‘I suppose he wants you to get in touch. Trot back home like a good little wifey.’
‘Yes,’ Rose said. That was something of an understatement.
‘Where are you, babe?’ Shona asked her softly, hesitantly, as if she didn’t really want to know.
Rose understood her friend’s reservations. Listening to Richard’s messages and speaking to Shona was making all this real. Up until this point it had been a sort of a dream, a flit in the night, an eccentric landlady, finding her father and Frasier all at once. Even Maddie settling in and getting on with people she barely knew. It was as if as soon as she stepped away from Richard, her life just fell neatly into place, and everything was as it should be. But that wasn’t how it was; she couldn’t just pretend she hadn’t been married for thirteen years and now she’d changed her mind. Richard was coming, he would find her, and when he did, Rose couldn’t imagine what would happen next, but she knew it would be bad.
‘If I tell you where I am, you’ll think I’m insane.’
‘Well, according to your darling husband, that’s a given,’ Shona said. ‘Where are you? Say it’s somewhere good, without an extradition treaty.’
‘I’m in Millthwaite,’ Rose said, bracing herself.
‘Millthwaite? Which part of the Costa del … fucking hell, Rose, you went to your fucking postcard!’ Rose braced herself against the string of expletives that blasted into her ear, as Shona tried to come to terms with what she had done.
‘Well, yes, I know but … I had to go somewhere, Shona, somewhere far away, and it was the only place I could think of.’
‘Not, you know, London or Leeds or New York?’ Shona
asked
her, before adding, ‘
Millthwaite
, Rose? What, did you think Mr Perfect, whatever his name is, would be sitting on a bench in the village green waiting for you?’
‘Well, the thing is,’ Rose said, biting her lip, ‘he sort of is.’
‘What the fuck!’ Shona exclaimed.
‘He’s in Millthwaite a lot … visiting my dad, who lives up the road.’
‘Did Dickhead give you those antipsychotic drugs he’s been threatening you with yet?’ Shona asked her, with her usual acidic bluntness.
Rose was used to Shona’s way, knowing that no matter how harsh Shona might sound, it was only because she was, as far as Rose knew, the only person in the entire world who really cared about her. And that was Shona in a nutshell: she spent her life roaring at the world, but in reality there could not be a kinder, sweeter, more loyal or more thoughtful best friend. It was just hard to spot that sometimes when Shona was in full sail.
‘You know, the ones that make you hallucinate,’ Shona continued. ‘Are you sure you’re in Millthwaite, not gibbering on the floor of the ladies’ loo in some motorway services, staring at your postcard?’
‘I know it sounds crazy,’ Rose said, smiling at Shona’s outrage. ‘It
is
crazy, isn’t it? I came here expecting … well, nothing really. I just wanted to be here, and not there. And they are both here. Frasier and my father.’
‘Fucking ridiculous,’ Shona said, sighing with obvious frustration. ‘Babe, this is only going to make things worse. This Frasier, he’s not going to know who you are, and if he does, he’s going to be freaked out by you. And as for your dad, well, I think
you
and I both know what he is, even if you have made me promise to stop using the C-word. He cut you out of his life and you’ve moved on without a second glance. How’s any of this going to help you now, when you’ve finally got away from him? You need to be finding your feet, not setting yourself up to be knocked down. You’ve made a clean break, so make it a fresh start too and run away from your past, not back to it.’
‘So where should I go?’ Rose asked. In her heart she knew Shona was most likely right, but Shona didn’t understand everything. She had been the only person Rose had ever confided in about the postcard, about how much of an impression Frasier had made on her, but Rose couldn’t tell even Shona how much he’d lived in her heart every single moment of every single day since. That was something too precious, too special and quite possibly too insane to share with anyone, even Shona. ‘I can’t come to you. I’ve got no family, no friends anywhere else that aren’t really Richard’s. Only the cash that’s in my secret account to live on. My only family is here, even if I have found him by accident, even if I’m pretty sure I don’t want to see him. This is a sign, right? This is the universe telling me in ten-foot-high neon-flashing letters exactly what to do. I can’t ignore it.’
‘You can’t handle this on your own,’ Shona said. ‘You’re not strong enough.’
