Page 38 of Dear Daisy

‘Wow. Not sure if that counts as dressing up or dressing down.’ He looked at me through wide eyes. ‘Cute, but you’ll freeze and I should know because I am wearing fourteen layers and my reproductive organs have still packed up and flown south.’

I was in pyjamas and an old silk kimono which I’d dragged on over the top. And he was right, I was freezing. ‘I’m not coming. Well, I am, but not with you. I’ll drive over on my own and meet Alex and Scarlet there, there’s no need for you to come.’

Dan put his head on the steering wheel. ‘And no doubt you’re going to say that you’ve got work to do? Because you and I both know that’s bollocks, don’t we?’ Now he raised his head and turned eyes that had lost the wide ‘innocent appeal’ look in favour of a cool heaviness on me. ‘So. You sit here in this, well, it’s got a roof and walls so I’m guessing it’s a house but come on, the Borrowers want their place back, and you . . . what?’

A car, squeezing past on the bit of road Dan had left unencumbered by vehicle, beeped its horn and Dan responded with a raised middle finger, without looking. ‘You trawl through your friends on Facebook, you head onto Twitter to tell everyone what a busy day you’ve got lined up, you drink some coffee . . .’ He stretched across and opened the passenger door. ‘And I’m offering you a ride out into the unknown. Well, unknown with guinea pigs.’

I hopped from bare foot to bare foot and tried to double the wrap around me. ‘I don’t want to go with you, Daniel. I said I’d work with you to get the book finished, not go cruising around the countryside in search of rodents.’

‘We can work in the car. Now, go and put something on that doesn’t make your nipples stick out like two stumps of Blu-Tack when the poster’s fallen down.’ I glanced down, saw that he was right and pulled the kimono even tighter around my chest. He gave me a bright smile and a wink and then nodded towards the front door. ‘Two minutes. Go.’

I wanted to argue, I really did, but he was right, it was freezing standing barefoot on the frosted pavement with nothing but brushed cotton and a layer of silk between me and the increasingly intrusive elements, and I had the horrible idea that if I just slammed back inside and closed the door on him, he’d sit there all day, leaning on the horn and charming his way out of parking tickets. So, blue-fingered, I changed into jeans and jumper and the huge anorak and went back outside, where Daniel was chatting through the open driver’s window to two women who were evidently asking him for directions.

‘So where did you send them?’ I hopped up into the warmth of the passenger seat as he buzzed up the window and waved the women off across the road.

‘No idea,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘I told them I wasn’t local but they just kept asking, so I made it up.’

‘Poor women.’ I looked back through the windscreen.

‘Oh come on! I sent them down to the Tourist Info centre down beside the river — God, you really do think I’m a total twat, don’t you?’ He sounded a bit upset, wrenching the huge car out into the traffic rather harder than I thought it needed to be wrenched.

‘I’m just going on evidence,’ I said, tightly, and kept my eyes on the scenery outside the window. ‘Whose car is this?’

‘Greg’s wife’s. Astra got flattened.’

‘What, left it parked somewhere you shouldn’t, did you? Charisma won’t rescue you from traffic wardens and the clamp brigade, you know.’ He didn’t answer, and eventually I had to look at him. Silence from Dan was like a bee with no buzz. He was just driving, but there was a jerky pull to the gears that gave away some emotion, a resolute straightness to his gaze out along the road. ‘What?’

Now he turned. His jaw was thrust forward, bringing his lips into a tight overbite as though he was clamping them together. ‘Winter.’ His voice was the kind of level you could use to smooth concrete. ‘I am your editor and I am trying to get this book out of you with as little pain as possible for both of us, therefore I hope you will take this comment as a one-off demonstration of my complete and utter fuckitude but you are not the only person in this world, all right? I get that you hurt, I get that you’ve got problems and that your life hasn’t been a bed of kittens, but . . .’ He crossed his wrists on the wheel, rubbing his tattoo on the back of the other hand. ‘My sister Beth borrowed my car and got hit by a lorry. Head-on.’

I felt the horror pull over me like a too-tight jumper. When Dan and I had been . . . well, Dan and I, he’d talked a lot about Beth, so I knew that they’d been the closest of brother-sister combinations. It was down to her refusal to allow him to cruise along at school that had got him his spectacular results, excellent degree and, now, his dream job. Beth had been the only member of his family that he’d told about our relationship. I wished now that I’d had the chance to meet her. ‘God, Dan, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

‘No. Well.’ And then the flip, the ‘alternate universe’ Daniel coming out to play. ‘She’s doing okay, spinal injuries but, well we can hope, you know? And she gets to use this cool chair, it’s like watching Davros coming down the road.’ Banter in his tone but not in his eyes, they continued shaded and self-protecting. ‘So. What’s next after this book, any thoughts?’

I stared down at my feet. I wanted to keep my eyes from looking at him, noticing those long fingers on the gear stick, the way he steered by laying his jutting wrists around the wheel and turning with his forearms. Things about Dan that I used to know and had forgotten, and I wasn’t sure if it was the fact that I had ever known or that I had managed to forget that disturbed me. ‘Not really, no.’

‘Your mum and dad, how are they doing?’

‘Still divorced.’

‘Yeah, I just meant . . . okay.’ He blew out a little whistle between his lips. ‘You are being chuffing hard work at the moment, love, you know that?’

‘Work, Daniel. That is all I want to talk about. This book, in the here and now, nothing else. No “probing questions”, no pretending that you even care about my life, all right?’

He winced at my tone. I’d sounded defensive. ‘Right. Okay. So you’re all about the here and now, are you? The past is, what? Gone? You sure?’

I sighed and turned to look out of the window. ‘Shut up, Dan.’

We fell into silence for a few miles. I could see him reflected in the window I pretended to gaze out of, flicking me occasional quick looks and once looking almost as though he had raised a hand to touch my arm, but drawing it back in time to say, ‘Hey, Yarton, this is us.’ The car lurched as he pulled a tight right-hander and drew us into a car park to a cacophony of barking from a row of kennels. ‘What’s your man driving?’

‘Alex isn’t my man.’ I scanned the parked cars. ‘And I’ve no idea what he drives.’

‘Looks he was giving me, he thinks differently. Maybe you want to watch yourself there, kiddo. Nothing worse than a relationship that one of you thinks is something when the other one thinks it’s a fruit bowl, okay?’

‘And this is about work, is it?’

An angle to the head that made his eyes look bigger, darker. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Could be. Come on, let’s go find them and start sorting that little girl out with a proper pet. I’m guessing that the hobby horse is a transitional object, yes? Mum and Dad separated, Mum left her to “go and find herself”, little girl hanging on to Light Bulb as a reminder. Am I getting warm?’

‘Except Alex is her uncle, her mum is dead, her dad isn’t anywhere on the scene, and Light Bulb is part toy, part weapon . . . yes, you’re spot on.’

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