Daisy, Daisy

1

Daisy worked in a prison, but not as a warden or anything like that. She was a counsellor, and initially not a very qualified one. Not officially qualified at all, in fact, but she got the position because of a commitment to learning on the job while taking online courses, as well as the prison's desperate need for someone to fill the role. She was a cheerful woman with what her father used to call ‘child-havin’ hips’, an appealingly fat bum, and a well-managed pile of black hair that in connection with her glasses gave her the look of a ‘50s pinup. You could imagine her looking at you over her shoulder with a suggestive wink.

On her first day, she met a woman called Barbara "Babs" Portnoy, whose complaints were endless and, on that day, revolved around a Jewish compulsive masturbator she'd had to deal with. Just as Daisy was wondering why the man's creed was necessary to mention, Babs launched into a visceral description of what she'd seen on entering the man's cell.   
   
Babs was an odd woman, for whom rules about discretion were more like general guidelines. She wore a coat with a faux-fur trim ('it used to be real, but the animal freaks kept hassling me'), had yellow fingernails, and seemed to always be smoking a cigarette, despite the NO SMOKING signs in the office areas. Daisy wondered how she still had a job, let alone one with any authority.   
   
'You know about our new system' said Babs, not as a question. She was referring to the new technology that allowed for prisoners' thoughts and memories to be presented pictorially, like a movie, on a large screen. It was considered a breakthrough in psychological treatment, allowing caregivers to empathise more with their charges' plights.   
   
'Yes' said Daisy, 'it's partly why I applied. ‘I’ve got aphantasia, so I don't see pictures in my head.'   
   
Babs looked at her like she'd lapsed into a dead tongue. 'Pictures in your head?'   
   
'Yeah, like... Say I mention Mickey Mouse. You probably get a picture of the character, right? With his saucer ears, button nose, and red dungarees?'   
   
Babs took a drag on her cigarette. 'Yeah.'   
   
'Well for me there's nothing. I have to be looking at something to see it at all.'   
   
'And what does that have to do with what we do here?'   
   
'I think that the new tech is a great chance to really get to know offenders, you know? Understand their trauma. Work out why they did what they did to get here.'   
   
Babs smiled. It wasn't a sweet smile. She stubbed out her cigarette in a pewter ashtray filled with butts, folded over and in disarray like passengers flung from the wreckage. Daisy noticed her fingernails. They looked like sweets abandoned at the bottom of an old woman's purse at least six months ago.   
   
'That's good' she said. 'I'm sure Norm liked that.' Norm was the head of rehabilitation services, with whom Daisy had had her interview. 'But let me give you some advice, woman to woman. These guys aren't your friends.    
   
'We once had a girl in here, twenty years ago now. Enthusiastic like you. She was fresh out of college and had all these theories about the importance of touch, letting the guys know that you're not there to judge all this hippy stuff.   
   
'This was in what we call the turnkey days, before key cards and automated locking and all the rest of it. One day she came in alone, for morning group, and some idiot (we never figured out who) locked her in with all the guys milling about and then went to breakfast or something.    
   
'When they found her, well... let me put it like this: one of the cops who had to review the CCTV footage ended up committing suicide.'   
   
Daisy stared at her. A few seconds elapsed. Babs smiled suddenly and slapped the table with the flat of her hand. 'But he was probably unstable anyway' she said, standing to hunt through her paperwork for the folder that Daisy would need to start her first day of work. 'And with all this new technology, it's not like anything that bad could happen again. It's just worth remembering, is all.'   
   
She found the folder and led her to the door. 'These guys are in here for a reason,' she said. 'A lot of it to do with what they did to nice girls who just wanted to love them.'   
   
2   
   
After a few days of group sessions with the prisoners, Daisy found herself in a room with an enormous television screen with a couple of reclining armchairs in front of it, like a Middle American front room during the Super Bowl. An armed guard stood in a corner and a couple of doctors fiddled with a large monitor to which the screen was attached.   
   
A prisoner was led in by Norm, a balding man in his early fifties who, he liked to remind everyone, used to be an addict himself. The prisoner was in his mid-forties and had been inside for the last ten years since pulping his girlfriend's face with the butt of a beer bottle.  
   
