The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (8 page)

He doesn’t exactly remember when he first saw Dani—Dani like she is now. For a while, after her death, she seemed to be always there in the corner of his eye, but when he turned to find her she was gone, melted away or morphed into another face. But that flash of her was enough to keep him going somehow.

But there came a point, maybe a year after her death, when it wasn’t just a glimpse. One day, soon after he’d resigned his job, he saw her straight on. She was on a train he’d just left. For some reason he turned back as it was about to leave the station, and there she was. She winked at him. A week or so later she waved from a taxi. She looked as she had that last time he saw her alive: dark brown shoulder-length hair held off her face by a clip, freckles dotting her nose and upper cheeks like they did even in winter. She wore no make-up and looked healthy. Looked happy. He never told Patty he saw her. He knew what she’d say: “You are cracking up, my friend, you need to see someone.”

That was pretty much what she said to him most days back then. He hated it when she called him
“my friend”
and of course she knew it made him crazy. And, in part, it was why she said it. She knew long before she left him that she would, and a part of her wanted to make him hate her, make him glad she was gone instead of just feeling abandoned. Of course that plan was futile. Without Dani, Jim held on to Patty harder than ever. He knew deep down it stifled her, pushed her away, but he couldn’t help himself. The fear of being alone was too deep, but that very fear made it inevitable. The man who loved women but who was left by them all.

It took Patty eight years to leave him. Eight years after Dani died to feed the resentment and build the courage to leave the man she loved. When she did, Jim fell apart. He called for her, howled for her, and for Dani. Then when Jim hit rock bottom, about a week after Patty left, Dani came back to him. He’d been in the
living room and he thought he heard the front door. He rushed out, like a dog desperate to see its owner.

“Patty?” he shouted.

The hallway was empty. He just stood there, staring at the front door, his brief moment of optimism deflated like a ruptured balloon. The sun was going down and the glass of the door was flaring with the last few rays. It was actually quite beautiful, reminded him for a moment of Notre Dame at dusk. Then, within the shimmering orange-gold light, a shape seemed to coalesce. The sun slipped away and Dani stood there. She was wearing a red duffel coat and held a beaten-up suitcase.

“I thought you might want some company,” she said with a smile. “Can I come in?”

He nodded and she walked past him into the living room. Not floating, not see-through. She left the suitcase in the hall. Later he noticed it was gone. That night he asked her to take her old room and she did. He asked where she had been, what she remembered. She said there was nothing. He accepted it, though he liked to imagine she’d been traveling—seen the world like she’d always planned. Once she’d graduated. Had she lived.

“It’s so quiet.”

Jim nods.

Father and daughter walk together toward Greenwich Park. Jim steers them on a slightly longer route than normal; yesterday he saw a poster on a tree: missing cat. He knows to avoid it. The streets are empty. It’s not even 10 a.m. but the grayness feels like dusk. Snowflakes still fall but not so thickly; the wind has died so they gracefully drift toward the earth, turning slowly.

As they approach the park, they begin to hear the first sounds
of the day—whooping and yelling. They enter the park at the top of the hill leading down to the Thames and the sprawling vista of London. Today the skyscrapers stand like gray mountains in among the clouds. The two of them stop to view the scene. Jim feels the cold in his chest, watches his breath billow like a dragon’s smoke. But when he turns to Dani there’s nothing.

“What’s going on in your head?” he asks her softly.

She turns her back on him and walks away. He watches her for a moment and then follows.

“Dani!” he calls to her and she turns.

She is just twenty-one, frozen in that state forever and … her face is shattered, a snowball punches through it.

“Be more bloody careful,” Jim screams at the kid.

“It weren’t anywhere near you,” the kid shouts back.

“You hit my daught—” He stops. Looks at Dani, her face is back to normal—and she bursts into laughter.

“Sorry, kid,” he calls back and starts to laugh himself.

“Your face.” She points, still laughing.

“Your face.”

And they walk to the observatory—like they’ve done a hundred times over the years.

“Do you remember anything?” he asks.

The day she came back to him he asked the same question, and he kept asking for months but she always shook her head. He could see the pain, so he stopped. But after his nightmare, and the call from Tom—he feels like something is coming.

“I … Dad, I don’t know.”

“It’s okay.”

“Is it?”

Her face pinches, mouth becomes hard.

“You said you came back for me.”

“I did. You called me.”

“Where were you?”

“I don’t know.”

They’re both silent. They sit on the wall of the closed observatory and watch children sledge down the hill.

“In my day we used a
Rupert
annual,” Jim says, pointing at the sleek blue sled that a small flame-haired boy is dragging up the hill. The snow has started to fall a little heavier again. Jim watches it settle on the wall beside him. The spot where he can see Dani sitting. Suddenly he jumps up and runs toward the flame-haired kid who has finally got the sled to the top of the hill.

Dani watches him pull something from his pocket and gesture wildly to the boy. Then he turns and with the broadest smile, waves at Dani and motions her to come. He hands something to the child and takes the sled. He sits on it and waits for Dani to scramble onto the back. Then kicks off.

“Whhhh​eheeh​ehheh​eheee​eeeee​eeee …”

The sled shoots off down the hill. Dani screams. Jim puts his arms in the air—the wind biting his face, his hair billowing out—and wipes out. The snow shoots up his shirt, down his neck, in his mouth and down his pants. The cold hits him like an electric shock, and he rolls and rolls until the hill runs out.

He lies there, wet and cold but most of all scared. Dani stands over him. She is twenty-one years old, beautiful. He is petrified he is going to lose her again. That was his nightmare—that is always his nightmare—being alone.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

He can’t answer, doesn’t trust his voice. He feels the weight of twenty years bear down on him.

We need to talk about Dani. About what happened
. Tom’s words echo through his mind.

At the top of the hill, directly above Jim, stands DS Tom Bevans. He had planned to talk to Jim, had walked a long way through the snow, but seeing him like this—having fun like a child—he can’t. Instead he turns his back on the older man and trudges back the way he came. In his pocket the diary feels heavy. He should have returned it to Jim and Patty years ago—but it’s too late. Everything feels too late.

Saturday, September 27, 1986

This will be my last entry in this diary. Tomorrow I’m packing everything up and on Monday I will be gone. This feels a little like the journal of a child. Time to grow up. I hope when I come back to read this in years’ and years’ time—maybe when I’ve got a child of my own going off to university—that I’m not too embarrassed by my immaturity. Anyway, this is the end of an era, the end of a life. I won’t be like Mum, though. When she went to uni she never went home again. I know she never saw Gramps after she left and Nanny had to get the coach to us if she wanted to visit even when she was dying—I won’t be like that, couldn’t cut Dad out of my life. But … I do have to push Tom back a little. I shouldn’t have said he could come up on Monday—I don’t know how to let him down easy. I hope he’ll find some pretty policewoman soon. I need to start the page again, reinvent myself. A new Dani Lancing
.

Finis