by Fiona Neill
And there is the guilt that if I hadn’t faked the note from Rex everything might have turned out so differently. Although some of the weirdness had definitely begun before the Drapers arrived that summer, it was nothing compared to what happened after that day. Everyone blames Dad when in truth it was my fault. I want to go back to old times, before our role reversal, when I was the younger brother who fell over learning to ride my bike and Daisy was the older sister, always waiting to pick me up, brush me down and tell me that everything would be all right. I would walk through fire for Daisy. I have. But I can’t do it again.
I tip my head back and gulp down my beer straight from the bottle so she doesn’t notice the way I keep swallowing my emotion, and check my phone to see if Carlo has messaged. Nothing. I don’t want to be a beg but I need him here as quickly as possible to dilute us. WTFRU? I write. I get nothing back.
‘Where’s Kit?’ I ask, looking for neutral conversation.
Kit is super punctual. He’s someone who always sticks to the plan, and I want him on board to take responsibility for my sister so I can focus on Connie and my coursework. Daisy doesn’t look up. She runs her finger round and round the rim of her glass of wine so that it makes a high-pitched hum. Someone drops a bottle behind the bar and it shatters on the floor. But I’m the one who’s so frazzled that my whole body tenses.
‘On edge?’ she teases, finally catching my eye, and I see a hint of the old Daisy in the way she smiles and enjoys the irony of me being the anxious one. She starts running her finger round the glass again.
‘Please stop that bloody noise.’
She keeps going, faster and faster. I remember counting thirty-one pairs of spinal nerves when we opened up Jean’s spinal column and right now it feels as if someone is running a scalpel up each pair of my own. If we weren’t in a public place I would wrestle Daisy to the ground to make it stop, like I used to when we were little. Instead I grab the glass by the stem and wine sloshes all over our hands.
Daisy appears startled. ‘Sorry. I was miles away.’
She looks at her phone and frowns, and I guess that she’s calculating how long she’s been here and whether she can check up on Mum. And I understand that if I tell her that Mum is fine she will relax and get some time off from her routines. I’ve lived through this a thousand times before. It sounds like a David Bowie song.
‘Kit’s ghosting me,’ she says. ‘We’ve had a huge row.’
‘What?’ This can’t be right.
Kit has been one hundred per cent dedicated to her. He buys her T-shirts with personalized messages; if she says she loves the colour yellow he cooks saffron rice; he bought her a first edition of Howards End when she got the highest mark in her first-year exams. It’s always been too much, not too little, with Kit. Fuck, he’s even been living with my mum to please Daisy. Not that Mum is particularly difficult to live with. It’s just she can’t cook and forgets to do basic domestic stuff like washing clothes.
‘I haven’t heard from him all week.’ She sounds more resigned than upset.
‘What’s happened?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘I do.’ Although it’s not fun, at least it feels vaguely normal to be talking about relationships.
‘Kit has a room in a flat with four other guys in Leytonstone. It’s his turn to have the biggest bedroom for the next four months and he thinks it’s crazy to pay rent to leave it empty. So about a week ago he asked me to move out of Mum’s and in with him.’
‘So, what’s not to love? It’s the logical next step, isn’t it?’
‘I refused.’
‘Why?’ I ask, although I can easily predict the answer.
‘I can’t leave Mum. The timing isn’t right. I told him I’d reconsider after Dad and Lisa get married. Kit got incredibly annoyed with me. He said I obsess about Mum too much and that she seems pretty relaxed about the whole wedding thing. He said he’s serious about our relationship and I’m obviously not and that I’m using the wedding as an excuse.’ She gives a self-defeated shrug.
‘Have you told Mum about any of this?’
‘No, because she would try and stop me from doing all the stuff I need to do to help her and force me to move in with him.’
‘And she’d be right to do that.’
‘I understand I’m not being rational but there’s nothing I can do. It’s out of my hands.’
‘Do you believe I always have your best interests at heart?’ I ask, trying a new tack. Occasionally it’s possible to outmanoeuvre the OCD.
‘Yes.’
