28
28
Rose’s bedroom was different. The room of an adolescent rather than a little girl. The walls were bare, apart from a picture of a beach that looked like it had come from IKEA.
‘What happened to the Taylor Swift posters?’ Fiona asked.
Rose shrugged. ‘Got bored of them.’
‘And your Barbies?’
‘I put them out with the bins.’
Fiona was shocked. ‘What did your parents say about that?’
‘They don’t know yet. I just did it.’ Her voice was flat. Emotionless.
‘Rose ... It’s a good idea to pretend. To be into the kind of stuff twelve-year-olds are meant to be into. For protection.’
Rose frowned like this annoyed her. ‘Twelve-year-olds aren’t meant to like dolls. They’re stupid. I’m leaving all that behind.’
Fiona had been expecting something like this. The change, hastened by what had happened at Patrick’s house. The accelerated pupation. Still, it was unsettling. Here was the butterfly, perched on the edge of her single bed, no expression on her face.
Fiona took a deep breath. Dylan was in his room but had music playing – some discordant rock racket – so Fiona was confident he wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop. ‘They found him today,’ she said. ‘Patrick. There was a piece on the local newspaper site. Former journalist dies in domestic accident. There doesn’t seem to be any suspicion that it was anything other than a fall.’
Rose nodded as if she hadn’t expected anything else.
‘He worked for a national paper, so I expect there’ll be some coverage there, maybe an obituary, but I don’t think we have anything to worry about.’
‘I wasn’t worried.’
Of course. Nothing had gone wrong in Rose’s life yet. She thought she was invincible. ‘I’m glad to hear it. Tell me about your holiday. How was it? Anything interesting happen?’
Rose sighed like Fiona had asked her how her day at school had been. ‘There was this really annoying boy called Henry who followed me around everywhere. We were playing laser tag, my family and his, and I wanted to win.’
‘Of course you did. What happened?’
Rose swung her legs, bouncing her heels on the carpet. ‘There was this raised area, the crow’s nest they called it, and I couldn’t get Henry out of it without getting shot. So I talked to him. I told him how repulsive he was. How his ears stuck out and he had bad breath. I told him he was ugly and stupid and that his parents didn’t really love him. I said I’d overheard them talking about how they wished he’d never been born. I said that I’d heard his sister say that he still wet the bed.’
Fiona laughed. ‘Wow. You laid it on thick.’
Rose didn’t crack a smile. ‘I thought he was going to yell at me, that I’d make him angry and he’d expose his position, allow me to shoot him. But he melted down, started crying. He jumped out of the crow’s nest and tried to run down this ramp, which was when he slipped and fell.’
‘Was he hurt?’
‘Not that badly.’ She sounded disappointed. ‘I think he was bruised, that was all. But he didn’t snitch on me. Too scared.’
Fiona made another mental note to warn Rose that normal people often told tales later, that she should always be careful. Have plausible deniability, and be prepared to use blackmail if that failed.
‘Did anyone overhear you?’
‘Maybe his sister. Dylan’s new girlfriend.’ She said the last word like it tasted rotten.
‘Girlfriend?’
‘Yeah. They’ve been messaging non-stop since we got back. Keira. She heard me talking to Henry, but she doesn’t have any proof.’
Fiona was excited. She had feared that Rose might be freaked out by what had happened in Wadhurst, feel the need to confess, reveal that she wasn’t like Fiona after all. But Rose was acting exactly as Fiona had done after Sienna drowned, all those years ago. Fiona hadn’t yet met Maisie then; hadn’t understood her own feelings – or lack of them – and had no one to guide her. Rose was lucky. She was about to get the education Fiona had only had later.
Rose lifted her gaze to meet Fiona’s. The girl’s eyes shone like dark pebbles. ‘What I did to Henry. I’m supposed to feel bad, aren’t I?’
‘Are you?’
Rose got up and walked across to the window. She seemed so much older than she was. Fiona remembered that she had been the same. When she was eleven or twelve, everyone had said she was an old soul. Adults would compliment her on her maturity. ‘She’s very serious, isn’t she?’ people would say, after which Fiona learned how to copy smiles and laughter, to make them look and sound real. Normal society didn’t like girls who didn’t smile, who didn’t appear to be soft. This was another lesson she was going to have to teach Rose.
