Cutting Cream | Richard Farren Barber and Stuart Hughes
As soon as Daisy opened the front door she heard Hannah’s unmistakable voice coming through the closed living room door.
“That you, Daisy?”
Daisy closed the door, put her bag on the floor, and took off her coat and scarf.
“You’re late!”
Daisy picked up her bag and headed towards the stairs. She considered ignoring her flatmate and heading straight to her room but then Hannah would just follow her.
“I had some things to do after work.”
“What?”
She sighed, as she desperately wanted to rush upstairs and try out her new purchases, and instead went toward the living room. She opened the door enough to poke her head through and repeated, “Had some stuff to do after work.”
“Like what?” Hannah lay stretched out on the sofa with her arms folded across her chest. The TV was on but the sound was turned down on the news readers. On the floor, by the side of the sofa, lay the latest trashy novel Hannah was reading.
“Just some shopping.”
Hannah rolled onto her side and looked at Daisy for the first time. “Not more cosmetics?”
“Maybe…” She felt her face getting warmer.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Daisy. You’re not ugly.”
Daisy looked away.
“And you’re not plain.”
“Says you.”
“Says me.”
Daisy closed the door and hurried towards the stairs.
“And it’s your turn to cook!” Hannah’s voice came through the closed door.
“I know!”
*
The latest jar was deep blue and when Daisy unscrewed the lid the stink that rose from the contents caused her to gag. She dipped her finger inside and dabbed a small amount of the lotion onto her cheek while she read the outside of the box.
“This will work,” she muttered to herself. She looked in the mirror and tried to stifle the disappointment when the face that looked back at her remained the same. She blinked against the scent. No pain, no gain. Maybe it wasn’t logical to think that the worse a lotion smelled the more effective it would be, but if there was any truth in that theory then the little jar would be the best yet.
In time, she thought. She closed the jar and tried not to think about how much it cost, and how many other jars there were on the cabinet, all different shapes and sizes and colours, all making the same promise to improve her skin, reduce the visible signs of ageing, make her younger, more beautiful.
She looked back in the mirror. The small patch of skin where she had applied the lotion looked smoother. She tried not to get excited – she’d been here before many times with the latest miracle potion – but as she inspected her face in the mirror she was sure now – it was definitely smoother. There were fewer wrinkles and the blotches that had plagued her since she was a young teenager were less livid.
“Don’t get carried away,” she warned herself. She heard a noise from outside the bathroom and jerked her head away from the mirror as if she had been caught in the middle of an embarrassing act.
When she opened the door Hannah was standing in the hallway. She looked like she had been standing there for some time. As if she had been waiting for Daisy to emerge.
“I’m getting hungry,” Hannah said.
“I know,” Daisy said. “I’m on it.”
*
Later that evening, after she’d cooked spaghetti bolognaise, Daisy retreated from her flatmate to the sanctuary of her own bedroom.
She closed the door and sat on the floor with her legs splayed out in front of her. Skinny legs. Ugly legs. Gary had said that she had great legs but she had known that was a lie, she had known that it was because of her legs and her face and her boobs and her ass that he had left her. That whatever he had said, that was the real reason she was living alone again. Well, she was living with Hannah, but a flatmate didn’t really count.
She rolled up her sleeve. The skin still red and raw and puckered with lines that criss-crossed her tissue. She took her knife out from where she kept it hidden at the bottom of her knickers and bras drawer. She drew the blade across her forearm, softly at first so it caused her skin to blush red. As usual it wasn’t enough; the pain didn’t go away until she broke the skin.
*
Hannah stopped in the hallway and stared at her. Immediately Daisy felt her skin crawl and she had to stop herself from demanding: “Stop looking at me.”