I take her by the hand. ‘I think this is one of those times when you have to trust my instincts. Please give it a go, Daisy. Try it for a week, six days if you like. If it doesn’t work out you can always move back in with Mum but that way you’ll have no regrets. I thought Carlo might be a big pain in the arse before I moved in with him but he’s turned out to be a good housemate because he cleans up his shit and listens to cool music.’
I’m trying to make it sound as though the dilemma is all about the usual preoccupations when people move in with each other. Is it too soon? Am I compatible with his flatmates? Do they wash the bath after they’ve used it? But we both know it isn’t.
‘When I said no, Kit told me he wanted a break. He said he’s finding me too distant and doesn’t know what I’m thinking any more, like my mind is never on him. He wondered if I’d met someone else.’
‘Is he aware of his very demanding rival?’
Daisy shakes her head.
‘Have you told him anything?’
‘I can’t. He’ll think I’m mad.’
‘You are mad.’
She smiles, and I shake my head sorrowfully.
‘He’s noticed a few things,’ she says cautiously.
‘Like what?’
‘The Vauxhall thing.’
‘What Vauxhall thing?’ This is a new one.
‘I have to do the magical thinking and say all the stuff if I see a Vauxhall because Lisa has the same car. Vauxhalls have become a trigger.’
I burst out laughing. ‘That is so fucked,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘How do you come up with this stuff?’
‘It’s not me. It’s the illness.’ Daisy manages a small smile. ‘Although it helps to have a good imagination.’
There’s a part of her that still has the insight to kick back against the irrational thinking. If only I could lever it open to help her mount a decent counter-attack. Don’t get involved, the voice says in my head. This is how it all started last time.
‘So what did you tell him?’ I’m genuinely interested because Daisy knows nothing about cars.
‘I said that Vauxhalls are badly designed, have poor acceleration, and crap bodywork. I looked it all up on a car website.’
Now I’m really laughing. Daisy giggles too, which makes me crack up even more. And then we can’t stop. For a moment it feels like old times.
‘I think you should tell him,’ I say.
‘I can’t.’
‘Kit’s such a good guy. He’ll understand.’
‘He noticed about three being a good and safe number, and he’s fine with that. He likes numbers because he writes algorithms, so patterns and sequences don’t faze him. But I can’t tell him why I have to do it.’
‘What if I spoke to him?’
‘No!’
‘Be logical, Daisy. If you tell him and he minds then it shows you probably shouldn’t be together anyway. And if he doesn’t you don’t have a problem any more.’ And I’m off the hook.
‘If I tell him the worries might come true.’
‘You told me last time and nothing happened.’
‘You’re different. You’ve been involved right from the start. And I feel completely safe with you. Look,’ she leans towards me. ‘Imagine if I told him and then something happened to Mum. It’s not worth taking the risk when everything is so finely balanced.’
‘Apart from you.’
‘What?’
; ‘You’re not finely balanced.’
‘Don’t do that thing where you try and use humour to avoid talking about my worries about Mum.’
‘I don’t do that.’
‘You do.’
I lean towards her so that our foreheads are almost touching. ‘Don’t do that thing where you avoid thinking about how much all this affects me,’ I say firmly.
‘It’s a short-term thing, Maxi,’ she says, her tone suddenly gentler. ‘We’re in a state of emergency because of the letter. I’m doing my best to keep an eye on Mum but she could go and see Lisa at any moment.’ She clicks her fingers to demonstrate and even that makes me jump.
‘You understand there’s nothing you can do,’ I say, choosing my words carefully. ‘You can’t control whether Mum goes to see Lisa. Nothing you do will keep her safe.’
‘What do you think she wants to tell her, Max?’
So she’s worried about this too. I do a good impression of nonchalance, although I have a pretty good idea: Lisa is going to tell Mum that I wrote the note pretending to be Rex, because Ava has told her, and Mum will finally realize that Daisy’s illness wasn’t caused by Dad leaving her for Lisa, but by Rex letting her down. Which lets Dad and Lisa off the hook but puts me in the frame. After all, Daisy’s therapist said betrayal could trigger OCD and it was after that day the illness got the upper hand. I wish I could tell Connie everything but I suspect she wouldn’t be that interested. Last time we hooked up, she forgot to ask me a question about myself. When I pointed out her omission, she laughed and said I was being demanding.
