by Juno Dawson
I rolled my eyes. ‘OK, you are really scary right now, so I’m not even gonna get into this –’ oh I so got into it – ‘but Zoë joined the band after Nico and Etienne put it together and she never wrote any of the songs. She didn’t even come up with her parts, Nico did.’ And then I really went there. ‘She’s not even that good.’
Polly laughed. She laughed in my face. ‘Are you that ******* stupid to think Nico can do no wrong? Wake up and smell the ****! You know what? Go **** yourself.’ She grabbed her satchel and stomped back towards the sixth-form wing.
Beasley scowled at me. ‘Oh nice one, Tor. Guess who has Sociology with her next period?’ He trailed after her, resigned to a lesson with a grizzly bear.
I was left alone with Daisy. ‘You agree, right? That she’s being ridiculous?’ I said.
Daisy smiled as sweetly as the crocuses around us. ‘Oh I’m not getting involved. I’m Princess Fence-Sitter of Switzerland.’
Frustration fizzed in my gut. Why did everyone always pander to Polly’s temper tantrums? A group of people who live in fear of a domineering leader isn’t a friendship, it’s a dictatorship. It wasn’t healthy. ‘OK,’ I said, gathering my things. ‘Watch out for splinters in your ass.’
I didn’t see Polly after school. Polly didn’t text me when I got home, before or after dinner. At dinner, even Mum noticed something was wrong and I had to fend her off sulkily. She hadn’t texted before bed. Like the metaphorical pot, a watched phone doesn’t ping.
This was stupid. It wasn’t even our beef. Why Zoë hadn’t had it out with Nico was anyone’s guess – it seemed so silly that Polly and I had been dragged into it. I truly believed the band wasn’t at fault though. If Zoë wasn’t fit for purpose then she had to go. She had a new band now anyway. More’s the point, there was no guarantee Judas Cradle would even get signed. This was thoughtcrime – the band were guilty of crimes they hadn’t yet committed!
I definitely wasn’t texting her, even if it meant we never spoke ever again. Oh, I could be stubborn when I wanted to be too. I wasn’t going to be another yes-person who flitted around her like she was sodding Titania.
(But I did want her to text me.)
I wanted her to realise that our friendship was more important than some band-rivalry nonsense. I wanted her to respect me for being the only person who stood up to her.
(But I absolutely wasn’t going to be the one to make the first move.)
It played on my mind all night. I lay awake in bed, staring at my ceiling but not seeing it. I could only think of the argument and what tomorrow would bring. At times I thought perhaps I should apologise and let it blow over, before the mule-headedness returned and I forbade myself from reaching for my phone.
Eventually I must have slumped into a reedy, deeply unsatisfying sleep because when my alarm went off it woke me up. No. It wasn’t my alarm. It was the landline. I looked at my clock and saw that it was six fifty. Kind of early for a phone call and, frustratingly, ten minutes before my actual alarm was due to go off. Hate that. I immediately wondered if it was Polly, ringing to clear the air before school. I imagined she’d had a night of fitful sleep too and wanted to make things right. I burst out onto the upstairs landing and threw myself downstairs towards the hall where the phone waited on its base.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, is that Toria? It’s Mr Wolff here.’
‘Oh … hello.’
‘I know it’s early, but could I talk to your mum or dad please?’
Dad now emerged from the kitchen in a dressing gown. ‘Who is it, Tor?’
I held out the phone. ‘It’s Mr Wolff from school.’ Dad looked worried at once, the kind of face that said What trouble have you got yourself into? I was more worried about Polly – what had she done? What had she said?
Dad said little after he took the phone, making ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and ‘uh-huhs’. It was impossible to read. ‘OK,’ he said finally. ‘Thank you for letting us know.’ He hung up the phone. ‘Victoria, I … er … I think you should sit down.’ He steered me into the lounge.
‘Dad, what is it? Is it Polly?’ I pictured her taking a pencil sharpener to pieces and slicing it into her skin. ‘Is she OK?’
