Except I can’t. Because I’m instantly snapped right back into my cage, as though I’m one of those swing ball things you played with when you were a kid. I don’t have legs to walk over to steal the lady’s muffin. I no longer have a nose with which to smell the coffee, and the din of other patrons’ voices mutes to a background murmur. I’m no longer a co-pilot; I’m the prisoner being transported again.
I return to the reality of now and notice Connor’s frown. He’s cupping my chin, his eyes pained as if wondering what the hell just happened. “I’ve wanted to do that for so long, but I waited and waited because I thought you weren’t interested in me. I think I waited too long.” He shakes his head, as if trying to clear a path through the clutter in his head, the contents of which I’ve just had the briefest glimpse into — sorry Connor! “I think … this … what just happened was for the other Daisy.” His frown deepens, as if even he can’t figure out what that means. “Not for the Daisy you’re … becoming.” His full mouth thins as he fights his way through the fog of confusion that Quark — and I! — have inflicted upon him. “Not for the Daisy you are now. I don’t understand what’s going on, but you must know you don’t need to change to fit in, or to become someone you’re not.” That word again — does he have even the slightest hint of its significance?
Then, like a dog shaking itself vigorously after ‘accidentally’ straying into a large body of water, he shivers, straightens and breaks out of the spell he has been under. “It’s not right, Daisy.”
“What do you mean?” Quark trills, his hand — my hand! — running up Connor’s arm and cradling his elbow. Awkward! His supreme Quarkiness is back with a vengeance and I although I can’t see my face, I can sense him at the deepest, most instinctive level now, and he’s flirting. Not in the natural, easy-going way that you’d want to imagine yourself doing, but in the cringey, drunken aunt at a party way that makes you want to curl up in embarrassment. After three weeks experience of being a teenage girl, we’d all probably struggle with the finer points of human interaction, but there should be positively NO flirting until you really are fourteen … or fifty — oh, God no, just had a flashback to my aunt again! “You don’t want to kiss me? You don’t like me anymore.” He’s using a pathetic put-upon voice I never would.
“I like you and I do want to kiss you.” Connor’s looking right into my eyes as he says this. “Or at least I want to kiss Daisy Jacobs.” He nods his head, “it’s Daisy I want to kiss. Not this … whatever it is you’re trying to be now. To kiss you now would be wrong. It would be like taking advantage of you. I couldn’t do that. I like you, Daisy. But … well, sorry, I like the other you more. Way more. This … this,” he points at me, “all this is fake. Not real. Not you.”
The words hang heavily between us in the silence that follows. Inside, I’m screaming — strangely enough with joy rather than anguish. I’ve come so close to being back home in my body, to my life with my family and friends and to a potential boyfriend on the horizon. And then it’s snatched away.
But Connor’s seen through Quark! He’s rejected that version of me, just as Amy did before him. Both of them are still fighting for me; still trying to get me to be me.
Connor’s words and the intensity of his gaze are like blazing sunlight warming my heart; and I can feel that — even in the isolated place of danger and torment where I’m trapped!
Chapter 48
HANGOVER
Quark is sick and dizzy. Weak, almost — although that’s a ridiculous word to use in connection with an entity controlling the fate of entire galaxies! This weakness is … ugh! — positively human! He can’t comprehend how one weedy little girl has reduced him to this condition of inefficiency. He feels powerless and inadequate; he’s less than perfect and this is not acceptable!
One drink; that’s all it was. He hadn’t even been able to finish the second. He thought rum and coke was a sophisticated alcoholic beverage. However, he’s not sure which was worse: the staggeringly sweet, syrupy concoction or the dark, musky rum. Separately they were both awful. Drinking them together, in a tall glass, he had not passed Go, he’d not collected £200 he’d just gone straight to HELL!
Now, Daisy’s heart-rate is elevated, her cheeks flushed, her lips dry, her head pounding. And Quark is hiding from an issue which he should have faced, but that he’d decided he could just as easily avoid. He’d read somewhere that there was no issue, no problem, that was too large or too complicated that it could not be effectively run away from. So instead of problem/solution, he’d done problem/rum and coke/head down toilet. And that had been no solution. Apparently, singularities and alcohol do not mix!
