The Lives We Touch

by Eva Woods

  ‘I know. I know. What can I do, though? She’s my sister.’ Was she really arguing about this? What a crazy job it was. Daisy had woken up late, haunted all night by dreams of buses slamming into people, brakes screeching. Now she was dashing round the house trying to find her shoes (and ideally put them on the right feet). Gary had already left, kissing her on the forehead after he’d zipped up his biking gear and mixed his kale smoothie. He’d cycle the five miles to his office, shower there, drink his smoothie, then tackle the day with his usual efficiency. She felt exhausted just thinking about it. ‘I’ll come by the hospital later,’ he’d promised. ‘As soon as the morning meeting’s out of the way.’ He’d left her a helpful checklist of things to do for the wedding. Buttonholes. Dove release. Cupcake tower. It all seemed so trivial.

  Maura sighed again. ‘I suppose I’ll have to ask Mai to do the pitch.’

  Mai, who got in even earlier than Maura; who never wore less than four-inch heels; who had shiny, lacquered nails. Daisy felt a spasm of fear. Mai would do a great job. Better than her, most likely. Something that Maura was bound to take note of during the next round of appraisals.

  But Rosie was in a coma. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said more firmly. ‘It can’t be helped.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ Maura had not expressed any concern about Daisy’s sister, or sympathy at what they were all going through. She was grooming Daisy for a leadership position, she said. It’s why I push you so hard, Daisy. I want you to reach your full potential. Was that what you needed to succeed? Ruthless efficiency? Daisy wasn’t sure she had it.

  Before she left the house, she put the dishes in the dishwasher, wiped the counters and plumped the cushions in the living room. That way Gary wouldn’t come home to any mess, which he hated. Then she put on her coat and determinedly left the house, later than usual. The day had a strange holiday feel to it, almost. As if something was going to change. She only hoped it wasn’t for the worse.

  At the hospital, her mother, who’d spent the night in the relatives’ room, was standing rigid by the door, clutching her hands together so hard they were white. It was nine a.m., but she was in full make-up and subtly glinting jewellery, a cashmere jumper and little heeled boots. Daisy hadn’t put on any make-up at all – it didn’t seem right when her sister was lying there with cuts all over her poor face. ‘Hi, Mum.’

  ‘Darling!’ Her mother was putting on her ‘stranger’ voice. ‘Isn’t this nice, Rosie’s friend has come to see her.’

  A woman was sitting in the chair beside Rosie, gazing down at her with that combination of discomfort and dismay that Daisy was beginning to recognise when people saw her sister’s blank, pale face, covered in cuts and bruises. One of Rosie’s acting friends, who she’d met once in a pub maybe, cigarette-thin, her hair in dreads, a beautiful sculpted face and multiple ear piercings – what was her name again?

  Her mother said, ‘Caroline, this is Rosie’s sister. Are you sure I can’t get you a drink, dear, or something to eat?’ As if she was hosting them in her living room, not at Rosie’s hospital bed. It was Caz, of course. One of the names on the list in Rosie’s flat.

  ‘No, thank you, Mrs Clarke.’

  ‘Oh, call me Alison, dear. I saw you in that Lear, you know. You were wonderful.’

  ‘Oh, thanks, I’m in a play at the Donmar right now, but, Christ! Rosie! What happened? Leo said something about a bus?’

  Daisy said, ‘We don’t know. It hit her.’ The bus hit her. A simple way of saying it, but there was so much to unpick in those four words. The bus hit her, yes, but did she walk in front of it?

  Although Caz was simply dressed in jeans and a baggy grey top, she exuded a night-time glamour, an aura of glitter and smoke and worn-out dawns. Beside her, Daisy felt frumpy and plain. She said, ‘It’s really good of you to come, Caz. Do you … when did you last talk to Rosie? It’s just we’re trying to piece together what she was doing in the last few weeks.’ Because Daisy hadn’t spoken to her since the engagement party. The dull ache of shame was like heartburn in her chest.

  ‘She left me a weird voicemail yesterday. But before that … well, to be honest, it’s been a few months since we talked. When I got the part in this play, I think Rosie felt … bad.’

  ‘Jealous?’ Daisy offered.

  Caz chewed her lip. ‘Maybe. God, that sounds awful, I know. But it’s unavoidable. You’re always competing in this job, always being judged, even against your friends. I’d have understood a bit of jealousy. But she just stopped answering my texts. Didn’t come to see the play, even when all our mates got tickets … I was a bit hurt, to be honest.’

