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Push the button…
He’d have to, wouldn’t he, unless he wanted to walk or go back in there and watch Ada breathe through a pain that should have been unbearable. Fuck…the dread of having to go in and tell her, watch her face as he did…
Unlock the door…
…and then, when she didn’t scream and rage against him, when she didn’t throw her glass in his face and himself out of the house – Christ - it was the pain of having the last of your living flesh stripped from your very bones…
Come home to me…
The street was deserted, there were no children to blow to kingdom come, he might as well push the fuckin’ button and be done with it
Something hit the car with a thud and for a split second Tommy braced himself against the steering wheel, waiting to be ripped to shreds; but nothing came. Instead, he caught sight of something moving on the bonnet. He lifted his head, squinting through the rain-smeared windshield into the dim light of the street lamp, his head pounding.
A woman. There was a woman lying on his bonnet, holding onto it, hugging it like she’d fallen from the sky with the rain. There was no telling the colour of her hair, it was dark and she was drenched, but his breath hitched nonetheless.
“Grace…”
The name was past his lips before he could stop himself and, just as it slipped out, the woman on the bonnet lifted her head, slowly, as though it was causing her great pain and looked at him.
He nearly screamed.
It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be her anymore than it could be Grace; it wasn’t her. It was some trick of the opium, turning a madwoman wandering the streets and throwing herself in front of parked cars to beg for a coin into a likeness of Rosie; a pale, disheveled, drenched and gasping likeness on the verge of blowing away on the wind, but a likeness nonetheless.
She stared at him. He could see her whole body heaving with heavy breaths, shaking with the idling engine beneath her, reminding him that he was in the car and the car was running. He turned it off and she dropped her head, resting her cheek against the bonnet, still holding on, still in the way.
He couldn’t very well drive over her.
His hands were shaking so badly, it took him three attempts to get the bloody door open; and once he did, he had to cling on to it to stay upright, his legs felt miles away.
“What the fuck-“
She turned her head, looked at him again, and without the blur of rain and streetlight on the windshield, there was no talking himself out of it.
“Rosie?”
She was righting herself, pushing up off the car, moving like she’d boulders strapped to her back and lead bullets sewn into the lapels of a coat he didn’t recognise. The look on her face – battered, exhausted, yet unable, or unwilling, to stay down – it reminded him of the women they’d encounter in burned out villages, digging for bits of crockery and children in the rubble of their homes.
It wasn’t her. She wasn’t here. She wasn’t fucking real. She couldn’t be.
She opened her mouth, moved her lips about soundlessly, like she’d left her voice in whatever strange place she’d come from.
He took a step forward, uncertain whether or not to touch her, whether or not it would make her disappear, whether or not he would have minded if it did.
“Rosie?”
She lunged at him. No warning. Dug her fingers into the sleeve of his jacket, hard enough for it to hurt; and somewhere within the explosion crashing through his chest, he found himself pulling away…but there was not shaking her off.
Her hand was freezing, even through the sleeve of his jacket, like some terror from the frozen wastes beyond the hell fires, like the living dead…
She smashed into his chest and suddenly he could feel her heart hammering underneath her sodden coat, could feel her trembling with cold and ragged breath, could smell her damp hair…It was like having a bucket of water thrown over you after a night on the piss.
His arms wrapped around her on their own accord, holding on for dear life, suddenly petrified that she would melt away into the darkness.
“Rosie…” He breathed rather than said it.
Rose got her nails into the front of his jacket and clawed herself upwards, until her fingers were digging into his shoulders. Her eyes were wild and more black than blue, the way they only looked when she was very sick. It made him want to bundle her up in blankets and cradle her in front of a fireplace, rock her to sleep, listening to the coughs from the upstairs bedroom ( It’s your mammy goin’ into battle, little Rosie, don’t be scared…they don’t know, who they’re messin’ with…) …he shook his head, forced the memory into the very back of it.
“What-“
“It’s not true…” Rosie was staring up at him, her voice rough with rain and running. She was slipping, her legs were giving way.
“Rosie…Rosie, come on…”
He was trying to get his hands under her arms to hold her more easily, terrified that he’d drop her.
“Listen-” her voice gave out and he gripped her as tightly as he dared.
“Come on…” He’d get her inside, Ada’d know what to do; Ada was a mother, she’d know the right words and have honey in her cupboard. “We’ll go into Ada’s-“
“No-“
“Rosie, you’re soaked, you’re-“
“No!”
