Weeks of petal counting have balanced him here, teetering, totally nervous. Bushels of buttercups plucked down to stem and style and stigma and still he has no clue whether she even knows he exists, let alone whether she loves him or, like, loves him not.
So, Mark teeters, here on the threshold of Daisy’s Florist, in his own shoes, which feel too big but aren’t. It just feels that way with the shoes because he’s completely out of his mind with being in love. Mark is. Really in love, like it gives him the rampant daffodils just thinking about it.
Daffodils or not though, he has to go in. Because now she’s gone and seen him see her see him, Daisy has, through the floral display in her window. Mark saw her do it. And she saw him see her do it. And so on. And so now if he leaves he knows he’ll wind up looking like he’s not leaving at all but slinking away. And then what? What then? It’ll all be over and all over nothing!
There’s no way around it.
This little brass bell above Daisy’s door tinkles. Well, it’s an electronic sensor actually, if you want to get literal about it. It’s an electronic sensor set in a black plastic box, and it doesn’t tinkle but buzzes a sharp accurate buzz whenever its tripwire of motion sensing light is broken by an ankle. But a little brass bell tinkling is closer to how it feels, for Mark, entering Daisy’s Florist.
A sepia haze shifts amongst her flowers, like the air in here is varnished, varnished with notions of days so sweet they literally ooze honey. Daisy’s poised by the counter, bouquet of lilies in one hand, ribbon in the other, hipshot, imaginary.
‘Hello again.’ she says, ‘Back for more buttercups?’
‘I…’
Mark does his best imitation of inspecting peonies, thinking spirals of how this is pretty much exactly what happened last time too, when he’d freaked out again and just said yes. Yet again! Yes, again, to whatever she said, and so wound up for some reason buying an entire bushel of buttercups.
Mark thinks of his little apartment kitchen, carpeted in browning yellow. Pretty autumnal.
‘Actually…’ he forces the words out through this knot of nerves tightening in his throat, ‘I was hoping… ,hoping you might be able to help me with something different this time. Maybe…’
Daisy prunes the excess length from those lilies’ stems with all the casual accuracy of expertise, and secateurs.
‘What sort of different?’
He could say so now, Mark thinks. But that would be like picking a flower bud before it’d bloomed. And what a far-gone waste when there’s so much time right now, when there’s so much potential packed into this moment, whole entire geraniums of petals folded and wrapped so tight they fit in a bud no bigger than an almond.
‘I was… I was hoping,’ he manages to say, ‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me what the flowers mean.’
‘What the flowers mean?’
‘Yeah, you know,’ says Mark, ‘like how red roses are for love and violets are blue for some reason too, and… I don’t know… I was hoping you could help me out with the rest... that’s why I’m here.’
‘That’s why you’re here.’ Daisy says slowly, slowly stuffing her bunch of lilies into a big glass jar and sort of ruffling it affectionately to coax it into its most aesthetically pleasing shape. ‘To be honest,’ she says, ‘I never really went in for all that stuff.’
‘That stuff?’
‘Yeah,’ Daisy wipes her pollinated hands on her apron, which is hemmed at its edges with green lace, ‘like explanations and stuff.’ She says, ‘I always reckoned that that’s…’ she puts the back of her hand to her nose, unexpectedly, ‘really the most…’ she closes her eyes, ‘beautiful thing… ah… about flowers…’ her face scrunches up in a bunch, ‘how they’re so… be… beautiful…’
But the rest is lost in an explosion of tiny particles of mucus. Cosmos of galaxies of mists of mucus swirling through the varnished air.
‘Bless you.’ Mark says.
‘Sorry.’ says Daisy, ‘Hay-fever.’
There’s something so impossible about Daisy, Mark reckons. She blushes now for no reason at all, almost as if to prove it. A blush which seems a reason all of its own. Maybe good things are their own reasons, Mark reasons. Maybe good things just are.
May be.
Either way, that blush makes Mark feel all sorts of fundamental emotions, emotions which make him confused as hell about what does he normally do to be normal? You know? His hands for instance—how should he, like, hold them?
‘But I mean,’ he says, ‘about what the flowers mean,’ he says, ‘what I mean is what about if you go and accidentally get romantic flowers for your mum or something and it winds up coming off like this Freudian slip, like Oedipus but with chrysanthemums. Or, like, if you get funeral flowers for a christening or… I don’t know… what if you really like this girl but you get her some kind of flowers she totally hates.’
‘I can’t imagine ever hating a flower.’ says Daisy, frowning disapprovingly, ‘Especially totally.’
‘No?’
