The Promise You Made

by A J McDine

  ‘I -’

  ‘Would you have done it for her?’ she asked. ‘For my mum?’

  I’d have died for her. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then do it for me. Please, Rose. You’re all I have. We’ll be Thelma and Louise, watching each other’s backs. Always.’

  And if I’d been wavering, that clinched it.

  Chapter Seven

  SEPTEMBER 1990

  * * *

  ‘Eat your hearts out, Thelma and Louise!’ Juliet yelled, as the opaline green Austin Metro juddered down the slip road and onto the motorway. Seeing a motorbike roaring up behind us, Juliet yanked the steering wheel to the left, and I ducked as a yucca plant rolled off the boxes on the back seat, almost decapitating me.

  ‘You don’t need to drive off a cliff to kill us,’ I said breathlessly. ‘Just a few junctions along the M25 should do it.’

  Juliet hooted with laughter and pressed her foot on the accelerator. The Metro’s engine whined as the dial on the speedometer edged towards seventy miles an hour. The car had been a twenty-first birthday present from her mum and dad. They’d wrapped it in a red ribbon and parked it on the driveway of their Surbiton home, so it was there when she came down for breakfast. Juliet, like me, was an only child of older parents. It was one of the many things we had in common. Only she was cosseted, indulged. Me, not so much.

  I rescued the yucca from the footwell and squeezed the plant pot between my feet. The plant’s sharp sword-like leaves scratched my bare legs as the Metro rattled along in the inside lane. Juliet had christened it, as students were wont to do, and as I gingerly gripped Kevin’s thick, woody stem between my knees, she looked sidelong at me, a smile playing on her lips.

  ‘It’s about time you tried a bit of cock, isn’t it?’

  ‘Juliet!’ I cried, heat racing up my neck and colouring my cheeks, although I should have been used to her by now. She had a filthy mind for someone so outwardly demure. A paradox I still found hard to get my head around.

  ‘Oh, come on, Rose. Don’t be so stuffy. We’re about to start our third year at university and you haven’t had a single boyfriend. And it’s no good saying you want to concentrate on your degree, because it won’t wash.’

  ‘I need to concentrate on my degree,’ I said. And it was true. I’d been top of the top set at my girls’ grammar school, but I’d had a nasty shock when I discovered I was fair to middling on a good day at med school. Being surrounded by people who were far cleverer than I could ever hope to be was dispiriting for someone so easily intimidated as I was.

  Juliet would be the first to admit she wasn’t naturally academic. She never appeared to do any work, yet she still managed to breeze through her exams and assessments, whereas I had to burn the candle to scrape a pass. It hardly seemed fair, but I couldn’t begrudge her for it. Not Juliet.

  ‘Life’s passing you by. You’ll be in your fifties before you know it, living on your own in the middle of the woods with a cat for company, you mark my words,’ she warned. ‘You need to find yourself a man before it’s too late.’

  ‘I don’t have the time or the inclination,’ I said, crossing my arms and staring out of the window. But I couldn’t stay cross with her for long. ‘Hey, d’you realise we met each other two years ago almost to the day?’

  She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. ‘Yeah, I suppose we did.’

  ‘What was your first impression of me?’ I asked, unable to stop myself.

  ‘You reminded me of Henry.’

  ‘Henry?’ I asked, wondering what I had in common with the family labrador.

  ‘Because you were so bloody eager to please.’ She checked her mirror and pulled out to overtake a horsebox.

  ‘Charming,’ I said, even though she was right.

  ‘Question is, what was your first impression of me?’ she said, pulling back into the slow lane.

  I thought you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. You were so shiny, so polished, I wanted to reach out and stroke your cheek just to check you were real. That public school drawl, the way you oozed confidence, your ability to make friends as easily as breathing, both fascinated and flustered me. I was mesmerised. I still am.

  ‘I liked your denim jacket,’ I said at last.

  Juliet laughed again. ‘Oh Rose, you crack me up.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘What did I say?’

  But Juliet didn’t answer. Instead, she chuckled to herself, her eyes on the road ahead.