He was a surprisingly pleasant chap. Jovial and with a habit of running his fingers through his shoulder-length brown hair while telling stories. He did this the most when talking about his childhood, raised by a single father in a motorhome.   
   
'We'll be leaving Keith here with you' said Norm, indicating the armed guard. 'But as I've explained to Michael, the session is being filmed so it can be looked at later. Do you need a Coke or anything?'   
   
'Oh no' said Daisy, 'I'll be fine. Anything for you, Mikey?'   
   
Michael declined and soon he and Daisy were alone together, other than Keith, who stared straight ahead and seemed ornamental. They sat in the recliners, Daisy flicked a switch on a remote, and millions of black dots invaded the large white screen, coalescing into shapes before taking on colour.    
   
A motorhome in the woods. Late afternoon. A dog was tied to a tree. An adolescent boy’s scream broke the silence, and the motorhome’s front door flew open, clattering against the vehicle’s flank. A man emerged, wild and rugged, closely pursued by the screaming boy. The man was wielding an axe, which he raised above the dog before bringing it down, again and again. It occurred to Daisy to be grateful for her aphantasia. The scene ended, breaking up like the blown-upon head of a dandelion, back into its constituent black dots.  

‘That was your worst memory of childhood’ Daisy said simply, and then saw that Michael was crying. 

3 

Daisy’s therapy programmes were a hit with both the prisoners and Norm, who spoke of them at charity events, in connection with the new mind translation technology that was turning people’s memories into movies. Daisy watched a lot of “movies”, and used them in her programmes, such as one built around writing letters to the thing in your life that holds you back, be it trauma, addiction, both, or something else altogether.  

A man called Frank, who over a long weekend had tortured a man who owed him a debt, read out a letter to his mother. His movie had been about his mother. She left her gentleman caller for a moment because Frank had woken up and started knocking on her bedroom door. She slapped him so hard that he’d fallen to the ground and started crying. In his mind’s eye, he saw his mother - looming over him, naked and yelling - like a hideous giantess whose body undulated like animate dough into which human hair was mixed. To Daisy, she looked like a demon from a surrealist horror film.  

‘And I just want to say, more for myself than for you’ he read, voice trembling a little, ‘that I forgive you.’  

The audience of men in jumpsuits clapped and cheered. For a moment Daisy forgot about professional distance and hugged him. ‘That’s very good, Frank’ she said. ‘You’ve come so far.’ Frank thanked her with a smile that reached his eyes and returned to his chair.  

At the end of the class, Michael came up to Daisy and asked if he could talk to her in the ten minutes before the guys had to return to their cells. ‘I just wanted to say that you’re doing a great job. None of us has really been through this sort of thing before. Opening up, sharing our emotions, all that hippy shit.’  

They both laughed. Daisy put her hand on his shoulder. ‘That means a lot to me,' she said. ‘Before I started this job I was really nervous about meeting you guys, whether we’d, you know, get on. I’ve had shit in my own past, though, so I understand trauma, even if I’ve not gone through half of what you have. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but my daughter’s daddy? He wasn’t a great guy. I had her when I was 16, and I don’t regret her for a second. But those were... tough years.’  

‘For both of you, I reckon, what with you being so young.’  

Daisy laughed. ‘He was 52’ she said. Michael blanched. Daisy apologised. ‘I shouldn’t have told you that, Mikey. You don’t need to know about my shit.’  

He put a hand over hers. ‘I’m glad you did’ he replied. ‘It’s just... I’m sorry, you know? You didn’t deserve that. Is the guy still alive?’  

Daisy laughed. ‘Oh yeah, but he spends all day in a wheelchair, pissing into a bag, so I guess he got his.’  

‘Still, if I ever met that guy...’  

A little while later she was in the staff room talking to Babs. ‘They don’t really care, you know’ said Babs, looking at a gossip magazine while a soap opera played on mute in a corner. She was smoking yet another cigarette and had the last of the vending machine’s Diet Cokes in front of her.  

‘In fact, that reminds me’ she said, looking up and pulling a crumpled bit of newsprint from her coat. ‘I was going through our files today and found this. It’s got that cop’s suicide note in it. Remember when I told you about that girl we had here?’  

