby grabbed her finger. On the other side, Daisy was also watching in her usual quiet way. “Hello, Petey,” she pronounced, taking her thumb from her mouth. From then on, they’d always call him that.
“That’s right, darling. He’s littler than you, isn’t he?”
Daisy looked to Rosie for confirmation that this was now the state of affairs. “You’re not the youngest now, Daisy,” she explained. “Petey is.” The first time she said her brother’s name. Their mother gathered all three of them in her arms, and from behind, their father stroked her hair back gently, to better see his family.
“It’s all of us now,” said their mother, and Rosie remembered her voice, so full of happiness. “Our family.”
“Mummy,” said Daisy. “The Christmas tree went on fire.”
Daisy
“She’s smiling,” said Scarlett, proudly.
Daisy looked up distractedly from her phone. Where was Gary? He promised he’d come soon. If he didn’t, what did that say about him? She didn’t want to think about that, so she needed him to get here ASAP. “Maybe it’s just an automatic thing, sweetheart.”
