Daisy darker, p.23
Daisy Darker, page 23
It was a bumpy ride and I felt carsick, but it was only a five-minute drive to the other end of Blacksand Bay where the Halloween gathering was being held. I was thirteen, but the only parties I’d ever been to before were hosted at Seaglass by Nana. The excitement I felt outweighed the fear. It was exhilarating. When we finally stopped driving, I waited for them all to get out, then I tried to open the boot. It wouldn’t budge. Conor had locked the car. I imagined them walking away and me running out of oxygen, and my sense of panic went from zero to a hundred before I could take another breath. I screamed.
Conor’s face when he opened the boot was not one of his happy ones. He was busy inflating his Halloween costume, and I had clearly interrupted him halfway.
‘Have you lost your tiny mind?’ Lily asked, blowing a bubble of gum in my face.
‘What were you thinking, Daisy?’ Rose said, sounding just like our mother. ‘If anything had happened to you—’
‘Come on, credit where credit is due. She wanted to come to the party and she came,’ said Conor with a kind smile. He reattached a nozzle to his costume and started stepping on a foot pump.
‘She’ll ruin this year’s theme,’ Lily moaned. ‘The Lion, the Witch, the Pumpkin and the Daisy doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.’
Conor ignored her. With every enthusiastic foot pump, I could see that he was wearing an inflatable pumpkin costume.
‘This is an adult party,’ whined Lily.
‘Then you should probably go home,’ I said.
‘Watch it, pipsqueak,’ Lily snapped. My dad’s nickname for me morphed from a term of endearment into an insult whenever she used it.
‘Lily’s right,’ said Rose. ‘Some of the others might feel a bit funny about a thirteen-year-old being on the beach and seeing what they get up to.’
‘I brought this,’ I said, pulling the white sheet ghost costume out of my bag.
I was allowed to stay, because none of them wanted to leave, but only if I promised to remain hidden under my makeshift costume for the entire evening. I didn’t mind. I was just excited to be out with other people, witnessing a snapshot of humanity first-hand instead of reading about it in a book or seeing it on TV. It was a big step for someone who rarely went anywhere without her mother. Peering through those two holes in the sheet felt like looking at life through a tunnel. A bit like the View-Master my dad gave me one Christmas. I liked the imagined safety of my disguise; it meant that I could see everything without being seen. And I wanted to make the most of it because I knew that the things, people and parties that had always been out of reach before were within touching distance for one night only.
Everything that happened next was a real education.
After so many years of feeling like I’d been missing out, I actually missed being at home. It was cold on the beach at night, and curling up in an armchair in front of the fire, with a good novel and a mug of hot chocolate, suddenly seemed a lot more appealing. The ‘party’ consisted of fifteen or so boys and girls – some of whom I’d seen before but were still strangers to me – all sitting around a small fire on the beach, drinking cheap cider and white wine.
Conor – our designated driver – drank Coke to begin with. I knew better than to drink alcohol with the cocktail of drugs my mother made me take every day to keep my heart ticking, but I did have an occasional sip of Rose’s wine when nobody was looking. I didn’t like the way it tasted – it was nothing like Nana’s birthday champagne, which I’d tried earlier that evening – but I wanted to know what it was like to be like the others. How it felt to be normal. After an hour of sitting on the beach with a sheet over my head, all I felt was cold, and tired, and a little bit sick. I concluded that being normal might be overrated. Lily drank more than the rest of us combined, and it was her suggestion to play spin the bottle.
‘You have to kiss whoever it points to when it stops spinning. I’ll go first,’ Lily said, with a naughty grin stretched across her pretty face. The other kids smiled too; everyone except Rose seemed to be having a good time. We all watched as the bottle spun, a zoetrope of drunken teenage faces lit up by the flickering light of the fire. It seemed to spin forever, but then it stopped, and the bottleneck pointed at the boy next to Conor. Without hesitation, Lily took out her bubble gum, then leaned over and kissed him. There were tongues involved and it looked unpleasant. She popped her gum back in her mouth afterwards and smiled at everyone.
