Dead Daisies by Emily Black
Image by Nathan Cowley for Pexels
TW: Sexual violence
When I was in year nine, my teacher showed my artwork to the class as an example. The piece comprised three canvases. The first depicted daisies in the grass, seen from above. The background was green and dark. The second panel was the daisies again, in the same composition, but darker, blurred. The final panel was the daisies, but now you could barely tell they were flowers, instead a white mess in the black. I told my teacher it depicted memory; the way our past is warped and dimmed by time. Art teachers love that shit, so she gave me the top grade in my class, and I took art for my GCSEs, and then for A-Level. My school uniform was always covered in paint.
Nia’s shoes have a tick on them, and I stare at the arc and the sharp point. They’re pastel-coloured trainers, with blocks of pink and pale yellow. She has a baby blue anklet on, and I have paint under my fingernails. We’re both visiting home; it’s the first time Nia and I have met since before I’d gone to college, and she’d been at uni. I never expected to be reunited in a police station.
My first boyfriend was called Jack. Jack was eighteen and I was seventeen. I was finishing school, but he’d dropped out and was working at a bar in town, had two tattoos and a cobalt blue car. We had sex for the first time in that dusty car, parked in the middle of a field in the British countryside, surrounded by wildflowers at night. I grabbed onto the door handle in the dark, felt a button give, and unintentionally rolled the windows down. Struggling to regain control, cool air rushed in to dry the sweat from my eyelids.
In my A-Level art classes I started painting nudes. I drew the soft fat rolls of bellies and hard buttocks, long calves and toes. My classmates painted landscapes and portraits and still life compositions, whilst I painted chest hair and nipples and fingers gripping other fingers. Sometimes they came in pairs and sometimes they were alone, staring at something in the background they floated on. These figures had dark pubic triangles, folds, and hard parts.
Nia was an old school friend, and she started going out with Jack’s best friend Nathan, so we spent more and more time together during sixth form, dropping old friends and feasting on the secrets of the sex we were having, indulging in our new teenage coupledom. I was a seasoned sex-fiend in no time.
Jack held me and I gripped him as though I was going to die. Handprints on asses: pink pain. Body parts and curls of hair. Kisses and lipstick and the need to always be ready and damp. He had great big hands and money from working at the bar.
I spent any money I made selling my paintings at school fairs on more oil paints, vodka, or wine, so we could sit in parks and drink together. In the beginning, he bought me things: gifts, surprises, little bits of jewellery and meals out at cheap bistros, a bar and grill, the local pub. I made him handmade cards with miniature oil paintings on the front. I felt like a kid making crafts with raw pasta and glitter-glue.
I moved to the city after college, and no longer see anyone from home. I like feeling lost and alone in London. I like walking down Carnaby Street without fear of seeing their faces; moving through crowds under the tall office blocks at Embankment; floating through Camden, and being nobody worth laying a hand on.
The night Jack met my parents, my mother cooked a large lasagne and opened a bottle of wine for us to share with our guest. She watched me drink my wine, as though I’d never taken as much as a sip before. We shared out the steaming red sheets of pasta and made awkward small talk. I felt responsible for ensuring my teenage boyfriend got along with my parents, who looked smaller than usual next to this man with tattoos and a stiff look. I could tell how my parents felt based on the shy tone in which they spoke about him, as though uncomfortable acknowledging his presence at our family meal. This only made me like him more.
I place canvases against my bedroom wall which looks out at the East London skyline. There are six of us in the townhouse—friends from college—and we have a little balcony where we sit and smoke. The girls bring their boyfriends and girlfriends over to the house sometimes and we entertain them with dinner parties and murder mysteries and board games and wine and film nights. Their partners bring their friends who I’d ‘really like and should get to know’ but I never like them, even when I get to know them.
It was fun to act like I knew things. I liked to be as dirty as possible for Jack because he went crazy for it, praised me like a good dog. He was only a kid playing games, but I thought he was a grown man, somewhat old. He had rough stubble and kept a pouch of tobacco in his wallet, which made the leather smell funny.
I went to his house, where his parents smiled at me and said I was a lovely girl. We took warm baths together upstairs, where I felt warm and safe; dipped in liquid approval.
Working hours in London are usually solitary, either on the computer mocking up designs or painting something ready to scan it in. When work is over, I’ll pull out a canvas to continue painting. When one fleshy figure is done—hipbones, knees, legs spread open—I’ll leave it for months, before painting over with more thick paint, ready to impose another body on the block.