‘When I was a little kid,’ Rose went on, ‘at nursery, they had this big soft-play room. There was a tower and chutes you could slide down and all these things you could climb. One day I pushed this other kid off this big tower because I wanted this cuddly animal she had. She sprained her arm and everyone went crazy. The girl’s parents, the nursery staff, my mum and dad. I kept saying sorry. But I don’t think I did feel sorry. I wanted that cuddly toy. I didn’t care if I had to hurt her to get it.’
Fiona nodded for her to go on.
‘But I think I realised that if I kept doing what I wanted, I’d get into trouble. I liked the nursery. It was fun. I liked playing on the tower. They gave us treats. So I learned to follow the rules. That made people happy. All the adults smiled and told me I was a good girl and gave me the things I asked for. I learned to camouflage myself. I learned how to blend in.’
Fiona had that tingle. This was so familiar. ‘But sometimes your nature shone through?’
Rose turned away from the window. Behind her, it was growing dark. Autumn would be on its way soon. Fiona’s favourite season. Leaves dying, black nights, less imperative to fake happiness.
‘I had this best friend. A girl called Jasmine.’
‘You’ve mentioned her.’
‘Yeah. Well, when we started school she was, like, the weirdo. The kid whose parents sent her to school in the wrong uniform, who had nothing in her lunchbox except a chocolate bar. She always had dirty fingernails and you’d see the teachers whispering about her. I decided to be friends with her because I didn’t want to be on my own.’
‘The pack instinct,’ Fiona said.
Rose frowned. ‘Jasmine was so annoying. She was weak. She let the other girls upset her. They called her Jas-minger.’
Fiona hadn’t encountered the word ‘minger’, meaning an unattractive person, until she’d come to the UK.
Rose went on: ‘And she let them. There was this group of popular girls who really bullied her and made her do jobs for them, or do their homework, clean their shoes at breaktime. It was so embarrassing. She’d do everything they asked and then they’d shout, “Thank you, Jas-minger!” and run off laughing, ignoring her. It made me hate her. The way she refused to stand up for herself. She was so weak.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I guess I started being horrible to her. I called her Jas-minger too. I made her shoplift chocolate bars from the corner shop, even though she was terrified of being caught. I wrote a fake love letter to this boy and signed it from her, so then all the boys started teasing her. I stole her schoolwork from her bag so she’d get into trouble with teachers. And all the time I knew I was meant to feel bad, but I didn’t. It made me happy. I had power over her. And she was so pathetic, she deserved it.’
‘Like Henry.’
‘Yeah. Just like Henry.’
There was a long pause.
‘I know why you took me to that museum to see the wolves and the walrus and all the predators. Because that’s what I am, isn’t it?’
‘It’s what we are, Rose. Apex predators. And people like Jasmine and Henry are prey. It’s the way the world is supposed to work. Some people – like a friend of mine called Lucy – get nourishment from tormenting and hurting others in the same way wolves obtain nourishment from meat. It’s a kind of pure pleasure for her. A need. Some of us aren’t that ... sadistic. But we don’t let others stand in the way of what we want.’
‘Is that what Max and Patrick were? Prey? Or were you trying to get something from them?’
Rose’s pupils were dilated. She was excited by all this. Happy to hear she was different. To understand why she felt the way she did.
To know she was special – and not alone.
‘With Max and Patrick it was different. That was vengeance – another understandable motivation for us. It was because of what they did to me. It was because of them that I spent some time in prison.’
Rose’s eyes went wide. ‘You were in prison?’
‘Yeah. Max was our lawyer and Patrick was the one who figured out what we were doing. Who exposed—’
‘Wait. Who’s we ?’
‘Ah. Maisie and me. Maisie was my partner.’
‘Your girlfriend ?’
‘I suppose you could use that word, but it doesn’t really describe it.’ She really didn’t want to go into all the details of her relationship with Maisie with a twelve-year-old. ‘We were a team. A little pack. We lived together, did everything as a couple. And we were going to get rich together.’