Daisy Darker(14)

‘Maybe Trixie woke up?’ whispers my mother.

‘And went for a walk outside in the rain? I don’t think so,’ Lily replies.

I think we all know that it isn’t my niece we can hear out in the hall.

Every member of my family stares at the closed kitchen door in horror, as the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the hallway gets closer. There is a collective holding of breath when the door handle slowly starts to turn.





Eight



30 October 10 p.m.

eight hours until low tide

Dad leans back in his chair, Nancy gasps, and Lily swears as the door bursts open. The candles on the table flicker, casting an eerie pattern over all the faces sitting around it, and only Rose keeps her wits on a tight leash as a man appears in the doorway. He is backlit from the light in the hall, and it takes a few seconds for me to recognize the shape of who is casting a new shadow over the evening.

Conor steps into the kitchen. The man I have secretly loved since he was a boy has been a stranger for too long. I’ve spent a lot of my life in love’s waiting room, not being noticed by those I want to see me. Other people seem to find it all so easy – Lily has never had any problems attracting attention from the opposite sex – but I’ve always been a little awkward in that way. I never know what to say or do when I like someone, so I tend to say and do nothing at all. Still, nobody here would have approved of me having a relationship with Conor. Not then, not now, not ever. I’m about to say something, I think we all are, but Nana beats us to it.

‘Conor, welcome. I didn’t know whether you’d come.’

‘You invited him?’ asks my mother.

‘Conor might not be a Darker, but he is part of this family,’ says Nana.

‘That depends on your point of view,’ says Dad, staring down at the table.

Conor ignores the comment. ‘I tried to call, to let you know that I was running late – I got stuck at work – but there seems to be a problem with your phone.’

‘There is. It kept ringing, so she had it cut off,’ Lily says, taking another large gulp of champagne, as though it were lemonade.

‘Well, I wanted to be here,’ he says.

Nana’s face is lit up like a Christmas tree. She always adored Conor, just like all the women in this family have at one point or another. The man I see now in the doorway – looking a little lost – reminds me of the boy he was when we first met. There are some memories we can never outrun.



It was a hot summer’s day when we all first saw nine-year-old Conor Kennedy with his bucket and spade. He was sitting alone, on what we had come to think of as our beach, just opposite Seaglass. It was as though he were trespassing. Blacksand Bay is a public part of the coastline, but nobody ever visits this particular stretch of black sand. It is too difficult to get to without scrambling down the cliff, and there are plenty of signs about the dangers of swimming in the sea. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but something at first sight happened to the women in my family that day. All of us.

I was four, Lily was eight, and Rose was nine. We lived in a world of our own during those childhood summers at Seaglass, while my father was busy touring the real one. Nancy would drop us off in July and reappear in August, leaving us alone with Nana for the weeks in between. On the rare occasions we dared to ask where our mother went when she left us, the answer was always the same: somewhere else. My sisters missed her more than I did. But then I’ve always loved Seaglass, it’s the only place that has ever really felt like home.

Strangers were a strange sight in Blacksand Bay. We all stopped and stared that day, including Nana, at this perfect-looking boy sitting on our beach. So out of place, he seemed to fit right in. Lily was the first one to speak, as usual. It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but it was the question we all wanted to ask.

‘Who are you?’

The boy glanced in our direction, looking unimpressed. ‘What’s it to you?’

Lily’s hands formed fists and found their way to her hips. ‘We live here.’

Conor looked the same age as Rose but acted a lot older. He stood up, dusted the sand from his hands and copied Lily’s stance. ‘Yeah? Well, I live here too.’

He took a yo-yo from his pocket and started playing with it, without taking his eyes off us.

Things get a little hazy after that. Sometimes our memories reframe themselves.

Nana bridged the gap between herself and the boy, leaving us behind. She’d seen the bruises on his neck, the shadows beneath his eyes – the details only age teaches you to translate. She asked him where he lived, and he explained that he and his father had just moved into a cottage along the coast.

‘What about your mother?’ she asked.

Nine-year-old Conor stared at her, and the yo-yo went down and up several more times while he decided how to answer. ‘I don’t have a mother anymore.’

‘Our parents are away all the time too,’ said Lily, misunderstanding.

Nana invited Conor to come across the causeway and have lemonade with us, she wanted to call his father to tell him that the boy was safe. Things didn’t used to be how they are now; children didn’t know they might need to worry about an adult offering them a cold drink on a hot day. Conor said yes. Sometimes I wish he’d said no. I remember him walking across the causeway with us for the first time, still yo-yoing as though his little life depended on it. He was officially the most fascinating creature four-year-old me had ever seen.