Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (22 page)

‘Where did she go?’ Anna asked. She’d never heard anything about this.

Christina shook her head. ‘I don’t think she ever said. I phoned that same evening – I was quite worried by then. But she only laughed. “Got me an afternoon off school, didn’t it?” she said. I supposed she’d been round the shops or something. And when I said, “It was awful, wasn’t it, that film?” she went, “Oh, that,” as if she’d already forgotten. Back at school next day she made a joke of it, said she’d suddenly had to dash for the loo.’

Anna knew Rose’s trick of being in tears one minute, flippant the next. She had always hated that – the way Rose would upset her with something gruesome, then dismiss it as nothing. But she also remembered that Rose had woken screaming from a nightmare about
Lord of the Flies
, after saying it was only a story.

‘Then there was the time she stopped eating,’ Christina said.

Anna had forgotten. Now a scene flipped up in her mind of Christina at home, shouting at Rose through her closed bedroom door.

‘You had a row with her,’ she says. ‘I remember that.’

‘Yes, about starving herself,’ Christina says. ‘Did you realize how bad it got?’

‘I can’t have done,’ Anna says. ‘I can vaguely remember Mum saying Rose was on some silly diet.’

‘It was worse than that. She stopped eating altogether. Perhaps she managed to hide it from your parents.’

‘When was this exactly? Can you remember how old she was?’

‘There was a famine in Ethiopia,’ Christina says. ‘When would that be – ’eighty-six, ’eighty-seven? We were about fifteen. Anyway, I know that was why.’

‘She stopped eating because there was a famine in Ethiopia?’

Christina nodded. ‘She stuck up a picture inside her locker. A starving kid – big eyes, pot belly, little stick legs, the sort of thing we were seeing on TV. So every time she opened her locker she’d remember not to eat. We used to keep our lunch in our lockers, and most morning breaks we had chocolate or crisps, to keep us going till lunch. But now if she was tempted, she saw this picture. I remember telling her, “This is stupid. If you want to help, send some money, but what use is starving yourself?” ’

‘What did she say?’

Christina thought for a moment. ‘Something like, she wasn’t trying to starve, but she couldn’t bring herself to eat with those pictures on TV every night. I thought she must be eating at home or your parents would know, but then I found out. She was just pretending to eat at odd times.’

Anna remembered Rose in the kitchen, turning up her nose at the smell of cooking; saying, ‘Not for me, Mum. I’m not hungry.’ Then, later, making herself a sandwich and taking it up to her room. Mum, worried: ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with her. Some silly diet, I suppose.’ Dad: ‘Diet? Have you seen the size of those sandwiches? Leave her, she’ll get over it.’

‘Yes, it went on for – oh, I don’t know – a week or two,’ Anna told Christina. ‘She made excuses not to eat with the rest of us.’

‘That’s right. She told me,’ Christina says. ‘She’d take food up to her room and then throw it away, smuggle it out to the bin. She got to the stage of being proud of it. I know, because she told me she hadn’t eaten for nearly a week – all she’d had was water. The first whole day was awful, she said, then she stopped even feeling hungry. I told her it was completely bonkers – wasting food, throwing it away, to show sympathy for people without any. She just wasn’t logical. I remember a row in the form room. Some boys were mucking about one lunch time, throwing sandwich-crusts about, and one of them stuffed a tuna roll down the back of the radiator so it’d stink later. Rose went ballistic – really had a go at them. She was all, “How can you waste food? Don’t you know there are people starving in Ethiopia? Children, babies?” Well, you know boys that age. One of them offered to send his crusts and the other one pretended to get the roll back to put in the Oxfam box. Rose was beside herself – crying, yelling. I think she’d have hit them if I hadn’t held her back. And yet she was chucking her own food in the bin every night. In the end the boys got quite scared. They went outside and Rose cried all through lunch time. I stayed with her, and told her she was getting hysterical because she wasn’t eating. I think it was that same night I came round to your house.’

‘You shouted at her,’ Anna prompted.

‘That’s right, I did. I’d had enough. She wouldn’t let me into her room for ages, but eventually she did and I gave her what for. I told her she’d die if she didn’t eat, I said she was being stupid and melodramatic. I said if she cared that much about the famine, then for the love of Christ we’d do something useful – clean teachers’ cars at lunch time and earn money to send, or join in the church fundraising. She went all quiet, then said, “Sorry,” just like that, and next day she was back to normal. Well, almost. It took her a couple of days to get used to eating. But she took the picture out of her locker and never said another word about that week of not eating, or the famine. We never even did the car-cleaning. She didn’t mention it again, not once. So I didn’t, either.’

