Falling Daisies

Chapter 12

"The hot chocolate looks pretty good here?"

"Yeah sure make it two, I'll grab us a table..." I called after Ben, as we entered the greasy spoon around the corner from Wakefield General. It was cosy in there, an absolute dive, but it felt inviting and full of warmth, which was much appreciated in relief from the bitter winds. I felt an uneasy stab of guilt however. Apparently today had been Daisy's release date and Ben was meant to be taking her home but he had instead apologised and made his excuses. We were friends now, nothing more, so why did I feel so bad about it?

In five minutes we were sat by an electric heater in the corner of the cafe, hidden away behind a concaved wall and two steaming hot chocolates were placed down in front of us, scrumptiously covered in whipped cream and marshmallows from which we each took a sip. On putting down his cup, much to my amusement, Ben had managed to create himself a creamy moustache and we both started laughing as he tried to lick it off, failing miserably. Before I knew what I was doing, I reached out and wiped at the cream with my fingertips, resting them a moment on his lips. His eyes suddenly became serious and the laughter stopped.

"Lucy, I..." he began but faltered.

"No sorry, my fault, I guess this is just going to take some getting used to right?" I shot breezily back pulling away my hand but inside my heart wrenched as it slowly began to dawn upon me all the little things that I was now to be denied.

"Right..."

"So..." I began curiously, "how did you get yourself out of taking Daisy home, I bet she was pretty mad?" Ben looked uncomfortable for a second before answering.

"I just told her the truth... That I'd bumped into a friend when I went to get coffee and they'd had a funny turn and I wanted to check they got home okay."

"And she bought that?"

"Yes... we trust each other. We don't lie or keep secrets..."

I flushed momentarily thinking that Daisy knew about me and this was some twisted thing they talked about at night, until I realised. He didn't keep secrets until he met me. The conversation suddenly became stiff and awkward, neither of us knowing where to go from there. This was going to be hard and we both knew it but I sure as hell wasn't giving up that easily.

"I just need to know why Ben... Why me? Why if you had a girlfriend did you come after me? I just want to understand..." my voice wasn't disparaging but possessed a tone of confusion and despair. I had to try and see, for my own closure if anything.

Ben reached across the table and drummed his fingertips onto my bare arm, the Daisy tattoo screaming out at me as I remembered my own recklessness when I thought it was just a mark of adolescence, not even contemplating the great significance it actually bore.

"If I tell you everything, can you please just let me tell the story, start to finish no interruptions..? If I get to the end and you hate me and want to walk out of this cafe and never speak to me again, I get that. Hell, I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to walk out right now... All I'm asking for is a chance, Luce...?"

I bit my lower lip and braced myself, before slowly nodding and allowing him to begin his story...

"There's that old cliché where the good girl falls for the bad guy - well I wasn't just the bad guy, I was the worse guy. I was a sixteen year old punk doing anything I could for attention. I had the best family growing up, my mum would do anything for anybody and my dad is about as upstanding as they get. They didn't have a perfect marriage, what marriage is, but they were happy and they loved each other. The only thing that was missing from our nuclear little family was infant number two. I knew my mum wanted a little girl so badly and I used to resent her for that, like she didn't think I was good enough or something.

I didn't know it at the time, but my parents were trying to have a baby for a while but weren't getting much luck... There were a couple of miscarriages apparently, people used to whisper that I had caused them with the stress I was putting on my parents but my mum was always quick to deny it or pretend she hadn't heard. I was going through the rebel years and not coming out the other side. I didn't even get into a bad crowd; I never really had a crowd. I preferred to keep to myself. It wasn't that I was dumb either; I got the work done and never dropped below a B. It used to really piss the teachers off that they couldn't even use my work against me. At school, little things used to irritate me and I'd end up in some argument or fist fight and get sent out of class, so soon I just didn't bother to show up - except when I had music. Music class was like a release for me. I just used to sit in a booth and get lost for that hour with my guitar; it was the only way I could vent without smashing things up. I saved up enough once too to buy a vintage acoustic guitar - she was an absolute stunner.

I don't know where the anger came from; it was like a loaded bullet inside of me, ready to fire at whoever was in my range when the trigger snapped. I can't even admit that I felt guilty about it because I just didn't care. I felt so out of place in the world. I didn't know who I was or what I was going to do. I felt lost and that small fire of anger may have been totally the wrong way to go about things, but it was an emotion, and I could feel it.

I remember when my mum told me she was pregnant, I was a sixteen year old prick and I didn't want a sibling to come and grow up as this dream child they wished I'd have been and have myself constantly compared. I broke a vase. She wasn't scared of me but I knew she was worried... and now she had a baby to think of and I knew she felt deep down I was a liability...