‘Now you’re sounding like him,’ Rose said unhappily, hoping for more support from her friend. ‘I’m not crazy, Shona. I see what this looks like, but it’s not how it is. You weren’t there, you don’t know how I feel. I’ve got to see Frasier again – I just have to – before I can do anything else. I’m not expecting anything to happen, or for him to sweep me into his arms and
ask
me where I’ve been all his life, but I have to see him. I have to know if what happened for me, happened for him too, because even if he’s moved on and forgotten me, if I know it was real for him too, then I’ll know. And I know there is something out there for me that’s better than Richard.’
‘Hannibal Lecter would have been better than Richard,’ Shona said bitterly.
‘What’s wrong?’ Rose asked her. ‘I mean apart from me, and all this mess. Are you OK?’
Shona was silent, which could only mean one thing. Ryan was somehow back, wanting to be in her life again.
‘What does he want?’ Rose asked, her chest filling with heavy dread. The key difference between Shona and Rose was that Rose hadn’t loved Richard for a long, long time, if she ever truly had. Shona never stopped loving Ryan, no matter what he did to her.
‘He wants me back,’ Shona said quietly. ‘He wants another chance, he wants to give it a go. For us and the boys to be a family again.’
‘But you know that can never happen,’ Rose said slowly, to be sure that Shona was hearing her. ‘Not now.’
‘He sounds so sad,’ Shona said softly, her strident tone now gentle, fragile almost. As far as Ryan was concerned she would always be like a moth to a flame, only ever seeing the light and never the danger. ‘He sounded so lonely and lost, and I … I miss him, Rose.’
Not this time, Rose thought, panicking, not now. She couldn’t drag herself away from darkness only to let her best friend fall back into its arms. There had to be some way of stopping Shona from making the same mistake again; telling her how
wrong
she was never worked. There was only one thing that Rose thought might be powerful enough to influence Shona, and that was loyalty. Shona’s unswerving loyalty to her.
‘Come here.’ Rose said the words out loud at exactly the moment the idea formed in her head. ‘Come here to me, please.’
‘What?’ Shona asked, incredulous. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Come here. You say I’m not strong enough to deal with this alone, and you’re right. I need you, Shona, I need you with me, and even if you don’t want to admit it, you need some time to think about what you’re going to do next. Run away too, come here and bring the boys and we can both hide for a while. I can help you clear your head, and you can make sure I don’t make a total fool of myself with Frasier or my father.’
‘Mate, I can’t just disappear like you,’ Shona said, distracted enough by the idea to sound like her old self again. ‘People will worry about me.’
‘Oh, thanks very much,’ Rose said.
‘You know what I mean. My mum, my job, Ryan …’
‘Ryan doesn’t care about you, Shona,’ Rose said brutally, unable to contain herself any longer. ‘He wants you, maybe he does love you in his own particular, twisted way, but he doesn’t care about you. If he did, he wouldn’t have put you in hospital with four broken ribs, a collapsed lung and internal bleeding. The boys wouldn’t have gone into temporary care, and he wouldn’t have done time for it.’
There they were, the facts laid bare, the reasons why Rose couldn’t bear for Shona to make the same mistake again, and Rose had said them out loud, even though she felt like a hypocrite, even though she knew she could never tell anyone, not
even
Shona, what it was Richard did to her. But this wasn’t about her, it was about saving Shona.
‘I know it sounds bad from the outside, but you don’t know …’ Shona trailed off, aware that she was repeating exactly what Rose had just said to her. ‘No one knows, do they, what it’s like inside? How you feel stuff you don’t want, think things you shouldn’t. It’s like … it’s like you’re two people. The person who knows what to do, and the one who does what she wants, whatever the consequences.’
‘Come here, Shona, please,’ Rose begged, urgency and concern flooding her voice. ‘Please, come and escape with me for a bit. I’ve decided, I’m not going to call Richard. I’m not going to let him get inside my head again. He’ll find me eventually, but not yet. We’ve got time, you and me, not much, but a little bit of time before everything catches up with us and I’m determined to make the best of it. I’m sure there is room here – I’m the only guest – but I’ll book you in as soon as I get off the phone, and you can help me get my head straight and strong before I have to face him again. And I can help you do the same. Besides, if you come here, then I’ll look a whole lot less stalkery when I “bump” into Frasier.’
