Daisy darker, p.5
Daisy Darker, page 5
‘My literary estate will continue to make donations to my own favourite charities, as long as there are sufficient funds for it to do so. I will be leaving Seaglass in my great-granddaughter’s precious hands. I hope we can all agree that Trixie is the future of this family. My home will be held in trust for her alone, until she is older, along with any other royalties and future payments from publishers—’
‘Hang on a minute,’ interrupts Lily, lighting yet another cigarette. She takes a drag, then exhales a cloud of smoke. ‘You’re basically going to leave everything to my daughter, a child, and nothing to me? You’ve finally lost your remaining marbles.’
Rose smiles at the outburst. Unlike the rest of the family, she seems completely indifferent and unoffended.
Nana sighs. ‘Not everything, Lily, and please stop smoking in my home. Before those tiny cogs in your small mind start trying to turn, the will prevents you from taking a penny of what will one day be Trixie’s. Besides, I’m not dead yet. You need to learn to make your own way in life, the world doesn’t owe you anything, and neither do I. But . . . it may or may not please you all to learn that I have started working on one final book.’
‘You haven’t written anything new for years,’ says Dad.
‘Well, I didn’t have anything left to say. But now I do have one last story I’d like to tell. It’s about a dysfunctional family, not unlike ours.’
‘What?’ says Nancy.
‘You’ve written a book about us?’ Lily asks.
‘I’ve started sketching out a few ideas,’ is all Nana says.
Dad slams his glass down on the table without meaning to. ‘Well, I can’t imagine that selling many copies. What I want to know is why? Why invite us here, if all along you planned to leave us out of the will? I’m your son. Your only child—’
‘Please keep your voice down,’ interrupts Lily. ‘Trixie is already asleep upstairs.’
‘Because the future of this family, and what I will leave behind when I am gone, has been on my mind for a long time,’ Nana replies.
I think she’s about to say something else, but she doesn’t.
Instead she is silent and wide-eyed – like the rest of us – when we hear the melancholy sound of the wind chimes outside and the front door slam at the other end of the house.
It’s almost ten o’clock.
The tide is in.
I can tell we’re all thinking the same thing. It’s not possible to walk across the causeway at this time of night, and nobody else was expected to join us at Seaglass this evening.
‘Maybe Trixie woke up?’ whispers my mother.
‘And went for a walk outside in the rain? I don’t think so,’ Lily replies.
I think we all know that it isn’t my niece we can hear out in the hall.
Every member of my family stares at the closed kitchen door in horror, as the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the hallway gets closer. There is a collective holding of breath when the door handle slowly starts to turn.
Eight
30 October 10 p.m.
eight hours until low tide
Dad leans back in his chair, Nancy gasps, and Lily swears as the door bursts open. The candles on the table flicker, casting an eerie pattern over all the faces sitting around it, and only Rose keeps her wits on a tight leash as a man appears in the doorway. He is backlit from the light in the hall, and it takes a few seconds for me to recognize the shape of who is casting a new shadow over the evening.
Conor steps into the kitchen. The man I have secretly loved since he was a boy has been a stranger for too long. I’ve spent a lot of my life in love’s waiting room, not being noticed by those I want to see me. Other people seem to find it all so easy – Lily has never had any problems attracting attention from the opposite sex – but I’ve always been a little awkward in that way. I never know what to say or do when I like someone, so I tend to say and do nothing at all. Still, nobody here would have approved of me having a relationship with Conor. Not then, not now, not ever. I’m about to say something, I think we all are, but Nana beats us to it.
‘Conor, welcome. I didn’t know whether you’d come.’
‘You invited him?’ asks my mother.
‘Conor might not be a Darker, but he is part of this family,’ says Nana.
‘That depends on your point of view,’ says Dad, staring down at the table.
Conor ignores the comment. ‘I tried to call, to let you know that I was running late – I got stuck at work – but there seems to be a problem with your phone.’