The slightest movement now sets off an explosion in his head, and for once the resultant headache has nothing to do with Daisy’s persistent, nagging chatter.
He occupies most of Daisy’s brain. He’s effectively closing her down, ever-reducing the space she has to exist in, the places she has to hide from the inevitable. At first, she saw what happened around her and heard what was said. Now he wonders if Daisy can see much at all. Does she have a paralysing headache too? Is her vision blurred? Does she realise her mouth tastes like Quark imagines the bottom of a budgie cage does? This, for those of you who have wisely avoided the rum and coke solution to life’s vicissitudes, is not at the top of TripAdvisor’s list of great gourmet tastes.
Before Quark had a teeny bit too much to drink, he’d been effectively blocking Daisy. Ironically, his connection to her, once very close, was now becoming cloudy and dim. He’d got her to the coffee shop for the entirely successful meeting with Connor without her knowing where her body was going. Then he got Daisy her first kiss. For obvious reasons it would also be her last.
Then he’d felt her presence within him; and it was … like an over-stepping of the mark; like an invasion. Quark temporarily lost himself in a hormonal teenage moment, and suddenly she was in charge! It was just the briefest instant, but it had been the single most intense — and terrifying — of his entire existence. It was as though she, Daisy Jacobs, was the one who was becoming, and he, Quark, was about to become nothing but a memory …
So, when he poured the first drink, he hadn’t been exactly celebrating a victory. His once in a lifetime — and absolutely never again — experiment with alcohol had been in order to avoid thinking too deeply, rather than in honour of his doubtful performance as a human teenager; although he guessed that some very much older teenagers did very occasionally have a little drink.
A gentle tapping interrupts Quark’s musings. No, actually, not a tap, a banging, a hammering with a force that is utterly unjustified this early on a Sunday morning. Quark reluctantly folds back one corner of the duvet and peers at the digital clock on Daisy’s bedside table: 11:28am! It’s practically the crack of dawn! What gives anyone the right to disturb an alien entity at this unearthly hour of the morning?! His head hurts and he will not come out from under these bed covers for any reason at all. Ever. In fact, just for the briefest microsecond he almost wished the head was still Daisy’s — then she’d definitely have the headache. She’d have to cope with her bedroom spinning slowly around her. And also deal with some lunatic battering the door down when it’s still practically the middle of the night.
“Daisy, it’s a beautiful sunny morning,” says Daisy’s mum, who then checks her watch, “just. You’re not planning on staying in bed all day, are you?”
“Yes!” Quark growls.
“Oh, sweetie, don’t you want to come out for a walk with me?” Her voice is altogether too cheerful, and stabs like needles deep into the brain Quark is, at the moment, in no rush to take greater control of.
“No, I do not!”
“Come on … it’s ages since we’ve had some girly time. We can walk along the river and go to the cafe by the weir for a lovely big Sunday lunch.”
Lunch! Food? Now?! Ugh, the very thought makes Quark remember the head-down-the-toilet result of his avoidance tactics of the
previous night. “Go away and leave me alone! I want to die in peace,” he whines.
He hears a muffled guffaw from Daisy’s father. “Oh, dear! I think we’re having another teenage moment.” Quark harrumphs loud enough to set off more loud parental giggling, but the laughter, muffled voices and footsteps finally move away.
He’s alone. Alone to mourn his fate as history’s first-ever hungover quantum singularity. And to contemplate how he got himself into this sorry predicament.
Death, that’s the problem. The death of Daisy Jacobs. And as a result, the death of PQD. He knows his endeavours will be rewarded — maybe just hours from now. Because Daisy’s changing. He can feel it, can feel the chemical balance of her body altering radically. Something big is about to happen. That much is obvious and to Quark this can mean only one thing: Daisy is becoming.
And that’s good — no, it’s great! After all, that’s what he’s here for: to pulverise her and every single one of her kind. And yet …
While Daisy Jacobs herself will cease to exist, the entity we call Quark will go on forever — until the very end of time. But when Daisy dies, in effect he’ll die too. He’s been around for well over thirteen billion years and may be around for at least that again. But the big question for him at the moment is what will he exist as?
