Permanent Rose Read online

  www.hodderchildrens.co.uk

  Praise for Permanent Rose

  Shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award

  ‘McKay’s third story about the vibrant Casson family is entrancing.’ Guardian

  ‘Charming, affectionate and perfectly written, the novel comes over like a sunny day in the midst of a frosty winter.’ Nicholas Tucker, Independent

  ‘McKay’s strength lies in her ability to craft an unputdownable story from everyday happenings, and to handle serious issues and emotions with real lightness. She evokes the whole Casson family so vividly that the reader can imagine their lives going on uninterrupted even after the book has been closed.’ Bookfest

  ‘Realistic dialogue and irresistible characters enliven the tale.’ School Library Journal

  ‘Permanent Rose is the antidote to everything that’s bad in children’s books and, indeed, everything that’s bad in life…there are no hard edges but no sentimental slop either, in this beguiling story.’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘The whole book is so well done that you feel you’ve moved into the Casson family home and have been living and not Reading. This is a must-read, along with the rest of Hilary McKay’s work.’ Adele Geras

  ‘Fresh and upbeat, a real page-turner.’ Publishing News

  To Jennifer Luithlen,

  who is so much more than a fantastic agent!

  Contents

  Praise for Permanent Rose

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  The World of the Casson Family

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  If you liked this, you’ll love…

  Chapter One

  David tramped along the road to the Casson house trying not to think too far ahead. In his pocket was a packet of banana-flavoured chews. He had started his journey with three packets (watermelon, lime and banana) but now only banana were left. Every few steps he unwrapped a fresh sweet and bundled it into his mouth. He did the unwrapping in his pocket, and the bundling in one quick furtive movement that looked like a yawn.

  It was the last week of the school summer holidays, late August, and smotheringly hot. David was on his way to visit Indigo Casson, something he had been meaning to do all summer. The nearer he got to Indigo’s house the harder he chewed.

  Chomp, chomp, chomp, went David, and then accidentally gulped and swallowed before he had the next sweet unwrapped. For the first time since he had started out his mouth was empty. Chewing had been David’s way of stopping himself thinking very hard. Now (and without any encouragement at all from David), his brain lurched into action.

  What if Indigo’s dad opens the door?

  Please not him! prayed David as he fumbled with a particularly tight chew wrapper.

  Indigo’s father was an artist: Bill Casson. Artist.

  It was hard to believe. He looked like someone from a TV advert for something very expensive. Sports cars. Or first class train travel. He did not look as if he had ever been near anything as messy as paint.

  Two things about Indigo’s father had alarmed David when they met. The first was this inhuman cleanness. The second was the way he had glanced at David. As if David was someone he intended (for obvious reasons) to have nothing at all to do with. David, always aware of his lifetime’s collection of guilty secrets struggling to escape, had been shocked at being rumbled so quickly.

  But Indigo’s dad will be in London, David told himself, as he finally got the chew wrapper free at last. He nearly always is in London. David bit down comfortingly into a new sweet. Good.

  Banana-flavoured chews were the best. Watermelon were a little too exotic, and lime slightly sour. Banana were perfect. Except for being much too small. In a David-perfect world they would have been the size and shape of a smallish egg. And not wrapped.

  I hope I don’t see Indigo’s mum either, thought David, swallowing a chew whole to see if it hurt.

  David did not actually know Indigo’s mother; he did not know anyone’s mother except his own. However, he assumed all mothers were more or less the same and when he had stopped choking (it hurt) he loaded in a fresh new chew and made a plan.

  If Indigo’s mum answers the door, I’ll run off!

  The packet of sweets was no longer a packet. It was a stump submerged in wrappers. David absent-mindedly scooped them out of his pocket as he trudged along and then suddenly turned back and began to scrabble them up again. Very recently (that day in fact), he had stopped being the sort of person who drops rubbish in the street. Now he was the sort of person who picked it up, and he was surprised how different that felt. Extraordinarily noble, and embarrassingly grubby at the same time.

  He kept a wary eye on Indigo’s house as he collected his papers. An awful lot of girls lived there.

  ‘How many sisters have you got?’ he had once asked Indigo.

  ‘Three,’ Indigo had replied, and then, reconsidering, ‘No, two really.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  Indigo said of course he knew, and he listed his sisters for David.

  ‘Caddy. She’s at university in London, but she’s home for the summer.’

  ‘She’s grown up then,’ pronounced David. He did not like grown-ups. ‘Grown up!’ he repeated disconsolately.

  Indigo said he supposed so. Caddy, scatty, golden-haired, last seen tearfully designing a gravestone for her most recent dead hamster, did not seem particularly grown-up.

  ‘Caddy’s the eldest,’ Indigo told David. ‘Then there’s Saffron, but she’s not really my sister, she’s my cousin. She came to live with us ages ago when she was little, when her mother died. Her mother was my mother’s sister, so we adopted her. Anyway, you know Saffron!’

  David winced at the thought of Saffron, whom he knew only too well. She was fifteen, more than a year older than him and Indigo, clever, gorgeous and ruthless. She and her best friend had once invaded the boys’ washroom, and attacked the leader of the most vicious gang in the school. Her friend had guarded the door to stop anyone escaping while Saffron had nearly pulled off the gang leader’s head. Not one of his henchmen, including David, had dared raise a finger to stop her.

