by Beth Thomas
‘What the hell was all that about?’ I asked her, once Justin had parallel parked (badly) to gushing praise from Abs (‘Oh well done, Justin, I’ve never seen such a beginner do it as well as that, you’re a natural’ – forget the fact he needed to get the bus to the kerb) and got out.
‘All what?’ she said easily, flipping down the sun visor and checking her appearance in the little mirror. She didn’t do anything to her face, like touch up her lipgloss or rub away mascara smudges like the rest of us have to, she just looked, scrutinised, turned slightly left, slightly right, once more in the centre, and was satisfied.
‘Yeah, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You know exactly what I’m talking about.’ I affected a high breathy voice. ‘“Ooh, Justin, look at your bulging muscles; ooh, Justin, you smell so delicious I could just eat you all up.” You were blatantly flirting with him, Abs! It’s outrageous! He must be all of eighteen!’
‘He’s twenty, Daze – in a couple of months – and stop looking so scandalised. This is me you’re talking to. I know you’re not that innocent, remember?’
She was right about that. Before I moved back in with Mum and Graham three years ago, I used to work in an office, processing food orders for restaurants and cafés. I gave that job up in the end, when being a carer became full time. But I used to be a real flirt-hound, when I had nothing less trivial on my mind. It was something of a hobby for Abby and me. We used to compare notes and swap tips over a glass of wine in the evenings. That is until Tom hove alongside and Abby was forced to give it up. It was like a habit she was trying to quit after that, with the occasional cute nineteen-year-old relapses. But she was with me when I flirted my way into Jamie Powell’s Spider-Man boxer shorts four years earlier. Oh calm down, he was twenty-one, it was all above board. He just had a bit of an obsession with superheroes, it turned out. Well, no, not superheroes. I would have liked that. He could have rescued me from things. Burning buildings, spiders, that kind of affair. What Jamie loved was comics. And action figures. Wanted to peer at me using Superman’s x-ray eyes, which basically consisted of a tiny red dot of light travelling up and down across every inch of my body. It took nearly forty minutes. That one was over before it started.
‘Oh yes, bring that up again. You haven’t mentioned it for at least two weeks, so we were well overdue. But the point is that this lad is your client, which makes it slightly different from me getting it on with the photocopier repair man, I think you’ll agree.’
She inhaled deeply, and sighed. ‘All right, yes, fine, I was flirting with him. So what? I flirt with all of them. It makes them feel strong and confident, so they’re more relaxed about driving. It’s perfect sense.’
I stared at her. She stared back. I raised my eyebrows. She raised hers. I folded my arms. She folded hers. Then unfolded them. Then fiddled with the bottom of her jumper. ‘Plus I get lots more business,’ she said quietly. ‘Word gets around.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I continued to stare at her.
She ran her hands lightly around the steering wheel, and focused intently on the cube of air that was sitting on the bonnet. ‘And he was really fit.’
‘There we go.’
‘Oh so what, Daze? It’s harmless, it doesn’t mean anything, does it? And Tom doesn’t know, and wouldn’t care even if he did ever find out, which he won’t, will he?’
I pressed my lips together and shook my head. Of course I wasn’t going to tell him. My loyalty was, and is, to Abby. Not the Monosyllabic Monolith she lives with. And anyway, she was absolutely right, there was nothing wrong with a bit of harmless flirting. It was harmless.
‘Training plan, Daze,’ Abs says now on the sofa, slapping my shin. I think she meant to pat it affectionately, but my leg muscles are feeling rather tender at the moment, so an ant crawling across my skin feels like someone dropping a chimney on me.
‘Owwww! Be careful, Abs. It all hurts, remember?’
‘Oh, yeah, sorry.’ She removes her hand as if my leg is a sleeping lion. ‘I’m so pleased with what you’ve done this week, you know,’ she goes on, although the tone of her voice suggests that she’s got more to say on the subject.
‘Thanks.’
She nods slowly, staring at the hairs on my knees. It makes me wish I’d shaved them today. They really do need to be shaved at least twice a week, and the last time I did it was November.