She was used to other people looking at her when they thought she wouldn’t notice them. She was used to the sneers from the pretty girls and the way that the boys sometimes turned away in disgust. But Hannah had always been different. Maybe her flatmate had just been better at hiding her feelings than anyone else, but over the last few months Daisy had almost been able to believe that Hannah could genuinely see beyond the ugly features that wrecked every aspect of her life. And if Hannah could do that, then maybe so could someone else. Maybe one of the boys might one day make that leap too.
Except she had been fooling herself, and the way Hannah stood in the hallway and stared at her was proof enough.
“What is it?”
“I…” Hannah started to say. Her mouth opened and closed like a goldfish trying to breathe. “I…” she said again. And then she started to laugh and Daisy had to force herself not to turn around and run back to her room.
“That’s incredible,” Hannah said at last. She took a step closer to her. “What is that? A new cream?”
“Don’t laugh at me,” Daisy said.
“I’m sorry. But seriously, whatever you’re using, Babe, it’s worth whatever ridiculous sum they’re charging you for it.”
The confusion must have shown in Daisy’s face because she didn’t have a chance to reply before Hannah had taken her by the wrist and pulled her in front of the bathroom mirror. Daisy’s immediate response was to flinch and look away, a reaction that was as natural to her as breathing.
“No. Look,” Hannah said.
Daisy dared to look into the mirror, already feeling that pit of disgust that always lived in her stomach. She took in her roman nose and her crooked teeth. She noticed the over-large lips and her thin hair. And then she realised there was something wrong because her skin looked… well it looked almost okay.
She turned to face the mirror head on. Her skin was … normal. None of the bright red blotches or the crop of acne spots that she usually found.
Hannah laughed again. “You look great.”
Daisy smiled. Great was an exaggeration, but even she couldn’t ignore the fact that her skin had improved. And that’s after just one application of the cream, she thought. She grinned. Her crooked teeth showed but, for the first time that she could ever remember, she was able to ignore that.
When she left for work that day she felt like she was floating above the ground. As if nothing could hurt her, nothing at all.
*
Daisy tried to hide in her room but as soon as she heard Hannah slam the front door she knew there was no way she was going to be allowed to remain alone. She choked back her tears so that the only sound that escaped her was an almost silent sob, but still Hannah heard it.
Hannah’s fist on the bedroom door sounded like a jackhammer. “What is it?” Hannah called through the door. “What happened?”
“Go away.”
The door opened and Hannah entered. Curled up on her bed, Daisy pulled her legs in even tighter and hugged her knees.
“What is it?” Hannah said. Daisy felt a soft hand gently touch her arm. “What’s up?”
“Nothing.” Daisy sniffled and wiped away the tears from her cheeks.
“Don’t give me nothing.” The gentle touch on her arm became two strong hands on her shoulders, and Daisy was rolled over to face her flatmate. “Tell me.”
The tears came again and Hannah pulled Daisy to her, stroking her hair as she cried into her flatmate’s shoulder.
After a while, the tears subsided, and Daisy pulled away.
“Look at me,” Daisy said.
Hannah did, but her face gave nothing away.
“The cream wore off,” Daisy said.
“So, use some more.”
“I will, of course I will.” Daisy wiped away another tear. “But that’s not all of it.”
Hannah gently stroked Daisy’s arm again and said, “So tell me.”
“That Chris. You know the tall one with red hair and freckles who stacks the shelves?”
Hannah nodded.
“Well he kept telling me that I got uglier and uglier as the day wore on.” The tears came again and this time they wouldn’t stop. Hannah pulled Daisy close and held her tight.
*
Before she went to bed for the night, Daisy applied the cream again. She checked herself in the mirror afterwards, but didn’t notice any difference. She consoled herself that the previous time it had taken a while for the cream to take effect. In fact, Daisy hadn’t noticed it herself in the mirror; it had been Hannah who noticed, and it had taken Hannah to frogmarch her into the bathroom and force her to look in the mirror herself before she saw it.
Daisy relived that moment of realisation from the previous day over and over again in her mind as she tried to drift off to sleep. But the recollection didn’t console her. She started to cry again.
