Daisy picks at the edges of the bacon sandwich that Stuart has placed in front of her. “Thanks and everything,” she says to Jane, “for trying to find me. And for bringing Hugo home.”
Jane stares in awe at the young woman who she can now see is both the small, quirky dark-haired girl in Spencer’s son’s photograph and also the plain, dumpy blond girl described by Helen Yaxley. She has put on weight, and she is older now, less elfin, but it is definitely her: the same dark eyes, the same slightly protruding ears and fine-boned nose.
“You’re welcome,” says Jane.
“It was stupid of me to take Hugo. I don’t know what I was thinking—I just had never been anywhere on my own before and I was scared to be alone. But I’m glad you found him. I’m glad he was OK. I was so worried about him.”
There’s a small silence and then Jane says, “So, how long have you been home?”
Daisy shrugs and pulls a piece of bacon out of the edge of her sandwich. “A couple of weeks.”
“Bloody hell,” says Jane, thinking, of course, of course she has. “Right.And what happened, with Helen’s Airbnb? Why did you abandon it like that?”
Daisy stirs slightly in her chair and sighs. She looks up at Jane with those liquid brown eyes and she says, “Listen. If you want to know everything, I’ll have to start at the beginning.”
“Which is?”
“Which is the day that policewoman came here and showed me that picture.”
chapter sixty-nine
DAISY
I couldn’t get back into my studies that day, not after seeing the photo of Claire Connolly that the policewoman showed me. It had left an imprint on my retinas, like when you stare at something so bright you can still see it when you close your eyes. Her eyes. It was mainly her eyes. But it was other things, like the shape of her hairline, the way her ears stuck out. I just knew. I just knew. And it made sense, immediately, because I’d always known that Jessamine couldn’t be my mum. There was no way. She didn’t have a mother’s bone in her body. I saw the way my friends’ mothers were with their kids, the way they took care of them, teased them, ran their hands over the crowns of their heads, folded their clean clothes just so. Jessamine never touched me; she never told me she loved me. Nobody told me they loved me until Stuart came.
I wanted to run after the detective that day, chase her car down the lane and beg her to leave me the photo. When they all came back the following day, the big search party with the warrant, I wanted to pull one of them aside and say, “The woman you’re looking for is my mum. I know she is!” But I didn’t. I just stood around watching, waiting, hoping, praying that they would find the pretty girl in the photograph. I was devastated when they left, when they said there was nothing more to be done.
Don’t go!I wanted to yell out.Stay! Find her!
But they left; I watched the last car pull around the corner and I went to my room and cried.
I lost interest in my studies after that. Instead of logging into virtual learning, I spent my days in my room scouring the internet for everything I could find about Claire Connolly. Instead of studying, I wrote long, elaborate stories about me and Claire, about how she had become pregnant with me, how she had been trapped here in this house with my crazy drunk mother and my weird evil grandmother and Allen, the grandfather I had never met.
I posted the stories on flash fiction forums and got quite a following. I created art too, pictures and drawings of me and Claire, me as a baby in her arms, me feeding at her breast, Claire’s hand on the crown of my head. I didn’t tell anyone what I was going through, only strangers on the internet who knew me by a pseudonym and as an avatar.
When they reopened the schools at the end of the first lockdown, I told Stuart that I wasn’t going back. He fought with me about it, but I was adamant. I could not sit in classrooms learning stuff that I would never need to know in the real world. I needed to be at home, in my room, on my laptop. I promised Stuart I would still do my studies. He gave in in the end, told the local authority he’d be homeschooling me and that was that.
Sometimes I thought I was going mad. My obsession with Claire Connolly seemed to override every other element of my existence. It also made me hate Jessamine even more. The smell of her, the look of her, her drunkenness, her violence. Every time I looked at Stuart’s ear, the lumpen mess of it, I hated her. I hated her for her cruelty, her meanness, her sadness, her dead eyes. I hated her for pretending to be my mother for my entire life.
I asked her to show me photographs of myself when I was a baby. She told me that Grandad Allen took them all with him when he left. The first photos of me as a baby, I am around nine months old and held awkwardly on the lap of Jessamine and wearing an ugly dress.
I asked her to tell me more about Grandad Allen. “Where did he go?”
“Nobody knows. He must have met another woman and decided he’d be happier living with her.”
“So he took photos of me as a baby, but then never wanted to see me again?”
“What can I say? He was a very selfish man.”
After Covid ended two years later, when everything finally started going back to normal, seeing friends, meeting boys, going to festivals, learning to drive, I stayed at home. I felt closer to Claire Connolly here in the house, and Stuart was here, and I felt safe when I was with Stuart. I became a different person over those years. Withdrawn. Sullen. Obsessive. I ate too much and stopped taking care of myself.
I passed a boy from my school when I was walking Hugo on the Heath one day. We’d kissed once in year eight and he’d told me that he thought about me in bed at night when he was touching himself.
He walked straight past me that day as if I was invisible.
And maybe in a way I was.
About a year ago I found a photograph tucked away in a book. It made my breath catch at the back of my throat; it made me almost spontaneously throw up. It was Grandad Allen sitting on our old sofa with Jessamine on one side of him and, on his other side, a young boy I didn’t recognize. He had floppy brown hair and something on his lap. A plastic mask, I thought, looking at it closely. A clown’s mask. I dropped the photo in disgust, then picked it up again. I turned it over and saw the words “The Last One of Us” scribbled on the back in ballpoint.