‘Of course not! It just seems silly right? Hating a flower? I mean, what’s the point? What could you possibly have against a flower?’ She says, ‘Seriously. What could a flower ever do to to you anyway? Flowers don’t do things, they just sort’ve… are. And anyway, listen.’ She leans on the counter, looking like a bartender doling out advice, ‘If this girl you’re talking about really does hate flowers, any flowers at all, then I reckon it’s as good a sign as any that you’re probably better off abandoning the whole…’
‘There’s no girl.’ says Mark quickly, ‘I just mean, like, hyper pathetically. Like, if there was a girl…you know…I mean…like…if…’
Neither of them knows what to say then. It’s too obvious. Which is a good sign, but also awkward as hell.
Of course, a particularly big bee just happens to choose this exact moment to start buzzing somewhere in Daisy’s shop, buzzing loud, like it’s as if this bee is actually hell bent on exposing this silence between them with its buzz.
Mark fidgets with his fingers.
While through drowses of late morning bee buzz haze, Daisy looks at him sideways, freckled, hiding her smile. He’s really something to chuckle about, Mark, there, teetering again, forever teetering, doing his best to hide in amongst the sunflowers, looking so overtly preoccupied with inspecting them that its beginning to spill over into parody—the way he’s frowning and scratching his chin and clearly so nervous he can’t even look in her general direction, let alone her eyes.
‘If it was me,’ says Daisy, ‘I’d choose forget me nots.’
‘Which ones are they?’
In reply she crosses the shop and reaches, stretches right up onto her toes, one foot extending reflexively for balance, performing a sort of pedestrian arabesque. While, with a shy glance, Mark watches on.
Daisy’s movement is that much more beautiful for its naïve clumsiness. Mark feels. Actually, it’s its naïve clumsiness that makes it beautiful to begin with. Because it’s through her naïve clumsiness that Daisy blossoms into this shape. And she doesn’t even realise what she’s gone and done. How right here, in her humble shop, bespoke with little brass bell and bumblebee, simply reaching for forget me nots, she’s oh so accidentally moved through this shape which every prima ballerina forever after will fail to achieve, for the very reason that they are trying to achieve it.
‘These.’ she says, stepping down, holding out a ruffle of blue and yellow, ‘These are forget me nots.’
‘Forget me nots,’ Mark glances up at Daisy with a shy smile, ‘They’re what perfect wishes it was.’ He says.
Well, actually he says something more like, ‘Nice flowers.’ And to be properly honest he doesn’t even really say it, he more like mumbles it. But later on, when he’s playing the scene over and over in his head, he settles on this response instead, and allows it to sort of nestle into his memory, to hang in the varnished air alongside secateurs and arabesque and cellophane and all the rest, until he’s pretty well convinced himself that this is how it actually went down, like, right off the cuff.
And Daisy says, ‘I’ll wrap them up for you.’ While she unrolls a scroll of baby blue tissue.
While Mark turns again to pretend to admire lavender delphiniums. He looks close, frowns, scratches his chin—convincingly, he convinces himself. Meanwhile he’s not really inspecting flowers at all, would you believe it? But actually deciding, under the cover of hot pink snapdragons, that love is really the only real reason—that all the other reasons are really only excuses with bows on.
He wonders if Daisy knows this, that his real reason for coming into her shop isn’t flowers at all, but something more fundamental. That flowers are just his excuse. Because the idea of coming right out and saying what he means scares the blooming carnations out of Mark, and also somehow suddenly seems impossible. Because real life becomes almost too obvious when you strip away all the flowers and it's just right out here in the open, completely exposed. It’s like it becomes so obvious that it disappears.
So, Mark admires irises. Or, at least, he pretends to, while really stealing glances.
Now, Mark wouldn’t consider himself a religious man. Not by a big size. But if anything was going to convince him there was some divine intention at work in the ordering of the universe, that thing would surely be watching Daisy at her floristry.
The way she is now, gliding around the room, gathering together all these loose streams of yellow silk and baby blue tissue, broad ribbons of transparent cellophane, delicate blooms of forget me nots, now furling them with airs of such elaborate calm, folding and twining together, now eyeing then adjusting with an attitude of such nonchalant aptitude, all practical distractions dissolved, all petty and selfish considerations of survival surrendered in flourish to this one gentle frown of satisfied concentration.
Once she’s finished tying off this yellow bow and snipping these stems neat, and ruffling the blooms balanced, she offers them up to Mark—a bouquet of forget me nots, delicate, complete.
‘Here you are.’ she says.
Mark reaches out his hand. But right then, real quick, Daisy withdraws the bouquet with an elastic snap, withdraws it so Mark grasps a handful of perfume instead.
And Daisy winks, ‘Before I give them to you though.’ she says, ‘I’d like you to tell me something.’
‘Oh?’ says Mark, ‘What’s that?’
‘Tell me who they’re for.’
‘Who they’re for?’
‘Yes. Who they’re for?’
‘But isn’t it obvious?’ The words spilled out of Mark before he could think to hold them back, ‘They’re for you.’