I.
The ancient Chinese art of feng shui has among its principles that one should never place a mirror in front of a bed, the reason being that while a person sleeps, the soul leaves the body to travel across the astral plane and if it catches sight of itself it will be frightened and unable to return. The same principle is true of the moment when the house lights come on at the end of a rave.
Daisy and Bryan collided at midnight — two unstable atoms, an excess of internal energy, bouncing around to trance and techno in the smoke and the lights and the lasers. At 2am the clocks went back. Spacetime was sliced apart and rearranged, the fabric of the universe detached from itself, leaving behind a void — some indefinable recess of nothing and nowhere. A perfect space for two new lovers to fall.
When the lights came on at 6am they weren’t frightened or lost but found.
They found each other chatter-jawed and squirrel-eyed from the ketty pills. Glowing, creatured, twisted and ethereal. Twinkling like the morning frost which now coated the banks of England’s motorways as they made their way home. They stumbled into an all-night garage, twitching beneath the iridescent strip-lighting and recoiling at the broadsheet newspapers in the plastic boxes, the inexorable morning-creep of reality.
“Let’s get some kiwis,” said Bryan. “They’ve got four times as much vitamin C as an orange.”
“That’ll definitely help us,” Daisy replied.
So they bought the small mesh-bag of fruit— incongruous between the foil-wrapped confectionary and the day-glo energy drinks and they took them home to sit on the floor of Bryan’s student digs and tried to eat them with a spoon but found the green flesh and seeds too tart and acidic, opting instead for tepid water and a badly rolled soap-bar spliff, as a trance mix played softly in the background on cassette tape and dawn broke slowly without ceremony or flourish, a slow transition from black to grey. The moon outside their window lingered like a pale visitor who — much like our two young friends giggling on the carpet — hadn’t yet the sense to go to bed.
II.
“Walk me out into the snow, I want to go back.”
“Eat your kiwi, it’s got four times as much vitamin C as an orange.”
“Thanks, that’ll definitely fix me.”
III.
Time warps and changes in the hospital. Daisy went into labour just before midnight on the 6th of November, the smell of bonfires and gunpowder still floated in the crisp, autumnal air as Bryan packed their things into the car. At first it seemed everything was happening quickly, then it was — Ok you’re doing great we’ll check on you again in four hours.
Bryan, fearing a rebuke from the stern ward sister or that he be added to a register of absentee fathers, went for a walk to stretch his legs, while Daisy — already spent and exhausted but with such a long way to go — took a moment to regain her breath, sucking deeply on the gas and air which, it seemed, was basically doing fuck-all.
Bryan wasn’t sure what day it was, had it been eight hours? Twelve? He walked the uniformly beige corridors listening to the music of the hospital — the deep thrum of industrial laundry rooms and rhythmical bleeps from the machines. He wanted their daughter to be born on the 7th, didn’t really know why, just had it in his head that it was lucky, she’d need a bit of luck in this world they were bringing her into.
The 8th was supposed to be lucky as well though, wasn’t it? He was pretty sure the Chinese believed the number 8 to be the luckiest number so that would be ok too.
When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen either, he decided to look up the number 9.
At some point, things started to move, and things were going in the wrong direction. The baby was face-down and couldn’t be turned, the heart-rate was dropping and Daisy needed to be rushed to theatre.
They gave Bryan a hat and gown and he went with them and when Lily was born — pink and screaming — they cleaned her up and handed her to Bryan who said, “Hello,” and maybe Lily recognised the sound of his voice because she stopped screaming. He didn’t recognise her though, not really. In truth she could’ve been anyone’s baby, Bryan didn’t feel like he knew her, that would come later.
For Daisy it was different of course, when Bryan placed Lily in her arms it was as though he’d handed her a piece of her soul which she’d always knew existed but could never hold. She cried as she cuddled her new daughter, and Lily’s eyelids drooped as she dozed on Daisy’s chest — tired from her long journey, happy to have finally met Mama.
IV.
“Walk me out into the snow.”
“It’s not time yet.”
“It is, it’s the ninth. I wanted to wait.”
“It’s the ninth tomorrow.”
