Page 60 of Dear Daisy

He grinned again and the feeling that I was tiptoeing along on drawing-pin tips finally left. He wasn’t going to mention the whole Daisy thing, he was content to just let it be ‘one of those things’. He didn’t seem to regard me as being one step away from the psych ward, and he was prepared to let me see Scarlet. And he was right, I should say goodbye properly, it wasn’t Scarlet’s fault that I couldn’t stay here any more.

No, it’s Dan’s fault. But Dan is gone. Over. If you’d had any doubt about that, then the way he walked off in the hospital, the way he blew your life apart in front of everyone who cared about you should have told you that.

He said he loved you and he walked away.

* * *

Scarlet was sprawled across the sofa, clearly wrestling ‘taking things easy’ into the ground. She’d got a set of model ponies spread out on the cover and was having a showjumping competition with them when we came in. Light Bulb, wearing a fabric rug that looked as if it had once been a dog-coat, was propped against one arm. His expression was now a re-stitched grin that looked as though he’d been at the vodka.

‘A-nother visitor, Scarl.’ Alex ushered me in. ‘All the g-irls from school h-ave been round, it’s been like P-iccadilly Circus. Or a T-opshop sponsored One D-irection fan f-est.’

‘Winter! You came!’ Scarlet leaped up but sat back down at a look from Alex. Her near-miss with death had clearly given her a temporary appreciation for discipline. ‘Did you see Bobso? Is she all right? Are the babies all right?’

‘Alex and I looked in on her on the way.’ I perched on the sofa arm, a wary distance from Light Bulb. Falling on top of him in the hospital had given me some interestingly BDSM-style bruises on both legs which were only slowly fading. ‘They’re all fine.’

‘I’m g-oing down to make c-offee,’ Alex said. ‘And to t-ell the guys to s-stand down from l-istening out for you, S-carl. Back in a m-inute.’

Scarlet waved a plastic-coated arm. ‘I broke my wrist,’ she said, when I looked at it. ‘And my collarbone, and my ankle.’ The cast was a mass of scribbles, pictures and get well messages written in glittery ink. ‘No one else at school has ever broken so many bones.’ There was a note of satisfied pride in her voice.

‘Did anyone get into trouble?’ I asked. ‘Those girls who were bullying you?’

Scarlet bit her lip and her fingers fiddled with a plastic Shetland. ‘Shari said Mr Moore made them all go in his office and told them all I could of died. Emily Goodyear and Marissa Cheam cried, Shari said. I think Shari cried too, but she wouldn’t say that, ’cos Shari is cool. Then they all came here and brought me chocolate and crayons and wrote on my casts.’ A sudden broad smile. ‘Emily said it was like magic that I didn’t die. And Shari is my friend now, we’re going to do riding lessons when I’m better, Alex says. Shari’s got a pony called Dylan, but he was her sister’s, so she has to learn to ride him properly, and I can ride him too, Shari says.’

I’d forgotten that, about primary school. I’d got so used to grown-up life, where you could just walk away from people you disagreed with; I could hardly remember what it was like to have to shrug off those slights and squabbles and then clean-slate your way into the future. ‘Well, I’m glad it turned out for the best,’ I said, moving a couple of equine outliers so that I could sit next to her, careful to avoid her equally-decorated ankle cast.

‘I pretend that Mummy lives in my cupboard with Light Bulb.’ Scarlet was looking back down at the plastic ponies on the coverlet, changing the subject with the ease of a child for whom all subjects are equal. ‘Grandma and Alex and Lucy all told me not to talk to you about Daisy, but I think that’s wrong. Like they don’t let me talk about Mummy in case it upsets me, so I didn’t tell them that I play games with her when I’m supposed to be in bed.’ Now those grey, shrewd eyes met mine. ‘It helps, doesn’t it?’

My mouth twisted disobediently. ‘Nothing really helps,’ I whispered, fighting those hooks trying to pull emotion out of me. They stopped tugging for a moment, but when Scarlet looped her cast arm round the back of my neck, they gave one last, sudden jerk and everything came up at once, tears like sickness, welling in my throat and then pouring from my eyes, my mouth, driven by sobs that sounded like dry heaves.

Scarlet sat, half on my lap, resting her head against mine. She cried too, for a few minutes, but then stopped, seemingly impressed by the sheer longevity of my tears. I felt guilty, crying like this in front of a child, in front of anyone, usually my emotions were reserved for private occasions. Me, alone, supporting the weight of the loss of my sister. There was something curiously cathartic in having an audience.

Finally I reached the point of blankness, where there were no more tears and I’d stopped feeling. I’d cried my way beyond the pain for the first time, and there was a strange relief in its cessation. I’d got so used to that sensation that I was only half a person, that I was flapping about on the end of some balance whose counterweight had gone, its leaving was like losing five stone from my heart overnight.

Scarlet mopped at my face with a corner of her duvet and gave me a little birdlike kiss on the cheek. ‘You’ve got snot all up your eyebrows,’ she observed.

‘Thanks,’ I sniffed and furtively tried to do some damage limitation with the edge of the cover.

‘Daniel said you never cried.’ Another simple observation. ‘About your sister.’

‘He was right. I didn’t cry at first because Mum and Dad . . . they were so devastated and I guess I was in shock. And then . . . then she was here.’ I tapped at my chest. ‘I never needed to cry because she was still here.’

Unselfconsciously Scarlet blew her nose on the duvet. ‘I cry all the time about Mummy. I don’t think she’d mind that really, she never told me off for crying before, but I don’t want to feel sad because it used to make her sad when I was sad. I know Mummy’s dead, I mean, we go to her grave and everything, but sometimes I can hear her voice talking to me. And she didn’t mean to die, so I try to be happy.’

I put my arms around Scarlet’s bony body and hugged her, hard enough to make her squeak and turn her injured side away. ‘You could have died too.’

‘But I didn’t. And if I had died, I wouldn’t have known how much everyone missed me, so I’m really glad I didn’t.’

‘You might have done.’ I pushed her sadly chopped fringe out of her eyes. ‘You might have been looking down on us all.’

Scarlet picked up a couple of the model horses. ‘And then I would have been sad that you were all sad, and I couldn’t do anything about it,’ she said, reasonably.

‘You’ve got a point there.’

Alex came back in balancing a pair of mugs. ‘B-bloody machine, s-orry Scarl. Nearly t-ook my head off. Have y-ou two b-een crying?’

Scarlet bounced, within plaster cast limitations. ‘Yes, but it was good crying, not bad crying, wasn’t it, Winter?’

I took the mug that Alex held out to me. His raised eyebrows called for more than a simple ‘thank you’. ‘D’you know, I think it was. Scarlet was telling me about’ — a quick glance from her and I realised that our conversation had been ‘off the parental-figure record’ — ‘things, about losing someone. About them not wanting us to be sad.’

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