‘But I think you need to increase your distance now,’ Abs is saying, still nodding slowly at my knees. She looks up at me and smiles. Ah. It was a joke.
‘Yeah. Ha!’ I grin back at her. Like ten miles a day isn’t enough at this stage!
A small frown appears between her immaculately groomed eyebrows. ‘What’s funny?’
‘You are. Telling me I need to increase my distance.’
The frown deepens. ‘I’m serious, Daze. Three or four miles a day is good, great actually, to go from nothing to that, but you have got to do more. Longer. Maybe spend next week doing seven or eight miles every day – something like that?’
I stare at her. My mouth falls open a little. My eyes widen and start to dry out. I am forced to blink. My head jerks once to the left. ‘Nuh …’ I say, to convey my disbelief at her massive confusion and misunderstanding while explaining to her exactly where she’s mistaken.
She smiles at the same time as continuing to frown. ‘Daze, it’s not that bad, honestly. Seven or eight miles should only take you about two and a half or three hours. Less as you get fitter and faster. And until you get a job of some description, you’ve got all day anyway, haven’t you? We are going to be walking twenty-six miles in five weeks, remember?’
‘Nuh-uh.’
‘You’re being silly …’
‘No, Abs. I’m not. You’ve got it wrong. I’m totally on top of this already. I’ve been doing about ten miles every day this week.’
Her frown disappears at this point and her face takes on the expression of a mum looking at a four-year-old’s appalling attempt at a self-portrait. ‘Ah Daze. No you haven’t. Nothing like it.’
‘Yes I have. I haven’t just been going to the park and back, you know. I’ve been walking round it a couple of times and round all the estates near it, which must have been at least another two or three miles. So when you add that to the going all the way down there and back, which must be at least four miles each way …’
‘Mile and a half.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a mile and a half down to the park. And a mile and a half back. That’s three miles.’
I blink again. It’s because of all the incredulous staring at Abby I’m doing. This is utter nonsense. I look back at her and shake my head. ‘I don’t believe it. You’re just trying to get me to do more by telling me I’ve done less.’
She shakes her head. ‘I’m not. I’m serious. I mean, come on, Daze, Tom works in sports equipment, for Nike’s sake. He owns a pedometer.’
An image pops into my head at this point of Tom’s placid, immobile face, with its closed-mouth half-smile and immaculate blond hair, wobbling backwards and forwards on top of one of those bikes with only one wheel you see clowns on. I start grinning, wondering if he rides round the warehouse on it to save time. I mean, it’s the ideal form of transport for that kind of thing. Both hands are free at all times for holding clipboards and ticking things off lists. Or is it just a hobby of his? Goes out on it at weekends? Maybe there’s a club or something where they can all meet up and wobble about together. Race each other. Oh no, wait. I don’t think that’s a pedometer, actually, is it? Isn’t it called a monobike or something. No. What is it? Unicycle. Yes. So what’s a pedometer then?
‘It measures the distance you’ve walked,’ Abby says at this point, surprising me not at all with her mind-reading capability. Yeah, I know, it is very impressive that she can actually read minds – or maybe just my mind – and leave exactly the right sized gap of silence for me to think about what she said before answering my unspoken question. But I have
seen it before. She looks at me sometimes and somehow just knows what I’m thinking. Unless maybe I show every single thought and idea on my face, and she just reads that. It’s possible, I suppose. Then again, I don’t really see how she could pick up that I was wondering what a pedometer is just from, I don’t know, the way my eyebrows are, or what my mouth is doing.
‘DAISY!’
I jump in my seat with a little yelp. ‘Oh my God, Abby. What?’
‘Pay attention! Seriously, you’ve got to start focusing on what’s going on around you.’
‘I am.’
