‘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 home schooling 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 favourite 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.