Chapter Twenty-Three
The room was dark and, at first, all I could see was the bed. I took two steps across the squeaky lino floor towards it, saw the equipment surrounding the figure in the bed and all hell erupted.
A screaming noise, inside my head, drowned out the sound of the machines. My sister’s voice, in agony, voices yelling and then I was yelling too, falling into a black spiral that sucked at me and still the voices. Still Daisy’s high-pitched regular shrieking, as though the rhythm of making noise was keeping her anchored, both of us crying.
And then I was lying on the floor. Dan had my head cradled in his hands and was murmuring soft words and rocking. Alex was looming in the half-dark between the door and the bed, and Lucy and Margaret were peering around the frame with their eyes bulging, fear and curiosity forming a fence that stopped them coming any closer.
I stared up into Dan’s eyes but couldn’t speak. My mouth opened but when I tried to form words all there was was the shrieking and crying echoing in my mind and a huge weight shattering my heart from the inside.
‘It’s okay,’ Dan was saying. ‘It’s okay, Winter.’ He carried on rocking.
A thin, high-pitched sound cut through the air like a dentist’s drill. Over and over, broken over breaths that pitched in and out. When Dan’s hand tightened under my head I realised that it was me making the noise, although I couldn’t feel it coming from my throat. Couldn’t feel my body at all, only Dan’s hands.
‘What is it?’ Lucy spoke around the doorframe. ‘Some kind of seizure? Should I fetch a doctor?’
Dan shook his head. His eyes were fixed on my face. ‘No. She’ll be okay, she just needs . . .’
‘Daisy,’ my mouth formed the name, spat it out. ‘Daisy.’
‘That’s her s-sister,’ Alex now, from the chair by the bed. ‘Should w-we get in t-touch with her? I mean, if they’re t-twins maybe s-something has happened to h-her that W-Winter is s-sensing?’
‘We’re too late.’ Dan raised a hand and I saw him rub it over his face. ‘I mean, you’re right, Alex, but it’s not happening now. Winter . . . seeing Scarlet there . . . Winter’s had a flashback. Daisy’s dead. She’s been dead for five years.’
‘No . . .’ I wanted to stand, to hit him, to deny everything he was saying. ‘No, she’s alive, she lives in Australia, she works in fashion, she . . .’ but my mouth and body wouldn’t do it.
‘But there are pictures.’ Margaret sounded stunned.
‘They’re Winter. The one on the fireplace? I took that, on holiday, before I . . . before I found out. She pretends.’ Dan stopped talking.
‘I said that.’ A small voice, faint and faraway. ‘I said that was Winter.’
‘Scarlet?’
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. It felt as though someone had blown my soul open with dynamite and left me paralysed and shocked, bleeding out on this floor. And everyone was clustering around the bed except me and Dan, exclaiming what a fright they’d had, and how did she feel, and she’d broken some bones and so not to move.
Dan picked me up, disentangled me from Light Bulb who had been jutting from underneath my legs all this time, and carried me out into the corridor. I closed my eyes against his shoulder.
By dint of walking down the hallway and kicking at doors until one opened, Dan found an empty room. He carried me inside and then laid me down on what felt like a dentist’s couch. ‘Okay,’ he said, slowly. ‘Okay.’ He sounded as though he was panicking slightly and, through half-closed eyes, I watched him whirl around, rubbing at the back of his neck. ‘Okay,’ he said again. ‘Can you speak?’
My lower jaw felt rigid. ‘What happened?’ My tongue felt artificial in my mouth, forming the words and pushing them out like some kind of manufacturing machine.
‘Pure guesswork here, but I’m thinking . . . what? You saw Scarlet and it threw you back to the last time you saw someone lying in a hospital bed all connected up? I mean, I never really found out the details, y’know, seemed bad taste and your mum just kind of outlined it for me but . . . Christ!’ He passed one hand around under his hair again, as though holding his head on. The other hand cupped his forehead. ‘ Christ. ’
I saw his face crumble, his hand come down to cover his expression as though he was hiding from me.
‘Daisy—’
‘Don’t make me do this, Win.’ Deep breaths; Dan was trying to control himself. ‘Please. It’s that night all over again. I love you, so fucking much, and I can’t watch you doing this, pretending, amnesia, some fugue state, whatever . . . I can’t. It destroys me. Every time you say her name you’re admitting that I’m not enough, that you have to keep that memory in your head to turn to, and I . . .’ A broken noise of a sob interrupted, not allowed to do its job. ‘. . . and I’m nowhere.’
