The Second Child Read online

  James chips in with, ‘You’re honoured. She only ever stays for one match – two, max – at my tournaments.’

  ‘You played really well. Well, until that ball nearly took your head off.’ Phil hugs her. ‘We’ll see you soon.’

  ‘When?’ It’s an abrupt question.

  ‘Well, we need to speak to your…’ – I don’t want to say it any more – ‘to Anne, but we’ll sort something out really soon.’ The other girls are in the car now and Megan’s dad is politely looking the other way, pretending they’re not all waiting for her. Rosie looks tired and still quite pale. ‘I promise, I’ll be in touch with her soon,’ I say. Rosie’s face pinches. ‘Okay, tomorrow, I’ll call her tomorrow.’

  ‘She’ll say I’ve got lots of school work, but I haven’t.’

  ‘Leave it with me.’ For an awful moment I think she’s going to cry, but she shrugs and seems to decide to trust me. She climbs in next to her friends. They all wave as the car pulls away. We have a tedious trip home ahead of us, but it’s been worth it. We’ve travelled a long way in one day.

  30

  Overreacting?

  ROSIE

  AS SOON as I get into school on Monday I can sense that people are talking about me; word has got around about ‘my parents’ and ‘my fit brother’ coming to watch me play at the weekend. It doesn’t bother me, but I wonder who blabbed. My money’s on Stacey. It’s kind of exciting being the centre of attention. It even reaches Ms Suri, our Head of Year, because after lunch she calls me into Red Base and asks awkwardly, ‘Is everything all right, Rosie?’

  I make her dangle for a bit. ‘Yes, Miss.’

  ‘Are you sure? You know that we’re here for you, if you want to talk about anything – anything at all. That’s what we’re here for.’ She cocks her head on one side, like a bird, as she repeats herself.

  ‘Why, has somebody said something?’ That puts her on the spot.

  ‘Well, not directly, but I’ve heard that you might have had some unsettling news.’ God, teachers!

  ‘You mean about my mum not being my mum?’

  She blinks twice. ‘Oh, Rosie. What a thing to say.’

  ‘What, the truth? It’s true. I’ve already met my real parents and my brother.’

  She blinks again. ‘Let’s sit down and I’ll make us a drink.’ Which I think is more for her benefit than mine. Actually she’s okay. She lets me skip Maths and we talk about it all and she doesn’t inter-rupt me once. I suppose she’s trained to listen, but it’s nice to talk to someone. She keeps patting my hand and saying ‘gosh’. I leave with a promise to ‘never be afraid to come to her and talk any time I need to’. That’s the good bit… What I don’t realise, until I get home on Tuesday, is that, as part of her pastoral responsibilities, she’s going to ring Mum.

  Mum’s waiting for me in the lounge when I get back. ‘Rosie, in here, please.’

  ‘I’m just gonna get changed.’

  ‘I’d like you to come in here first.’ I can tell by her voice that I’m in trouble. ‘Sit down, please. I had a call from school today. Your Head of Year.’ I say nothing. ‘She was very concerned about your welfare.’ A pause. ‘She went into great detail about what’s been happening. She seemed very well informed. You must have had a long conversation with her.’

  ‘People have been talking… she wanted to know if I was okay. It was nice of her.’

  ‘Who’s been talking?’

  ‘Just people.’

  ‘The football girls?’ The look on her face is a real giveaway.

  ‘I don’t see why it’s such a big secret.’

  ‘It’s not. I’m just very uncomfortable being the subject of school gossip.’

  ‘This isn’t about you!’

  ‘Rosie… please.’

  ‘So what, if people are talking. They’re gonna. It’s a mad story. It’s me it affects.’

  Her neck flushes red and I can see she’s struggling to keep her voice down. ‘It does affect me. Of course it does, deeply. Is that what you said to your teacher: that I’m not supporting you. Is that why she rang?’

  I look at her, sitting on the edge of the sofa in our stupidly tidy house with her stupid clock ticking away, her face tight with frustration, and I blow. ‘You can’t control everything. You want to, but you can’t.’ She puts her hand up to her forehead, her ‘go to’ warning that I’m causing her pain. I’m so bloody sick of her being fragile.

