Sunflowers in February Read online

  ‘NATHAN!’

  He’s here, or rather, I’m there. I’ve actually left the house and I’m in Nathan’s living room. I’m not dead … or at least, I haven’t disappeared. ‘Nathan?’ I kneel beside where he’s lying on his couch, calling his name softly, and then more loudly. The TV is on in the background and a plate is on the coffee table beside him, showing the remains of something tomatoey. His house is wonderfully familiar. I’ve been here before of course, and each time I can’t help but admire how big and luxurious it is compared to ours. Everything is unique and expensive-looking, and the heavy curtains hang from floor to ceiling in tightly woven golden threads, like something out of a style magazine. They’re not fully closed, which allows the street lamp outside to cast its dim orange light across the room, over Nathan’s face.

  ‘Nate?’ I study his face, putting my own face so close to his that if I was alive I would be able to feel his warm breath on my skin. I move round until I’m looking at him full on, right into his eyes, so that it appears as if he is looking into mine. His lashes curl at the end and I can see where the froth of blue shades like waves on an ocean gather around the endless black of his pupils. ‘I miss you,’ I whisper. ‘It would have been seven weeks and three days now, Nate.’

  His lips move. ‘Lily?’

  ‘You can hear me? Oh my God, Nathan! You can hear me!’ I think I’m about to pop inside with the most unimaginable relief, that finally someone has found me. I stand up, then kneel back down, then put my head in my hands, then lean back to look into his eyes again, like I am doing a mad dance of extreme demented gratitude. ‘I’m here, Nate.’ I almost shriek in his face. ‘Can you see me as well?’

  ‘Where are you, Lily?’

  I move my face, but Nathan’s gaze stays fixed where it is. ‘I’m here! Right here, in front of you.’ I sink my hands into his shoulders, in my useless attempt to touch him, feeling the beginnings of an unwanted realisation form a frown between my eyebrows.

  ‘If you’re there, Lily … If you can hear me … give me a sign … Something, anything, so that I know you’re OK.’

  My smile freezes on my lips and my disappointment is huge. He can’t hear or see me at all! He’s just trying to communicate with the dead me. Maybe that’s how I got here, that he managed to somehow summon me to him. But what’s the point of him being able to pull me to him, if he doesn’t even know that he did?

  ‘How can I give you a sign when I can’t touch anything, and I can’t be heard?’ I grunt angrily and poutily. We stay like this for a long sad moment, while Nathan continues to will the ghost of his dead girlfriend to his side, totally unaware that’s exactly what he managed to do.

  ‘A pink feather,’ he says eventually, out loud, continuing his one-sided conversation. ‘Any old ghost can do white feathers, but I want a pink one … a bright pink one.

  I’m obviously not any old ghost because I can’t even give him a stupid white feather, so I definitely won’t be able to give him a pink one. ‘Oh God, this is so FRUSTRATING!’ I yell through clenched teeth. Everything about him is gorgeous: his face, the square of his jaw, the arch of his eyebrows, the way his heart beats in the nape of his neck. ‘How about this? Can you feel this?’ I ask him, leaning over and placing my undetected lips on his, kissing him softly, before moving away, just far enough to allow my lips to open and murmur, ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you, Lily,’ he says into the air beside me, touching his lips with his fingers, as if he just might have felt something. But he’s looking up at the ceiling, as if I should be floating above him … as if dead people turn into invisible helium balloons, bobbing around above everyone’s heads.

  ‘I’m not up there,’ I grumble. ‘I’m here … right in front of your FACE!’

  From above we hear the stairs creaking as if someone is walking down them. Nathan’s mum moves past the open door and into the kitchen, where the sound of something like a glass being placed on the counter top and a bottle hitting its rim make their way into the lounge, and a few seconds later I see her walk back, holding a full glass of wine. I notice how she doesn’t turn her head, or say anything to Nathan, but quietly creaks her way back upstairs. He, on the other hand, watches her pass by, his unfathomable eyes following her as she moves.

  The spell is broken.