She was on him like a spider, her legs round his waist, her arms round his neck, cutting off his air. Tommy struggled to keep his balance, shifting his weight and hers; and, for a moment, there was nothing in the world, nothing but the feeling of Rosie in his arms. A wild, unreasonable joy sparked somewhere inside him; but a wave of something dark and deadly flushed it out before it could take a hold. Because there’d been a time when Rosie would have fitted into his arms more easily, when he might have carried her for miles and never broken a sweat; and he’d spent that time under the ground and amongst the screeching terror of dying men.
“You’ll leave,” she croaked into his shoulder.
“I-“
“You will!”
What would it matter if he did? What could he possibly do to ease this…whatever it was…when it took all he had to keep his head from straying to places he’d no business taking her to?
“Rosie-“
“No!”
She wasn’t one for tantrums, Rosie, she hadn’t been when she was little and she certainly wasn’t now, so the sheer vehemence of her refusal to see reason, to be taken to safety, to fucking let go of him – it steamrolled him. It robbed him of options.
“Orright…” he said breathlessly. “Come on…”
He turned and made for the car. Get her out of the rain. Calm her down. Take her in to Ada’s, fight the need to curl up on the floor in front of her bed, like a penitent guard dog, and run for it.
Rosie was crying into his shoulder, turning to water in his arms.
“Shh…”
He couldn’t get into the car, not with her on him like this, the steering wheel was in the way. He reached behind and tried to pry her arms apart, but they were locked. She burrowed into him, her sobs like tiny earthquakes against his collarbone, a pain blooming in his chest that made him worry he might be having a heart attack.
“Rosie…” he was pleading now. “Come on…it’s orright, my little love. Just til we get in the car, eh?”
She acquiesced, thank fuck, and he bundled her into the car, pushed her through to the passenger’s side as gently as he could to make room for himself. Tommy went slowly, buying himself time, steeling himself with some kind of parental resolve. It was best to take her in to Ada’s – it mightn’t be a bad idea for Ada to have someone else to fuss over, keep her from sinking into grief – he’d tell her, he’d lay down the law, he was her bloody father, wasn’t he.
Tommy closed the door and Rose bent forward with a gut-wrenching sob. It was terrifying. There were noises breaking forth from her skinny little body, noises he’d never heard her make, he’d never thought she was capable of making. He’d seen her cry before, a handful of times. When the mad dog from down the road had got its teeth into her arm. On her sick bed, when they’d been hidden away in Small Heath, running from the Italians. And then – after – when she came to fetch him back from the brink, when there were cracks in their walls and he held her on the sofa…but never, never had she wept like this. Like she was having the heart burned out of her.
It made a man struggle for breath, struggle to maintain his composure. It made a man reach out against his better judgement and put his hand on the back of her neck, feeling her buck with sobs. It made a man feel beyond useless. It made his pain at Ada’s dry-eyed sadness look like a joke.
“Ah, Rosie…ah, fuck…Christ…Rosie, my Rosie…”
He could hear her – Rosie, his girl, his wild child – struggling for breath to the point of retching, closed his hand around her coat and pulled her upright. Her face was streaked with tears and the grime of the big city, her lids closed and swollen, sorrow dripping from her lashes and the tip of her nose. She slipped sideways until her head came to rest on his shoulder; the way she might have done while he was reading to her in front of a fireplace or watching the singing at a fair or even just waiting for a train on a station bench late at night, if he’d turned out to be the type of father he’d wanted to be. Only he hadn’t. And Rosie’d spent the last ten years surrounded by the barely disguised mayhem snapping at his heels.
“It’s not true…”
Tommy looked down and found Rose staring at the tracks of the rain on the windshield, her eyes still brimming with tears.
“What isn’t?” he asked.
“Whatever they’re sayin’…”
“Who?”
“The dragons…” Rosie got her hand into his sleeve again, twisted the fabric between her fingers. “They’re liars…and I am, as well.”
She was like the soldiers, the ones that were bleeding out from small but lethal wounds, talking. Talking absolute nonsense with great authority, great eloquence. The first time he’d come across this, he’d been fooled; tried to reason with the lad on the stretcher, thought he owed him some sort of honesty, some sort of truth, when all you had to do at moments like this was to just let them go on.
“Yea?” he asked softly.
“Yea.”