He physically squashed me down by the shoulders until I was perched stiff on the couch. ‘No, Toria, it’s Daisy. God, I don’t know how to say this. I’m so sorry, Tor. She passed away in the night.’
I’ll be honest. I don’t really remember too clearly what happened next. It’s a blobby blur.
I remember some bits – images and noises – but I can’t decide if they really happened or if my mind is filling the blanks with little scenes my brain’s directed.
I’ll do my best.
Chapter Fifteen
Inappropriate
My dad said something like: ‘Daisy died, Tor.’
I said something like: ‘I heard what you said, I just …’
I remember thinking that the last word I said to her was ‘ass’.
Dad did some explaining: ‘Mr Wolff said she had heart failure. She died in her sleep, Tor, I’m sure it wasn’t …’
Then there’s a blob. Dad said some more words and I think I said something like this: ‘No, no way, she’s getting better. She’s been eating, we’ve all seen her eating.’ I don’t know what made me think I could argue her back from death’s bony clutches, but I gave it a go.
Dad shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry, Tor. She’s been ill for years. I guess … I guess her body couldn’t cope any more …’ He said more stuff that I don’t remember because there’s another blob.
Either he went quiet or I stopped listening. The clock beat out seconds on the mantelpiece and I heard the pitter-patter of the shower running upstairs. Despite everything I’ve said about time, sometimes a second can feel like a forever.
Daisy. Gone.
I had nothing. Just blob.
And then I was back, I think. I must have sprung off the sofa and gone for the stairs because I remember being at the foot of them. Dad caught hold of my arm. ‘Toria, you don’t have to go into school today, Mr Wolff said.’
I pulled my arm loose. ‘I know. I really need to ring Polly.’
‘Maybe you should wait until –’
‘No! I have to do it now!’ I remember thinking that I had to get to the others. We had to be together. That was the most important thing.
‘Please come and sit down. We need to talk about this –’ I must have cut him off and ran because the next thing I remember I was upstairs by myself.
On the landing, Mum emerged from the bathroom in a towel. She said something like: ‘What’s going on down there? Was that the phone? Who was it?’
I ignored her, head down, fists clenched. I said something like: ‘I don’t need to talk about it. I’m fine. I need to check on the others. I’m fine.’ I ran past my bewildered mother, and into my room. I dived over the bed to retrieve my phone. There were already texts and missed calls from Nico and Beasley but I ignored them. I called Polly.
After the seventh ring it went straight to voicemail.
I think I tried again. I didn’t leave a message. All I could think about was how devastated the others would be. The hugeness of Daisy dying was too vast, too abstract, to process, like trying to visualise a really big number.
I know I did not cry.
This is why I hate death: I’d experienced my first proper death when I was fifteen. My grandma, Dad’s mum, had died of breast cancer and I didn’t handle it at all well. By that I mean I didn’t handle it the way you’re expected to. You’re meant to weep and cry and sob, but I just couldn’t. It was sad and I would miss her but I couldn’t cry. For months I’d watched her fade away on chemotherapy, becoming thinner and thinner until she no longer resembled my gran – more like living carrion. It was horrific. People repeatedly said to me, ‘Don’t you care? It’s your grandma,’ and I did care, I loved her a lot, but I didn’t cry. I tried so hard, I tried to make myself sadder – gazing out of the window
at night and listening to maudlin songs, but I still couldn’t get it up.
People judge you if you don’t cry when people die. They call you cold and heartless. I don’t think I’m heartless. Maybe it’s stage fright. Maybe I’m just a hard-boiled egg.
Then I didn’t need to cry, I needed to get through to Polly. On the third attempt her mother answered, as cold and pointed as an icicle, as always.
‘Hello, Toria, this is Mrs Wolff.’
‘Hi. Is Polly there please?’
‘She can’t come to the phone at the moment. She’s very upset about what’s happened.’
You can say her name, I thought, but kept it to myself. ‘OK. I was just ringing to check she was OK, but … well … please let her know that I’m here if she needs to talk, OK?’ The pathetic stupidity of our squabble yesterday was erased; it was the first thing that was washed away when the tidal wave struck.
‘I will do, thank you, Toria.’ Mrs Wolff hung up.
