My Husband's Wife Read Online Free Page B

would sit there and chat to her mum. She would tell her all about her day, if there was anyone she fancied at school, what she wanted for her birthday, that kind of thing. Those were special times for Rosie. The fact that she had never met her mum and had absolutely no idea what she looked like wasn’t relevant. The mum she created in her mind, the neat, smiling, attentive listener, was just about as perfect as a mum could be; and she smelt of apples.
    At the age of six, sitting in the bathtub in their colourless, austere bathroom, where the tile grouting was grey and the towels were thin and stiff, Rosie had opened a bottle of apple-scented shampoo. Its sweet, synthetic smell was one of the most glorious things she had ever sniffed. Inhaling it until she was utterly intoxicated by the mouth-watering aroma, she decided there and then that this was the way her mum would have smelt. In her mind, anything that smelt of apples could only be good.
    All Rosie knew was that her mum had disappeared just a few hours after she was born. There were no photos and sadly, no memories. Ever since she could remember, her dad’s stock response had been, ‘Something happened, Rosie, and she just couldn’t live with me any more,’ and that was always the end of the conversation. Rosie spent her childhood trying to imagine what her dad could possibly have done to make her mum run off like that. During her bench chats she often used to apologise on behalf of her dad, for whatever it was that he’d done to scare her mum away.
    Sometimes Rosie used to secretly wonder if, actually, she had somehow killed her mum when she was born and her dad was just covering that up, pretending it wasn’t her fault, to make her feel better. In her fertile, childish mind she would let her imagination run wild with images of her mum slipping away, deathly pale but still beautiful, hands reaching out, lips trying to tell Rosie something really important, eyes fixed and bright, looking at her and trying to convey what her mouth could not.
    As strange as it sounded, it was easier in some ways to imagine her dead. Better that her mum was gone and unable to get in touch than that she was alive somewhere but had chosen to remain hidden, scared off by Rosie’s dad.
    Or, when she wasn’t imagining her dead, she imagined her with a lust for travel, too far away for contact. She pictured her in the jungle, living wild and tanned among beasts, in tropical heat, carving out paths with a rusty machete and sipping water from clear waterfalls, crouched on slippery rocks with one eye on the lookout for snakes. At other times she pictured her wrapped in furs, trekking across ice floes, navigating icy cold plateaus with frozen lashes and teeth that chattered in the cold, her trusty rifle stuck to her palm in case of polar bear attack. Rosie often placed herself in these imaginings, having either built a tree house high in the jungle canopy or a cosy, concealed igloo. In both, she would have the kettle boiling and a red and white tablecloth set for tea and when her mum stumbled, through the door, relieved and grateful, she would hug her tightly and kiss her face. ‘How I’ve missed you! My beloved daughter!’
    The reality was, though, that Rosie had no idea what happened. All she knew was that, not long after her mum went, her dad upped sticks and relocated them both to a new house further out of town. To the adult Rosie it seemed as if he was trying to outrun the memories of his wife, escape the guilt. As a child, it had worried her greatly that if her mum had wanted to return home, wanted to come and find her only child, she wouldn’t know where they’d gone. Rosie used to imagine hiding a note with their new address on it, and she knew just where she would leave it, behind the wonky brink at the back of the coalhole. She was confident that her mum would know to look there, that she could read Rosie’s mind, just as Rosie could read hers. This she still maintained, even