Eventually, she cried herself to sleep.
*
The first thing Daisy did after waking was to switch on the bedroom light and look into the mirror. The flat light did her no favours; it drew thick lines beneath her eyes and seemed to exaggerate every imperfection on her face. Maybe if it was someone else they could almost find it funny. Maybe if it was Cameron Diaz or Beyonce they would be able to look at themselves and laugh it off. Daisy just managed to avoid screaming at herself in the mirror. Just.
She rubbed her eyes and looked into the mirror once more. I should be used to this, she thought. I should be battle-hardened.
Battle-scarred more like.
Her skin had returned to its terrible worst. It was almost as if the cream she had applied the night before had actually made her features worse. She would never have believed it was possible but when she looked in the mirror she was sure that she was uglier than ever before.
Her nose was crooked. It wasn’t possible, but over the years Daisy had learned that it was not just the camera that did not lie – nether did her mirror, and if it showed that somehow her nose now looked like it belonged on the face of a fifty year old bare-knuckle boxer then that had to be the truth.
She tried not to cry, because she knew from past experience that crying just caused her features to curdle, but it was impossible to stop the tears and the best that she could manage was to fall back onto her bed and cry silently so that Hannah would not hear her.
*
She waited until she heard movement elsewhere in the house, announcing Hannah was awake.
Daisy rose from her bed and stood at the back of the door, her hand clamped down tight on the handle and her ear pressed against the door. She listened to Hannah walk down the corridor and enter the bathroom. Once the sound of running water began Daisy counted to sixty and opened the door. She stood in the hallway and called out, “I’m off, need to get in early today,” and before Hannah had a chance to respond she walked downstairs loudly, opened the front door and slammed it shut again. Her path back up the stairs was silent, each footfall perfectly weighted to avoid betraying her. Daisy opened the door to her room and closed it silently behind her. She winced as the door clicked shut.
She hid under the bed, and tried not to recall the memory of her mother standing outside her bedroom pleading with her to come out and go to school. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t anything like the same.
Daisy lay under the bed for almost an hour. She listened to the sound of Hannah moving through the flat – making her breakfast and finally leaving for work. Her nose clogged with dust and it took a huge effort to avoid sneezing. Fear of being discovered by Hannah and having to explain exactly what she was doing hiding under the bed was incentive enough, and when Hannah finally closed the front door behind her Daisy was almost proud of what she had achieved.
Still, she remained under the bed for a while longer. Under the bed where it was safe and no one would ever see her. Where there was no Chris to make fun of her and tell her how ugly she was. She didn’t need him to tell her, she knew better than he did how deep her ugliness went, how it was not something that could be brushed away with foundation or blusher or lipstick.
She dared to take a look in the mirror when she finally came out from under the bed and Daisy recognised that part of her still believed in the fairy story where the charm would be lifted and suddenly she would be beautiful. What stared back at her from the mirror was more Old Crone than Snow White and this time there was no reason to hold back the tears so she let them flood from her. She watched herself cry in the mirror.
“Ugly girl,” she told her reflection. “You’re just an ugly, ugly girl.”
She took the knife from her drawer and began to cut, and cut…
Eventually the tears stopped when she fell asleep.
*
“Daisy!”
The voice sounded vaguely familiar but she could not place it. She was floating in darkness and the voice seemed to be travelling slowly towards her, across the vacuum of space. Softly. Quietly. She could hardly make it out.
“Daisy! Wake up, Daisy!”
Louder now, slightly more recognisable, but still drifting gently towards her from light years away.
“Wake up!”
And now she was rocking from side to side, smoothly at first, then rougher as she plummeted back down to Earth.
“There you are,” Hannah said as Daisy opened her eyes and blinked against the bright light of her bedroom.
“Huh? What?”
Hannah held her shoulders and locked eyes with her as if they were having a staring competition. “You’ve worried a lot of people this morning.”
