The Exit (3 page)

There were four others in the group activity room. Henrietta Ruth read for twenty minutes, each second duller than the last. A baddy. A body. A detective inspector with a dark past, blah, blah, blah.

‘Well!’ Marcus clapped when the reading finally came to an end. ‘Incredible! Would anyone like to ask our bestselling author a question?’

Rose looked at the four other residents in the room. There was Jim, a sixty-eight-year-old ex-rock guitarist with gorgeous long hair and good legs, which Rose fancied touching. Jim wasn’t old or frail enough to be here, and it had always seemed odd to Rose that he was. He did not appear to have a burning question. He was sitting in his chair, tapping away at his mobile phone. There was Nancy, catatonic. Beside her was her loyal husband, Gavin, who’d moved in when she did, even though there was nothing wrong with him at all (apart from an increasingly debilitating depression caused by being imprisoned in here with a wife who’d said nothing for four years). He shook his head. His questions were too big for an author of detective fiction. And there was Emma, too busy singing to ask anything – one line, on repeat – bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond; bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond; bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond. Her dementia was a kind one, though her incessant singing drove everyone else nuts, including Henrietta Ruth, who’d had to read on as the line replayed.

Rose put up her hand. ‘Yes, sir, I want to know why you won’t get the doctor for my sister. I can’t understand it at all.’

‘We don’t need to get the doctor, Rose,’ the farmer said.

‘I realise you may not know much about asthma, but please listen to me, because I do.’

‘Let’s get you back to your room. Let’s not get anxious. There’s nothing to worry about.’ The farmer held out his hands to haul Rose from the armchair. ‘Shh, there we go. We’ll go find Catherine. Remember Catherine?’

‘But Margie could die!’

Margie was seven years old, with soft yellow hair and deep brown eyes. She was soft and pudgy and still inclined to choose happiness. They’d been there a month. Four weeks since their mum had waved them off at King’s Cross Station to be taken to the country because bombs don’t get dropped there. Rose and Margie had never been on a train, and had never been to the countryside. Their mother had kissed them matter-of-factly at the station in order to reassure them, she supposed, that this was nothing major. As soon as they got in the carriage, her mother turned and left. Maybe she cried as she walked away. She’d be alone in London now. Alone in the one bedroom tenement they called home. Rose watched until she disappeared. Bye, Mum.

The train was a fast, rattling machine, cram-packed with children of all ages, many of them sobbing. Rose hugged Margie, who held her precious doll, Violet, into her chest the entire trip, stroked her hair, refused to cry because she was the grown-up now. She was in charge.

‘Are we going to be okay Ro-Ro?’ Margie had always called her Ro-Ro; she was the only person who did, and the only person Rose would ever allow.

‘We’re going to be perfect, angel.’

The farmer picked them up at the town hall in Penrith. He was a crooked man, leant to the left as he walked. Perhaps the crookedness had made him unhappy, or was it the other way round? As several men in raggedy, dirty country clothes entered the hall to claim their prizes, Rose prayed he would not be their farmer. Her hand squeezed Margie’s too tightly as he walked towards them with his squinty back, his limping legs, his tight, mean eyes. He gestured with a hand – come now. They followed him, walking two miles in the rain until they reached their new home. During the train journey, Rose had imagined a grand country house with hedges and a rose garden. She’d dreamt of pretty lambs to feed and love, of cats and dogs and happy chubby farmy-type people. When they finally reached the small boggy ramshackle residence, Rose had to work very hard to hide her disappointment. There were no happy people here. The miserable monosyllabic farmer, his bedridden wife, and four other city children who had taken the farmer’s lead and turned miserable and mute.

Once there, the farmer set about making them safe: make your bed, clean the floor, milk the cows, be quiet, you brazen hussies – whatever that meant – stir the soup, clean the kitchen, squeeze, squirt, cows, squirt, I said be quiet!

‘Now, Rose,’ the farmer said once she was back in her room, ‘calm down, nice and quiet, there are no cows here. Catherine will put on your favourite tune.’

The music came from a very small machine on the bedside table.

‘Imagination.’ Yes, this was her favourite tune! Every night since they arrived here, Margie would say, ‘Sing it, Ro-Ro; sing me the song.’ Margie would drift off to her big sister’s voice, imagining they were at home, and that everything was as it should be. But that machine was so small!

‘And now I want you to sit at the desk and spend some time going through your special things. Take your time, look at each object and talk to Catherine about them.’

