Chapter Twenty-Eight #6
‘I feel like such a terrible friend,’ Keera says. ‘I haven’t seen Cat in years. She must think I’m such a bitch. We used to sleep in each other’s beds when we were little. She braided my hair, I did her eye make-up. I painted her toes every week with a different colour for each toe.’
‘Have you been going over other incidents in your mind with you and your mother where you don’t like what you see?’
‘Yeah,’ says Keera wearily. She drinks her juice. ‘When I got out of rehab, Mom expected me to start work all over again. I was too fragile. Mom thought rehab was self-indulgent. She didn’t come on family day.’
The terrace is silent.
‘When I got out, she said all that rehab stuff was in the past. I was a superstar and I had work to do.’
Keera bursts into tears. ‘I know we’re messed up but I love her. I guess I grew up and she didn’t want me to.’
It takes Rose a while to calm Keera down.
‘You can love your mother and want to change things, Keera: both of these statements can be true at the same time.’
‘But I’m betraying her—’
‘If you don’t stand up for what you feel, then the person you’re betraying is yourself,’ says Rose firmly.
She can tell that the group are all on edge, so she shifts her focus.
‘India,’ Rose says, ‘tell us about your outfit today?’
India looks astonished.
‘Me? This was dirt cheap,’ she says holding up the linen skating skirt she’s wearing with tennis shoes and a floppy cerise polka-dot blouse.
‘I got it in the Oxfam shop. This,’ she waves her arms around and the small sleeves of her blouse wave, ‘was expensive. It’s Chloé. Twenty-five quid at a car boot sale.’
‘That is not expensive,’ says Grazia, ‘but it is lovely.’
‘Twenty-five’s a lot at a car boot,’ India explains. ‘I put ribbons in the tennis shoes for fun.’
She holds up one long leg with the shoe at the end decorated with neon-green ribbon laces.
‘Who says you’re not clever?’ Rose remarks and India laughs.
‘I told you: you’re an artist.’
Rose ends the session by standing up.
‘You’re all free from now till six this evening when we meet to discuss any insights from your notebooks. Yours too, Bernard,’ she says.
Bernard glares at her.
Once she’s walked away, Dan stands up and stretches his long arms over his head.
‘I’m going to do a hike,’ he says to India and Keera. ‘You two want to come?’
Keera shakes her head.
‘Didn’t sleep well last night,’ she says.
Her sleep was full of rehab-style nightmares where she’s been drinking and lying about it. She needs to phone her closest NA friend, Yolande. Ask what it means when you haven’t had a drink or used, but think you
have.
‘I’ll go with you,’ says India suddenly. ‘I think a march will be good for me!’
‘I didn’t say a march,’ says Dan. ‘We can’t be out too long – you heard what Rose said, it’s too hot and we can only carry a certain amount of water with us.’
‘Fine,’ says India. ‘Where are we starting from?’
‘The beach,’ says Dan.
‘See you there in half an hour, then,’ India says and skips off.
Rose gets a cup of coffee from the kitchen, then goes into the air-conditioned cool of her room and sits down at her desk, pulling her notepad towards her.
Rose thinks again about how Keera thought she was an empath.
Rose is fed up of the word – to her, it just means people who were raised on a knife-edge and who’ve learned to anticipate the inevitable explosions.
If you learned as a kid how to predict the anger/rage/whatever of your supposed adult carer, you knew how to hide or get out of the way.
Rose learned that early on.
Being raised in care didn’t actually mean care. There weren’t enough caring people to go around.
But there were plenty of supposed empaths.
Rose’s own gift at seeing people’s pain was the result of it. She’d always thought it was half magic, but she finally realised that life had taught her to thin-slice people expertly.
It was a technique whereby one noted every facial and emotional tic, every word, every syllable, every roll of the eyes, every sliver of contempt until you could tell exactly what sort of person was in front of you.
Most people had to train to do this but, after her childhood, Rose is an expert.
After that, it’s about how you help other people to heal.
She was lucky, she knows. She’d been in care all her young life and she’d had some lovely foster parents. Some mediocre ones.
None of them ever lasted.
Now Rose knows it’s a hellish job to do and that foster parents burn out.
Rose has been Rose Talisman for so long that she can barely recall being Alys Rosemarie Flint.
Flint is a harsh name and names have meaning.
Rose has always understood this. Little Alys Flint had been raised without so much.
Without real parents and, for a very long time, without much in the way of love or kindness.