  Two years may have passed, but I remembered the day I met Juliet with such clarity it could have been yesterday. Waking up at five o’clock, my stomach writhing with nerves and excitement. Forgoing breakfast in favour of a mug of black coffee, not because of my nerves, but because I wanted to be thin and beautiful, like the girls in the university prospectus that I’d pored over for months.

  Reading medicine had been my dream for as long as I could remember, and now the day had arrived. At university, I could reinvent myself, shed my boring, pasty skin like a snake. Say goodbye to timid, frumpy Rose and embrace a cool, confident new me. All my new friends, for there would be many, would regard me as kooky, not weird. I would be part of the gang. Accepted for who I was. I wouldn’t have to watch my life from the sidelines ever again.

  My father had slipped me some money on the quiet to buy myself some clothes for university a fortnight before the start of term.

  ‘Best not tell your mother,’ he said, as he popped an envelope on my dressing table with a smile and a wink. I’d opened it with fumbling fingers, my eyes wide as I’d counted out the ten-pound notes. There were, to my amazement, twenty of them. Two hundred pounds! I’d never seen so much money in my life. I had to count the notes twice, just to be sure. God only knew how he’d saved it. My mother handled the family finances with the rigid control of a communist dictator. He wasn’t allowed near them.

  I found him in his armchair in the library and kissed the top of his head.

  ‘Thank you so much, Daddy.’

  ‘My pleasure, darling girl. We couldn’t have you turning up for medical school looking like the poor relation now, could we?’ His tone was jovial, but there was a sadness behind his eyes that his smile couldn’t mask. I knew it upset him that his job as a clerk at the Post Office barely paid enough to meet the bills. My mother getting a part-time job was out of the question, of course. Instead, she marched me along to every jumble sale within a five-mile radius, holding dead people’s moth-eaten garments against me as if she was a personal shopper in Harrods, to my acute embarrassment. Second Hand Rose was just one of my many monikers at school.

  So, with the two hundred pounds in my sticky fist, I’d caught the bus into Canterbury and ventured into the shops my mother normally marched me past, a firm hand on my shoulder. Dorothy Perkins, Snob, Next, Topshop. Even their names seemed synonymous with style and sophistication. I wasn’t to know that the truly cool kids were shopping in Benetton and French Connection.

  As I trailed around the shops, my eyes agog and my father’s money burning a hole in my pocket, I wished more than anything that I had a friend to go shopping with. But I was an outcast at school and fraternising with the village children was expressly forbidden because they were, according to my mother, “common”. The only person I could even loosely call a friend was a glum lump of a girl called Sonia Merryweather, who, like me, was doing all three sciences for A-level. But our friendship was confined to the classroom. Outside school, my best friend was our black cat, Smokey, and I could hardly take him shopping.

  In Snob, a pretty shop assistant with an impressive cloud of permed auburn hair a few shades darker than mine, took pity on me, bringing armfuls of clothes into the changing room for me to try on.

  ‘Green is your friend,’ she said, handing me a cotton top the colour of emeralds. ‘But blue is good, too, especially navy and cobalt, because it highlights fair skin.’

  I had no idea what cobalt was, but I nodded anyway.

  ‘We redheads look amazing in purple
as long as we choose a shade with blue undertones and steer well clear of lavender.’ She ferreted through the clothes and pulled out a bright purple cable-knit jumper. ‘Try that on with the jeans,’ she ordered, and I did as I was told, savouring the casual way in which she’d included me. We redheads. The possibility that I had anything in common with this luminous-skinned beauty made me fizz with happiness.

  ‘Pastels will wash you out and avoid yellow and orange like the plague,’ she continued, looping a chunky black necklace around my neck.

  ‘I will,’ I whispered fervently. ‘How much if I have all this?’

  An hour and almost two hundred pounds later, I strutted out of the shop, my arms weighed down with four heaving carrier bags. I had just enough left for some makeup in Superdrug. Emboldened now, I asked a friendly looking woman stacking shelves to help me choose an eyeliner, eyeshadow, mascara and lip gloss.

