Daisy Darker(86)

It still feels as though I am falling, again and again, and nobody is ever going to catch me.

‘Can anyone else see me?’ I ask.

‘No. Except Poppins the dog! She can see and hear you too. I bet she ran out to greet you when you arrived at Seaglass yesterday! People seem to see you just before they die. Like the residents in the care home you visit – I know how much you like to comfort them in their last few moments – but there have been other instances. You visited the hospital once, and sat talking to a little girl who had been in a car accident. Her parents were killed in the crash, she was in a critical condition, and you stayed with her until it was time for her to . . . leave. But seeing children die made you too sad, so maybe that’s why you only visit the elderly these days. We both know that Rose saw you downstairs, briefly, just before she . . . passed away.’ Something like remorse makes itself at home on Trixie’s face. ‘I told my mum when I first started seeing you, and she got super cross about it. She didn’t believe me and said she never wanted to hear me say your name again. That’s why she tipped the Scrabble board on the floor last night, because she was scared that I was playing with you. Sometimes if she heard me talking to you, I would pretend that you were an imaginary friend. She was more comfortable with that than the idea of me talking to her dead sister. The one she threw off a cliff.’

I know what she’s telling me is true. All the times my family ignored what I said this weekend were because they couldn’t hear me. Nobody hugged me when they arrived because they couldn’t see me. My family has treated me like a ghost for years because I am one. Clarity comes like one of the waves I can hear outside Seaglass, crashing all around me, over me and into me, before knocking me down. The lucidity of the moment cannot be ignored or forgotten. I believe it, but still can’t quite accept what happened then, or has happened now.

‘But why did you kill them? I don’t understand why you would do such a terrible thing? You’ve been crying all night, as though you were as scared as the rest of us!’

‘I was scared and I did cry. What I did tonight was truly horrible, so of course it upset me. I’m not a monster.’ Trixie stares at the floor. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I really thought you’d figure it out once you saw the Scrabble letters stuck to the VHS tapes: WATCH ME, HEAR ME, NOTICE ME, SEE ME. Those are all the things you wanted your family to do since you died. But even before you died, they didn’t really see you. And Scrabble was a game we always played together, so I thought you might guess it was me. Try not to be too sad about all of this, Aunty Daisy. Some people are ghosts before they are dead.’

I stare at her and notice the open suitcase on the bed again. There are some things inside that I couldn’t see before: a reel of red ribbon, some Scrabble letters – including a square B made from sea glass and wood – the missing B piano key, a handkerchief with the letter B stitched onto it, a bumblebee necklace, and some pages torn from my mother’s The Observer’s Book of Wild Flowers: buttercups, bellflowers and bluebells. I understand now that B is for Beatrice, Trixie’s full name. She was leaving clues the whole time, as though she wanted someone to know that it was her. Maybe she wanted someone to stop her.

‘What’s that?’ I ask, seeing something else in the suitcase.

‘This book?’ she replies, picking up a battered-looking old novel. ‘It’s And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, one of my favourites. Would you like to borrow it?’

‘No. And I meant the sheets of paper with all of our names on.’

Trixie smiles. ‘Poems. About each member of the family. Like the one written in chalk on the kitchen wall last night, I wrote that too. Did you like it? I’ve written one about everyone except you. I even wrote a poem about myself as a little red herring! But I decided not to share them in the end. Would you like to read them?’

I feel as though I am staring at a monster and have to look away, but she still takes the sheets of paper and lays them out on the bed for me to see. Each page is a poem about a member of the family. I don’t want to read them, but can’t seem to stop myself.

‘You said you had help. Who?’ I ask.

‘I did say that. Come on, let’s put you out of your misery.’

I follow her in stunned silence as she hurries down the staircase. But I hesitate when she walks past the cupboard beneath the stairs. The door is closed again, and Rose’s body has disappeared from the hallway. I’m not as good at herding my thoughts as I used to be, they tend to come and go as they please. But the ones inside my head right now are loud, and clear, and frightening. I follow Trixie into the kitchen.

Only a moment ago, I believed that the rest of my family were all dead.

But now one of them is sitting at the table, smiling at me.

Once again, it feels like I am falling.

‘Hello, Daisy.’





Forty-nine



31 October 6:45 a.m.

low tide

‘Hello, Daisy,’ Nana says, with a smile I spent my whole life trusting.

It takes a while for me to think of anything to say, and even when I do, it isn’t terribly articulate. ‘I don’t understand what is happening.’

‘Nana can’t see or hear you. Do you want me to tell her what you said?’ Trixie offers.

‘Yes. I’d like you to ask Nana if she has completely lost her bloody mind.’