Daisy Does it Herself

by Gracie Player

  Copyright © 2020 Gracie Player

  ISBN: 978-1-9162836-1-9

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  For Errol

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  About the Author

  One

  Bloody British summer. It had been blue skies ahoy when we set out just a few minutes ago. Now the sky was scudding with black clouds and slinging down heavy sheets of rain.

  It had been roasting for weeks, the fierce, clammy hot of a city heatwave. Far from having a cooling effect, the rain seemed to exacerbate the issue, pressing the air down like a steaming towel, smothering all of London in its folds. I blew a strand of sweaty hair off my forehead.

  The air conditioning had not yet kicked in, and the inside of Phil’s Mercedes ran with condensation. All in all, it was pretty hot and steamy in the car—and not in a good way.

  Phil sat beside me in the passenger seat, his lips getting thinner and whiter with each passing moment. A bead of sweat inched out of his hairline and rolled down his face. I flipped the left indicator and took the corner at a sedate pace.

  ‘I honestly don’t know why you’re putting yourself through this, Daisy love,’ Phil said, his handsome face rearranging itself into an expression of concern. ‘You’ve got a perfectly good chauffeur right here.’ He doffed an imaginary cap in my direction.

  ‘I know, babe,’ I said, turning back to concentrate on the road, ‘but I’m determined to pass this time around.’ Three disastrous driving tests in, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, I was starting to doubt I would ever learn to drive.

  I think Phil would have preferred it if I’d given up completely. But when I persisted, he insisted on teaching me himself. To be honest, his need to control everything could be a little wearing. But it’s best to pick your battles, I guess. So here we were.

  ‘Anyway, Ruby said she’ll take me out as well, when she gets back, which should help.’

  Phil made a non-committal harrumphing sound.

  My best friend Ruby was currently finding herself after a particularly nasty breakup. Mainly by boinking her way across Southeast Asia.

  Ruby and I had known each other forever, since the first day of primary school to be exact. Ruby – as kind and empathetic as she was bossy and occasionally thoughtless – had noticed the shy little church mouse that was my five-year-old self, cowering in the corner and decided then and there that that simply would not do. She actually said that, the precocious little diva.

  I can still see her, hand on hip. Pretty face scrunched up into a frown. ‘No babes,’ she said, handing me a tissue. ‘This simply won’t do.’ I took the tissue and blew my nose enthusiastically.

  ‘What do you suggest?’ I’d asked.

  Which led to the first of many scrapes that Ruby was to get me into over the years. And this is how, on my first day of primary school, I got my first trip to the headmaster’s office. And also my first and dearest friend.

  Phil and Ruby had never seen eye to eye. Sometimes I thought Phil was a little jealous of our relationship, which was kind of cute, I guess. Though I hated the tension between the two most important people in my life. But Ruby, well, she’d never been afraid to speak her mind—let’s put it that way. And wonderful as Phil was, accepting criticism had never been his strong suit. Not from Ruby, yours truly, or anybody else. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time he was thoughtful and funny and loving. It was just that he had his pressure points, same as everyone else.

  Up ahead, a flock of umbrellas, presumably with people underneath, swarmed towards the pedestrian crossing. I started to apply the brakes as the traffic lights changed to red. I managed the transition fairly smoothly, switching to first gear without looking down and pulling to a stop only a smidge over the line. ‘Nice,’ Phil said, and I turned and smiled at him, thinking how handsome he looked. Even when he was a hot, sweaty mess.

  I absolutely adored Phil, despite the odd niggle, which was perfectly normal for any couple after years together, two of those cohabiting. I’m sure he harboured a few pet peeves about me too. To give one example, I knew for a fact it drove him mad when I went to the corner shop in my pyjamas. In my defence, they were very nice pyjamas, although the purple pom-pom slippers may have been a bit much. When Phil pointed this out, I swapped them for my Ugg boots. See, our relationship had its compromises, as all the best ones did.

  Seriously though, he was actually pretty great. We met when I was just twenty, living in grotty shared accommodation with four unfriendly strangers and pulling pints in a wine bar up town.

  One evening, this rowdy group of city blokes in pinstripe suits rolled in. Phil made a beeline straight for me. He asked me out that same night and I said yes. To be honest, I got asked out a lot in the wine bar, usually by utter knobheads or gentlemen of the elderly persuasion. I’d gotten pretty adept at brushing them off, egos intact. A hazard of the job.

  But I couldn’t believe that this sophisticated older man, with a plush job and a car and a posh suit, was interested in me. Phil was a bit of a dreamboat (my mother’s words). A rugby player’s build in a Gucci suit. Charm and swagger for days. Anyway, here we were six years later. And I still couldn’t bloody drive.