‘And we had no idea, at home. How can you not know someone you live with is deliberately starving herself?’ Anna gave Christina a searching look. ‘What else didn’t we know?’

Christina only shrugged. ‘It’s such a long time ago.’

Anna had always thought that Rose told her horrible things to frighten her, to wield a sort of power; that she didn’t feel things as deeply as she pretended, and that she did it to get attention and sympathy. But there could have been another reason for Rose’s abrupt switchings-off; maybe it was the only way she had of distancing herself.

‘I know you used to look after her,’ Anna said. ‘When she had those panic attacks.’

‘Oh yes. Remember that time on the playing field, when she was hyperventilating? You wanted to dial 999. You were terrified, weren’t you? I’m not surprised. I was, at first.’

Anna warmed to Christina for seeing her fear, for not remembering her as a pest.

‘Was she – would you say …’ Anna wasn’t sure how to put this. ‘The intense way she felt about things, the way she’d suddenly switch moods – do you think she was mentally ill? Did she need help?’

‘I don’t know.’ Christina swept crumbs from the table into the palm of her hand, and stood up to scatter them in the sink. ‘Where’s the line between being over-sensitive and being disturbed? And I’ve only picked out those examples. You could make anyone sound peculiar, doing that. I’ve left out all the normal teenage things about her.’

‘Like?’

‘Like – well, for one thing, the way she’d got passing notes in lessons down to a fine art. She only did it in the lessons she didn’t like – maths was one. She’d look like she was paying attention, be writing things down or even have her hand up to answer a question, and all the time there’d be these notes going along the rows. Sometimes two or three at once. I don’t think she ever got caught, not once.’

‘And she still got As all round.’ Anna liked this idea of a subversive Rose.

‘Yes, sickening, wasn’t it?’ Christina was refilling the kettle. ‘She always worked hard in spite of that, but she didn’t have much respect for the teachers. Apart from her art teacher. He was different.’

‘Mr Greaves. Jim.’ Anna had been taught by him too, in the sixth form. ‘Yes. He came round to the house, after, to see Mum and Dad. Rose used to talk to him the way she wouldn’t to any other teacher. He liked her too, you could tell. He knew about her being adopted. He thought she’d gone to her real mother. But she hadn’t, we know that.’

Could there be more to Mr Greaves than anyone had thought? Anna wondered now. Rose’s special teacher, her confidant? He’d talked to the police; he’d been worried, upset, but could that have been an act? Surely not. He’d been a special teacher to Anna, too, and she would have sworn he was genuine. One of the worst things about Rose’s disappearance was that it made everyone seem underhand, manipulative.

Opening the fridge door, Christina paused and said, ‘I’ve just remembered someone else she liked, that last year. A new science teacher, physics. Mr … wait – Mr Sullivan. D’you remember him?’

‘Mm – vaguely.’ Anna’s mind produced an impression of a young man walking along a crowded corridor, intent, tall enough for his head and shoulders to rise above the throng of navy-clad pupils. Sabrina Fawcett, in Anna’s form, had fancied him, she remembered; he didn’t take their class for science, but occasionally he’d come into the lab for something, or they’d see him in the prep room, in his white coat. Any personable young male was bound to stir up teenage lust in the hothouse atmosphere of a mixed comprehensive, but science wasn’t one of Anna’s favourite subjects, and like many of the girls in her year she’d been more impressed by Mr Spicer, Paul Spicer, who taught PE and whose tanned legs were often on view as he strode about in shorts and trainers. But wouldn’t Rose consider herself too mature for a crush on a teacher?

‘He was form tutor to one of the other sixth-form groups,’ Christina said, ‘so he was there whenever we had assembly. And he was at our leavers’ ball.’

‘Tell me about that,’ Anna prompted. She remembered Rose taking ages to get ready, and Dad taking her photograph in the garden, before she left. For once, Mum’s offer of dressmaking had not been spurned. She and Rose between them had customized a sea-green dress Rose found in a charity shop, taking it in to fit Rose’s slender figure, making a wide cummerbund of black fabric. To Anna it looked glamorous enough for a film star, and Rose had done her hair loose and in deep waves that tumbled over one shoulder, leaving one side of her neck bare. It was one of the last photographs.

