Prologue
Most of life’s defining moments happen unexpectedly; sometimes they slide past you completely unnoticed until afterwards, if at all. The last time your child is small enough to carry on your hip. An eye- roll exchanged with a stranger who becomes your life-long best friend. The summer job you apply for on impulse and stay at for the next twenty years. That kind of thing. So I’m completely unaware that one of my defining moments is passing me by when my mobile rings at 6.47 p.m. on 14 March, 2018; instead, I curse under my breath because I’ve got a Velcro roller stuck in my hair and I’m already running late.
‘Hello?’
I can’t help it; I smile as I tap on speakerphone and Freddie half shouts his greeting over the background road noise.
‘I’m here,’ I say loudly, hairpins gripped between my teeth.
‘Listen, Lyds, Jonah’s got car trouble so I’m going to swing round and pick him up on the way back. It won’t make much difference, ten minutes max.’
I’m glad he isn’t here to see the look on my face. Was it Princess Diana who famously said there were three people in her marriage? I get that, because there are three people in mine too. Not that we’re married yet; very
nearly though. Freddie Hunter and I are engaged, and I’m officially almost the happiest girl in the world. I refer you back to my earlier statement to explain why I say ‘almost’ the happiest; because there’s me, there’s Freddie and there’s Jonah bloody Jones.
I get it; I don’t go a day without speaking to my sister, but Elle isn’t always here on our sofa drinking our tea and demanding my attention. Not that Freddie’s best friend is demanding, exactly. Jonah’s so laid-back he’s almost horizontal most of the time and it’s not as if I don’t like him – I’d just like him a whole lot more if I didn’t see so much of him, you know? Tonight, for instance. Freddie asked Jonah to the dinner without thinking to check with me first, even though it’s my birthday.
I spit the hairpins out as I give up wrestling with the Velcro and pick the phone up instead, irritated.
‘God, Freddie, must you? Alfredo’s is booked for eight and they won’t hold the table if we’re late.’
I know this from bitter experience: our work Christmas dinner there turned into a disaster when the minibus arrived ten minutes late and we all ended up eating McDonald’s in our Sunday best. Tonight is my birthday dinner and I’m pretty sure my mum won’t be impressed with a Big Mac instead of Chicken Fettuccine.
‘Chill your boots, Cinders, you won’t be late for the ball. Promise.’
That’s Freddie all over. He never takes life seriously, even on the once -in- a-while occasions when, actually, it would be nice if he did. Time is elastic in his world, he can stretch it to accommodate his needs – or, in this case, to accommodate Jonah’s.
‘Okay,’ I sigh, resigned. ‘Just keep your eye on the time, for God’s sake.’
‘Got it,’ he says, already turning up the car radio. ‘Over and out.’
Silence fills the bedroom and I wonder if anyone would notice if I cut off the chunk of hair knotted around the roller currently hanging off the side of my head.
And there it was. My life’s defining moment, sliding nonchalantly past me at 6.47 p.m. on 14 March, 2018.
Thursday 10 May
Freddie Hunter, otherwise known as the great big love of my life, died fifty-six days ago.
One moment I’m cursing him for running late and ruining my birthday dinner, the next I’m trying to make sense of the two uniformed policewomen in my living room, one of them holding my hand as she speaks. I stare at her wedding ring and then at my engagement ring.
‘Freddie can’t be dead,’ I say. ‘We’re getting married next year.’
It’s probably a self-preservation thing that I struggle to recall exactly what happened afterwards. I remember being blue-lighted to A&E in the police car and my sister holding me up when my legs buckled at the hospital. I remember turning my back on Jonah Jones when he appeared in the waiting room with barely a scratch on him, just his hand bandaged and a wound dressing over one eye. How is that fair? Two get into the car, only one gets out again. I remember what I was wearing, a new green blouse I’d bought especially for the dinner. I’ve given it away to a charity shop; I never want it on my body again.