“Orright…” Tommy slid down in his seat ever so slightly, just enough to comfortably rest his cheek on the nest of Rosie’s wet hair. She allowed it, she didn’t recoil, didn’t slap him in the face and yell at him that he’d had his fuckin’ chance, that he’d pissed it away, that he’d worked it away.
“I lied…” Rose exhaled slowly “…to you.”
“Huh.” Like they were on opposite sides of the confessional. Like he’d not deceived her enough to give her free passes until she was old and grey. “About what?”
Tommy took her hand, eased it out of the knot of his sleeve, ran his thumb over her palm, trying to rub the tension away, uncurl her, bring her back into the car.
“About it bein’ a terrible time,” she said dreamily, “- it isn’t…I mean, it is...”
Tommy closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Rose said in a small voice.
“Rosie-“
“No,” she interrupted. “I’m sorry, I really am…I didn’t know it was you. I’d never have said it otherwise.”
There’d been something deeply troubling about the way she was, the way she’d been, the few times she’d woken and caught him in the chair. But he’d always been so shattered, so drunk or so full of morphine – because he had to be, didn’t he, he’d to break himself down to a point when he could kid himself into believing that staring at her sleep and breathe and roll over was making up for lost time – that thinking about it, really thinking, had been out of the question. The idea that she might remember in the morning had made him nervous at first, but when she never said a word, he figured she didn’t recall. It hadn’t occurred to him that she’d not known it was him. It was the sort of thing that made a man want to fill his pockets with rocks and jump into the cut.
“Who’d you think I was?”
“Dunno…” Rose sighed and a cloud of hot breath obscured her pale face for a moment. “A ghost, something like that.”
For fuck’s sake…a bubble of unfamiliar, vaguely hysterical laughter popped in Tommy’s gut, making him shake and snort. He’d have to tell Grace next time she deigned to visit, tell her that they weren’t so different after all.
“What?” Rosie was looking up at him, frowning.
“So,“ Tommy braced himself against the steering wheel, “ you’ve six different plans to get out of the house in case your old man goes spare – no, bear with me –“ he held up a
finger and Rose closed her mouth again “- six different fuckin’ plans and you’d sooner belief in a ghost sitting in your room than your own father bein’ there.”
It was funny. Was it, fuck.
“So?”
There was something in her tone, in the angle of her eyebrows, something that evoked the smell of delicately twisted pastries from the best bakery in Digbeth.
“So?” he echoed, forcing the smells from the cab. “So, you’re not lying – well, you are now, you’re lying about having lied – but you didn’t lie when you said these are terrible times.”
They’d had strategies, as well, himself and Arthur, to get Ada and their mum and John out of the firing line; and themselves, ideally, though that didn’t work out all that often. Nothing like Rosie’s plans though, Christ Almighty, it hurt as much as it made him proud.
“Yea, they are – but…” Rosie trailed off, stared up at the roof of the cabin; Tommy could see her jaw twitching.
“But what?”
“It’s terrible,” Rose said, “but it’s no worse than any other time.”
She was fucking serious. It made him furious, he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because she’d never known bad times like he had.
“No worse?” Tommy repeated. “No worse than any other time, eh?”
His ire took him by surprise. How dare she? How dare she fancy herself a hard girl, when she’d been fed and clothes and sleeping in a bed of her own all the days of her life that might have counted as her hard times, before he moved her into a fucking palace. Before he filled her day-to-day with things he couldn’t even have conceived of as a boy – and wouldn’t have thought to dream about if he did – only to find her pouting when she learned they hadn’t gone broke.
“No.”
The bloody cheek.
“And how’s that?” he growled.
“ ‘cause it doesn’t matter…” She picked up on his tone, he could tell, she was trying to keep from squirming.
“What doesn’t matter?”
“Nothing does,” Rosie said, not looking at him. “It doesn’t matter what happens, what matters is what we think is happening. It’s always terrible, but it’s also always grand, it might be, and it’s always funny and it’s always sad. Everything. Like the magic drawer.”
“Yea?”
Ada’d told him about it, the magic fuckin’ drawer, and he’d been uncertain whether it’d been a stroke of genius or a sure sign they’d gone mad. He still wasn’t sure.
“Yea,” Rose nodded. “See…it was terrible for Pol and for Ada, but it wasn’t for me. I don’t think it was for Finn either. We were all in the same room, at the same time, but we all saw different things.”
