Sunflowers in February
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Acknowledgements
Phyllida Shrimpton
Copyright
For my daughter Rebecca Katelyn Mooney
May you always turn your face towards the sunshine.
Silence.
The bluish light to the day gives away the early hour, and I hug my knees to my chest as if I should be cold.
Sitting on the grass verge of a narrow country lane I become aware, with the gradual creeping light of dawn, that I must have been here for some time. It comes to me slowly, in the same way that I search for recent dreams when I first wake.
I can’t remember …
The shrill call of a wild bird and the urgent flapping of its wings shatters the still air, nudging me to question why I’m here and not at home where I should be, in my pyjamas and tucked under my duvet. All around there’s nothing but sparse winter countryside, no house, no shop, no building.
I’d been shopping in town.
A low mist spreads over the fields, disappearing into the grass around me, like in a horror film when dry ice creeps across the set, just before something scary happens. A light glittering of winter frost is sprinkled over everything, but I don’t feel cold.
Why don’t I feel cold?
My purple Converse shoe is on its side, half in and half out of a puddle, and the remains of the night still linger in the darkness of the water around it. I stare at the shoe, and the laces trailing in the dirt, still caught in the grip of overnight ice, and I wonder if it’s washable or ruined.
The purple will go well with the T-shirt I just bought, if they’re not completely wrecked.
I’d begged my mother for these shoes, until she’d finally given in and bought them for me. Now the Converse star stares back at me, its single eye unblinking.
It was Saturday. I was with Beth. I bought a T-shirt.
We’d both agreed that Nathan Peterson, my boyfriend of seven weeks, would think that I’d look extra cute in it. Or is it seven weeks and one day now? Is it Sunday morning? It was almost dark when I was walking home.
Beth. Shopping. Walking home.
I grab at the fragments of my memory as they float past.
I’d spent most of my bus fare on a fabulous pair of earrings … I texted Mum to tell her I was on the bus home – a small lie … I had to get off the bus early because I didn’t have enough money for the whole journey. I took a shortcut down King’s Lane and it was evening, almost dark … and now it’s not.
So, why am I still here?
I reach around for my phone, but it’s not beside me. The bag with my new top in is about five feet away, half buried in the long grass, and my handbag is next to it, shining with wet and frost. I look again at my shoe in the puddle, and then at my feet …
I’m wearing both shoes.
The sound of a car engine pushes through the quietness of the morning, and I drag my gaze away from my feet, towards it, wondering what the driver is going to think about a fifteen-year-old girl sitting out here, in the middle of nowhere, alone.
Yellow headlights flicker intermittently between the winter-bare roadside hedges, then blur as they hit patches of mist. The engine chugs slowly, and it hits me that I should be nervous about what sort of person is driving that slowly … but I’m not.
‘Thank God!’ I mutter under my breath, standing up, as the white, blue, and yellow of a police car comes into view and two policemen get out. They look briefly at my purple Converse in the puddle, then make their way over to me. ‘OK, so, I have no idea why I’m here …’ I tell them, laughing a little, to cover my embarrassment.
The dark-haired one reaches his hand towards me.
‘I think we’ve found her,’ he says, rather rudely reaching past me and brushing weeds and grass aside.
I turn to see what they’ve found.
And there I am.
My legs are bent upwards with a bone sticking out where my right ankle should be, making my foot hang from its tendons, facing backwards in its stripy sock. My chest is pressed into watery brown mud at the bottom of a ditch, but my head is turned, facing towards us at the strangest angle. My long, dark hair is spread out in the mud, and I can’t take my gaze off the bluey whiteness of my skin, and how I’m staring blankly up towards all three of us, a milky bloom spreading across the green of my eyes.
I am statue still, unable to move, staring back at myself with total disbelief. A thin scream, high-pitched and desperate, fills my ears and I realise that it’s coming out of my mouth without my consent. The police don’t react to the noise I’m making, as if there’s an invisible soundproof wall between us.
‘Noooo, this isn’t happening!’ I shout at them, grabbing desperately at the arm of the nearest one, but my hands disappear into the black of his jacket.
