She tried to focus back onto the designs she had been working on, but her thoughts were interrupted by the colours of Parisian traffic, red and white lights sailing back and forth, and the flickering yellow of a flame and the blue shadows of the Arc. She remembered the coffee table in the hotel, and Daisy’s designs, some finished and some still little more than ideas. She remembered how some of Daisy’s sketches were not much more than lines on a white page, and yet somehow they captured it, the spirit of that simplicity, the style Poppy knew when she saw it.
One of Daisy’s designs achieved clarity in her mind; she recognized it as the tabard Daisy had just started to work on, and Poppy’s mind coloured it with rich turquoise. It rotated smoothly like a 3D image in space, and Poppy was guided to different parts of it so that she could identify the seams, the lining, the style and cut, even the design of the buttons. She could see it all.
The tabard vanished, to be replaced by one of Daisy’s tunic designs. Again this image adjusted and filled with colour. Not a single colour this time but a riot of hues in orange and purple, with a thread of gold; she recognized it as some of the Kente cloth that Daisy had found. She could see it all, how the component parts of the garment would come together, and how it would look when it was finished.
Poppy let out a deep physical sigh that carried across the heads of the congregation. She opened her eyes and felt the colour come to her cheeks. A few of the people around her were glancing in her direction; some clearly wondering if she was in pain, or some kind of discomfort.
Her sister, Louisa, who was sitting next to her leant and whispered, “You okay?”
She nodded, and then said, “I think I could do with some fresh air.”
“Shall I come with you?”
“No, I’ll be fine.”
And with that she stood, grateful to be at the end of one of the rows of chairs, and left.
Outside, she breathed in the early spring air. Daisy’s designs hovered in the back of her mind, like ghosts, like water building behind a dam. She coloured them all, and it came to her then that she could only do this because there was, in fact, so little colour in Daisy’s work. It was just like the days at Central St Martins when they complemented each other in their work.
She walked home, brisk, distracted, and she didn’t even take her jacket off as she took two steps at a time, up to her room.
When she arrived she found tears running down her cheeks, so she reached for a tissue with one hand while with the other she swept everything off her desk so she had a space to work in. She picked up her sketchpad and flipped over the used pages so she had a blank sheet in front of her. To her right on the desk was a large coffee tin, brimming with pencils, charcoals and pastels.
She shut her eyes and prepared to let Daisy’s designs come to her again.
“Okay,” she said, and the floodgates opened and in a moment she was lost in a furious industry of design and colour. Some of it came upon her so quickly that she only had time to sketch an outline. She annotated the designs with a manic, rushing script, hoping she would be able to decipher it all later; she sketched briefly and with impatience, resisting the dam-burst of colour long enough to capture something of the form before the shades and hues gave it life. When it was finished, she tossed the sheet onto the floor and stared at the next blank page.
This was the cheongsam. She knew it was an adventurous piece of work. The image of it filled with pinks and cream, a scattering of cherry red, and then it was discarded and next came the jacket, and then the culottes, to which Daisy had added a chequered design that shocked Poppy, but she did not dare pass judgement on any of it. And then, improbably, there was a scarf, and it spoke of the ocean, of greens and blues in the sunlight, and a fabric that would be soft to touch, and so it went on, one after the other, as she took the raw material of Daisy’s designs and gave them the colour they were always meant to have.
Eventually she stopped because her wrist hurt so much that she could not hold a pencil properly. She leant back in her chair, and cradled her arm like a baby at the breast, and she cried and looked down at the furious scattering of paper on the floor and she flexed the fingers of her aching hand and the tears fell until, eventually, she regained herself and she stood up, walked over to her bed and collapsed into sleep.
She woke about thirty minutes later and the house was still quiet. She stood and stretched and gathered the papers up from the floor and laid them neatly on the desk. Then she took one more sheet of paper and wrote on it:
“Dear Daisy,
Your beautiful designs came to me in these colours, and I had to draw them, and send them to you. I am full of the memories of when we worked together, and I can’t help but put colour between the lines you draw. Forgive me.
With love,
Poppy”
Then she took the whole lot, pushed them in an envelope and sealed the flap.
The post office, she knew, would be open at nine o’clock in the morning.
Daisy is asleep, and dreaming.
In her dream she sees moments from her life appearing on a screen in front of her. As she witnesses these moments she senses some of the emotions that went with them, she’s watching the screen but she is also the principal actor.
There is an image of herself as a small child; she has fallen down the stairs at her parents’ home. Daisy sees the little girl, in a state of bewilderment, as her orderly world turns over and over, full of shock and pain as she falls. She is looking up at the steep steps, like staring at a mountain.
The expectation of sympathy and attention is instinctive. She is waiting for the mother and the father to arrive. The little girl has generated noise by the lung full, a penetrating, piercing scream. The scream is flooding a house where the adults are already at their wits’ end. It passes through walls, doors, humming through the rafters of the roof; it is irresistible.
The father emerges from behind a door. She focuses on him as a source of compassion; but there is something in his manner that seems disconnected from her, he stands near to her but does not touch her, comfort her. She cannot understand why he is not coming to her, giving her the attention that she craves right now.
