---

 

Blood pooled in the palm of her outstretched hand and a single red tear rolled down her wrist. Truth be known, it turned his stomach. She had been crying and her knickers were on the bathroom floor.

‘I want Mum’, she wailed and the breath and snot caught in her throat.

Me too, he thought. Along with, Thank God for long baggy T-Shirts. But instead he just said, ‘Can’t really ask her to come back from her honeymoon for this.’

He thought he was stating the obvious, but she slammed the bathroom door in his face. He could hear her sobbing moan on the other side. He wondered why, when he pointed out the facts of a situation, the women in his life always considered him cruel.

‘Daisy.’ He tapped gently on the door. Nothing. He sat on the landing floor, looking out of the low window pane. The rain was now horizontal across the moor, smattering against the glass.

‘Typical August.’ He pitied the poor holidaymakers on their walks. ‘Morons.’

The young she-cat, all agile sinew and muscle, sprang up to the window sill and licked his ear. He gently nudged her head with his. With one hand holding around the cat’s chest, he took her paw, splayed her claws between his thumb and forefinger, and gently started scratching on the bathroom door.

‘I’ve got someone here who wants to see you.’

He gave the cat’s chest a gentle squeeze with his hand. As if on cue she mewed. The door flung open.

‘It’s D now’, she said. ‘I told you. Not Daisy.’

She seemed more composed now, no tears, just black clumps of mascaraed eyelashes. A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth as she took the cat from him. She retreated back into the bathroom, and shut the door; leaving him a few stray, white cat hairs on his shirt.

‘Dad’, her call echoed around the bathroom, ‘Can you get me my phone.’ ‘Please’, he said. Silence.

He went to his daughter’s bedroom. The clutter of trainers, cosmetics, papers, exercise books and socks made his head spin. He punched a floating, crinkled balloon with ‘13’ on it out of the way. Out of every plug there was a recharging lead ending in nothing. No phone.

He straightened the tangled mass of bedding and wondered about the electricity being used.

Then he heard a ping and saw it. Shining and glittering from underneath a small, white cropped-top bra. Whatever the garment was, holding the thin white elasticated cotton between his thumb and forefinger as he retrieved the phone, made him feel uneasy.

He knocked on the bathroom door. ‘Maybe text your Mum, yeah?’

She took the phone. Again the door came to rest just inches from his face. ‘When are you going to tidy your room?’

‘I’m texting Cherish.’

He pictured his daughter’s new best friend. A chubby apple of a girl, whose knees seemed to bend backwards. Cherish? Only a mother would.

He leant his forehead on the bathroom door. He listened – the rain was easing. ‘We could go out for dinner.’

‘And Cherish.’

He couldn’t decide whether she was asking him or telling him. He winced at the thought of his credit card. He imagined his ex-wife lying by the pool in Tenerife with her new husband lying next to her. Both basking and squinting behind dark glasses into the sun.

Bastards were even holding hands. He pictured their flesh burning bright red, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

‘Sure. Why not.’

‘Whitby.’

She was definitely telling him this time. ‘Of course.’

 

#

 

He could feel the rivulets of rain running down his scalp. The two girls whispered as they huddled together under the awning outside the restaurant. They showed each other their phones and giggled. There was no room for him. They were the last in the queue. He looked out across the harbour; the grey sky melded into the grey of the sea.

Once inside they waited while the waitress wiped over the table. Deft, no movement superfluous, she handed them their laminated menus as they bundled up their dripping coats and slid into the booth. Finally, they could all breathe. He consciously relaxed his shoulders.

He tried to get the girls to have the kids’ menu but his daughter just laughed in his face and called him cheap. Her mother had said the same thing. Her mother could’ve done with being a bit more sensible herself. Still, it was someone else’s problem now.

‘Not cheap. Frugal. I just don’t like waste.’

He reasoned to himself that there would be no waste, he would finish anything they left, even if it killed him.

As it turned out, his life wasn’t in any way in peril. The girls polished off every bit of their buttery fish. The flesh, bright white, almost translucent, in crispy batter. They relished the tang of the salt and vinegar chips on their tongues. Their fingers were like claws as they plied them, three chips at a time, into their mouths. Their heads tilted back to receive them, like baby birds. They licked their ketchup smeared hands. Peas rolled across the table and fell and were crushed underfoot, their guts smeared sickly green across the floor.

He caught their happiness but he was not a part of it.

Droplets trickled down the front window pane of the restaurant. It was difficult to tell if this was the rain outside or the greasy steam inside. The light in the restaurant was harsh yellow bright. The girls’ skin shone pale and luminous under its glare. Every time the door opened they were briefly bathed in fresh North Sea air before the warm kitchen steam engulfed them again.

‘Desserts?’

He could curse that waitress. The girls pored over the menu while he ordered a coffee. He figured he could easily muscle in on his daughter’s dessert.

‘Knickerbocker Glory’, Daisy announced and Cherish’s eyes widened. ‘Yes. Yes.’ They giggled.

‘What? No.’

It was the most ridiculous thing on the menu, and the most expensive. The thing he least wanted to steal from her.

‘Two knickerbocker glories’, she told the waitress, looking at him and nudging Cherish.

He liked her assertiveness. Her self-assurance. That would be useful in life. It had stood her mother in good stead.

‘I’m done’, her mother had said. ‘It’s time for you to take the strain.’ But he thought that was what he had been doing at work.