After the news I just got worse. Once, this guy was sat at the back of me, flicking screwed up bits of paper at my head and I flipped. I had him on his back on a table and I was punching the crap out of him. You'd think once would have been enough, he was a runt of a thing, but I couldn't stop myself. It was like I had lost control. I kept smacking him over and over, even when the blood started pouring from his nose and his eyes became red, the bruising already starting to protrude, I didn't stop. I had to be physically pulled off him and restrained by two male teachers that had come running when they had heard my maths teacher's screams. That got me expelled.

I just sat around the house then and was a constant aggravation to my mum. We used to fight a lot and I swear our voices could be heard from several blocks away. But I never lashed out... Not to my mum... I couldn't...

She was almost eight months pregnant. I don't know how it happened but... it was bad. I didn't push her, I swear I didn't push her... but she fell. She fell down twenty-three steps onto the tiled floor, hitting her head on the banister as she went. The memory of it, watching her from the top as her balloon like body was tossed down the stairs like washing in a tumble dryer. Seeing her motionless figure at the bottom, bones sticking out in awkward positions, a pool of blood starting to seep from under her was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen in my life. It was like watching a horror movie in slow motion, only there no stop button, no rewind to take it back or no fast forward to make it be over. I wanted it to be over.

It was a baby girl; a perfectly formed, miniature baby girl. Only this little girl didn't breathe. My little, baby sister Jessica was a still born.

I saw her fleetingly as I watched from outside the hospital room as they handed her to my mother to cradle in her arms for one last time. I will never forget my mother's face. She wasn't crying, she didn't even appear sad; she just sat rocking the baby, smiling and humming a lullaby to her, the one I assumed she used to sing to me. But when they came to take her, my mother broke into an anguished sob and her screams of:

"No! Please, no! Please don't take my baby girl away from me! No, please no...Why? Why? Why!" rang out in my ears as I watched my father, tears streaming down his face, put his arm protectively around my mother and stroke her arm helplessly as she cried freely into his chest and the little bundle was carried away. I've never felt as worthless as I did that day. I killed her. I killed my baby sister.

From then on I couldn't stand to be in the house. The worst thing was my mother didn't even hate me, it had been an accident after all, a tragic accident but I knew, I knew if we hadn't of been fighting, if I'd of been in school that day, if I hadn't of got kicked out of school then none of that would of happened.

If. That word has haunted me ever since and I've carried the pain it holds along with it. What if. You can drive yourself mad with it you know. Life is full of them.

...It was her that made me see though; she made me see that you can't live your life like that. You can't live with regret, because at the time, that was exactly what you chose, that was the path you chose for your life and you could either live wallowing in it, or make the choice to change...

Sometime after the incident my mum found some solace in going church. I thought it was ridiculous but I was so racked with guilt that one day I accepted her request to join her in some Christian out-reach group for coping with loss. It was full of old people who had come to grief over their loved ones who had died at a respectable age, tucked up in bed after a life full of memories. I was mad, there was no one here who could understand loss as a young person, no one that could relate to me and my pain and help me understand what it meant to let go.

She was late. She burst into the cold church hall however, like a ray of sunshine. It was as if her arrival had turned on a thousand light switches and the atmosphere in the room just suddenly shifted. Everyone just seemed to, I don't know... brighten. She took an empty seat across from me and it was then she turned to look in my direction. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen and then this smile broke across her face that just... I was smitten.

I went back every week then to the outreach meetings. Sometimes she was there, sometimes she wasn't, but I never knew why and whenever I asked no one would tell me. I finally plucked up the courage one day to ask her out. I remember I was so nervous, my palms were sweaty and I was mixing up my words in my head as I tried to rehearse what to say.

It didn't make sense to me, when I asked her, her face told me yes but the words that came out of her mouth sounded like a no. I was so put out. It had been a long time since I had stuck my neck out on the line and I had been knocked back. She said something about it being a bad idea. I assumed it was because of my bad boy image and so I tried to make her see I wasn't like that anymore. I enrolled to a sixth form that would allow me to retake the maths and English I had missed and I began to control my anger. She was so delicate that I was frightened of losing control around her. I even began to form a kind of relationship with my mum. I knew I never wanted to be that person I was again, as long as this girl was in my life.

It was doing wonders for me but each time I asked her out it was the same, her face told me one thing and her words shot me back.

It was about this time that it had gotten around to my turn to talk about grief and the experience I had gone through. When it was over I looked around the room to see everyone in tears, I shocked myself to find I was crying also. She came up to me after and agreed to one date. But that was it.