‘There is. It kept ringing, so she had it cut off,’ Lily says, taking another large gulp of champagne, as though it were lemonade.
‘Well, I wanted to be here,’ he says.
Nana’s face is lit up like a Christmas tree. She always adored Conor, just like all the women in this family have at one point or another. The man I see now in the doorway – looking a little lost – reminds me of the boy he was when we first met. There are some memories we can never outrun.
It was a hot summer’s day when we all first saw nine-year-old Conor Kennedy with his bucket and spade. He was sitting alone, on what we had come to think of as our beach, just opposite Seaglass. It was as though he were trespassing. Blacksand Bay is a public part of the coastline, but nobody ever visits this particular stretch of black sand. It is too difficult to get to without scrambling down the cliff, and there are plenty of signs about the dangers of swimming in the sea. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but something at first sight happened to the women in my family that day. All of us.
I was four, Lily was eight, and Rose was nine. We lived in a world of our own during those childhood summers at Seaglass, while my father was busy touring the real one. Nancy would drop us off in July and reappear in August, leaving us alone with Nana for the weeks in between. On the rare occasions we dared to ask where our mother went when she left us, the answer was always the same: somewhere else. My sisters missed her more than I did. But then I’ve always loved Seaglass, it’s the only place that has ever really felt like home.
Strangers were a strange sight in Blacksand Bay. We all stopped and stared that day, including Nana, at this perfect-looking boy sitting on our beach. So out of place, he seemed to fit right in. Lily was the first one to speak, as usual. It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but it was the question we all wanted to ask.
‘Who are you?’
The boy glanced in our direction, looking unimpressed. ‘What’s it to you?’
Lily’s hands formed fists and found their way to her hips. ‘We live here.’
Conor looked the same age as Rose but acted a lot older. He stood up, dusted the sand from his hands and copied Lily’s stance. ‘Yeah? Well, I live here too.’
He took a yo-yo from his pocket and started playing with it, without taking his eyes off us.
Things get a little hazy after that. Sometimes our memories reframe themselves.
Nana bridged the gap between herself and the boy, leaving us behind. She’d seen the bruises on his neck, the shadows beneath his eyes – the details only age teaches you to translate. She asked him where he lived, and he explained that he and his father had just moved into a cottage along the coast.
‘What about your mother?’ she asked.
Nine-year-old Conor stared at her, and the yo-yo went down and up several more times while he decided how to answer. ‘I don’t have a mother anymore.’
‘Our parents are away all the time too,’ said Lily, misunderstanding.
Nana invited Conor to come across the causeway and have lemonade with us, she wanted to call his father to tell him that the boy was safe. Things didn’t used to be how they are now; children didn’t know they might need to worry about an adult offering them a cold drink on a hot day. Conor said yes. Sometimes I wish he’d said no. I remember him walking across the causeway with us for the first time, still yo-yoing as though his little life depended on it. He was officially the most fascinating creature four-year-old me had ever seen.
Our new neighbour lived a mile away, but that isn’t far at all when you are a child and in search of company. Conor didn’t have any other children to play with, and sisters are rarely satisfied to be with one another when someone more interesting comes along. He became a permanent fixture in our lives, and I think I might have fallen in love with him that day. I liked the taste of his name in my mouth and on my tongue, so much so I would whisper it to myself on the days he didn’t come to visit. It felt like snacking between meals. That chance meeting with Conor and his yo-yo changed the shape of my family forever.
We spend our youth building sandcastles of ambition, then watch as life blows sands of doubt over our carefully crafted turrets of wishes and dreams, until we can no longer see them at all. We learn to settle instead for flattened lives, residing inside prisons of compromise. A little relieved that the windows of the world we settled for are too small to see out of, so we don’t have to stare at the castle-shaped fantasies of who we might have been.
