Out of her bag she produces a small docking station, which she sets beside us all so that it can fill the air with the softness of her atmospheric music. ‘OK, Lily,’ she begins, ‘I am going to show you how to meditate until you experience a trance-like state, or even sleep. Mum and Dad, could you kiss Lily and tell her that you will see her when it is your own time to move on.’ They dutifully do this and it’s not lost on us that we don’t have to say goodbye. Dad has to pull Mum gently away, as he did that day in the morgue, and her fingertips caress my hair, until with Dad’s protective arm firmly round her shoulders her fingers cannot reach me any more.
Sue begins to allow her words to form a steady line, like a verbal slipstream in amongst her music, encouraging me to breathe deeply and relax. ‘Don’t be scared, dear. You are warm, you are comfortable, you are looking for a bright light, and when you find it you must move towards it.’ Her words go on, and on, and I know I’m supposed to find some sort of meditative state in all this, but really? That music is doing my head in.
Suddenly I snap open my eyes and make everyone jolt slightly, and I know they are all looking intently at me to see if I am Ben. ‘It’s still me,’ I say, looking at each one of them. ‘Can one of you get my phone? Sorry, Sue, but this is not my kind of music; It’s for old people. I want something to remind me I am a teenager and I have lived.’
Dad gets my phone and hands it to me and I scroll through for something. I find a track that was played at Milly’s party and I set it to play on a loop, settling myself back on the sofa and sucking in a deep breath. ‘OK, ready!’
‘Close your eyes, Lily … you are warm … you are comfortable …’ Sue’s words become a drone again, and I let them fade into the background as my music floats into my head, the lyrics and the soft beat reminding me of that one single brilliant night, of dancing and friends and music. I want to tell Mum and Dad to let Ben be the one to decide what to do with my ashes but when I open my eyes again it is Ben that I see standing next to me.
He takes a step forward and holds his hand out to help me up. This time, I do take his hand, my arms and legs and body becoming Lily again, my hair long and black. His arms round my shoulders feel so good, and I know, without him saying anything, that he’s OK. We are one again, arms entwined, tied forever by the twin thing. I turn to look into the room and I see Ben’s body lying on the sofa as if he’s asleep. Mum and Dad are watching him intently. They cannot see their children hugging each other so close beside them. I wish they could.
Sue is not looking at the sofa. She has that strange look she gets, as if tuning in to something ‘She has left his body,’ she whispers. ‘They are together.’
I see a wisp of smoke curling around us, and some more in the corner of the room. I know then that they have come to get me, these wisps that belong to people who have gone before, and now there is nothing holding me back.
Sue is still talking. Her words are filtering through and she is asking Ben to let me go and to come back to his family.
‘Hyacinths? You jerk! At a time like this, you gave me a clue?’ I ask. ‘Why didn’t you just tell me to go and forgive her?’
‘Because you needed to work it out yourself,’ he answers. ‘I could have tried to find you in the night on several occasions but I wanted to give you a bit of time to find your way.’
‘How long would you have given me?’ I ask, wondering if I could have at least made it to Paris.
He shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Not enough to make it to Paris. I just knew you needed to sort some stuff out before you could let go of everything. Thankfully your superiorness worked it out reasonably swiftly.’
Who knew? My brother is a wise old thing and not an idiot after all. But I have to say it. ‘Superiority! “Superiorness” isn’t a word.’ We both laugh one final time.
‘I left you a letter,’ I add.
‘I know,’ he says and his look says a thousand words as a smile plays on the corner of his mouth. He has seen everything. I didn’t steal him, I just used his body for a while, and he let me. He gave me the greatest of gifts and I will literally be grateful for eternity.
‘Thank you, Ben.’
‘What for?’ He grins, acting, as if these lost weeks in his life were nothing.
‘Allowing me to … climb back on my perch for a while.’ I grin back. ‘And letting me make an idiot of you.’
‘Yeah, you did make an idiot of me … several times over … but you saved me too.’
A vision of Joe and Graham comes to mind and I know Ben saw all of this. ‘Yeah, I did, didn’t I …? So we’re even?’ I ask.
‘We’re even,’ he answers.
I did a good thing.
‘You’d better go.’ I point to his body, as Sue calls him back, and the wisps of smoke begin to take form, beckoning me towards them. ‘Can’t have you dying on Mum and Dad too.’
‘You’d better go too,’ he says. ‘I think someone is waiting.’
A wisp beckons me like it did in the crematorium, but I now can see the shape of our lovely gran, her gentle, timeless face that I remember so well, emerging through the beckoning forms. In an instant all the difficult emotions that I have felt over the last few weeks, anger, fear, regret and guilt, slip away; I am warm, and I am peaceful.