‘It might be something completely insignificant,’ I say.
‘If it’s something so important that Lisa can’t die with the secret then it’s going to be something big enough to have a negative impact on Mum. I’m working so hard to keep her safe.’ She pauses. ‘You could help, Max. It worked really well last time.’
I urgently need to change the subject. I remember I have the Kahlil Gibran book with the reading for Dad and Lisa’s wedding in my coat pocket. They dropped it off at my flat on their way to Somerset for the weekend and wanted me to give it to Daisy. I pull it out and it falls open on a dog-eared page where Lisa has marked the four different sections she wants us all to read with fluorescent pen and written our names along the side in her strange swirly scrawl. I am sandwiched between Ava and Daisy.
‘Here,’ I say, pushing it towards Daisy. ‘They want us to practise. You keep the book because I’ll lose it and Lisa will have a shit fit.’
Daisy stares at it but her arms remain rigidly by her sides. ‘I can’t,’ she says.
At first I think she is on a downer about the wedding. I’m not sure if my judgement is off because I’m so pleased Connie has agreed to come with me or if I am caught up in the romanticism of Dad marrying someone who is dying, but I’m not unhappy to read at their wedding. I came to the realization a few years ago that Dad is a pretty selfish human being, and there’s something redeeming about his commitment to Lisa in this awful situation.
‘Come on, Daisy. Marriage is just a piece of paper. Not even Mum minds that much.’ I slide the book along the table towards her and she flinches.
‘It’s not about the wedding.’
‘Is it about seeing Rex again?’ I feel that familiar stab of guilt as I say his name.
‘I’m more worried about seeing Ava than him,’ she says.
‘Lisa wants you to read the first section,’ I tell Daisy. ‘Three verses.’
‘You know they did the same reading when she married Barney.’
‘Mum told me. If it ain’t broke why fix it?’ I joke.
She doesn’t smile. I push the book towards her and she jumps so much when the edge touches her hand that she tips my beer into my lap.
‘Shit,’ I say, standing up as it drips into the bag containing my medical textbooks and a couple of files.
‘I’m so, so, so sorry.’ Daisy tries to mop up the pool of beer with some serviettes.
A couple on the next table eye us warily.
‘I can’t touch it,’ she says desperately.
‘Why?’
‘I can’t touch it because Lisa has touched it, and if I touch anything that she has touched then the anxiety about something bad happening to Mum starts up in my head. Then I’ll need to go through all my routines before the others get here. And that will take hours. It’s all so exhausting. I just want to make it stop but I can’t.’
‘You need to break the anxiety loop. Go with it and eventually it will subside. It’s like swimming out of a rip tide.’
She is rigid with tension. I take her hand.
‘You got rid of it once, Daisy. You can do it again,’ I say. I put the book in my back pocket. ‘I’ll scan the poem and email you a copy.’
‘Once Lisa has gone, all this will stop.’ She says it rhythmically, three times, with a break in the middle in a way that makes me realize it’s one of her special sentences but there is undeniable truth in her analysis. ‘How did she look when you saw her?’
‘Frail. She’s living off juices. I heard them arguing about some quack Lisa is seeing who thinks you can cure cancer by sticking coffee up your arse. So that will speed things up. I reckon she’s got a couple of months. If you can just hold out for eight more weeks then it will all be over.’
‘Are we bad people for wanting a dying person to die quicker?’ Daisy asks quietly.
I remember all those interviews I went through when I was applying to medical school and the ethical dilemmas posed to me to test whether I had the right instincts to make the correct judgement call under pressure. Is wishing one person dead morally wrong if it means saving the lives of three others? I’m including myself alongside Mum and Daisy now. Because if one of us goes down, we all do. Because that’s what happened last time.