  ‘Rosie, please, there’s no need to shout.’

  There’s absolutely no point in me talking to her, she never listens. I walk out of the room, but she follows me. I slam my bedroom door on her, but that still doesn’t stop her. I refuse to respond to her questions, but she keeps on at me through the door.

  ‘Rosie, you’re fourteen. You can’t act like a five-year-old and storm off when anyone says anything that doesn’t suit you. Please open the door.’ She waits. ‘Rosie.’ Here it comes. Control queen swings into action. ‘Very well. If you choose to behave like a child, you’re grounded. I want you straight home after school every day this week: no training tomorrow, and no football on Saturday. We can use the time to talk. We need to sort this out.’ With that, she walks away from the door.

  I hate her.

  PHIL

  The doorbell goes as we’re eating lunch on Saturday. I open up. ‘What the hell!’ Rosie is standing outside.

  She smiles, nervously. ‘Surprise!’ She follows me through to the kitchen. I sweep some of the debris from lunch out of the way and take her backpack from her.

  ‘Hey.’ James nods a hello. Lauren stays focused on her yoghurt.

  ‘I’m sorry for turning up unannounced. I hope it’s okay.’ There’s a tremor in her voice.

  I start to say, ‘It’s fine, we love—’ when Sarah cuts straight across me.

  ‘Does your mum know you’re here?’

  SARAH

  She just turns up. She appears at the kitchen table and Phil reacts as if it’s normal for Rosie to be in Leeds, on her own, without any warning. ‘Does your mum know you’re here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I watch her discomfort with the lie. ‘Rosie?’

  ‘I sent her a text from the train.’ She proffers me her phone, as if she expects me to check.

  ‘What I mean is: did you arrange this with your mum? Have you her permission to be here?’ Her nervy smile wavers and fades.

  Phil leaps in.

  ‘Whoa! Let’s at least get Rosie a drink, then we’ll talk about it.’ He rises from the table.

  ‘No!’ I surprise myself with my abruptness. I repeat the question. ‘Rosie, does your mum know where you are?’ The silence that follows is only briefly disturbed by James sliding away from the table and Lauren throwing her yoghurt pot on the floor. Rosie says nothing. ‘Right.’ My chair scrapes loudly across the tiles as I stand up and fetch my phone.

  Anne picks up on the second ring. Her voice sounds hesitant. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Anne. She’s here. She’s safe. She just turned up.’

  ‘She’s with you?’ I can hear shock in her voice. ‘She’s in Leeds?’

  ‘Yes. You didn’t know?’ Rosie and Phil watch me across the room.

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’ Anne sounds weary rather than angry. ‘We’ve had a difficult week. When her bed was empty this morning, I was… well, you can imagine. Then I got a text, saying she was with one of her friends. I’m very sorry to drag you into all this.’

  ‘You’ve no need to apologise. I’ll put Rosie on.’ Rosie looks startled, but I pass the phone to her, giving her no option but to speak to Anne. ‘Phil, let’s get Lauren settled in the front room.’ We leave the door open so that we can hear the subsequent awkward conversation.

  ‘No… No. I’m not. No. Well, there’s not a lot you can do about it… What’s the point? No.’ Then silence.

  Phil makes to go back into the kitchen, but I grab his arm. ‘She can’t stay.’

  ‘She’s travelled all the way up to see us.’

 
; ‘Without Anne’s permission or knowledge, by the sound of it.’

  ‘There must be a reason.’

  ‘We’ll talk to her, but we can’t reward her for just running off and not telling her mum, or us.’

  ‘Jeez, Sarah, give the kid a break. Let’s actually find out what’s going on before we make any decisions.’ And he shrugs my hand away.

  Rosie is flushed and agitated when we go back into the kitchen. She tells us about a row with her mum, something to do with school knowing about what’s happened; it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me. The real trigger seems to have been Anne stopping her playing a football match, hence the sudden flight up north.

  ‘But you can’t just leave and not tell your mum where you are?’

  ‘I didn’t. Like I said, I texted.’ There it is, the defiance and the loose connection with the truth, when it suits her.

  ‘But you’re supposed to be grounded.’