‘OK,’ Shona said, so quietly that Rose was unsure she’d heard her. ‘OK, I’ll borrow Mum’s car and drive up tomorrow. But I’m only coming because you need me, you bloody loser. And you better tell me where the hell the godforsaken shit hole of Millthwaite actually is.’
Chapter Five
ROSE SAT IN
Jenny’s living room, the weak August sunshine battling through the silver clouds to illuminate the spotless room. Maddie was sitting on a dining room chair, her head buried in the enormous doll’s house where she was happily arranging its occupants around the new technological arrival of television into their nineteenth-century lives. She felt curiously at peace considering the hurricane of a day she was about to step into, Richard snapping somewhere at her heels, her father alone somewhere in the hills, oblivious to her just as he had been every single day for more than twenty years. And one step closer to seeing Frasier again.
Her heart raced, interrupting her moment of calm as she thought of him, of the enormous gamble she had taken coming here, deciding to look for him. She knew Shona thought she was crazy, staking everything she had on what was nothing more than a dream and a postcard, but what Shona didn’t really understand was that just being here, just taking this step, this giant leap that broke her away from the prison of her old life, was all that really mattered now. Looking for Frasier was much more important to her than finding him, and although the idea of seeing him again, the fantasy that he might be pleased to
see
her too, was so compelling, Rose allowed herself to think only from moment to moment. There was no possible future that she had the ability to picture at that precise moment in her life, and not knowing what was going to happen next was as exciting and exhilarating as it was terrifying.
As for seeing her father again, Rose had decided that she had to go, but she had no idea how she felt about the prospect of facing him. Her heart felt numb whenever she thought of him. She couldn’t imagine how he would look now, how it would feel to see him after so many years, what it would be like to look into his face and see how he felt about seeing her. It was like knowing you were going to walk through a door but being unable to comprehend what might lie behind it.
After giving it some thought, Rose had decided not to wait for Shona to arrive before making the short drive to her father’s cottage. It would mean wasting another precious day before Richard found her and, besides, Shona had this curious effect on her life, reflecting back a true image of herself, of the way things really were, that Rose rarely enjoyed looking at. Shona was the one adult in her life who never lied to Rose, who was always straight with her. If Shona said something was wrong or insane or deeply misguided, then Rose knew she was right. Rose didn’t want that lens focused on her too closely on the day she first set eyes on her father again. It had been a brief, chance encounter with Shona years before they truly found each other that had made Rose see her marriage for what it was for the first time, an unveiling that Rose would have been content to live without.
Rose was twenty-three and had been a married woman for five years. She was walking back from her daily trip to the
supermarket
a little later than usual, and was almost home when she’d bumped into Shona, walking down the road where Rose lived, underdressed for the freezing weather in a flimsy cotton jacket. And heavily pregnant.
Panicking at the sight of her former friend, Rose ducked her head down, hoping to make it past the other woman without being spotted. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to Shona, it was more that she had no idea what she would say to her.
‘Babe? Rose, babe, it is you!’ Shona stopped her by putting a hand on her arm. ‘Rose, fuck me, I’ve been wondering about what happened to you since you left Harley’s. You disappeared! What happened to you? One minute you were there, next you were gone.’
Rose caught her breath as Shona hugged her, slapping her on the back for good measure when she finally released Rose from her grip.
‘Hello, Shona,’ Rose said quietly. ‘It’s good to see you. You haven’t changed, well, apart from the obvious.’
‘This fucking thing?’ Shona laughed, hugging her belly. ‘I know, it’s nuts, right? I wasn’t planning on kids just yet, but I’ve met this bloke. The father, fuck, Rose. He’s perfect. He loves me so much, and I just know he’s going to be a brilliant dad. I’m so happy!’
Shona squealed and hugged Rose again with sheer joy, which Rose felt radiating through her bones. It was an unfamiliar sensation.
‘Listen to me, I haven’t let you get a word in. So, what have you been up to?’
‘Me? I got married! Have been for five years,’ Rose smiled, trying to emulate a little of Shona’s ebullience. She had felt that
way
once about marrying Richard, she had felt that way for a long time, revelling in a sense of belonging, of being wanted and cherished, and feeling safe. It was only seeing Shona’s own fresh excitement about life that made her realise she didn’t really feel that way any more.