Page 28 of Dear Daisy

‘H-here. Tea. I’ll just show W-Winter out.’ Alex put the plate down on the counter and came with me to the door of the flat. Outside, on the landing, he put out a hand to stop me from walking straight down the stairs. ‘Hey.’

‘What?’

‘D-do you really think y-you can do something about the b-bullying?’

He was keeping me talking, I was fairly sure of that. Didn’t want to see me leave. ‘Not all of it, but maybe some. I’ll talk to the school.’

He walked in closer. ‘Th-thank you,’ he whispered, and that hurricane gained more storm force as he put fingers to the back of my neck and drew my mouth up to his, beginning a kiss that made my clothes feel too tight and massively too hot. When we finally stepped apart I felt like a ghost.

‘Wow.’

Another wide smile, a wink, and he stepped back inside the flat, closing the door gently and slowly on that gigantic grin. I stood and fanned myself for a moment before I set foot on the stairs and caused a conflagration.

‘Wow,’ I said again, to myself. ‘This just got complicated.’

Chapter Twelve

‘Gravestones can be heart-rending, funny, an attempt on behalf of the stonemason to try out every type of lettering he’s learned; they can be decorative and inspiring. But up here, on the North Yorkshire moors, in one of the highest, most bleak parts of the country, there isn’t much time for fancy, either during life or after death. The Osborne family, who lived, worked and died up on the high moors, seem to have got this down to a fine art. Witness one William Osborne, whose stone reads simply: ‘Wm Osborne. Died Jan 1815. Killed by bull.’ — BOOK OF THE DEAD 2

* * *

‘He kissed you?’

‘Yes, Daisy, I just said that.’ I leaned my back against the wall by the bed. It was dark, it was late, but I couldn’t sleep until I’d updated my sister with this latest development.

‘And how did it make you feel?’

I took a deep breath. ‘Oh, he got it just right. None of that awful groin-thrust that some of them do, no trying to lick the face off me. It was sweet. It was kind.’

‘Hmm.’ Daisy sounded slightly annoyed. ‘That’s not what I asked, Win. I asked how it made you feel, not what his technique was like.’

I shuffled my feet under the duvet, but kept my back against the plaster of the wall for the cool reassurance of its solidity. ‘I feel . . . Seriously, Daze, I like Alex. He’s calm and pretty stable, if you don’t count all that guilt he’s got going on, which, and I hate to admit it, makes him a little bit more human. Otherwise he’s just this well-built bloke with the looks of an action hero, a gorgeous home and a future of financial stability.’

‘And?’

‘Does there have to be an “and”?’

Daisy sighed. ‘Yes, Winter, I think there does.’

‘Okay, okay. I think I fancy him, but I just don’t know if I trust what I feel any more. But then again, I’m old enough to know what I think, so—’

‘Two buts, Win. You know you’re only allowed one, with a possibility of a half a one for “but he’s too rich and successful and glamorous, and or famous”. Two buts mean he isn’t for you, you’re just trying to talk yourself into it.’

‘Look, I’ve only just met the bloke. He might even have something going on with Scarlet’s teacher, I haven’t really got to the bottom of that yet. We’ve had one dinner and one little kiss — I think I can give things a bit longer before I have to decide, don’t you?’

‘Okay.’ She sounded as though she was smiling now, which was a relief. I’d hesitated about talking to her until I got to bed, slightly worried that she might have given me some kind of moralistic homily about how I was rebounding and it wasn’t fair on Alex, etc etc. Instead she seemed to be taking it all quite seriously. ‘Just be careful, Win.’

‘It’s all right, he’s not going to throw a Dan on us. He’s more laid-back than Dan anyway, a bit more . . . I can’t explain it. Less . . .’ I made a sort of ‘clutching into my stomach’ gesture which, of course, she couldn’t see.

‘A bit more and also less.’ She was definitely smiling now. ‘Sounds more like a French perfume ad to me. ‘’E is a leetle more . . . and yet ’e is also a leetle less.’

‘Shut up or I shall never speak to you again.’ I was laughing at her terrible French accent.

‘Yeah, right. Laters, Win.’ And she was gone, like the ethereal being she was.

I picked up the photo I had beside the bed and grinned at her in it. It was us on our twenty-first birthday, nine years younger, nine years slimmer, arms around one another. We were both bending with laughter, me wearing a classical green dress that swept the floor and left my shoulders and arms bare, Daisy in her trademark mini-dress, very retro, very 60s, all geometric circles that made us both feel sick to look at by the end of the evening, but beneath it her legs had gone on forever. ‘Night, Daze,’ I whispered to it. Then I curled up under the duvet. Well, I had to curl up, if I’d stretched out my feet would have been on the landing.

That was the thing about being a twin. One of the things that Dan hadn’t understood. I was never alone. Oh, she wasn’t here in the room with me, but I always knew that, wherever she was, wherever I might be, my sister was there for me. We were two different people, led two very different lives, and yet the inexplicable connection played between us. It lay, like a permanently open telephone line that ran heart-to-heart, as though within us we each carried a part of the other.

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