For our one-year anniversary Jack took me to the field by the river outside of town where we liked to drink and dip our toes in the water. I was knocking back paracetamol, as I had bad cramps. My insides were alien and full of pain. We lay in the grass in spring; insects filled the air. Pollen fell from the trees thick and heavy. Jack gave me a silver necklace as a gift, and I gave him an oil-paint nude portrait of him. He tilted his head when pulling the canvas out of the plastic bag I’d wrapped it in. His lips curled inwards, and he chewed at something non-existent. He said his belly didn’t look like that, and he felt weird I’d painted his penis. “Why does it look yellow?” he asked.
When I first moved to London I worked as a designer for a large company, a painter for a small one, then a designer again, which is where I settled—painting shit for an agency that provided website backgrounds and edgy graphics. I meet friends for drinks in the evenings; plant little pink flowers in the terracotta pots on our small square of balcony; paint for work, paint in my free time; meet up with old friends and go dancing; smoke on the weekends and melt into a heap with my housemates; order poké; go to parties; techno raves; hungover days; work more; harder. Hot nights; sadness; itching at scabs; hanging out on the ceiling of my room; drugs; comedowns; no drugs; paint again; more oil; never letting myself think, in fear I’ll be plagued. Buy a record player to feel nostalgic for a time when I wasn’t alive; cover my bookshelf in colour; paint great big pink nudes that sit leant against the wall in our hallway, where my housemates scuff the bottom of the canvas with their shoes.
A month after Jack and I spent our anniversary by the river, we returned with Nia and Nathan on one of our regular double-dates. It was in the middle of a heatwave; the grass was scorched and yellow. Nia asked to see one of my paintings, so I told Jack to get one of my cards out of his car. When he went to retrieve them, Nia and I waiting expectantly, he said he couldn’t find them, and he must’ve lost them when clearing out the boot. I was embarrassed and confused, but we continued drinking, and I sulked and ignored Jack for an hour. He told me I was childish, and pushed his hot tongue against mine, and told me to take another drink. He poured sharp wine into my mouth until it overfilled and spilled out the corner of my lips, and I gurgled as though underwater.
Nia and I whispered while the boys leapt in and out of the river in their trunks, crushing beer cans in their fists. My throat was dry, and I could smell salt on my own skin. Nia stretched out like a cat in the grass. She was sun kissed, and bordering paralytic.
I was escorting a large vaginal red canvas downstairs in our London townhouse, when my housemate emerged from the kitchen in her pyjama bottoms, eating salad from a bowl with her fingers. She shovelled leaves into her mouth with her hands, and watched me propping up my latest work. “Are you gay?” she asked.
“What?”
“Are you gay?”
“No. What makes you ask?”
“Dunno, you’re always painting naked people, mainly women.”
“I like painting bodies,” I said. “I’m not gay.”
“Ok.” She turned around and walked back into the kitchen, leaving a limp piece of lettuce on the carpet.
Nia and I sit in the waiting room at the police station, and it feels like a sterile eternity. The floor is white and speckled. Nia breathes deeply, whilst I look at the floor. When the officer calls our names, we stand up simultaneously. They tell us we’re only allowed to come in one at a time, which makes my throat contract. How are we meant to explain what they’d made us do, as a fraction of the whole?
I sat at the table eating garlic pasta with the girls, on a rare night we’d all got back from work with no plans, except to be together. It was winter, and there were dry lips and pink noses.
“Ellie?” one of the girls asked me, when we’d all finished analysing a different housemate’s ex-boyfriend’s-new-girl.
“Yeah?”
She looked shy. “Why don’t you like the guys we introduce you to?”
I put my fork down. The girls looked tense, staring at one another; a rule had been broken.
“I just don’t really like any of them. They’re not my type.”
“What is your type?” Another girl asked cautiously. They were scared, breathing in anticipation.
I thought about it. “I haven’t found it yet,” I said.
“Are you like…asexual?”
“She used to have a boyfriend,” another girl corrected her.
One of the others snickered in disbelief.
I imagined pouring the remains of my garlic pasta over her expensive blonde highlights, or telling her to fuck off and mind her own business. Instead, I said I was going to eat the rest of my meal elsewhere.
On the carpet of my bedroom, I stared at my current project: a male nude outstretched on a sofa, feet raised, head hanging off the edge. I imagined the rush of blood to his cheeks, and used my elbow to smudge the delicate shadows I’d spent hours painting on the back of his shaved scalp. It somehow looked better, and I hated that I couldn’t just ruin it.
I picked up my phone and searched for an old number. She was still there. I messaged her, Do you ever look back and wonder if something was wrong?
When nodding off to sleep on the carpet, sat in front of my messy painting, garlic pasta cold in its bowl, I got a reply from her. Nia. I’ve wanted to talk about this for a while, she said.
When the officer asks me where the ‘incident’ happened I’m not prepared. I haven’t thought about what I’ll say, or any details. I just thought about the span of it all; each piece of me I’d let him take and the invisible violence of our love.
