The bottle of conditioner she carefully placed back in the basket had a lovely, dark-skinned beauty, rinsing waist length black hair under a jungle waterfall, but the bottle was a lie. "Made in Liverpool" adorned the backside, after the length warning labels and ingredients that were only partially decipherable with her one term of college chemistry.
Just for a moment, Rose had been able to imagine the jungle waterfall, but the cold shock of the flat's sudden loss of warm water was more than enough accelerate her morning routine.
Outside in the the flat, the kettle scream furiously from the hob. Rose, broke her reverie and emerged from her shower to find no towel in the rail. She could hear her mum, moving about in the living area, killing the kettle, and Rose tried in vain to shake the water from her body and hair.
"Mum, towel?" she called fretfully, spying a rumpled towel wadded up under the sink. She grabbed it eagerly, burying her hands into it's damp mustiness. "Oh blast! It's wet."
"First one up gets the dry towel, love," Jackie shouted from over her tea and toast at the table that was unceremoniously sandwiched between the oversize couch and the kitchen wall.
The tiny bathroom they all shared was so poorly ventilated that it was pretty much hopeless to see a reflection in the mirror for at least ten minutes after running a shower. This suited Rose, though, she never was particularly fond of her reflection in the mornings. Her best friend, Shareen, had repeatedly complimented Rose on her figure, but hadn't been as complimentary on her looks. "You look fine from a distance, but Rose you really gotta give up on the blonde if you aren't going to keep up on your roots."
Rose didn't want to go back to the dull, natural ash hair that she shared with her mum. They both fought and lost that battle. Jackie was an excellent colourist, but finances being what they were, neither of them could afford the luxury of timely touch-ups. Rose was happy with her life with her mother and brother, the she yearned for travel and a more personal space. Just a few months until she finished her fifteen week stint as a student teacher in her final practicum and could find a permanent or supply job and flat of her own.
Out in the hallway it was Jackie's turn to grouse. "I can't have arrived home in just one," she was saying, "I would have definitely noticed stepping into the puddle stepping off the bus yesterday."
"Lost shoe, lost shoe!" announced Tony as Rose clad only a a towel ran past him into her room.
Closing the door, Rose stopped. Just for a moment she was frightened, and then for a moment again, she felt it, like her very soul was a plucked string.
"Bugger it, I've looked everywhere," Jackie said. She was descending into a morning panic that might derail the entire day. Rose, trying to shrug off her morning fear, found the one clean, professional outfit that she had left before laundry day and pulled it onto her wet body.
"It's happening," said a voice in her head. "Bad Wolf is going to happen, it has happened."
"What's is going to happen?" Rose asked before she realized the voice was only in her head.
It's a warning, "Bad Wolf" again, she thought with a sinking heart. She been warned before and they where infrequent but unforgettable. The warnings were beyond her control, an event that is destined to happen that no matter how prepared she found herself to be, was still jolting. She should be able to alter things, but the best she could hope for was to be strong.
"No shoe, no shoe!" chanted Tony, beyond her closed door.
Rose faced her un-fogged bedroom mirror, pulling a brush through her wet hair and then carefully braiding it to hide the wetness. If she was lucky her bangs would dry straight and she'd have a head full of soft curls by end of day. Her reflection was rebellious though. Suddenly older than her twenty-two years, an true adult staring back at he child in an adult's body she knew herself to be. That older face looked back with knowledge and memories of pleasures she would not recognized and just as she started studying her older-self, her true reflection merged back into being. Warning and enticement in her future.
"Stop it!" she fierily growled at her reflection. She shook her head and when she looked back her brown eyes, bottle blond hair and wide mouth had returned to their usual place in the universe.
"Mum, help!" she bolted out of her room and into the tiny bedroom her mother shared with Tony. Almost tripping across her mother in the ridiculous position of scrabbling under the bed looking for the lost shoe. "Mum, warning, Mum!" plainly exasperated with Jackie ignoring her distress in favor of a blasted black pump.
"Calm down, love" Jackie irritated voice echoed up through the mattress. "Just tell me how a perfectly ordinary shoe can go missing two days running, eh?"
"Mum, I looked in the mirror and my reflection went all wibbly and older all of a sudden." Rose said.
"Pfft. Wait until you are pushing forty, that'll happen everyday." Jackie declared, brushing the dust off the knees of her capris. Tony stood in the doorway, holding his Booboo doggie and watching the pair of them like they were monkeys in the zoo, doing tricks for his entertainment.
