Prologue from GJ Moffat's Daisychain

Her vision blurred red.

He hit her again.

She tried to breathe and it sounded like a baby’s rattle filled with syrup as blood gurgled deep inside her lungs. She coughed a fine red mist into the air.

The crunch again of metal on bone.

Something in her broke and she began the long, slow fall in to the void. As she fell, an image stirred in her shattered mind and she saw a man’s face, a boy really, no more than twenty years old.

A dream, she thought. A beautiful dream.

No, not a dream, a memory.

What a thing to remember at the end of it all. Why did it have to be this? She wanted something warm to grab on to and hold tight as she fell in to the cold embrace of her death. But death is not a friend to warmth and she died drowning in the memory of her own tears.

They sat together at the end of the bed with the red cotton throw wrapped tightly around them, making silent bets on the threads of rainwater racing down the window. Two of the threads merged as one, becoming greater together.

She started at a loud crack from the logs burning in the open fireplace. A single glowing ember was spat out on to the old floorboards, scorching the wood black.

Tell him.

She rested her head on his shoulder, her breath a warm caress on his damp skin and his sweat like seawater on her lips. Her heat penetrated deep inside him, settling down in the marrow of his bones. She slipped her hand in to his and squeezed hard as the branches of the oak tree raked against the outside wall of the flat.

Tell him.

He turned to her and saw something fleeting in her eyes, something that aged her in a brief instant well beyond her years.

‘What?’ He asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing.’

As if repeating it would make it true. He sensed that it was not true, but his fear stopped him from the questions that he should have asked. He shifted his doubts to the same place he kept his feelings about the growing distance between them in the last month. If he didn’t think or talk about it, how could it be real?

How different would things have turned out if he had forced her to open up? She wanted him to do it. To push her down on to the bed and shout at her to let it out, to tell him what it was that was forcing them apart. But he never did.

They could hear the growing din of rush hour traffic outside on Byres Road and lay back on the bed. The cotton throw fell away leaving them both naked. He turned on his side and traced his fingers over her shoulders and then down over her breasts and on to her stomach. She put her hand on top of his and pressed it hard in to the flesh of her belly. She wanted to push his hand down through the layers of skin and fat and muscle until he was inside her womb and could feel the pulse of new life growing there.

Tell him.

He sensed her muscles straining and mistook it for desire. He leaned over and opened his mouth on hers, his tongue sliding over her lips and entering the warmth of her mouth.

Tell him and it will be alright, she thought. Then she almost laughed at the naiveté of the thought. They had both just graduated from Strathclyde University; confident about the future in their chosen careers of law and architecture. And it was a career she wanted, not a husband and a child – she knew that it was selfish but she still found herself pushing him away. How would they bring up a child?

And now, as the distance between them continued to grow, she convinced herself that she was not even sure that he was the one she wanted to make a life with. She knew in her heart that it was the fear and uncertainty driving them apart and not just the natural atrophy that a dying love endures before the end. But she willed herself to ignore that, to make bearable the decision to leave him and end the pregnancy.

Tell him.

Instead, she guided his hand down between her legs, pushed up to meet him and lost herself to him.

Make it good, she told herself. Make it the best and he’ll hold it dear, like a photograph that fades with time but never disappears.

It is. It was.

Later, he stood in the door to the street with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and watched her run through the rain to the underground station, water kicking up off her heels. The streetlights buzzed to life along the road and glowed dirty yellow in the late afternoon gloom of a Glasgow winter.

He raised a hand to wave as she stopped at the station entrance, lifting the wet hair up out of her face and smiling. He was too far away to see that the smile never touched her eyes, too far to distinguish the tears from the rain.

Was it good enough, she wondered? Then he stepped out in to the street, his bare feet splashing in the puddle outside the door. The rain quickly soaked his shirt, moulding it to the con tours of his body so that he appeared naked to her. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.

‘I love you, Penny.’

Tell him.

Tell him.

Tell him.

Her insides twisted and screamed and she took an unsteady step back towards him, towards life and away from the ugly death waiting for her down the years. But he did what he always did and stepped back inside and out of sight.

‘I never want to see you go,’ he told her once when she asked why he did that. ‘No long goodbyes.’

The moment was lost forever, her tears coursing away with the rain in the gutter and falling in to the sewer drain beneath the street. She stood alone in the rain for a minute.

‘Till a’ the seas gang dry,’ she whispered to the space where he had been.
It was how she always responded when he told her that he loved her – a poet’s way of telling him it would be forever.

She paid for a single at the ticket booth and waited on the narrow central platform for the distinctive orange train. She stepped on and the doors hissed shut behind her. The train rattled and lurched forward, taking her in to the black of the tunnel.

And she was gone.

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  Daisychain
  G. J. Moffat - Hardback - Hachette Scotland
  Logan Finch has just about everything he ever wanted, including a penthouse apartment and a shot at making partner in one of Scotland's largest law firms. But there's something missing from his life: he still pines for the woman he thought was 'the one' and who left him without a word of explanation over 12 years ago.