“No it isn’t.”
V.
They keep the lights low in the hospice, the curtains are usually drawn. No one wants the light to catch Death’s bony face for too long.
Bryan first noticed a lump in his neck, and ignored it for several months. By the time he got it checked it was too late. The cancer had started in his lungs and metastasised to his liver, kidneys and lymph nodes. It spread like knotweed, as relentless as it was mean.
The treatment was aggressive, it took everything from him. At first, Lily wanted to know why Daddy wouldn’t pick her up and carry her around. Then she was crying in the night wondering where he’d gone, when he was coming back.
Bryan didn’t want Lily to see him. By the end he weighed seven stone and couldn’t get out of bed or wipe the shit from his own arse. No one wants to be remembered like that. He prayed that Lily would forget him entirely, in time. She was still young enough to live a full and unburdened life and he didn’t intend to leave her haunted by the image of a man she didn’t really know — staring up at her from his mechanical bed.
VI.
“Walk me out into the snow.”
“Ok.”
It was the ninth of December, it was time to go.
VII.
9 is a special number, so it turns out. Bryan had looked it up while he wandered the endlessly beige hospital corridors, lost in the liminal space which divided the two episodes of his brief life. He was searching for some significance, as we all do in those times we need something to help give shape to the dark and formless night.
The language of the universe is mathematics, once everything is broken down to its most basic elements, numbers are all that remain. 9 is the highest single digit, the last of the cardinal numbers. It represents completion, but not finality. 9 is the fulfilment of one cycle, in preparation for the beginning of another. It’s finishing a chapter, and starting a new one.
VIII.
Daisy and Bryan walk out into the snow. Bryan leans on Daisy for support, so light in his dressing gown he could almost float away on the breeze, his gait leaves no trace on the snow-covered lawns. Instead, as they walk, things fall back into place behind them. The fresh snow covers the ground, where new bulbs sleep beneath the frozen topsoil, ready to bloom in another lifetime, shooting up between Death’s bony fingers.
Our two friends walk backwards into the wind and the fog and the snow, back into the gaps and the spaces left behind. Back into that stolen extra hour, just after midnight, where they left their own little bulb to grow.
Daisy kisses the top of Bryan’s head, feels for one last time the fuzz of what remains. And then there is only one figure — cast in silhouette against a perfectly white background, flickering like warped videotape — as the wind whips an empty dressing gown up, up, up into the sky.
IX.
“Alexa, play the Inpetto mix of Toca Me!”
It’s a rainy Friday tea-time in England, but Lily is getting ready to go to Ibiza at the end of the month and until she can dance from dusk ’til dawn with her friends on white sandy beaches she’s made “kitchen raves” into a thing for her and Mum. The tunes are the same ones Daisy remembers from her day, except they’re referred to as “classics” now, and as she’s putting the finishing touches to her carbonara and sipping a glass of red, she just can’t help it when the beat takes hold of her central nervous system — something primal, hardwired — and starts dancing round the kitchen, holding a wooden spoon.
Lily is tall and slightly gangly: a runner, a raver, apparently surviving on a diet of caramel lattes and fresh air and the occasional Mum’s Carbonara. Never staying still, just as young people are supposed to be. She has her mum’s blonde hair and her dad’s goofy smile. She is happy.
The two women bounce round the kitchen together, throwing their hands in the air and posing in the mirror and there’s so many angles, so many bent and twisted beams of light — refracted through spacetime and converging into the image Daisy sees of Lily’s face. It is her face and it is Bryan’s face, Bryan’s old face made young again.
In truth, Daisy is terrified of letting Lily go on holiday with her friends. It will be the most time they’ve ever spent apart, but the small voice in her head says, let her go, let her dance, let her come back and keep dancing together. Let this house be noise and chaos for the time you’re lucky enough to have. Leave the mirror by the bed so that your soul might catch a glimpse of your face in the morning when it returns and know that it hasn’t changed, not really. It’s still your face unmasked, unblinking. Leave your bed unmade, leave the houselights off, leave your chair on a creak-spot. Let the cracks in the walls fill with music and laughter and let there be space to breathe, and gaps through which a soul may visit.