by Fiona Neill
Dad turned to Max. ‘Can you keep an eye on Daisy, please?’
It was one of our favourite family jokes and we all laughed. I felt bad for Rex, and even Ava, because our happiness was in such contrast to their misery.
‘I’m going to the beach,’ I told Max when I found him in the kitchen a few hours later. He was lying flat on the floor using a pair of tweezers to pick out dead ladybirds from the gap between the floor and skirting board. ‘Will you be okay?’
He didn’t look up. ‘It’s exhausting trying to keep on top of all this,’ he sighed, like a tired old man.
‘Barney’s here. If you need anything.’
‘Like a glass of wine, you mean.’
We both giggled. I headed out the back door through the garden, wondering if it was going to hurt and whether I should have downed a couple of sachets of Calpol from the bathroom cupboard. As I walked under the washing line, I saw a pair of tiny black knickers that belonged to Lisa hanging on the line and impulsively tore them down and stuffed them into the waistband of my skirt. I wondered why Lisa wore such exotic underwear. I was pretty certain that the new version of Barney that had turned up on this holiday wouldn’t notice the way the lace felt like the wings of the ladybirds.
I headed towards the beach. It was really hot and I held up my arms so my T-shirt wouldn’t get sweaty. I was drenched with Mum’s perfume. It attracted clouds of ladybirds that I tried to windmill away. I increased my pace. When I got to the dunes I looked behind me to check that no one had seen me. I cut left through the marram grass and it whipped my legs red raw but I was glad of the pain because it took my mind off what was to come.
The old breeze-block pillbox had been built during the war for the Home Guard to defend the coast. It nestled in the dunes, camouflaged by folds of sand and plants that now threatened to obscure it completely. Over the years it had become our favourite location for elaborate imaginary games that sometimes took up the whole day: Viking invader, hide and seek, doctors and nurses. Even when he was tiny Max was always the doctor. Ava and I used to pretend the pillbox was our house and cook sand cakes that we served to Rex and Max on seaweed plates. Last year we had discovered the hexagonal roof was a perfect suntrap. I found the door straight away. The arch was even smaller than I remembered and I had to crawl through the gap, commando-style on my stomach, which filled my T-shirt and bikini top with sand.
It was dark inside, which was a blessing because Rex might not notice the way my skin puckered around my buttocks and the ladybird bite on my leg that had gone septic. The air was damp and musty and I noticed that the ground was strewn with rubbish left by other people. I buried some empty beer cans and half-eaten packets of crisps. Then I smoothed an area flat by the small slit window and unfolded the towel I had brought with me so that I could tell anyone nosy enough to ask that I was going swimming.
I sat down and waited. For weeks my head had been brimming over with thoughts and now I felt strangely calm, as if my entire life had been leading up to this moment. I remembered Rex lying on top of me, tickling me until I cried, when I was little; I remembered how he had come up to me in the playground on my first day at secondary school to whisper, ‘Stand tall, Small,’ in my ear, winning me the immediate approval of my new classmates; I traced back gestures of casual affection and saw that each had meaning. How many people end up marrying the first person they have sex with? I wondered, casually confident I would soon be able to contribute to such debates.
There was a noise outside the window. It sounded like a voice. He was here. I knelt on the towel and combed my hair with my fingers, waiting for him to crawl through the entrance. I felt something press into my stomach and remembered that Lisa’s knickers were still stuffed down my skirt. I quickly pulled off my old white knickers, buried them in the sand beside me, and pulled on the pair I had stolen from the washing line. They were too big and blousy but mine were now covered in sand. I felt panicked by the obscene idea that he might notice I was wearing his mum’s underwear. But it was too late. I heard another noise outside, this time more high-pitched. I wondered if it was an oystercatcher. They always made their nests in the dunes.
I looked through the narrow arrow-slit window. Outside the wind had sculpted a small, perfectly shaped shelter in the dunes. It was surrounded by clumps of grass and wild plants creating a totally discreet bowl that in a different time would have been perfect for nude sunbathing. There was something there. I pressed my face towards the window opening, imagining that I might see Rex beckoning me to come and share this new hiding place.