Rose sat at her desk as the farmer ordered and reminded herself that she had to play ball in order to do what she was going to do. She rolled her eyes at Margie (not Catherine!), and then pretended to study the ‘special’ things on her desk. Photos of the faces of strangers. A bad drawing. Some children’s books. Coloured pencils, lead writing pencils, a huge pile of the crispest whitest paper she’d ever seen. These things were not special to her. They weren’t even hers. But she had to play ball, so she lifted the light orange pencil and began to draw.

She wasn’t always aware of the transitions, but when Natalie used to visit she told her she drifted back to ten quite often. She wasn’t drifting anywhere now, everything was clear. Coloured pencils. She had to draw!

Drawing was the only way now because they had taken everything else since Beatrice died. She wasn’t allowed to leave the premises. Her mobile phone had been confiscated. The phone in the office: out of bounds. Letter writing? Not permitted. (They even took the latest stash of stamped addressed envelopes Natalie had given her.) No visitors either, except Chris. She was not allowed to do anything but draw Tilly stories. All for her own good, of course. ‘You nearly drowned last time you went for a walk,’ Chris had told her. ‘We can’t waste police time again,’ Marcus had told her. ‘You get special treatment here, you know,’ Chris had told her. ‘I protect you, I keep you safe!’

She had to get it down, now, before the lucid up and left. This girl was fresh and shiny new. Forget drawing, Rose should just tell the girl. Perhaps she’d believe her. The police didn’t, Chris didn’t, her daughters didn’t, even Natalie didn’t. Please, please, little girl, I’m not crazy right now, listen to me, please. Believe me.

This old bird scared me with her incongruous clothes – jeans and Doc Marten boots, baggy tie-die T-shirt, short hair dyed blackcurrant. An eighty-two-year-old punk, and mad as a hatter.

She turned her attention away from the ‘precious things’ on her desk and towards me. ‘If you promise to keep a secret I’ll tell you something.’

‘Um, okay.’

‘You promise?’

I offered the old lady a pinky, but she didn’t understand, so I withdrew it. ‘I promise.’

‘What?’

‘I promise I won’t tell.’

‘Won’t tell what?’

Ha! She’d already forgotten. I’d never known anyone really sick, or anyone really old. This sick old woman was as unknown and as ugly to me as a ferret. That’s what this woman looked like! A ferret. All skinny and bony and yellow-white and crinkly and she might totally dig her teeth into my neck.

‘You two getting on okay?’ A nurse appeared at the door. Her badge said Nurse Gabriella. She had pointy tits, a grey bob and bright red lipstick.

Rose looked terrified when she spotted her. ‘You not heard of knocking? Get out of my room.’

Gabriella smiled at me. ‘Don’t worry. She just gets a little mixed up.’

As the nurse left, Rose turned to me: ‘How do you know her?’

‘I don’t.’

‘And the others? Are you friends with the others?’

‘What others?’

‘Out there, the others out there.’ She pointed to her door. I assumed she meant everyone in the care home.

‘No. I met Marcus yesterday, everyone else today. I’m new.’

‘So you won’t tell them what I’m about to say? You won’t tell anyone till I decide what we should do?’

‘Not a word.’

‘Who do you love?’

‘What?’

‘Who do you love most in the world?’

‘Um, my mum.’

‘You swear on your mother’s life?’

I crossed my heart, said: ‘Hope to die.’

‘Don’t hope to die.’

‘Okay, but I do promise, I won’t tell anyone.’

The ferret lady leant in towards my neck, and whispered: ‘Something very bad is going on in this place.’

I took a step back. From the ferocious-ferret look on her face, I feared she’d be sucking blood from my neck any second.

‘You’re scared of me. Oh Jesus Christ. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not me you should be scared of. You have to believe me! Are you hearing me?’

It was hard not to hear her – her whisper was becoming a yell.

‘You don’t believe me! I can see it in your eyes, you stupid little girl. Get out of my room!’

Nurse Gabriella had heard. She raced in, directed Rose to bed, popped a pill in her mouth, and watched until she’d closed her eyes. ‘Stay with her, and don’t let her upset you. She says the strangest things.’

‘Okay.’

‘And could you do a daily search of the room? She keeps stealing matches from the kitchen, always when she’s travelled back in time. We never catch her, and we have no idea where she stashes them. She’s fast and sneaky as a ten-year-old.’ Having given her orders, the nurse headed for the door.

‘But it’s her room.’ I thought I’d said this under my breath.

Nurse Gabriella walked back towards me and stood quite close. ‘And?’

‘And I don’t feel right about it.’

