Chapter Eighteen
Rosie had been upstairs, as usual, but I brought her up a cup of relaxing tea.
‘Sweetheart?’ I called gently through her door. ‘How’s it going in there?’
Silence. I pushed open the door.
‘Rosie, I have some nice camomile…’
She was asleep on the bed, her breathing light and steady. For a moment, I just gazed at her. The poor girl. Fully dressed, her long hair falling over thepillow.
I remembered when she was a little girl and we’d walk to school together, knowing so clearly that this was a golden moment in my life. You, as their mother, define their world, you shape it and make sense of it for them, sharing the life so intimately with your small child. I stayed in my marriage for her, I became a teacher because I thought it was more family friendly, I wanted to makethe world perfect, or as near perfect as was possible, for her but it seemed it was never quite enough.
I hovered for a moment with the cup of camomile tea. Should I leave it or bring it downstairs? Leave it. I went to her desk to place it down.
One notebook was open, the pen lying across it, as though she’d been writing and, overcome with tiredness, had fallen asleep. It was just a glance,but something made me take a second look. It was the uniform look of the writing, the fact that it looked so unlike a piece of revision work or an essay of any kind. It was Rosie’s handwriting, though, her loopy biro, the way she did her a’s, the slightly embellished f. But it was the same sentence, over and over again, the same phrase, over and over.
I hate my life. I hate my life. I hate mylife.
The same words covered the page. I flicked through the whole book. Everywhere, the same sentence, filling the pages. This must have taken weeks and weeks. Months.
I hate my life. I hate my life. I hate my life.
I looked through other papers on her desk, the ream of foolscap, all covered with that phrase. The same, page after page after page. Months of work, the careful writing of thishorrible sentence. She hadn’t been revising, she had been filling notebooks with this one thought.
I hate my life, I hate my life.
On the shelf above her desk were other A4 pads, I flicked through them, all of them, the same.
I hate my life. I hate my life. I hate my life.
My darling girl. My beautiful girl. The person I loved more than anything, my absolute pride and joy, the girl who hadeverything, was good at everything, the person who had the world at her feet, laid out like the finest carpet, hated her life, and had become stuck on this one thought and couldn’t move forwards. She must have been so terrified. Why hadn’t I realised? Why hadn’t I checked, helped her, asked more about how she was getting on… there were so many signs. So many obvious signs and I just assumed – hoped– that it would be okay.
I stood there, for a few moments, not quite knowing what to do. I thought back to Celia’s party, and then when she called me at the cake sale. And the fact that she hadn’t gone to see any of her friends for months, or been out of the house.
But all the time, I had thought she was getting closer and closer to the end, when in fact she was getting further away. Becausethe one thing I wanted for her was for her to love her life. That’s all I had ever wanted and if she didn’t, then I had failed.
‘Mum. What are you doing?’ Rosie was sitting up, furious.
‘Rosie… why didn’t you say?’
She stood up and angrily grabbed her notebook from my hands. ‘Why are you going through my things? I can’t believe you’d do such a thing!’
‘Rosie, wait…’
‘Everything’s fine, Mum.Don’t look at me like that.’
‘You can’t keep saying everything’s fine when obviously it isn’t. You should have told me. I could have helped. I could have helped you.’
‘And done what exactly?’ Rosie started to cry, great rackety sobs, the kind I hadn’t seen her take since she was tiny. They were filled with hopelessness and devastation, as if her life had come to an end.
‘Rosie… Rosie…’ Shestood trembling and shaking in my arms, her head pressed onto my shoulder.
‘Mum…’ was all she managed. ‘What am I going to do?’
I pulled her onto the bed and we sat side by side, both her trembling hands in mine, and we waited until her breathing slowed down.
‘Right, Rosie, whatever you are thinking now, that none of this can be fixed, it can. It’s a case of how you recover. Setbacks are justthat. Until your comeback. You get up again, you move on and youlearn. Do you understand?’