I tell him things happened in a cobalt blue car, by the river, and in my childhood bedroom. The officer laughs, takes off his cap, and says, “No, I need an address.”
I flounder, my tongue large and dry like a sponge.
The first time Jack met my parents, we’d gone upstairs to my room after dinner. Jack pushed up against me on my single bed, pressing my skull into the metal bars of the headboard. “That was boring,” he said, “Now let’s have some fun.” He pulled my jeans down, and I froze with fear that my parents would hear, because we’d only ever done it in his car. “Not now, Jack,” I said, pushing him off me. He smiled kindly and continued to tug my jeans. I repeated, “Not now.” When he did it anyway, I just held those metal bars tight, hoping to be quiet.
The day of our anniversary, Jack pushed me onto my knees in his car and shoved himself inside me; blood trickled down my legs and onto my pink skirt. My stomach cramped, and I whispered at him not to because I was in pain, but I didn’t want to disappoint. Thin red paint spilt on his car seats.
When Nia and I were wine drunk by the river, wet feet, minds dripping out of consciousness; moon rising; fingers in mouths, Jack and Nathan leant over us in the fuzzy dark. Pushed us together, pulled off our clothes. Pressed my hands up against her tits like a puppet. She was moaning, drunk. Jack pushed her face down between my legs. When she came up for air she was crying, and the moonlight made her look so pretty, lipstick smudged on my crotch. Jack tossed me around, Nathan’s face in front of mine, both naked and silver. Body parts; soggy; tugging; my earrings floating down the river.
I was red and blue and naïve and full of desire to make someone happy; to tell me I was worth being there, in the grass under the moon, and on my thin single bed, and on my knees, and in the black of night, by myself, craving him, craving anyone. Searching through red and peach and purple paints trying to pin something down and create a figure which could act as a mirror because I no longer had the ability to see myself. My mother. My father. Family. Drifting like a slick of oil separated from the pigment. I wanted to be scooped up and made into something. Fingers inside me in the bath. Sharp nails and my own face submerged in the water. Water filling my nostrils.
He broke up with me on the phone when I moved away from home for art college. He called me when I was unpacking a box of new kitchen utensils for my student flat. I stood staring at a grater when he asked me, “Do you still love me?”
I said to the phone, “Yes. Do you still love me?”
There was nothing, and I wondered what I’d done wrong.
My memory is glossed with layers of time; one-night stands, lucidity, then pain. It’s like trying to chip away at the surface of my mind to find something which was already dry. After Jack ended our relationship, I was removed from any desire to make friends at art school. I just sat in my room painting grotesque bodies with ears and arms in the wrong places; carnal, graphic genitals. It took sixth months to drag myself out of the swamp of my brain and start engaging with my art and design classes. I met friends who’d become future housemates, started talking again, moved on.
Of all the reasons to return to my hometown, I never thought speaking to the police would be one. Nia and I leave the station, we don’t know what to do. It feels odd to walk away and leave each other, but we’re not really friends anymore. We sit in a park for an hour, to tide over the tension, settled on a baked square of earth.
“Remember—”
“—When we went to that field with the boys?” she says. “Yeah.”
The memory seems brittle and sharp.
“You left Nathan after that, right?”
“Yeah, we broke up.”
“I didn’t see much of you after that.”
“No,” Nia sighs.
“What is it you’re doing now?” I ask.
“I’m an accountant. In Edinburgh. Stayed there after uni.”
“It’s been ages,” I say.
“Yeah. Someone told me you paint porn?”
“What? No. I’m a painter and designer for an agency…I don’t…I don’t paint porn…”
We’re still for a moment.
“You were always good at painting. I’m no good at anything creative.”
“You’re good with numbers.”
“I gave up art in year nine. But I remember when the teacher used a painting you’d done as an example, and I was so jealous.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it was good. Although I don’t remember what it was, just that none of us could paint like that…” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “Anyway…do you feel better?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you feel better now that we’ve been to the station? Better for telling someone?”
“No,” I say, “I don’t. It feels really bad. Do you?”
“No,” she says.
Nia reaches out and holds my hand. Her palm is soft and safe. We sit in the remains of the grass. I grab a handful of daisies in the dry earth and tug. They hold tight, then snap at the stems as I pull. With nothing to say, we sit and rip flowers out of the earth like children that don’t know better.
Emily (she/her) holds an MA in creative writing; her work has appeared on The Litro Lab Podcast, in The Tilt, Ellipses Zine, The Final Girls, The York Journal, Ginosoko Journal, and Disgraceful Magazine. She was long-listed for the LYB Tate Prize and The White Review Short Story Prize 2021. She’s currently based in west London.