Chapter Thirty-Nine
Alys Rosemarie Flint thought animals were more reliable than people when she made friends with Aunt Patsy’s small, fluffy brown mongrel, Biscuit.
Biscuit was a sweet old dog and liked lying with children having his tummy petted. He was always there for children to sit with him and tell him their woes. Biscuit never told anyone of the secrets whispered to him. He asked for nothing and gave love eagerly.
Aunt Patsy’s house was on the outskirts of Aberystwyth, and as well as five foster kids, she had two apricot gerbils. Biscuit watched the gerbils’ cage with jaw-dropped fascination. The gerbils didn’t last. Someone opened their cage and let them out for Biscuit to chase.
Teenage Alys was grown up beyond her years and had known exactly who’d done this. Biscuit didn’t mean to be cruel: he was merely being a dog.
The gerbils had been a warning.
Aunt Patsy had been one of the best foster mums Alys had known. She’d been thirteen when she’d gone there and had long since given up the notion that one day her real parents would appear out of the mist and take care of her.
What Alys had long realised was that she wanted to go to college to learn how to help kids like her. To change something, anything, because she had so many skills after a childhood in care.
She was wise, as wise as if she’d lived a thousand years. She knew that the care people considered her worryingly silent. Thought that she kept all her pain inside.
But she was fixing herself slowly. One day, she would help other people.
She’s been in Aunt Patsy’s house for two years when Ivan, nicknamed The Terrible, arrived.
He was fifteen, skinny and had an innocent face. But Alys didn’t trust that face. Ivan had been in eleven different homes at this point. A childhood in that many homes said he’d either been very unlucky – or was trouble. He let the gerbils out, And after that, Alys was on her guard.
She discovered that Ivan was watching violent porn videos late at night. Had seen him watching Adriana, the smallest of Aunt Patsy’s foster children. When he didn’t think anyone was looking, he sat open-mouthed and stared at her, his eyes dull with longing.
Adriana was small for her age, with dark hair and glowing dark eyes that shone in an eager little face as if she was always waiting for the sheer happiness she just knew was coming.
Alys was sure that Ivan wanted a real-life victim.
There was no point, she thought, in telling her foster mother.
Aunt Patsy was lovely, but she was like the other foster carers Rose had known: too worn down trying to care for an assortment of tricky, traumatised kids to give any of them the absolute love they all longed for.
‘Alys, give him a chance,’ Aunt Patsy would say.
Alys Flint was too young for people to believe that she understood the cruelties of life.
When she was older and had left the memory of Alys behind for a new name and a new life, Alys was determined that people would take her seriously.
She’d come up with a name for this new person she’d become: Rose Talisman.
She told nobody of her plans and watched her little sister carefully.
She knew Ivan had opened the gerbil cage so they’d be killed by poor Biscuit. Could see he bullied the other kids. Could see him watching Adriana, trying to sit beside her at meals and touching her little legs, pinching her, scaring her.
What he didn’t realise was that even though Adriana and Alys weren’t blood relatives, over the past two years Alys had grown to love the little girl as her sister. Adriana felt like the only family Alys had.
The two of them slept in the same room: Alys in a single bed and little Adriana in a child’s bed set at a ninety-degree angle to hers. Adriana told her stories about her teddies and Alys vowed that nobody would ever hurt Adriana.
The day it had happened, Alys saw Ivan make his move through Aunt Patsy’s glass doors.
He’d thought it was safe. He hadn’t understood Alys’s love for Adriana and her awareness of the damage that could be inflicted on small children.
Ivan didn’t understand love because he loved nobody.
He’d taken her four-year-old sister by the hand and led her upstairs.
Alys made it into the bathroom just in time.
‘Fucking bitch—’ began Ivan and then she crashed the cistern lid down on his right hand.
He began screaming and holding his mangled hand.
‘I didn’t do nothing,’ Ivan had roared with pain, as he lay on the ground clutching his hand.
Alys knew he was telling the truth, that he hadn’t actually done anything yet.
Yet.
She’d been so quick following him.
‘You’re a fucking bitch, Alys Flint, and I’m going to get you!’ he yelled, which was a mistake.
Alys realised that she’d just made him more dangerous.
He needed more injuries so he’d be moved away from Aberystwyth. She couldn’t risk him staying near Adriana.
‘No, you won’t, you little prick,’ she said coldly, angling the cistern a bit better this time.
The cistern lid broke after it had been bashed against Ivan’s ankle a few times but it had done its work well.
