Page 25 of Dear Daisy

Oh well. Could have been worse, I could have been standing in for Ewan McGregor.

I slumped for a bit longer, but the shaft of lengthening sunlight which had been growing across the floor for the last hour or so decided me. I’d go up onto the moors, pop in to a couple of small chapels that were marked on the map but I’d not yet had a chance to see, take some more pictures and generally enjoy the brightness outside. Being out of doors might just jazz me up enough to get down to some writing. Last time round Dan had been there to cajole me out of the mid-book slump, now it was down to me, and if I couldn’t cajole myself then I had no business calling myself a writer.

I got into the car, which was still festooned with the remnants of Scarlet’s biscuit extravaganza. You should do something about that. The thought was there, but I just couldn’t work up sufficient disgust in the state of my passenger seat to do anything like hoovering, so I just turned a blind eye and headed out of Great Leys and up onto the road that ran over the high moors, a track so old that it was grooved into the landscape with the centuries of passing traffic. The high sun cast brittle shadows from the ancient marker stones and crosses which marked the way and the road was so empty that I could almost imagine myself riding across the moors, leading a string of pack ponies down towards the town.

I suppose I must have been daydreaming a bit, lulled by the straight road, the flicker of the passing stones, the warmth of the sun, because the next thing I knew a horn was blaring at me. On the opposite side of the road a big four-wheel drive thing had been forced to put two wheels up onto the verge to avoid my somewhat erratic approach along a part of the road not quite wide enough for two vehicles to pass easily. I should have pulled over, even slowed down, but my fugue state had meant that I hadn’t even registered the road’s degradation from smooth two-lane tarmac to single track. The sudden slicing of the horn into my thoughts made me jump and flick the wheel, so that we passed each other at speed, narrowly avoiding clipping wing mirrors, and adrenaline was dry and powdery in my mouth as I realised what could have happened. A quick glance in my rear mirror showed me the other car driving slowly down off the grass and heading the way I’d come, but the brief glimpse I’d had of the annoyed other driver was what was really sending those iced-acid pulses through my blood.

Dan.

I pulled into the little lay-by and put my head down on the steering wheel. It can’t have been Dan. You’re just being stupid now, transposing his face onto every dark-haired man you see. You went by far too fast to get a proper look anyway, and Dan drives an Astra, not that big silver monstrosity, the kind of thing favoured by people who tow caravans or ferry umpteen children to a private school.

I repeatedly licked my lips, trying to bring some fluid back into my mouth but my tongue was sticky with lack of moisture. Not Dan. Just a bloke with a similar haircut. You’re losing it, Winter.

I had to speak to Daisy.

‘Daze, I keep thinking I see Dan everywhere.’

‘Define “everywhere”. In your bathroom, hiding in the boot of your car?’

As everything settled down I began to feel ridiculous. ‘I might be overreacting a bit. It might not have been him — it can’t have been him now I come to think of it. Dan doesn’t understand the countryside and he thinks sheep are out to get him.’

Daisy sighed. ‘How long are we going to have this going on for? Win, you have to get over him, however you choose to do it, confront him, ignore him, burn down his house. He shouldn’t be able to make you feel this bad just by existing. I mean, so what if you did see him? He can’t do anything, not now, not as long as we’re strong. He can only affect you as badly as you let him, can’t he?’

With my sister’s wise words ringing in my ears, I restarted the car and headed towards my original destination, the overgrown churchyard which lay off this hardly-used bit of roadway. The wheel was still clammy between my hands but the panic had abated. Daisy was right, of course she was. In fact, she usually was. That artistic temperament that should, by rights, have made her flighty and inconsequential had in fact given her a sensible and rational outlook on life, which was why I loved to talk things over with her. She’d see what lay behind my knee-jerk reactions and force me to see it too.

It wasn’t Dan. It can’t have been Dan. And even if it was, so what? He can’t touch us now.

Chapter Eleven

The graveyard was wonderful. Twisted old crab apple trees hunched over stones like elderly mourners, their leaves beginning to buckle under the weight of autumn. The monuments themselves were austere, the lettering proud of its basic hand-craftedness and the legends little more than curt dates and reminders that we’d all be dead, one day. Grass skirted the graves and bramble bushes coiled and buttressed around stones, trees and the chapel itself, providing a Sleeping Beauty-esque look to the pictures I took. I found myself relaxing more and more, talking sense into myself as I wandered around trying not to disturb anything in this almost breathless place. I was fine. Of course I was fine. It was men, they were the problem: Dan and our unpleasant break-up yet having to stay vaguely in touch until this book was done, meaning that the longed-for ‘clean break’ was going to be a while in coming; Alex and his guilt, his stress over doing the right thing; even bloody Light Bulb was male, although, apart from that relentless chain-stitched grin, I couldn’t really accuse him of anything.