‘Oh, in that case, if you don’t feel right about it.’

We stared each other out. I blinked first.

‘Now do as you’re told or go home.’

After Gabriella shut the door, Rose opened her eyes, looked straight at me, put her bony finger to her lips and said, ‘Shh.’ Then she closed her eyes again.

Scarier than Freddy Krueger, this woman.

I shut the door to avoid helping with lunch, and posted a photo of myself on Facebook titled ‘working woman.’ (Pose #1 chin down, fringe over eyes, serious expression, gorgeous obv.) Ten likes in fifteen minutes. Not bad. Craig hadn’t emailed or texted about my un-friending. He would. They always did. And I’d ignore him like all the other desperados.

The bookshelf in the corner was filled with Tilly books. They were up there with Katie Morag in my childhood. Most families had at least one series. Obviously this old bird couldn’t manage to read more than a kid’s picture book. Mum had bought a box set for my seventh birthday and read one each night in bed. She loved how independent and strong Tilly was (‘How a girl should be! Don’t depend on some idiot to take care of you!’). I flicked through the one that was my favourite (Tilly and the telegram). So sad and uplifting still, this story. The farmer’s two sons were at war. Bridget, one of the girls billeted to the farm, had collected the mail in the village, and it included a dreaded telegram. On the way back to the farm, she got into a mud fight with the annoying neighbour. She returned to the house covered in mud, and with no telegram. Tilly covered up for her, and dug through mud for hours before retrieving it. The farmer’s oldest son was missing in action. As punishment, Tilly had to muck out the sheds, alone, until the war ended. But somehow, she found a way to enjoy it. It was better being in the sheds than in the house, Tilly decided.

Was I really reading children’s books while a scary old alien lady slept in bed beside me? And when she woke, would she go on about ‘bad things’ again, or worse, need help going to the toilet? No, this was gross and wrong. I decided I’d see this shift out, head to the Queens for a drink, and work out what to tell Mum – something to do with health and safety, no doubt. The place was badly managed and dangerous! Did she want her only child to be seriously injured, maimed for life, emotionally damaged, for £6.19 an hour?

There were cards on Rose’s wall from people who loved her enough to send cards, but not enough to let her stay in their houses.

There were black-and-white photos. A grim-looking groom, hers no doubt; dead now, I supposed. Two small girls in a garden. And there were colour photographs – the next generation, doing the same things as the last: getting married, having kids, smiling. She’d made those lives, yet here she was, alone, reliving a past trauma and imagining a present one.

If I wound up here, with the same cruel dementia, what trauma would I relive? The time Mum caught me looking at porn? Nah, that was just embarrassing. When Mark cheated on me? No, I’d done it first, and he was a wank. I realised I had no trauma to relive. My dementia, if and when it came, would be a kind bonnie, bonnie banks one. I took another photo of myself. Pose #2: fringe flicked back, lips saying Prune. Gorgeous obv.

And, at that moment, traumaless.

The new girl, Catherine, was asleep on the high-tech chair that tilted this way and that. She was very pretty, but uninteresting. Rose studied her. No, there was nothing interesting about this young girl. If she included her in a story, she would be like Betty, thirteen years old, insecure hormones and determined self-love vying for control. Betty never did much in the books, except bug Tilly. She was a prop, static, something for the real characters to bounce off. The new girl sleeping on the chair even had perfect blonde hair like Betty, groomed for hours, no doubt, because her looks were her only asset. Rose had already written Betty. No need to write another, ever. No, this girl would never make the grade as a character interesting enough to be in one of her books. She looked like she’d been nowhere, done nothing. She looked like she had no ambition to go anywhere, or do anything.

Rose was looking at her latest Tilly drawing when the girl woke, but it wasn’t making any sense. She handed it to the girl. ‘What do you think?’ While the colours were as vibrant as they were in all her books, there was something creepy about this one that bewildered Rose. Tilly was lying in bed in a room just like Rose’s. A woman stood over her, with no facial features except for bright red lips. Four muted figures surrounded the bed, one of them in a chair. The text read:

‘I can’t even remember drawing this. Can’t make sense of it! Then, that was often the way with my books. I’d be three-quarters of the way through before I knew where Tilly would wind up.’

For the first time, an emotion other than boredom dressed the girl’s face. ‘Tilly! Rose Price! You wrote the Tilly books!’

‘You read them?’ A fan! How she missed the queues of little girls at her signing table.

‘Each and every one. Wow, Rose Price, of course! But this drawing is different, very dark.’ The girl scrutinised the page. ‘You gave Tilly a beauty spot. She doesn’t have one, does she?’

