Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon by Linda Newbery

Anna was sixteen, the shock of returning from school one day to find the radio on in Rose’s room and her mother busy with bags and boxes. The bed had been stripped; clothes were piled in heaps on the mattress.
    ‘What are you doing ?’
    On her knees, pulling a box out from the floor of the wardrobe, her mother must have been so absorbed that she hadn’t heard Anna unlocking the front door, or coming upstairs. She looked up, startled; her expression was that of a child caught doing wrong, quickly replaced by an air of tutting impatience.
    ‘Having a good clear out. What does it look like?’
    ‘Those are Rose’s things!’
    ‘I know whose they are. She doesn’t need them any more, does she? It’s a waste of a room. We may as well make use of it.’ Mum flashed Anna a defiant look. She might have been rebelling against a diktat imposed by someone else. ‘If you want any of these clothes, you may as well have them. You’re about the same size now.’
    ‘No!’ Anna affected shock, although she had on occasion borrowed items from Rose’s wardrobe when her mother hadn’t been around. ‘It’s not right, wearing her clothes.’
    Rose had so many. No one had seen her leave, that hot August day; Anna, last to see her, had given details of what Rose was wearing – jeans and a green vest top – and she and her mother attempted to work out, by elimination, what Rose had taken with her. A rucksack was missing, and the sketchbook, and the tapestry bag Rose used for her purse, keys and other small items. Rose’s favourites were still in the wardrobe: the skinny black jeans, the denim skirt she’d customized with patterned patches, the green Indian top with flowing sleeves that Anna had helped her choose from a market stall. She hadn’t even taken the gemstone necklace Anna had given her last birthday; finding it in the muddle of a drawer, Anna had felt the sting of rejection.
    Her mother shrugged and went on sorting. The cardboard box contained school books: exercise books in various faded colours, folders, ring-binders. She gave them no more than a cursory glance, then said to Anna, ‘Pass me one of those bin-bags, will you?’
    ‘You can’t throw those away!’
    ‘Why? What use are they to anyone?’
    ‘They’ve got Rose’s writing in them!’
    ‘So?’
    Anna gazed helplessly at her mother, not recognizing this strange, curt mood. Mum wore an expression that was quite unfamiliar: chin high whenever she turned to speak to Anna, her eyes almost scornful. Now she picked up an exercise book and flipped through its pages without interest before reaching for the roll of bin-bags by the door.
    ‘Don’t!’ Anna protested. ‘I want to keep them. Here, let me look.’ She tugged at the edge of the box; her mother pulled it back, and for a moment there was a ridiculous tug-of-war which ended with the box tearing limply, the top layer of contents spilling out.
    Mum shrugged. ‘Go on then. Take one or two if you must, but you can’t tell me you want all this history, maths, geography, RE.’ She frisbeed them at Anna, one after another. ‘Have whatever you want, but hurry up. I need to get this done.’
    Anna took this to mean that she wanted to finish the job before Dad came in from work. If anything, Anna thought, he’d be pleased; it hadn’t been his idea to keep the room as a Rose-museum. But what would he make of such a drastic reversal? Uncertainly at first, Anna delved into the box. No, there was no point keeping them all; she rejected the maths and science books, filled with neat figures and writing and diagrams, sprinkled all over with the praise of red ticks and comments, Good work , Excellent , Well done! A thinner exercise book must have been Rose’s first, from her infant class. Rose Taverner. Writing Book , was written on the cover in a teacher’s careful hand, and Rose had copied her own name underneath, in wobbling letters. Anna took that one, a history book from the first year of secondary