"I hate days like this, I'm calling in sick," Rose announced. "Its just too dangerous to go out when I've had a warning. A strong cuppa, a good book and binging of low budget sci-fi will fix it."
"Don't you dare. Not on a Thursday, young lady," Jackie cried. "I need you, Rose. It's a late night and you have to collect Tony from the school, get him fed and in bed, and you can't do that lying about all day."
"Mum, I didn't plan it this way," Rose protested. "Bad Wolf, Mum, something serious. You don't remember what it's like, when it happen before."
"Tell me later," said Jackie, but Rose knew that no matter how precisely she described the sensation, it was asking too much of her mother to have faith in her gut feeling. Especially in the morning when their three separate lives where so divergent and her mother was the only one keeping hold of the reins.
Jackie was struck with sudden inspiration and dashed for the top of the bookshelf, plucking her prize, wayward trainer from the upper ledge. Rose relaxed for a moment, the morning stress suddenly relieved before looking out the dim windows of the flat to the oppressive sky. Summer was coming soon, the end of the term, graduation, and hopefully a life. What should be beautiful was unexpectedly oppressive, like humidity in August, a hot wolfish breath at her neck.
"Where is your satchel, Tony?" asked Jackie as the boy dashed underfoot. His satchel contained his spare set of clothes, his library book to return, the illustrated "How to Train Your Dragon" book, and his school-home folder. He carefully placed Booboo doggie on top of his other valuable possessions.
"Ooo, look at the time. We've got to run, loves." Jackie pulled her purse, phone and keys out the bowl by the door and shooed her charges onto the landing. "Up for a run Rose, because I have a feeling that ole' Dick is driving bus today, and he waits for no one," she grumbled about the pensioner detective sergeant turned bus driver.
"There she goes, mate!" Rose whispered to Tony. "Run, run, run as fast as you can, you can't catch me. I'm the gingerbread man." Tony dashed ahead
"You can't catch me, gingerbread man running, chased by Fox," Tony pulled Booboo Doggie from his satchel, hugging him fiercely in case the fox came by. "Fox eats gingerbread man, Rose," he whispered sadly.
"I wish I had a Booboo Doggie," Rose said. "Could use one, myself right now." They hurried to board the bus, Jackie, Rose, Tony, Booboo Doggie and all. The bus belched in welcome.
"See love, all settled," crowed Jackie and they found a bench to occupy.
"Oh mum, no on a day with a warning!" Rose said. "For a second there, I thought you'd slip under the bus and get mashed up."
"Oh, piffle. You and your warnings!" Jackie said in the voice she typically reserve for Tony.
"Fine, don't believe," said Rose. "I can't blame you for it, but it's still true. Everything lights up like the final battle in Death to Mantodeans saying, Warning! Warning! Warning!"
"Have you been playing that blasted game again, Rose?" Jackie remarked gladly changing subjects in favor of something much less superstitious than Rose's childhood fear of the big bad wolf. "I'd wish you stayed clear of that game slaved crowd." Always too many young men who couldn't or wouldn't get decent work, not the sort she wanted cavorting with her Rose, especially now that her life was sorted out.
"Bad Wolf!" insisted Rose refusing the dodge to safer subject matter. "Everything looses it's colour, time flows differently, things that should be connected stand separate and totally unrelated things blend into each other like time has stopped and they pile up like cars on the motorway behind a wreck." She slowed her rant. "The weekend Dad left, before you knew about Tony coming, I had warnings. That's why I tried to be brave although I was terrified it could have been worse."
"Your Dad is happier now, that he ever was when we were together." Jackie latched onto what was important to her. Pete has always been very happy with be with Rose, they where so similar, but Tony's birth struck him as an attempt at entrapment and his relations with the family had been strained of late, poor finances not withstanding.
"The first time it happened, remember? Jimmy hit me and left me with a mound of debt." Rose was never displeased that he never came back, but the shame of having to work off the debt and having quit school at sixteen like every other estate chav still stung. Crawling back to Jericho Street Comprehensive and begging for re-admittance stripped every shred of dignity she had left.
"The second, Rita Mae died. Tripped on that damn shag carpet at the landing." Mickey was still beside himself for that, his gran being his only loyal family.
"And just at the beginning of the term when Jon Carlisle started with the sixth forms," she went on.