I can’t feel any of the trembling that comes with fear, or the rush of breath that comes with panic. No tears are running down my face. I just feel kind of … disconnected, as if I’m watching this happening in a film. ‘OK … so it’s a dream,’ I say out loud, another small laugh escaping from me, like I’ve just laughed at a joke that only I’m pretending to understand. I circle both men. ‘It’s a DREAM!’ I shout in their ears, willing them to fade away and let me wake up. I scream again, and pinch myself, really, really hard, only I can’t feel my fingers because I’m in a dream.
I’m not in a dream.
&nb
sp; I hear the dark-haired one radio back to the station for reinforcements and an ambulance, while the ginger one runs over to the car and comes hurrying back with a small machine in his hands.
‘I’m not sure you’re going to need that, mate,’ the dark-haired man says sarcastically, as his ‘mate’ kneels down beside my body in the ditch, and starts to get the machine ready. ‘I said, I’m not sure you’re going to need the defibrillator, Gary,’ he repeats, alternating his gaze between me and Gary.
‘Why?’ Gary pants, squinting up, the red of his face competing with his hair.
‘Because her fucking head is on backwards,’ he says.
This is really happening.
I am dead, and I’ve absolutely no idea how it happened.
‘Shit,’ I hiss to myself. Hardly articulate, but it’s all I’ve got to go with right now.
And the pinching and the crying and the trembling, it would seem, are for the physical body, and as I watch and listen to everything unfolding in front of me, I realise, with a kind of detached and awful shock, that I no longer have one of those. My body is in that ditch, and, to quote that police guy, my ‘fucking head is on backwards’. My body and me have somehow got separated, and now I’m trapped in a soundproof bubble, and no one knows I’m here.
I watch the hustle and bustle of my roadside death: the ambulance with its wailing siren, the various police officers, investigators with their grim faces, tape stretched across the road, measurements taken, information recorded, pictures carefully snapped, and phone calls made. My phone is checked but the battery is flat, my bag is examined and so is my body. A large man with russet-brown skin stands close by holding a photograph of me, his lips squeezed into a downward turn.
This whole thing is all about me, but for once it’s nothing I want to hear.
Apparently the trauma to my body is consistent with a road traffic collision, a ‘hit-and-run’, meaning that I have basically just become an … incident.
I, or rather, my body, has got rigor mortis, which has reached its maximum at around twelve hours after death, and has probably started the next stage. This basically means that I’m stiff, and am now going to head towards that floppy traditional dead look. Right now, I’m like a dolly chucked on the ground and broken. My rigor mortis, and the fact that evidently the angle of my head is not compatible with life, means the paramedics can determine, categorically and without doubt, ‘life extinct!’
I shout at them all again. ‘Hey!… I’m not a dinosaur!’ What does that mean exactly? My body is still on the planet, and I’m still here, seeing and hearing. I am not extinct! Although I am quite obviously not alive.
I watch the empty ambulance drive away, leaving my body behind, venturing on with its mission to save lives, as it has been unable to do with mine, its siren now hushed, all hope of saving me gone. I wouldn’t say I’ve ‘lost’ my life exactly, and I haven’t exactly ‘lost’ my body but I have, for sure, somehow lost the connection between the two.
My rigor mortis also means the procedure for scraping me out of the mud, and shoving me into a body bag, is totally degrading and less than graceful, and I watch with an expression of contorted disgust as they force my unwilling limbs inside and pull up the zipper.
Finally, long after the mists have dissipated, and the crystals of frost have been evaporated by the winter sun, and the sounds of the road and nearby town have filled the air, I climb into a black van, next to my own bagged-up self, and together we set off for wherever dead people are taken.
I can only describe it as unusual … looking at yourself from this angle.
My body is now lying down in the hospital mortuary covered by a sheet. My stiff limbs have been forced, and manipulated, into a more appropriate position, so I look a little less grotesque at least, and my closed eyes thankfully mean that I’m not staring back at … myself.
I’ve never studied my face from above like this, let alone porcelain smooth and still … eyes shut. I have always seen ‘me’, looking out from a mirror, a photograph or a screen, looking at my face full on, eyes wide and shining, and alive.
Always looking good, so I thought.
Bizarrely I can’t help admiring how well I’d put my make-up on. Still perfectly applied in the places where it wasn’t smudged and spoiled. Black mascaraed lashes fan my cheeks; they look quite long – thank God for waterproof! Forest shimmer green and pearly cream shadow, painstakingly applied with little brushes, now looks odd against my skin where all the natural colours of my life have slipped away, like paint down a plughole. The empty grey of my face looks creepy against the still blackness of my once beautifully straightened hair, and the twinkle of gold and fake diamonds, peeping from my ears, look wrong as if they’re clashing with death.
