Chapter 47

47

October 31, 6:30 a.m.

low tide

It feels like I’m falling.

“What did you say?” I ask Trixie, but she turns her back on me and starts to get changed. She takes off the pink pajamas, neatly folding the cotton fabric before placing them beneath her pillow. I watch as she calmly dresses in a pink cotton shirt and pink dungarees instead.

“Why don’t you sit down on the bed?” she suggests. “You sometimes faint when you remember that you’re dead. I’ve seen you do it a few times now.”

I am dreaming. That’s what this must be … a nightmare. Nothing else makes sense. Which means I just have to wake up.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

“You’re not dreaming, Daisy. You’ve been dead for years,” Trixie says, as though she can read my mind. I do sit down on the bed, but only because it feels like I’m falling again.

“I can’t be dead. I have a job. The old people’s home…” I whisper.

“So you always tell me. But how much do they pay you these days?” Trixie asks.

“They don’t pay me … I volunteer there. I—”

“You visit the care home. You don’t volunteer. None of the staff have ever heard of you. And most of the residents have never seen you. You go there because it’s one of the few places you do occasionally feel seen. People seem to see you just before they die—like Rose did a few minutes ago—and you like comforting the residents when they’re scared and alone at the end. It’s sweet really, but it’s not a job. It’s just something you do to convince yourself you’re still alive.” She sighs and looks genuinely sad. “I do love you, Aunty Daisy, and I hate seeing you so upset. Try to remember that night, after the Halloween beach party in 1988.”

My train of thought has derailed. The child has lost her mind.

“What are you talking about?”

“Please try to remember. Concentrate,” she says, sounding impatient. “You were on the rocks, you saw my mum and Conor doing something they shouldn’t have been doing—although if they hadn’t, I guess I wouldn’t exist. Then what happened?”

I remember exactly what happened after that. I ran.

---

Conor and Lily were both pulling on their clothes and yelling at me, but my heart was thudding so loud in my ears, I couldn’t hear what they were shouting. All I knew was that I never wanted to see either of them ever again.

People should be more careful what they wish for.

I ran along the beach in the dark until I ran straight into Rose. She was holding a bottle of wine, and I noticed it was almost empty.

“There you are!” she said. “I was getting worried, I’ve been looking everywhere for you! We all need to leave soon, or the tide will be too far in to cross the causeway. Where did you go?”

“She was with me,” said Conor, out of breath from trying to catch up.

I stared at him, then at Rose. Then at Lily, who had also been running. She was still only wearing a towel over her underwear after swimming in the sea, and her lipstick was a little smudged. The look she gave me made me want to run again.

“I didn’t see anything,” I blurted out.

Rose frowned. “What didn’t you see, Daisy?”

I could feel my cheeks start to burn. The cheap wine I’d been drinking made my head feel fuzzy. I didn’t know what to say. So I opted to tell the truth.

“I just saw Conor and Lily having sex behind the rocks.”

For a moment, nobody said anything. Then Rose laughed.

“Daisy, you are a terrible liar,” she said.

She didn’t believe me.

Conor started to laugh too. “Wow, Daisy. That is quite an imagination you’ve got!”

“Do you even know what sex is?” Lily slurred. She was drunk. They all were. “Look at the lies little Daisy tells when she’s had a couple of drinks!”

“I’m not lying. Lily is in love with Conor,” I said.

They all laughed some more. Then Rose stopped. At first, I thought she’d realized that I was telling the truth, but then she smiled. It was her puzzle-solving smile. The expression her face always wore when she had solved a difficult sum.

“Was it you?” she said, staring at me. “Did you shred my new blue dress on my birthday and pretend it was Lily? Have you been telling lies for years and getting away with it? Trying to start little fights between us?”

“Oh. My. God!” laughed Lily. “Daisy has a crush on Conor! That’s what all this is really about!”

Rose laughed again too. “Do you have a little crush on Conor?” she asked, and her unkind smile made her beauty turn ugly.

“No,” I whispered.

“As I said, you really are a terrible liar, Daisy,” Rose replied, still smiling.

I stared at Conor and saw the look of pity on his face. The humiliation was worse than the heartbreak. Then Lily’s face turned dark. “Was it you who cut off my plaits when I was asleep? The night before my birthday? When everyone—including me—thought it was Rose?”

I ran before anyone could say or do anything else. Cutting off my sister’s hair was the worst thing I ever did to anyone, and the guilt was never a good fit for me. I still loved my family, even when I hated them. I just wanted them to love me too.

“Daisy, wait!” Rose shouted, but I ran and didn’t look back.