There was something there though and we both felt it. She didn't tell me about the cancer till a month in. She was so racked with guilt and hysterical when she told me, scared to death that she'd lulled me into a false sense of security before dropping the C-bomb and not giving me time to process it and decide if it was what I wanted to get involved in. But I didn't need to think. What I wanted was her. The cancer didn't bother me either, it was just a part of who she was, it didn't define her, it wasn't who she was on the inside.

We had a good relationship, we did all the things couples did along with the extra things like hospital appointments and scans and tablets and chemo and I slowly felt myself falling in love with her. Although I think I'd felt that way all along. The cancer just made me feel it even stronger because to watch how she dealt with it was... awe-inspiring. She began to chip at my amour too; she made me into this better version of myself that I wanted to be for me, as well as for her. I guess she 'tamed the bad boy'. I would go with her to church and eventually admitted my passion for music and ended up getting involved in her choir.

We lived life to the fullest, making first time memories with each other, acutely aware they could also be the last time ones too. Time just suddenly seemed so precious. I had never considered it before but I finally understood why people tell you to make the seconds count.

It was April this year when she got the all clear. I was with her and she actually hugged the doctor and proceeded to dance with him around the room. And he let her, it's impossible not to be infected by Daisy's happiness.

It was then that a couple of things happened. I started to have doubts. A life without cancer was a new life for me, not just for Daisy. I realised I was young and that there was so much world out there that I hadn't even seen. We had always talked about going to Thailand together, but it was just a dream, Daisy's health had never permitted it could be a possibility but now it was feasible. She had different ideas however and wanted to go back to college to train to be a children's nurse before starting to think about having children of her own, they were a big priority in her head. I began to feel suffocated then, as though we wanted two different lives with the other, only the other didn't fit into the dream anymore. I was all set to call it a day when she got the news.

The cancer had come back and this time, it wasn't going away. I held her when she cried. I'd never seen her cry so much before, I sat and held her and stoked her arm helplessly in a mirror of what my father had done to my mum those few years back. It was the embrace off loss.

Things got kind of rocky after that. I struggled with the idea of death and couldn't get my head around it. Thinking that one day she'd be here and the next she wouldn't. It just didn't add up in my head. We didn't know how long she had either, they couldn't specify, as it was different in all cases, so it seemed to make everything more blurred and time became warped. We spent countless days at the start arguing over the smallest things and I was always the one that started them. I knew, with a guilty conscious, that it was because I resented her in a way, deep down. I resented her for making it be so that I couldn't break up with her and that feeling nearly killed me. I hated myself for even considering finishing with her.

The latest row had been a really big one. She was due to come back into hospital and she was complaining about the chemo and how it was useless for her to keep taking it seeing as she was going to die anyway and I had snapped. Hearing her giving up like that was so out of character that it didn't feel like Daisy anymore. For a second it seemed like cancer wasn't just a part of her, it had consumed her.

I had ended up storming out the house to drown my sorrows in alcohol. I hadn't touched a drop since she had had the news and so it went to my head a little quicker than anticipated. Then you appeared. You looked so gorgeously agitated and seeing you look at me like you did was a welcome breath of fresh air. But there was something else, there was a hurt behind your eyes that seemed to match mine and call me stupid, but I had a feeling you needed me just as much as I needed you.

I know what I did was dumb. But you gave me things, selfish things that the cancer had denied for me. You were fun and made me feel alive and young again. I've had to grow up so quickly over the past few years and I know that's my fault but I missed that feeling of not wanting to grow up. But then it suddenly wasn't just about the fun anymore. My feelings for you have grown a lot stronger and you are never going to quite understand what you have given me but I know you are special to me and I would hate to be the one to cause you pain. But I don't want to cause Daisy pain either, any more than she is going through already. I do love her still and I can't leave her now, whatever my feelings are for you... But this whole thing is just so messed up and I'm just so... I'm just so...

Sorry..."

Ben broke down in front of me now. His face fell into his hands and the tears he was trying to stop during the last part of his story cascaded down his face, tears that I assumed had been long overdue. Our pain was shared. Throughout his words, I had ridden the roller-coaster of emotions with him. I wasn't scared however. Even though he had admitted to dark things from his past I wasn't scared. This boy could see inside of my soul and I knew we were one of the same. I reached out my hand and rested it on his head, stroking it soothingly and wiping away at the tears, like a mother would do to their child. He was broken, he needed me more than I needed him and I felt all feelings dissipate to the back of my mind; still very much there but forced to the inner most crevices, to collect dust and eventually blow away like cobwebs.

He looked up at me and smiled weakly and I smiled back, as an unspoken connection passed between us.

"Shit." Ben's face suddenly dropped, "I'm meant to be at Daisy's in twenty minutes, I don't want to leave you though till I know you're okay..."

My reaction even surprised myself.

"I want to come with you. I want to meet Daisy."