Page 46 of Dear Daisy

Remember when I was home last time, what you said about Winter and the books? And I didn’t want to listen? Hate to say it, kiddo, but it looks as if you might have been right all along. Guess I just didn’t want to look at it like that. But I think we might be getting somewhere with the new one. She’s pulled a bit of a turnaround on me and now she’s promising that she’s going to come in on time with it. Everything else between us has gone to hell, she gets all kinda jumpy when I’m around like she can hardly bear to look at me now. And every time she moves away from me, every time she refuses to see what’s in front of her, it’s like just another kick in the teeth for me.

I’m going to see this one through and then call it a day. Sorry, kid, I know you wanted this to work, I know you thought that Winter and I were going to be some kind of modern-day Tristan and Isolde, but it’s never going to be like that with us again. Too much is broken and I can only stand so much. Reckon I’ve had enough now.

See you soon

Danny Boy

Chapter Nineteen

‘There’s something that worries me slightly in the stone erected over Thomas Parris, sheepherder of the district of Fryupdale. It isn’t the lettering, which is a pleasing italic style, giving his last resting place a sort of ‘handwritten’ look. It’s the fact that his stone says merely ‘near this place lieth the remains of Thomas Parris who departed this life on the twenty-eighth of February, 1818, in his seventieth year’. Near this place? Couldn’t they remember where they put him?’ — BOOK OF THE DEAD 2

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From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Thanks

Thanks a lot for talking sense into me yet again. You’re a star.

Al x

Alex Hill @AlexHillStone

@WinterGAuthor Got a message for you from school. Why not pop round? Bobso has a surprise.

WinterGregory @WinterGAuthor

@AlexHillStone Sounds intriguing. #Amwriting but could come tonight?

Alex Hill @AlexHillStone

@WinterGAuthor That’s fine. Come after nine and have some food.

WinterGregory @WinterGAuthor

@AlexHillStone Lovely, see you then.

Matt Simons @MattyS

@AlexHillStone @WinterGAuthor Have a nice time, you two!

Alex Hill @AlexHillStone

@MattyS Shut up #sarcasmlowestformofwit

It wasn’t just wanting to show Dan I could do it without him. Neither was it the realisation that I’d come to that I really wanted to write this book, to let people know about all those who were lying almost forgotten in churchyards across this area. It was more like a re-emergence of a passion that I’d used to have, a bit like falling in love all over again with a man and remembering what it was I’d used to love about him. The words, once I sat down at the laptop, just kept flowing out of me, as though something had dammed them up and they’d been swirling around in a backwash of lost plots but were now rushing over the barrier and carrying all the detritus with them.

I didn’t even make a coffee. Dan’s crack about ‘self-medication’, whatever he’d meant by that, had stung and I wanted to demonstrate, even to myself, that I could work without it. So, fuelled by nothing but a packet of slightly soggy biscuits and half a bar of chocolate that I found doing duty as a bookmark, I positioned myself in the light which managed to ooze its way in through the window and wrote for the whole day.

When I looked up from the screen, eyes itching and my fingers tired, I was surprised to find that it was almost dark. I’d been assuming that the gradual closing in of the light had been my eyes focussing so hard on the laptop that my pupils had somehow frozen.

‘I’m off to see Alex,’ I announced to Daisy. ‘For a meal.’

‘Uh huh.’ She sounded distracted, as though she wasn’t really listening. ‘So, you’ve given our Daniel his marching orders, have you? Does he know he’s “outta here”?’

‘I think he can infer it from context.’ I felt different too. Lighter. As though the words had been weighing me down and getting them out of my head had been enough to allow my body to rise from whichever depths the arrival of Dan had forced them to.

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