Daisy rubbed her eyes and sat up. “Hannah? What are you doing here?”
“Your boss just rang me.”
“He did?”
Hannah nodded.
“Shit.”
“What happened?”
“I meant to ring in sick… but I forgot. Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“Don’t worry, Daisy. I covered for you. I told him that you were ill.”
Daisy mouthed the words, “Thank you.”
“I came straight home. What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry.”
Hannah smiled warmly. “Why didn’t you go in?”
“I couldn’t face them. Him. Couldn’t face him.”
“What are you talking about? You used that cream again?”
“It’s rubbish. Just like all the others.”
“No, it isn’t.” Hannah grabbed a hand mirror off the bedside cabinet and handed it to her. “Look!”
*
Daisy waited until Hannah had left and she was alone in her room. She had cleared the shelf in front of the mirror of all the half-empty bottles of lotions until there was just the single bottle left. The latest bottle. She didn’t need any of the others, Hannah was right, her mother had been right, hell, even Chris was probably right – they were all just a waste of money. But this one... This one was different.
She rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. Her skin looked like a tiger had raked its claws across her arm again and again. There were layers to the wounds; some were fresh and bright red, the edges puckered into tiny ridges. Others were old scars, pale white tracks against her skin.
She opened the top drawer of her dresser and took out the knife and laid the blade flat against her skin. Now it didn’t even hurt when she cut. Not when she understood what cutting meant, not when she understood what it offered to her. Pain didn’t last; it was gone almost as soon as the bleeding stopped.
Daisy pressed the tip of the blade into her skin. A single pearl-drop of blood welled up from the puncture mark and sat on the steel of the blade for a moment. She pressed deeper into her arm. As deep as she could bear until she felt the cold edge of the knife press against her bone. For a moment it seemed that the knife carved a direct path between her arm and her brain, as if she could feel her nerve endings connect with the base of her spine. She couldn’t just feel the cut; she could see it, explosions of black and purple and red that blinded her sight.
And when she looked again she was...
Beautiful.
A single tear slipped down her cheek.
She stared at herself in the mirror.
Beautiful. There was no other way to describe it, and yet she would never have believed that the word could ever, ever be applied to her.
The skin around her eyes was soft. There were no lines, no blemishes, nothing to reduce the impact. The slight kink in her nose that had been there since forever was now gone. As if the world’s most skilled cosmetic surgeon had taken an eraser and very, very gently corrected the mistakes nature had inflicted upon her.
Her eyes were bright blue. Not the slightly dirty colour they had always been, but the blue of a cornflower field or the Mediterranean Sea. Her lips were perfect, two halves of a rosebud.
“I love me,” Daisy whispered. A second tear followed the first. She laughed – it was stupid to be crying at this moment, wasn’t this everything she had ever wanted? To be able to look into a mirror and see a goddess staring back at her. “I love me,” she shouted. She laughed again, high pitched and just short of hysterical.
She put her fingers to her face and felt the press of soft skin beneath her fingertips. When she removed her hands the indentations remained on her skin for just a moment, just long enough to know that they were real, that none of this was a dream.
And then she stopped. And looked closer, moved closer until her nose was almost pressed against the glass and the cold surface of the mirror fogged up beneath her breath.
There was a blemish in her eyes, a tiny fleck of white in the otherwise perfect blue cornea. And when she looked closely at her eyebrows she saw that one of the hairs was grey.
“It can’t happen,” she said. She heard the terror in her own voice, the despair. “It cannot be allowed to happen.”
She looked again. It wasn’t just the speck of white in her eye or the awry hair in her eyebrow. It was the way her nose was not quite perfect, not like she had first thought and she knew what was happening; the affects were already beginning to fade.
Daisy picked up the jar of cream from the table and dipped her hand inside. The cream was thick, almost greasy, and when she slathered it upon her skin she caught the strong scent of decay, as if it was already beginning to rot.
She picked up the knife and began to cut.