"Jonathan Carlisle!" Jackie gave a little yelp of laughter. She sounded scandalized. "What on earth is there about that head in the clouds, stick of a man, that you need a warning for? It's like being warned about little red rather than the wolf...Isn't he the saviour of the school, started that sixth form programme? Taking the physics club out to shoot off rockets? Clean, hardworking to a fault, single and a bit dull really!"
Jackie may have been being dismissive but it wasn't her fault. Rose had been rather obsessed with him and she only had her descriptions to go on.
Jonathan Carlisle had suddenly appeared at Heath Comprehensive at the Easter holiday, supposedly covering the paternity leave of the regular physics teacher. Just a short term supply job through the summer holiday. Rumor had it that his mother had been the headmistress a couple of decades back, a well known figure in the local community and somehow related to the family who's land was seized in the public works projects that became the council estates where she now lived. No one could remember a boy-child born to the headmistress though, it was like he appeared out of thin air, a man fully grown. Penelope Carlisle had never married and never bothered to explain anything other than he was her son, apparently a genius, and marked out by a terrible tendency to babble around a subject taking twice as long to arrive at a conclusion or just lose his train of thought, before diving into something totally unrelated.
His unfortunate reputation to the other teachers was that he couldn't resist a smart-alec answer. This did not worry Rose, in that she had only exchange a few dozen word with him over the term. On those rare occasions he was hesitant, burning with a remarkable smile and hint of a shared secret. Rose never mentioned this special smile or her suspected reason for it.
Jackie was moved by Rose's quiet moment to comment, "If Jonathan Carlisle is the worst thing you are warned about, you've got nothing to worry about."
The bus threaded its way down the potholed streets like a behemoth of the Silurian era. The gates of the Heath Comprehensive where just ahead past the final traffic circle on her commute. Rose knew a lot of people despised the estates, but she cherished her life there, knowing that all too soon things would change and with the warning in the air perhaps not for the better.
"Jonathon Carlisle is a witch!" she said. "No one knows but me."
"Sweetheart, if you sat about all day thinking of a witch in our midst, you could not have come up with a more unlikely subject than Jon Carlisle. Now if you fingered his mother Penelope or even his grandmother, old Verity Smith. Changes the story, that does. Those old dames have first class craziness in their blue blood."
"Are you done yet, mum?" Rose interrupted.
"How those two raised that boy between them, is beyond me. Old Verity is got dementia they say and Penelope is so stuck in the past that she looks like she walked out of Mad Men," Jackie continued.
"You done yet?" asked Rose. "Look – I know all about Jon Carlisle. I notice, he's manic one moment, dark and brooding the next. No one sees that, he's got a false sheen of normalcy, like he alters the mood of the people around him to like him automatically. He puts off a field of nothing to see here, move along, but it doesn't work on me. When he drops the pretense, it's on purpose. I notice him do it, mum."
"You've never said anything about this before. I'm a bit confused," said Jackie.
"He's hiding, mum. He just wants to be left alone. He's got to be pushing thirty and when I look at him without the false normalcy he projects, he's vast and inscrutable, something ancient and alien. What causes such depth in a person?" Rose sighed heavily as the bus came to her stop and she collected her bag.
"Well at least you know he doesn't have a broomstick, he has that bright blue Fiat right?" Jackie remarked giving a cheeky grin.
"It's a Mercedes, mum," Rose said with a sigh. "I knew you wouldn't believe me."
"Rose, dear, how could I? You've never mentioned your warnings before they happened. There is nothing we can do to change this, right? But I do know that if you don't get off this bus, right now you will be late for work. Rose, be careful with yourself today and be careful with Tony after school...just in case." She gave Rose a quick squeeze.
Rose stepped off the bus into an unseasonable early morning heat. The air was sweet and oppressive with a faint hint of mint that reminded her of childhood illnesses.
"Hurry up, Tyler!" said the staff member unlocking the outer gate. It was Jonathan Carslie himself. "Staff meeting started a minute ago," he reminded her as he wound the chain around the post.
He had brown eyes with a habit of turning black if you looked at them sideways. Honest eyes some said, but Rose found them trick-some and wiley. Endless pathways and mazes within his gaze leading nowhere safe and she had to stop herself from getting lost.
Rose and Jon smiled at each other now, not in friendship, but in a shared secret held between their breaths. Rose walked past him, into the school gates, facing a day with warnings, with the living embodiment of a warning at her back. The warning had come, she had ignored it, and her day swallowed her up with strange jaws. She felt the jaws snap and the day swallowed her whole, the entire time feeling Jon's gaze on her back.
