by Daisy Pearce
He spits, a white foam bubbling at the corners of his mouth. He smells like spoiled meat and his hand is flexing on the poker. I step a little closer. The room moves around me. I don’t know how much time I have left but not long till I go under. Not long.
‘You were drugging me. I lost my mind. It’s called gaslighting, the things that you do. Did you know that?’
‘They were dragging you down, Katie. All those monstrous friends, that boring little life you had. You should be thanking me. You should be on your knees thanking me.’
I am close enough now to see that one of his eyes is filled with blood. I squeeze the glass in my palm to remind myself. This is who he is, this pain.
‘What did you do with my parents’ wedding rings?’
‘In the canal they went. It’s not healthy to hold on to sentimental things. You, you should know that.’ He wipes his lips and his ghastly red eye fixes on me. ‘I’m going to knock that gap back into your teeth. Stand back, honey. This is going to hurt a lot.’
He is lifting the poker, and I turn to run, tripping over the stupid ruffled skirts, sending myself sprawling. I roll, amazed at my agility, and he brings the poker down, splintering the floorboards. I know what I have to do. I have to get him outside. I have to stay together long enough to get him onto the cliff and then Ellie will help me. I start to crawl and I hear him behind me, coming forward, the rush of air as he lifts that poker, and so I pull myself beneath the dining table, hear the crash overhead as something breaks, the fruit bowl perhaps, a thud as the strike leaves a long gash in the beautiful polished oak. The back door is open, and even though I am floaty, floaty, I scramble towards it stiff-legged on all fours like a bear. Outside the mist has thickened to a dense, glittering fog. I can hear Marco behind me, the crash of an overturned chair, I can’t believe how fast he is after losing all that blood. It’s the madness, boiling in him, galvanising him.
I push through the back door and hear the frame fracture as he swings the poker sideways into it, missing me by a hair. The coolness of the outside wakes me immediately, and I run into the curtain of mist without looking back, hoping he can hear my footsteps. He mustn’t lose me. If he does, then he will just go back to the house and wait for the mist to clear. I will collapse on the clifftop if I’m lucky, maybe ten, fifteen minutes from now. He will drag me back before nightfall. So he has to be able to see me. He has to be close.
I turn around, see him struggling with the poker, which is embedded in the plaster. He finally jerks it free and turns, squinting into the gloom. I move, and he spots me, lurching forward, face twisted into a sneer.
‘Marco!’ I call him and he walks forward, slashing at the fog with the poker, the whicking sound it makes flat and horrible. His breathing is ragged, focused. I call him again, a little ahead of him, and to my shock and surprise he runs, almost grabs me, appearing out of the grey like a phantom. I pitch at the last minute, turning sharply, the glass grinding into my palm, my throat tight. All the sounds are like underwater, seven minutes, maybe less, and I will be so unsteady I will need to hide. I stumble along the cliff path, trying to be careful, trying to be fast. I hear him behind me, clumsy, spitting, and the whick, whick, whick of the poker as though he might get lucky.
‘Marco!’
I have moved a little to the right, a little too far from the path, and now I realise I am dangerously close to the edge. I try to move further along and I see him, shadowy and bent over, coming towards me when I have nowhere to back in to. Behind me, the drop and the Atlantic. I can hear the deep booming of the waves in the caves below. For a moment my world balloons horribly, throwing me off balance.
‘Marco!’
He spins on his heel, listening. That was not my voice. Was it? It was another woman.
‘Marco!’
Now it is slightly behind us, back the way we have come. Someone with a thin, lonely voice calling to him.
‘Marco! Over here!’
He staggers off and slowly, I follow. We are both responding to her words, but I know something he doesn’t. The direction of her voice is where the cliff ends. I wonder if Marco knows that. I hope not. Whick. Whick.
‘High-handed little bitch,’ he growls.
Whick, whick.
Then, again, ‘Marco!’
Laughing, merry. It infuriates him. He moves faster, heading down the slope where the wild grass and gorse grow thickest. I can just see him there in the gloom but I daren’t go any further. I know how deep that drop is.
‘Marc-oh.’ He has become a thin sketch, a shadow figure. I cup my hands together and blow on them. It is very cold up here and the light is bad. Marco has stopped moving, seems suddenly unsure of himself. Perhaps he can hear the sea just below him, sense that vast emptiness. If the fall doesn’t kill you the cold will. Good. I hope it is miserable and lingering. There is someone else there too, moving towards him. Another figure in the dark. She is very close to him now, and he sees her. I hear his voice just barely. I think he is saying, ‘Not you, not you’, and then he moves as if to run, pinwheels his arms as the ground gives way, crumbling. I am glad I do not see his face as he falls.
Epilogue
The sky is overcast, threatening rain. Although it is not yet late afternoon the day is darkening, and many of the cars already have their headlights on. I am walking towards Abney Park Cemetery near Stoke Newington. It’s where Carmel grew up and where we used to come when we were teenage Goths, drinking snakebite and black and smoking Embassy down to the filters. She was cremated, but we planted a tree here, her mother and I. It’s a rowan tree, said to protect against evil.