There are two kinds of attractive people in the world: those who know that’s what they are, and those who don’t. Conor Kennedy knows it. His good looks gifted him an unshakeable confidence in life, the kind very few mere mortals experience, and fear of failure is a stranger he has yet to meet. He wears his stubble like a mask, always dresses in scruffy jeans teamed with smart shirts, and his blonde hair is long enough to hide his blue eyes when it falls over his face. He doesn’t look like a journalist, but that’s what he is. Thirty-something going on fifty, and addicted to his job.
Tonight, Conor’s white cotton shirt is clinging to his chest, and a small puddle of water has already formed around his feet where he stands in the kitchen doorway. He looks like he might have swum from the mainland, but that’s not possible – we all learned a long time ago that the riptides between here and there can be deadly.
My dad – seemingly sober all of a sudden – asks the question we all want to know the answer to.
‘How the devil did you get here?’
‘By boat,’ Conor says.
‘By boat?’
‘Yes, they’re a fantastic invention that you can use to sail across the sea,’ Nana says. ‘I get my post and groceries delivered by boat once a week now too. So I don’t have to cycle into town, or worry about the tide—’
‘I expect they don’t deliver after ten p.m. in a storm though, do they?’ interrupts Dad, narrowing his eyes at Conor, like a comedy villain with a sense of humour bypass. ‘What kind of boat?’
‘A boat with oars, Mr Darker.’
‘You came here in a rowing boat, in a storm, in the dark?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry to arrive so late. I got held up at work; there was a murder.’ This would sound strange coming from most people, but Conor is a crime correspondent for the BBC. His press pass is still dangling from the lanyard around his neck. ‘I managed to borrow a small boat from an old friend – Harry from the fish shop. The storm isn’t as bad as it sounds, and it isn’t as though I haven’t rowed a boat across Blacksand Bay before. I feel as though I might be interrupting, and I don’t want to be a party pooper, but I wonder if I might head upstairs and change into some dry clothes?’
‘Of course,’ says Nana. ‘It isn’t my birthday until tomorrow, I’m just glad you’re here in time for that. Before you disappear . . . I found something belonging to you.’ She shuffles over to the sideboard, opens a cupboard door and takes out an old Polaroid camera. It looks like a vintage item from a museum, but I remember when it was brand new. ‘Would you mind just taking a quick snap of the family? Who knows when we’ll all be together again?’
Conor takes the camera from her, we all – reluctantly – lean in, and he takes a photo, before passing the white square to Nana. She attaches it to her retro fridge with a strawberry-shaped magnet before the picture has even developed.
‘Thank you, Conor. I suppose Daisy’s room would be best for you to sleep in. It’s the only one with a spare bed. Unless . . . that would be too—’
‘I don’t mind,’ I say, a little too quickly. The thought of sleeping in the same room with Conor starts a little fantasy inside my head, one which I’ve had several times before. Lily pulls a face but I ignore her.
‘That’s fine with me. We’re all grown-ups. It’s just somewhere to sleep,’ Conor says, and my fantasy deflates. You can’t make someone fall in love with you. I don’t know much, but I do know that. The rest of my family exchange glances which I choose to ignore.
‘Do you remember where it is?’ Nana asks.
‘I’m sure Conor remembers everything about Daisy,’ says Rose.
It’s one of the few times she has spoken tonight, and her words feel like a slap.
I excuse myself and leave the kitchen. Conor does the same and follows. I don’t mind sharing a room if he doesn’t; he used to be like a brother to me. I don’t say a word as we walk through the hallway and past the cupboard under the stairs. I was locked in there once as a child and I give it a wide berth.
