“Anyway, you shouldn’t have done it, Dais.”
“Done what?”
“Spoken to Connor. Love is a dangerous thing.”
“Ah, yes — I was talking about that with Da— I mean, I was thinking about this subject only this morning.”
“Oh, and did you reach any conclusions?”
“No, only that love and desire and sex and romance and being gay — these are tricky things.”
Amy forced a laugh. “And you make it even trickier when you say you’ll experiment with being gay just to please your bestie! You really do know better, Daisy: you can’t manufacture emotions like that.”
Quark was sure Daisy’s long time best friend would notice how he held himself away from her. He was trying to balance authenticity against the extent to which physical closeness made him want to puke. His notion of gender experimentation had hurt Amy in a way that he didn’t understand. Surely his wanting to be like her should make Amy happy? They were supposed to be practically joined at the hip, according to Daisy.
Yet now Amy released Daisy’s arm, clearly hoping to relax her friend and bring about a return of that closeness. “Anyway, you’ve not been the same since you tried to talk to Connor. I think you screwed up there. Cosmically,” she added with a shrewdness that momentarily threw Quark.
He stifled a gasp with a cough. “What?!”
“It’s like you’re not yourself. You’re gloomy.”
“Really?”
“Yeah — you’ve lost your sparkle.”
“Sparkle? Right — I will endeavour to rectify that situation. Could you possibly tell me how I might sparkle once more, Miss Porter.”
“Jeez, Daisy! No need for sarcasm; I was only trying to help.” Amy took a step away from Daisy, frowning as if trying to figure out a reason for her friend’s mystifying behaviour.
“Yes, indeed. And your assistance is most appreciated.” Quark still couldn’t get a grip on this conversation. Amy’s feelings were too raw for him to cope with. He cleared his throat and nodded, grasping for logic in a sea of intense emotion. “Listening to, and learning from, one’s peers is a fundamental component of the human condition, is it not?”
“Huh? What the— Listen, Daisy, are you sure you’re feeling okay? That bang on the head and the fainting … you really haven’t been the same since.”
“I am quite alright, Miss Porter, but your concern is most appreciated.” Quark’s face kept its rigid expression.
“Oh, it’s stern Daisy, is it?” Now Amy’s face was serious too. “Where’s the warmth, wit and animation? Where did my friend go? What did you do with her?” She poked Daisy playfully in the tummy. Quark flinched as if he’d been shot.
A look of panic scudded across his features before he regained control and essayed a smile. “I am here.” He waved at Amy from a distance of about a metre. “Hello, Amy Porter, my friend, I have gone nowhere.” He let out an unnatural and unsettling giggle. “Unlike Elvis, I have not left the building, so your talk makes no sense.” Without him realising, Quark’s guard was slipping again … and his use of language with it.
“My talk?”
“Your statement. Your comment. I am Daisy; who else could I be?”
“You’re not looking well, Dais. Honestly. I’m worried about you.”
“I feel fine. Practically optimum!” Quark retreated further into his version of normal.
“You don’t look fine. And you haven’t since that bang on your head. You’re not yourself at all! There are bags under your eyes. And your eyes have lost that ocean green shine. Where’s your wit? Where’s my Daisy?!” Amy continued to stare intently at her friend’s face.
“What? I am thinking. Contemplating. Life is serious, my friend Amy.”
“Again — ‘my friend Amy’. Who talks like this? Are you auditioning for the role of a Russian spy?” She looked around in mock exaggeration. “Is this a YouTube prank?”
“I do not understand what you mean.”
“Oh, flying slugs, Daisy!”
Quark looked up into the air in absolute confusion. “What?”
Amy stopped walking so suddenly that Quark had moved on several steps before he realised Amy was no longer alongside him.
“You don’t get that?”
Quark still looked confused. “Slugs?” He looked up into the sky again. “Slugs do not fly, Amy. In this you are mistaken.”
“Wait — you really don’t get it, do you?”
“It is just simple science, Amy — slugs crawl, they do not fly.”
Amy’s face was impassive. “Artichokes!” she shouted so suddenly that Quark jumped.
Quark was flustered, unsure where Daisy’s friend’s conversational gambit was heading. The girl was crazy! But, for Daisy’s sake, and for the slim chance that the blind alley down which Amy’s conversation was heading might lead him to a greater understanding of humanity, he played along, rather than run home as quickly as he could.
He nodded seriously. “Yes, Amy — artichoke. A vegetable. Very nutritious, but can have unfortunately windy side-effect on the digestive system. And also not relevant to our slug discussion.”
“It’s our way of swearing, Daisy.”
“Swearing?”
“Our three-stage swearing — ‘Melons!’ for mildly upsetting. ‘Artichokes!’ for something worse. And, if something is really serious or disturbing, ‘Flying slugs!’”
Quark shook his head in utter bafflement. “These are not swear words, Amy. A good example of a swear word is fu—”
“Stop!” said Amy, holding up her hand, palm towards Daisy. “We do not use actual swear words.” Her voice has taken on a playful, exaggeratedly ladylike tone. “We decided in Year 7 that we are ladies, and that swearing is un-ladylike. That’s when we created these swear words and you know that.”
