Chapter 37

37

SEAGLASS

1988

“Why do they get to go to a Halloween party and I have to stay here? I always have to stay behind. You never let me do anything,” I said to my mother, hoping that the vast amount of alcohol she had consumed that night might have made her change her mind. Saving an alcoholic seemed to turn her into one. Albeit the functioning variety that people aren’t as quick to condemn.

“Because you’re only thirteen,” Nancy said, pouring another glass of wine.

“So? You let Rose and Lily go to parties when they were my age.”

“You know as well as I do that your sisters aren’t as—”

“What? Unhappy? Lonely? Bored?”

Nancy tutted, and it made me so mad. It was the bad habit she was always so good at. The sound of people tutting still makes me cross. Sometimes my mother would tut for the benefit of nobody but herself, when she thought she was alone and no one could hear her. Tut. Tut. Tut. It was her response to everything that irritated her, including me. Nancy steered me out of the room, as though I were an embarrassment that Nana’s agent shouldn’t have to see.

“Your sisters aren’t as delicate as you are,” she said, with a level of satisfaction that made me want to tut.

“I’m not—”

“Daisy, I have spent my life protecting you from the world and looking after you…” That sounded like a joke to me. By then, my mother was a woman who could barely look after herself. After the breakup with Conor’s father, she seemed smaller, and had become a bit introverted. London was too loud for her, and our tiny town house was too claustrophobic with no real outdoor space. So we spent more time at Seaglass than ever before. Nancy sat alone in the garden for hours with her precious flowers, because they were all she had left of Conor’s dad, and her only friends came in bottles. My mother had less time than ever for me, and she resented the pity and guilt I seemed to cause her to feel. “I am never going to let anything happen to you,” she said, holding my shoulders a little too tight. Sometimes it felt like she wanted me to stay sick and vulnerable forever.

A lifetime of my mother “protecting” me meant that I didn’t have much of a life or any friends of my own, not real ones. I didn’t go to school, or Brownies, or swimming lessons like my sisters. I didn’t get to hang out with any other children my own age. Even now, I find it hard to make friends, and sometimes I think it’s because I never got taught how to do it. That was something neither Nancy nor Nana knew how to teach, because they didn’t have any either. My childhood friends were Agatha Christie and Stephen King.

When I look back, I think being homeschooled deprived me of so much more than anyone realized. I can understand why my mother didn’t see the point in me learning algebra—that was something we did agree on—but there were plenty of things I couldn’t teach myself by reading books. I didn’t just miss out on the lessons most children learn in a classroom. There were life lessons I never knew.

I gave up demanding to be allowed out. There was no point arguing with my mother. You can’t win an argument with someone who refuses to have one. I left them all to it and went up to my room, furious about being treated like a child when I no longer felt like one. Nancy wouldn’t even let me read the letters from the hospital, even though they were about me. I thought about the last doctor I had seen, and how happy and cheerful he was compared to all the others. “Now go and live your life,” he had said with a big smile on his face, as though there were nothing wrong with me at all. Living was all I wanted to do, so I couldn’t understand why Nancy still insisted on locking me away and treating me like a porcelain doll.

An hour or so after Nana’s birthday dinner, the tide was almost low enough for Rose, Lily, and Conor to leave. They had changed into costumes for the annual Halloween beach party, and as always, I was going to miss out on all the fun. Whenever the three of them attended local parties, there was normally some coordination when it came to their outfits. That year they were going as the Lion, the Witch, and the Pumpkin. Rose was the lion, Lily was a witch—a role she was well rehearsed in—and Conor was dressed in what looked like an orange sack.

I sat at the top of the stairs, watching them put on their coats and say their goodbyes. Then I heard the front door slam, and listened to the adults return to the kitchen and their drinks. In my fury at the injustice of it all, I stumbled into the old wicker hamper on the landing, the one that we used for dressing-up games when we were younger. I kicked it in frustration, then had an idea. I opened up the hamper, pulling out homemade Ghostbuster and Gizmo costumes, along with witches’ hats and wigs, but realized none of it would be enough to change my appearance and hide my face. Then I found the old sheet from my performance as a ghost a few years earlier. I pulled it over my head, lined up the two holes with my eyes, and looked in the mirror. Then I put the sheet in my backpack and hatched a plan.

