Chapter 30

30

October 31, 3 a.m.

three hours until low tide

The tape comes to an abrupt end and ejects itself. Then the eighty clocks out in the hall inform us that it is three a.m. We all wait for the noise to stop.

“I don’t think we learned anything at all from watching that nonsense,” says Lily when it is quiet again.

“Maybe not,” says Rose, putting down the remote. I stare at it and can’t help wondering if she stopped the tape just now, and whether there might have been more to see. “But this will be the first hour that someone didn’t … go missing. So I think we did the right thing by staying together in one room.”

“What do you mean?” asks Lily.

“Well, Nana was”—she looks at Trixie and sensors herself—“found at midnight. Dad at one a.m. We … found Trixie at two—”

“You can all stop pretending. I’m not a child,” says Trixie. Though in pink pajamas and with her mess of curls, she does look like one. “I’ve guessed that I didn’t just faint and that something happened to me too.”

“We didn’t want you to be scared,” says Lily.

“Why not? It’s obvious you all are,” Trixie replies, staring at her mother.

“If Rose is right, and someone planned to do something to one of us on the hour, every hour, then we’re due another … incident,” says Conor.

“Well, I make it three-oh-three, so maybe we’re safe now,” says Lily.

“Maybe,” Rose replies, sounding uncertain. She stares at Poppins, who is lying upside down, stretched out in front of the fire. It’s one of the old dog’s favorite spots in the house. Poppins hasn’t moved or made a sound for quite some time. We exchange looks, and then Rose speaks in that special voice she only uses for animals.

“Poppins?”

The dog doesn’t move.

“Poppins?” Rose tries again.

Nothing.

“Wakey wakey, Poppins,” says Trixie.

Rose turns a whiter shade of pale when there is still no response.

“Poppins,” she tries one last time. “Do you want din-dins?”

The dog goes from upside down to up on all fours and wagging her tail in seconds, and we breathe a communal sigh of relief.

“Thank god,” says Rose. “It’s less than three hours until low tide now. We just have to stay calm, then we can all get out of here. Together.”

Conor starts checking that the doors and windows are locked again, it’s Lily’s turn to pace up and down the room, and Rose sits in Nana’s purple armchair, quietly playing with the ring on her right hand. It’s made of three interlocking bands of bronze, silver, and gold, and was a gift from Nana on Rose’s sixteenth birthday. It’s something that I’ve always been jealous of, like so many of the things my sisters had that I didn’t. I remember that birthday and that year very well. It was 1986.

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Nana and Nancy were both wearing aprons—which was a recipe for disaster seeing as Nana didn’t like anyone else in the kitchen when she was cooking. But Nancy insisted on helping with her daughter’s sixteenth birthday cake. Lily—the lover of all things sweet—marched into the room where I had been sitting quietly and stuck her hand into the bowl of chocolate icing before licking her finger clean. Lily still had short hair, but it had grown into a bob by then, so she looked like a miniature version of our mother.

Rose was allowed to have a sleepover at Seaglass with some of her closest friends for her sixteenth birthday. She was about to start attending a different school, and I think in many ways it was a chance to say goodbye. Things were never quite the same between my sisters after the hair-cutting incident. But Lily was not looking forward to life at boarding school without Rose, and clung to her side that summer like a barnacle. She was our sister’s shadow but was never in it. She followed Rose everywhere, always wanting to be one step ahead. But she couldn’t follow Rose to a school for gifted students because she wasn’t one.

I remember the conversation Nana and Nancy had about my dad, and for the first time I didn’t really care whether he made an appearance or not. He wasn’t there for all of my birthdays.

“If he said he’ll be here, he’ll be here,” said Nana, defending her son.

Nancy sighed. “Well, it isn’t long before the kids arrive, then the tide will be in, and then he’ll be too late. You can’t be there for one daughter’s birthday and not there for the other. Rose will feel so let down if he’s a no-show again.”

“Just be patient,” Nana said. “And as for the other one, he’ll be back. Men don’t like being told off, it makes them sulk like the little boys they’re pretending not to be.”

“All I asked was for Bradley to wipe his feet before trudging in mud from the garden. It’s as though he can’t see the dirt.” I remember my mother and Conor’s father squabbling about the strangest of things when they were “friends.” Being neat and tidy frequently seemed to be high on their list of differences: she was; he wasn’t. Nancy was always tidying things away and putting them in cupboards. Conor’s dad’s inability to remove his muddy gardening boots before stepping inside made her crazier than normal.

“Daisy!” Nancy said. “Leave the cake mix alone!”

“Lily stuck her finger in the bowl, why can’t I? And why can’t I stay up for the party? I’m almost eleven,” said ten-year-old me.

