Rose lifted her head off the pillow. It had a smell about it now, the smell of hair unwashed for days, of the pillowcase unlaundered. The bed had the same scent, because her laundry had stopped being done for her and she had no desire to do it for herself.
She sat up in bed, looking at the ceiling. Smooth, white, it had once been reassuring, a familiar thing to awake to every morning. She used to keep lying there, staring up at it, thinking about her day. Thinking about her lessons, thinking about Graham, about the village…
Now she still thought about all those things, but…differently.
Rose listened. Dim whispers reached her ears from outside her room. Quiet talk in the kitchen between Granddad and Mam, she decided at last. That was all they did nowadays. Quiet talk when she wasn’t around. Quiet talk when she was.
It was all anybody did around her these days.
She arose, putting her feet over the side of her bed. She felt sticky all over, hair still limp and tangled where it hadn’t been fiddled with for days. Weeks, maybe. She only made a cursory effort anymore to address her looks, her hygiene, because…what was the point, really?
Rose dragged herself out of bed, still wearing the jeans and shirt from the night before. She opened the door to the hall and heard the voices in the kitchen quell. Stepping across the hall, soft as a mouse, she closed the bathroom door and relieved herself, making this one solitary concession to hygiene.
When she was done, she left the bathroom, flushing, again, a small concession. She opened the door to silence, and worked her way slowly down the hall, shuffling, almost like a zombie, toward the quiet living room and kitchen.
She found them standing awkwardly in the kitchen. Granddad was next to the fridge, arms folded, grey bushy eyebrows furrowed heavily, and eyes pointed at the floor. Her mam had her back turned.
Mam always had her back turned these days.
Rose thought about conditioned response, the theory that you became accustomed to, acclimated, trained to respond in certain ways by certain stimuli. In her case, it’d be days and weeks of silence, strained words to convey small points, and overwhelming quiet the rest of the time.
Today looked to be no different, with the two of them silent and immobile as statues, not even looking up or turning around to acknowledge her.
A sudden urge of wild abandon tweaked at her, like a raw nerve tinging at her spine. “Good morning,” she said, softly. In the quiet it was like a bomb going off.
Her mam did not react, did not move. Why would she? She had a good streak going, having not spoken to Rose since…then. The day of.
“Morning, Rose,” her granddad said, also softly. He did not look at her.
“I think I’ll go out for a while,” Rose said. No reply.
After waiting a good half minute, Rose went for the door. She opened it slowly, hoping someone would say something—anything, really.
Silence was all that lingered within the house.
The sky was sunny, for once, a peculiar turn of events if ever there was one. It had been sunny the last few days, even more peculiar still.
Rose didn’t care for that. She wanted grey skies to reflect her dark mood. The more opaque the clouds, the better, in her view. Twenty-four hours of night per day wouldn’t have been out of line.
Hamilton went past, on the crossroad up ahead next to the Macdonald house, and Rose raised a hand to wave, reflexively. Apparently her response hadn’t been completely conditioned out of her, but Hamilton caught sight of the motion and hurried on, not daring to stop or even look back once he realized who was waving at him.
Rose turned to walk toward the path out of the village that she’d followed on that day—that awful day, the one that changed everything.
The one that ruined her life forever.
She trudged, feet against the road, the worn soles of her shoes protesting that they were thin and in need of replacement. Her feet protested, too, catching a rock that popped up through the sole. Rose grimaced, but didn’t complain aloud.
It was the least of her problems lately.
She was walking past Miriam Shell’s house when the door opened. Rose slowed, figuring she might try saying something. Reaching out, trying to make some human contact, at least—
Graham stepped out through the door, pulling his shirt on. His trousers were undone, and a voice carried behind him on the wind.
“And you can come back tonight, if you’d like.” Miriam emerged behind Graham, broad smile beamed at him. She wore a thin, silken sort of gown. “I wouldn’t mind at all.” She stepped out onto the porch and ran a hand over his bare, smooth shoulder, then, catching sight of Rose before he did, turned him around. Graham went along with it, and she drew his lips to hers for a long, full kiss.
Rose just stood there, watching it, dumbstruck and horrified.
A part of her, distant and in the back of her mind, wanted to scream, to cry, to do anything but stand there silently as her mind assembled the pieces that had been thrown out on the table before her like a puzzle box overturned.
Instead, she watched in silence as Miriam parted Graham’s lips and put her tongue in his mouth, obvious as the sun in the bloody sky, and then broke from him with a wide, satisfied smile and a sidelong look at Rose to make sure she’d caught it all.
She had. It would have been impossible to miss.
“I’ll see you later, luv,” Miriam said, stroking Graham’s chest and letting a gentle sigh as she admired his physique. She turned and headed back inside, casting one last look of smug satisfaction at Rose.
Graham, for his part, was smiling. That faded the moment he turned and saw Rose standing there. His shirt fluttered in his hand. His trousers, though fastened, were still unzipped.
He hadn’t spoken to her since the day it happened. She hadn’t dared say anything to him, either. Now they just looked at one another, Graham’s cheeks blossoming red.
“Hi,” Rose said stupidly, and hated herself for it. Her own cheeks flushed hot, like a lit fireplace, and she turned her gaze away from him, standing shirtless and shamed on Miriam Shell’s front porch, the truth of what had passed between him and Miriam written obvious across his face for her to read, obvious to someone who’d known Graham from the time they were both toddling infants.
Rose broke into a run, down the road to the village. Behind her…Graham said nothing.
He did not come after her, no quiet footsteps or running feet reaching her ears over the sound of the wind, which was picking up.
And the wind did howl the closer she got to the cutoff that led down the hill to the spring. She hurried down it, wanting to get away, away from anyone, away from Graham, away from her mam, away from Granddad, away from Hamilton, and that damned Miriam Shell, the whore.
Graham had been hers, dammit. Hadn’t he known? Hadn’t the whole village known? Of course they had. There were jokes about it. They’d circled each other for years. At night, when she’d…touched herself…it was Graham she was thinking of. When she imagined her future, it was him that was in those thoughts.
And when she pictured kids…he was always there in those dreams, too. He’d make such a good da, she’d always known it…
It felt as though someone had punched through her ribcage, giving the ol’ heart a solid tug. It would come free easily enough these days, withered and dead as it seemed like it must be after all these weeks and months of silence, of quiet hate, of fear and disgust. Someone had spat on her the other day, caught her flush in the eye. It was little Ronnie Gordon, not even ten, and he ran off before she could scarcely reconcile herself to believing it. She’d babysat that little shite, had known him since he was knee high to a cricket.
Rose almost stumbled, her head down, not paying a whit of attention to the path. Something stopped her, though, a solid bump against a solid object. She raised her head as she stumbled back, and almost fell over.