I pass someone, and they do a double take. It happens a lot, even now, although it’s nothing to do with Marigold! anymore. It’s the story they printed in the papers. Afterwards.
It is nearly two years since Marco went missing. A patch of his blood was found very close to the cliff edge and less than a foot away they found one of his shoes. Italian, hand-stitched leather. What a waste.
By the time I got back to the cottage that day I could barely stand. My dress was trailing on the ground behind me, my wig lost, my nails split and torn. As I pushed open the back door I saw a figure in the kitchen and staggered, sure it was somehow Marco, with those pills and a cigarette and that poker in his hand, whick, whick.
But it wasn’t. It was Frankie. He was leaning on the table, his face grey. When he saw me his jaw fell open and his hands moved as if to catch me.
‘I thought you were dead,’ I told him.
‘Stella. Oh my God. Come here.’
I started to walk towards him, but I didn’t make it. I went down, down.
A list of my injuries as reported in the papers: broken nose, dislocated collarbone, soft tissue damage, various abrasions. The level of barbiturates in my system was exaggerated, but not by much. Attempted suicide, the papers said, just like her mother. Tragic.
Carmel’s death was recorded as blunt force trauma. Marco had felled her like a tree, denting the smooth bone of her skull in the process. My wonderful friend, who had lain in a pool of tacky blood as I’d placed her hand in my lap and waited for the police to arrive. They’d found his fingerprints on the doorstop along with traces of Carmel’s blood and strands of her hair.
I spent nine days in hospital and several hours under police interrogation. It was only Alice giving evidence against Marco which means I am no longer under suspicion for murder. Alice calls me now and then. Tells me she thinks of me often. Sometimes we meet for coffee. It is good to have a friend again.
Frankie had a punctured lung and at least two broken ribs, a fractured jaw and elbow as well as scrapes and injuries to the side which bore the brunt of the impact. Later he would tell me that Marco accelerated almost immediately after he got in the car, before he could put on his seatbelt. He still walks with a limp, leaning heavily on his left side. The car almost overturned up the bank before hitting the tree. In the boot of the car police found a hunting knife, cable ties and rope, a bottl
e of ether and wads of gauze. The knife had an eight-inch blade and, I was told later, was used for gutting deer. Any idea why Marco would have these in the car, they asked me. No, I said. No idea.
Except, of course, I did. I’d been so sure he was going to keep me prisoner, that he wanted to preserve me like a little doll, that it hadn’t occurred to me that he was going to kill me. High-handed bitch, he’d called me, and I still thought he’d wanted me to live. A man who, as a boy, had sent those strange little packages to a ten-year-old girl: crushed-out cigarettes, nail clippings, tissues still gummy with semen. All that time. All that time. Talk about a life sentence.
Doctor Wilson was arrested only days later at his home for three counts of practising medicine without a licence; two counts of practice of gynaecological examination without a licence; three counts of forgery; two counts of theft; and three counts of fraudulent use of personal identification information. ‘I deal with a lot of addicts, Stella,’ he’d told me, and in a way I suppose that was true, wasn’t it? He’d been a dealer of sorts. In the cupboard beneath his desk was found a large quantity of opioids and stimulants, mainly morphine. He liked to dabble, and he’s known to have spiked a number of his patients, mostly young women. I’m hoping they too will testify.
Sometimes the fall is more frightening than the impact. That’s what I keep telling myself. Ten months of therapy and a wedding and a funeral and all it took was the phone call I received yesterday morning to shake me to my bones. There is only one person I want to see to share this news with and I have come a long way to see her. The sky in London is flat grey chrome. I am wearing a plain blue dress and I have lost my brittle, fragile shell, cutting my hair short, allowing it to lighten in the summer sun. I have been married a little over a month and the wedding ring still shocks me when I see it on my finger.
Frankie and I were wed in a church in the far south of Cornwall, a long way from Tyrlaze, and even further from Chy an Mor. It was a bright spring morning, bitterly cold with the first few flurries of snow falling amongst the yellow daffodils growing in the churchyard. It was a small ceremony, very informal. I wore yellow and carried primroses in my posy. Aunt Jackie wept in the front pew, her face shiny with happiness. She’d come to see me in the days after Marco’s disappearance, hugging me tightly to her with a jangle of charm bracelets and rosaries.
‘He told me you weren’t coming back,’ she said.
‘I know.’
Martha and James had also sat in the front pew, in the space my parents would have occupied. Baby Oskar had been cradled in Martha’s arms, his skin downy-soft and peach-coloured. Earlier that morning Martha had helped me get ready, smoothing my skin with her beautiful, expensive face serums and dusting me with soft perfume. She had reached into her bag and pulled out a liquid eyeliner – a bright, vibrant blue colour – that I recognised immediately as the one Carmel used to wear.
