Chapter 2
Rose
Once, on a sleepover, I was playing a late-night game of ‘Truth or Dare’ and Becky Betts asked me to choose between my sisters.
‘You can only save one, and the other one will die,’ she declared melodramatically.
I didn’t hesitate to respond.
I still remember the look of shock on her face as she glanced at her sister Laura. Neither of them could believe my blasé lack of diplomacy.
But of course I’d save Phoebe. Everyone would, Eliza included.
It’s not that Eliza and I hate each other. We just don’t get on very well. We never have. She thinks I’m boring and uptight and I think she’s immature and disrespectful.
‘You’re as thorny as your name,’ she never tires of saying. Or another variant: ‘Don’t be so prickly, Rose.’
If we weren’t sisters, it’s unlikely we’d be friends.
Phoebe, on the other hand, is like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. Her laughter is infectious.
Damn, I miss her. She’s only been gone two days.
‘You’re not taking that with you, are you?’ I ask Mum now, realising that she’s been holding the same china plate in her hands for at least two minutes.
‘I haven’t decided,’ she replies defensively, putting it down with a slight clatter.
‘You won’t need a formal dinner service in a smaller house,’ I point out pedantically.
‘I might do,’ she snaps.
‘You can’t take all of it with you,’ I warn wearily as she stalks out of the room. She stops abruptly in the hall, her face turned towards the front door. It breaks into a smile.
‘Have you been busking?’ she asks over the sound of the door clunking shut.
‘Yeah, in town,’ I hear Eliza’s reply, and then a knock as she places her guitar case against the adjoining wall.
‘I thought you must’ve been at work. Come and have a cup of tea,’ Mum urges genially.
I roll my eyes. ‘Or better still, come and help!’ I call out, smoothing my hands over my floral summer dress as our mother heads spiritedly in the direction of the kitchen.
‘Do you want one, Rose?’ she calls out to me as an afterthought. She’s already put the kettle on.
‘Sure,’ I reply, as Eliza appears in the doorway.
She’s wearing ripped denim jeans with a bright orange vest top and her hair has been fashioned into pigtails.
The hairstyle is just one example of how she hasn’t grown up. Others include busking and waitressing instead of getting a proper job, going through boyfriends like they’re going out of fashion, and still living at home. I could go on.
‘Seriously, are you going to help at all with this packing?’ I ask, as she slumps into a chair at the dining-room table. I’m kneeling on the carpet in front of Mum’s display cabinet, wrapping yet another of her beloved ornaments in bubble wrap.
‘Why should I? I don’t want to move,’ Eliza responds sarkily.
I was the one who recently persuaded Mum to sell up and downsize.
Phoebe thought it was ‘probably a good idea’, but Eliza was just furious to be losing her free hotel room.
‘This is not about you,’ I point out.
She leans forward and rests her elbows on the table, gazing down at me intently. I shift uneasily, already bristling at whatever it is that she’s going to say.
‘Do you really have nothing better to do with your holidays?’ she asks.
I’m a nurse and I live and work in London, doing an often harrowing and stressful job. I would love to be lying on a beach right now beside my boyfriend Gerard in a hot country, but instead I’m here in Manchester for the next two weeks, helping our mother to move, and our sister with her last-minute wedding preparations. What’s Eliza doing? A big fat diddly squat, that’s what.
My father’s words ring in my ears: ‘Rose is a giver, not a taker. Just like her mother...’
Mum used to be a nurse – that’s how she and Dad met. Dad had a climbing accident and Mum nursed him back to health, but she gave up work when we were born. It was all hands on deck after that.
‘I’m just saying,’ Eliza says, shrugging and looking away, dispassionately. ‘Some of us have better things to do with our time.’
I raise my voice. ‘Some of us need to get a proper job and stop scrounging off their elderly parent!’
‘Stop it!’ Mum barks from the doorway, making me flinch guiltily. The mugs on her tray vibrate noisily against each other as she continues. ‘You two turn into spoilt brats when you’re together! When are you going to start acting your age?’
She has a point. We are twenty-seven.
‘Why don’t you go and make a start on the attic?’ Mum prompts me.
‘Fine, I will,’ I reply, grabbing my tea and flouncing out of the room in much the same manner as she did a couple of minutes ago.
When Phoebe and I were at university, our parents decided to turn our family home into a bed and breakfast. All of our childhood bits and pieces went up into the attic – even Eliza had a tidy up, but she never moved out – and then Dad died and Mum lost interest in putting up strangers.
I’ve been meaning to sort through my stuff for ages.
On my way past the hall mirror, I catch sight of my reflection and see that my high bun has come loose into a ponytail – the no-fuss, sporty style Phoebe favours. For a split second, it’s like I’m looking right at her.
She and I adopted our own hairstyles from an early age because we were fed up with our teachers collectively calling us ‘Miss Thomson’ when they couldn’t tell us apart. But Eliza was responsible for me first embracing the bun.
I used to nick her scissors occasionally because I could never find mine, but one day she went mad because she had an art project due – some bizarre collage made out of cardboard – and I told her I’d given them back. She stormed into my bedroom, vying for blood, and was so cross to see them sitting in my top drawer that she yanked my hair and snipped off a chunk. She got into a lot of trouble for that.
In some ways, though, she did me a favour. I had to wear my hair up the next day and I got so many compliments that it became my signature look. Sometimes she’d wind me up by wearing hers in a bun, too, but she never could do neat and tidy so the teachers always knew something was off.
I hunt out the pole from the airing cupboard and hook it onto the ring to open the hatch door and bring down the ladder. A few minutes later, I’m up in the dingy, dusty space surrounded by boxes. I have no idea where to start, so I grab one and haul it towards me.
It’s almost an hour before I come across the first diary. I recognise it immediately, despite the stickers plastering the front cover. My sisters and I were given identical purple notebooks by our Uncle Simon for our seventeenth birthdays, padlocked with tiny locks. I wrote in mine religiously, although I’d probably cringe at reading it now.
I prise back one corner of the cover and start in surprise at the scratchy handwriting I can just make out inside.
I knew Phoebe kept a diary – everyone knew Phoebe kept a diary – she was always entering writing competitions and telling people she wanted to be an author one day. But Eliza? I never would have pegged her as the diary-writing type. Songs, sure. But pouring her heart out to inanimate objects? Not her style. Even her songs are weird and quirky – there’s no soul-baring in her lyrics, not the ones that I’ve heard, anyway.
Yet this is definitely her scrawl. When did she start writing this?
I scrutinise the lock. I lost my own key once, so I have a fair idea how to crack it. I reach up and remove one of the bobby pins that were unsuccessfully securing my bun and poke it in the keyhole, wiggling it around. A moment later, there’s a click and I’m in.
I jolt at the sight of the first entry date: Friday 13th May, a whole decade ago. Friday 13th May – that was the day Angus moved in!
I slam the diary shut again. I knew it! I knew he had got to her, too! She always went around with this couldn’t-care-less attitude, but she didn’t fool me.
Guilt slithers like a snake in my gut as I open up the diary again. A chance to get inside Eliza’s head? How could I resist? She’d kill me if she found out, of course, but it serves her right for not helping to pack up the house.
I press back the pages and begin to read...