After using cuddly toys to make a me-shaped lump in my bed, I crept downstairs and let myself out of the front door. I ran across the causeway as fast as I could with the moon lighting my way, constantly checking over my shoulder to see if I’d been caught escaping. Then I scrambled up the cliff path, until my sisters and Conor were only a few meters ahead of me. They were going the long route—which was safest when it was dark—but I knew a shortcut, and reached Conor’s car before they did, just in time to climb inside the trunk. Nobody ever used to bother locking their cars when leaving them behind the sand dunes back then. Things have changed so much since 1988. These days we are taught to suspect others of doing us harm at all times.

Conor had borrowed the old blue Volvo from his dad, without Mr. Kennedy’s knowledge or consent. Forgiveness is easier to ask for than permission, but Conor no longer asked his father for either. The car was already as battered and broken as its owner. Since his return to drowning his sorrows, Conor’s dad had driven home drunk from the pub on more than one occasion, often driving into a wall or a tree along the way, but at a speed that luckily only dented his pride and the vehicle.

Conor had only recently passed his driving test—a few days earlier—and was keen to impress Rose before she went off to university. He opened the passenger door for his girlfriend, leaving Lily to help herself to the back seat. She sprayed her Poison perfume, stinking up the entire car—she was already wearing more than enough to scare a skunk—and the smell made me want to sneeze. I covered my nose and mouth with my hands, and stayed as quiet as I could in my hiding place.

“Nice wheels,” Lily said unkindly, and Conor slammed his door so hard I’m surprised it didn’t fall off its hinges. As he started the engine, I wondered whether there was enough air in the trunk for me to survive the journey. The car coughed and spluttered a few times before coming to life, and I began to panic. My heart was thudding in my chest, and I could feel a sneeze trying to escape my nose, which it did, but luckily Conor turned on the car stereo at the exact same time. He pushed a cassette tape inside, and a song called “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” started to play, replacing the noise of the radio. My sisters knew all the words, and they sang along as Conor pulled out from behind the sand dunes and started driving down the winding cliff road.

It was a bumpy ride and I felt carsick, but it was only a five-minute drive to the other end of Blacksand Bay, where the Halloween gathering was being held. I was thirteen, and the only parties I’d ever been to before were hosted at Seaglass by Nana. The excitement I felt outweighed the fear. It was exhilarating. When we finally stopped driving, I waited for them all to get out; then I tried to open the trunk. It wouldn’t budge. Conor had locked the car. I imagined them walking away and me running out of oxygen, and my sense of panic went from zero to a hundred before I could take another breath. I screamed.

Conor’s face when he opened the trunk was not one of his happy ones. He was busy inflating his Halloween costume, and I had clearly interrupted him halfway.

“Have you lost your tiny mind?” Lily asked, blowing a bubble of gum in my face.

“What were you thinking, Daisy?” Rose said, sounding just like our mother. “If anything had happened to you—”

“Come on, credit where credit is due. She wanted to come to the party and she came,” said Conor with a kind smile. He reattached a nozzle to his costume and started stepping on a foot pump.

“She’ll ruin this year’s theme,” Lily moaned. “‘The Lion, the Witch, the Pumpkin, and the Daisy’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.”

Conor ignored her. With every enthusiastic foot pump, I could see that he was wearing an inflatable pumpkin costume.

“This is an adult party,” whined Lily.

“Then you should probably go home,” I said.

“Watch it, pipsqueak,” Lily snapped. My dad’s nickname for me morphed from a term of endearment into an insult whenever she used it.

“Lily’s right,” said Rose. “Some of the others might feel a bit funny about a thirteen-year-old being on the beach and seeing what they get up to.”