  I squinted and rubbed a circle on the steamy windscreen with the back of my hand. My hair, I noticed, was doing alarming things. I’d ruthlessly straightened it that morning and one side held dark, glossy and smooth while the other side seemed to have puffed up like a cotton candy ball. I blew at a strand that had stuck to my face and tried to fiddle with the windscreen wipers.

  ‘No, no, silly, like this,�
�� Phil said. ‘Come on now, Goose, we’ve been through this,’ he went on, using the cutesy pet name that I wouldn’t dream of telling him I secretly hated. Like really, really hated.

  ‘Get ready, Daisy,’ Phil said as the lights changed from red to amber. I scrambled for the handbrake, the car jerked forward and we were off. I narrowly avoided ploughing through the centre of a puddle. Unfortunately, I caught it with my rear wheel and a pedestrian looked up in alarm as a mini tidal wave roared up and splattered him with muddy London rain. He jumped back shaking his fist and I mouthed ‘Sorry,’ into the mirror as I sped away. By this point we’d made it as far as the end of the block.

  ‘Time to turn back then?’ I asked cheerfully.

  Phil nodded. ‘I think that would be for the best, Goose,’ he said, patting my leg.

  Two

  Sunday morning. I rolled over and covered my eyes with a groan. My stomach gave a little skip and I wondered for one, long, icky moment if I was going to throw up. To be honest, that seemed like a lot of fuss and effort. I decided against it and reluctantly cranked open my eyes instead.

  Phil’s side of the bed was empty. The freak must have got up early and gone to the gym. I was sort of glad he wasn’t there to see me like this. He was one of those annoying people who could drink as much as they liked and it barely seemed to touch them. Consequently, he had little to no sympathy for mere mortals like me, who only had to sniff a drop of wine to be absolutely hanging the next day.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and rustled around for my slippers. The world lurched for a moment, before deciding it wasn’t going to punish me with too bad of a hangover. I said a little prayer of thanks to the booze gods and tottered off to the bathroom to have a wee and inspect the damage.

  Oh Christ, I still had on my dress from last night. Wrapped around my neck to be precise. I must have tried to take it off before stumbling into bed and gotten myself tangled up in it.

  Just how drunk was I?

  ‘Daisy, you are a classy bird,’ I muttered, untangling myself from the clutches of the dress before it throttled me and slinging the damn thing in the laundry basket with a curse.

  Phil bought the dress for my birthday last year and, dare I say, it was a little slutty. Still, he liked me in it, so I made the effort to dust the shimmery, slinky item off once in a while. Though truth be told, it had always been a little on the snug side.

  Hmm, maybe I should have gone to the gym after all. Phil always said it was nothing to do with weight, it was all about health, and I’d just feel all-round healthier if I worked out a little more. I thought that was a bit unfair. I wasn’t a gym nut by any means, but I did go for jogs quite regularly. Admittedly, the last time I stepped into an actual gym I was climbing a rope in PE shorts.

  I slouched downstairs in one of Phil’s old T-shirts, looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Swamp Thing made a baby. I didn’t know how Phil managed it. All I wanted was Pepsi on a drip and carbs. Lots of carbs.

  I poked around the fridge, looking for anything with a hint of fat to soak up the booze. But nope, Phil was up before eight and off to the gym and our fridge was full of lettuce. In the end I settled for toast and jam, which, it turned out, was just the thing. Three slices and a cup of tea later, I felt almost human again.

  I sat sipping the last few inches of tea, listening to the radio and enjoying the me-time while pootling about on my iPad. I wiped my buttery fingers on a tea towel and navigated to an article about some new developments in SEO that I was interested in. Search Engine Optimisation, that is, to civilians; a highly technical bit of witchery that involves techniques for pushing a website higher up the results page in Google.

  A year ago, I started as a temp, doing admin work for a small corporate event management company. My first office job. I was meant to be filing, doing data entry and making tea. Basically, all the crap jobs that nobody else wanted to do. But three weeks in, the managing director, a caustically sarcastic man named Oliver, had casually tasked me with managing the website, updating content and the like.

  ‘The IT guy (I think most people in the office think that’s his actual name) will show you the ropes,’ he’d said, noticing my horrified expression. ‘Oh, and Daisy dear, we’d like to see a ten percent increase in traffic to the website in, let’s say, three months?’

  What? I’d thought. What did he just ask me to do? What the hell has traffic got to do with anything?

  ‘Think you can manage that?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure thing,’ I’d said, beaming confidently, although I was quaking on the inside. Dear God, I didn’t know the arse end of a computer from its elbow—or that computers have neither arses nor elbows, clearly.

