Rumours and Red Roses by Patricia Fawcett

with the winning sash around her, and even though it was a lifetime away, her mum’s eyes still lit up at the memory.
    ‘He had nothing on under his dressing gown, the dirty devil. WhenI realized what was what I told him where to get off in no uncertain terms. You should have seen his face. I had just started going out with your dad at the time and it was all I could do to stop him going round to the stage door and thumping him one.’
    Becky could not imagine that. Her dad had been a gentle sort of man, quiet, although he never got much of a word in edgeways with her mum around. He was a bus driver but in his spare time he had a passion for fishing. He had taken Becky fishing a few times off the jetty of the North Pier at Blackpool when she was about nine years old, a sort of father/daughter bonding exercise, she supposed, but she had hated it. She had never understood the fishing thing, sitting there cold for hours on end, doing nothing, saying nothing either. And the water churning round the jetty seemed always to be a dirty grey-brown, creamy tipped like froth on beer. She had tasted the salt on her lips for days afterwards. He got the picture and never offered to take her again. By the following year, he was dead.
    Why had she done that? Thought about her dad? Even now, after all these years, she still got a stupid lump in her throat when she thought about him.
    Her mum lit up again, ignoring Becky’s protest. Her philosophy was that something had to kill you in the end and it might as well be something you enjoyed. And, after all, she was still here, wasn’t she, and her dad who never smoked in his life was dead of a heart attack, his ashes scattered off the jetty as he would have wanted. Fit as a fiddle all his life with nobody knowing that he had a heart problem that could have seen him off any time.
    And Becky was still here, wasn’t she, when Janet and the others were long gone, forever sixteen, puffed out in the instant it took the car to spin out of control and hit the tree. Well, not quite instantly … she had heard Paul breathing and moaning for quite a while until he quietened and it was a while longer, a lifetime longer, when the police and firemen arrived to set her free.
    ‘One of them is still alive,’ she heard somebody say, a man’s voice. ‘Hello, love. What’s your name?’
    ‘Becky,’ she had said, so low that he had to ask her again. ‘Becky,’ she said, although she could still only whisper.
    ‘Don’t you worry, Becky, love,’ the kind voice said. ‘We’ll have you out in no time.’
    And why on earth had she thought of that?
    Becky nearly told her mum what Simon had done tonight but it was late and they were both tired and her mum would just laugh. In any case, she was keeping quiet about just who Simon was so as not to get her mum too excited. In fact, she must try to keep them apart for the moment because she didn’t want her mum spoiling things for her by acting over eager. If her mum got wind of the fact that there was money in Simon’s family, if she realized that Becky stood to land very nicely on her feet if she married him, then she would not let it drop. 

FIVE
    B ECKY WENT OVER the evening minute by minute as she lay in bed, her current book, a bestseller she was eagerly anticipating, still unopened on the bedside table. Single bed at her age – it was getting beyond a joke.
    It was some time before her mum settled in the room next door. She could hear her shifting about but at last the hall light went out and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, from her bed Becky could see the familiar outline of the window that overlooked the street. The curtains were thin because her mum didn’t believe in spending money on bedroom curtains. The same window overlooking the same street for the last thirty-odd years and, unless she did something about it, she could count on a few more years yet looking at it.
    She could do worse than Simon Blundell. He was smitten with her,