‘Sorry I had to do that to you, Rosehip,’ she’d say, apologetically, ‘but it was the only way to get your attention. I’m not actually dead at all, but if I was, how would you feel?’
She would feel … destroyed. Completely and utterly destroyed. Wracked with agony. Raw and exposed and empty.
Exactly how she feels now. She’s watched the video three times, and the panic has got worse with each viewing. She can feel it now, rising up to choke her, wrapping around her internal organs and strangling the oxygen out of her.
Every moment is etched in agony in her memory. The way her mother smiled. The way she clutched the blanket on her lap. The way her nails were still painted, glamour against the grey. The way she spoke, so calm and deliberate and real. As though she was sitting in the room with her right now, not already dead. Already cold.
The image of her mother in some chilly mortuary in the Midlands grips her, and she can’t get it out of her head. Lying on a stainless-steel slab, skin pale, flesh pallid, eyes closed. Fingernails painted, hair done, make-up still on. Looking like her mother, but not her mother – a waxwork model of her mother. She wants to bust in, and cover her up with a fleecy blanket, and keep her warm.
The pain is so intense, she doesn’t know quite what to do with herself. Physically, she’s a wreck – short of breath, panting, paralysed by shock, aching. Emotionally, it is even worse, and she wants to die. If it wasn’t for Joe, innocently upstairs, now quiet, possibly sleeping, his shaggy brown hair curling over his forehead, she probably would.
She wants to reach out for someone, to seek comfort, but has nowhere to turn. Joe’s dad Gareth is in London, on to his third wife and fourth child, and dead to her in any way that matters. Any way beyond terse emails about Joe, and the sly digs she knows are intended to hurt and always hit their target.
She has friends, but they’re not the kind you call at midnight to sob uncontrollably. She has Joe himself, but she can’t use him as an emotional crutch. His granny’s death will hit him hard enough – she can at least let him sleep one last night without having to deal with it.
She has a sister, but even thinking about Poppy makes the pain so much worse. It’s too big. Too frightening. Too much.
There is nobody to help her. Nobody to console her. And all she wants is her mum. Her mum, who always smelled of Chanel Coco and had the softest skin and gave the best hugs. Her mum, who held her hand when she started school, and lurked across the road in the car on her first date in case it didn’t go well. Her mum, who got up at 5.30 a.m. that summer she had a paper round and did it with her just so she had company.
Her mum, who had wiped away so many tears; and always had a tissue handy. Who talked her through the importance of properly burping a baby, and took Joe out for huge walks in his pram when he had colic and Rose was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Who cleared her entire ironing pile while she zoned out on sleeping pills after Gareth left.
Her mum – who taught her everything she knew about love.
She’d broken her mother’s heart.
‘Oh God,’ she wails, muffling her words into an already snot-stained cushion, ‘please tell her I love her! Tell her I’m sorry!’
God doesn’t answer, and, even if He did, Rose probably wouldn’t listen – she is lost and alone in her grief and her anguish.
She rolls physically to the floor, and lands on the carpet in an ungainly heap. Crawling first on to all fours, then to her feet, she totters unsteadily through to the hallway. Her eyes are red and raw, and she bounces off walls as she walks.
She pulls open the drawer of the telephone table so hard it comes out in her hand, and she drops it to the floor, spilling its contents: a small torch, a ball of string, a tube of Superglue, a rubber in the shape of Pikachu’s head, a Thai takeaway menu, a pedometer.
She kneels down, breath heavy with the effort, and scrabbles until she finds a biro and one of those block memo pads for taking phone messages. Clutching them to her like a newborn baby, she walks back into the living room.
There isn’t a desk down here, and she needs something to lean on. She finds one of Joe’s hardback books – aStar Warsencyclopedia – and covers up Yoda’s head with the paper.
Her hand is trembling, and she can’t hold the pen properly. It keeps slipping, and making her scrawl, and she’s useless. Just utterly, pathetically useless. She can’t even do this properly. She stabs Yoda in the eye in frustration, and draws in a long, slow, shuddering breath.
She knows the biology of what is happening to her. She knows she needs to calm down, to regulate her breathing, to inhale and exhale and simply stop bloody panicking. She takes in three long, slow breaths through her nose, tries to let them out just as slowly through her mouth.
She temporarily gives up on the list, and goes to the fridge. She opens the door, sees that the quinoa and the carrot batons are still there, and grabs a half-full bottle of Blossom Hill from the door.
She looks around the kitchen, and there are no cups. No glasses. She is as shitty at keeping a house as she is at everything else. She pulls open the cupboards, and sees only an egg cup. Everything is either in the dishwasher, or festering somewhere in the science experiment that Joe calls a bedroom, buried under layers of mouldy pizza and rigid socks.
She pulls out the egg cup. It has an acid-house-style smiley face on it, and it’s just too small. She opens the next cupboard, and pulls out a plastic measuring jug. That’ll do.
The wine glugs in, splashing back up to sting already stinging eyes. She looks at the markings on the side of the jug, having a strange flashback to simpler days – days when a laboratory and strange liquids and carefully poured fluids were the centre of her world.
The wine bottle is empty. The jug shows her she has 600 millilitres of anaesthetic to play with, and she takes it back through to the lounge. She picks up the book, the pen, the paper. She tries to rub the ink mark off Yoda, but it’s gone too deep, like a weird eyeball tattoo.
Rose drinks, and she breathes, and she swipes snot from her inflamed nostrils with the corner of her already soggy cardigan, the long one that she fools herself covers her arse.
And she makes her list.
Chapter 15
Rose starts with shaky hands, calmer now but still barely able to hold the pen, eyes blurred by tears. As the wine goes down, and the tears dry up, and the words start to flow, it gets easier. And worse. It feels like the List That Will Never Die. The guilt pours out of her and into the pen and on to the tiny white pages. She underlines the title twice, freehand, so the line is a jagged doodle, and she even feels guilty about not using a ruler.