Daisy took the note. It was an article headlined HERO COP TAKES OWN LIFE. Midway down was an excerpt from the note. Daisy read aloud. ‘I can’t keep on like this. I’ve been in therapy and on meds for a year now and nothing works, the nightmares keep coming. First I see those animals coming for her, then I see myself running down a long corridor, trying to reach her, trying to drag her back through the door before it happens. But my legs are like lead and I know it’s not possible.’  

She handed the piece back to Babs. ‘What do you think of that?’ said Babs.  

‘I think that that happened twenty years ago’ said Daisy.  

She left the prison that day by a path that adjoined the exercise yard, which the guys were spending an hour in before sundown. On seeing her they hooted and hollered, crying out ‘we love you, Miss Daisy!’ She grinned and waved at them, feeling like an actress on a red carpet. They started to sing ‘Daisy, Daisy...’  

4 

Daisy lived with her teenage daughter in a flat not far from the prison. When she returned home from work she ordered pizza and they watched a movie that was one of Daisy’s favourites. It was called Unhappy Cafe and about a grumpy Frenchman in ‘60s Paris whose shabby cafe is turned into a bustling salon by a female tourist from London. Swilling pizza and cola and watching as the woman told the cafe owner of her secret sadness, while Daisy’s daughter flicked through her social media, the newly minted prison counsellor realised that she’d rarely been more content.  
   
It wasn't until a year into the job that something terrifying happened to her: she saw pictures in her head for the first time. She dreamt that she was in a cabin in the woods, the one from a slasher movie she'd seen when she was much too young. It was a well-appointed cabin with good furniture, not at all like the gross and run-down one in the movie, but in that dream logic way, it was still the same one.   
   
The movie had been about a masked killer who preyed on construction workers (and a few arbitrary bikini babes) with power tools. All of the workers were connected to the gang rape of their employer's daughter exactly six months prior, and one was tracked to the cabin, where a pneumatic drill was thrust through his groin. In the dream, Daisy heard a noise much like a drill revving, deep in the woods outside the cabin. She looked at the ever-increasing rows of dark trees, convinced that the noise was coming closer and closer.   
   
In the movie, a couple of moron detectives tried to solve the "mystery" of who was killing the construction workers, on the half-year anniversary of their controversial acquittal for gang rape, just after the alleged victim's father was seen buying up power tools and Halloween masks. (Sample dialogue: 'I just don't know, Ray-Ray. You're telling me that all these men worked on that site?' 'It's a weird one, Billy. You think it could be that new black guy in town?')   
   
Like Schrodinger's Cat, she paced about the dream cabin, not quite sure if she was alive or dead. After a while, words began to accompany the sounds. They were a song: 'Daisy, Daisy... Give me your answer do... I'm half-crazy... Oh, for the love of you...'   
   
Though the dream disturbed her enough to share it with her daughter, who just laughed and said that she'd probably smoked some bad weed, after a day or two Daisy forgot all about it, her aphantasia pulling the blind back down over her mind's eye.  

5 

One morning when she went to work there was no one in the office. This wasn’t unusual, since Babs was often late and Norm out at various political or charity functions. But Daisy was surprised to see no one at the door to the cell block, which stood open. She entered the common area, with its metallic round tables and chairs.  

On a monitor in the CCTV booth, she saw a guard approach an automated locking system. The deafening noise of 300 cells unlocking startled her. The light beside the cell block door flashed from green to red. She tried to open the door with her key card but it wouldn’t budge. She looked back at the monitor and saw that the guard had disappeared.  

Backing up against the door, she looked at the ascending levels of cells and iron walkways that gave access to them. The walkways remained unpopulated. For a moment there was silence, and then voices singing in chorus broke it. ‘Daisy, Daisy... give me your answer do... I’m half-crazy... oh, for the love of you.’  

Daisy closed her eyes. The walkways started to fill. ‘It won’t be a stylish marriage... I can’t afford a carriage...’ For the second time in her life, she saw a picture in her head. It was of her, being carried past an axe lodged in a tree stump and towards the threshold of a caravan. She wore a wedding dress and her groom had wild eyes. She knew that if she let him take her inside the caravan something terrible would happen, but she was paralysed.  

‘But you’ll look neat... upon the seat... of a bicycle built for two...’ And then her fate came out to greet her.