Since that awful day I’ve racked my brain countless
times to try to recall every word of my last conversation with Freddie, and all I can remember is grumbling at him about cutting it fine for the restaurant. And then come the other thoughts. Was he rushing to please me? Was the accident my fault? God, I wish I’d told him that I love him. Had I known it was the last time I’d ever speak to him, I would have, of course I would. Since it happened, I’ve sometimes wished he’d lived just long enough for us to have one more conversation – but then I’m not sure my heart could have withstood it. It’s probably for the best if the last time you do something momentous passes you by unheralded: the last time my mother collected me at the school gate, her hand reassuring around my smaller one; the last time my father remembered my birthday. Do you know the last thing Freddie said to me as he dashed back on my twenty- eighth birthday? Over and out. It was a habit, something he’d done for years, silly words that have now become one of the most significant phrases of my life.
I guess it was just so Freddie, though, to go out on a phrase like that. He had this insatiable lust for life, a lightness of attitude coupled with a killer competitive streak – fun but lethal, if you like. I’ve never met anyone with such a gift for always knowing what to say. He has – he had – a knack of making other people think they’d won when in fact he’d got exactly what he wanted; he walked into his advertising career and shot up the ranks like a meteor, eyes always on the next prize. He is – he was – the bright spark amongst us, the one who was always going to be someone or do something that made people remember his name long after he’d gone.
And now he bloody well has gone, his car concertinaed against an oak tree, and I feel as if someone has sliced me through and tied a knot in my windpipe. It’s as if I can’t quite get enough air into my lungs – I’m breathless and perpetually on the edge of panic.
The doctor has finally given me something to help me sleep after my mum yelled at him yesterday in the living room, a month’s supply of some new pill that he wasn’t at all sure about prescribing because he thinks grief needs to be ‘passed through sentiently in order to emerge’. I’m not making this shit up; he said those actual words to me a couple of weeks ago, before leaving me empty-handed to go home to his very-much-alive wife and children.
Living around the corner from my mother is a blessing and a curse in varying measures. When she makes her champion chicken stew and brings a pan round for us still hot off the stove, for instance, or when she’s waiting for me at the end of the road on a cold November morning to give me a lift into work – those times our proximity is a blessing. Other times, like when I’m in bed seeing double with a hangover and she appears in my bedroom as if I’m still seventeen, or when I haven’t tidied up for a couple of days and she looks down her nose like I’m one of those extreme hoarders in need of a reality-TV intervention, those times our proximity is a curse. Ditto when I’m trying to grieve in private with the living-room curtains still closed at three in the afternoon and the same PJs on as when she visited me yesterday and the day before; making me tea I’ll forget to drink and sandwiches I’ll bury in the back of the fridge when she’s upstairs cleaning the bathroom or outside pulling the bins down.
I understand, of course. She’s fiercely protective of me, especially at the moment. She had the doctor practically shaking with fear when he wavered over the idea of prescribing sleeping tablets. I’m not all that sure about popping pills either, as it happens, although God knows the idea of oblivion is appealing. I don’t know why I’m bringing God into this. Freddie is, was and would have always been a strident atheist, and I’m ambivalent at best, so I don’t expect God has had much to do with my being placed on a clinical trial for the recently bereaved. The doctor recommended joining the drug trial, probably because my mother was demanding maximum-strength Valium and these new pills are being touted as a milder, more holistic option. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really care what they are; I’m officially the world’s saddest, most tired guinea pig.
Freddie and I have this fabulous bed, you see. It sounds unlikely, but the Savoy were auctioning off hotel beds to make way for new ones for hardly anything and, sweet heaven, this bed is a fantasy island of epic proportions. People raised eyebrows at first: You’re buying a second-hand bed? ‘Why on earth would you do that?’ my mother said, as aghast as if we were buying a camp bed discarded by the local homeless shelter. Clearly those doubters had never stayed at the Savoy. I hadn’t either, in truth, but I’d seen something on TV about their handmade beds and I knew exactly what I was getting. And that’s how we came to be in possession of the most comfortable bed in a hundredmile radius, in which Freddie and I have demolished countless Sunday-morning breakfasts, laughed and cried and made heart-achingly sweet love. When my mother told me she’d changed the sheets for
me a few days after the accident, she unintentionally sent me into a sudden, screeching meltdown. I watched myself as if from a distance, clawing at the door of the washing machine, sobbing as the sheets tumbled through the suds, swilling any last lingering traces of Freddie’s skin and scent down the drain.