Sex was a mystery to me back then. I’d read about it, and thought about it, but the idea of actually doing it seemed both unnecessary and unhygienic. Watching Lily kiss a random boy only made me feel more queasy.
‘Conor’s turn next,’ Lily declared.
‘I don’t really want to play—’
‘Man up. Perhaps you can write about it for the local newspaper,’ she said when he tried to refuse.
Conor – a now slightly deflated orange pumpkin – leaned forward and reluctantly played the game. He stared at Rose the whole time the bottle spun, but it stopped on Lily.
I’ve never seen her look more delighted.
Sometimes when we think we know what we want but don’t get it, we look for something or someone else to fill the gap. Lily had always been jealous of Conor and Rose being together. Not because she really wanted to be with Conor, but because she always wanted whatever Rose had. Lily couldn’t stand being left out of anything. She marched around the fire and kissed him before he had a chance to protest – or run away – and I noticed Rose drink from her bottle of wine until it looked half empty.
‘Delicious,’ Lily said with a drunken smile as soon as their lips parted. That was the year she started smoking, so I imagine it wasn’t delicious for him at all. ‘Who wants to go skinny-dipping?’ she asked everyone and nobody in particular. Then she stood up and removed her witch’s hat, black dress and shoes, before running towards the sea in just her underwear. It looked whiter than white in the moonlight. Despite the cold, a few of the boys from around the fire followed her. Lily had made more than a bit of a name for herself by then. Her variety of fun was mostly harmless, and only ever born out of a desperate need for affection, but rumours ruin far more reputations than reality. Despite the unpleasant things that people sometimes said, in that moment I would have given anything to have been my sister. Everyone seemed to adore her. She was fun and beautiful, full of life and free. While I was only ever me.
Thirty-eight
SEAGLASS – 1988
Rose stormed off in the other direction, disappearing down the beach, her lion’s tail swinging as she walked. And Conor the pumpkin chased after her. If I didn’t feel so ill, I might have found the whole scene funny.
‘You’re the youngest Darker sister under there, aren’t you?’ asked a boy I recognized from Rose’s sixteenth birthday party at Seaglass. He sat down next to me, so close that I could smell the beer on his breath. The wine had made me very sleepy, and I didn’t try to stop him at first, as he attempted to remove the sheet from my head and peek underneath. I was tired of pretending to be a ghost and of being treated like one all my life, but part of me wanted to stay hidden. I pulled the sheet back down. ‘I wish it was Daisy Darker under there,’ he said, backing off a little. ‘I was hoping that the bottle might land on her if I spun it,’ he whispered, even though there was nobody else left by the fire to hear.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so said nothing.
‘Or maybe we could play a little game of trick-or-treat if you don’t like spin the bottle?’ he suggested innocently, as though we were discussing what board game to play on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
‘I don’t know how to play trick-or-treat,’ I replied.
‘It’s easy, I’ll teach you. But come a little closer first, you’re shivering. I’ll keep you warm.’
I looked around for my sisters, but they were nowhere to be seen. Everyone else had wandered away from the fire except the boy. And me. I shuffled an inch closer and he smiled.
‘First, the trick,’ he said. ‘If you can guess which hand I’m holding this chocolate coin in, you can eat the treat, but if you guess wrong, you have to take the sheet off your head.’
I looked at the chocolate in its shiny gold foil wrapping and nodded. The game seemed simple and harmless enough. He put his hands behind his back, then held two closed fists out in front of me to choose from. The hand I chose was empty, so I took off the sheet and he smiled.
‘That’s better, and look how beautiful you are. No wonder your sisters always want to leave you at home, you outshine them both. Play again?’