  Phil is on another tack entirely. ‘She actually stopped you playing today – a cup semi-final?’ Rosie nods and I feel a surge of irritation with both of them.

  ‘That’s not the point. I know it’s difficult at the moment, but you have to think about your mum.’

  She looks at me for a second with a real spark of anger in her eyes.

  ‘So I have to go back home then, do I?’

  ‘Well, I think you should…’

  Phil cuts across me. ‘Not straight away.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back.’ Tough. ‘You said I was always welcome. Don’t you want me to stay?’ This she aims at me, not Phil. She picks up a knife from the table and starts to dig the tip into the breadboard; if she’s not careful, she’ll stab it straight into her fingers. I’m trapped by a swirl of impulses. I’m concerned about her lack of respect for Anne, and frustrated by Phil’s response to her behaviour. He wants Rosie to be here and she’s here, so he’s glad. He’s not thinking about the message we’re sending. He and Rosie are bonding, quickly, simply, strongly, but I’m adrift. Do I want her here? Of course I do, but not like this, not this rush and pressure and battle of conflicting needs. It’s such hard work. It shouldn’t be, but it is. No one should have to get to know their daughter like this, it isn’t natural.

  They’re both staring at me, waiting for me to speak. I decide to compromise. That’s what Phil and I have been trying to do. I have to stick to my side of the bargain. ‘Let’s ring your mum back. Ask her about you staying tonight, but you must go home first thing in the morning. And it depends on what your mum says. It’s her call.’ But Rosie isn’t placated. If anything, she seems to be getting more worked up.

  ‘She’ll say “no”.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘She will. She doesn’t want me here.’ A tear emerges and slides down her cheek. ‘And you don’t really want me here, either, do you?’ She keeps playing with the knife – dig, dig, the tip gouges into the board. I reach over and take it out of her hand, trying to calm her agitation, but my attempts to reassure her are obviously not enough. Phil looks at me, waiting for something more. Rosie’s voice grows raspy with emotion. ‘If you don’t want me to stay, I won’t. I don’t want to be getting in anybody’s way.’ She stands up and reaches for her backpack, making a show of preparing to leave.

  ‘Whoa! No. Hang on. We do want you here.’ Phil stretches to take the bag from her and glares at me to fix this.

  Rosie flares. ‘I don’t fit anywhere. Not here, not there. It’s not fair. I never wanted it to be like this. It’s not my fault. It’s not. I just want a normal family like everyone else. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. It should just be normal.’ She’s properly crying now, like a small child. She looks so stranded and confused. Out of the corner of my eye I see James slope past the open door.

  ‘Rosie, shush. It’s okay.’ I go and put my arms round her, genuinely wanting to protect her from the confusion and the hurt. The tension in her shoulders holds for a second, then releases. She leans into me and cries, and I pat her back as if she’s a baby. She smells of shampoo and body spray, so different from Lauren. She lets me hug her. As I hold her, I look up across the top of her head and I catch sight of Phil; an odd look of contentment settles on his face as he watches us.

  When she’s calmed down, we ring Anne. She agrees, without argument, to Rosie staying the night. I’m about to end the call when she says, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t ask… how’s Lauren?’ I tell her she’s fine. Anne’s ‘Good, I’m glad to hear it’ is so softly spoken that I nearly miss it.

  With everything agreed, Rosie heads to the bathroom to wash her face and I go looking for James, thinking he’s upstairs. He’s not, he’s in the lounge, hunkered down on the carpet next to his sister, earbuds in, something tinny playing very loudly on his phone, looking at Lauren’s favourite cookery book with her. They share a love of all things cake.

  ‘You okay?’

  He pulls out an earbud. The sizzle of something discordant and thrashy fills the room. ‘What?’

  ‘I said, are you okay? It’s all calmed down now. Rosie’s just going stay for tonight and she’s heading home tomorrow, in the morning. It won’t interfere with Dad taking you to your match. Sorry. I know I keep saying that it’ll settle down and it doesn’t, but it will.’

  ‘We’re fine, aren’t we, Lauren?’ He slings his arm across Lauren’s shoulder. She doesn’t lift her eyes from the page.