But instead I saw the back of a man’s head facing the sand. Except he wasn’t making human noises. He was grunting like an animal. The noises got louder, forming a guttural rhythm like ancient music. My eyes adjusted to the brightness and the man lifted his chin towards the sky. It was Dad. His swimming trunks were down by his ankles, and he was on top of a woman, grinding his hips into the centre of her being so hard that at first I was relieved that it wasn’t Mum being subjected to such rough treatment. Then almost immediately I realized that it should have been Mum. The woman’s legs clamped Dad’s lower body to hers. I put my hands over my ears because I didn’t want to listen to the obscenities coming out of Dad’s mouth. The woman directed his rhythm. It sounded as though they were dying. Sex is death. Sex is death. Sex is death. The thought barrelled through my head in time with their rhythm.
I glanced over at the door, willing Rex to arrive, because surely he would know what to do, and then the noise stopped. I looked out of the window again. The woman beneath Dad turned her head to one side so she was looking straight at me. Her face glistened with sweat and I saw it was Lisa.
I’m not sure how long I waited in the pillbox after this. It could have been minutes or hours. Rex never appeared. I blamed myself for what had happened. If I had done my rituals that day then I would have saved Mum. It was all my fault. Anxiety cascaded through my body and I resolved to immediately improve my system to prevent any more catastrophes on my watch:
Instead of just tapping the ball of my foot I would tap the heel and the side.
As well as tapping my shoulders I would include my elbows and the inside of my wrists.
In addition to checking the curtains and windows, I needed to check every plug was taken out of its socket before I went to bed, every switch was off and the gas was turned off.
I would triple the number of times I had to say the special words at the end of all the movements.
I ran through this new routine once and for a while the anxiety subsided and my head felt clear. When I finally left to go back to the house I knew that I had changed completely. I felt as though someone had turned me inside out, exposing every cell and nerve ending, leaving me with no defences. Three is a good and safe number. I said it over and over again on that long walk home.
10
Max
I was still collecting up dead Coccinellidae from the sitting-room floor when Daisy appeared in the garden. Outside thunder rumbled and lightning forked the sky but inside it was hot, sweaty work. The ladybirds stuck like Velcro to the bottom of furniture and their wings turned to dust between my fingers. I was almost overwhelmed by the scale of it all. There were 276 bodies under the coffee table alone. I quickly ran out of space in my matchboxes and had to use an old ice-cream tub for the spillover. Counting each body would take hours and I needed Dad’s advice on how to estimate but he was still at the shops with Lisa.
Barney might have helped, but he had been asleep upstairs all day and after what he did to Dad the other night, there was no way I was going to disturb him. ‘He’s in exile,’ Ava announced at breakfast. No one responded or even mentioned what had happened, even when Rex got a piece of broken glass in his toe and Daisy insisted she had to hold his foot in her lap for half an hour to prevent him from bleeding to death. If I had thrown a glass of water at someone, the consequences would have been catastrophic.
Nothing felt quite right on that holiday. And although I ha
d an idea of what was wrong, I just couldn’t work out why it was wrong. It was like when I looked through the wrong end of Dad’s binoculars and could see something in the distance without knowing what it was. But somehow I convinced myself that if I could keep on top of my ladybird research then everything else might feel less wonky.
I looked up at Ava, who had refused to move so I could reach the ladybirds under the armchair. Her feet were resting on my bare back while I lay flat on my stomach using a ruler to scrape out dead insects. She was watching Friends on a computer, listening through headphones, and lip-synching all the best lines. I could tell when each episode finished because she curled her toes in and out in time to the music, scratching my back with her long black nails. It should have been unpleasant but it wasn’t. Either she hadn’t noticed Daisy was standing in the pouring rain, gazing up at the sky, or more likely she was ignoring her. Ava specialized in psychological torture.
