Daisy Darker(56)

I put the card on the little table, said that I needed to sleep, and asked the nurse to pull the flimsy curtain around my hospital bed. Then I tried to pretend that the boy and the rest of the ward weren’t really there. I didn’t like sleeping in a room full of sick strangers, I don’t suppose anyone does. I stared at that Valentine’s card, wondering why the red heart on the front looked absolutely nothing like the heart inside my chest. I’d seen enough posters on enough doctors’ office walls to know it was a very poor likeness. And I wondered how and why this rather ugly internal organ had become the universal symbol for love.

Over the next few days, I asked all of the doctors – who were supposed to be clever – and all of the nurses – who seemed even cleverer than the doctors to me – but nobody seemed able to answer my question. When Nana came to visit, I asked her, because Nana knew everything.

‘You’re far too young to start worrying about love. I suggest you concentrate on getting better,’ she said, pulling the curtain around my hospital bed before perching on the side of it. She was wearing a purple coat with a matching purple hat and gloves, and I could tell from her rosy cheeks that it must have been cold outside. ‘Here,’ she whispered, opening up her huge pink and purple patchwork bag. ‘I brought you a snack.’ The red-and-white tablecloth made another appearance. She laid it across the bed between us, then produced two parcels of takeaway cod and chips wrapped in newspaper. She set the makeshift table with wooden cutlery, sachets of salt and vinegar, and a pot of mushy peas mixed with green Jelly Tots. The memory still makes me smile.

‘Why do you let your sisters treat you the way they do?’ Nana said, dipping a chip in ketchup.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘You need to stand up for yourself, or life will always knock you down.’

I thought she might be right about that. Nana was almost always right about everything. So I decided things would be different with my sisters from that day on Nana was as wise as an owl, she even had a new owl-shaped clock to prove it, so I asked her the question again.

‘Do you know why the heart is a symbol of love?’

‘Well, that is an interesting question and therefore deserves an interesting answer,’ Nana said. ‘The ancient Egyptians thought that the human heart epitomized life, the Greeks believed that it controlled our thoughts and emotions, and the Romans declared that Venus, the goddess of love, set hearts on fire with Cupid’s help. The Romans also believed that there was a vein connecting the fourth finger on the left hand directly to the heart. There isn’t, but that’s why people traditionally wear wedding rings on that finger, even today. In the Middle Ages, Christians agreed that the human heart had something to do with love, and hundreds of years later, the familiar red shape still appears on greetings cards, playing cards, even T-shirts. The heart symbol became a verb in the 1970s, with I Heart New York. Does that answer your question?’

‘I think so. How do you know the answers to everything?’ I asked.

She laughed. ‘I don’t, nobody does! But if I do know more than most, it’s because I read. Books will teach you anything you want to know, and they tend to be more honest than people.’

We finished our fish and chips as the sun was setting outside. Then we read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland together, which has always been one of my most favourite books.

‘Speaking of love . . .’ Nana said. ‘I hope you know how much I love you.’

I grinned. ‘How much?’

She looked out of the hospital window and pointed at the full moon. ‘I love you from here to the moon and back.’

‘I love you from here to the moon and back twice,’ I replied.

It was her turn to smile now. ‘I love you from here to the moon and back three times and once for luck.’

Later that night, when I was alone again and tucked into my hospital bed, I started to wonder if my heart being broken meant that I could never truly love someone. The human heart beats eighty times a minute, one hundred thousand times a day, and about thirty-five million times a year. In an average lifetime, a heart will beat two and a half billion times. Maybe it had something to do with endurance, something which hearts and love have in common?

The second reason I remember that particular hospital stay so well was because my mother cried the next day when she came to visit. It was something she rarely did – the crying part, I mean – and as I watched her talking to a doctor on the other side of a window on my hospital ward, I wished I could lip-read. She never told me what that doctor said, or why it upset her so much.



We all hear the sound of the lounge door creaking open, and I spin around.

Rose looks as startled as we do as she lets go of the handle, the key still in her hand.

‘I just need to pop to the loo,’ she says, as we continue to stare at her.

‘You’re going to go out there again? Alone?’ Lily asks.

‘Yes. Or do I need a hall pass? You told Trixie off for being scared to go to the bathroom earlier. I’m a lot older and I have a gun. There’s no need to worry about me. I’ll be two minutes,’ Rose says, and leaves the room before any of us have time to reply.

‘Conor,’ Lily whispers.

He looks up like a startled meerkat, then whispers himself. ‘What?’

‘Do you think it was a bit strange how quickly Rose knew what was wrong with Trixie? Finding the blood between her toes like that?’