‘She’s my twin sister .’ The fragments that were what my soul had once been were piercing my heart at the sight of him. Gorgeous, chaotic Daniel. Now the chaos was gone. Had wheeled down through entropy into decay.
‘Yeah, and what happened to Beth . . . that’s why I came. That’s what made me realise what you went through, what you were still going through; my sister was so ill, and if anything had happened, if she’d . . . if she’d died, I would have done anything to keep her alive. Anything . And I sat by her bedside and held her hand and I willed her to stay with us. And finally I realised where you’d been coming from. You kept your sister alive, Win, you kept her with you. I saw that, I saw how you kind of sheared off part of who you were, and you put it into Daisy. Twins, yeah? Two parts of the same whole. She was your other half, and you couldn’t let that half go, you didn’t think you could make it on your own so you kept her. And you’re writing books about death and graveyards because you’re trying to give a voice to the dead in every way you can think of because you can’t face the fact that she’s gone.’
He stopped suddenly, as though he’d been talking on a breath that had finally run out. His expression was exactly the same as it had been that night on the bridge, when he’d finally told me that he knew. My thirtieth birthday had been coming up fast, he wanted to organise a big party — friends, family. He’d found my mother’s phone number in my contacts list and called her. Asked her how to get in touch with Daisy.
We’d been walking along the Embankment in the late spring warmth, arms around one another, and I’d looked up at him, my lovely, dark, anarchic Daniel. He’d stopped. Turned against the bridge and said he had something to discuss. I, stupid, romantic in my new feelings for him, had imagined a book conversation or — my heartbeats rising to match my pulse — some kind of commitment. A flat together, a house . . . And then those slow, measured words, spat into the water. She’s been dead all the time you’ve known me.
Daisy and I were at home. She said she didn’t feel well, she’d been off colour for days, we were heading upstairs so I could tuck her up in bed. And then she fell, dropping at my feet like an elegant bird and I was screaming and there were ambulances and hospitals and the long days and nights until there was no more hope.
But Daisy was part of me as I was part of her. I could no more exist without her than I could . . . I could . . .
‘I love her, Dan.’ It felt like hooks were attaching themselves to my insides, dragging them upwards. ‘I love her.’ And here came the grief, the sorrow that I never allowed because it would mean admitting she was truly gone. It poured up through me as though their source lay behind my heart rather than in my head. She’s never gone if I won’t let her be. I can hold her, I know how she thinks, how she speaks, she is me.
‘And what about me, then, hey?’ His voice was so gentle. ‘You chose Daisy that night, Win, and I had to go because I couldn’t bear to watch what you were doing to yourself. You wouldn’t grieve—’
‘You just wanted me to shut up and stop talking about her!’ I yelled through the tears. ‘You didn’t understand.’
Dan came over. Very, very close, so I could see those black eyes, see the compassion that I didn’t want. ‘You have to let her go.’ Now his voice was less gentle and more weighted. ‘I do understand. Honest, I do. But she died. Meningitis is a bitch, Win, it was sudden and you had no time to get used to being without her. I stared down the barrel of losing my sister and I don’t think I could have done it and walked out of that room the same man I went in. You have to let yourself be changed by it. Not forget, never that, Christ, no, you always had a twin sister, but you have to take on board what happened and let yourself move on.’
Let him go again. When Daniel is gone, none of this happened. We can be together, talk like we always did, and he . . .
But he’s told them all now. They all know.
So, you don’t belong here anyway. Go back to London. Or France, yes, go and stay with Mum in France again — loads of potential books in French graveyards; all those war stories.
Except it’s nice here. Quiet and slow moving, it’s easier to think. Not always having to rush from place to place, I can walk by the river when the writing isn’t going so well and the hills are all moorland and stuff and it’s like living in a calendar picture.
Whatever. But they’re all going to feel sorry for you, and do that ‘hushed voice’ thing and treat you very, very carefully and start talking about therapy and counselling and that crap.
But it’s Daniel. The man I fell in love with but had to leave. He’s been in my heart, ever since; remember what happened with Alex, how I couldn’t sleep with him because he wasn’t Dan?