  As she disappears from view, Nathan’s fingers leave his lips and reach for the TV remote. He changes his position on the sofa and switches channels and, against my will, and far too soon, I feel the dragging start.

  I’m back with Mum and she’s awake, lighting a new cigarette by the back door. So Nathan pulled me to him and my mum pulled me back.

  Basically I’m the spiritual rope in an emotional tug of war … and Mum is winning.

  Lily’s mum, Amelia, hardly knew what day it was.

  Nothing seemed to matter any more. Her mind was trapped in a moment of disbelief, and nothing anyone did or said could snap her out of it. The evening her daughter went missing was a point in her life when time had stretched and warped like melting tar, black and ugly. Everything inside her had shifted when she’d phoned Beth and learnt that Lily had left her for home so long ago that she should easily have been home by then. It was as if all her organs had been wrenched out and pushed back inside her in a different order. She hadn’t wanted to phone the police at first, it would be like admitting that something might actually be wrong, but she knew in her heart that her daughter would never have changed her plan; she would never have gone off somewhere without telling one of them.

  She’d rung Lily’s mobile of course, and after a few rings it had switched to her voicemail. Each time Lily’s voice came through calling ‘hi’ she would breathe the words ‘Oh, Lily, thank God,’ until the recorded voice of her daughter interrupted, talking over the top of her desperate relief. Amelia had cursed her repeatedly for not picking up, or for probably having the sound turned off on her phone again, but she kept trying all the same. When it began to switch immediately to voicemail she knew that the battery must have gone flat. This time she cursed herself for using up precious seconds of Lily’s battery in case she was in trouble and needed to call home.

  When the police finally become involved Amelia had begun to tremble. It started inside with her jumbled organs, reaching all the way to her toes, until even her ears and scalp prickled with the fear coursing through her. She’d made Ben a bacon sandwich early on, and the fact that he was unable to finish it was everything she needed to be told. If her big ever-hungry son couldn’t eat, it was because he was worried, and if he was worried it was because that strange thing that they had going on between them had told him that his sister was in trouble.

  Her twins, her beautiful, wonderful twins … they understood each other without words, and then, because of that bacon sandwich, she had known too.

  When Brian had come to the door in the early hours of Sunday morning she’d stared at his mouth as the words came out, even though his face had said it all first. She’d waited, listening as he offered her a string of words, such as ‘sorry’ and ‘found’ and ‘daughter’ and ‘dead’, and all the other words had become lost between his mouth and her ears.

  When he finished what he had to say it was as if it all collected together and burst inside her head, and suddenly she needed to protect Lily from what he said. If he said different words, the meaning would be different. She remembered striking out at him, trying to tear him down, forcing him to tell her a different kind of truth, but even the desperate, animal-like instinct of a mother couldn’t save her child now.

  In the vacant hours and days that followed she didn’t know where she slotted into life any more. She played her daughter’s voicemail message over and over again, lost in that precious moment when she said ‘hi’ down the phone. If she tried to think of tomorrow, it merely frightened her that it was another day further away from when her daughter had been alive. If she tried to think of today, she couldn’t bear that she was living in a moment where life, as she knew it,
was broken. If she tried to think of yesterday, her insides twisted with the ugliest feeling of guilt and remorse that she had ever told Lily not to bother ringing for a lift home from town if she spent all her money.

  Amelia believed with all her heart that if she had been a good mother she would have told her daughter that if, for whatever reason, she did spend all her money, and couldn’t pay for a bus home, then she must ring her, because a good mother would have driven to the ends of the earth to get her precious daughter and bring her home.

  She struggled with every hurdle that every day inevitably brought with it. She pushed food into her mouth because her body insisted on it, but it no longer had a taste. She smoked because it was something to do with her empty hands. She drank wine or gin to numb the ache inside her and every time she looked into the face of her husband she saw his pain and every time she looked into the face of her son she saw the likeness of Lily.

  She was misplaced in her own home because her family belonged to yesterday.

  Fred was enjoying his role as detective and was taking it very seriously.

