daisies

3 years, 10 months before

The daisy-speckled field smells of dry wood and dirt, and the hazy sun washes everything over with a buttery yellow. The grass is forming little imprints on Dev's bare arms as he lies on his front, scrolling idly though the music on Clara's phone.

"I don't know half these songs," he grumbles.

Clara pops the cap off her sun cream bottle and shakes it. The dwindling remnants at the bottom splutter out onto her open palm. "I can't help it that you're not as cool as me," she jokes, rubbing the sun cream down her arms. Dev's sunglasses slide down Clara's nose, too big for her face, but she pushes them back up with the back of her hand.

The air is stagnant. These fields roll over the hills for miles beyond Clara's parent's house, and they're fringed with a little stretch of woodland. It's miles from the cramped quasi-suburbs that Dev's used to, but that just means there's more to explore.

"I know a couple of these," Dev says. "Well, I know of them."

"Who do you know of?" she asks, stressing the last word to echo him.

His elbows are getting tired, so he rolls onto his back with a grunt. "Um, I know of The Rolling Stones, The Who, Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols..."

She looks down at him. He can't see her face very well from this angle, even if he squints out the sun, but he imagines she looks quite incredulous. "You've never heard one single song by any of them?"

"Well, I'm sure I have, I just don't remember them. You know, like in films and stuff." He keeps scrolling. "I mean, I know Billy Joel and David Bowie, sort of."

With a cry of frustration, Clara snatches the phone from him and begins to scroll. Without much of a delay, piano and saxophone notes spill out of her phone's tinny speakers. She looks down at him expectantly.

Soon the instruments are joined by Bowie's soft but jagged voice, urging him to 'turn and face the strange'.

Dev closes his eyes. The summer sun glares through his eyelids and paints them orange. "I like it; it's Bowie. I have an outsider's knowledge of Bowie."

"He's a real master," she says. "If I could make anyone immortal, I think it would be him."

He pulls a face. "But he's aging so quickly. He ages at like fifteen times the rate of a normal human. Imagine him immortal – what would that even look like?"

She laughs and shushes him. "Bowie doesn't age, he evolves like a Pokémon."

"No," he says, "he does age, and he ages horribly. If you made him immortal he'd be like a shrivelled ginger prune in a shiny suit."

"Blasphemy!" she cries, bursting into her strange, breathy cackle. She kicks him softly and says, "He would be a prune of wisdom. People would come to him from across the galaxy to learn of his genius ways."

"Yeah but the whole point of prunes are as a food, and nobody would want to be the one who cannibalised immortal prune David Bowie," he counters. "So he'd be effectively redundant."

Clara makes a pantomime vomiting sound. "So who would you make immortal, if you could?" She bends over to pick a daisy, and she pierces its stem with her thumbnail.

Dev thinks about it. "My mum?"

"That's a boring answer," she complains.

"What's wrong with my mum?" he whines, returning the kick.

"Nothing, I love Anita!" she proclaims. "But you can't have her as your answer, you have to be creative. Anyway, then she'd outlive you and it's always tragic when parents outlive their kids. Pick something funny."

"Um," Dev says slowly. "I don't know? Ruth Bader Ginsburg?"

"The judge?" Clara looks torn between amusement and confusion, so she picks both. She's holding a wonky chain of about seven daisies.

"She's a feminist icon," he counters. "Anyway, I can't think of anyone cool. I guess Tom Hanks is pretty cool, but I keep thinking he's dead."

"That's Robin Williams."

"Yeah, I know, but whenever I see a Tom Hanks film my mind just goes 'huh, was this his Last Film Ever'."

"That's creepy."

Dev lets the last verse of Changes wash thinly around him like an electric breeze. Bowie sings, "Pretty soon now you're gonna get older." Which just makes him think of prune-Bowie. That's going to taint this song forever, he thinks, but Bowie reassures him with, "Time may change me, but I can't trace time."

"Okay, fine," Dev relents. "I'd pick Bowie. Are you happy?"

"I am indeed," sings Clara, switching the song to some Boston record he doesn't know. "Dev-id Bowie."

"Okay, I take it back. Let him die."

She laughs again. "You'd be killing a national treasure."

"If he's a national treasure then Nicholas Cage would steal him and I would be fine with that." Dev imagines that sequel in his head. National Treasure 4: The Prune of Immortality. To be honest, he'd still probably go and see that if it came out.

"You're actually the worst at comebacks," Clara says. "But leave Bowie alone. He's the reason I want to visit Berlin one day."

Dev pulls a face. "Isn't he from Brixton?"

"Yeah, but he lived in Berlin. Wrote a lot of his best stuff there."

"No way?"