Now the mother appears, and the girl switches her attention from the father to the mother, awaiting attention. Her body is still in shock, there is pain all over her, and she is frightened. The mother is coming, but somehow she is deflected; the father figure has drawn her away and now they are making their own noise. Daisy feels the pure frustration of her physical limits. She cannot go to the mother, she cannot go and reclaim the attention and so she pours all of her will and anger and despair into her voice, the limit of her human reaction in the world. The noise is pure urgent energy, transcending everything else.
Success! She has reclaimed the attention of both the mother and the father; they are both turning to her now; this is a rich vein, both parents are looking at her and the father is moving to her. She feels the exhilaration of focus again; he is coming to her quickly.
There is an eruption of feeling in her head which she does not immediately associate with the father, even though he is there standing over her. And then some things happen and she cannot identify what they are. The noise at her command is blended with the father’s noise and it scares her The mother’s noise joins them, and at the same time, with the father next to her, the feeling in her head, which started as sensation, mutates into pain, and the noise which was the mother rises and rises with the pain in her ears and her head, and the father moves away quickly. She sees him in a blur of tears, and she is confused, and above all else, she is alone, cast adrift from the people who, even at this age, she knows should be there for her, but are not.
The scene changes and she is in her bedroom, the door is shut. She is fifteen. In the dream she is completely naked and she is standing in the half-light, with the curtains drawn. She has placed a small rubber wedge under her door so nobody can get in and disturb her. She is looking at herself, using a small han
d mirror. She is moving the mirror around so she can see different parts of her body. Some parts she is examining closely, and for other areas she moves the mirror away so she can encompass more of herself. The act of examining herself, piecemeal like this, dislocates her from her own body, allowing her to examine it in a way that she thinks is dispassionate, objective, but is in fact full of judgement and condemnation.
She has weighed her own body on the scales, and found it lacking, guilty. She feels the familiar sense of solitude wash over her. She is alone with a solitude that was initially forced upon her, but is now also hers by choice.
Watching this on the screen of her dreams, Daisy feels a prickling of compassion for the girl that she was: the girl with the dull eyes, and the thin body; the girl who thinks she lacks so much but in fact lacks only one thing really, the love and compassion that has been missing from her life.
The image moves on and now she is in a small study bedroom. There are posters on the wall, and there is music; it is urgent and loud, and it crowds out the thoughts in her head. This is not her room but she recognizes it immediately. This scene has more clarity and precision than the previous two because she has a much clearer memory of what happened here. This comes as something of a surprise to her because she knows that at that moment she was quite drunk. Not helplessly, but enough to make her feel a little detached, as if the words she says are spoken by someone else. She is sitting, slumped, on a bed. The music is loud and she cannot make out any words or tune. There is someone else in the room and she knows who he is. He moves around the room and then he lies down next to her, and his hand moves over her stomach, her shoulder. Somewhere within her mind she is trying to decide whether she wants this physical contact now, whether she is enjoying the sensations she is feeling, whether she would choose to let this happen.
The process of assimilating the experience is slow. His hand feels strong and urgent. His touch is full of hunger, and it takes rather than gives as his fingers press on the fabric of her shirt.
There is so much sensory information pouring into her mind, the smell of his clothing, the noise of the music, the cascade of pressure on her body, all of these senses compelling her, commanding her to comply, to submit.
The pressure applied by the hand increases, and it provokes her into some kind of response. She might not always be averse to this experience, but at the moment she feels threatened, forced. She does not want this to happen now.
She can hear herself saying no.
No.
Now she feels other parts of her body being touched, manipulated. She is becoming more sober. Perhaps the adrenaline is working, kicking her body into action. She articulates her reaction more strongly, pushing the hand away. She is now clear that this is not what she wants.
Daisy is right handed, and for a fleeting moment she feels strong. His hand digs under her shirt, ferreting away, and as it does so she swings her right hand round, trying to swing her body at the same time. It’s a lucky shot, and she slaps hard into the cheek and mouth of the boy. She hears a sound like a gunshot, even above the crashing chords of the noise around them, and his head flicks away from her; the hand that was under her tee shirt pulls free. With her other hand she pushes him completely away.
NO
She repeats the word.
NO
Somehow the room manages to become silent, the sound continues but everything is still. The boy stands motionless, staring at her, caught between anger at her slap and shock at what has happened.
The shock has given her the energy to get up and make her way to the door; she thanks a suddenly manifested God that she doesn’t have to walk past him to get to the exit. The boy does not move. She opens the door, exits and starts to walk, and then to run down the corridor. Her tee shirt is untucked, it feels uncomfortable, but she will not deal with the discomfort until she reaches her room.
The scene changes.
She is in her room, just a few minutes after the incident. She is shivering. The door is locked. Her right hand is still stinging from the impact on the boy’s cheek. He is probably feeling more pain than she is now.
Good.