With a hand and an ankle requiring medical intervention, Ivan would not be hurting small children for a while.
Alys yelled for Aunt Patsy.
‘Tell her the truth about why you dragged my little sister up here or I’ll break your other ankle,’ she hissed to Ivan. ‘You touch Adriana again, and you’ll regret it.’
To the accompaniment of Ivan’s squeals of pain, Alys had scooped Adriana up and brought her out of the bathroom.
‘You’re my little sister now,’ she said to Adriana. ‘I’m going to look after you. Let’s tell Aunt Patsy what Ivan has done. We like nice people, not nasty ones.’
Ivan never came back to Aberystwyth. She always kept tabs on him. He was in jail now for two brutal assaults. Best place for him, she thought.
Ivan had been in her mind when she first met Theo’s parents.
It had been talking of Wales that had done it.
Rose’s cover story was that she’d travelled around a lot as a child, mainly in France, briefly in Wales (to cover any accent issues) and, of course, she mentioned her conveniently dead parents.
They died.
Such a pity.
Life moves on.
If people thought she sounded cold discussing them, they assumed she was hiding grief behind a facade.
‘We love Wales,’ Theo’s father had said. ‘We went there in the nineties to Snowdonia and we visited the Jurassic part, the Glamorgan Coast I think it is.’
‘Of course,’ Rose had echoed, smiling.
She thought for a millisecond about how she’d never heard of the Glamorgan Heritage Coast as a child and then how these kind people would be shocked to hear she’d crushed another foster kid’s hand and ankle with a cistern lid.
She’d even managed to give Ivan a limp for good measure. It was mentioned in all his criminal trials. He was disabled, the reports said.
Rose did not feel guilty about him. He’d been in the system the same as she had. Her childhood had been about pure survival. But she had not preyed on weaker kids.
She was sure that Theo’s parents, educated, thoughtful people, would have viewed her as other if she’d told them or her beloved Theo the truth.
They knew childhoods like hers existed – but they’d never seen such damage so close up.
So she made the decision.
She’d never be able to tell them.
She lied coolly to Theo about her family, about her dead parents, how she rarely spoke to any of her other relatives.
Foster kids were experts at lying. She’d seen many of them in her private practice before she got her TV show. Plenty of them afterwards too.
When Rose was eighteen, she’d tried to adopt Adriana but her application was refused.
So she stayed very close and finally, when Adriana was eleven and Aunt Patsy decided to retire, Rose took her little sister and ran.
It was easy to run with a foster kid.
So many of them slipped through the cracks of an overstretched system into trafficking or drugs.
One missing eleven-year-old girl didn’t actually cause that much of a fuss.
Rose knew how to work the system, how not to leave a trail.
She wanted to escape their childhood files: abandonment, foster homes, the attempted abuse of four-year-old Adriana, Alys’s defence of the small girl that ended up with a teenage sexual predator in detention.
Nobody needed to know that Rose was a foster kid, that another foster home inhabitant had tried to sexually abuse Adriana.
They’d earned their privacy.
When Rose had moved to Los Angeles, Adriana had been beginning hotel management training.
Rose never spoke of a sister in interviews because she told Adriana that if Rose’s past was revealed, at least Adriana would not be connected with it.
Now, it seems that the past might be catching up with her. Someone knows that she and Alys Flint are the same person.
Keera’s sitting on the edge of the infinity pool, dangling her feet in its glorious cool.
She can see Bernard still at the other side of the infinity pool, baking himself in the sun. His skin must be like leather, she thinks.
She’s wearing a hat and a soft linen shirt that covers her body over her one-piece swimsuit.
The sun beating down relentlessly makes her slip the shirt off and slide into the pool.
The cool water surrounds her like a balm.
She thinks about what she’s got to do before she leaves this haven.
She has to finish up her notebook. Journaling has helped her so much already. She wouldn’t have been brave enough to enter rehab if she hadn’t been journaling thanks to Rose’s self-help book.
But what next? Keera can’t leave without facing up to what she needs to say to her mother.
After their time on the acropolis, Bobbi stomped back to the bar.
Keera knows Bobbi can’t see her from here.
Keera floats in the pool, staring up at the cloudless blue sky.
Singing and touring means there is no stability in her life, none of the things she now realises she wants.
‘A dog, pets, having close friends, sleepovers, dinner parties …’ She’d told Rose and the group that she’d never experienced these things.
Simple ordinary pleasures.