The Florist | ✓ (#Wattys2016)

daisies

daisies

3 years, 10 months before

The daisy-speckled field smells of dry wood and dirt, and the hazy sun washes everything over with a buttery yellow. The grass is forming little imprints on Dev's bare arms as he lies on his front, scrolling idly though the music on Clara's phone.

"I don't know half these songs," he grumbles.

Clara pops the cap off her sun cream bottle and shakes it. The dwindling remnants at the bottom splutter out onto her open palm. "I can't help it that you're not as cool as me," she jokes, rubbing the sun cream down her arms. Dev's sunglasses slide down Clara's nose, too big for her face, but she pushes them back up with the back of her hand.

The air is stagnant. These fields roll over the hills for miles beyond Clara's parent's house, and they're fringed with a little stretch of woodland. It's miles from the cramped quasi-suburbs that Dev's used to, but that just means there's more to explore.

"I know a couple of these," Dev says. "Well, I know of them."

"Who do you know of?" she asks, stressing the last word to echo him.

His elbows are getting tired, so he rolls onto his back with a grunt. "Um, I know of The Rolling Stones, The Who, Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols..."

She looks down at him. He can't see her face very well from this angle, even if he squints out the sun, but he imagines she looks quite incredulous. "You've never heard one single song by any of them?"

"Well, I'm sure I have, I just don't remember them. You know, like in films and stuff." He keeps scrolling. "I mean, I know Billy Joel and David Bowie, sort of."

With a cry of frustration, Clara snatches the phone from him and begins to scroll. Without much of a delay, piano and saxophone notes spill out of her phone's tinny speakers. She looks down at him expectantly.

Soon the instruments are joined by Bowie's soft but jagged voice, urging him to 'turn and face the strange'.

Dev closes his eyes. The summer sun glares through his eyelids and paints them orange. "I like it; it's Bowie. I have an outsider's knowledge of Bowie."

"He's a real master," she says. "If I could make anyone immortal, I think it would be him."

He pulls a face. "But he's aging so quickly. He ages at like fifteen times the rate of a normal human. Imagine him immortal – what would that even look like?"

She laughs and shushes him. "Bowie doesn't age, he evolves like a Pokémon."

"No," he says, "he does age, and he ages horribly. If you made him immortal he'd be like a shrivelled ginger prune in a shiny suit."

"Blasphemy!" she cries, bursting into her strange, breathy cackle. She kicks him softly and says, "He would be a prune of wisdom. People would come to him from across the galaxy to learn of his genius ways."

"Yeah but the whole point of prunes are as a food, and nobody would want to be the one who cannibalised immortal prune David Bowie," he counters. "So he'd be effectively redundant."

Clara makes a pantomime vomiting sound. "So who would you make immortal, if you could?" She bends over to pick a daisy, and she pierces its stem with her thumbnail.

Dev thinks about it. "My mum?"

"That's a boring answer," she complains.

"What's wrong with my mum?" he whines, returning the kick.