  ‘You can come back in, if you want to.’

  ‘In a bit, we just have to see check out the peanut-butter cupcakes first, don’t we, Lauren?’ He puts his earbud back in.

  The two of them sit on the floor, content together, and I feel a surge of pure love and protectiveness for him. I go across, crouch down and hug him. I’m stupidly surprised by how broad and strong his shoulders are beneath his crumpled T-shirt.

  ANNE

  The house is empty without Rosie. I sit in her bedroom, listen to the quiet and think, This is what life will be like if I lose her.

  ROSIE

  Mum’s on the platform when my train pulls in, she’s waiting under one of the information boards, scanning the passengers as they pour off the train. I see her before she sees me. She stands out from the crowd. She looks smarter, more glamorous than everyone else, like she has a life that other people might envy. One middle-aged dude definitely checks her out. He slows down as he passes her, one, two backward glances, but she doesn’t notice, she never does. She’s immune to men. Finally she picks me out in the crowd. She waves and smiles like she’s genuinely pleased to see me. I was expecting disapproval, or at least weary disappointment, but she doesn’t come at me at all. In fact, in the car she apologises for over-reacting to school ringing, and for making me miss the match. She doesn’t even really tell me off for going up to Phil and Sarah’s; she just asks what we did and tells me how much she missed me. I guess that she’s waiting till we get home to start with the lecture, but even then it doesn’t come. Instead she’s makes us a stir-fry and we watch a film together, she lets me choose which one. It’s nice, once I relax; nice not to be fighting for a change, nice to be in the same room without irritating each other, so nice, in fact, that I wait until the closing credits before I mention Dad.

  ‘I forgot to tell you, Dad left me a message yesterday.’ She immediately becomes tense and the atmosphere screws back up into a ball. ‘He’s sounding iffy about my birthday weekend.’

  ‘Iffy?’ For once she’s not questioning my choice of words.

  ‘He’s saying it might clash with a conference he’s going to, in Cologne. That he might have to go straight home afterwards because he’ll have been away for four days already, so staying up in London to see me might be difficult.’ Without meaning to, I realise that I’m sounding exactly like him. He’s always hedging his bets, never directly saying ‘no’, but meaning it all the same. She doesn’t say anything, but I can see she’s upset and, underneath the upset, really pissed off. She hates it that he puts them before me, though why she’s surprised af
ter all these years is beyond me.

  ‘I thought he’d already got tickets for the show.’ There it is, the same worry that I’m gonna burst into tears like a baby. She doesn’t seem to realise there are only so many times that you can expect something and not get it, before you learn not to expect anything at all – except cash, of course.

  ‘He said he’s gonna give the tickets to somebody else to use rather than waste them.’ I have to look away from her pained face. She needs to get over him. I have. ‘Anyway, I just thought, if I’m not going to London that weekend, maybe we could do something else.’ I don’t just sound like him.

  ‘What would you like to do?’ I can see her rethinking Dad’s abandonment of me, seeing an upside, anticipating a spa day or shopping, with lunch somewhere nice, just the two of us.

  ‘I was thinking, on the train, on the way home, that maybe it would be nice to invite the Rudaks down.’ Her face collapses like a popped balloon. ‘Well, we’ve been up to theirs; we should invite them back, shouldn’t we? It’s only polite.’

  ‘Rosie, I’m not sure…’

  I head her off. ‘But it looks odd, like we don’t want them here.’

  ‘You know it’s not that.’ I can see her wrestling with the logic of what I’ve said, but it is strange that she hasn’t thought to invite them to ours; we’re supposed to be getting to know each other, and surely that means them getting to know us, as well as the other way round. At last she says, ‘Okay. I’ll think about it, but, Rosie, no conversations with the Rudaks about it, not yet. You must promise me? I just want to fathom out how it might work first.’

  I know not to push my luck. ‘Okay.’ I stand up and stretch out my muscles, I feel all bunched up from sitting on my backside all weekend. Before I head upstairs I fold the blanket and drape it over the back of the sofa, positioning it precisely in the middle, just as she likes it. ‘Well, I’m going go up now. Goodnight, Mum.’ I’m nearly out of the room when she stops me.