away, although I’d never really thought about it as going until I was actually gone. Applying to university had just been the next expected step—expected even by Mum, although she knew full well that you couldn’t study witchcraft at any British university. She’d never tried to encourage me to study one subject rather than another at school, obviously figuring that the instruction from Mrs. Cole and our dutiful association with the Pagan Federation would supplement any kind of orthodox education as well as any other. If Mum was relieved that I clung hard to English Literature and refused to interest myself in science she never showed it. If she was desolate when she and Dad unloaded my stuff outside the hall of residence where I’d been allocated a room she didn’t show that either. Every week, though, she’d send me a brand new phonecard, to ease the ritual of keeping in touch.
I don’t know how exactly how it came about that I became a part of a little group of four. It wasn’t entirely a matter of chance, and it certainly wasn’t entirely a matter of convenience. I suppose, looking back, that it was because I liked Howard Fletcher that I gravitated into his orbit, and because Howard knew John Coulthart from school that he turned out to be already occupying the next orbit in—and it was probably because John thought that Barbara Schiff looked gorgeous that he tried with all his might to bring her into our combined gravitational field. Once we were together, though, that initial chain of causation gave way to a much more complicated combination of attractions and movements.
Howard’s nickname must have been left over from school. John had obviously been calling him ‘Flasher’ for years, and wasn’t about to be put off just because Howard wanted to make a clean start—quite the reverse, in fact. I don’t think Howard ever retaliated in kind; it was certainly Barbara who first started calling him ‘Coldheart’, deliberately echoing the kind of transformation that he insisted on wreaking upon his friend’s name. I didn’t want to get involved—I never called Howard ‘Flasher’—but they wouldn’t leave me out of it. I even explained to them that Rose already was a nickname, because my name was actually Rosemary, but they wouldn’t be content with that.
‘We could call you Ophelia,’ John said, after I’d told him what my full name was, ‘because Rosemary’s for remembrance.’
‘She’s not Rosemary now,’ Howard pointed out. ‘She’s Rose.’
‘But she has no thorns,’ John said, still trying to be clever, ‘and a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet. If only Ophelia hadn’t gone mad....’
It was Barbara who took the next step. Like any new girl, not knowing what to expect, I’d come to university liberally equipped with notebooks and files, all neat and new and far more brightly-colored than anything I ever wore, and I’d punctiliously stenciled my name on every one of them, in formal capitals: R. EDGELL.
‘Rag doll,’ said Barbara. ‘They called her Rag Doll.’ She was quoting an old song by the Four Seasons, that must have been her mother’s or her grandmother’s vintage. She’d never even heard of Inkubus Sukkubus or Midnight Configuration or All Living Fear, or any of the bands I liked. Not many people had—which was one of the reasons I liked them so much.
Maybe she wasn’t being vicious, at least not consciously. Maybe she was just looking to apply the same methodology to my name as she’d applied to ‘Coldheart’ John’s. She certainly didn’t have any good reason to attack my clothes, which were no worse than hers. I was used to people remarking on the fact that they were uniformly black, but no one had ever criticized their quality.
Perhaps, if I’d been quick enough, I could have derailed the entire train of thought. Perhaps, if I’d only known how, I could not only have kept myself in their minds as Rose but made her Barb or Barbie in our everyday usage—but the suggestion was rejected on the grounds that the contractions were too obvious, and too commonplace to qualify as a private joke. I suppose it must have been John who took up the baton and dubbed her ‘Mischief’—on account, of course, of the fact that her surname was Schiff and she was, for the moment, single.
‘Mischief’s no good,’ I pointed out. ‘It won’t make sense after she gets married.’
‘Nor will Rag Doll,’ Barbara was quick to point out. ‘But that won’t matter. When you marry John, you can be Mrs. Coldheart.’
She only said it to make mischief, of course. She only said it because she knew full well that it was Howard I liked. It was the first inkling I’d had that she liked him too—and that she had already considered, as coolly as you please, the possibility that if John’s obvious desire for her might be deflected, I was the direction in which he ought to be encouraged to look.
Even if the nickname itself hadn’t been a kind of curse, that supplementary remark certainly was—and like all the worst curses, it unwound over time, rebounding as it went, and it kept on and on rebounding.
‘It wouldn’t be as bad as Mrs. Flasher,’ John contended, but even I could see that it all depended how flash she was to start with—and Barbie was very flash indeed. Not that beautiful, and not that rich, but certainly flash. She thought she could have everything she wanted, and she would probably have been right, if she hadn’t tangled with a witch. We were tangled already, of course, but only by common-or-garden friendship. It wasn’t until the business of the nicknames that the tangles became thorny, catching like curses. Until then, it hadn’t mattered that I was a witch, but afterwards....
I didn’t swear anything there and then, but that was when it all began in earnest. John had been right about my having no thorns. Until then, in spite of my being Rose instead of Rosemary, I’d been entirely innocent of thorns. From that moment on, though, I was fated to be crowned with them.
Howard arrived at half past eleven. If he’d only had to drive from Marlow it wouldn’t have taken him nearly as long, but he hadn’t been at home. Lately, he’d been spending a lot of time away from home, exactly as John had, and probably for much the same reason: fucking someone else’s Barbie while his own got fucked in her turn. No witchcraft involved, of course: no love potions, no real glamour. Just the everyday routines of ordinary folk, supposedly hurting no one. But a needle in the eye is a needle in the eye, and you feel what you feel, even when the needle isn’t literal, especially if you’re a witch.
Flasher Fletcher rang the doorbell in an uncommonly assertive manner, although I didn’t take more time than was warranted letting him in.
‘Hello Howard,’ I said. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Where’s John?’ he demanded. He was already looking up the stairs, wondering if he ought to bound up them two at a time and hurl back the door of the room I had claimed as a counterpart to John’s ‘study’: the room in which I kept my cabinet, and my recipes, and my pathetic apology for a sewing kit.
‘Why?’ I asked, innocently. ‘Do you want to beat the living daylights out of him for fucking your wife?’ My assiduous rehearsals were still paying dividends.
Howard cast one last look up the staircase, and then turned to look down at me. He looked down from a much greater elevation than Barbie, greater even than John. From way up there I must have looked very tiny indeed, and utterly harmless. I must have looked meek, too, because he relaxed perceptibly.
‘You’ll never believe this, Rose,’ he said, perhaps hoping that it might even be true, ‘but Barbara’s got some stupid idea into her head that you might have killed him. She only insisted that I came round to make sure that he was all right.’
‘Only insisted,’ I echoed. ‘That doesn’t sound like Barbie at all. She was never one to take things one at a time.’
‘She