The staircase itself is a rather grand affair, and unique in that the entire wall next to it is covered with a hand-painted family tree. Time-warped branches stretch across cracked plaster from the floor to the ceiling. Nana did it – of course – illustrating our lives as though they were the same as her books; another story to be told. We’re all on there, dangling on fragile-looking twigs. She has painted us in the same style that she illustrates her children’s books, using a pot of black ink and various sized dip pens and brushes. Sometimes – if she is in ‘the mood’ – she will draw the outline of her characters with a reed from the garden. Then, when the ink is dry, she colours them in with palettes of watercolour paints. She likes to portray people, places and things the way she sees them, which rarely matches the view of those being drawn. Her characters are all as flawed as the world they live in, but children love them, maybe because of the honesty that shines through what they get to see and read. Other children’s authors seem to sugar-coat their books in an attempt to make the world less scary. But Nana always told it like it was, and her readers loved her for it.
Miniature faces of the Darker family past and present, painted inside the tree’s giant black leaves, permanently look down on the mistakes we’ve all made. It makes me feel an overwhelming sadness; the idea of this one day being a place I can no longer visit whenever I want to. We all have roots in this family and in this house. It isn’t something I think any of us can just walk away from.
Conor and I head up the creaking steps to the first floor, and only when we reach my old childhood bedroom, and the door is firmly closed behind us, do I whisper:
‘Why did you have to come here?’
There is an ivory-coloured metal daybed against the back wall of my old bedroom. Nana bought it second-hand, for all the times when she slept in here, too scared to leave me alone in case my heart stopped in the night. Sometimes I would wake up and see her staring at me in the darkness, whispering words I couldn’t quite hear. Conor puts his bag on the daybed as though marking his territory, then starts to change out of his wet clothes, with his back to me. I sit down on the very edge of my bed and turn away. Maybe sharing a room wasn’t such a great idea after all. It takes a lot of courage for me to ask the question.
‘Could we maybe just talk about what happened?’
But Conor doesn’t answer. It’s been like this between us for a long time. No matter how sorry I am, he can’t seem to move on, just like my sisters. I know he’d probably rather never see me again, but I’m glad that he chose to come anyway this weekend, for Nana. What happened certainly wasn’t her fault.
The rest of the evening is a blur at best. I’m exhausted, but I never seem to be able to sleep these days, and the atmosphere in the house feels even more polluted than before. We heard the others decide to turn in and call it a night too, almost as soon as we left the kitchen. Nana’s room is the largest bedroom at the back of the house, and she whispers goodnight as she passes my door. Lily and Trixie take the room that Lily and Rose used to share as children. My mother is the last person to come up. I only know it’s her because I hear her talking to someone in a hushed voice at the top of the stairs.
‘We’ll get out of here as soon as it’s light. I knew the old witch wouldn’t leave us a penny.’
I listen at the door as she scuttles along the hall to the guest bedroom she used to share with my father. Rose stays downstairs, choosing to sleep on a sofa in the library. Dad also said he would rather stay downstairs, sealing himself in the music room that was his sanctuary as a child. He always needs to disappear inside his music when the real world gets too loud. But Seaglass is no longer noisy, it has returned to its own variety of silence.
I can hear the sea outside my window, and Conor’s slow and steady breathing. I can tell he’s still awake. I keep completely quiet when I hear him get up and tiptoe across the room, and I listen as he opens his laptop on the desk in the corner. There’s no internet here, but it seems that Conor still can’t resist doing a little work this weekend. He’s become a workaholic since getting the crime correspondent job at the BBC. Perhaps because when you work that hard for something, sometimes you live in constant fear of losing it.
He creeps out of the room – presumably to use the bathroom down the hall – and while he is gone, I get up, cross the threadbare carpet to his side of the bedroom, and stare at the laptop screen. What I see is nothing to do with work, it looks more like a poem. Which is odd, because Conor has never been one to dabble with fiction or anything creative, he is a man who only likes to deal in facts. Or at least he was.
I hear footsteps in the hallway, creaking floorboards telling tales on anyone out of bed, and know I have to hurry. In a childish attempt to get Conor’s attention and make things less awkward between us, I type a Halloween-inspired message with my index finger. I can’t type properly and am dreadful with modern technology, but I smile to myself as the letters appear on the screen.