‘No you’re not. You’re on some kind of constant internal monologue, incessantly debating with yourself about stuff that’s trivial and unrelated to what is actually occurring.’ Her voice softens and she touches her hand to my arm. ‘God, I know you’ve been through a terrible time lately, Daze, and I know you’re drifting and finding it incredibly hard to focus on your life again and connect with the world around you. You’re like a … a delicate little blossom flower that’s dropped from a tree and is now being tossed around in a fast-flowing stream, unable to find your way. It’s …’ She smiles at me sweetly and tips her head on one side. ‘It’s pissing me right off.’
I flinch. ‘Oh.’
‘Yeah.’ She inhales deeply with closed eyes, then lets all the breath out again. ‘I’m telling you for your own good, you know. Because I care about you so much. You do know that, don’t you?’ She pauses while I sit up a bit straighter and open my eyes wider. ‘OK. Now. I know it’s only three miles to the park and back because Tom and I have walked it plenty of times and we’ve measured it. Which means that what you’ve been doing this past week is no more than four miles a day. So you have got to increase the distance.’ She unfolds a piece of paper that I hadn’t noticed she was holding and spreads it out on the sofa. ‘So I’ve worked out this route for you. It’s about eight miles all together, and I want you to do it at least four times next week. Or every day, preferably. I will walk it with you for as long as it takes for you to learn it, OK? Then there’s no danger of you getting lost again.’
Unfair, to say the least. Makes me sound like some kind of child. Or idiot. I smile and nod, but I’m a bit put out, to be honest. And not because she’s patronising me. I’m put out because this week I have actually managed to sustain my first ever sports injury. It’s a massive achievement, and something I never thought I would be capable of, and I’m really proud of myself. It’s been making me feel like a proper athlete – pushing myself too hard, stretching myself to my absolute limits, and beyond, in order to reach my goal. If I had spoken to anyone other than Abby and Tom, they might have said, ‘Why hello there, Daisy, why are you limping?’ And I’d have said, ‘It’s a sports injury. I’ve walked fifty miles over five days.’ And they’d have nodded and said, ‘Wow, a sports injury, you say? You must have been pushing yourself far too hard. And you could have walked to Bluewater from here!’ But of course I haven’t spoken to anyone outside of this flat since I got here. Apart from Wheelbarrow Man, and he doesn’t count. Speaking of which, I have a bit of a confession to make. All this walking I’ve been doing this past week hasn’t entirely been down to the burning desire inside of me to get out there and train my bum off. There has been an ulterior motive. You may have spotted it, actually. I have been marching every which way around the park and its environs the past five days in a desperate attempt to try to avoid seeing that man again. When I finally got back to Abby’s flat the day I saw him, I was horrified when I looked in the bathroom mirror. I was an absolute fright. I had been lost for so long, my hair was a tangled mess, I was caked in mud and leaves, my clothes were torn and ragged, and I had virtually lost the power of speech. I was reduced to communicating in grunts and hand signals. I shudder now when I think about what Wheelbarrow Man must have thought when he saw me. He’s not quite so Taj-Mahal-ish as Tom is; more Machu Picchu, maybe – older and not so gleaming, but interesting to look at and very precisely sculpted – but I’m definitely still just a lump of mud. And on that occasion I was a gauche, incompetent lump of mud that all the other lumps of mud were looking down on and smirking at.
Anyway, in a determined attempt to avoid bumping into him again, I found myself walking until my feet hurt. Which would have been good, except it turns out that my feet start hurting after a total of only about fifteen or twenty miles, spread over five days. It’s humiliating, actually, considering Abby took me back to the sportswear shop where we bought the trainers and made a complaint.
‘Fifty miles, you say?’ Martin had said, holding one of the trainers delicately in his fingers, as if it were made of glass.
I nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. And now my foot is hurting. Quite badly.’
He turned the shoe over in his hands a few times, then gave it back to me with a strange smile that I didn’t get at the time. I just assumed he had a sudden wind pain or something. Now of course I realise that he thought I was lying about the number of miles I’d walked. Probably to impress him. Oh God.
‘There’s nothing wrong with these,’ he’d said, and his tone of voice was different suddenly. Deeper, more manly. As if he’d just stepped out of a 1960s public information film about safety in the kitchen. ‘You just need to build up your muscles and stamina more.’ And in the event of a pan fire, call a big strong man to sort it out for you.