Now he’s had just over three weeks of life. He’s tasted Mama-lade and breakfast-strength coffee; pizza and pancakes and many other food types, including the dill-pickle, blueberry yoghurt and left-over curry combination that he’d like to erase from his memory as easily as it had been expelled from Daisy’s body. He’s watched people buying houses and auctioning plant pots on daytime TV; become hooked on Love Island and the best Netflix has to offer. He can list “interesting” facts about volcanoes, glaciers, and the many wives of a weirdly woman-hating Tudor king. He’s made a new friend or two; he has (just barely) kept Daisy’s old friends. And he’s kissed a boy.
But soon he’ll be dust again. He’ll be exactly what he’s been for thirteen billion years. He won’t even have to think of doing homework, it’s true, but he’ll also never get to eat a bacon sandwich again. (Daisy will be happy about that; or rather, she would be if she actually existed, which, of course, she won’t …) And when Daisy becomes, Quark will not learn what happens to Steffie and Dan on Bake Off; he’ll never have to drink rum and coke again, but equally he’ll never get a hug. Imagine that: all eternity without a hug! He’ll never see a flower again or inhale its sweet scent; will never hear the latest tunes on Spotify. And he’ll never kiss a boy — or a girl — again. In short, Quark as he has got to know himself, will be as bereft of form as Daisy Jacobs.
And Daisy herself will be no more. No two ways about it, call a hand-operated soil-moving implement a hand-operated soil-moving implement as Daisy herself had said (or words to that effect), she would be d-e-a-d. And the fact is, though he would admit it only reluctantly, through Daisy’s own gritted teeth, he lov—
Well, let’s not get carried away! She’s okay … for a teenage human girl. Quark reluctantly admits he feels something not unadjacent to fondness for her.
But now he’s had a drink to get his courage up, and her body chemistry is changing — clearly in his favour. This is it. The end is nigh for Daisy Jacobs!
Chapter 49
OBLIGATORY CHASE SCENE
You love me! I heard you! You didn’t say it out loud, but you do and that explains why you haven’t killed me yet … because you can’t bring yourself to do it. You can’t kill the one you love.”
Quark gets up quickly from my bed and rushes to the bathroom. I think he’s going to be sick again, but instead he just stares at the mirror through red-rimmed eyes. He seems to be steeling himself for something. A big announcement maybe? But he says nothing; just stares at me with brooding bitterness. My arms are crossed as if that way he can fend off the me that’s still inside. Me and my pesky emotions.
The silence stretches until finally, through thinned lips, he speaks. “I love you?!” he grinds out. The expression on my face is unreadable because my eyes are now cast down to my hands which grip the sink so tightly that my knuckles turn white and claw like. “How dare you!”
What’s going on in his luxuriously appointed part of my mind right now? I thought we were on a firmer footing. I’ve been getting weaker, but I thought we were reaching an understanding. And I believed he’d come to really care about me.
But no — from one moment to the next, something changes. There’s a shift in the atmosphere between us. It’s as rapid as the flipping of a switch. He looks up, eyes filled with a seething malevolence that’s straight out of a Hollywood horror film.
Ugh! Seeing myself in the mirror … I’d had nightmares about that mirror! About one day seeing my face warp into something monstrous and beast-like as the thing within me distorts my features into a true reflection of what passes for its personality. How did I forget this? Forget what he — IT — really is? The way he looks at me now proves that beyond any doubt.
The image on the TV screen in my head is suddenly clear and without interference. I realise with a kind of stunned amazement that the TV’s not a virtual antique anymore; now it really is that 56-inch OLED and every single pore of my own face is up there on the screen, in sharply detailed, richly coloured, perfectly pixillated clarity. And I know Quark’s done this … in my room.
