Darker London

Joss woke up bleary, rotten and heavy as a corpse as he heaved himself up in bed. His blankets had twisted and mostly fallen to the floor and there was a smell from the half dozen mostly-empty coffee cups gathered at his bedside. It was his own fault, the cups, the smell, and he could easily do something about it, and yet he didn’t grab any of them as he made his way down to the kitchen for another one.

I’ll clean them all up in one go, he thought. Later. When I do laundry. Something else he hadn’t done in a while.

( ... )

The first time Yolande died, Daria had been seventeen. She’d dealt with her grief by not dealing with it, spending all night out of the house without a word to Neil where she was, getting so, so high with Adam, disappearing from school with Art. She spent as little time around her dying mother as she possibly could, and as little time around her family. It had been terrible, and damaging, and as a result Daria had always tried to confront her feelings head on. Shine a fucking maglight onto them and just – cope. Link arm and arm with the rest of her family, with her friends, and don’t hide. Never hide.

Now, Yolande was curled up on the couch in Daria’s living room, shaking and sweating and pale as a ghost, and all Daria wanted to do was lock herself in her closet and press her hands over her ears till it was over.

( ... )

Since appearing naked in front of an angel in a hospital room, Yolande had been wringing every moment she could from the extra days she’d been given.

Every day was packed full of activity. So much of it was spent looking after Daria and Noah and their newborn twins, but the help was spread over many friends so there was time to reconnect, and play, with Neil and her other daughters too. And she hooked in anyone else who came to the house, Hayley’s friends, Joss. Once she’d gone clubbing with Allanah.

( ... )

“Dammit,” Daria hissed, as several shards of shell from the egg she’d cracked fell into the bowl with the egg. She took a moment to suck in air through her nose but this did nothing to calm her, and she dug into the eggy slime with a frustrated finger, trying to hook the shell back up the lip of the bowl.

“I can do this,” Yolande said cheerfully, reaching to take the bowl away from Daria.

“I can make my own daughter’s birthday cake!” Daria snapped, gripping the bowl close to her. “Fucks sake.”

( ... )

“Daria Persephone,” said her mother’s voice, and Daria looked up blearily from where she was staring at the padded corner of the coffee table. There was nothing particularly interesting about it, it had simply been where her eyes had fallen and refused to get up. Dragging her gaze away from the table was an effort incomparable to anything else she’d been through.

Yolande was wearing one of Daria’s Ethereal Façade shirts to sleep in and looked like she’d stepped out of another time. “You should be asleep.”

( ... )

GIRLS!! LOOK OVER HERE!! IT'S A NOTE ON THE KETTLE FROM YOUR MOTHER! COOEE!! WHY NOT READ ME WHILE THE JUG BOILS!!

I SUPPOSE ONE OF YOU MIGHT ALSO HAVE A BOY OVER SO IF THIS NOTE IS BEING READ BY A BOY, HELLO!! TELL ONE OF MY GIRLS THERE IS A NOTE HERE WAITING FOR THEM. KEEP THE BEDROOM DOOR OPEN, HAHAHA! (I AM KIDDING! IF YOU ARE HERE, YOU MIGHT HAVE BEEN HERE ALL NIGHT!! IN WHICH CASE I ALREADY KNOW THE BEDROOM DOORS WERE CLOSED! GOOD WORK KEEPING YOURSELF SECRET FROM PRYING PARENTS! IF YOU LIKE, WHY NOT STAY AND MEET US?)

GIRLS! I HAVE TAKEN YOUR FATHER OUT FOR A MORNING RUN. HE TELLS ME THAT YOU WILL WORRY THAT HE WILL OVERDO IT SO I AM HERE TO TELL YOU NOT TO. HE WILL NOT OVERDO IT. HE WILL JUST DO IT! AND SO WILL I!

IF YOU TURN AROUND YOU WILL SEE ANOTHER NOTE. IF YOU LIKE, YOU COULD SEE WHAT THAT NOTE SAYS AS WELL.

( ... )

“Dad’s coming in after dinner with my girls,” Daria whispered to her mother, reading off the phone that Noah was holding, since both her hands were occupied with a breastfeeding Alastair. “And Merry again, and Hayley,” she watched her mother’s face as Yolande covered her mouth with her hands to keep the joy from bursting out. Daria felt the same, but with extra layers of tired, and extra layers of sore. She’d always been active, loved the gym, athletic sex, and finding new ways to push her body, but right now there were muscles aching she’d never thought about before. Her whole body felt like it had fallen out of a tree.

She had fallen out of a tree once too. She’d been getting high with Adam in after school and leaned back too far, hit another branch on the way down and was lucky not to break anything. It hadn’t been a very tall tree, but she was discovering new bruises for days.

“Neil and Merry and Hayley,” Yolande echoed, voice creeping out through her fingers. “Cassandra and Phoebe and Neil and Merry and Hayley.”

“I think we should tell Cass and Bee that you’re an Auntie, or something – I don’t want them telling their preschool they got two new siblings and a granny back from the dead,” Daria said, picturing it. Or rather – she didn’t want other adults telling Phoebe and Cassandra that they were making up stories when they weren’t. “That should work, right?” she looked over at Noah.

Merry stepped out of Daria’s room, and instantly found that looking at her mother without the distraction of her sister and new niece and nephew became far more difficult. Her gaze dropped to her hands, one of them slowly wringing anxiety out of the other.

“I’ll, uh, get coffees,” Joss said, thinking that this was a mother-daughter conversation and he better get himself out of there for a while. “What do you drink – uh – do you drink?”

( ... )

Merry had been struggling through the last few months in a way she was very reluctant to describe as struggling. She had support from her family and a nice place to live and a cat with more personality than ears – it wasn’t like she was homeless or suffering abuse or living in a war zone or anything. She even had proper medical support and a doctor who understood the reality of all the things that had happened to her. She was so fucking lucky.

Life was just... gruelling, and from where she was standing at the moment it was hard to see any progress and harder still to see how things could improve. Today, for example, progress was not feeling like progress at all: She’d started talking in group therapy and afterward she felt wretched.

She’d gone with Joss a few times before now. Joss, who also didn’t talk much but seemed less like he was suffocating under the weight of not-talking than she did. It had taken her weeks and weeks to first identify where this suffocating feeling was coming from and then longer to come to terms with the idea that talking about it might not destroy her as much as she’d once been convinced it would.

( ... )

Daria had done pain before. When Pat cut her left arm open using her right, when he’d stabbed her hand, her throat, cracked her ribs while she was still healing from her c-section. She’d done pain, and while none of that was pain like this, the ghosts of the old pain crowded into the hospital room with her. The threat of being overpowered, incapacitated. Made it hard to think straight.

She’d got down to a contraction every three minutes but around four in the afternoon they’d dropped back to eight minutes apart and after the second eight minute wait she’d thrashed her pillow with her fist in frustration. Then another hit, just before the five minute mark, and the peak of it was so bad she held her breath, fists gripping the blankets while she waited for it to pass. “Breathe, Daria,” Neil reminded her.

( ... )