Page 33 of Dear Daisy

‘Try to jolly me along. Not now. Not any more.’ I tore my eyes away from his wildness, from that careful illusion of anarchy and pandemonium that he promulgated. ‘I don’t need your help and I don’t need you.’

‘Sure about that, are you?’ And now he was so still, so dark, it almost felt as though the sunlight bounced off him. A black hole. ‘Because I’ve tracked all your messages back to the mothership and it doesn’t look as though there’s a whole lot of work getting done right now. Last word we got, you were about halfway through and since then . . .’ Dan spun once more then jumped easily down, landing with a chink of metal and the sound of hollow earth. ‘. . . nada. Now I hate to get all “editor” on your ass but, hey, we have a deadline here, and it’s beginning to make a ticking noise.’ He made ‘metronomes’ of his two index fingers, wiggling them to and fro. ‘You sure you don’t want a little bit of input from One Who Knows, that might just get this book brought in, on time, and earning its keep?’

A deep breath. As though that would save me. ‘I’d rather you were on the other side of the planet, actually, Dan. But yes, you’re right, things haven’t been going quite like I’d hoped.’ I saw him give a slow smile and hurried to smack it down. ‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with us, with what happened, it’s just that there’s so much material here, so much more than I thought, it’s like I can’t pick out which people to write about.’

His hands went into his pockets and an expression came over his face that I might have expected to see on Scarlet’s, a sort of ‘deep thinking sulk’, as though he was mentally weighing up options to see which was the most likely to get a positive reaction. ‘Right,’ he said, slowly. ‘Right, yeah, okay. I see.’

He half-turned and swept the coat close around his body and there was a finality about the gesture that made something deep inside me ache like an old bruise. Go away, Dan, I thought, but somehow seeing him here, everything was different. ‘Look. You can help me, if you must, but only if we can be professional about it. No being unnaturally “upbeat” about the book, no cosy little meetings like this or talking about . . .’ My voice fell into the unsayable.

‘Daisy. Right?’

All I could do was nod and scrunch the paper under the tips of my fingers.

‘I get that.’ Dan closed the gap of grass that had stood between us, stitching its sunlight space with his darkness. ‘And that’s what’s behind this?’

You can do this, Winter. This is the conversation you’ve rehearsed in your head over all those sleepless midnights. My palms tingled and dampened and my heart performed a nauseating double beat, but I held steady. I can do this. ‘I hated you, Daniel.’ My voice came out only slightly shaky. ‘I mean, before, I . . . well, it was good, we were good. And then, the stuff you said’ — and now the tremor was more of a catch — ‘about Daisy, it made me hate you so much.’

He stopped moving. Just stood as though the words had frozen him. ‘I never meant that to happen.’ But his hands had come up in front of him now, that giveaway gesture he could never manage to control, pushing his cuffs back as though revealing that chaos symbol on his skin could somehow keep order.

‘But it did. You became something in my head, some huge monster, but now I’ve seen you, now you’re here, and now I’ve got, well, other things to think about besides the vile things you said about my sister, I’ve started to realise. You’re just this bloke, Daniel. Not evil, not something to fear, just a really stupid bloke who doesn’t know when to keep his nose out of someone’s business, and who thought that isolating me from my sister would, what? Get you centre-stage? So, yes, for the duration of this book I can work with you, but on a professional basis only. Understood?’

‘Whew.’ Another step, and now I could smell the vanilla from his skin. ‘Some nasty stuff coming out here, Win.’ His voice was soft. ‘For the record, I’ve only ever tried to help you. Nothing else, no agenda.’

‘Right, so sleeping with me wasn’t “having an agenda” then?’ I dropped my voice to match his.

He looked down at the toes of his boots, collecting little beads of damp from the grass. His hair flopped towards his forehead, unspiked today and allowed to fall naturally; it gave him the look of an off-duty punk. ‘No,’ and his voice was soft. ‘That wasn’t agenda. That was something else.’ A sideways look up out from under the hair, his eyes had an almost ‘walled-in’ expression. ‘Never mind. Doesn’t matter.’ Another shove at his cuffs until his palm cupped the chaos symbol.

‘It does to me,’ I said, softly.

He lifted his head. The sun caught the edge of his hair and highlighted the side of his face, so he looked split, half in shadow, half in light. Very Daniel. Never quite sure which side he comes down on. ‘Okay.’ A slow nod. ‘We’ll be professional, get this thing done and then I’ll let you get back to toying with the affections of Mrs Hill’s lovely son, deal?’

‘I am not toying with his affections!’ But he’d done it, done the thing that Dan was best at — twisted the conversation away from the dark, away from pain and panic and into me being infuriated with him. To know Dan was to cultivate a really firm jaw from all the teeth gritting you had to do.

‘If you say so.’ Dark eyebrows lifted. ‘Right, we’re kicking this book into shape, yes? What’s first on the list?’

‘I’ve sort of promised to go down to the local primary school.’

‘Seriously? Primary school? Wow. And there was you never so much as looking in prams when I knew you.’ He kicked his toes against a tussock of grass and gave me ‘wicked eyes’, slightly hooded as though he wasn’t quite sure how I’d take the lightness of his tone.

‘It’s a bit of a long story, but I think I can get a little girl some kudos if I go in and give a talk. Maybe stop some rather nasty kids from picking on her.’

Dan gave his head a quick shake as though flipping away a thought. ‘Okay. Probably not such a bad idea, get yourself a bit of a rep around here, bit of a local base for when the book comes out. You won’t need me to come with you — small children and I don’t really mix well, unless it’s nieces’ and nephews’ parties with cake and some suspicious old bloke dressed as a clown making things out of balloons.’

‘Nieces and nephews?’

‘Four.’

Why hadn’t I known that? ‘You never mentioned them before.’

He shrugged. ‘No. Well. Maybe we kind of screwed up that stage, didn’t we? The whole “taking home to meet the family” thing, what with your family being all spread out around the world, and my lot professional workaholics that think a day off is like admitting failure, well . . .’ He stopped staring down at his feet and gave me a sudden, and very steady, look from tawny eyes that held a hint of a challenge. ‘Not taking any of it back, before you start to wonder,’ he said, his voice very quiet. ‘You and . . . her. I stand by what I said then, Win, what you and Daisy have, it’s not healthy, and that, I promise, is absolutely the last time I shall refer to your sister, okay?’ With a squaring of his shoulders that told me he expected me to retaliate, he took a step back.

‘Fine.’

His surprise manifested in a billowing of coat as his body moved inside it, and he looked as though he was about to say something; a frown flashed across his forehead and vanished behind his eyes.

‘What you think of Daisy, or of me, or the relationship we have doesn’t matter any more, does it?’ I went on. ‘As my editor you said you can work with me, anything else is just . . .’ I threw my hands wide, the pages of my notebook scuttling and riffling like a nest of caffeine-addicted ants. ‘As I said, just strictly professional.’

Another shot of the cuff, another rub of the tattoo. ‘That’s what I’m here for,’ he said, then turned and was gone in a swirl of coat, like a traditional villain making good his escape, walking through the dew-laden grass without looking back. The cool air closed around him as though reclaiming its own and he was lost to sight before he even rounded the church building.

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