Daisy Darker(31)
Inside the studio, there were three large desks permanently covered in sketch books and drawings, four windows letting in lots of light, endless rows of different watercolour paints, pots full of ink, pens, pencils and brushes, and enormous drawers filled with different coloured paper. There were shelves crammed full of all sorts of paraphernalia that Nana once described as ‘a few of my favourite things’, and there was a huge easel with a white sheet over the top on the day this home movie was filmed. The sheet was hiding Nana’s latest work in progress – she didn’t like anyone to see her work until it was finished. A newspaper once described Nana as the female Quentin Blake. She was furious, and said that they should have called him the male Beatrice Darker.
Nana’s studio was the only room in Seaglass where my sisters were not allowed to look at anything, touch anything, or even venture inside. I was allowed, when it was just Nana and I, and so was Conor, but she never trusted my sisters. Even back then. They both knew and understood the rules, but Lily was never very good at following them. When she got a pair of roller skates for her ninth birthday, all she wanted to do was skate around the house. With all the internal doors open, it was possible to skate from the hall to the lounge, through to the library, then the music room, the kitchen and Nana’s studio in a giant loop, and there was nothing Rose or I could say to persuade her that this was a very bad idea.
As soon as Nana had left that morning to cycle into town for supplies, Lily put on her skates. She insisted that Rose time her skating laps, and film her doing them. It was my job to watch the causeway from my bedroom window upstairs and warn my sisters when Nana returned. Which I fully intended to do. But the sky was extremely blue that day, and the clouds drifting across it made very interesting shapes.
I spotted a cloud pony and a cloud castle, both of which were distracting for a four-year-old with a big imagination. I’d been taught to name a few clouds by Rose, the walking, talking encyclopaedia of the family. There is nothing more calming than a good fluffy white cumulus in a bright blue sky, or the birdlike beauty of cirrus clouds made from tiny ice crystals, or a sky full of thick stratocumulus, because in real life we all contain shades of light and dark. There are as many different kinds of clouds as there are different kinds of people and, like people, they all float and drift as they please, being one thing one minute, transforming into something quite different the next. Unrecognizable in the blink of an eye. The circle of life exists in every aspect of nature, and we all just play our part for as long as the universe decides.
The home movie begins with Rose filming from the hallway as Lily shoots past, skating through every room and singing along to the Fame theme tune at the same time.
‘Is this my best side?’ Lily asked, whooshing by.
‘They’re both as bad as each other,’ ten-year-old Rose replied from behind the camera, and I imagine her smiling to herself.
The video is surprisingly good. Then the star of the show got a little more ambitious and decided to film herself, while skating and singing. Sometimes she aimed the camera down at her feet, and I could see the red-and-white roller skates I remember so well, zooming across the wooden floors. It took her forever to lace up those skates, and Lily was almost as tall as Rose when wearing them. Perhaps that was another reason why she loved them.
The music was so loud that neither of my sisters heard Nana return. The home movie shows Lily’s point of view as she is filming and skating into one end of the studio. The camerawork wobbles when she spots Nana standing at the other end of the room, with her arms and face folded into cross shapes. Then Lily collides with an enormous easel, sending a giant painting crashing to the floor. The film ends on a sideways, ground-level shot, showing puddles of red and blue paint.
Nana marched over and peered down at my sister where she had fallen.
‘Lily Darker, you have a lot to learn. If you must always break the rules in life, you need to understand how to do so without getting caught. Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.’
‘What?’ Lily said, rubbing a bruised knee.
‘Pardon, not what. It’s Shakespeare.’ Nana may as well have said it was Swahili. ‘Look, Lily, I admire your spirit and your ambition to always get your own way in life, but I fear others might find your personality tiresome and petulant when you are older. If you want to be bad and get away with it, you need to be better at pretending to be good. Like the innocent flower they all wish you were. Understand?’
Upstairs, I had just spotted a cloud dragon in the sky outside my bedroom window, and when Lily appeared in the doorway, red-faced and with flaring nostrils, she looked a lot like a dragon and nothing like an innocent flower.
‘You were supposed to be on lookout,’ she hissed. ‘Why must you be such a baby, and when are you going to grow up?’
I reached inside myself for a suitable response but, despite a frantic search, could not find one until the moment had passed and she was no longer there to hear it. There are a lot of things I wish I’d said to my older siblings when I was a child, if only I had been clever enough to think of them at the time. But I just said sorry, like always. Apologies were a bit like Get Out of Jail Free cards in our house.
Lily was banned from roller-skating inside or outside Seaglass for a week, and I got the blame. She didn’t speak to me at all for three days – which was a blessing in some ways – but then Lily did something I have never known her to do before or since: she apologized.