Rose took the page and studied the picture. ‘No she doesn’t, that’s odd.’

‘And doesn’t Tilly always wear the same outfit?’

The girl was right. Tilly always wore a dark green pinafore, a white blouse, and knee-length socks. And her red hair was always plaited in two. In this drawing she had short hair and wore a white nightgown with the letter B on it.

The room, just like Rose’s. Beauty spot. Short hair. B.

Ah, this wasn’t Tilly at all. ‘It’s Beatrice. Bea! She used to be in Room 5.’ Rose examined the rest of the drawing. The door in the picture was ajar and you could see the words: Room 7 on its frame. ‘I wonder why I have her in Room 7. Strange. I get the feeling it made sense when I drew it. Now, gobbledegook.’

‘Bea died?’

‘Six months ago. Alzheimer’s like me. She was a dancer! Only seventy-one. So . . .’ Rose took the page back from Catherine and placed it next to the one she was drawing. So far, she’d drawn Room 7 again. She stood. ‘So . . .’ She bent down and put her ear next to Catherine’s mouth.

‘. . . Your breathing’s getting worse, Margie. Keep your head high. Higher than that! In slowly, and don’t forget the out. Out!’

‘I can breathe fine,’ Margie said. She didn’t look fine, though. All wrong.

Rose spotted the farmer outside the room, and whispered. ‘We’ll have to go over to the sheds again now. When he’s not looking, we’ll go to the doctor. Follow me. Come!’

‘You’re a selfish girl, Rose Price,’ her father said the day before they waved him off at the station. She hadn’t done her chores (that day she was supposed to sweep the floor and make the beds). She hadn’t comforted her mother, who was to be left alone in London with two small children. He was usually a big old softy with his girls, so it shocked Rose when he said, ‘You’re a selfish girl, Rose Price.’ Her dad had probably spoken to her after this. He might have said he loved her, that he believed she had qualities other than selfishness. He might have kissed her on the cheek, tickled her under the arms, called her precious and sweetheart and light of my life. But if he did, she couldn’t remember.

‘You’re a selfish girl, Rose Price.’ The last words she remembered him saying turned out to be the meanest words he ever spoke to her.

He was a storyteller, Rose’s dad. Each night he had perched himself on the edge of the double mattress she shared with Margie in the kitchen alcove and made up a delightful tale that always had an excellent ending. He was far too talented to work in a factory. Too talented to be sent to war. He taught Rose everything she knew but the most enduring thing he taught her was that she was selfish.

Margie had nearly died twice before. At three, when the fever hit her harder than the rest of them and settled on her lungs. Her dad fetched the doctor in the middle of the night. Her mum burnt Potter’s Asthma Remedy for hours after. Rose hadn’t helped at all, but Margie made it to her fourth birthday.

And a year ago. Springtime brought it on. Rose hadn’t done anything to help then, either, but her parents got Margie to the hospital in time, and she made it to her seventh.

Squeaky breath, Margie called it. ‘My breath’s all squeaky.’ Her face would go grey, she’d sit up straight and stiff, her back like a board, her tiny chest barely registering desperate cat-like inhalations. Last year, the sound was too awful for Rose to bear. She locked herself in the bathroom and drew pretty pictures of people who were not grey and could breathe untroubled.

Margie was grey now. She struggled to walk to the shed. Sixteen black Jerseys shuffled towards them from the south field. There was defiant Josie, sheepish Wendy, feisty Gee. Where was happy Noreen? Rose held her sister’s hand, pulling her along. ‘We’ll wait till he’s not looking, then run.’

Josie’s wet-rubber udders were bursting to be emptied. Rose sat at her stool and began relieving her. Lovely Josie, the rebellious one of the bunch, straying from the line on the way to the shed, hurrying back to the field afterwards. Josie flicked her tail, blinding Rose for a moment. Rose rubbed her eye, checked on Margie, gasping for air as she squeezed weakly at Melina’s teats. Where was the farmer? Nowhere to be seen.

Run!

The new girl was holding her arms too tight. Ow!

‘Get off the road! Rose! A car!’ The girl pulled Rose by the arms and they fell on the gravel at the side of the road together, the white van that had swerved to the wrong side tooting as it disappeared round the bend.

The girl was face down in the gravel. Rose had landed on top of her. Dear oh dear, she’d hurt her. She didn’t mean to do that. ‘What’s your name again?’

The girl sat up, stunned. ‘Catherine.’

‘What on earth are we doing here, Catherine?’