Bill heard a sound behind him. Rosa Boyd was standing in his office doorway, her right hand resting on the doorknob. She wore jeans and an orange tweed jacket and boots with immensely high heels. Her hair was loose. She looked to Bill about eight foot tall and mildly alarming.

‘Rosa!’ Bill said. He smiled. ‘Hello’.

Rosa said nothing.

Bill moved round his desk and patted the chair nearest to Rosa invitingly. ‘Sit down’. Rosa didn’t move.

‘Sit, Rosa,’ Bill said, still smiling. ‘This won’t take a minute’.

Rosa gave a small sigh, and relaxed on to one leg.

‘Come in,’ Bill said. ‘Come in and shut the door. This is just between you and me. We don’t want the office hearing, do we?’

‘They know,’ Rosa said.

Bill swallowed. He patted the chair again.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Rosa said, before he could begin, ‘They’re taking bets. On how quickly you’ll do it’.

Bill looked at the opposite wall.

‘I’m going to win,’ Rosa said. ‘I said it’d be under a minute. And I’m right’.

And then she stepped backwards and pulled the door shut behind her with a slam.


Kate Ferguson lay on the bathroom floor waiting to be sick again. She had been well prepared, she thought, for morning sickness in early pregnancy to afflict her in the mornings when Barney could bring her tea and a biscuit (Kate’s mother had sworn by Rich Tea) and hover round her in a clumsy, husbandly way. But she was not at all prepared to feel sick all day, every day, too sick to go to work, too sick to allow brown bread or coffee to tiptoe anywhere near her mind, let alone her kitchen cupboard, too sick to be even remotely civil to people who wanted to congratulate her, soppily, on being pregnant so soon after getting married.

‘So lovely,’ her mother’s best friend had said, ‘to see someone doing it properly. None of this heartless careergirl stuff, leaving having babies until you’re practically old enough to be a granny’.

At this rate, Kate thought, moaning faintly against the floor tiles, she’d never be a granny because she’d never even be a mother if this is what it took to get there. It was such a terrible kind of nausea too, so engulfing, so endless, so devoid of any possibility of relief. The baby, down somewhere in those tortured realms, felt like an enemy, a malevolent walnut-sized goblin, remorselessly pursuing its own determined path of development. Barney had the photograph from the first ultrasound scan in his wallet but Kate didn’t really even want to look at it, didn’t want to give herself the chance to visualise this tiny thing that was making itself so violently unlovable. One minute, it seemed, she and Barney had been honeymooning in Malaysia and planning their excited, newly married lives back in London, and the next she was lying on the bathroom floor, clammy and ashen, whining and snivelling to herself without even a tissue for comfort.

The phone rang.

‘Sod off!’ Kate shouted.

The phone rang four times, and then stopped. Then it started again. It would be Rosa. Kate and Rosa had started a four-ring pattern as a kind of signal to one another, at university, first as a let-out for dates that were either dull or dangerous and then simply as a demonstration of consciousness of the other. Kate began to pull herself, whimpering, across the bathroom floor and into the bedroom next door where her phone lay, muffled in the duvet.

‘I want to die,’ Kate said into it.

‘Still? Poor babe’.

‘Four weeks, nearly five. I hate this baby’. ‘Try hating your hormones instead’. ‘I can’t picture them. I can’t hate something I can’t picture’.

‘I’ll give you something to picture,’ Rosa said, ‘and you can hate him all you like. Bill Moreton’.

Kate crawled up on to the bed and fell into the folds of the duvet.

‘What’s he done?’

‘Sacked me,’ Rosa said.

Kate groaned.

‘Rosa—’

‘I know’.

‘What did you do?’ ‘Nothing’.

‘People don’t get sacked for nothing—’

‘In Bill Moreton’s skin-saving world they do. He can’t sack Heidi because he screwed her and she’d squeal. And the business isn’t doing well enough to support us all’.

Kate rolled on to her side and crushed a pillow against her stomach.

‘Rosa, you needed that job’.

‘Yes’.

‘What did you say, five thousand on your credit cards?’ ‘Nearer six’.

‘You’d better come and live with us—’

‘No’.

‘Barney wouldn’t mind—’

‘He would. So would you. So would I’.

‘But thank you, Kate, all the same’. ‘Thank you, Kate’.

‘How soon,’ Kate said, ‘are you going?’ ‘I’ve gone. I cleared my desk, mostly into a black bag, and dumped it outside his office’.

‘So you won’t get any kind of reference—’ ‘I don’t want a reference—’ Kate sighed heavily.