I flopped down onto the bed. Perhaps I should be crying now. I looked deep, really deep inside myself, but it was like mining coal. Inside there was only black. I felt nothing except the need, the urgent need, to be with Polly.
How could Daisy be gone?
Stupidly, selfishly, I thought how the next time I went to French no one would have saved me a seat. I was almost sick, but I swallowed it back. My hands were trembling and clammy and I could feel panic creeping in, like I was falling somehow, losing my grip. I closed my eyes and let out a long, controlled breath. I couldn’t falter. I had to make sure the others were OK. Freaking out wasn’t going to achieve anything. Hard-boiled egg.
Who found her? Was it her mum? Was she cold? I pictured her lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, curls spilling around her head like a halo … No, too much. I blotted the thought out of my head, squeezing my temples.
‘Toria?’ It was Mum. She rapped on the door. ‘Are you OK? Dad told me what happened. Can I come in?’
‘I’m fine!’ I yelled. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’ I opened the first text from Nico:
Fuck, have you heard about Dais? CALL ME.
My phone lit up. Beasley. I answered at once.
‘Hey …’
‘Oh god, Tor, thank god you answered.’ He was sniffing. He had managed to cry, evidently. Why can’t I cry? ‘No one’s answering their phone!’
‘It’s OK, I’m here.’
‘Tor, I don’t know what to do. I just can’t believe it. My mum has gone round to Daisy’s. My mum couldn’t stop crying; it was awful.’
So everyone but me was crying.
‘Stay there, OK? I’m coming over.’
I threw on a mish-mash wash-basket outfit and pelted out of the door, only pausing to let Dad know where I was headed. This was good, this was taking action. No point in sitting around and being sad, was there?
On the way over I called Nico. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked. The morning was bright and sunny and it felt grossly wrong. The sun shouldn’t have come up today, the disrespectful bitch.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Seriously. But I’m so worried about Polly. She wouldn’t even come to the phone. I’m on my way over to Beasley’s now.’
‘Want me to come over?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good. We should be together.’ I refrained from saying It’s what Daisy would have wanted. Daisy would have been pissed off and rightly so. Daisy was doing everything she could to stay alive and it still wasn’t good enough. Ooh, that was good. Some of the feeling was coming back, like when the anaesthetic wears off after you’ve been to the dentist and you realise you’re dribbling down your chin. I was angry, angry at no one and nothing, lashing and kicking at thin air – but it was a feeling nonetheless.
I arrived at Beasley’s house, a new build almost identical to ours, and everything was too normal. Beasley welcomed me inside and we hugged. He made my shoulder wet, but got it together pretty quickly. This was good: I could do this. Now I had a function: the ‘shoulder to cry on’. With a trembling voice he asked if I wanted a drink and I followed him into the kitchen. The fridge hummed, ice shifted in the ice-maker and the cat noisily scoffed his breakfast.
Everything was the same except Daisy was dead.
I thought about her body again, this time in a body bag on a mortuary slab. Where is it now? Where do they take them? Is she blue? Are her eyes open or shut? But Daisy wasn’t in her body any more. Wherever it was, it was just a shed skin now.
‘I don’t know how to talk,’ Beasley said, lifting some orange juice out of the fridge door. ‘Like, I don’t know what words to say.’
‘I know what you mean. It feels like everything is rude, like everyone should be silent for a while.’
‘Do you think we should be silent?’
‘I don’t know. No. That’s weird.’
His breath wavered again. ‘I just can’t believe it.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I knew I could listen, if nothing else.
He shook his head. ‘I think if I do I’ll break down again.’
I took a sip of the orange juice. It was the kind with bits in. Gross. God, why was I even thinking about orange juice? Daisy is dead and you’re thinking about bits in orange juice, what the hell is wrong with you? I didn’t say anything. ‘Well, we don’t have to. We can do anything you want to do.’
His lips drew down at the edges like Grumpy Cat. ‘Would it be wrong to watch a film or something?’
I shrugged. ‘We can either be sad in silence or be sad with the TV on. Either way, today is sad.’