“Because I said so. Rose wants to have a sleepover with some friends. They’re all a bit older than you, sweetheart. You can stay for the food, then straight up to your room. Nana and I are forbidden from staying downstairs too,” my mother said. “You’ll understand one day.”

I didn’t believe her.

Like all children whose parents get divorced, my sisters and I learned to adapt to our new lives. Rose and Lily learned to love going to boarding school, and soon seemed to resent their long summers back at Seaglass with me. Despite the unpleasantness they unpacked with their bags, I always longed for their return. I missed them. They shared a life that I had little knowledge of, filled with teachers and friends and lessons. I would listen to their stories with little understanding of what they meant. For years I thought that a spelling test was something only trainee witches had to do, to check they had learned their magic spells. I wondered if that’s what my sisters really were: witches. There had been plenty of evidence to suggest I was right. I resented their relationship, and was jealous of their education, and the older I got, the more being left behind bothered me.

My mother’s idea of homeschooling was to allow me to read the books Nana gave me. She wouldn’t even let me watch the news on TV, only cartoons like Bugs Bunny.

“Daisy doesn’t need to learn about the horrors of the real world,” Nancy would say, depriving me of the joy of learning. So I tried to teach myself. This Daisy was a self-raising flower. But my life was too quiet without my sisters in it. I was almost always alone, with nothing but novels and an overactive imagination for company.

Books can take you anywhere if you let them, and reading proved to be a big part of my education. But my sisters learned a lot of things that I didn’t. Things about real life, and social skills, and boys. I have always been a little awkward around real people. I don’t know how to talk to them, and even now, I still prefer the company of characters in books. I suppose it is a hangover from my childhood, when I was so often drunk with solitude. “Doesn’t play well with others” is to be expected when playing with others was rarely an option. And I have always been a little over the limit with my own opinions, without the views of others to dilute them.

“Can I watch Labyrinth again?” I asked Nancy when she tried to shoo me out of the kitchen for the tenth time. It was my favorite film that year, and Conor had managed to get me a bootlegged copy, but my sisters only wanted to watch Top Gun and drool over Tom Cruise, so I had to watch it on my own.

“Yes, but not tonight, because the only TV is downstairs, as you well know. Go on, skedaddle,” she said, wearing her enormous shoulder pads—a very strange invention, then and now. She started blowing up a blue balloon and left the room.

“Don’t waste your life being sad about things you can’t change,” Nana said when my mother was gone.

“I’m just sick of being such a loser,” I replied. Lily had started calling me that name on a regular basis, and always made an L-shape on her forehead when she did. She called me a loser so often I had started to believe that I was one. “Rose will go off to university one day, Conor will probably be a brilliant journalist … and I want that to happen for him, he’s so talented he deserves it—”

“Don’t spend all of your ambition on other people’s dreams,” said Nana.

“Why not? What kind of future do I have to look forward to? I’m a nobody.”

She smiled and shook her head. “The only nobodies in this world are the people who pretend to be somebody; the people who think they are better than other people because of the way they choose to look, or speak, or vote, or pray, or love. People are not the same but different, they are different but the same.” I was too young to understand what she meant at the time, but I think I do now.

“And Daisy…” Nana said, as we heard the sound of people arriving at the front door.

“Yes, Nana?”

“Best to leave the scissors in the drawer this family birthday.”

She knew. Nana knew that it was me who cut off Lily’s hair, but she had never said anything about it before. I’ve no idea what my face did—I’ve never had much control over the expressions it pulls—but the rest of me froze.

Nana smiled. “I’ll always keep your secrets, my darling girl. And you’ll always be my favorite. You just have to prove all those doctors wrong for me. As for your sisters … Albert Einstein once said that weak people revenge, strong people forgive, and intelligent people ignore. It was one of the few things he was wrong about. Success is the best revenge. Try to remember that.”

Before she could say any more on the subject, a small but perfectly formed group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds arrived at Seaglass. They had been shepherded across the causeway like lost sheep by Rose before the tide came in. Every one of them was dressed to impress. The only teenager I recognized among them was Conor, doing a not-bad impression of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. He wore aviator sunglasses indoors even when it got dark, so was constantly bumping into things and people, but he thought he looked cool.

I was allowed to stay downstairs until Rose blew out the sixteen candles on her birthday cake. Nancy, with a lot of help from Nana, had created a magic-looking Malteser cake, which looked like the bag of chocolates was hovering in midair. The number sixteen was spelled in chocolate balls too. It really was very impressive. When the bowls were all cleared away, Rose started opening her presents, surrounded by friends and people who loved her. My mother gave her a beautiful pale blue designer dress, and I felt the jealousy growing inside me until it hurt. But I wasn’t the only one. Lily looked at that dress as though it should have been hers, which might be why Rose immediately put it away in her wardrobe upstairs. When Rose opened Nana’s present—the bronze, silver, and gold ring that Rose still wears today—I remember how hard it was not to cry. The ring was so beautiful, just like my sister. I wished it were mine.