And cut.
And cut.
As soon as Daisy opened the front door she heard Hannah’s unmistakable voice coming through the closed living room door.
“That you, Daisy?”
Daisy closed the door, put her bag on the floor, and took off her coat and scarf.
“You’re late!”
Daisy picked up her bag and headed towards the stairs. She considered ignoring her flatmate and heading straight to her room but then Hannah would just follow her.
“I had some things to do after work.”
“What?”
She sighed, as she desperately wanted to rush upstairs and try out her new purchases, and instead went toward the living room. She opened the door enough to poke her head through and repeated, “Had some stuff to do after work.”
“Like what?” Hannah lay stretched out on the sofa with her arms folded across her chest. The TV was on but the sound was turned down on the news readers. On the floor, by the side of the sofa, lay the latest trashy novel Hannah was reading.
“Just some shopping.”
Hannah rolled onto her side and looked at Daisy for the first time. “Not more cosmetics?”
“Maybe…” She felt her face getting warmer.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Daisy. You’re not ugly.”
Daisy looked away.
“And you’re not plain.”
“Says you.”
“Says me.”
Daisy closed the door and hurried towards the stairs.
“And it’s your turn to cook!” Hannah’s voice came through the closed door.
“I know!”
*
The latest jar was deep blue and when Daisy unscrewed the lid the stink that rose from the contents caused her to gag. She dipped her finger inside and dabbed a small amount of the lotion onto her cheek while she read the outside of the box.
“This will work,” she muttered to herself. She looked in the mirror and tried to stifle the disappointment when the face that looked back at her remained the same. She blinked against the scent. No pain, no gain. Maybe it wasn’t logical to think that the worse a lotion smelled the more effective it would be, but if there was any truth in that theory then the little jar would be the best yet.
In time, she thought. She closed the jar and tried not to think about how much it cost, and how many other jars there were on the cabinet, all different shapes and sizes and colours, all making the same promise to improve her skin, reduce the visible signs of ageing, make her younger, more beautiful.
She looked back in the mirror. The small patch of skin where she had applied the lotion looked smoother. She tried not to get excited – she’d been here before many times with the latest miracle potion – but as she inspected her face in the mirror she was sure now – it was definitely smoother. There were fewer wrinkles and the blotches that had plagued her since she was a young teenager were less livid.
“Don’t get carried away,” she warned herself. She heard a noise from outside the bathroom and jerked her head away from the mirror as if she had been caught in the middle of an embarrassing act.
When she opened the door Hannah was standing in the hallway. She looked like she had been standing there for some time. As if she had been waiting for Daisy to emerge.
“I’m getting hungry,” Hannah said.
“I know,” Daisy said. “I’m on it.”
*
Later that evening, after she’d cooked spaghetti bolognaise, Daisy retreated from her flatmate to the sanctuary of her own bedroom.
She closed the door and sat on the floor with her legs splayed out in front of her. Skinny legs. Ugly legs. Gary had said that she had great legs but she had known that was a lie, she had known that it was because of her legs and her face and her boobs and her ass that he had left her. That whatever he had said, that was the real reason she was living alone again. Well, she was living with Hannah, but a flatmate didn’t really count.
She rolled up her sleeve. The skin still red and raw and puckered with lines that criss-crossed her tissue. She took her knife out from where she kept it hidden at the bottom of her knickers and bras drawer. She drew the blade across her forearm, softly at first so it caused her skin to blush red. As usual it wasn’t enough; the pain didn’t go away until she broke the skin.
*
Hannah stopped in the hallway and stared at her. Immediately Daisy felt her skin crawl and she had to stop herself from demanding: “Stop looking at me.”
She was used to other people looking at her when they thought she wouldn’t notice them. She was used to the sneers from the pretty girls and the way that the boys sometimes turned away in disgust. But Hannah had always been different. Maybe her flatmate had just been better at hiding her feelings than anyone else, but over the last few months Daisy had almost been able to believe that Hannah could genuinely see beyond the ugly features that wrecked every aspect of her life. And if Hannah could do that, then maybe so could someone else. Maybe one of the boys might one day make that leap too.