I think that was the first time a stranger had ever paid me a proper compliment. I knew I wasn’t really beautiful, not compared to Rose or Lily, but I confess that I liked someone saying that I was, even if it wasn’t true. I nodded a silent agreement to play again, and he held out two closed fists. I chose wrong a second time.
‘I’m afraid that means one of these comes undone,’ he said, unhooking one of the clips on my dungaree dress. When I lost again, he unhooked the other. Then he tried to kiss me and I tried to let him. I had never been kissed before. It was cold and wet, and I kept my mouth firmly closed as he tried to stick his tongue inside it. I closed my eyes too, as though I didn’t want to see what was happening.
I’d always dreamt of Conor being the first boy who I kissed, perhaps because he was the only boy I really knew. I’m sure I wasn’t the only girl in the world to fantasize about their sister’s boyfriend, and it was him I imagined as I let this eighteen-year-old stranger kiss thirteen-year-old me. I don’t expect people to understand, but according to all the doctors I spent my childhood visiting, I only had a couple of years left. I didn’t know then what the most recent doctor had said to Nancy, about a dramatic change in my life expectancy. And I didn’t want to die never having been kissed. When you know you can’t make long-term plans, it’s easy to let yourself make short-term mistakes.
‘Try to relax,’ the boy whispered, kissing my neck, and I noticed the shiny foil chocolate on the black sand behind us. It was never in either of his hands. Those lying fingers were busy instead sliding up and under my top, before pulling it off over my head. I was wearing a hand-me-down training bra and felt nothing but shame. The cold air stole my breath from me, tiny clouds of it escaping from my mouth. It reminded me of the cloud creatures I used to try to see in the sky when I was a little girl, and I imagined seeing a lion, a witch and a pumpkin as the boy reached behind my back, trying, and failing, to unfasten my bra.
I saw someone dressed as a devil run past laughing and I felt afraid, even though I knew it was just a costume. Nana taught us that the devil is not a fictional man with a red cape and horns, he’s the voice inside our heads that tells us to do things we shouldn’t, he’s the eyes that pretend not to see, and the ears that pretend not to hear. He’s you, he’s me, he’s all of us. The full moon was a flirt that night, teasing the sky with little glimpses of itself, only occasionally coming out from behind the clouds. They all started to look like devils too. The boy kissed me again, still trying to take off my bra.
‘Wait, stop,’ I said, feeling very sick all of a sudden.
‘You’re so beautiful, I just want to see it,’ the boy said, staring at my chest.
‘See what?’ I asked.
‘Your scar. You won’t die if we do this, will you? Can I touch it?’
I knew there and then that if that was what it was like to be normal, I’d rather be me.
I pushed him away, covered myself up, and fled.
‘Freak!’ he called after me, then laughed.
I cried, because he was right: I was a freak. A freak with a broken heart, who would never love, or be loved. A freak who had been kissed for the first time by a horrible, disgusting boy. A freak who wanted to disappear. But first, I wanted to go home.
I couldn’t see Rose or Conor anywhere on the beach, but I thought I could hear Lily laughing with one of the boys behind the rocks. She has always craved attention, especially from men. Little girls who lose their fathers spend their lives looking for them in every man they meet. In my tired, slightly drunken state, I thought Lily would look after me. The rocks were covered in barnacles and seaweed, but I kept climbing until I was high enough to see without being seen.
I was right, Lily was talking to a boy. The boy was Conor.
‘Rose is upset with me,’ he said, then took a swig from what looked like a bottle of whisky, just like the ones his dad liked to drink.
‘She’ll get over it, pumpkin,’ Lily replied, grabbing the bottle from him and taking a swig herself. She screwed up her face as though she hated the taste, but then drank some more. ‘Besides, Rose is going to university, you’ve got a job on the local newspaper . . . it was never going to be forever. You’ll be breaking up soon anyway when she meets some brainiac at Cambridge. May as well rip off the Band-Aid now if you ask me.’
