Page 56 of Dear Daisy

I might have known he couldn’t sit still in a place like this for very long. Striding about, thinking was Dan’s natural state. ‘I’ll come too.’ The smell of the room was beginning to get to me, that institutionally-clean smell of bleach and fake flowers, and I didn’t know what to say to Alex. There wasn’t much I could say, not with his mother in the room. I wanted to tell him that his email was far more understanding than I had any right to, to tell him that friendship was all I could manage these days. But Dan was waiting in the doorway and I had to leave Alex, head back in his hands, to the somewhat more tender care of his mother.

We found a coffee machine on a corridor and Dan started feeding coins into it.

‘Do you think Scarlet will be all right?’ I asked.

‘God, I hope so.’ He handed me the first cup. ‘Milk and sugar all round, I think. Now is really not the time for anyone to be fussy.’

‘You’re being very . . .’ I saw his face as he looked quickly up from the brown liquid streaming into another polystyrene container. He’d dropped some of the capable, in-charge attitude as soon as we’d left Alex and Margaret behind, and now he looked haunted. ‘It must be awful for you, after . . . after what happened to Beth. All this waiting around in hospitals and stuff.’

He left the full cup sitting in the machine and turned around to face me properly. ‘Yeah?’

‘Daisy said . . .’ I stopped speaking. He’d closed his eyes at the mention of my sister.

‘Daisy said, did she?’ He moved in until he stood so close that the fastenings of his coat knocked against my face as he breathed. ‘And what do you think, hey, Winter? What do you think?’

I looked up into those black eyes, slightly hooded as though he was keeping his real thoughts hidden behind them and didn’t want me to suspect what they might be. And suddenly he was not my editor, not the man who’d thrown my love away over the edge of a bridge in the night because he hadn’t liked what I was telling him, he was just an unhappy man. As though all the images I’d kept of him in my head were gone, broken apart by the misery that he couldn’t conceal; I looked into his eyes and through them to the person beyond. ‘I think . . . what happened to your sister affected you more than you know.’

He smiled. ‘Not quite. Nearly, but not quite. Y’see, Win, what it is, what happened to Beth it affected me more than you know.’

‘Very enigmatic, Daniel.’ The cup was hot between my fingers, the smell of synthetic coffee sour in my nose. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what the hell you are on about?’

He stepped back to push more coins into the machine. That look stayed in his eyes though. ‘Can’t. It might just make you . . . well, let’s just say that your sister comes into things, okay? And I don’t . . . look, let’s leave it, hey? I’m not into pushing that rock up the hill again. I’ll wait until we know more about Scarlet and then I’m heading back to London and that will be that, you need never look at me again, unless I’m on the publicity wagon when it wheels you around town, and even then my offensive presence will be well-diluted by all the PR bods and the hangers-on. Okay? We’re done. You get what you wanted.’

I didn’t notice my hands were shaking until spilled coffee burned its way through my sleeve. ‘But what if that’s not what I want any more?’ I half-whispered, the words almost hidden under the background sounds of a hospital working away behind us, unheeded.

The sudden bang made me jump. Dan had kicked the coffee machine, his forehead resting against the coin slot and his shoulders hunched. ‘This isn’t fucking fair!’ He turned around slowly and raised his head and now his eyes weren’t hiding anything, they were letting tears slide out. ‘Don’t,’ he said, softly. ‘Don’t do this.’

‘Don’t do what?’ I was baffled. It felt . . . it felt as though he was leaving despite himself, despite what he wanted. He’d kissed me, he behaved as though he still cared. And yet, when I said that maybe I did want to go back, here he was telling me that he didn’t?

‘We’re still where we were.’ Dan straightened and used the sleeve of his coat to wipe his face. ‘Nothing has changed. I want you, Winter, let’s just put that right up there now, front and centre. I want you like I wanted you before. It’s you, always has been. But I can’t deal with the Daisy thing. Every time it looks like there might be hope, like you’ve let it change you, back it comes again and you’re all “I’ve got to talk to Daisy about this”. Y’see . . .’ Now he was in close again, a cup of steaming liquid in each hand. ‘. . . until you admit you can live without her, I can’t be part of anything with you.’

I stared at him. Underneath the relentless fluorescent lights he stood like a shadow. ‘So, you’re still not prepared to make allowances?’ I said, slowly.

‘I thought I could. But I can’t. I want it to be me, Winter. I want you to turn to me when the going gets tough. I want to have all of you, not just the part that you can spare. I want to be the one you call on, I want you to be able to share how you feel with me, rather than . . . Shit. Let’s get back. This isn’t the time or place.’ And balancing three cups between his hands, he stormed past me and back up the corridor to the waiting area.

Where we were met by Light Bulb, who was propped against the doorframe. Inside, Lucy, who’d evidently brought him from the school, was talking earnestly to Alex, but stopped when we came in, and looked embarrassed.

Dan handed round the coffees and the silence between us all wasn’t only the silence of worry. Lucy and Alex kept looking at one another in a kind of deeply miserable way, while Dan and I avoided looking at each other at all.

There was a shard of pain under my ribs whenever I accidentally found myself looking at him out of the corner of my eye; he’d taken his coat off in the oppressive humidity of the hospital air and rolled the sleeves of his dark shirt to the elbows. His lean frame contrasted with Alex’s hard-work muscles, which seemed to be drawing Lucy’s eye like a magnet to iron.

‘Can we see her?’ I said, finally. ‘I mean, aren’t you supposed to talk to people who . . . and Light Bulb should be in there, for when she wakes up, I mean.’

Margaret sighed. ‘I should think so. We came out because the doctors and nurses were fixing up some machines, but they did say we could sit with her when they were finished.’

Nobody moved. It was as though, if we all stayed here in this room, Scarlet was still just ‘asleep’ and as soon as we had to look at her connected to drips and monitors, what had happened would become real. ‘I’m going to just look in on her,’ I said, finally. ‘Take Light Bulb in. Let her know that Bobso and the babies will be all right while she’s here.’

Everyone stared at me. ‘Sh-she’s unconscious,’ Alex said at last. ‘I d-don’t th-think Bobso m-matters at the m-moment.’

‘Bobso matters to her,’ I said, firmly. ‘And she’ll be worrying.’

‘Shit,’ said Dan, quietly. ‘Win, I don’t think you . . .’

But I didn’t wait to hear the end of what he was saying. I seized Light Bulb around his stick and, carrying him like a floppy, corduroy-headed standard, went in to the room I’d seen Alex and Margaret come out of earlier.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The room was dark and, at first, all I could see was the bed. I took two steps across the squeaky lino floor towards it, saw the equipment surrounding the figure in the bed and all hell erupted.

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