I must have been running—and crying—for over ten minutes, mostly uphill, along the coastal road to the cliffs overlooking Blacksand Bay. That was the fastest way home when the tide was that far in, above and around the rocks down below that prevented me from just walking across the sand. I felt so alone. I kept thinking about the boy who had kissed me, then called me a freak, and how he was right. I was a freak and nobody loved me. Nobody even liked me, not even my own family. My heart felt as though it was trembling inside my chest.

I was over halfway home when it happened. Right at the very top of the cliff, but so close to the sand dunes and the hidden path that would have led me to our part of Blacksand Bay and the causeway that would have carried me home to Seaglass. All I wanted in that moment was to get back to my bedroom without being seen, close the door behind me, and lock myself away from the world forever.

I heard the music before I heard the car. I knew it was Conor’s because of the song: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” I stopped in the middle of the road, thinking that maybe he had come to rescue me. That maybe he loved me after all. My imagination started working overtime, just like always, and I pictured Conor telling me that Rose and Lily had both been nothing more than mistakes, and saying that he too wished that he had been the first boy to kiss me.

But the car didn’t slow down.

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” blared out across Blacksand Bay as the blue Volvo got closer. But I was worried, and I wasn’t happy. I remember how the sky was an inky black, and the stars were shy and sometimes hiding. I remember the sound of the sea crashing on the rocks below, and I remember how very cold I was. My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering.

All I had on was a denim dungaree dress, a stripy long-sleeved T-shirt, my rainbow tights, and my daisy trainers, and it was a particularly cold Halloween. I had pulled my last-minute sheet costume over myself, trying to keep warm as I walked along the cliff road. I didn’t care whether I looked like a ghost; I already felt like one. Maybe a ghost was all Conor saw when he drove his dad’s car into me at thirty miles an hour. Otherwise I’m sure he would have hit the brakes.

I remember the sensation of flying through the air. So high, like a bird. It didn’t hurt a bit. Not even when I landed on the road. The white sheet flew too, then fell on top of me, covering my face as though declaring me dead. The car skidded to a sudden and violent stop, the twin beams of its headlights shining at the sheet, and me hidden beneath it. Then everything was perfectly still and silent and calm.

Until one of the car doors opened.

It was Lily’s voice I heard first. She sounded very drunk. “What was that?”

Then two more car doors opened.

“Conor, I think you hit something,” said Rose. “You should have been watching the road instead of playing with the stereo.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Conor said, sounding even more drunk than my sisters. “It came out of nowhere.”

“It?” said Rose. I could hear her slowly walking toward me. The way she would have if I were an injured animal on the side of the street. “Is that Daisy’s ghost costume?” she whispered. “Oh my god, did you hit Daisy?”

“No!” said Conor. “No, it’s just a sheet.”

“Sheets don’t bounce off of car hoods,” said Lily.

One of them pulled the sheet back. I think it must have been Rose because I heard her scream first. It was a gentle scream, if there is such a thing. I wanted to reassure her that I was fine. But that was the moment when I realized that I couldn’t speak, or open my eyes, or move at all. I was only thirteen years old, but I had already died eight times before. Even if my heart had stopped beating, I knew there were ways to make it start again. There always had been in the past. They just needed to get help.

“What have we done?” Rose whispered. “What. Have. We. Done?” She screamed the words a second time, sounding hysterical.

“We didn’t do anything,” said Lily, sounding more sober all of a sudden. “Conor was the one driving.”

“This isn’t helping,” said Rose. “We have to help Daisy.”

She checked for a pulse, and I remember that her trembling fingers felt so warm on my cold skin. I wanted her to hold my hand and tell me that everything was going to be all right.

“She’s hit her head. It’s very bad. There’s a lot of blood … a lot.” Rose leaned down over me, and I could smell the alcohol on her breath. “I can’t find a pulse and … I don’t think she’s breathing.” Rose started to sob loudly. “We need to find a phone and call an ambulance.”

“How?” said Lily, and I could hear that she was crying too.

We all knew that they couldn’t call for help without either driving into town or driving to Seaglass, then scrambling down the cliff path and across the causeway to use Nana’s landline. Both options would take at least twenty minutes, by which time it might be too late if it wasn’t already. None of us had mobiles in 1988. Even now, there is no phone signal on this corner of the Cornish coast.

“Wait,” said Conor. “We should think about this before we do anything we might regret.”

“What are you talking about? Haven’t you already done something that you regret?” Rose screamed at him. “You’ve killed Daisy!”

“I didn’t pass my driving test,” Conor said quietly.

“What did you say?” Rose asked.