I shake my head. ‘Lisa has caused a lot of problems for us, Daisy. We’ve been pretty generous to her over the years, given what she did to Mum. And now she’s causing problems all over again. She’s the one dredging up the past and making Mum revisit the bad times. It isn’t Dad’s fault that Lisa has written the letter. He’d never let her see Mum. He knows how hard it was for her.’
I try not to look back too much because it’s like staring over the edge of the cliff on Mundesley Beach. But I remember once, when Daisy was really bad, and Mum hadn’t slept properly for months because she was up every night trying to persuade her to stop her rituals, I had phoned up Dad in the middle of the night and told him he had to come over to give Mum a break. She was getting no sleep, working long hours during the day, and had lost so much weight that her shoulder blades looked like wings.
The doctor had wanted Daisy to go into a children’s psychiatric unit to get some intensive treatment but the only place available was in Birmingham and Daisy wouldn’t go. By that time Mum was as pale and gaunt as Daisy. It was like the house of the living dead. I kept cooking and cleaning and generally trying to hold it all together but I had school during the day and homework in the evening. We ate a lot of eggs. Hard-boiled. Omelette. Poached. On a rotation because Daisy liked the symmetry and I could buy eggs on the way home from school.
I could tell Dad was shocked because for the first time since he walked out on us he offered to stay for a couple of nights, even though he hadn’t brought any clothes. So he saw how I had to do most of the cooking and Mum’s friend Deborah sometimes came round to help with the washing and the neighbours opposite left meals on our doorstep. By that stage Mum hadn’t gone out at night for over a year. She brought home papers from the hospital and set up her office in Daisy’s bedroom because otherwise Daisy had panic attacks. Often Mum would fall asleep on her bed. Everything fell apart. Everything.
The instant Carlo appears I regret messaging him. Fortunately he is too wrapped up in making an impression on Daisy to read the disappointment on my face. When he takes off his coat I notice he’s wearing one of his tight T-shirts that showcases his six-pack. The smell of aftershave hangs over h
im like a cloud. He is so obvious that I can’t understand why girls don’t see him coming a mile off.
‘Finally I get to meet Maxi’s big sister. I’ve heard a lot about you, Daisy.’
‘Have you?’ asks Daisy, sounding slightly alarmed because I’ve told her nothing about Carlo.
‘No wonder he’s kept you under wraps.’
He shakes her hand and holds it a second too long. Daisy has that bewildered expression that I remember from the last time she was ill. It is when her mind is so consumed by the worries and rituals that everything else fades out of focus. So new situations throw her, which is why she spends more and more time at home in familiar surroundings, where she can tend her anxieties and rituals. Carlo is the opposite of a thoughtful, sensitive person. He doesn’t really see himself in relation to other people because he’s so self-obsessed. And his self-confidence is so boundless it doesn’t occur to him that other people might be riddled with self-doubt. All attributes, I realize, that could be quite useful in the current scenario.
He looks Daisy up and down. I see his eyes flit in a triangle from her breasts to her lips and fight the urge to shove him. I should have warned him if he valued our friendship that my sister was off limits. But then I see that her T-shirt has slid down her right arm revealing an oozing red welt the size of a tangerine just below her collar bone and that Carlo is trying hard to avoid staring at this. No wonder the first doctor she saw misdiagnosed her as a self-harmer. I remember from last time how this sore is like a barometer for her illness. Mum used to monitor it as closely as a newborn baby. Things are worse than I had assumed. The whole area around the point where she taps is red and inflamed and I guess that it’s infected. She needs a dressing and possibly a course of antibiotics. Daisy pulls her T-shirt up and the wound disappears.
I glance over at Carlo and can tell from the way he chews his lower lip that he is probably coming to the same conclusion. I recognize his expression of intent focus from classes.
‘So how do you know my little brother?’ Daisy asks Carlo. She’s trying to make an effort, which makes me feel even more desperate for her.
‘We study together, we live together, we party together, we even share the same dead body,’ says Carlo. ‘It’s all pretty intimate.’ His eyes keep darting towards Daisy’s shoulder but her T-shirt doesn’t shift.