She told him like it was new information, like she’d only just worked it out for herself. He should have been pleased, maybe, that she was thinking so deeply about things – and
he was, he knew, on some level he was – but he couldn’t let her lecture him, not even if she was clever.
“That’s called perspective, Rosie,” he said drily.
“Is it?”
You had to credit her, she sounded genuinely interested.
“Yea,” Tommy drew a flask from the inside of his pocket, unscrewed the lid carefully and took a slow swig. Like he fuckin’ needed it. “And I tell you somethin’ else, if you’ll listen.”
The face on her. Perfectly still. Eyes drilling into him. She was listening, and no mistake.
“It weren’t terrible for you and Finn, because Pol and Ada made up that story about the magic wardrobe-“
“Drawer.”
The nerve of her; but if he was going to burst her bubble, he might as well use the correct terminology. Couldn’t say fairer than that.
“Pardon me,” he said. “The magic drawer. There was nothing real about it. It was a fuckin’ bujo.”
“Yea, but-“
“So,” Tommy barged on, “on balance, you’ve to either be lied to or lie to yourself if you want a happy perspective on a terrible time. It’s that easy, eh, Rosie? Just close your eyes to the truth and look away to where the fuckin’ flowers bloom by the roadside and you won’t see the bodies rotting in the woods…”
He'd told himself, over and over, that there was a difference between telling a lie and telling a story; but there wasn’t not really, not with a child like this. And she wasn’t even a proper child anymore, fuck’s sake; the time for pretty stories had passed. It wouldn’t do for Rosie to be allowed to keep her head in the clouds and rainbows, not with things going the way they did. She’d have to be brought back to earth before the rug was pulled from under her feet, or she’d never survive the fall. The sooner she learned to see the world for what it was, the better.
“Yea…” Her voice was soft, but there was a hardness in her face that made her look old and battered. “I used to think that, as well. That they were just buyin’ us time…and that was nice enough, really, even if it was only making times nicer for us. But-“
Tommy opened his mouth, ready to congratulate her on getting there at last, but Rosie held up her hand to stop him.
“- then, this morning, when our Ruby woke up and she was just delighted, that made me happy. And that really happened. That was true.”
“Eh?”
She couldn’t be serious. It was too much. She was like fuckin’ Linda, banging on about the joy of doing unto others…or some such shite…
“There’s always good bits,” Rose went on. “Even when everything’s fucked, there’s always good bits. You’ve just got to look for them, really, really look. And you’ve to let them count, even the small bits.”
His own daughter, a fucking zealot of optimism.
“Every cloud’s got a fuckin’ silver lining,” he said darkly.
“No-“ she sounded like she was getting annoyed with him, as well “- fuck linings, that’d be too easy. Every cloud’s got a handful of tiny, tiny specks of silver all through it.”
“A cloud’s just a fuckin’ cloud, Rose.”
“Nothing’s just anything.”
She was raising her voice at him. It wouldn’t do.
“Yea, it is. This car’s just a car. That rain out there, it’s just fuckin’ rain. A tree’s just a tree. You’re just a child. A horse is just that – a fuckin’ horse – and I’m just…”
She raised an eyebrow. It was pure Greta and it was all it took. Tommy felt himself unmooring from the seat, slipping into a depth of feeling entirely out of bounds.
“You’re just what?” Rosie’s voice drifted from far away.
It was a comfort, maybe, to know that he was going to hell. It’d get him out of facing Greta in the afterlife. Then again, if everyone went to a hell of their own, his might well consist of nothing but his first wife’s disappointment and pain at the innumerable ways in which he’d fucked Rosie up.
“I’m just a bad man,” Tommy said tonelessly. “And everything I touch, everything I fuckin’ touch, my little love-“
“You’re wrong.”
She was coming to his defense. It was as adorable as it was misguided.
“I’ve blood on my hands, Rosie.” Suddenly he was the one confessing; the roles were fluid in the fractured church of Shelby, it seemed. “Of friends and enemies alike…of my own kin. I lie and I rob and my own children are afraid of me.”
“They’re not.”
“Yea, they are,” he said; nearly added that it was only reasonable.
“I’m not,” Rosie insisted. “I’m not. Not of you. Of the dragon, yea, a bit. Sometimes. But that’s not even really you, that’s just the dragon.”