‘Your “something blue”,’ she had said, her hand only slightly trembling as she’d applied it to the line of my lashes.
I take a right and then another right down a long street of houses stacked like crooked teeth. Deep breath. The London air curdles my lungs. A cat lies on a windowsill watching me, tail switching, half asleep.
I’d taken flowers to the spot on the cliff where she jumped. Ellie. I wonder how it would feel to plummet that far; would there be a lightness, a liberation? Would the air rushing past your ears sound like voices in the dark? I’d closed my eyes and seen the rain dimpling the surface of the water, and Ellie jack-knifing into it like a blade, over and over on a loop. A descending horror, down where the thoughts bury themselves like reclusive creatures of the deep. I had stood until the wind had made my eyes stream and then I walked back the way I had come, up from Tyrlaze, around the coastal path. I did not look over my shoulder. I did not look at Chy an Mor.
I don’t take flowers to Carmel’s tree. I take wine and cigarettes and something bright to hang in it. Neon-pink fishnet, a vivid green taffeta, ribbons in electric blue. In the winter I string fairy lights through the branches. Last year a robin nested in the Y-shaped bough. Her mother had been pleased. They’re said to be good omens, she’d told me. A symbol of dead loved ones. Then she’d hooked her arm through mine and said she would buy me tea in the café in the park. That was then, last time. I’m here alone now. Some nights I wake and think I see someone standing in the corner of our bedroom where the eaves dip the lowest. A shape, slightly blurred. Like moving smoke. I think it may be Carmel, come back to me in the still hours of the night. I jerk awake as though she is standing over me and I can never tell if my heart is beating too fast because I am hopeful or because I am frightened. And so I come here, and I bring her things, and I tell her I am sorry.
I still have her gift, the inscribed bracelet, but I have not been able to bring myself to wear it. I haven’t felt worthy. Not till yesterday. Not till I got the call.
They found his body. After all this time. The phone had rung yesterday morning, startling me from a dreamless sleep. The skeletal remains of Marco Nilsen – a man also known as ‘Uncle’ – had been washed ashore at high tide in a bay thirteen miles away. He was still wearing the remaining shoe. He had been missing his lower jaw and his right hand. I like to think of crabs nesting behind his ribs, barnacles clotting his spine.
I am nearly at Carmel’s tree now. I’ll sit there awhile. The crocuses are bursting through the earth and my silver bracelet winks as it catches the sunlight. It is a good day. A warm day.
I will enjoy this day and all the ones after it.
And I will make scar tissue of my memories.
And I will heal.
I will heal.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe heartfelt thanks to so many people for helping me to write this book.
My agent Catherine Cho at Curtis Brown for her enthusiasm, her ideas and her determination. This would not be happening without you.
To my editor Jane Snelgrove for your boundless belief and the help you’ve given me. Wishing you many great things ahead. Thanks also to Ian Pinder for your patience and assistance and to Hatty for her creativity. Extremely grateful to all at Thomas & Mercer for their hard work!
I am lucky enough to have some wonderful family and friends who supported me while this book was written, in particular my sister Simone Franklin for her insights, my pal OJ Murrell for his patience, Erica Morgan for the loan of the laptop and the shove to get going, Mary Torjussen, a brilliant writer who has been so much help, and of course to Anne Booty, for her friendship and constant, unwavering belief in me. To these original readers, thank you.
Also special mentions to Writers HQ in Brighton, New Writing South and the Literary Consultancy as well as Bill Griffin from Crowdwish, who all helped me keep going. Many, many shout-outs to Pleasant Cafe in Lewes (RIP) for all the coffee and to Amy Murrell for making a photoshoot fun even when I’m dying inside.
To my family, especially my mum and Steve, to Berwyn and Dominic and Simone, I promise I’ll never write about the old days (I will write about the old days). And to my wonderful daughter Poppy, a force of good and happiness in my life. I love you, darling.
Lastly, thanks to Stephen King. I love you, man.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2019 A. Murrell
Daisy Pearce was born in Cornwall and grew up on a smallholding surrounded by hippies. She read Stephen King’s Cujo and The Hamlyn Book of Horror far too young and has been fascinated with the macabre ever since.
She began writing short stories as a teenager and dropped out of a fashion journalism course at university when she realised it wasn’t anywhere near as fun as making stuff up. After spells living in London and Brighton, Daisy had her short story ‘The Black Prince’ published in One Eye Grey magazine. Another short story, ‘The Brook Witch’, was performed on stage at the Small Story Cabaret in Lewes in 2016. She has also written articles about mental health online. In 2015, The Silence won a bursary with The Literary Consultancy, and later that y
ear Daisy also won the Chindi Authors Competition with her short story ‘Worm Food’. Her second novel was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Award.
Daisy currently works in the library at the University of Sussex, where she shelves books and listens to podcasts on true crime and folklore. She lives in Lewes with a one-eyed Siamese cat and a nine-year-old daughter who occasionally needs reminding that ghosts and monsters aren’t real.
Sometimes she almost believes it herself.