Daisy Darker(59)

‘We didn’t want you to be scared,’ says Lily.

‘Why not? It’s obvious you all are,’ Trixie replies, staring at her mother.

‘If Rose is right, and someone planned to do something to one of us on the hour, every hour, then we’re due another . . . incident,’ says Conor.

‘Well, I make it three-oh-three, so maybe we’re safe now,’ says Lily.

‘Maybe,’ Rose replies, sounding uncertain. She stares at Poppins, who is lying upside down, stretched out in front of the fire. It’s one of the old dog’s favourite spots in the house. Poppins hasn’t moved or made a sound for quite some time. We exchange looks, and then Rose speaks in that special voice she only uses for animals.

‘Poppins?’

The dog doesn’t move.

‘Poppins?’ Rose tries again.

Nothing.

‘Wakey wakey, Poppins,’ says Trixie.

Rose turns a whiter shade of pale when there is still no response.

‘Poppins,’ she tries one last time. ‘Do you want din-dins?’

The dog goes from upside down to up on all fours and wagging her tail in seconds, and we breathe a communal sigh of relief.

‘Thank god,’ says Rose. ‘It’s less than three hours until low tide now. We just have to stay calm, then we can all get out of here. Together.’

Conor starts checking that the doors and windows are locked again, it’s Lily’s turn to pace up and down the room, and Rose sits in Nana’s purple armchair, quietly playing with the ring on her right hand. It’s made of three interlocking bands, of bronze, silver and gold, and was a gift from Nana on Rose’s sixteenth birthday. It’s something that I’ve always been jealous of, like so many of the things my sisters had that I didn’t. I remember that birthday and that year very well. It was 1986.



Nana and Nancy were both wearing aprons – which was a recipe for disaster seeing as Nana didn’t like anyone else in the kitchen when she was cooking. But Nancy insisted on helping with her daughter’s sixteenth birthday cake. Lily – the lover of all things sweet – marched into the room where I had been sitting quietly and stuck her hand into the bowl of chocolate icing, before licking her finger clean. Lily still had short hair, but it had grown into a bob by then, so she looked like a miniature version of our mother.

Rose was allowed to have a sleepover at Seaglass with some of her closest friends for her sixteenth birthday. She would soon be attending a different school, and I think in many ways it was a chance to say goodbye. Things were never quite the same between my sisters after the hair-cutting incident. But Lily was not looking forward to life at boarding school without Rose, and clung to her side that summer like a barnacle. She was our sister’s shadow but was never in it. She followed Rose everywhere, always wanting to be one step ahead. But she couldn’t follow Rose to a school for gifted students because she wasn’t one.

I remember the conversation Nana and Nancy had about my dad, and for the first time I didn’t really care whether he made an appearance or not. He wasn’t there for all of my birthdays.

‘If he said he’ll be here, he’ll be here,’ said Nana, defending her son.

Nancy sighed. ‘Well, it isn’t long before the kids arrive, then the tide will be in, and then he’ll be too late. You can’t be there for one daughter’s birthday and not there for the other. Rose will feel so let down if he’s a no-show again.’

‘Just be patient,’ Nana said. ‘And as for the other one, he’ll be back. Men don’t like being told off; it makes them sulk like the little boys they’re pretending not to be.’

‘All I asked was for Bradley to wipe his feet before trudging in mud from the garden. It’s as though he can’t see the dirt.’ I remember my mother and Conor’s father squabbling about the strangest of things when they were ‘friends’. Being neat and tidy frequently seemed to be high on their list of differences: she was, he wasn’t. Nancy was always tidying things away and putting them in cupboards. Conor’s dad’s inability to remove his muddy gardening boots before stepping inside made her crazier than normal.

‘Daisy!’ Nancy said. ‘Leave the cake mix alone!’

‘Lily stuck her finger in the bowl, why can’t I? And why can’t I stay up for the party? I’m almost eleven,’ said ten-year-old me.

‘Because I said so. Rose wants to have a sleepover with some friends. They’re all a bit older than you, sweetheart. You can stay for the food, then straight up to your room. Nana and I are forbidden from staying downstairs too,’ my mother said. ‘You’ll understand one day.’

I didn’t believe her.

Like all children whose parents get divorced, my sisters and I learned to adapt to our new lives. Rose and Lily learned to love going to boarding school, and soon seemed to resent their long summers back at Seaglass with me. Despite the unpleasantness they unpacked with their bags, I always longed for their return. I missed them. They shared a life that I had little knowledge of, filled with teachers and friends and lessons. I would listen to their stories with little understanding of what they meant. For years I thought that a spelling test was something only trainee witches had to do, to check they had learned their magic spells. I wondered if that’s what my sisters really were: witches. There had been plenty of evidence to suggest I was right. I resented their relationship, and was jealous of their education, and the older I got, the more being left behind bothered me.