There was a long pause as she continued to stare into Daisy’s eyes. “Or rather, Daisy knows that,” she finally said. “My Daisy knows that. We invented this way of swearing together.”
Quark jumped as if poked by a cattle prod. “Ah, yes indeed. I remember! We like a good swear — FLYING SLUGS! Ha! A good swear, yes, Amy?”
Amy remained unimpressed. “What’s happened to you, Dais?” Her generous lips thinned as her mouth set firm. “What’s happened to you and why won’t you tell me about it? Who have you become?” Her tone was harsh.
“I am Daisy Jacobs —”
“No, you’re not. Not my Daisy Jacobs. She’s nothing like this. Babe, you’re —”
“— of 9 Castle Walk, Scuttleford.”
“Nope. I don’t know what’s happened, but you’re not my Daisy. My warm, funny, brilliant friend.”
“We —”
“Daisy! Listen to me, what happened? What have you done to the girl I love?”
“Me? I—”
“Where is my Daisy?!”
“Amy Porter, please do not shout. You are causing a scene. And scenes are not good, this is one thing I do know.”
“Daisy —?”
Even Quark could read Amy’s fear and distress now. But he remembered her earlier comment: he couldn’t manufacture emotions to solve this. He caught her open-mouthed gaze, but although his eyes saw the flood of tears begin, his part of Daisy’s brain failed to register them. He left as fast as Daisy’s legs could carry him.
Chapter 35
THE EPICENTRE OF ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE AT ALL
Quark?”
“Yes?”
“What’s the purpose of your life?”
There’s silence while Quark considers my question. “To exist,” he says finally.
“That’s it — just exist?”
“Yes. I drift through everlasting emptiness — that is if moving faster than the speed of light can be called drifting and deep space can be called empty.”
“So, your life is just existing in emptiness? Wow, that must be so inspiring! No wonder you want to get right back to i
t.”
He ignores the dig. “Well, there is a lot of nothing.” Weirdly, in the mirror I see the corners of my mouth quirk upward into a small smile at this. “And there is a lot of what you would call solitude. Or isolation. Or … loneliness.” The smile vanishes, replaced by a frown of concentration. “An aeon in terms of my overall existence is not a long time. Aeon is Greek, and it means an age in everyday language, but in scientific terms, an aeon is a billion years. And —”
“Boring!” I interrupt before he can get into full flow. “You’re lecturing again, Quark. How do you cope with all that … nothing? I couldn’t do it — I enjoy company too much. An afternoon by myself is okay. A day or two, not so good. But being alone for a billion years?!”
“Well, you can see a lot if you have a billion years to spare. At the speed of light, you are travelling at about 300,000km a second. So, in Earth terms you can travel a fair distance.”
I’m not convinced. “If you travel that far, where would you be? What exciting things would you see? None! Because you’ll have arrived at the epicentre of absolutely nowhere at all.”
“It would be wrong to say nothing,” Quark continues, pointedly, “because you would still see the twinkling of distant stars — without pollution or atmospheric interference. But, yes, they would still be very, very distant. There would be a great view of your Moon, but even that would still be over 80,000 kilometres away. That’s in just one second, though. In a mere eight minutes you would reach the Sun, less than 150 million kilometres away!”
“I hate to detract from your lecture, Quark, but that’s eight minutes out of a billion years! And you’d still be alone,” I scoff. “In fact, even more alone than you were eight minutes earlier. And you’d be a lot further away from the nearest McDonald’s!”
Quark frowns, and my lips firm in disapproval at the interruption. “From there you could look into the darkness beyond and maybe head for your nearest neighbour … ?”
I sigh, “Proxima Centauri”.
He nods. “At the maximum speed humanity can currently capable travel you would get there in 81,000 years. But you travel at light speed, so you would make it in just over four years.”
“So a long way in just four years. And over that distance you’d see an awful lot of very little.”
“Well, almost no dust or debris — it is not called the void for nothing!”
“Is that what passes for a joke on your planet?” I answer, tartly.
Quark stares at me balefully. “The average density of much of this space is about a single atom of hydrogen per cubic metre. So there is stuff. There is a bit of plasma here and there. A tiny amount of dust, some cosmic rays, some background radiation.”
“Wow! Well worth travelling 4.2 light years for! It’s hardly a trip to the fair, a beach, or a rock concert, is it?”
“I suppose it is not even a Thursday afternoon of double Mathematics.”
I giggle. “Now, that was pretty funny,” I admit.
“I agree,” Quark continues, in full flow now, “it is, in every practical sense, a void. An unimaginable amount of nothing at all.”
“And you wonder why I want memories. Why I want to live my life and not just exist!”
“You live life in 3D all the time. It is full of colour, vivid high-definition, 24/7. Daisy, you do not know how lucky you are. How lucky you have been. Talking about my average day, my average year — or century — I realise now that my existence has been shapeless and ill-defined. But now, in this body, I am aware of everything going on around me. My senses are on high alert.” He frowns, “sometimes it’s too much.”