  What if Saffron opened the door?

  David unwrapped the whole of the rest of the packet of chews and pushed them into his mouth all together. They fitted easily. Only two tiny yellow triangles of dribble at the corners of his lips showed that they were there at all.

  Saffron’ll have forgotten about me by now, thought David, who was a hopeful person.

  The last of Indigo’s sisters was very young, not quite nine, dark-haired and white-faced, completely different from Caddy and Saffron. Nothing about her was alarmingly good-looking, or grown up or tough. Her name was Rose. Permanent Rose.

  ‘Permanent Rose!’ said people, whenever they heard Rose’s name for the first time. ‘What kind of name is Permanent Rose?’

  ‘It’s my kind of name,’ said Rose.

  ‘Is it a joke?’

  That was the question everyone asked.

  Everyone.

  Even Rose’s own father had asked it once.

  Rose could just remember the huge indignant fuss he had made when she was four years old and her father had finally discovered that her amusing pet name was not, as he had always supposed, an amusing pet name at all.

  ‘Permanent Rose!’ he had repeated, over and over again. ‘Permanent Rose! No!’

  He had been filling
in a form for a new passport, putting on all the children’s names, so that they could travel with him. ‘Just in case,’ said Bill, who always did things just in case. Caddy, Saffron and Indigo were already safely listed, and then he came to Rose. She was hanging around, watching every move he made, the way she always did when he was home.

  ‘Your turn, Rosy Pose!’ he had said, smiling down at her.

  Then he picked up Rose’s birth certificate which he had never happened to see before. And there it was.

  Permanent Rose.

  ‘Eve, darling!’ said Bill (Eve was Rose’s mother). ‘Darling!’ repeated Bill (very indignant and far from amused). ‘What were you thinking of ?’

  Eve, who was also an artist, had been thinking of the colour that painters use: Permanent Rose. A clear, warm colour that glows with its own lively brightness, no matter how thinly spread. A colour that does not fade. There had been a Permanent Rose-coloured sky on the morning that Rose was born.

  Rose had arrived into the world a lot earlier than anyone had expected her to, and from the absolute beginning she had seemed very unthrilled about the prospect of having to stay. She had been like a visitor hovering on a doorstep, wondering if it is worth the bother of actually coming in. People had sent flowers to Eve, but not baby toys or little clothes. It did not seem that Rose intended to be around long enough to need such things.

  Eve knew quite well why she only got flowers. That was why one afternoon she had slipped out of the hospital and gone all by herself across the town to register the latest Casson’s defiant name. Permanent Rose.

  ‘Permanent Rose,’ said Tom, ‘is the coolest name on the planet!’

  That had been back in the spring, when Tom had first arrived into Rose’s life. He was an American boy, the same age as Indigo, who had spent the summer term at Indigo’s school. Tom and Indigo and Rose had become best friends. It had not seemed to matter that Rose was only eight years old.

  ‘More than eight,’ said Rose. ‘Nearly nine.’

  ‘Darling Rose, even nearly nine-year-olds don’t fall in love,’ said forgetful Caddy.

  Caddy tried very hard to comfort Rose when Tom went away. It was not an easy job. It was like trying to comfort a small, unhappy tiger.

  ‘Who said anything about falling in love!’ growled Rose, crossly. ‘Falling! Falling is by accident! I didn’t fall in anything!’

  ‘Oh. Right. Sorry, Rose.’

  ‘And I am definitely not in love!’

  ‘No. OK, Rosy Pose. Sorry about that too.’

  Rose, who was sitting on Caddy’s bed, hunched her knees up under her chin, turned her back and sighed. Caddy sighed too. The room became very quiet until Rose asked suddenly, ‘What is the name for it when you are trying to paint a picture and you haven’t any red? Or blue? Or yellow? When you finish a jigsaw and a piece is not there? When Indigo’s guitar loses a string and a whole lot of notes are suddenly missing?’

  ‘Oh, Rose!’

  ‘Is there a name for it?’

  ‘Incomplete.’ Caddy reached across and rubbed her little sister’s drooping shoulders. ‘You would call it incomplete.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I think so. Is that how you felt when Tom went away?’

  ‘Not at first,’ said Rose.

  ‘The coolest name on the planet!’

  Tom had said it again, the very last time that Rose had seen him. ‘Permanent Rose! Oh yes! So what am I going to do without you, Permanent Rose?’

  ‘You don’t have to do without me.’

  ‘I have to go back to America.’

  ‘I’ll still be here.’

  Indigo leaned over and scuffled Rose’s hair with a music magazine he was holding. Tom did not reply at all, just grinned and bent a little lower over his guitar. There was a good feeling in the air, the way that happens in a place when all the people there are friends with each other. If Rose could have stopped time right then she would have done, but she couldn’t. Time went on, and Tom went away.

  This was how it had happened, that for Indigo and Rose, the summer began with an ending. Tom was gone. He had gone home to America because his baby sister was seriously ill. Earlier in the year he had fled to England to escape her. Now, it seemed, she might escape him instead.