‘Isn’t that just kick-you-in-the-crotch, spit-on-your-neck fantastic?’ she said, doing a terrible impersonation of Jennifer Aniston.
Then the toe-curling began again. There would be scratches on my back the next day but I didn’t mind. They would remind me of her when she was gone. I understood for the first time on that holiday what Daisy saw in Ava. Being the object of her attention was like having a tiger for tea. It felt dangerous and comforting at the same time. Although it took years for me to realize, she was the prototype for all my adult relationships with women. I never truly fancied a girl unless she put me on edge.
I woke up each day tense with the need for her attention and couldn’t believe it when she wanted to play with me. She helped me fix the tiny helmets on to my stormtroopers when they came apart; she didn’t complain when I wanted to pause Doctor Who to discuss whether the Weeping Angels were more frightening than the Abzorbaloff; and she let me watch any film she was watching without mentioning my age. Best of all she saved me from the new games Daisy wanted to play, which weren’t really games at all, because they weren’t any fun and for the first time in my life they made me scared of my own sister.
They involved things like repeatedly checking whether the curtains in our bedroom were touching all the way down the middle in exactly the way Daisy wanted. If I went from floor to ceiling, for example, she would make me start all over again. Sometimes when I finally got it right she insisted I open them to check the window was closed properly so I had to repeat the manoeuvre. While I was doing this she often disappeared downstairs. I followed her once and saw her take out all the knives from the kitchen drawer, count them three times, in a really sinister way, and then put them back. I would fall asleep to the sound of her tapping on the wall. Totally weird.
Even worse, Daisy acted like she was doing me a favour by letting me join in. When I asked her why we had to do all this stuff she explained that it was magic to keep Mum and me safe, which was a good example of irony, because the only thing that frightened me was Daisy with all her weirdnesses.
The first time I was truly freaked out was a few days after we arrived. I was on the bottom bunk, in total darkness, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, when I felt something touch my upper body. It pressed down on my Shaun the Sheep pyjama top close to his head, and stayed there. I froze with fear and kept my eyes tight shut, convinced it was the ghost of my grandmother, who had died in this same bedroom when I was little. I imagined her dressed in her favourite pale-pink nightdress, naked beneath, with a big black hole where her teeth should be, because she always took them out at night. I had once caught sight of her pubic hair and it was thicker than Shaun the Sheep’s fringe. Just considering this made me even more terrified because ghosts know exactly what you are thinking.
The hand stayed on my chest. I started to make all sorts of promises to myself about what I would do if only it would disappear: I won’t take short cuts with Daisy’s magic spells; I will never again take coins higher than 10p from Mum’s purse. As it crept slowly to the lower seam of my pyjama top and gently peeled it up towards my chest the promises got more and more extravagant: I will learn to say my times tables backwards; I will eat cucumber; I won’t stare at breasts. The hand rested on my bare stomach. Please don’t let it drift any lower, I pleaded in my head, not because I was scared of it slipping inside my pyjama bottoms but because I didn’t want even a ghost to know that I had wet the bed. That was my most shameful secret.
And then the low whispering started. ‘Be safe, brother of mine. Be safe, brother of mine. Be safe, brother of mine.’ I recognized the voice straight away. At first I thought she might be sleepwalking but then I realized she was counting my breaths in sets of three until she reached nine. ‘Three is a good and safe number,’ I heard her say. The same thing happened the following night. No surprise that when Ava and Rex arrived I instantly volunteered to go in a bunk bed with Ava. And for a few days at least things went back to normal.
The French doors crashed open and Daisy came into the sitting room, looking wild. The downpour outside had oiled her hair to her scalp. Her eye make-up was mostly streaked down her cheeks. As her calves stepped over me I noticed they were whipped red raw and that a small trail of blood had leached into the top of her favourite trainers, which were leaving a trail of sandy footprints on the pale-blue carpet. The cuts on her legs were a dead giveaway – only the razor-sharp grass in the dunes could savage you like that.
‘Have you seen Dad?’ I asked, trying to put a lid on the overflowing ice-cream tub.
