Daisy Darker(34)
My mother blamed herself for my broken heart. I have always known that deep down, but never quite understood why. Something she did while pregnant with me perhaps? The doctors said my condition was so rare they still didn’t know what caused it. Nancy spent days sitting by my bedside or in waiting rooms. She tutted and sighed and flicked through the free magazines, looking for competitions to enter. Nancy rarely read anything except a TV guide.
I remember when the doctors said that I was well enough for the whole family to visit. My sisters gave me home-made get-well cards, Nana brought me a bottle of Lucozade, and a box of Quality Street filled with only toffee pennies because they were my favourites. Dad sent ‘all his love’ from a concert hall in Vienna. Apparently there were no flights back to the UK that week. Lily wore a new dress and her very best smile for the occasion. She was the last one to leave my hospital bed, and rushed back over when they were all about to go. Everyone waited in the entrance to the ward while she whispered something in my ear before kissing me on the cheek.
‘Good girl,’ said Nancy, happy that her favourite daughter was trying to make up for what had happened. She has always been a firm believer in fraudulent feelings. She presumed Lily had apologized and didn’t hear what my sister had really said. None of them did, but I’ve never forgotten it:
‘I wish you had drowned.’
Seventeen
31 October 1:45 a.m.
less than five hours until low tide
I was never allowed to go to school once my hidden heart problem was exposed, and life was never allowed to return to normal. For any of us. My parents divorced less than a year later. Some marriages are held hostage by memories of happier times, others are imprisoned by the idea that parenthood can only be performed well in pairs. A dying child seemed to set my parents free from each other. My two older sisters were sent to boarding school; I was more than enough for my mother to look after and they were too much. A groundless guilt consumed her and she wrapped the rest of my childhood in cotton wool, which in turn led to me wrapping myself inside books. Hundreds of them. Reading was one of the few things I was still allowed to do.
Books saved me, and I ran away inside the stories I read as a child. They were the only place where I could run, and swim, and dance without fear of falling and not being able to get back up. Books were full of friends and adventures, whereas my real childhood was cold, and dark, and horribly lonely. I’ve never spoken honestly about it with anybody. Until now. And the only place that felt like home when I was a child was Seaglass. I think that’s why the idea of never coming back here hurts too much. Nana’s little library was my Disneyland, and the books inside it were the paper-shaped rides that let me live, while everyone else was waiting for me to die.
Sometimes people get impatient when they have to wait too long for something.
‘I’ve always felt terrible about what happened that day on the beach, and all the other days when I wasn’t as kind as I could have been,’ says Lily, back in the present, where she can no longer bully me the way she used to. She doesn’t look me in the eye when she says it. I don’t think she can, and I don’t really believe that Lily is sorry at all.
Her words do nothing to blunt my anger, instead they sharpen it into a more dangerous shape, one which will leave a mark. But I bite my tongue, as always, keen to keep the peace. My sisters won’t talk to me because of what happened with Conor a few years ago. It seems so unfair, given all the things they did when I was a child. But saying how I really feel about it all now isn’t going to help fix what got broken then, and there are bigger things to worry about.
Why would someone want us to watch that home movie?
I look at my sisters tonight and see us all exactly the same way we were then. They might be taller, older, have a few more wrinkles, but we are all just children masquerading as the adults we thought we should become. My personality is very similar now to what it was when I was a child. I’m still shy, and quiet, and happiest at home. Rose and Lily haven’t changed very much either; none of us have, not really. There are pockets of sadness in all of our lives, and mine are deep. The diagnosis of my broken heart felt like a death sentence, and five is awfully young to find out that you won’t live forever.
They say that your life flashes before your eyes when you die, so you should make it a life worth watching. But, as someone who has died several times, I don’t think that is true. For me, every time my heart stopped beating, it felt like a delayed train journey through the cruellest moments of my life. The memories didn’t flash, they were slow and painful. It was like travelling through time and space to somewhere dark and cold, to relive my worst mistakes in technicolour misery. Sometimes I could still hear people around me, when my heart stopped. I swear I heard doctors or nurses saying that I was dead on more than one occasion. My parents didn’t believe me back then, but neurologists have since confirmed that the human brain is still active for a period of time after death, and I promise you that it is true. Dead people can hear you, so be careful what you say. I hope it wasn’t too awful for Nana. Or my dad. I hope neither of them heard something they shouldn’t have.
We take death almost as for granted as life. We think we know what to expect because we’ve read a chapter of a book or watched a scene in a film. We no longer seem capable of separating fiction from facts. There is so much that we don’t know we don’t know. It scares me. When you’ve died as often as I have, it’s hard not to become a little preoccupied with it all, and seeing other people take their good health for granted makes me so angry. None of them understand what it’s like for me. How could they? I’m grateful to still be here, but death has been part of my life for so long, I worry about it all of the time. Our future is just our past in the making.