  Ever since the night he had left, Indigo and Rose had waited for news.

  Hour by hour, and then day by day.

  No news came.

  Nothing.

  Tom, comrade and companion-in-arms to Indigo, troubadour, jester and storyteller to Rose, sent no word at all.

  He did not telephone, and he did not write. He did not communicate in any way. They had not heard a word from him.

  It was not so bad for Indigo; he was older, and he had Tom’s old guitar to learn to play, and he had a larger supply of patience than most people. He said, ‘Tom knows where we are. And it hasn’t been that long.’

  It seemed long to Rose. The summer holidays had passed in a blur of heat and waiting. Tom’s absence haunted her. In town she would catch glimpses of someone with a walk like his, and for a moment, be certain that he was back. At night she often dreamed of him, stifling nightmares of non-communication. Two or three times she struggled right out of these dreams and down the stairs to the kitchen, convinced she had heard the telephone ring.

  ‘It is two o’clock in the morning, Rose!’ said Eve, hugging her, the third time this happened. ‘And anyway, we cannot even hear the telephone upstairs, unless all the doors are open.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Come on back to bed then. You should be asleep.’

  ‘Can we leave all the doors open?’

  ‘Do you fall asleep waiting for the telephone to ring, Rose?’

  Rose nodded.

  ‘No wonder you have nightmares,’ said Eve, but after that all the doors were left open, and Rose’s nightmares stopped.

  The nightmares stopped, but Rose’s waiting did not stop. She still jumped every time the telephone rang, or she saw a familiar grey jacket in the street. She waited impatiently for the post every morning.

  ‘Do you know how long Tom has been gone now?’ she asked Indigo, that last Monday morning of the summer holidays.

  ‘It must be more than five weeks.’

  ‘It has been five weeks and two days,’ said Rose.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Five weeks, two days and about eleven hours. Why are you smiling?’

  ‘Because your maths is so good.’

  ‘It wasn’t maths, it was counting,’ said Rose.

  When David rang the doorbell of Indigo’s house Tom had been gone five weeks and two days and about twelve hours.

  At the sound of the bell Rose jumped. Something inside her lifted, and then dropped a little too far. As if her heart had unexpectedly missed a step on a stairway.

  She rushed to the door and dragged it open, but of course it was not Tom. It was only David, smelling (as usual) of sweets and sweat and looking redder and hotter than it was natural for any human being to look, even in the middle of a heat wave.

  Rose gazed at him with dislike, which did not upset David because he did not notice.

  ‘I’ve come to see Indigo,’ he announced.

  ‘He’s in the garden,’ snapped Rose and shut the door as quickly as she pulled it open.

  David was never very fast at taking in information, especially when it was hurled at him by white-faced little girls with hardly any clothes on. So he remained where he was, huge, sticky, panting a little, and he was still there when Rose pulled the door open again and demanded, ‘Would you like to be tattooed?’

  ‘Yes,’ said David, who longed more than anything to be tattooed, pierced, studded, thin, witty, swift and effortlessly cool, and was none of these things.

  ‘Oh good.’

  Then David noticed that Rose was holding a bunch of biros in one hand, and an old-fashioned steel-nibbed pen in the other, that various parts of her body were beautifully patterned in red and blue ink, and that she was lo
oking speculatively at his own large pink unadorned arms.

  ‘I’ve been practising designs all week,’ he heard her say. ‘And I’ve just found this pen and I’m sure it’s sharp enough to do the real thing…I don’t suppose it hurts much…Come back!’

  But David had already gone, fleeing in horror round the side of the house, past the overgrown fig tree whose dark leaves rubbed and rustled as if there were animals amongst them, and across to the patch of rough grass and guinea pig hutches that the Casson family called a garden.

  Rose should have called, Stop! Thus saving him. But she didn’t.

  There was no shade at all in the Cassons’ garden, and that day the sunlight was so bright it was like a sound in the air. The jangling echo that might come after an enormous gong had been struck. It added to the dazed, alarmed, confusion in David’s head, so that he could not seem to think or see very clearly.

  At first there did not appear to be anyone about. Then David became aware of a screen that had been made of guinea pig hutches and draped blankets.

  ‘Indigo?’ he called, and blundered forward and nearly died of fright.

  Except for a recent period (spent as a random but violent thug), David had had a very sheltered existence. Apart from Rose, he had never voluntarily spoken to a girl in his life. He was not a bit prepared for the fearsome (and yet ravishing) sight of Saffron, entirely naked except for dark glasses and flip-flops, industriously sunbathing among the guinea pigs.

  ‘Rose?’ asked Saffron sleepily, lifting her head. Then she shoved back her sunglasses to look properly and her eyes glinted with silver sparks and she said coldly, ‘Oh. Not Rose. David. Get out. Go.’

  David did not go. He did not move. He could not. He wanted to say, Rose sent me here, but he could not speak because his mouth was hanging open and he could not summon up the strength to get it shut. He was now so feverishly hot that he thought he must be terribly ill. It occurred to him that if he died right then it would be simultaneously much too late and much too soon.