Page 15 of Dear Daisy

To the consternation of other patrons, except Scarlet, who I think had fallen asleep, I abandoned my position in the queue and dashed to the door. The crowds were thickening now as people came into town for lunch, and all I could see was a dark shape, hands in pockets, moving away towards the Minster.

Run after him? Shout, call out his name? It may not be Dan, it could be some other slightly-built bloke in black and just the fact that he’s on my mind so much is making me see what isn’t there.

I hovered in the doorway. I wanted, so badly, to know if it was him. To face him, look him in the eye and ask him how he dared be here, in Yorkshire, even how he dared be on the same planet as me, after the way he’d behaved. Just to ask him . . . why? Why had he felt the need to do it? Wasn’t I good enough? How had I failed so badly to be what he wanted me to be that he needed to drive a wedge between me and my sister?

‘Winter?’ Scarlet’s voice, sleepily raised over the general chat. ‘Where are you going?’ And the note of panic in her voice told me that I wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t leave her, whoever the dark man might have been.

‘It’s fine,’ I replied, but I felt too sick to want cake now. I was shaky and shocked, as though I’d been in an accident, as though the blood was being diverted from my brain to my heart. ‘I’ll get your milkshake.’

Scarlet sat and sucked pink milk through a straw and flipped through one of the new books we’d bought, blissfully unaware that next to her I was trying to stop my hands from trembling. The skin on my face felt tight and clammy, bile kept rising up as far as the base of my throat, and the throat-swelling of tears didn’t seem too far away. Why would he even be here? He’ll be in London, working; he certainly won’t be bothered wondering where you are and what you’re doing. And he most especially won’t be working himself into a state of hysteria because he thought he saw someone who looks a bit like you somewhere. Come on, Winter. You’re in charge of the child, you can’t go into meltdown because the ex who tried to get between you and Daisy might have walked down a street in York.

‘We’d better go back to the car.’

‘Oh, can’t we go into—’

‘No!’ I felt guilt as soon as I’d snapped out the word, seeing the thumb go into the mouth and her eyes become cautious and guarded. She’s eight. Don’t make her suffer because you got shat on. ‘Sorry. I just think we ought to get home before Alex starts to worry.’

Slowly the thumb came out, hovering at chin level in case I was going to be cross again. She’d got pink milk all over her upper lip where she’d drunk the froth from the cup and now it was all over her fingers too, mushing down into a tight pink line like candy floss that’s got wet. ‘Please may I have a biscuit to eat in the car?’

She’d almost whispered the words and, once again, I felt the jab to the gut of shame. ‘Of course you can.’ Cautiously I thought my way through meeting Dan on the street, walking into him in the car park, yep, good, I no longer wanted to scream all the swear words I could think of and stab him with my car keys, so we were probably good to go. ‘Sorry, Scarlet, I just thought I saw someone I don’t like very much.’

Her eyes brightened. ‘I do that all the time! Most of the girls at school, really.’

We queued up to buy biscuits. ‘Yes, I saw them ignoring you in the park. Don’t you get on with them?’

The thumb hovered as though it was thinking about going back in the mouth, but eventually got shoved into a pocket instead. ‘They call Alex “weirdo”.’

I looked down at the sticky pink face, her blonde hair pulled into two rather inexpert bunches and her ever-so-slightly too small jeans. They tease you too, I should think. A child with a dead mother and no father, brought up by a man who must sound scary when he speaks, if you’re eight and don’t understand stammering. I don’t really think your grandmother helps much either. ‘What do you do? When they call him names?’

Scarlet swung away, seizing the cellophane bag that the girl behind the counter held out to her. ‘I hit them with Light Bulb.’

Ah.

We sat in the car, waiting to pull out of the car park into the traffic. My brain was humming, my eyes straining this way and that, trying to catch a glimpse of a flick of coat, the hint of a studded boot.

‘Why are you called Winter?’ She’d bitten her way into the first biscuit. A cloud of sugar puffed across the dashboard and settled like dust in the nooks and crannies of the air blower.

‘When I was born it was snowing. My mum looked out of the window and knew she was going to call me Winter.’

‘Oh.’ Crunch crunch. A shower of crumbs fell under her booster seat and made me narrow my eyes. ‘So why is your sister called Daisy? If you’re twins aren’t you born at the same time?’

Oh boy. How much do eight-year-old girls know about babies being born? I could traumatise her for life here. ‘Twins don’t . . . ummm . . . they don’t come out at the same time,’ I said, carefully trying to be euphemistic and yet factually correct, and, for all I knew, she still thought babies were found under gooseberry bushes. ‘I was born first and Daisy took a while to come out. By the time she was born, the sun was shining and the snow had melted.’

Well done, Winter. You managed to skirt right around the whole ‘childbirth’ thing, she’s probably going to grow up now thinking babies appear like pop-up book illustrations.

‘When Granny’s cat had kittens there was blood everywhere,’ Scarlet said, with a disgusting amount of relish. ‘They came out one after the other, like squeezing cheese out of a tube.’

I’d forgotten to take into account that children living in the countryside were brought up with a more robust approach to new life than we townies, clearly. I’d thought babies came through belly buttons until I was eleven. ‘Riiight.’

‘Do you miss your sister?’ The question came around another biscuit. The car was knee deep in half-eaten raisins and bits.

‘What do you mean?’ My elbows trembled with the strain of keeping my hands steady on the wheel.

‘I wish I had a sister.’ Scarlet turned and looked out of the window, almost dreamily. ‘I could go and visit her and we’d make cakes and draw pictures. Do you visit your sister and make cakes?’

I took a deep breath. ‘It’s different when you grow up. Daisy lives a long, long way away in Australia and she’s got a fabulous life over there that she can’t just drop to come here. We talk a lot though, practically all the time, but no cakes.’ And besides, Dan hovers over us like a huge storm cloud. We might ignore his presence, but it’s always there, big and black and waiting to burst if we acknowledge him.

We drove over the moors. Scarlet had put her thumb back in her mouth and was making small sucky sounds around it, her head leaning against the glass and bumping. I tried to drive as smoothly as I could, I didn’t want her waking up and finding another load of questions to ask, but either she wasn’t asleep or she had a kind of sixth sense, because as soon as we drove through the archway to the Old Mill she sat upright and took her thumb out. When the car stopped she undid her seat belt, turned to me with a ‘thankyoufortakingmeshoppingWinter, bye!’ and hurtled off through the glass doors with bags dangling from her hands, bumping and bobbing in accompaniment, leaving a child-shaped clear space on the passenger seat, outlined in bits of biscuit and icing sugar like a confectionary-based murder scene.

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