“I didn’t pass my driving test, but I didn’t want to tell you that I’d failed. How could I confess to my genius girlfriend—who was about to head off to Cambridge—that I couldn’t pass a simple test? I lied. For you. And I didn’t ask to borrow my dad’s car tonight because he would have said no—he knows I don’t have a license.”

“Oh my god,” Rose whispers.

“I’m going to jail,” Conor says. “They’ll say it’s manslaughter. I’ve been drinking. They’re going to lock me up. My life will be over … I’ll never get a job after this. I just wanted to drive my girlfriend to a party before she left for university, a girlfriend who was probably going to dump me anyway, and now I’m going to jail.”

“I was never going to dump you, why would you think that?” Rose says. “This was an accident—”

“An accident I am going to regret for the rest of my life.”

Silence followed. All I could hear was the sound of the sea. It was like a lullaby, and I could feel myself drifting away to somewhere else. Then Conor spoke again.

“Do we have to make things even worse than they already are?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” said Rose. “Daisy is dead. Nothing could be worse. I’m sorry that you lied about having a license, and I’m sorry that you’re going to get in trouble, but this is your fault.”

“Is it? You both knew that your little sister was at the party tonight when she should have been safe at home. Your parents will find out that neither of you looked after her, or tried to take her back to Seaglass. You let her drink alcohol, then left her alone on the beach, despite her being underage and having a heart condition. You bullied her and made her run away. Your family will hate you just as much as they will hate me, for the rest of your lives.”

I wanted to tell them that I was fine. That they didn’t need to worry. But I still couldn’t move.

“He’s right,” said Lily. “They will hate us.”

“Have you both lost your minds?” said Rose. “What are you suggesting? That we leave her here on the street like roadkill?”

“No,” Conor said, and I felt such an overwhelming sense of relief until he spoke again. “I’m suggesting we throw her over the cliff.”

Even if I could have spoken at that point, I don’t think I would have been able to.

“Think about it,” he said gently. “I know how upsetting this is, but Daisy really didn’t have much longer to live anyway. We all know that. Every doctor she ever saw said her broken heart wouldn’t last forever. She was a good person. She wouldn’t want you, or me, or Lily to have this hanging over us, like a noose around our necks for the rest of our lives. Her life is over whatever we do, but ours don’t have to be. It will look like an accident. All we have to do is go home and keep quiet. Say that she wandered off and left the beach without us realizing.”

I could hear my sisters crying. Both of them. I imagined myself sitting up and us all hugging, with our arms wrapped around each other. I knew they would never be mean to me again, not after this. I thought maybe we would become the best of friends, and that one day we might even laugh about the night Conor accidently hit me with his dad’s car.

But that isn’t what happened.

“Come on, before another car comes along and sees us. I’ll take her feet,” Conor said, picking me up by my ankles.

“No! What are you doing?” Rose screamed at him.

I didn’t think my sisters would let it happen, but then Lily held my hands in hers. I could smell her favorite perfume: Poison.

“I think he’s right,” Lily said. “We’re all going to be in so much trouble otherwise.”

“We can’t do this. Stop it, put her down,” Rose argued, and I could hear a scuffle.

“She’s already dead. What difference does it make?” Lily replied.

Until that moment, I never really believed that they were going to throw me off the cliff, onto the rocks and into the black waves below. I wanted to kick and scream and bite them to make them let go, but I couldn’t. And they didn’t.

“Are you sure you want to do this? She’s your sister,” I heard Rose say.

“I don’t know,” said Lily, starting to cry again.

“We don’t have a choice,” said Conor.

It was a lie. Life is only ever a series of choices; we all have them and make them and regret them every single day. The ability to choose between right and wrong is a fundamental part of being human. But Conor’s humanity got lost that night, and I fear he never found it again.

“On three,” he said, and Rose sobbed. I could feel Lily’s hands trembling as she held on to mine. The waves crashing on the rocks below sounded like thunder in my ears. Conor started to count, and they swung me back and forth as though I were the old skipping rope we used to play with on the beach.

“One.”

Mississippi.

“Two.”

Mississippi.

“Three.”

Mississippi.

When they swung me the third time, I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. It was louder than Conor counting, louder than my sisters crying, and louder than the cold dark sea crashing on those rocks beneath me. Looking back, I wonder if the fear I felt produced so much adrenaline that it restarted my heart.

Just as they let me go, I opened my eyes.

I was flying again, and I smiled at Rose, Lily, and Conor. Because I was alive, and everything was going to be okay. But they did not smile when they saw my eyes open. They stared back in horror as I disappeared over the cliff and fell down, down, down into the icy-cold black sea.