  But as it turned out, I had something of an aptitude for all things digital. Who knew! Not only did I improve web traffic, i.e. visitors to the website, by significantly more than ten percent, I introduced a few simple changes that meant our conversion rates went through the roof, leading to a big increase in leads and bookings.

  Not that getting to that point was easy. Far from it. In a protracted, panic-induced fugue state, the first place I went was, ironically, the Internet. ‘What is website traffic?’ I typed into the search box and off I went down the rabbit hole.

  I was surprised to find that, beyond all the trolling and Instagram models making perfectly normal people feel fat, the Internet could be a wonderful, generous place. It was actually a great leveller in some ways. My school education, in retrospect, was pretty shoddy and I was a disinterested student at best. But there was a wealth of resources out there for self-improvement and learning that I had never even considered. Much of it free.

  Since then, I’d been studying relentlessly. Teaching myself programming, the basics of database development and reading up on all things digital marketing. I’d even created several micro-sites for some of our upcoming events, all designed and hand coded by myself. They were only small and nothing overly showy: a little HTML, a little CSS and a smidgen of JavaScript. All words I had never even heard of not too long ago. But they looked great (if I do say so myself) and the clients gave some really good feedback.

  I’d even moved on to some of the more complex programming languages, although the options were a little overwhelming. Great names though—Python, C#, Java and, my particular favourite for obvious reasons, Ruby on Rails.

  A year on, alongside the IT guy – or ‘Dave’ as I liked to call him – I’d somehow become the de facto digital marketing and web person in the company. Not that my salary or title reflected that workload; however, I had high hopes of that being corrected. In fact, a meeting had been called first thing Monday morning by big boss Oliver and the head of HR. I didn’t see what else it could mean except a well-deserved promotion and a permanent position for yours truly. I was feeling positively giddy about the prospect.

  According to Phil, it was a super-competitive profession and I needed to temper my expectations. In a way, I knew he was right, but I also didn’t think he realised how much this had just clicked with me. Like suddenly I’d discovered, a little late in life to be sure, what it was I was supposed to be doing.

  But I also knew nobody was going to hire me with no real experience and no relevant qualifications. That’s why the meeting was so important. If I could just get the promotion. Something official. Then my foot would be well and truly wedged in the door.

  Unfortunately, there was still plenty to learn, hence me blearily pretending to read the article. Eventually I admitted defeat. My concentration was no match for my excited nerves about tomorrow’s meeting and the slightly disquieting anxiety I’d been feeling over how last night had played out.

  We’d been out as usual with Phil’s circle of school friends. People he’d known for years and the Wags, their wives and girlfriends, who all had names like Minty and Tiffy. Some of them were fairly interchangeable but Francesca, call me Frannie, always seemed to
be around.

  I suppose I got on fine with her. It was just that it always felt like there was some sort of undercurrent that I couldn’t define whenever we met. Like everything she said had a sharp edge under the sugar surface. I was probably being oversensitive, because if I was truly honest, she made me feel insecure and unpolished. My accent was cockney, hers was cut glass. I went to the local comprehensive and left school at sixteen. She went to Cambridge and wasn’t afraid to mention it—a lot.

  Ruby, on the other hand, was more succinct about the bad vibes I got from Frannie. ‘She wants to fuck your boyfriend, babes,’ Ruby said.

  The night before, Frannie had been on fine form, dressed super casually in that way only the super-rich can pull off. Tanned, buffed and highlighted to peroxided perfection. She hung off Phil’s every last word, while her chinless wonder of a husband, Sebastian, call me Seb, ignored the whole situation.

  He was more interested in drooling drunkenly over the eighteen-year-old barmaid. She deflected his interest with a practised ease that I recognised all too well from my own experience working behind a bar. God, men were fools sometimes.

  Frannie and Seb lived in a super posh pad in Chelsea and I kind of suspected that Phil only kept up the friendship with Seb for his connections. He was a bit of a drip to be honest, despite the impressive resume. And a horrible drunk. I couldn’t imagine a woman like Frannie, who had the emotional depth of a baked bean, looking at him twice if it weren’t for the bank balance and the hereditary title.

  I think that was why I’d had a few extra glasses of wine last night. Phil’s friends and the Wags were all big drinkers anyway. Anyone who couldn’t keep up was relentlessly mocked. I often felt out of place and uncomfortable around them; they tended to talk across me rather than to me, like I was some sort of temporary inconvenience they had to put up with until Phil the Magnificent came to his senses. Couple that with Frannie’s incessant flirting and, long story short, my hangover was totally her fault.

  Still, Phil had never given me any reason to doubt him. It wasn’t his fault if that thirsty cow couldn’t keep her tongue in her mouth around him. She could flirt all she liked—I was the one Phil loved, the one who shared a beautiful home with him. I was the one who, in all probability, he was going to marry one day.