The door banged open. ‘There you are.’ It was Lucy, looking so down-to-earth in her school smock that Light Bulb bobbing in her hand was like a Photoshop blunder. ‘Scarlet is asking for you, Winter.’
I could just run. Find a bus, find a train, leave this place and these people who know. If I can get away, then Daisy is still alive. Surround myself with crowds who never knew.
And then I thought of that little girl. Of her desperation to keep what remained of her mother close to the extent of putting life into that stick-and-fabric horse. Breathing life into the inanimate, because the alternative was too dreadful to contemplate. ‘Yes.’ I struggled to sit up.
Dan didn’t look back. He walked past Lucy, shrugging himself into his coat as he went, without any kind of farewell and, as Lucy and I reached the doorway I saw him walk off down the corridor towards the entrance to the hospital. ‘Dan,’ I tried to shout after him, but my voice was a dry squeak. ‘Dan.’
Lucy gave me a sideways look. She didn’t say anything, but the hand not supporting Light Bulb gave my shoulder a quick rub and her mouth did a kind of straight-line smile. It was all the sympathy I could take right now, and I was curiously grateful for it.
‘I found her, Scarlet.’
The room was brighter now. A nurse was fiddling around, doing something to a drip while Margaret got in the way, and Alex was sitting leaning towards the little girl, who I could now see had one arm in a plastic cast and a sling supporting the other. Her face was almost transparently pale. ‘Hey,’ I said, against the images that were trying to push forward in my head. It’s Scarlet not Daisy. This is nothing to do with that time, this is now.
Everyone turned to look at me and the air thickened with their curiosity and doubt. Dan had just shown me up as not the person they’d thought I was. From being an ordinary, if such a word can ever be used about a writer, everyday person, I’d become something strange. Someone whose thought processes they couldn’t even guess at. But they didn’t matter now. None of it mattered now. ‘Hey,’ I said again. ‘How are you feeling?’
Scarlet’s eyes were on Light Bulb. ‘I was riding, wasn’t I? You saw me, Winter.’
I glanced across and met Alex’s eye. He nodded slightly, but he too was looking inwards. Obviously re-writing his mental image of me, editing all our conversations, checking them over for any clear signs of my insanity.
‘Yep. You were doing a good job too until that horse got over-excited and chucked you off.’ I decided on matter-of-fact. No one could challenge me if I was more straightforward than a Roman road.
‘Will you take me riding?’ Her voice was faint now, her eyes closing. ‘You’re going to get Alex to give me riding lessons, you said.’ Dropping towards sleep, probably induced by the drip towering over her head.
‘I’m not sure I’ll . . .’ I wanted to say it. To tell Scarlet, to tell them all that I was leaving. How could I stay, how could they expect me to stay, now that they all knew about Daisy?
Eyelids traced with pale-blue veins flickered and opened, with effort. ‘You said , Winter. You mustn’t lie, you know.’
Why not? My whole life for the last five years has been built on a lie . . . The thought travelled down through my brain like a nail falling through water. There was a collective weight of eyes on me that almost buckled my knees. ‘You’re right. Of course I’ll take you riding. When you’re better though, you can’t ride with . . .’ I looked her over, there seemed to be wires and tubes coming from all over. ‘. . . until you’re all better.’
Scarlet smiled a smile of such happiness that everyone in the room smiled too, as though it was infectious. ‘Mmmmm,’ she sighed and her eyes finally closed. We were all silent for a moment, until the machine to the left of the bed began blipping a regular heartbeat and it was clear that she’d just gone to sleep.
‘Th-thank you,’ Alex said, quietly.
I tried to smile, failed. Inclined my head, and left the room.
From: [email protected]
Subject: I think you already know
I’ve been so scared, Lu, that I’d lose her. And now, now I nearly did lose her, but you were there, helping me through and I thought — what the hell is wrong with me? Like you’d let them take her just because you and I were an item, like you’d ever let her be second best. I am such a dick. I should never have doubted you and I should never have screwed up what we had, I should have trusted myself and I should have trusted you.
How was I so blind? How could I not see what was right in front of me? And how could you still care for a man who was so unkind to you back when Ellen died?
Al x
From: [email protected]
Subject: Because I’ve always loved you
That’s all. Xx