Except she had been fooling herself, and the way Hannah stood in the hallway and stared at her was proof enough.
“What is it?”
“I…” Hannah started to say. Her mouth opened and closed like a goldfish trying to breathe. “I…” she said again. And then she started to laugh and Daisy had to force herself not to turn around and run back to her room.
“That’s incredible,” Hannah said at last. She took a step closer to her. “What is that? A new cream?”
“Don’t laugh at me,” Daisy said.
“I’m sorry. But seriously, whatever you’re using, Babe, it’s worth whatever ridiculous sum they’re charging you for it.”
The confusion must have shown in Daisy’s face because she didn’t have a chance to reply before Hannah had taken her by the wrist and pulled her in front of the bathroom mirror. Daisy’s immediate response was to flinch and look away, a reaction that was as natural to her as breathing.
“No. Look,” Hannah said.
Daisy dared to look into the mirror, already feeling that pit of disgust that always lived in her stomach. She took in her roman nose and her crooked teeth. She noticed the over-large lips and her thin hair. And then she realised there was something wrong because her skin looked… well it looked almost okay.
She turned to face the mirror head on. Her skin was … normal. None of the bright red blotches or the crop of acne spots that she usually found.
Hannah laughed again. “You look great.”
Daisy smiled. Great was an exaggeration, but even she couldn’t ignore the fact that her skin had improved. And that’s after just one application of the cream, she thought. She grinned. Her crooked teeth showed but, for the first time that she could ever remember, she was able to ignore that.
When she left for work that day she felt like she was floating above the ground. As if nothing could hurt her, nothing at all.
*
Daisy tried to hide in her room but as soon as she heard Hannah slam the front door she knew there was no way she was going to be allowed to remain alone. She choked back her tears so that the only sound that escaped her was an almost silent sob, but still Hannah heard it.
Hannah’s fist on the bedroom door sounded like a jackhammer. “What is it?” Hannah called through the door. “What happened?”
“Go away.”
The door opened and Hannah entered. Curled up on her bed, Daisy pulled her legs in even tighter and hugged her knees.
“What is it?” Hannah said. Daisy felt a soft hand gently touch her arm. “What’s up?”
“Nothing.” Daisy sniffled and wiped away the tears from her cheeks.
“Don’t give me nothing.” The gentle touch on her arm became two strong hands on her shoulders, and Daisy was rolled over to face her flatmate. “Tell me.”
The tears came again and Hannah pulled Daisy to her, stroking her hair as she cried into her flatmate’s shoulder.
After a while, the tears subsided, and Daisy pulled away.
“Look at me,” Daisy said.
Hannah did, but her face gave nothing away.
“The cream wore off,” Daisy said.
“So, use some more.”
“I will, of course I will.” Daisy wiped away another tear. “But that’s not all of it.”
Hannah gently stroked Daisy’s arm again and said, “So tell me.”
“That Chris. You know the tall one with red hair and freckles who stacks the shelves?”
Hannah nodded.
“Well he kept telling me that I got uglier and uglier as the day wore on.” The tears came again and this time they wouldn’t stop. Hannah pulled Daisy close and held her tight.
*
Before she went to bed for the night, Daisy applied the cream again. She checked herself in the mirror afterwards, but didn’t notice any difference. She consoled herself that the previous time it had taken a while for the cream to take effect. In fact, Daisy hadn’t noticed it herself in the mirror; it had been Hannah who noticed, and it had taken Hannah to frogmarch her into the bathroom and force her to look in the mirror herself before she saw it.
Daisy relived that moment of realisation from the previous day over and over again in her mind as she tried to drift off to sleep. But the recollection didn’t console her. She started to cry again.