‘So? What do you think?’ Abs says now. She means the training plan.
I nod. ‘Yes, OK, fine. I’ll do it.’
She grins and pats my leg. ‘Of course you will. We start tomorrow.’ She slaps her hands onto her own thighs and starts to get up, then notices my hands flapping and my head shaking. She sits back down again. ‘What?’
‘Tomorrow? Really? But my muscles are all aching and my foot hurts.’
She pulls one of those really sad faces you see people do when they’re generally pretending to be playing a violin. ‘Oh, Daze, of course, I forgot about that. Well don’t worry, you must take it easy for a while. We can start in a week or two, OK?’
I smile gratefully. ‘That would be a lot better. Thanks, Abs.’
‘No problem, sweetheart. You take all the time you need. I’m sure all the people dying of breast cancer will understand totally.’
‘Tomorrow is perfect.’
‘I know.’ She gets up abruptly, then turns to face me. ‘Have you been eating Jaffa Cakes, by the way?’
I shrug nonchalantly and shake my head. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Well, they’re all gone. I only had two, and Tom says he hasn’t had any since last Wednesday.’ This surprises me. I didn’t think Tom could say that many words all at once.
‘Well, I may have had one or two but I don’t think …’
‘Plus I can see that flattened empty box stuffed under the sofa cushion.’
Shit. ‘Ah. Yes. You’re right. Sorry about that.’
She steps nearer and pulls the flat carton out from under me. ‘Daze, if you finish them up, can you at least get some more? It’s the same with the milk. Tom and I would like to enjoy some of our food and drink from time to time, you know.’
‘Yes, yes, I know, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’
She nods. ‘OK,’ and walks to the door as if she’s leaving the room. Then at the last minute she turns, Columbo-style, and says, ‘Oh, there’s just one more thing.’ She reaches behind her and pulls out an envelope that was tucked in her jeans back pocket. ‘The estate agent brought this round yesterday.’ She hands me the envelope – thick and white, with my name and Mum’s address on the front. And then she hits me with something far more devastating than a heavy glass paperweight. ‘It’s from Owen and Lake.’
Mum’s solicitor.
SIX
Daisy Mack
Sometimes, acceptance is just easier. In fact, all the time. Every day, at every possible opportunity. Accept, and find happiness.
Abby Marcus Stop complaining, it looks lovely.
Georgia Ling Aww bless yah un xxx<
br />
Jenny Martin You had a marriage proposal, Daisy??? xxx
Abby thinks I’m talking about my super-duper new haircut. She’s right, annoyingly. I wanted to sound intriguing and deep, so that people would think I was, you know, intriguing and deep, while actually I was just talking about a haircut. Although there are one or two more things it applies to of course. My life in general, to be more specific.
After Abby inadvertently rubbed the hairs on my legs up the wrong way two days ago then frowned at me with her perfectly sculptured eyebrows, I secretly decided it was high time I gave my whole body a bit of a de-fuzz. The local paper had already started running stories about glimpsed sightings of an escaped bear, complete with close-up photos of residents looking concerned, so I knew it was time to dust off the razor and tweezers and put everyone’s minds at ease.
It’s amazing really how smooth legs and shaped eyebrows can make you feel kind of invigorated. I actually felt a bit like I was on the periphery of the human race, rather than out in the field miles from anywhere. I wasn’t back in, but I was approaching the steps to the porch. Maybe it was the fresh air finally touching my bald skin after all these weeks.
After it was done, I took another long look at myself in the mirror in the bathroom and decided that my head hair would also have to go. Or the ends of it would, anyway – this was only about grooming, not aero-dynamics. It was generally up in a ponytail these days, but when down had started to look like a frayed rug: fairly smooth and straight three-quarters of the way down, then the final quarter exploding outwards in an indistinguishable blur of light brown fluff. That part was no longer welcome at the Daisy Macintyre establishment.