I hear my mother before I see her. There’s an agonised noise coming from the depths of her body, like the groaning of an animal in pain, and I can hardly bear to listen. The sound heaves over and over, and it’s getting louder, travelling down the hospital corridor, escorted by the echoes of three pairs of shoes tapping against polished vinyl. A fat man with thin white hair poking fluffily upwards over his ridiculously large forehead opens the door with a gentle click and a respectful expression. With his hand still on the door, he hesitates. ‘Are you sure? We have already … identified her.’ I’d already seen how the police had matched my ID and my strangely angled face, with a photograph held by Brian, the man with the russet-brown skin, and embarrassingly they had made a note of my birthmark, a kind of coffee stain of Australia on my right buttock. But I guess my parents couldn’t believe without seeing, because they enter the room anyway.
‘Mum …? Dad?’ I run to them, reaching out and watching my hands disappear mistily into their live bodies, like grabbing at steam. Although I already know it’s pointless, I try wildly flinging my arms about in front of their faces, yelling at them to notice me, until, frustrated, I give up.
They hear and see nothing.
Mum and Dad hold on to each other, as if by letting go they’ll somehow fall, down into the black abyss that is horror, fear and death itself. My mother’s normally shoulder-length brown hair is scraped back into a fat hair comb, but a large chunk has escaped and hangs in mousey-brown tendrils down the side of her stricken face. Dad’s black- and grey-peppered hair looks short and smart as always, but merely serves to frame his haggard face. From memory it looks as if they’re wearing what they were wearing when I left the house yesterday morning, only now their clothes look crumpled and almost too big for their bodies.
The impenetrable metal of the entire room cups their raw emotions, like a bowl holds water. If I can be glad about anything right now, it’s that they didn’t have to see me as I had seen me earlier.
A thin, strangled sound now chokes in Mum’s throat as she looks down at the dead me, and a trickle of saliva glimmers on her fingers as they try desperately to hold in her grief. Tears course down her cheeks and her nose starts to run, joining the saliva on her fingers. She shakes her head and says ‘noooo’ in one long and ugly drawn-out sound, almost identical to the way I had when I first saw me.
The man with the ridiculously large forehead reaches for a plain box of tissues and pulls one out. As he hands her a tissue, she reaches for it but her eyes never leave my face. Dad has clamped his teeth and lips together and I notice how the muscles in his jaw flex over and over. He says nothing but gives a nod of affirmation to the man with the forehead. The faces of my parents have become distorted by tension below the surface of their skin, as if they’re merely rough sketches of themselves.
Grief, I have learnt today, is the colour grey. All around us is grey. The walls, the equipment, the skin of the dead, and the skin of the living. The reddish brown of Mum’s jacket and the green of Dad’s chunky-knit jumper look barely sepia against this room of grey.
Having confirmed with that nod that the lifeless mass of slowly putrefying cells lying in front of them had recently been me, the living, breathing, body of Lily Richardson, f
ifteen years old, daughter of James and Amelia Richardson, twin sister to Ben Richardson, they are allowed to leave. Or rather, they are encouraged, gently, to abandon their child, so that the accurate cause of my death can be determined, and recorded.
Dad turns stiffly, still holding Mum’s hand, as he leads her out of this shiny room where death remains in the reflections of the stainless steel. Mum pulls against him, her free hand reaching for my hair, and her eyes caressing my face. ‘What happened, Lily? Who did this to you?’
‘I don’t know, Mum,’ I answer sadly. ‘I wish I knew.’
She lets out another low horrible mourning sound, which drags itself out of her mouth again, while Dad puts a protective arm round her shoulders, turning his face away from both of us, his movement causing the tears balanced on his lashes to spill.
‘I love you,’ she whispers, walking through my invisible outstretched hands as they leave.
‘I love you too,’ I call out, as I follow them, but my words don’t reach their ears, only the echoes of their footsteps on the vinyl fills the corridor, until Dad’s voice bounces off the walls around me. ‘I’ll find the bastard that did this to you, Lily … and I’ll make him pay. So help me GOD!’