Page 59 of Dear Daisy

I’ve been so scared, Lu, that I’d lose her. And now, now I nearly did lose her, but you were there, helping me through and I thought — what the hell is wrong with me? Like you’d let them take her just because you and I were an item, like you’d ever let her be second best. I am such a dick. I should never have doubted you and I should never have screwed up what we had, I should have trusted myself and I should have trusted you.

How was I so blind? How could I not see what was right in front of me? And how could you still care for a man who was so unkind to you back when Ellen died?

Al x

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Because I’ve always loved you

That’s all. Xx

Chapter Twenty-Four

‘In any graveyard there is always the one corner. Sometimes it’s more than one, sometimes they are dotted around like small punctuations in the sentence of living, but they are there. Every line in their stone is carved so deep with their parents’ unhappiness that it is hard to read, not because of illegibility but because of sympathy. In one grave, in one churchyard, there are nine children from one family, all gone within the space of six months, the result of a bout of typhoid that swept the region. In another lies ‘George Smith, son of Henry Smith, aged 32 weeks’. How agonised those parents must have been, only able to count out the existence of their child in weeks . . .’ — BOOK OF THE DEAD 2

* * *

It took me two weeks to pluck up the courage to step outside the front door, and when I did I found the world had been brushed with snow. The far hilltops looked like iced puddings and the pavements of Great Leys had frozen lines on their edges where the snow had melted back. Nobody looked at me. It felt almost as though they averted their eyes, becoming interested in shop windows or the slippery conditions underfoot rather than look at the mad woman in their midst.

Sense tried to tell me that they’d always been like this, that I was just being paranoid, but it didn’t stop me feeling as though I was moving in a giant circle of black loneliness that no one dared touch. I walked down the street and on to the churchyard to take a last look at the stones under their cardigan of frost before I packed my car and headed away. The stones were a constant, they’d still be here when I was gone as they’d been here for hundreds of years before I came; now they were also doubly immortalised by being in my book.

I stood in the corner of the graveyard where I’d first met Scarlet and Alex and rested my hand on Beatrice’s stone, wondered how she’d feel if she knew that her inscription and history were, even at this moment, being read over by Dan in his London office. That the words I’d so carefully written to give her context and to show readers what her world had been like were being highlighted and underlined, crossed out and adjusted.

A pigeon clapped its way free of a tree above me as I walked out onto the frozen grass. It cracked beneath my feet into the quiet air and I saved up the sounds and the smell of cold air which tasted like metal on my tongue to tell Daisy. Daisy. I tried to force her image into my mind but it kept being overridden by Dan’s face, that awful, sad, destroyed expression he’d worn in the hospital when I’d told him that I couldn’t live without my sister.

I bent down and traced Beatrice’s inscription with a fingertip. ‘You’re going to be famous,’ I whispered to her. This little corner of a rural churchyard, with its sagging shoulders of wall and centuries old yew trees, now immortalised in the book, would be visited by readers from all over the world, if Book of the Dead was anything to go by. I’d had so many letters of thanks from parishes all over London who were now able to refurbish their churches from donations given by my readers that I was thinking they might make a book on their own.

‘W-inter?’

I straightened up, almost guiltily. ‘Alex?’

He shrugged. ‘D-on’t sound so s-urprised, I do live here.’ A glance around. ‘W-ell, not h-ere, but you know w-hat I mean.’ He sounded different and it took me a moment to realise that his stammer was getting better. A slow delivery rather than a stoppered one. He looked different too, wearing a lumberjack shirt which didn’t so much cover his muscles as focus the eyes on them one square at a time. ‘C-ome and have a c-offee.’

I looked at him. ‘I can’t.’

I can’t face you now you know. You’ll stop treating me as just another person and start using that ‘quiet’ voice that people use when they think your sanity is in question. Treating me as if I’ve got a huge crack running through me that might blow open at any moment.

‘S-o what? Y-ou were just g-oing to leave?’ Alex came across the grass towards me. His footsteps tracked alongside mine in the frosty vegetation leaving a trail as though two ghosts had walked behind us. ‘W-inter? Were you?’

I couldn’t take the expression in his eyes and had to look away. I shrugged.

‘S-carlet wants to see you. I m-ean properly see y-ou, not l-ike through binoculars.’ He grinned and the tension that I’d been feeling began to seep away. ‘But I w-arn you, it may be B-obso related.’

‘She’s home?’ At least talking about Scarlet meant that we didn’t have to address the Daisy-shaped elephant, although the presence of the tombstones meant that everything that had happened in the hospital was hovering just behind my eyes.

‘Yep. Once th-ey established there w-as no brain d-amage, just b-roken bones and c-oncussion. H-ome and bored and c-onfined to bed. Well, s-ofa. Bed s-eemed un-necessarily p-unitive.’ Alex held out an arm. ‘Please.’

‘What about what happened at the hospital?’ I took two steps forward.

‘Look. We’re f-riends. Friends are allowed to screw up b-etween themselves, y-es? Your h-ead, my head, p-rivate spaces. We all d-o what we h-ave to to k-eep going.’ He crossed the space between us and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘I’m just s-orry that you and D-an . . .’ He stopped, and it wasn’t a stammer stop.

An embarrassed silence fell. At least, it was embarrassment on my side, I really had no idea what Alex was feeling, although his arm across my shoulders was comfortable and reassuring. ‘Yeah, well,’ was all I could think of to say.

‘So, c-offee? And S-carl? And p-robably Bobso?’ Alex gave my shoulders a little shake. ‘Come on, W-inter. At l-east say g-oodbye properly to a l-ittle girl who th-inks you’re amazing.’

‘Ah, guilt. Nice one, Alex.’

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