I am so glad to see her, and as I move towards her open arms I am overwhelmed by the most amazing feeling, like peanut butter, riding Arizona through the salty sea, and the twenty-second hug with my mum and dad. The other wisps take shape and reach their arms towards me too, I don’t remember who they all are – our other gran from long ago, I think, and other faces from the family album, but I know I want to go with them. I know now that I will no longer be alone. It’s as if the sun has come out, its warmth and brightness leading the way, and that to follow them towards it will be the most wonderful thing to do.
‘Tell Dad Gran came for me,’ I say, but as I turn back to look at Ben, he is already lying down in his own body. I wanted to tell him I love him, but I guess he already knows. It’s a twin thing.
When my brother opens his own eyes, in his own house, with his parents beside him, ready to live the rest of his life, I am gone.
I can see the tops of distant buildings, a patchwork of countryside and the beetling of cars along tiny grey threads of road becoming smaller and smaller, masked occasionally by the mists of rushing clouds, until they have gone, and there is nothing but blue. I lean back, breathing with satisfaction, letting the brightness of a foreign sun flooding through the oval window bathe me in its light.
I use this time, as I always do, to reflect. It is a time with no agenda except the hours between taking off and landing. As the aeroplane banks I think of the tiny seeds I’ve just planted in a patch of ground belonging to a small village, now nestled in the African soil that I’m flying over. I picture their golden heads waving under the orange African sunshine in a few months’ time, watered by my new good friend with conker-brown skin and the whitest of teeth. I hope that his smiling face, beaming out from his copy of the World Traveller magazine I am photographer for, will encourage him to remember his task. I trust him, as I do the many other friends I have made around the world, to care for my seeds. I think of their feet, and their children’s feet, treading the ground beneath them, perhaps in the very place where some of the ashes of my sister have settled.
My camera equipment is stowed safely in the hold, having captured all the photographs of this particular adventure, and as always, I’m so grateful that my amazing job means I get to travel the world. Lucky, lucky me.
I still have the urn. The ashes within are steadily reducing as I take my sister on her much-wanted trip around the world, number one on her long-ago list. The ashes settle in sand, or grass, or dust, undetected by my glossy photographs submitted to the magazine, but very much there even so. Every summer I imagine Lily and her sunflowers rising out of unusual places, an old wooden boat filled with soil or a tractor tyre in a junk yard, on hills sweeping down to the sea, or small front yards in dra
b urban corners, or on the rooftop gardens of city buildings. It makes me smile.
I think of the first adventure when I took Lily’s ashes to Paris in the summer of our sixteenth birthday, when I went with Matthew and his family. At the highest pinnacle of what was once the tallest building in the world, I took a tiny bag out of my pocket and scattered the ashes to the wind. I imagined Lily floating over Paris and eventually coming to land in gardens, on buildings or on an open-topped boat on the River Seine. I snapped a picture with the camera on my phone and that was the moment I knew what my future would be.
When she used my body, when we were just fifteen, I watched her every moment. I watched her every night from the shadows of her sleep while I waited, keeping a safe distance away, so that the power of my own body couldn’t draw me back to itself. Because after that first time, when she wouldn’t let go of the duvet, I realised that I couldn’t push her aside, leaving her on her own with her unfinished life. She wasn’t ready.
I knew that my sister needed to work out how to let go, and in the few short weeks that Lily had her second chance, she learnt to forgive, to accept and to die. I watched her mend the rips and tears that had appeared in everyone’s lives from that one fateful moment on a February day. She did a good thing.
I also thank her for every single day that I’ve missed her. And on Nathan and Alex Peterson’s behalf, for giving them back their wife and mother, the very lovely Alice Peterson. The world is definitely a better place with her in it.
I hope that from wherever she is Lily can see the faces of the old people where Alice still works. She kept her promise too, and honoured Lily in a different way; tired but peaceful eyes now spend their last days lingering on an anonymously donated courtyard garden, with raised planters, hanging sun catchers and carefully arranged bird feeders, and an old terracotta pot with ever-changing flowers.
I also hope that she can see that Mum and Dad honoured her wish to revisit King’s Lane in September, planting a host of wildflowers all along the lane where they grow still, returning year after year, flourishing where death once lingered, waving their colourful heads at all who drive down that road.
As glamorous as my job is, there is only one place for me at the end of it, with my own family. My wife, with her beautiful warm, copper-coloured skin, and the wild black hair of my daughter, with its untamed curls that dance around cheeks spilt with cinnamon freckles, and those eyes, those big green eyes. I love them both.