The shock of the incident has been replaced by a sense of indignation. She is sitting on her bed, headphones on, playing her favourite CD, with her dressing gown wrapped around her. There is a conflict within her; she feels anger at what has happened, but also a sense of worthlessness, that even if she had allowed him to do whatever he wanted, it would only have been what she deserved. Even knows this is a lie, even if it is one she’s tempted to believe.
What she does think is true is that she is alone, but in this belief she is wrong. Even now, as she looks on in her dream Daisy knows it’s a lie, and for the very worst of reasons.
In her sleep Daisy twitches and shifts in her bed. Still looking in on the same scene she sees something that, until recently, she has never seen before. She isn’t alone as she huddles into her gown and loses herself in her music. The dark companions are in there with her, under the dressing gown; right in there, under her skin, in the blood and the bones, fingering her, more invasive than the unwanted hand of a drunken boy.
The scene changes again.
Daisy is looking at a row of cubicles in a public lavatory. The wall tiles reflect the dull luminous strips on the ceiling and she can hear the remote gurgle of a cistern. There is a strange peacefulness about the place.
Suddenly a door flies open and there she is, clutching a little bag and running into the nearest cubicle; crashing into the door which swings violently, hitting a rubber stopper and ricocheting back to hit her shoulder. Watching in her dream Daisy feels that pain in her shoulder now. She has never dreamed this moment before, and she is intrigued and terrified by the thought of how it might play out in her mind now.
She sees herself push round the door, slam it shut, and force the lock across. Then her knees seem to buckle and she collapses onto the cubicle floor, weeping and weeping so that the tears fall noiselessly onto the floor tiles. Her body is shaking with the discharge of emotion.
In her dream she can see herself hunched over in silence, jerking with every sob. As she watches herself she sees three forms materialize in a triangle around her. They pause for a moment, these three figures that she has never seen before, human forms in grey hovering over her, touching her, stroking her back and her arms. Daisy watches in fascination and horror, feeling the revulsion well up inside her.
But she knows that something else is about to happen; if the dream plays out as a copy of reality then she might be about to see the impact of Caleb’s prayers for her.
One of the three forms leans in closer and seems to pick with a thin finger at her forehead. The finger has worked itself into her head, just a couple of centimetres, but then the scene is transformed by a deluge of liquid light, pouring like clear water down onto her and over her. The light drowns out the artificial glow of the fluorescent tubes, and it is clean and urgent and alive.
At its touch the three figures recoil as if stung, and flatten themselves against the walls of the cubicle. The edges of each figure seem to bubble and dissolve becoming insubstantial, fraying under the proximity of this new presence.
Daisy remembers this moment, she remembers seeing a vision of Caleb Wicks; and he is there in the dream again, as in the vision, except she sees him more clearly this time. He is kneeling rather painfully on the floor and is wearing a rather faded chequered dressing gown. He is leaning on a desk with his fingers intertwined and clenched. Although he is perfectly still, he gives the impression of being engaged in combat. In her dream she can hear his prayers as inaudible whispers; they are prayers for her and she is embarrassed and thrilled to hear them.
She stares at the praying figure for a moment longer, and only now she sees there is someone else, a man, standing beside him. The man is short, and with a kind but plain face. He is no more than five and a half feet tall, and with wavy dark hair and olive coloured skin. He stands next to Caleb, and has his
hand on Caleb’s shoulder. Daisy looks at the hand and sees a ragged hole through the base of the palm; it looks like someone has dug a hole through his flesh with a potato peeler. The hole is large enough that the material of Caleb dressing gown is just visible through the wound.
The presence of this squat looking man in her dream seems to banish, for a moment, Daisy’s sense of loneliness. She feels his presence as if it were the presence of not one but many people, a great and joyful company, countless millions beside her, laughing, delighted by the truth of their being, who they are, and where they are going. They carry Daisy along with them, pleased to accept her into their company, and she is not alone, and will never be alone again.
Daisy knew that something had woken her up, a familiar noise. She guessed it was the post dropping onto the mat in the entry hall downstairs. She wanted to go and see if it was for her, but the bed was warm and her body wanted to stay there, and so she lay for a couple of minutes more before she began to fidget and her curiosity got the better of her.
She eased out of bed, and picked up the same old dressing gown she had wrapped protectively around herself five years ago after the attack. Hugging the gown to herself, she padded down the stairs to look at the scatter of envelopes sitting on their doormat. There, amongst the detritus of junk mail and pizza menus, she found a large handwritten envelope, generously covered in stamps, and marked “1st Class – please do not bend.” It was addressed to her. She recognized the writing as Poppy’s and she felt an echo of that sense of company, of companionship that she’d experienced in her dream.
Still standing in the hallway she opened the envelope and found within it a treasure of coloured drawings together with a little note from Poppy. She clutched them to herself and leapt up the stairs back to her room.
She emptied the envelope and spread the drawings out across the table, and her eyes began to water. Here were her drawings, her concepts, now given breath by a kaleidoscope of colours. There was the tabard sketched and coloured with the Kente designs, as she had wanted it. Daisy stared at it all in wonder.
Cain's Redemption Page 10