“I brought this,” I said, pulling the white sheet ghost costume out of my bag.

I was allowed to stay, because none of them wanted to leave, but only if I promised to remain hidden under my makeshift costume for the entire evening. I didn’t mind. I was just excited to be out with other people, witnessing a snapshot of humanity firsthand instead of reading about it in a book or seeing it on TV. It was a big step for someone who rarely went anywhere without her mother. Peering through those two holes in the sheet felt like looking at life through a tunnel. A bit like the View-Master my dad gave me one Christmas. I liked the imagined safety of my disguise; it meant that I could see everything without being seen. And I wanted to make the most of it because I knew that the things, people, and parties that had always been out of reach before were within touching distance for one night only.

Everything that happened next was a real education.

After so many years of feeling like I’d been missing out, I actually missed being at home. It was cold on the beach at night, and curling up in an armchair in front of the fire, with a good novel and a mug of hot chocolate, suddenly seemed a lot more appealing. The “party” consisted of fifteen or so boys and girls—some of whom I’d seen before but were still strangers to me—all sitting around a small fire on the beach, drinking cheap cider and warm white wine.

Conor—our designated driver—drank Coke to begin with. I knew better than to drink alcohol with the cocktail of drugs my mother made me take every day to keep my heart ticking, but I did have an occasional sip of Rose’s wine when nobody was looking. I didn’t like the way it tasted—it was nothing like Nana’s birthday champagne, which I’d tried earlier that evening—but I wanted to know what it was like to be like the others. How it felt to be normal. After an hour of sitting on the beach with a sheet over my head, all I felt was cold, and tired, and a little bit sick. I concluded that being normal might be overrated. Lily drank more than the rest of us combined, and it was her suggestion to play spin the bottle.

“You have to kiss whoever it points to when it stops spinning. I’ll go first,” Lily said, with a naughty grin stretched across her pretty face. The other kids smiled too; everyone except Rose seemed to be having a good time. We all watched as the bottle spun, a zoetrope of drunken teenage faces lit up by the flickering light of the fire. It seemed to spin forever, but then it stopped, and the bottleneck pointed at the boy next to Conor. Without hesitation, Lily took out her bubble gum, then leaned over and kissed him. There were tongues involved, and it looked unpleasant. She popped her gum back in her mouth afterward and smiled at everyone.

Sex was a mystery to me back then. I’d read about it, and thought about it, but the idea of actually doing it seemed both unnecessary and unhygienic. Watching Lily kiss a random boy only made me feel queasier.

“Conor’s turn next,” Lily declared.

“I don’t really want to play—”

“Man up. Perhaps you can write about it for the local newspaper,” she said when he tried to refuse.

Conor—a now slightly deflated orange pumpkin—leaned forward and reluctantly played the game. He stared at Rose the whole time the bottle spun, but it stopped on Lily.

I’ve never seen her look more delighted.

Sometimes when we think we know what we want but don’t get it, we look for something or someone else to fill the gap. Lily had always been jealous of Conor and Rose being together. Not because she really wanted to be with Conor, but because she always wanted whatever Rose had. Lily couldn’t stand being left out of anything. She marched around the fire and kissed him before he had a chance to protest—or run away—and I noticed Rose drink from her bottle of wine until it looked half empty.

“Delicious,” Lily said with a drunken smile as soon as their lips parted. That was the year she started smoking, so I imagine it wasn’t delicious for him at all. “Who wants to go skinny-dipping?” she asked everyone and nobody in particular. Then she stood up and removed her witch’s hat, black dress, and shoes before running toward the sea in just her underwear. It looked whiter than white in the moonlight. Despite the cold, a few of the boys from around the fire followed her. Lily had made more than a bit of a name for herself by then. Her variety of fun was mostly harmless, and only ever born out of a desperate need for affection, but rumors ruin far more reputations than reality. Despite the unpleasant things that people sometimes said, in that moment, I would have given anything to have been my sister. Everyone seemed to adore her. She was fun and beautiful, full of life and free. While I was only ever me.