  ‘What did the voicemail say?’ asked Daisy.

  Caz sighed. ‘Said she was sorry about what happened between us. I … I didn’t reply. I would have, probably, but – I needed a bit of time. But then Leo called me last night, before I went onstage. You know, her neighbour, he’s sort of a mate. He said she’d been in an accident. I just felt so bad. If only I’d replied!’ She buried her head in her hands, and it was a strange sensation, to realise other people were aching for Rosie too, not just her family. ‘I was such a bitch to her. I knew she was finding it hard, me getting these parts, doing OK, and I didn’t … I didn’t try to make that easier for her. I didn’t really try to understand. Oh, shit. I wish I could say sorry.’

  A picture was building in Daisy’s mind. Her sister, alone and isolated, not speaking to her family, estranged from her friends. Living in that horrible studio flat with the sleazy guy downstairs. Making a list of names, people she’d fallen out with … An idea occurred. ‘Caz? Have you ever heard Rosie talk about someone called Luke?’

  Caz thought about it. ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  So why then was his name on Rosie’s lips at the moment of impact? If he was so important to her, why had her family and friends no idea who he was?

  Daisy had forgotten her mother was still there until a discreet cough reminded her. ‘Caroline? It’s so good of you to come, dear, but if you don’t mind they said two visitors only, and we have Rosie’s father coming soon. I’m terribly sorry.’

  ‘Oh.’ Caz, who still looked rather dazed, began to gather her parka and her tatty ethnic bag. ‘Will you let me know if anything … if there’s any change?’ She bent over and unself-consciously kissed Rosie’s cold white cheek. ‘Get better soon, babe, yeah. And I’m sorry for everything I – I’m just sorry, OK? I’ll come back when I can.’

  Rosie said nothing. Of course. Looking down at her fluttering eyelids, mauve with bruising, Daisy wondered if she could even hear them at all. She reached out a hand, tentatively, and touched her sister’s, tracing the blue veins on the inside of the pale wrists. As her mother saw Caz to the door, she whispered, ‘Oh Rosie, please wake up. Please?’

  Rosie

  Caz. Caz! I’m here. I can hear you. Caz!

  Nothing. She couldn’t so much as get a finger to twitch. Come on, please? I know I’ve neglected you too, I never get manicures and I bite my nails and forget to use hand cream, but … please? Nothing. It was torture, this, to lie there like a lump and listen to her family and friends talk about her, not be able to join in. Her body lay perfectly calm, immobile, while inside she raged like a storm. At least Caz still cared. Or was it just guilt, at how badly they’d fallen out? Because this was Caz, of course. Her best friend. How could Rosie have forgotten her?

  ‘Are you remembering what happened with you two?’ Mr Malcolm’s voice crept into Rosie’s ear.

  ‘Sort of.’ The edges of the memory were there, the overall feeling of it. And that feeling was … shame. ‘Please, Mr Malcolm, I don’t want to relive it. I know it was bad. I know I … I wasn’t nice to her.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said sympathetically, materialising in front of her. She could see Caz’s retreating back through his spectral body. ‘You don’t get to choose the memories. That’s not how it works.’

  ‘Why do you all keep saying that?’ Rosie said, irritated. ‘How does it work?’


  ‘Your brain’s in a real muddle, so it’s pulling out certain memories it thinks you need to see. Like your computer scanning its hard drive. Or like … picking files up from the floor when you’ve knocked over the cabinet.’

  ‘But why these memories? They’re nearly all terrible! I … I must be a horrible person. Is that what my brain’s trying to tell me?’ If everything about her life was so terrible, could she have tried to kill herself? She still didn’t feel it was possible. But the memories were so bad.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’ He looked so sad, in his green tank top with the hole in it, that Rosie’s heart ached.

  ‘It’s OK. If I have to do it, I have to. Let’s go then.’

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know the drill by now.’

  Dial. Spinning. Noise, blur. 20 4 2006. When was that? She couldn’t remember.

  The world was gone.

  20 April 2006 (Eleven years ago)

  The smell of the place always hit first, like a ghostly path into the memory. Here it was dust, and paper, and a slight undertone of feet. A theatre. Rosie’s favourite smell in the world, ever since she was five and her mother took her and a small squirming Daisy to see a regional performance of The Nutcracker. Daisy had fallen asleep within minutes, but Rosie had watched, transfixed, determined that one day it would be her up there onstage. She looked around for her past self, and winced. ‘That was when I had the fringe. God, it really did nothing for me.’