‘How can you say that? I love Rose,’ Conor said, sounding like he might cry. ‘And she loves me.’ Denial is often a down payment for future heartbreak.
‘Then why, deep down, do you already know she’s going to dump you?’ said Lily. She was still in her underwear, but had a towel wrapped around her. ‘I know the truth hurts, and I’m sorry to be the one saying it, but we both know Rose is out of your league. I understand how you’re feeling, Rose is leaving me too,’ Lily said, taking a step towards Conor. ‘Maybe we could help each other feel better?’
‘How?’ he asked, taking another sip of whisky.
I stared at Lily’s feet as she took another step towards him. Her toenails were painted red, and I knew the varnish must have belonged to our mother. I had stolen all of Lily’s nail varnishes a week earlier, when she refused to let me borrow any of them. There were ten in total, and I used them to paint each of my toenails a different colour, before burying each tiny glass bottle in the sand outside Seaglass. I imagined the crabs that lived in Blacksand Bay finding them, and taking it in turns to paint one another’s claws.
Lily’s towel dropped onto the ground and she took one more step towards Conor, until their lips were almost touching. Her white underwear seemed to glow in the moonlight against a backdrop of black sand.
‘Rose might be the clever one in the family, but there are all kinds of things I know how to do that she doesn’t,’ Lily said, not taking her eyes off his. ‘I could show you if you like? Or we could just kiss it better?’ she added, pressing herself up against him. ‘Just tonight, then never again? It could be our little secret?’
But they didn’t just kiss.
I watched from my hiding place above the rocks while they did what they did beneath them.
One Mississippi . . . Two Mississippi . . . Three Mississippi . . .
Conor accidentally called Lily ‘Rose’ at one point. But she didn’t seem to mind.
One Mississippi . . . Two Mississippi . . .
I think it was the toxic mix of shock, and revulsion, and heartbreak that prevented me from moving or saying a word. There are times when we all stand still while the ghosts of our pasts run by. And that’s how I felt: like a ghost. I watched, unable to look away, just like people rubbernecking at a car crash, until it was over.
One Mississippi . . .
Then I slipped on the rocks, and they both looked up and saw me.
Thirty-nine
31 October 4 a.m.
two hours until low tide
T he clocks out in the hall start to chime four o’clock, and nobody says a word. My memories of that night did not appear on the TV screen. All we saw just now were some teenagers sitting around a bonfire on a beach in 1988. But it’s a night both of my sisters and Conor and I would rather forget. We’ve never really spoken about what happened after I caught Conor and Lily together. And none of them have ever forgiven me for what happened next, even though it was not my fault.
‘I don’t want to see any more of this,’ Conor says. He crosses the room and ejects the tape. ‘It’s only two hours until we can leave – less if we don’t mind getting our feet wet – I vote we just sit in silence while we wait. No more home movies. No more unhappy trips down the Darker family memory lane.’ He crosses the room and throws the VHS tape on the fire. When it doesn’t catch light straight away, he adds another log to the flames. But it isn’t a log in his hand, it’s another sky-blue chair leg painted with white clouds. Someone has chopped up the chair Nana once painted for Conor and left it here to burn. He turns to stare at us.
‘I don’t know which one of you is responsible for all of this, but I’m not playing along anymore. It’s sick. That’s the only word for what is happening here tonight. This ends now.’
‘I don’t remember anyone putting you in charge,’ says Rose.
‘Someone needs to be. For Trixie’s sake. The poor kid doesn’t stand a chance growing up in this family. It isn’t as though Lily will ever win mother of the year.’
I’m shocked by Conor’s outburst, I think we all are, but most of all I’m shocked that Lily doesn’t respond. It’s not in her nature to stay quiet. She’s still just staring at the TV screen, even though there is nothing on it. Rose finds it strange too.
‘Lily?’ she says.
Trixie, who has been sitting next to me since I called her to the Scrabble board, walks over to Lily and taps her gently on the shoulder. ‘Mum?’