“Ah, yea?” Dragons…trust her to latch onto such fancy. It was sweet, really, how shamelessly she’d contradict herself to keep the fantasy of him alive. No one’d fought for him this hard in a long time; it almost didn’t matter that the battle was already lost. “I thought nothin’ was ever just anythin’.”
“Dragons are,” Rose said. “Only they look like lots of things on the outside. See, it’s the other way round with dragons. But you’re not a dragon, you’re a man. And no man’s all bad.”
She sounded so earnest, like she really believed it. And if she did…maybe all a man needed was just one person to believe in his goodness. One person of pure heart…like the princesses in the fairy tales. The fucking fairy tales, like she told Charles and Ruby at bedtime.
“When the grown-ups were all busy and the children ruled the streets…” Tommy could feel himself smiling.
“That-“
“It was good,” he cut her off. “Before. Your life was good. There was a war on and it was still the stuff of fairytales and then…” the truth of it and the harshness, it was enough to force his eyes shut. He couldn’t look at her while breaking her heart, “…I came back and I-“
“You brought chocolate…”fucking hell… “…you showed me how to ride a horse, when everyone else said I was too fuckin’ small…”
“Chocolate and fuckin’ horses…” A sob escaped from deep inside Tommy, there was no keeping it in, not at the thought of the tiny, fierce creature that he’d found upon his
return; who seemed to have gained heart and soul at the same rate he’d lost it.
“That’s all I ever wanted.” She was nearly in tears, this big, brave, ridiculous girl. “Chocolate and horses and a story once in a while…”
All the fuckin’ money in the world and he’d still not been able to give her what little might have made her happy. He’d not cried properly in so long, it took him a moment to realise what was happening. She’d been there with him the last time, as well, when the pain became too much to hold it. Her mother not yet cold in the room above them, as he soaked the sleeping baby in his arms with his tears. Swearing to her, between sobs that took his breath away, that everything would be orright, promising the moon. And now, here they were. Tommy grabbed hold of the back of Rose’s neck and held on for dear life, held on until he could feel her sobs stilling as well as his own; until the need to make her stop crying overtook his own need to cry.
“Fuckin’ ridiculous, eh, Rosie?” he said shakily, forcing a bitter sort of cheer into his tone. It wasn’t much, but it was the best he could do.
“Desperate,” Rose wheezed.
A flash of delight warmed his sodden insides. She’d go for anything, poor old Rosie, there wasn’t a straw too thin for her to hold onto. He put his hand to her cheek, like a real father might do every day, and startled at just how cold she felt. It spurred something deep inside him into action.
“You’re bloody freezing,” he said. “Get that wet coat off you, come on.”
You’d have thought the girl had never seen a button before, her fingers were so stiff. Tommy opened up the coat for her – who’s bloody coat was it? – slid it off her shoulders. The thing she’d on underneath was in such a state it took him a moment to recognise it for what it was.
“Well,” he said, slipping out of his own jacket, “no more new dresses for you, chavi.”
Rose shook with shivers as much as with giggles. She’d been a shocker for ruining dresses, all her life. Climbing walls and roofs and trees, getting snagged on fences and fouled in football matches, ripping them on purpose to easier mount a horse…it’d driven Pol round the bend. And Grace.
“Don’t want new dresses an-anyway,” she said.
“So, I hear…” Tommy wrapped his jacket around her and started rubbing her arms, trying to get some warmth going. “Only chocolate and horses.”
“And stories.”
They were back in business, soldiering on. He didn’t care if she destroyed every bit of clothing she owned, so long as she kept this…this unbreakable wonderfulness. Her nerve. Her guts.
“Where’re we goin’?” Rose asked.
“To get you warmed up and dry,” her father said, pulling away from the curb.
“At the London apartment?” she asked dubiously.
“Unless you fancy staying here,” Tommy said. “You’ll have a bed and a cuppa tea, what else d’you want?”
“A story?”
It struck him that it wasn’t fair to string her along; not when there was no way he’d keep from dashing her hopes and her heart again and again. It was cruel to give her hope that he’d be the father she wanted, the one she deserved even; cruel to her, but also to himself. But her shaking, sideways grin…it was murder.
“Fair enough,” he heard himself say over the rumble of the starting car.
“Yea?”
“Yea.” He gave her a wink. “But don’t go askin’ me for chocolates and horses now, eh?”
He'd be a proper father, just the once. Make her tea. Put her to bed. It’d be like a holiday; and fuck knew they both deserved one of those. Just for a bit.