“Time for bed now, Daisy,” my mother said in front of everyone, and I hated her a little bit. I didn’t feel like a child, even though I was one, and I didn’t like the way she spoke to me in front of everyone else. I was old enough by then to notice that my mother always wanted to hide me away from the world, as though I were something to be ashamed of. At least that’s how it felt.

Ten-year-old me did go upstairs, but I didn’t go to bed as instructed.

Instead I snuck into my sisters’ bedroom, while everyone else was having too much fun downstairs to realize. I opened their wardrobe and found the pale blue dress my mother had given Rose for her birthday. The tags were still attached. I didn’t care that it didn’t belong to me, or that it was several sizes too big. I was sick of wearing hand-me-downs that were years old, and faded from being washed too many times. I put the dress on and admired my own reflection. Disappointed by what I saw, I borrowed one of Lily’s bras, stuffed it with socks, and pulled the dress over my head again. I looked better, even if one fake boob was bigger and higher than the other. Next I stole a pair of shoes, kitten heels that were too big and impossible to walk in, but that didn’t bother me. I never knew my shoe size as a child because I always just wore the shoes Rose and Lily had grown out of.

I borrowed some of my sisters’ makeup. Applying it wasn’t something I was good at—having never been shown—but I’d give myself an A for effort. Then I backcombed my hair. I’m still not sure why anyone ever thought this looked good, but in 1986, big hair was cool. I sprayed a can of hairspray all over the creature on top of my head until I made myself cough, and admired the finished result in the mirror. My face was a shock of pink lipstick and blue eye shadow, my hair looked as though I had stuck my fingers in a socket, but the blue dress was beautiful, and I liked what I saw.

Not sure what to do next, but still in the mood to do things I knew I shouldn’t, I opened Rose’s diary, which she kept by her bed. I understood that what she wrote inside was private, but I wanted to know everything about the lives that my sisters got to lead. I found one of Rose’s hush poems scribbled on a scrap of paper, hidden between the pages, and I sang it out loud.

Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.

Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

And if that mockingbird does scream,

Mama’s gonna trap you inside a dream.

And if that dream is a scary place,

Mama’s gonna put a pillow over your face.

Hush, little baby, don’t you cry.

Sometimes we live, sometimes we die.

There were magazines spread across Lily’s side of the room—she loved Just Seventeen—and there were a pair of scissors on top of an open page, where she had been cutting out the faces of her favorite boy bands and sticking them to the wall. Lily was obsessed with boys by then, and to be fair, they were fairly obsessed with her in return.

I could hear my sisters and their friends playing a game downstairs in the hall, so I crept out onto the stairs so that I could listen. The game involved striped drinking straws, the kind Nana normally used for homemade lemonade. The rules of the game were hard to follow, but the boys picked blue-and-white straws, the girls picked red-and-white ones, and the boy and girl with the shortest straws were locked in the cupboard under the stairs for one minute. The cupboard with no light. And mice. And spiders. But spiders aren’t the only ones to spin webs to catch their victims.

I peered down at them all through the banister, and it didn’t look like a fun game to me. When Rose and Conor chose the short straws and were locked inside, Lily looked very upset. The group of ten or so teenagers were all counting down the seconds and giggling, and I couldn’t resist slowly creeping down the stairs to get a closer look. When the clocks in the hallway all struck midnight, the kids all screamed.

Lily unlocked the cupboard.

But Rose and Conor didn’t come out; they were too busy kissing.

“Look! It’s the real Daisy Darker!” said a boy I’d seen staring at me earlier. He looked like he ate too many chocolate bars.

Nobody else noticed me at all; they were too busy staring at Rose and Conor. I guess I’m one of those people who other people just don’t see. Lily was crying in the corner of the hallway for some reason; the mascara she had been wearing had leaked down her cheeks in a series of inky tears. Rose and Conor were still kissing—as though the rest of us weren’t there—and I decided that it was time for bed after all.

I ran up the stairs and back into my sisters’ bedroom, pulling off the blue designer dress. I could still hear all the clocks striking midnight down in the hall, and they sounded louder than normal. That’s when I noticed the scissors on top of Lily’s pile of magazines again. I didn’t really think about it, didn’t hesitate. I shredded that blue dress so that Rose would never ever get to wear it. Then I put the thin strands of silky blue material in her bed, hiding them beneath her pillow. I put the scissors on Lily’s bedside table and left everything else exactly as I found it.

Lily got the blame, and a silent war started between my sisters.

Everyone thought it was an act of revenge.

They were right about that part.