  He had reported the Morris Minor that he’d been cleaning, even though the police woman hadn’t seemed that interested. ‘It was very muddy and Mrs Peterson never lets that car get muddy.’ he told his boss, ‘She was very rude to me,’ he complained.

  ‘I’d have been very rude, Fred, if you’d accused me of killing a kid,’ his boss replied, with his face in his hands.

  Fred bobbed his head. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t accuse her; I just asked her if she had.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Fred!’ His boss groaned. ‘Mrs Peterson is a pillar of the community, not to mention a tight bit of arse.’ He stopped for a second to leer at an imaginary thought.

  ‘She’s out of your league,’ the mechanic called over from the coffee machine. ‘You dirty old bastard,’ she added under her breath.

  ‘I’ll apologise to her the very next time I see her. And you are not allowed to talk to anyone else, Fred. Understood?’

  ‘Then how can I be a detective?’ he asked and his head didn’t bob.

  ‘You can only look for cars with dents on the front. Like they’ve hit something heavy.’

  ‘No mud?’

  ‘No mud, Fred, only dents … Well, maybe the odd eyeball or set of teeth embedded in the paintwork,’ he added, and sniggered at his own joke, while the mechanic tutted loudly into her coffee, and Fred walked off, looking dejected and desperately disappointed.

  Uncle Roger has spent a lot of time at our house this week.

  He’s made himself the self-appointed head of our dysfunctional household for the time being, and he’s making me feel a bit nauseous in the process, as he glides around speaking to Mum and Dad in a soft voice as if he’s going to make things worse by speaking at a normal volume. I know they have to organise all the stuff to do with me, the dead stuff, but he’s bugging me now. I’m sure it’s because Aunty Ruth is so tedious this must be the most exciting thing that’s happened to him in, like, forever. He’s taken to leaving Aunty Ruth behind, bringing packets of fags with him instead so he can hang around the back door offering them to Mum as if he’s doing her some kind of favour.

  Today my parents have to take part in a press conference and local television report to raise awareness regarding the mystery of my death, and try to glean some clues or tip-offs from the public. They put on their smart clothes, which go some way to creating the clever illusion that they are still normal people. If anything, Uncle Roger seems to be thriving on this, strutting around with an air of importance, his hand possessively on Ben’s shoulder, nodding in agreement as Dad tells the camera how this tragedy has torn them apart, and if anyone knows anything, they should come forward and help with the investigation.

  Then … Dad looks hard into the camera and begs whoever did it to come forward themselves and take rightful blame for the total devastation they’ve caused. His mask of ‘normal person’ slips and a beetroot hue fills his face as he starts yelling, ‘C’mon, you BASTARD, you know you’re out there.’

  ‘Way to go, Dad,’ I tell him. ‘You’ve just sworn on TV.’

  The cameras skilfully switch to a speech from the police who confess that at this stage indications are it was an anonymous hit-and-run collision and they still have no clues regarding the type of vehicle involved, but the vehicle would most likely have an area of significant impact caused by the collision. They add that they are currently investigating CCTV footage from various local points, including petrol stations, and staff at local garages and repair workshops have been asked to look out for any vehicle that may come in for repair. Then they make a plea to the public to come forward if they have any information regarding the case.

  It began like the distant sound of water rushing through a tunnel and this time I knew what was going to happen, but I didn’t know where I was going to go.

  I’m in Beth’s bedroom. Predictably my entrance is completely undetected by her, but she has obviously been crying, because her lips are all puffy, her nostrils are quivering, and her eyelids are the colour of a ripening plum. The drying tracks of her tears are staining her cheeks as she lies motionless on the bed, staring at my social media page on her screen. The light fitting above her hangs in strands of pink crystals, which cast tiny glimmers of speckled pink light on the bed and on her skin. A cold cup of previously hot chocolate sits untouched on her bedside table with its wrinkly disc of milk skin floating on top. A plate with a half-eaten piece of toast is beside it.

  ‘Beth, oh my God! I’ve missed you!’ I squeal and run towards where she’s lying on the bed.