“What’s wrong, Daisy?” he sing-songs in a voice like a harsh growl. I see my lips pull back over my teeth in a distinctly unpleasant vampire-like grimace. He grins. “Cat got your tongue? Nothing to say for once?” I notice my teeth are not evenly spaced with that cute gap between the top two incisors anymore; now they seem to consist entirely of sharply pointed canines — as though I’m looking into the mouth of a Great White Shark!
On the high-definition screen, my expression hardens. It’s like I’m seeing the movement of a glacier in time lapse photography, so the action is speeded up and what was once warm simply ices over. And it’s Daisy/not Daisy looking in at me on the big screen. The millions of pixels that make up my face rush apart and then implode into a darkness from which a screaming, shrieking shadow emerges. A huge black, wolf-like claw with long, sharp talons smashes through the screen —
And that’s when I look around and audibly gasp. I shake my head, trying to clear my vision. But it’s not a dream. This is my nightmare made real. I’m not in my room. I have no idea where I am! A wave of despair strikes me and for the first time in all of this, for the first time in a life filled with what I now realise were trivial panics, I know what true terror is.
Then the claw grabs me by my school tie. “Got you, you bitch!” the flat lizard voice says.
I’m choking and the pain is intense; more real than anything I’ve felt in weeks, because I can actually feel it. This isn’t my imagination, it’s not a ‘what if’, arm’s length, distant memory of a feeling. This is claws gouging at my throat and hot, stinky breath on my face. Quark’s eyes, red rimmed and sunken rear up out of the darkness and stare directly into the depths of my soul. This is not life experienced at second hand, through a mirror anymore, this is up close and personal with a creature from the inky blackness at the heart of the universe; this is life literally red in tooth and claw!
My face is no longer mine, now it’s all him, all it, all dreadful, inscrutable darkness. But a darkness made real, a darkness given terrifying form. Its breath is putrid, its grip vicelike, its gaze unrelenting and without mercy or even the vaguest remembrance of humanity. The sometimes playful, almost childlike Quark is gone and in his place is something dark and malevolent. There’s a low, hoarse growl in its throat as it throttles the life from my own.
“‘Ur hurtin’ ‘e,” I rasp out. “Quark, tha’ ‘urts!”
“I do not so love you!” Quark/not Quark screeches, each word punctuated by a shake that jiggles me like a rag doll. Just for a moment, as if down an ever-lengthening corridor, I catch a glimpse of him — a Frankenstein-like
echo of who he’d been when he’d been me. Then that window into the soul of an ex-human slams shut. Quark is gone. With swooning horror, I realise I won’t see him again.
“Now I’ll fix you,” it grunts. It shakes me by the throat again. “Now I’ll end ‘ou.” Its’ voice becomes harsher, less lilting, less human. It’s holding tightly on to me. Crushing my windpipe. Crushing the life out of me.
My consciousness wavers and my vision blurs as I stare up into those baleful eyes. Through them, through the creature’s wraithlike corruption I see the distant glimmer of one tiny pinprick of light — like the first star to appear at twilight — shimmering at first faintly and then with increasing brightness. One teeny dot of light and then another and another. But it’s not the light of hope, it’s not a beacon calling me home, it’s eternity calling to me — and you. It’s the end. I’m becoming.
“‘Fix oo, ‘ix oo. Now I’ll ‘ix oo,” it mutters in a barely audible, entirely inhuman growl.
I can smell the sour odour of sweat and death. My own sweat and the death that’s coming.
“‘Ix oo, ‘ix oo now!” Shake, shake. I see its blood red lips form into a parody of a scary clown grin as my head rattles side to side. My breath comes in bare gasps. “Now I’ll ‘ix oooooo!” The hand, the claw tightens its grip.
Even my panic is gone now and my breath is a memory.
Not real. Not real. Not real. I chant to myself, in time with each violent shake of my head. I try to force the vision away, to dig in my heels and stop the slow drift down the long tunnel of darkness becoming a headlong rush. But the blackness is in me. The darkness overwhelms —
I find myself unable to look away from its red eyes. They’re soulless. Depthless. No longer mortal. I hear it again, “‘Ix ooo now! I’ll ‘ix ooo now.”
Daisy Jacobs Saves the World Page 21