In what was a really inappropriate or really appropriate gesture, we watched Poltergeist. By the time we were on Poltergeist II: The Other Side, Nico had arrived and by the opening credits of Poltergeist III, Alice and Alex had arrived too. We said very little, not even commenting on the film. Alice lay in Alex’s lap, a twisted tissue wrapped around her fingers.
I had questions and I’m pretty sure the others did too, but they were a waste of air. Knowing the ins and outs of Daisy’s death wasn’t going to bring her back. I didn’t hear a word of the films; I thought about illness. Daisy had been ill for almost eight years. Eight years of starvation and force-feeding. One look at her said she wasn’t well and yet it would have somehow been easier to understand or predict if she’d had cancer or something – we get that. Everyone understands physical disease. The plain fact was Daisy had starved herself until her body couldn’t work any more. A different kind of disease, a harder one to get my head around.
She had been very, very ill and yet her death was still so sudden. I wondered if it’s always like that. Even with sick people, death is the ultimate ninja – you never hear her footsteps until it’s too late.
Like Daisy said herself at Christmas, I’ve always been optimistic – it’s how I get through the day – knowing that there is always something to look forward to. Sure I wear a lot of black and I’m not exactly cheerleader material, but even a new vlog going online was a reason to get out of bed in the morning. That’s how I’ve always been. I guess I wanted Daisy to get better so badly I never even considered that she might not.
The same thoughts going round and round in my head were making me feel carsick. Eventually I could sit still no longer. ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea. Does anyone want one?’
Alex did and I told them not to pause the film. With no one looking, I swiped a chocolate chip muffin out of a packet on top of the bread bin. I was starving but airing this thought again seemed wrong somehow. Mouth full of cake, I leaned against the kitchen counter waiting for the kettle to boil, and tried to have a cry. It felt like emotional constipation; I might feel better if I could squeeze some tears out. Nothing. It wasn’t going to happen. Nico followed me into the kitchen. ‘Hey, how’re you doing?’
‘I’m fine. It’s not about me, is it? I’m scared to say anything in case I accidentally crack a joke.’
Nico gave a slight smile. ‘Oh, whoops, I laughed.’
‘You know what?’ I plonked two
mugs onto the counter. ‘This isn’t real yet. There’s going to be a moment, probably in a few weeks, and something’s going to happen that only Daisy would find funny and I’m going to try to text her and I’m going to lose it.’
Nico wrapped his arms around me, but I felt cactus-like and subtly brushed him off to pour the water. ‘When you do, I’ll be ready to scrape you back together,’ he murmured.
‘Thank you. When it hits it’s going to hit hard.’
‘Mum did her Buddhist bit this morning.’ Nico pushed himself up to sit on the counter. ‘Sickness, dying and death. It’s all in the small print.’
‘What?’ I took out some of my frustration on the teabag, squishing the poor thing against the side of the mug with all my strength.
‘It’s like Ariel in The Little Mermaid.’
I waited for an explanation, gawping at him blankly. ‘OK, now I have to ask if you’re OK?’
He smiled. ‘I mean there’s always a catch. Ariel gets to be human, but she has to give up her voice. The catch with being alive is that we’re all going to die. Sooner or later. It’s a done deal. What actually makes life really hard is that we don’t want to die and we don’t want to lose people. According to Mum, life is one long struggle against not getting your own way. We all wish Daisy was still alive, simple as that. We’re spoiled brats; we all want to get our own way. That’s why life is so hard. Death is easy.’
I abandoned the tea and pressed myself into his chest. He was right. I remember reading once about a girl who chewed her hair so often it formed a ball in her stomach and killed her. That’s what it felt like. The knot in my stomach wasn’t SAD it was WANT. I really, really, really wanted Daisy to not be dead. Perhaps sadness is always ‘want’: wanting someone or something you can’t have. I don’t know.
‘That doesn’t make it any easier. I do want her back, Nico. I can’t help it. I want her back. I want her to be here.’ I spoke to his chest.
He stroked my hair. ‘According to my mum, you can meditate it away. I think she’s lying though.’