By the time I drove back to Great Leys I was positively insouciant.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Are you free?

Hi Winter

I wondered if I could have the benefit of your experience on something? Well, not experience, exactly, not unless you’ve got half a dozen children you’re not admitting to! It’s to do with Scarl and this bullying thing going on at school, which seems to have escalated just recently. Lucy came over yesterday (she does pop over from time to time but don’t get the wrong impression, we’re just friends now) and she’s worried about Scarl and what’s going on. I really don’t want to try to cover it in an email, it doesn’t seem fair either to you or to Scarl, a little bit as though I’m talking about her behind her back — is that ridiculous? Anyway, if you’re free tomorrow, could you come here, sometime during school hours, yes, I know I said I didn’t want to talk about Scarl behind her back, but I can’t really talk about this with her in the room.

I really would just like another perspective on things, and there aren’t that many people who could give input. Mum can’t really get her head around any of this and I really just want to offload on someone neutral. Not that you’re neutral exactly, it’s weird but in my head I have you as sort of orange and flame and, yes, still Catwoman. So, like Catwoman if she was on fire, which, now I think of it, is a bloody stupid analogy and I’ll leave the creative writing to you. Don’t worry about emailing me back, I’ll be in all day tomorrow, just pop in and pour yourself a coffee and I’ll be round.

I really, truly appreciate everything you’ve done for us, Winter.

Alex

I didn’t really know how to feel. Alex seemed to like me. He kept on with this Catwoman thing until I’d had to Google her, never really having been much of a one for the comics or the films. I’d sort of imagined a woman who had loads of cats, and was ever-so-slightly amused, and a little bit shocked, to find pictures of a very slim woman in black Lycra. I hadn’t been that thin since I was about five and in something that body-hugging I’d probably look more like a shrink-wrapped egg-timer.

Which gave rise to an interesting question — well, interesting if you were me, anyway. Did Alex really like me or was he seeing me as something I wasn’t just because I was the first woman he’d met that he hadn’t grown up with? Because I liked Scarlet and was unaffected by the stammer? It was obvious that he and Lucy had had something going on, might even still have something, although two-timing anybody in a place the size — and with the gossip-quotient — of Great Leys was like walking down Oxford Street wearing a T-shirt that says ‘I’m Cheating’.

He didn’t really know all that much about me, other than what I’d told him the other night or he’d gleaned from Scarlet, he didn’t know my favourite music or authors or colour or food. Maybe he was trying to talk himself into liking me, because I was the nearest thing he thought he was likely to get to a girlfriend, and overlaying me with cartoon characters because it was easier to relate to me that way than in real life? I snuck another look at the Catwoman graphic on the computer, and then looked down at myself. Nope. Not even if there was a sudden Manga-attack and liposuction event would I ever have eyes that huge or a body that tiny.

And then I checked all the places online that Dan usually hung out. His Twitter profile had gone quiet, there was nothing on his Facebook page or his blog, since the last post. Nothing to indicate that he’d decided to come to Yorkshire, nothing that gave any hint as to his current state. Is he angry? I ran over his last string of messages. He doesn’t sound angry. He sounds regretful. Sad.

I shook my head and gritted my teeth. So he should, so he bloody should! But my heart wasn’t in it, although the hurt ran deeper than my heart; it was coursing through my entire circulatory system, lodging in my veins and winding tight silver coils through my arteries. I’d thought I was falling in love with Dan. What had started as a fun, light-hearted friendship had started to deepen. When we’d slept together for the first time he’d taken my hand and solemnly told me that it meant we were bound together for life by a memory. And he’d been right. Only now it was a memory I didn’t want any more, a memory that flashed through my head as I fell asleep or tried to concentrate on words. Dan kissing my neck, running those slim fingers over my cheekbones, fixing my eyes with his black gaze. Grinning that manic grin, tinged with something else, something softer, as he undressed me, so gently. Lifted me and lowered me onto the bed, pinned me there with words of beauty and kindness and whispered me into making love . . .

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