She shook her head and her dark eyes bored into me like she was looking for an answer without asking a question. I shrank back into Ava, who kept up with the Friends riff: ‘All right, look if you absolutely have to tell her the truth, at least wait until the timing’s right. And that’s what deathbeds are for.’
Ava looked straight at Daisy and pulled off her headphones. ‘Are you, like, practising for Halloween or something?’ Ava asked, wrinkling her nose in a way that always made me smile.
Daisy brushed her hand over her face and when she saw the black streaks on her fingertips she started wiping more vigorously, spitting on her hand and scouring her cheeks until they were as red as her legs.
‘Please don’t, Daisy. You’re making it worse.’ I tried to get up to make her stop but Ava’s legs pressed down on my back and the more I tried to wriggle away the deeper she dug in her nails.
‘Don’t worry about Rex seeing you messed up. He’s not here,’ said Ava flippantly.
It was the right thing to say because Daisy immediately stopped clawing at her face.
‘Do you know where he is?’ she asked Ava, trying to sound casual.
‘He went to the caravan site to find that girl he met yesterday and the day before,’ Ava said, holding Daisy’s gaze.
My stomach tensed. I hadn’t been expecting this.
‘Which girl?’ asked Daisy.
Don’t make it sound as though you care, I thought. How could she be friends with Ava for so many years and not realize that?
‘The incredibly cool girl with the wolf tattoo on her calf who comes the same week every August,’ said Ava, finally releasing me.
I got up from the floor and rubbed the furrows in my back.
‘Remember we spied on her and Rex in the dunes last year? She was sunbathing topless.’
I couldn’t remember her face but I could remember her breasts. They were unavoidable. Like Ava’s.
‘Max remembers,’ giggled Ava. ‘Why do you remember, Max?’
I blushed.
‘Rex didn’t tell me that was where he was going,’ said Daisy, pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her denim skirt. Her gaze jumped nervously from Ava to me.
‘What did he tell you?’ asked Ava, raising one eyebrow. ‘I didn’t realize you were stalking him.’
This was a lie because the joke that holiday was if you wanted to find Daisy, you just had to locate Rex. Everyone knew she had a crush on him. She exposed herself on a daily basis by wearing make-up at breakfast and sitting too clos
e to him and pretending to like things she hated eating, like crab, or knew nothing about, like rap music. Sometimes Ava would tease her and for a couple of hours Daisy would rein it in but then the humiliating cycle would begin all over again. Behind her back Ava referred to Daisy as ‘The Limpet’. Lisa described her more fondly as ‘Rex’s little shadow’. But instead of feeling angry with them I was furious with Daisy for not being able to see she was making a fool of herself.
To be honest, if I was a girl I might have fancied Rex. What I hadn’t realized until that moment in the sitting room was that Daisy genuinely thought she was in with a chance. She truly believed Rex was interested in her when it was obvious he felt sorry for her. Even worse, Ava understood in that way girls like her do, and she wasn’t afraid to show Daisy the absurdity of her illusion. I wanted to protect my sister from this harsh truth but it was too late. She went wordlessly upstairs and, although part of me knew I should go after her, the other part wanted to stay with Ava even more.
A few minutes later, Barney lumbered into the room, slow as a giant Galapagos tortoise, and lay down on the sofa. I had almost forgotten he was in the house. He was wearing the same pair of swimming trunks as yesterday and it looked as though he had shaved one half of his face and forgotten the other. His trunks were splattered with purple spots that I guessed were red wine. I was relieved to see he was holding a glass of water, which he tried to balance on his stomach in between tiny sips.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
‘Hey, Dad,’ shouted Ava over her headphones. ‘Do you want to watch Friends with me?’
‘I’ve got work to do,’ said Barney. He opened up a music magazine and told me how he was the first person ever to review an album by the Arctic Monkeys and should have been given first refusal on any interview with the lead singer, especially since he had just been one of their VIP guests at Glastonbury. I was flattered he wanted to discuss this with me.