The frown deepens, furrowing my brow. Then he shivers and continues as if nothing has happened. “And just recently, in the last day or so, things have become even clearer. I am seeing the world in a whole different way. My senses tell me that the chemical balance in your body has changed and colours appear brighter, birdsong sweeter. The meal your father cooked last night — gnocchi and garlic mushrooms … I could taste it, really taste the garlic and the tartness of the dressing on the salad. It was … delicious. So good that I felt as though my head would explode.”
“Hey! That’s my head you’re talking about!”
“And my eyes leaked when I watched television after dinner.”
“Leaked?”
“A strange experience. There was a drama on about a baby elephant that was about to die, but its mother and aunts cared for it and, Daisy — it survived!”
“That wasn’t a drama. That was a David Attenborough wildlife documentary. It was real.”
“It was certainly a dramatic story!”
“And it made you cry?”
“Cry, yes! That was it; I was sad, so my eyes leaked. Then I was happy, and they leaked again. Strange to cry when sad and when happy. A most curious feeling, but it was an experience. I felt it. That was just one moment — not an aeon! — just one single moment. And I felt as though I was living. As though I was alive.” He speaks with real warmth and feeling.
“But it is my life you are still living! Mine!” I’m furious with his unfeeling attitude — reeling off experiences that should be mine. “You’re living a stand-in life in my body. Like an understudy in a play when the audience have paid to see the star — the lead actor — playing the role.
“The way you’ve been talking recently … it seemed like you were being friendly. Like you were getting to know me. And I’ve been helping you too. Trying to let you see the good things about being human. About being truly alive.”
“I see that, Daisy. And I am very thankful to you for your help.”
“But I thought, if you saw what my life was like, then you would let me live it.”
“I can also see how you might have thought that. However, what I have learned from being you and what I have learned from you, will help me be a better Daisy Jacobs.”
“What about my becoming?”
My body leant forward, closer to the mirror, and an eyebrow quirked. “Are you going to give in? To surrender to me?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then we have reached an impasse. In chess, this would be a stalemate. For the moment, you are correct — I cannot dig you out of your redoubt. So I will simply wait you out.”
“What does that mean?”
“I would prefer to get this over quickly, to enter the stage of becoming tonight — right now. But this life, this living, this learning about your world, I find it fascinating. I may stick around.”
“For how long?”
“Not long.”
“And then you’ll leave and let me live my life?”
“Well, I will live your life for you. I will experience your life, and then when it is time, the boost of energy should be enough for the next becoming.”
“Exactly how long do you plan on staying?”
“Well, I got the idea from something you said the other day, when I gave you the English lessons. It’s hard to say how long your life will be, you are only fourteen after all. But I think I can get at least seventy years of experiences from you.”
“You’ll live my entire life and then use me to take over the world, anyway?”
Talk about the lingering effects of catastrophic near-death experience! I wonder whether to just give in and let Quark finish me off now. That’ll end the constant fear, the continual questioning of my existence and the frustration of the simple question of ‘why me’.
In the mirror my lips curve into a cold smile and my head nods at another little victory. He’s pulled the rug from under me — again. He’s busted me back down once more, blowing away my illusion of progress. So here I still am, hiding in my lonely room, and once more I sense the pulse of life within me fade as I choke back the fear and desolation that could easily overwhelm me. The light I’ve been clawing my way towards grows ever dimmer.
“Quark, you are a bas—”
“Remember, Daisy, we are a lady!” Quark interrup
ts. In the mirror, my eyes have lost any hint of the green that usually gives them warmth. They stare back at a vulnerable girl who’s looking at a life-sentence, locked in the gloomy darkness of her own head. My usually generous mouth thins into a grim smile as Quark’s glance slices into me with invasive intensity.
“Don’t forget the swears we created with our friend, Amy Porter. I think you would say, ‘flying slugs, Quark, you are an artichoke!’ I am sure, under the circumstances, the use of two of our really bad swears is fully justified.” And Quark smirks. He has the cheek to actually smirk!
Chapter 36
WHY ME?
Why me?” Daisy asked.
“Sorry?!” Quark jumped in surprise. He’d been practising applying make-up, hardly aware of looking into the mirror and so of Daisy looking out at him.
“Was that an apology?!”
“What! No, it most certainly was not.” Quark pursed Daisy’s lips and turned her head to see what effect Sun-Kissed blusher and Foxy Red lipstick had on his appearance. He dabbed away the extra blusher Daisy’s interruption caused him to apply. He’s toying with bending one of Daisy’s ridiculously austere rules by wearing make-up to school. “What do I have to apologise for, anyway?”
“I just can’t imagine,” replied Daisy with a hint of sarcasm that passed Quark by. Frankly she’d have to batter him over the head with derision for him to notice, so absorbed was he in his cosmetic routine.
“What do you mean?” Quark’s trying to work out the correct degree of ‘discretion’ required to make a sufficient impact on the school authorities. He decided that, on the whole, there was subtle … and then there was Foxy Red!
“I mean that I could’ve walked across the playground a few minutes — maybe even a few moments — earlier or later, or waited until the next day, or decided I didn’t want to talk to Connor and just left him in the clutches of eager-Ellie.”
Daisy Jacobs Saves the World Page 14