“You may have added the sexy bit.”
“Except, all musicians are sexy,” says Rosie. “Even the ugly ones. Anyway, go on.”
“Well, my mum has always told me she doesn’t know anything about him,” I tell Rosie. “Just that he was in a band and she was working at the same festival as him, and they had a couple of days together. His name was Peter and he lived in Brittany, that’s all she’d told me. And that he doesn’t know I exist.”
“I remember.” Rosie nods gently. “You said you never believed her. Not really.”
“Yeah,” I say, and pull my handbag toward me, the brown leather speckled with sand. I hand her the jiffy bag from inside. “She sent me these last Tuesday.”
Rosie pulls the cards out in a pile, taking the first out of its pink envelope. Like the rest of them, they’re scrawled with our old address. She’s silent for a moment, then she looks at me, mouth open.
“Oh my God.” She gawps at me, flinging the sunglasses to the top of her head. “This is… this is huge, Em.” I love the way her face has lit up, the way there are tears in her eyes now, glittering at the edges. The way she holds my arm and says, “He knows about you, Emmie. He cares. He’s always cared. This is proof.”
Rosie pulls her glasses back down, fingers swiping her eyes for stray tears under the dark lenses. “So, she’s had these all along, your mum?”
A swoop of seagulls crow low overhead. A family behind us, from behind a blue-and-pink striped windbreak, throw a scatter of chips in their direction.
“I guess so,” I say. “But I don’t know, Rosie. I can’t get through to her.” I don’t add that I’m not sure I will again.
“Shit.” Rosie’s phone vibrates and she taps a finger hard at the screen. “That’s my alarm, Em. We’ve got to get back to work. Why does it always go so bloody quick. Shall we walk?”
Rosie and I amble along the beach, empty boxes from our chicken wraps in our hands, the sun in our eyes. Rosie walks close to me, looking every so often at me at her side, watchful and careful, as if she wants to speak but doesn’t for fear of pressing me too much. We come to the steps leading up to the pavement, and Rosie sits on the edge of the wall, dusting sand from her bare feet with her hands. I sit beside her and look out to the beach. Children jump over waves at the sea’s edge, parents struggle swiping sun cream on tiny arms and faces, people lay still, facedown, milky legs under the sun.
“So, the cards—that’s the reason for the village,” says Rosie, slipping on a shoe. “The one jammed up your arse.”
I nod and tell her it’s not so much a village but a small hamlet.
“I searched for him so many times,” I tell her. “But I haven’t really tried since that last time. In school.” Words dry in my mouth.
“The teacher. Morgan,” Rosie says carefully, and I nod again. Rosie and Fox, apart from the Moreaus, are the only people who know about Robert Morgan. About the night of the Summer Ball. That he, an IT teaching assistant, was helping me find my dad on the computers in the IT block. The night of the Summer Ball was when he’d told me he found something. And I believed him. Went back to the empty, silent IT room with him, while the rest of year eleven danced, to mark the end of childhood, of school as we knew it. I didn’t even tell Adam, or the colleague or two I grew close to at the photo studio. Every time I tried, it felt so alien, to be saying those words out loud about something that actually happened to me, that I’d stop. For a time, every time I talked about it, it felt like I was exposing too much of myself, that if I told them, they might shrink away, recoil, leave. I’m getting better at that part—saying it out loud—but only very slowly.
“That address,” says Rosie, feet dusted, shoes back on, legs dangling over the wall. “On the back of the cards. Did you see it? You need to go there. Or at least get yourself on Google Maps.”
“I did. It’s my old town. I just don’t recognize the road.”
I didn’t recognize it at all as somewhere we lived, or anybody we knew back then. I’ve listed them over the last fortnight, the people we knew when we lived in Ramsgate for the first time. Mum’s cousin Sheila, but she lived in London. And sometimes we visited Den’s mum, but she lived in a high-rise flat, a train ride away. And Marv, Den’s friend. Kind Marv with the Scottish accent who would pop in when Mum was at work, take me for rides on my bike, buy me an ice cream, balance piles of shells I’d collect, in his large hands. But he was from Aberdeen, I’m sure. The list of people is short. We kept ourselves to ourselves. Mum made sure of it.
“You could go there, then,” says Rosie. “Someone might know something. He might have lived there or maybe he has a sister or relative or anyone who lives over here.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I haven’t been back to my old town for a really long time,” I say. “It all feels a bit scary. And I am scared, Rosie.”
“Listen, Emmie,” says Rosie, putting an arm around me. “I get scared. I went to a school full of arseholes who bullied me to the brink. Yet look at me. I was just on my back on a wet beach in nothing but a kaftan, while dudes with their dogs looked at me like I had two fuckin’ heads.”
I laugh, and Rosie squeezes her arm around me tighter as we walk, hip to hip.
“You know what you need to do?” she says.
“What?”
“What I do. I think about the Rosie Kalwar who isn’t afraid, the one that thinks nothing of posing in a bikini on a beach, or doing an Instagram Live with a massive pimple and no makeup, and I just pretend I’m her. Every damn day.”
Rosie swipes her security pass to unlock the side gate of the Clarice, and together we walk through the back entrance to the hotel, down the cracked concrete path, past the hot waft of the recycling bins.
“That Emmie Blue—that’s who you need to find,” she says. “The one who arrives in her old town like Miranda Priestly just fucking landed. Pretend you’re her. What would she do in this situation?”
I smile up at her. “You’re smart,” I say, and she leans in and kisses my cheek at the same time Fox appears in the courtyard through the kitchen door, a cigarette in his hand. He gawps at Rosie in her kaftan and cerise-pink bikini bottoms. “Emmie took about seven hundred photos if you’re interested, Fox.” Rosie grins and makes for the door. “Collect ’em all. I’m gonna go get changed.”
Fox, pale cheeks blotching pink, looks down at his unlit cigarette and then at me. “You two have been lying on the sand again, haven’t you?” he says. “I’ll, er, get you a spare blouse, shall I?”
* * *
Me:
Guess who has just said yes to a job interview at a school next Friday?
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
SERIOUSLY?!
Me:
Yep! Totally terrified but feeling like it might be time to face it. It’s working with the school counselors!
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
EM!!!!!!!! This is fucking incredible.
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
I’m so proud of you.
Me: