Daisy Darker(51)

We dried and pressed the dead flowers between the pages of her Observer’s Book of Wild Flowers that afternoon, drinking home-made lemonade and enjoying the sunshine, and for a little while I think we were almost happy. But it didn’t last.

‘Are all the flowers in Nana’s garden wild?’ I asked.

‘All living things are wild,’ Nancy answered.

‘Even children?’

‘Especially children.’

As she closed the book on the flattened daisies – the least interesting or beautiful of the flowers she picked – I felt as though she’d like to flatten me between the pages of a book too. It’s hard to explain, but it was the first time I truly understood that my mother didn’t really love me. The sea sounded louder, and I remember feeling filled with sorrow, as though the lonely thoughts inside my young head might drown me. I was nothing but a disappointment. A broken promise. She blamed herself for my broken heart, and when she looked at me, all she saw was guilt. In that moment, I understood that my mother loved my sisters, and she loved that garden, but her love for me was not evergreen, or even perennial; it would not grow back. Sad memories hide inside us all like ghosts.

It started the way it always did, a strange sensation in my chest. Then I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, even louder than the waves crashing on the rocks around Seaglass. Nancy sensed something was wrong when she looked at my face.

‘Is it happening again?’ she asked, without saying what.

I nodded. ‘I think so.’

She just stared at me.

‘Is everything all right?’ called Nana from the house.

There was only a brief hesitation, but it was there, before Nancy told her to call an ambulance. By the time she did, I was lying on the grass, my arms hugging my chest, my face pressed against the spot where the dead daisies used to be.

Nana and Nancy carried me across the causeway and up the cliff path wrapped in a blanket, to meet the paramedics on the road. The tide was already coming in, and I was running out of time. My heart stopped just before the ambulance arrived with a defibrillator. I always remember the dying part: the excruciating pain in my chest, the way it felt as though someone was squeezing the air out of my lungs, and the dizzy, light-headed moment just before blacking out. Then an infinite black.

My heart didn’t beat for three minutes, and I don’t remember anything about it. Nothing at all. Sometimes I feel jealous of other people’s near-death stories. For me, despite having died so often, there have never been any white lights or long tunnels, or men with white beards waiting to welcome me at the pearly gates. My experiences were frightfully dull in comparison. I was there and then I wasn’t. But I do remember waking up on an unfamiliar ward; I was in hospital for four weeks the fourth time I died.

Because we were in Cornwall when it happened, there wasn’t time to get me to the children’s hospital in London where I’d been treated so many times before. At first, I was on a ward with all kinds of people – some very old, some very young – with all kinds of problems. The one thing that they had in common was that they all seemed more interested in my health than their own.

It has always fascinated me, how people seem to know so little about how their bodies work. But maybe that’s because their bodies do work, and it is human nature to take things that aren’t broken for granted. I lost count of all the people I had to explain my heart condition to during that stay. Over and over, I had to teach grown adults how their hearts worked and clarify why mine didn’t. People seem to know more about how their phones function than their own bodies. It’s bizarre and makes no sense to me.

The heart is a muscle, cleverly designed to pump blood all around the body and keep you alive. It’s simple and very complicated at the same time. The right side of your heart receives oxygen-poor blood from your veins and pumps it to your lungs, where it picks up oxygen and gets rid of carbon dioxide. The left side of your heart receives oxygen-rich blood from your lungs and pumps it through your arteries to the rest of your body. A septum separates the right and left sides, and the left side has thicker walls because it needs to put the blood under higher pressure. The heart is so strong that this whole process only takes about one minute, so if it stops for any reason, the person it belongs to stops pretty soon after. I find people glaze over when I start talking about atriums, or ventricles, or my problematic aorta, so it’s easier to just say I’ve got a faulty valve.

‘My radiator had one of those,’ a woman on the ward said. I didn’t know how to reply to that, so just nodded and smiled until she shuffled away in her back-to-front hospital gown.

Me being in hospital was like a holiday for my mother. The dark circles beneath her eyes were several shades lighter than before. Every time I almost died, she looked rejuvenated. She was happier and healthier without me in her life, and a little secret part of me hated her for it.

Nana was the only person who came to visit me regularly. She would read me stories, and make up new ones about all the hospital staff. Sometimes I’d wake up and she would be asleep in the chair next to me, holding a book in one hand and my hand in her other. I think that was the first time I knew that Nana loved me the most. More than she loved my sisters – unlike my mother. Though I didn’t understand why.

‘Don’t you mind that I’m broken?’ I asked one day when she came to visit.

She took off her pink and purple coat, sat down on the bed, and smiled. ‘You’re not broken in my eyes, and you shouldn’t see yourself that way either. We are who we think we are, and there is much beauty in imperfection.’