"Yes way," she declares. "Come on, you can tell from his lyrics. You know, like 'I can remember standing by the wall'? From Heroes?"

"Could be any wall. Could've been a wall in Brixton."

"It's the Berlin Wall! All the legends were in Berlin at that time. Bowie, Iggy Pop..."

"That's two."

"I think Lou Reed was there."

"Oh, okay," he says. "Well that completes the set. That's all of them. All three legends."

Clara snorts. "Stop being a bitch," she chuckles. She squints off at the sky. "I wonder where all the legends are now? You know, the new legends. I wonder if they're all in one place, and if they know they're going to change everything."

"Probably not Brixton," supplies Dev, then he adds, "Or Edgecastle."

"Yeah," says Clara quietly. "That's why I'm moving."

He perks up. It's been ages since Clara's mentioned her plans since finishing high school. "So you're taking your offer at Plymouth?"

"I'm not," she says carefully, measuring out each word with equal caution. "I'm going to Moscow."

All of a sudden, the sun seems far too bright. Clara is looking at him, checking to see his reaction, and she looks far more nervous than she should. It's like she rehearsed this.

Dev props himself up on his elbows and says, "What?" A frown knots his thick brows.

Clara shrugs apologetically, and takes a breath. "Moscow. To study Fine Art this time. Not Psychology."

Dev doesn't know what to say. He's only just met Clara a few months back; he can't lose her so quickly. He wants to tell her that he's happy she's found something, but so torn about the fact that it's going to take her so far away. He wants to say they'll stay in touch, and they'll Skype, and they'll even send postcards at first, maybe for the first month before it gets too slow and cumulatively expensive. Most of all, he wants to tell her that even though they've only known each other for a matter of months, this feels like he's losing his best friend.

Instead he says, "Fine Art, huh?"

"Yeah?" she nods. "Because you know, I've always wanted to work in retail," she says, forcing the joke. When he doesn't laugh convincingly, she adds, "Because the job prospects are abysmal."

"Yes, they are," Dev says in an attempt to sound sufficiently cheerful. He's squinting out the sunlight, and everything feels hazy. There is a numbness in his stomach that he wishes would just piss off for a second.

Clara busies herself with fixing the chain of flowers into a ring. "Look." She produces it with a flourish. "A tiara. For you."

"I'm honoured."

"I hereby crown you the Princess of Pharmacy," she declares.

Dev bobs his head so she can place the wonky crown of daisies onto it. Her fingers brush his hair as she fixes it straight, and a slight breeze stirs the grass around them.

"Thanks," he deadpans. "Although I don't see why I can't wear a tiara and be a prince."

She laughs. "That's not my only present for you, actually."

Dev hums interestedly. Because although he's devastated, he does like presents.

Plunging her hand into her backpack, Clara fishes out a book. It's battered and it looks decidedly second-hand, but she presents it to him with a flourish. Dev takes it into his hand and reads the title, 50 Greatest Love Letters.

"I thought you'd like it," Clara says self-consciously. "You know, because you're into sentimental stuff like this. It's got letters from Virginia Woolfe and Jack Kerouac and the like, so yeah. Pretty poetic. It used to be mine."

Dev smiles. "Thank you," he says, holding it up. "I'll use it as inspiration when I woo all the Pharmacy girls at uni."

"All of them?" She bares her palms, grinning. "Slow down, you slut."

"Don't slut-shame me!" he declares jokingly, and Clara's face creases up with laughter. "Immortal Ruth Bader Ginsburg would not be impressed, Clara Monroe!"

Clara is about to reply, but the song switches to Life on Mars. She stares at the phone for a second, then she smiles. "This is my first Bowie record."

Dev says, "Really?"

"Yeah." She smiles. "I bought Hunk Dory after, and it's still my favourite album." She looks up. "I'll lend it to you."

"Before you go to Moscow?"

Clara shrugs. "Sure. Until I visit Edgecastle again – probably around Christmas, so that gives you a good few months to listen to it. Then I'll come and see you, and you can give it back to me."

"So I'm essentially holding it for ransom? So you'll come visit me?"

She laughs. "No, it's not a hostage, it's a promise," she says, and she pulls another flower out of the ground.

Dev smiles and the dawdling breeze follows Bowie's record over the fields. "Yeah. Yeah, alright. I'll give it back whenever I see you next," he says, and the sun washes down over the sprawling green fields around them.

He keeps that CD for the next three years.

-
update at 11.01.2016: this chapter was written before Bowie's passing. I'm heartbroken that this world has lost such an amazing man, who has created my favourite music and is a massive inspiration to so many. At least we all got to share the world with him for a little while. Rest in peace.