  By the time I caught the last bus home, tired but jubilant, the transformation was complete. I pulled up the collar of my new denim jacket. Wiping away the condensation on the bus window, I blew my reflection a kiss and whispered, ‘Rest in Peace, Second Hand Rose.’

  The euphoria lasted until I let myself in the back door later that afternoon. I’d already had the foresight to hide my new clothes in the log store, planning to smuggle them into my bedroom when my mother was at bridge club. But she looked up from her tapestry the second I walked in and barked, ‘What’s that muck on your face?’

  ‘Just a bit of makeup.’

  ‘Makeup?’ she snorted. ‘You’re far too young to be wearing makeup. You think you look pretty?’ She jumped up, pinched my chin between her finger and thumb and studied me, her mouth turned down at the corners. Finally loosening her grip, she pushed me away. ‘Well, you don’t. You look like a good for nothing tart.’

  And with that, my happiness leached away like rainwater down a storm drain, leaving a swell of bubbling resentment in its place.

  ‘Where did you get the money to pay for it all?’ she asked. ‘I hope you didn’t steal it.’

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘Of course I didn’t steal it! The woman in Superdrug let me use the samples, if you must know. She took pity on me because I look like a refugee.’ I plucked at my baggy sweater.

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t answer me back. And show some gratitude for the clothes on your back. There are children in Africa who have to make do with rags.’

  ‘Give me a break,’ I muttered, turning to go.

  ‘What did you say, young lady?’

  Old Rose would have backed down and apologised. Anything to keep the peace, ever her father’s daughter. But New Rose had had enough.

  ‘I said, give me a break, you poisonous old cow.’ My gaze swept over the drab 1960s kitchen with its tired Formica units and chipped floor tiles, lurid yellow and brown curtains and matching wall tiles. ‘God, I can’t wait to leave this dump.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ she spluttered, her face slowly turning red with rage.

  ‘You heard,’ I said coolly. ‘I’ll come back in the holidays, but only because I have to. When I’ve qualified as a doctor you won’t see me for dust.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘All right,’ I said at long last. ‘But there’s one proviso. And it’s non-negotiable.’

  Eloise clasped her hands together. ‘Anything.’

  ‘You leave Theo to me. I’ll take care of him.’

  ‘But -’

  ‘I mean it, Eloise. Seeing him - his body - will only upset you. Promise you’ll let me deal with him?’

  She nodded. ‘OK, I promise. And thank you. You don’t know how much this means to me.’

  I waved her words away with a sweep of my hand. ‘Run yourself a bath, then go to bed. Everything will look much brighter in the morning.’ It was something my father used to say, although in my experience it was rarely the case.

  ‘Where will you…?’ Eloise began.

  ‘I think it’s best you don’t know, don’t you?’

  She nodded again and was halfway across the room when she stopped, came back and pecked me on the cheek. Her lips felt cool and soft on my skin. ‘Night night, Auntie Rose.’

  I touched the cheek she’d kissed and smiled. ‘Goodnight, Eloise.’

  Once she’d disappeared upstairs, I pulled on my coat and wellies, picked up the torch and her car keys and ventured outside. It was still raining, a fine drizzle that stuck my hair to my head and dribbled down my neck. I followed the beam of the torch to the small shed behind my father’s allotment. A handful of straggly redcurrant bushes and a gnarly apple tree were all that remained of his once-pristine vegetable patch. As anything I ever planted inevitably shrivelled up and died, I’d let nature take its course. Within another couple of years, the entire area would vanish under a tangle of brambles.

  I unlocked the shed door and ferreted around for the things I would need - gardening gloves, shears, secateurs, a shovel, a can of WD-40 and a length of rope - flinging them into the wheelbarrow that was propped up outside. Heading back into the shed, I swept piles of plastic plant pots off the metal trunk in the far corner, heaved the lid open and grabbed my father’s air rifle and a tin of pellets. I loaded the gun and laid it carefully next to the shovel.