Christina brought the mugs over. ‘Oh, this takes me back,’ she said, smiling. ‘You’d have thought it was the Oscars, the fuss we all made. I think it was the first time there’d been a leavers’ ball like that – before, it’d been a barbecue and disco. We talked endlessly about dresses, and the boys got themselves DJs, and one or two of the girls even had their make-up done professionally. Then there was a great flap about going with a partner. The really one-up thing, for us girls, was to come with a boyfriend from outside school – someone cool, someone older. People paired up for the night, borrowed each other’s brothers, that sort of thing. I didn’t have a boyfriend and I nearly didn’t go, but then a boy from our form asked me. David Wiseman, his name was.’

‘Rose went on her own, didn’t she?’

‘That’s right. She could have had ten different partners if she’d wanted, but no, she wasn’t going to do the same as everyone else. She wanted to look as if she was still choosing. She wanted other girls to be jealous because their boyfriends would wish they were with her.’

‘Did she tell you this? Or is it what you thought?’

‘Bit of both. That’s how she was.’

Anna looked away, towards the notice board and a postcard pinned there, a drawing of hands clasped in prayer and, in italics,
Be assured, if you walk with Him and look to Him, and expect help from Him, He will never fail you
. She remembered the mention of church this morning. When Christina had said
for the love of Christ
a few minutes ago, she had meant it.

‘Course,’ Christina was saying, ‘for most of the evening it made no difference if you had a partner or not. There was disco music, and people danced in groups or with no one. But now and then – towards the end especially – there was a slow smoochy number, and that’s when Rose went over and asked Mr Sullivan to dance. Actually it was my fault – I dared her to, as a joke, not thinking she actually would. The teachers were mainly there to keep an eye on things, but some of them joined in – you know, uncle-at-wedding sort of thing’ – she mimed a sitting bump-and-grind – ‘apart from one of the PE teachers who was a fantastic dancer. Total star, he was.’

‘Mr Spicer. Paul Spicer.’

‘That’s the one.’ Christina gave a sudden grin that revealed the ghost of her eighteen-year-old self.

‘So Rose danced with Mr Sullivan?’

‘No, she didn’t. She went over to the group of teachers but he said no, and she had to walk back again with a whole group of us watching. So instead she grabbed a boy who was standing nearby and started smooching with him.’

‘Did you tell this to the police?’

Christina gave her a sceptical look. ‘What – that a teacher refused to dance with a sixth-form girl at a school bash? Hardly a crime, is it?’

‘Maybe she saw him again.’

‘But there’s no reason to think that. I teased her a bit about it, but that was all.’ Chrissie shrugged. ‘To be honest, I can’t remember that either of us ever mentioned him again, after the dance.’

‘I wonder where he is now?’ Anna was already fidgety, wondering whether the school would pass on details; whether, even, Mr Sullivan still taught at Oldlands Hall. He would have been only a few years older than Rose, which would put him in his forties now; about Martin’s age. ‘Do you know his first name?’

Christina thought for a moment. ‘Michael, I’m pretty sure. Yes. Michael Sullivan. But Anna, you can’t hound the poor chap about a schoolgirl who fancied him twenty years ago. Most likely he doesn’t even remember.’

‘Maybe you’re right.’
And maybe you’re not
, Anna added silently. ‘Are you in touch with anyone else from school?’

‘A few of us get together sometimes. We’ve talked about Rose now and then.’

The girl, Ellie, came through from the next room, looking suspiciously at Anna, looping her arms round Christina’s substantial middle and leaning against her in a way that implied she’d been ignored for too long. ‘Mattie won’t let me watch CBeebies,’ she complained.

Christina said, imperturbably calm, ‘All right, love. I’ll be there in a minute. Why don’t you read your book?’

‘Don’t feel like it.’ Ellie’s whiny voice made Anna want to slap her.

Getting up from the table, Christina took the mugs and teapot over to the sink. ‘I’ll give you my email address before you go.’

Anna took the hint, looking at her watch. ‘Yes, I’d better head back. Thanks, Christina. It was kind of you.’

‘If only any of this could bring her back. I still miss her – that is, I miss her as she was then. Maybe I wouldn’t even know her, now.’ She found pen and paper, wrote rapidly, tore the sheet off the pad and handed it to Anna, who scrutinized her handwriting: round, regular as knitting, a circle floating above each i.