  ‘You’d suit a nice bob, you know,’ said Mr Malcolm, surprising her. ‘Let people see your face more.’

  ‘Oh. Do you think so?’

  ‘Oh yes. Like that Amy Adams, you know.’ He sighed. ‘She is just fabulous.’

  Past Rosie was crouched in a corner of the theatre, stretching her limbs and swallowing hard every few minutes. She wore her audition clothes, baggy jeans with holes in them and a vest top. Trying to be like the kids from Fame, and instead looking like a reject from New Kids on the Block. This was one of the cruellest things about being forced to relive your memories – realising all the terrible fashion choices you’d made along the way. As Now Rosie watched, hidden in shadows, a slim black girl approached, dumping a large tote bag on a chair beside her. She wore leggings and a big jumper and moved with a sort of innate focus, like all the best performers did.

  ‘Not this shit again,’ she declared, scanning Rosie quickly, her sharp South London accent in striking contrast to the grace of her movements, like a debutante at court. Sizing people up was what you did in these situations. Is she taller? Is she prettier? Is she up for the same part? The differences between her and Caz, not just skin colour but height and weight and style too, had always made it easier for them to be friends, because they likely wouldn’t be up for the same roles. ‘Cordelia?’

  ‘Goneril.’

  ‘Isn’t that the worst name? Sounds like an STD. Old Willie really had issues with strong women, didn’t he? You show a bit of gumption and it’s all, like …’ Here the girl rather startlingly cupped her breasts and declaimed: ‘“Come, ye spirits, unsex me here!” A bit much, methinks.’

  ‘Gosh, she’s wonderful,’ said Mr Malcolm approvingly. ‘If only we’d had her for that sixth-form production of the Scottish play, you know the one where I gave the lead to Janine Campbell, and she was five months pregnant by the time we went onstage? It made that scene a lot more disturbing.’

  Rosie was watching as her past self blinked. Caz had that effect – you wrote her off as a small pixie thing, swathed in layers of jumpers and scarves and cardies (like many actors, she was terrified of getting ill), then she stood up straight and spoke and you were just mesmerised. She had ‘it’. Whatever it was.

  ‘Sorry.’ Caz snapped back into her own self, peeling off her layers. ‘Did the Scottish play last year on a tour of the Scottish Highlands. It’s never really left me.’

  ‘You played Lady M?’

  ‘God, no. I played the second page from the left, and sometimes one of the dead Macduff kids. It’s a tough old business, eh?’

  ‘Sure is.’ Past Rosie had thawed a bit, de-iced by Caz’s warm charm. ‘I’m Rosie.’

  ‘Caroline Harper. Caz.’

  ‘Good stage name.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s really Hazada – Portuguese.’

  ‘I’m plain old Rosie Cooke. Sounds like a kitchen maid in a Dickens novel, doesn’t it?’ They smiled at each other, the flash of sudden friendship running between them, that immediate clicking that was just as powerful as attraction, and lasted far longer. Falling in friendship. Rosie tried to remember when she’d last done that. This was actually a nice memory. Soon they would do their audition pieces – Caz’s Lady Macbeth, her own rendition of Juliet’s ‘Romeo’ speech – and they’d both get the parts, because it was a truly terrible production with an insane director who wanted them all to do King Lear as if they were in an African military junta, and made them get into character by flinging buckets of fake blood at them and screaming, but it paid Equity rates and was Rosie’s first proper acting job, plus she and Caz went to the pub every night afterwards and became best mates and it was all great.

  ‘Time to go,’ said Mr Malcolm regretfully.

  ‘But it’s not finished! I got the part! Caz and I became friends!’

  ‘It seems this is going to be more of a … montage memory.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your brain’s got impatient, I think. It wants to show you more. Allons, cherie.’

  ‘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 oversized 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 ‘Hook-ups, 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 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.

  T
he 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 OK?’

  ‘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 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, her 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 where she and Caz were still friends. She knew what was coming next.

  *

  The years skipped by. 3 5 2009. Caz had got engaged 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 engagement 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 got too much for her, and she’d texted some random guy on her phone and gone round to his, spent the night shivering on the futon in the living room that was his bed, feeling terrible about herself the whole time.