‘Rosa—’

‘I’ll think of something’.

‘Like what?’

‘Telemarketing, maybe—’ ‘I feel too awful,’ Kate said, ‘to cheer you up’. ‘I’m still in a rage,’ Rosa said. ‘I’m fine as long as I’m furious’.

‘Aren’t you worried?’

There was a long pause. Kate released the pillow a little.

‘Rosa?’

‘Of course I’m worried,’ Rosa said. ‘I can’t remember when I wasn’t worried. About money’. ‘But all that spending—’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said. ‘It frightens me and I can’t stop doing it. When I was with Josh—’ She stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, there was a reason then. Meals, holidays—’ ‘He exploited you’. ‘So you always said’. ‘Well, at least I was right’. ‘Mmm,’ Rosa said.

‘What are you going to do?’

Rosa said slowly, pacing out the words, ‘Don’t know. Haven’t thought. Yet’. ‘I wish—’

‘You can’t do anything. I had to tell you but I didn’t tell you so’s you’d feel you had to do anything’.

‘I’ll be more use when I can think about something other than dying’.

‘You ought to be so happy—’

‘Because I’ve got everything?’ Kate said sharply.

‘I wasn’t going to say that—’

‘But you thought it’.

Rosa said crossly, ‘Of course I did. What do you expect?’

Kate closed her eyes. ‘Go away’.

‘I’m going. To find a begging pitch under a cash machine’.

‘I meant it. I meant it about coming here’. ‘I know. Thank you’.

Kate’s stomach heaved and turned. She flung the phone into the dented pillows and scrambled off the bed. ‘Bye!’ she shouted after it and fled towards the bathroom.


Rosa bought a Mexican bean wrap from the sandwich bar and took it to a bench in Soho Square. At the other end of the bench a hunched girl in a long grey overcoat and tinted glasses was speaking in a low monotone into a mobile phone. She wasn’t speaking English and in a strange, almost undefinable way, she didn’t look English, either. Perhaps, Rosa thought, she was Latvian or Romanian or even Chechen. Perhaps she was a refugee, or on the run; perhaps someone had kept her as a sex slave, sharing a windowless room with five other girls and made to service twenty men a day. Perhaps, Rosa thought, inspecting her wrap and regretting the choice of filling – unfortunate colour, somehow – she led the kind of life that would make Rosa’s current situation seem no more than a temporary and trivial blip in an otherwise indulged and comparatively prosperous one. Maybe the trouble with Rosa was not her circumstances, but her eternal expectations, her conviction that, with enough energy on her part, enough desire, enough – focus, she could bring about the kind of satisfaction that she was sure lay out there, the reward for the brave.

She peeled back the plastic film from the wrap and took an awkward bite. Three red beans immediately fell wetly on to the knee of her jeans – clean that morning -and thence to the path where they lay, bright, exotic and faintly sinister. Glancing at them, Rosa reflected how odd it was that one hardly noticed details in life – or at least, didn’t dignify them with significance – until one was forced into some heightened state of consciousness by joy or grief or disappointment or fear, at which point the whole of existence, from the largest things to the smallest, seemed to take on a kind of meaningful drama. Three red beans on a path, a girl in a grey coat speaking another language softly into a phone – suddenly, both seemed emblematic, important. And yet both were probably no more than irrelevant objects that happened to accompany a moment in Rosa’s life, which she ardently, fervently wished she wasn’t having.

She laid the wrap on the seat beside her. In these circumstances, it didn’t manage to taste exotic and foreign, only alien. Rosa leaned back and looked up at the steady grey sky and the spidery branches of the trees already lumpy with incipient leaves, and thought that one of the hardest aspects of what had just happened was that she had not reckoned on it. Any of it. She had not supposed, for one moment, that five years after leaving university she would have failed to find absorbing employment, failed to sustain a romantic relationship, and failed to gain exactly the kind of control over her life that she had assumed to be an automatic part of growing up.

Education had, by contrast, been easy. Rosa had been good at education, good at friendships, comfortable with achievement. She had negotiated, from the age of eleven, a subversive but successful pathway between intelligence and rebelliousness, a pathway that her elder brother admired and her younger brother emulated. She had cultivated, all those long, busy, channelled educational years, a subtle flamboyance, which she had believed would carry her through both dullness and difficulty. And, almost, it had, until falling for a man who preferred to believe her publicity rather than what lay beneath it in more vulnerable reality exposed her in a way that seemed to have deconstructed all those assiduously built years of showy confidence in an instant.