Sometimes, when she’d been on the TV show and people came to her with families so broken and damaged that they seemed unfixable, Rose would wish she could hold their hands and tell them that she really understood.
You can escape, she’d have said. I did.
But she’d said nothing. Not to them, not to her beloved Theo. Nobody knew. Holding on to her secret was insurance against the past emerging.
Rose understood trauma because she’d grown up in it.
There was nothing to beat the lived experience to understand pain.
Her way out of that trauma came from her vast ability to learn.
She learned that education could help her clamber out of the world of foster parents and damaged foster siblings.
When she hit eighteen, she’d changed her name and magicked up a French mother and a background in the Auvergne, a rural part of France.
Nobody searching for Rosemary Talisman would ever find the remnants of little Alys Flint who’d been in fourteen foster homes before the age of ten.
Nor would they find her little adopted sister. After everything they’d gone through together, Rose would keep Adriana safe no matter what.
Dan sits on the sand waiting for India and stares into the sea. There’s the lightest of breezes down here on the beach, and the beach goat has already come up to say hello, bumped Dan in the ribs, and then wandered off when it was obvious that Dan had nothing for him to eat.
Now Dan’s trying to sit cross-legged on the sand, a position he finds hard to hold but Julia makes him do it because it’s ‘good for your hips, babes’.
She’s hyper flexible so she can do anything bendy, but Dan’s a cycling man and the sort of muscles that help him power up hills mean his muscles are taut rather than lean and stretchy like Julia’s.
It always comes back to Julia, doesn’t it? Always.
His mind goes to one of their last big rows. He’s in the faculty meeting; they’re discussing the car parking. The faculty is always discussing car parking.
Dan is not interested because he does not drive into college. His daily routine involves cycling four miles from his two-bedroom redbrick, hauling the Boardman SLR 8.9 Disc up the stairs to his office and hanging it on the wall.
It cost so much, there is no way he’s leaving it chained in the bike shed. Bikes mysteriously disappear. Especially items of beauty like the Boardi.
‘It’s art,’ he shrugs whenever people mutter about having a large custom-painted racing bike dangling from the wall.
There are twenty people at the meeting, and Dan has tuned out.
He’s looking down at the hardback notebook he uses for all his non-research notes, and is thinking of a lecture he has to give on optogenetics, when his phone starts to vibrate.
It’s on silent but he absentmindedly placed it on the desk in front of him and when Julia’s picture flashes up, it feels as if the vibrations are somehow louder.
She picked the picture herself – one of her at a party looking spectacular in a silvery sequinned dress that appears to be a very small, slightly elongated vest to Dan.
He never understands women’s clothes. Julia’s are all ridiculously flimsy, barely covering her long limbs and the appropriate bits in a way that makes many men long to see what’s underneath.
Dan is used to men lusting over Julia. Has been since they were first going out, when they were both seventeen and different.
He can still recall the wonder he felt that someone as beautiful as Julia would want to talk to him, never mind kiss him.
He was tall, awkward, knew he was clever but worried that his cleverness made him stand out in the wrong way.
He hadn’t worked out then that cleverness sometimes needed to be hidden because nobody liked a know-it-all.
Julia was someone who seemed to shimmer like a star. That she should say she didn’t fit in either, that she liked him and his cleverness, still astonishes him on many levels.
In her currently pulsating phone picture, Julia’s beautiful face is thrown back as if she’s laughing at something and her deliciously sexy mouth is open, displaying perfect teeth and that soft pink tongue.
The phone continues pulsing.
With anyone else, Dan could click on the ‘can I call you later’ option. But not his on-off girlfriend of twenty years. Julia will keep phoning and phoning until he gives up and answers.
‘Sorry, sorry, got to take this,’ he murmurs at the faculty, bowing his head in apology as he unwinds his long legs out of the steel chair.
Outside the meeting room, Dan leans against the only wall without college notices taped on it and answers.
‘Bunny Wabbit!’ shrieks Julia. ‘I thought you were avoiding me?’
‘Never,’ says Dan in comforting tones but he feels a certain wariness.
He is only Bunny Wabbit at certain times. Times when Julia has done something she feels guilty about.
Guilt means confession which, it turns out, has never been helpful to Dan’s soul.
‘Where are you?’ he asks.
‘That’s a very loaded question, babes,’ says Julia, the bunny wabbitiness suddenly all gone. Her accent is harsher now, more London than the neutral accent she adopts most of the time.
‘Just asking,’ he says brightly, feeling a tremor of anxiety.