  Beth is my best friend. She’s half Jamaican with the most enviable warm copper-coloured skin. Her hair has the partial wiriness of her dad’s Jamaican origin but with mad long curls, yet the amber streaks of her mum’s hair. Her cheeks are sprinkled with the liberal freckles of Irish descent and her Cupid’s bow lips are the envy of the whole female population of our school year. Together we had turned heads, we knew it, and we loved it. Even with the stains of her tears all over her face she is still gorgeous, like a weeping film star.

  On the screen is a photo of us, taken the night a bunch of us stayed at a friend’s house. We were wearing onesies and hugging each other so that our cheeks were pressed together, but our faces were pointing at the camera. Our lips were stretched into happy smiles, our futures stretching before us.

  I guess because she’s thinking about us she’s managed to pull me to her, like Nathan did the other night. I feel like the genie of the lamp – your wish is my command.

  ‘It’s about time you got past my mother to bring me to you instead,’ I tell her, trying to lean on the bed beside her, but predictably falling right through. I settle for pressing my cheek to hers, like in the photo. When she turns her head, for a happy second, I think she has felt me, but like with Nathan, it’s just a cruel coincidence, as the door pushes open and the little mop of her dog, Charlie, comes in.

  He wriggles and sniffs and tips his head up me. I crouch down. ‘Hello, Charlie, good boy,’ I tell him, amazed there is a chance he can detect me, but he keeps jumping back, the curls on his black and white fur bouncing excitedly as if I’m something to be wary of.

  The dog knows … Why does no one else?

  ‘Don’t be scared of me, Charlie,’ I beg him. ‘You used to love me.’ His rejection hurts, and in that split second a tiny but ugly realisation comes to my mind. I don’t belong. To Beth I’m just an image, staring out of a screen from a world that belongs to another time. She can simply close down that screen and carry on with living in the moment. The thought grows until it crowds my head, with its sticky green fingers, trying to push away the love I have for my best friend and replace it with resentment.

  Charlie yaps at me and Beth looks through me then down at him. ‘Shhhh, Charlie, there’s nothing there.’ And her words hang in the air like soiled clothes on a line. Charlie backs away, still yapping, but Beth throws a cushion at him and he l
ies flat on the carpet whimpering for two seconds, before jumping up and starting again. Then Beth gives in, closes down the screen and reaches for him, murmuring comforting things in his ear, and, again, the spell is broken. Her thoughts are with Charlie and no longer with me.

  ‘No, not yet. I don’t want to go yet … I’m sorry. You’re still my best friend. I’m not … nothing,’ I call desperately to her, as I begin the uncontrollable process of disappearing from her room. I have only enough time to kiss Beth’s cheek before I’m completely dragged away, but I see her rub her cheek where my kiss had been, as if something had touched it.

  These little fragments of the life that I should be living are killing me more than death itself.

  So I can’t be touched, I can’t be heard, and I can’t be seen, but occasionally perhaps a tiny act of love can somehow find its way through death’s lonely barricade.

  As soon as the television report comes out, it’s as if our doors have been flung open to the baying crowd.

  Mysterious food parcels appear on our doorstep. Pies and casseroles and puddings, which have been anonymously baked, are slipped kindly near our front door, as if bereavement should give my family the appetite of contestants in a food-eating challenge. Flowers are propped up in abundance against our front wall and passers-by keep stopping and looking with sympathy … or relief that it’s not their family. The phone rings constantly and Uncle Roger keeps diving for the handset, like it’s a competitive sport, talking down the receiver in hushed, important tones. ‘Yes, she was hit by a car … unknown driver … She wouldn’t have known anything about it … They haven’t found him yet … Yes, I will pass on your condolences.’

  A journalist comes to the house trying to get some juicy news to top up his press release, and Dad stands in the doorway helpfully answering any questions he can. The journalist guy, however, makes a fatal error, microphone pointing at the bereaved: ‘The driver hasn’t been found yet. How does that make you and your family feel after the tragic death of your daughter?’