  I pushed the wheelbarrow up the slope to the woods at the top of the garden. As I passed the sinkhole, I stopped and waved the torch over it. Water was already pooling at the bottom. The sight of it triggered a memory of Eloise’s christening. A huddle of people standing around a font. The vicar, a thin man with a nasal twang. Juliet’s parents, already well into their seventies, wearing proud smiles and their Sunday best. Juliet, regal in an elegant silk shift dress and matching jacket. My fellow godparent, a hapless man called Greg or Gavin or some such, who was knocked off his bike by a courier a week later and died instantly. And at the centre of things, a red-faced baby called Eloise, named not after the 12th-century French scholar and philosopher Héloïse, but after her mother’s favourite song by The Damned.

  ‘Will you pray for her, draw her by your example into the community of faith and walk with her in the way of Christ?’ the vicar intoned.

  I was a committed atheist, but I’d pushed my principles, such as they were, to one side, and murmured, ‘With the help of God I will.’

  ‘Will you care for her, and help her to take her place within the life and worship of Christ’s Church?’

  ‘With the help of God, I will.’

  Empty promises before a God I didn’t believe in. Yet, twenty-one years later, here I was, standing on the side of a sinkhole about to put my life on the line for that red-faced baby. I caught myself wondering how it would all end.

  I pushed the wheelbarrow through the undergrowth, wincing as hazel branches whipped my face and hands, aiming for the ridge Eloise and I had followed earlier. But this time when I reached it, I turned deeper into the woods towards an old pillbox at the northernmost tip.

  The squat, concrete building had been part of a network of defences thrown up in 1940 to defend Britain against the anticipated Nazi invasion. Never needed, it had slowly disappeared under a mass of brambles and bracken and when my parents bought the cottage as newlyweds in the late 1950s, they had no idea it was there. My father discovered it by chance when he was clearing a fallen tree some years later and had fitted a sturdy wooden door so he could use it as a log store until a small colony of pipistrelles made it their home. He built another log store nearer the house and left the pipistrelles in peace.

  Years passed, and the pillbox was smothered by scrub once more. When I was about twelve, curious to see inside the little concrete building, I took a pair of shears to the undergrowth and cut a path to the narrow door. I slid back the bolts and pulled my hood firmly over my head as I stepped inside, worried the bats might dive-bomb me and entangle themselves in my hair. But they were asleep, tucked into tiny crevices, and had no interest in me. I retraced my steps, my nostrils filled with the faint scent of ammonia, bat droppings crumbling to dust
beneath my wellies. My curiosity satisfied, I’d never been back.

  Until now.

  The pillbox was further from the house than I remembered, and I was wondering if I’d already passed it when the beam of my torch fell on a slab of rough concrete swathed in brambles. Balancing the torch on the wheelbarrow, I pulled on my gardening gloves, picked up the shears and began attacking the brambles as if my life depended on it. Twenty minutes later, sweat had joined the dribble of rain down the back of my neck, but the path to the pillbox was clear. I grabbed the torch and picked my way to the door.

  It was no surprise that the two bolts had rusted stuck since my last visit almost forty years before. I gave them both a liberal spray of WD-40, hammered them open with the end of the shears and stepped inside and waved the torch around.

  The pillbox was about ten feet square and just under six feet high. The tang of ammonia was still there. So were the bats, hanging like dried leaves from narrow cracks in the concrete. I checked the two window slits through which soldiers would have stuck their machine guns if the Germans had made it across the Channel. They were wide enough to stick an arm through but narrow enough to suit my purpose. Which was just as well, as the pillbox was my only option.

  With one last glance around the compact space, I tossed the can of WD-40 into the wheelbarrow and headed back through the woods. As I neared the house, my heart rate quickened. I’d promised Eloise I’d take care of Theo.

  And that’s exactly what I intended to do.

  Chapter Nine

  When I’d felt the flicker of a pulse in Theo’s neck, I thought I must have imagined it. He was supposed to be dead. Eloise had killed him. She was certain of it. Holding my breath, I’d increased the pressure. And there it was. Faint and slow, but steady. Almost indiscernible and yet utterly indisputable.