Beth and I tasted the sweetness of a brief wild fling when I first returned, healing the wound that was life without Lily, until our lives, as they needed to, went their own separate ways. A quirky burst of rain found us running for the same doorway of a warm London cafe eight years later, pearls of water clinging to our hair and clothes as our lives unfolded over frothy cappuccinos and blueberry muffins. So much to tell … university, her promised world travel, and mine, of loves found and lost, memories of who we used to be and who we had become, until in the hour and a half it took for the rain to stop, love found its way.
The steward’s trolley stops by my aisle and I order one of their tiny bottles of white wine. The stewardess with the reddest of lipstick applied to perfection asks me if there is anything else that I need. But I have it all. I make a toast, as I do on every trip, to everything that is good, and sip from my plastic glass, as I read Lily’s long-ago letter, which was left with an old chocolate box of silver memories.
Dear Ben.
With this letter you will find my after bucket list and all the many things that I would do if I could. Now you have to do them for me. All of them, if possible, and more.
I know you wanted to take my ashes and do something crazy with them. Well, here is a clue. In the wrappers inside the envelope are two pieces of gum. I have chewed one (I cleaned my teeth first) and you must chew the other, preferably not after eating pizza! After you have done that, put a teeny tiny bit of my ash inside, then merge them together and stick them on the Seattle Gum Wall. I don’t care how you find the money for the trip, or when. Do it! Our bits of gum will have the craziest story out of all the other bits of gum. How cool is that?
Do you like the tattoo? It is number two on my list. Sue took me to have it done on Friday after I saw Nathan’s mum. Pretty, isn’t it? Payback for the potty photo! I wanted the tattoo but you are the one who has to live with it. My final work of sabotage … Hurrah for me!
Well, I had better sign off. It just isn’t possible to fit a lifetime of words on this small page. All I can do is thank you for all time – my fabulous brother.
Lily x
The cabin feels warm and I roll the sleeves of my white shirt up past my elbows. The skin on my arms is tanned and shows up the scattering of grey amongst the once-black hairs. My shirt hides the tattoo on my arm of a lily. It’s not very discrete, and not very manly, but this also makes me smile every time I see it. I thought we were even, but she won!
There is a pocket in my heart where all the jokes and pranks, the flicking of tea towels and the firing of elastic bands now lie dormant. This pocket belongs exclusively to me and my twin sister and our fabulous childhood years.
I fold the letter, finish the wine, and sigh with pure satisfaction. Lily is everywhere. In dust, in cities, in fields and rivers and even on the Seattle Gum Wall.
And sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I think I can see wisps, like clouds in a summer sky, changing shape with the breeze.
Acknowledgements
My sincere gratitude to the author Anthony Riches for believing this book had legs and for pushing it under the nose of Broo Doherty, Literary Agent.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the very lovely Broo Docherty, for having faith in and for making it happen.
Thank you to Emma Matthewson and all the staff from Hot Key Books for your amazing enthusiasm.
Thank you to Geraldine Davey who was always ready for brainstorming sessions, suffered my endless ups and downs, queries and self doubts, whilst tirelessly sliding delicious homemade cakes and cups of tea in my general direction.
A big thank-you to my life-long friend Della Ray and the late Josie McDonagh for sharing the most wonderful bottle of 1982 Veuve Clicquot to celebrate my book deal. I feel honoured that you shared this with me.
Thank you to Lisa Cherry – speaker, trainer, author – for giving me the push I needed to believe I could write a book.
Thank you to all my friends and family for their ongoing support and to the friends who read the first drafts and gave me the confidence to keep going: Helen Riches, Antoinette Wilcox, Barbara Drummond and Marti Scott-Lee.
Thank you also to my Dutch family, Carla Meijer and Marjon and Bert Bakker for encouraging me to write and for always being so positive.
Thank you to my stepdaughter, Christina O’Sullivan, Paramedic Education and Training Officer, East of England, and to Garrett Gloyn, Gloucestershire Police for their advice.
And last but not least to David Mooney, my wonderful husband, for supporting me in every way while I wrote this book.
Phyllida Shrimpton
Phyllida Shrimpton is a full-time mother of a teenage daughter and currently lives in Essex with her husband, their rescued Newfoundland and small badly behaved Jack Russell.
She achieved a postgraduate degree in Human Resource Management, but soon jumped ship to work with teenagers, including students with Asperger’s syndrome, on an Essex-based agricultural college farm before eventually moving to live temporarily in the Netherlands. She is also an artist. Sunflowers in February is her first novel.
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by
HOT KEY BOOKS
80–81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE
www.hotkeybooks.com
Copyright © Phyllida Shrimpton, 2018
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the p
ublisher.
The right of Phyllida Shrimpton to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781471406898
This eBook was produced using Atomik ePublisher
Hot Key Books is an imprint of Bonnier Zaffre Ltd,
a Bonnier Publishing company
www.bonnierpublishing.com
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