The Sick Rose by Erin Kelly Page A

his bedsit, not even a payphone. He had a pager instead. Her parents carried pagers, only they called them bleepers. When they were on call they took them everywhere, even to bed, and when the bleep came, they dropped everything. Of course no one was depending on Adam Glasslake to step in and save a life, which was fortunate as Louisa soon learned that the gap between leaving a message and hearing back from him could be hours. Most of the telephone booths on his street in Shepherd’s Bush had been vandalised, he said, sometimes he had to walk for miles to find a working one, and moreoever there was a band rule that rehearsal time was uninterruptable. She was reluctant to leave her room until she had heard from him, pulling the extension next to her bed just so that she could ignore it for a few seconds when finally it rang. The longed-for conversations were fraught, on her part if not on his; even when he said beautiful things to her, she imagined she heard the chirrup of female laughter in the background. She felt imprisoned, like some fairy-tale princess in her tower, or a mistress in her married lover’s pied-à-terre.
    The other people in his life – his band members in particular – became mythical creatures to her. They gained glamour and power the longer they remained strangers. Getting him to talk about them was like trying to prise open a bad shellfish. She gleaned only that he didn’t seem to have much time for the boys, Ben and Ciaran, but he did confess that he was close to Angie.
    ‘You’re lucky she’s ugly,’ he said.
    While she waited, she still had his company in the form of twelve songs spread across two cassettes. She set up Nick’s decommissioned tape deck in her room so that the music was on a continuous loop. At some instinctive level she knew that he must not know how often she did this; it was the behaviour of a groupie, not a girlfriend.
    Miranda came home one day to find Louisa cross-legged on her bed, having a staring contest with the silent telephone. ‘Someone playing you at your own game?’
    It was a throwaway, affectionate remark that articulated for the first time the relationship’s appeal and its danger. ‘No,’ she said. She would have loved to confide in her sister but what would Miranda know about passion? She’d been with Devendra since their O levels and as far as Louisa could see, the couple had plunged headlong into mild affection and things had cooled rapidly from there. The closest she’d ever seen them come to sexual abandon was when Dev had squeezed her sister’s toes through her socks and Miranda had spilled her coffee on her lap in surprise.
    She knew the number of his pager by heart, the digits a rhyme in her mind. She wished she could put some kind of bug on the device, or on Adam himself, that would show on a map of London where he was at any given time. She would never have thought that about any man but Adam and if a previous lover had said such a thing about her she would have been repulsed. Lately, she didn’t recognise herself. The sooner she broke into his life and let reality colour the blanks in her imagination the better.

Chapter 13
    September 2004
    Daniel Scatlock was a year older than the rest of them, a mystery which was never publicly solved, and he wore his school uniform like a Savile Row suit. He towered over Mrs Fox who introduced him saying that he was new to the area, which was usually a euphemism for ‘excluded from every other school in the county’. Where you went after you were expelled from Grays Reach High was anyone’s guess. She appointed Paul as Daniel’s guide for the day because their names were adjacent on the register. Paul’s dismay was keen. He only hoped that Daniel would recognise his minnowish status and show him the contemptuous disregard he deserved. Invisibility was the pinnacle of his social ambition.
    During English, Daniel didn’t even make an effort to look at their shared copy of The Diary of Anne Frank and