The cold stillness grew all around him. He was gentle with his daughter, hugs and soft tones of voice to comfort her. Or was it himself? But with his wife, slabs of insurmountable silence built up between them. Until, finally, the desolation of abandonment. His desolation; her abandonment.

The two knickerbocker glories arrived on the table. The thick coned glass, the fresh fruit, the ice cream topped with cream, and viscous raspberry sauce sliding down the inside and outside of the goblet. All topped with chopped nuts and a triangular wafer. And the cherry on top – all bright slick, shiny translucent red. His arteries hardened just looking at them.

Daisy clapped her hands and the two girls squealed with delight. Oh my God. Oh my God. He decided he would try it, even though it looked utterly ridiculous. Too big and bold and drawing attention to itself.

‘Just a taste’, he said.

He tried a small spoonful – and it was good. Very good. The fruit was fresh and refreshing in his mouth, and it was not too sweet, except for the sauce. He tried a bit more and a bit more. Until his luck ran out and she rapped her long silver spoon over his knuckles.

‘Enough – So greedy.’ He laughed.

He watched his daughter and felt his heart twist as he realised she would never be the little child again. She would never be new and wide-eyed and wondering. He would never be her need, her reliance, her perfect. He would only ever be him now.

He went to the bathroom. By the sinks, there were mirrors on two sides and he caught sight of his profile. He noted his bad posture, his hunched shoulders, his thinning hair, his weak chin; how the frown and furrow lines of his brow deepened by the day. Divorced, middle-aged and redundant; of course she was in Tenerife. Look at him.

When he returned to the table, his daughter caught his eye and smiled. Sustenance comes in many forms.

 

#

 

As they left the restaurant, it was decided that Cherish should come back to theirs, if her mum agreed. So he walked on with Cherish as she messaged her mum back and forth, as Daisy stopped and fiddled with her high tops and adjusted her coat. He noticed the new dimensions of her changing body and hoped she wouldn’t need a new coat this month. The paving slabs were staggered in a pattern, and he watched as she hopscotched along them. Jump, hop, jump, hop.

A man, probably older than him, walked towards Daisy in the opposite direction. As he got level with her, he turned his head towards her and tilted it up and down. He couldn’t see whether the man’s mouth moved or not, but Daisy, who had previously been focused on the paving slabs and the placement of her feet on them, suddenly snapped her head up and stared at the man’s back as he carried on down the road without breaking his stride.

‘Mum wants to know if you will drive me back later?’ said Cherish.

‘Course’.

When they got to the car he held the door open. ‘M’ladies’, he said, as Cherish scrambled in.

The rain had stopped but the wind was whipping up off the sea. Daisy’s hair was shocked and tangled, her face thunderous. Her shoulders were rounded, making her chest concave.

‘I hate you. Arsehole’, she growled, ‘I hate you all.’

‘For fuck’s sake’, he muttered under his breath. What now?

He slammed the car door behind her and drove in angry silence back to the cottage.

He didn’t trust himself to speak. He took it out on the car, slamming through the gears, going that little bit too fast, breaking hard.

The two girls messaged each other throughout the twenty-minute car journey. At one point he noticed Cherish place a comforting hand on his daughter’s shoulder. His daughter took Cherish’s hand in hers, then they threaded arms, leaving their fingers free to message.

She tilted her head on to Cherish’s shoulder. More messages and they began to laugh again. He slowed up, the lanes were full of puddles; run off from the fields. He opened his window, the air outside was fresh but still wet. He could feel the fine water on his cheeks and in his eyelashes and eyebrows.

He smiled to himself. Last time at the hairdressers, the barber had trimmed his eyebrows, he hadn’t even asked him to. He didn’t even know that was a thing. It was the sort of thing his ex-wife would have told him to do.

He looked in the rear-view mirror and caught his daughter’s eye. He winked at her and she stuck out her tongue.

 

#

 

As they got out the car, Cherish stopped to pet the cat, who had come to greet them. He walked in front to unlock the door and for a brief moment Daisy was there at his side.

‘Thanks Dad’, her hand slipped into his then immediately out again.

He stooped to let her kiss his cheek. Her breath was sweet smelling and lips sticky pink.

‘I need to go to Marks’s tomorrow’, she said, ‘I need some proper bras … Oh – and I’m dieting.’

She had read somewhere that girls with anorexia don’t have periods.

Her hair and skin were dewy wet from the rain suspended in the atmosphere.

Hovering without falling. Neither rain nor air.

Then she was gone.

 

Lisa Blackwell is a writer and performer. Her fiction has appeared in the Bath Short Story Award Anthology 2019, MIR Online, TSS, Shooter Literary Magazine and Dandelion Years: Bath Flash Fiction Volume Seven. Her poetry has appeared in Rialto, Shearsman, Broken Sleep Books, 3AM Magazine, Lighthouse Journal and is forthcoming with The Pomegranate. Her poetry pamphlet, How it will happen, was Three Trees Portfolio Award winner, 2022, and is published with Maytree Press. She has performed her own work at literary events in Oxford, London, Berlin and Brussels. Lisa has collaborated with other artists to produce performances for the European Poetry Festival since 2021. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from University of Oxford, and is a graduate of RADA / King’s College London, where she gained a Master’s in Text and Performance Studies.

Main photo by John Lavin. Knickerbocker glory photo by Lisa Blackwell.