Eventually, she cried herself to sleep.
*
The first thing Daisy did after waking was to switch on the bedroom light and look into the mirror. The flat light did her no favours; it drew thick lines beneath her eyes and seemed to exaggerate every imperfection on her face. Maybe if it was someone else they could almost find it funny. Maybe if it was Cameron Diaz or Beyonce they would be able to look at themselves and laugh it off. Daisy just managed to avoid screaming at herself in the mirror. Just.
She rubbed her eyes and looked into the mirror once more. I should be used to this, she thought. I should be battle-hardened.
Battle-scarred more like.
Her skin had returned to its terrible worst. It was almost as if the cream she had applied the night before had actually made her features worse. She would never have believed it was possible but when she looked in the mirror she was sure that she was uglier than ever before.
Her nose was crooked. It wasn’t possible, but over the years Daisy had learned that it was not just the camera that did not lie – nether did her mirror, and if it showed that somehow her nose now looked like it belonged on the face of a fifty year old bare-knuckle boxer then that had to be the truth.
She tried not to cry, because she knew from past experience that crying just caused her features to curdle, but it was impossible to stop the tears and the best that she could manage was to fall back onto her bed and cry silently so that Hannah would not hear her.
*
She waited until she heard movement elsewhere in the house, announcing Hannah was awake.
Daisy rose from her bed and stood at the back of the door, her hand clamped down tight on the handle and her ear pressed against the door. She listened to Hannah walk down the corridor and enter the bathroom. Once the sound of running water began Daisy counted to sixty and opened the door. She stood in the hallway and called out, “I’m off, need to get in early today,” and before Hannah had a chance to respond she walked downstairs loudly, opened the front door and slammed it shut again. Her path back up the stairs was silent, each footfall perfectly weighted to avoid betraying her. Daisy opened the door to her room and closed it silently behind her. She winced as the door clicked shut.
She hid under the bed, and tried not to recall the memory of her mother standing outside her bedroom pleading with her to come out and go to school. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t anything like the same.
Daisy lay under the bed for almost an hour. She listened to the sound of Hannah moving through the flat – making her breakfast and finally leaving for work. Her nose clogged with dust and it took a huge effort to avoid sneezing. Fear of being discovered by Hannah and having to explain exactly what she was doing hiding under the bed was incentive enough, and when Hannah finally closed the front door behind her Daisy was almost proud of what she had achieved.
Still, she remained under the bed for a while longer. Under the bed where it was safe and no one would ever see her. Where there was no Chris to make fun of her and tell her how ugly she was. She didn’t need him to tell her, she knew better than he did how deep her ugliness went, how it was not something that could be brushed away with foundation or blusher or lipstick.
She dared to take a look in the mirror when she finally came out from under the bed and Daisy recognised that part of her still believed in the fairy story where the charm would be lifted and suddenly she would be beautiful. What stared back at her from the mirror was more Old Crone than Snow White and this time there was no reason to hold back the tears so she let them flood from her. She watched herself cry in the mirror.
“Ugly girl,” she told her reflection. “You’re just an ugly, ugly girl.”
She took the knife from her drawer and began to cut, and cut…
Eventually the tears stopped when she fell asleep.
*
“Daisy!”
The voice sounded vaguely familiar but she could not place it. She was floating in darkness and the voice seemed to be travelling slowly towards her, across the vacuum of space. Softly. Quietly. She could hardly make it out.
“Daisy! Wake up, Daisy!”
Louder now, slightly more recognisable, but still drifting gently towards her from light years away.
“Wake up!”
And now she was rocking from side to side, smoothly at first, then rougher as she plummeted back down to Earth.
“There you are,” Hannah said as Daisy opened her eyes and blinked against the bright light of her bedroom.
“Huh? What?”
Hannah held her shoulders and locked eyes with her as if they were having a staring competition. “You’ve worried a lot of people this morning.”
Daisy rubbed her eyes and sat up. “Hannah? What are you doing here?”
