chapter seventy-seven
STUART, ONE MONTH LATER
It has been ten years since I last celebrated Christmas with my brother. I had no idea, of course, when I drove away from his house that day back in 2016, waving and making faces at my nephews from the passenger seat of my brother’s car, that I would not come back to his house for a full decade, that I would make excuses, year after year, delivering half-truths and lies about my absences, because how could I, Stuart Tucker, self-proclaimed free spirit, tell my brother that I’d had my wings clipped by a manipulative, abusive woman?
On Christmas Eve, I collect Daisy from the house where she is staying with her old childhood friend George and George’s amiable and slightly dull dad, Spencer. She looks so dierent seven months on from the events of May. At some point, while I’ve been out in the suburbs with my brother, Daisy has had something professional done to her hair and looks suddenly grown up and womanly as result. She’s also bought new clothes, something she hadn’t done for years, existing as she did in castos and things she found lying around the house.
The dull man called Spencer tells her to have a wonderful Christmas and, as we leave, we both turn to regard the yellow house at the bottom of the Vale. It is boarded up against prying eyes, its front garden still churned up and broken from the police excavation of the basement. I touch Daisy’s shoulder reassuringly. “Isn’t it weird,” I ask, “living here, so close?”
She shakes her head, a tiny, barely perceptible movement. “No,” she says. “It’s good. It keeps it small in my head when I see it every day. If I couldn’t see it, I’d dream about it, have nightmares about it. It would get too big and overwhelm me. And besides,” she says, turning to smile sadly at Stuart, “it keeps me closer to my mum.”
She’d changed her name by deed poll a couple of weeks ago. Daisy Connolly is her name now. She has no interest in the woman who raised her, who now grows stronger by the day in a rambling ivy-clad rehabilitation center while awaiting trial. She has no interest in her at all. “I don’t feel sorry for her,” she’d said to Stuart just after everything had exploded. “She says she’s a victim, but I don’t feel sorry for her in the least.”
They turn their gaze away from the house at the end of the road, and head back toward the cobbled alleyways, the Christmas-lights-strung windows, the sparkling trees, the sense of innocent wonder and joy as Christmas comes to the Vale of Health.