“Your boss just rang me.”
“He did?”
Hannah nodded.
“Shit.”
“What happened?”
“I meant to ring in sick… but I forgot. Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“Don’t worry, Daisy. I covered for you. I told him that you were ill.”
Daisy mouthed the words, “Thank you.”
“I came straight home. What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry.”
Hannah smiled warmly. “Why didn’t you go in?”
“I couldn’t face them. Him. Couldn’t face him.”
“What are you talking about? You used that cream again?”
“It’s rubbish. Just like all the others.”
“No, it isn’t.” Hannah grabbed a hand mirror off the bedside cabinet and handed it to her. “Look!”
*
Daisy waited until Hannah had left and she was alone in her room. She had cleared the shelf in front of the mirror of all the half-empty bottles of lotions until there was just the single bottle left. The latest bottle. She didn’t need any of the others, Hannah was right, her mother had been right, hell, even Chris was probably right – they were all just a waste of money. But this one... This one was different.
She rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. Her skin looked like a tiger had raked its claws across her arm again and again. There were layers to the wounds; some were fresh and bright red, the edges puckered into tiny ridges. Others were old scars, pale white tracks against her skin.
She opened the top drawer of her dresser and took out the knife and laid the blade flat against her skin. Now it didn’t even hurt when she cut. Not when she understood what cutting meant, not when she understood what it offered to her. Pain didn’t last; it was gone almost as soon as the bleeding stopped.
Daisy pressed the tip of the blade into her skin. A single pearl-drop of blood welled up from the puncture mark and sat on the steel of the blade for a moment. She pressed deeper into her arm. As deep as she could bear until she felt the cold edge of the knife press against her bone. For a moment it seemed that the knife carved a direct path between her arm and her brain, as if she could feel her nerve endings connect with the base of her spine. She couldn’t just feel the cut; she could see it, explosions of black and purple and red that blinded her sight.
And when she looked again she was...
Beautiful.
A single tear slipped down her cheek.
She stared at herself in the mirror.
Beautiful. There was no other way to describe it, and yet she would never have believed that the word could ever, ever be applied to her.
The skin around her eyes was soft. There were no lines, no blemishes, nothing to reduce the impact. The slight kink in her nose that had been there since forever was now gone. As if the world’s most skilled cosmetic surgeon had taken an eraser and very, very gently corrected the mistakes nature had inflicted upon her.
Her eyes were bright blue. Not the slightly dirty colour they had always been, but the blue of a cornflower field or the Mediterranean Sea. Her lips were perfect, two halves of a rosebud.
“I love me,” Daisy whispered. A second tear followed the first. She laughed – it was stupid to be crying at this moment, wasn’t this everything she had ever wanted? To be able to look into a mirror and see a goddess staring back at her. “I love me,” she shouted. She laughed again, high pitched and just short of hysterical.
She put her fingers to her face and felt the press of soft skin beneath her fingertips. When she removed her hands the indentations remained on her skin for just a moment, just long enough to know that they were real, that none of this was a dream.
And then she stopped. And looked closer, moved closer until her nose was almost pressed against the glass and the cold surface of the mirror fogged up beneath her breath.
There was a blemish in her eyes, a tiny fleck of white in the otherwise perfect blue cornea. And when she looked closely at her eyebrows she saw that one of the hairs was grey.
“It can’t happen,” she said. She heard the terror in her own voice, the despair. “It cannot be allowed to happen.”
She looked again. It wasn’t just the speck of white in her eye or the awry hair in her eyebrow. It was the way her nose was not quite perfect, not like she had first thought and she knew what was happening; the affects were already beginning to fade.
Daisy picked up the jar of cream from the table and dipped her hand inside. The cream was thick, almost greasy, and when she slathered it upon her skin she caught the strong scent of decay, as if it was already beginning to rot.
She picked up the knife and began to cut.
And cut.
And cut.