My mother was beside herself, trying to lift me from the floor, calling out for my sister to come and help. We ended up huddled together on the stripped kitchen floorboards, watching the sheets, all of us in tears because it is just so bloody unfair that Freddie isn’t here any more.
I haven’t been to bed since. In fact, I don’t think I’ve properly been to sleep since. I just nap sometimes: my head on the table beside my uneaten breakfast; on the sofa huddled underneath Freddie’s winter coat; standing up leaning against the fridge, even.
‘Come on, Lyds,’ my sister says now, shaking my shoulder softly. ‘I’ll come up with you.’
I glance at the clock, disorientated because it was broad daylight when I closed my eyes, but now it’s shadowy enough for someone, Elle I presume, to have flicked the lamps on. It’s typical of her to be so thoughtful. I’ve always thought of her as a better version of me. We’re physically similar in height and bone structure, but she’s dark to my light; her hair, her eyes. She’s kinder than I am too, too kind for her own good a lot of the time. She’s been here most of the afternoon – I think my mum must have drawn up a rota to make sure I’m never on my own for more than an hour or two. It’s probably pinned to the side of her fridge, right next to the shopping list she adds to all week and the food diary she fills in for her slimming class. She likes a list, my mum.
‘Up where?’ I say, sitting up straighter, clocking the glass of water and bottle of pills in Elle’s hand.
‘Bed,’ she says, an edge of steel to her voice.
‘I’m fine here,’ I mutter, even though our sofa isn’t actually all that comfortable to sleep on. ‘It’s not even bedtime. We can watch . . .’ I bat my hand towards the TV in the corner, trying to remember any of the soaps. I sigh, annoyed that my tired brain can’t muster it. ‘You know, that one with the pub and the bald men and the shouting.’
She smiles and rolls her eyes. ‘You mean EastEnders.’
‘That’s the one,’ I say, distracted as I scan the room for the remote to turn the TV on.
‘It’ll have finished by now. Besides, you haven’t watched EastEnders for the last five years or more,’ she says, having none of it.
I screw my face up. ‘I have. There’s . . . there’s that woman with the dangly earrings and . . . and the one played by Barbara Windsor,’ I say, lifting my chin.
Elle shakes her head. ‘Both dead,’ she says.
Poor them, I think, and their poor families.
Elle holds her hand out. ‘It’s time to go to bed, Lydia,’ she says, gentle and firm, more nurse than sister.
Hot tears prick the back of my retinas. ‘I don’t think I can.’
‘You can,’ she says, resolute, her hand still outstretched. ‘What else are you going to do? Sleep on the sofa for the rest of your life?’
‘Would that be so bad?’
Elle perches next to me and picks up my hand, the pills in her lap. ‘It would, really, Lyds,’ she says. ‘If it was
Freddie left here alone rather than you, you’d want him to get some proper sleep, wouldn’t you?’
I nod, miserable. Of course I would.
‘In fact, you’d haunt him rotten until he went to bed,’ she says, rubbing her thumb over my knuckles, and I half choke on the permanent ball of tears I’ve been trying to breathe around since the day Freddie died.
I watch her shake a small neon- pink tablet into her palm. Is that all it’s going to take to put me straight? A few weeks of solid sleep and I’ll be ship-shape-shiny and good to go again?
Elle holds my gaze, unwavering, and tears slide down my cheeks as I realize how shattered I am; I’m as emotionally and physically low as I can go. Or at least I hope I am, because I don’t think I’ll survive if there’s further to fall than this. Taking the pill with trembling fingers, I put it in my mouth and wash it down. At my bedroom door, I turn to Elle.
‘I need to do this on my own,’ I whisper. She brushes my lank hair out of my eyes. ‘You sure?’ Her dark eyes study my face. ‘I can stay with you until you’re asleep, if you like?’
I sniff, looking at the floor, crying as usual. ‘I know you could,’ I say, catching hold of her hand and holding on tight. ‘But I think I’d better . . .’ I can’t quite find the words I need; I don’t know if it’s because the tablet is having an effect or simply because there aren’t any adequate words.
Elle nods. ‘I’ll be just downstairs if you want me, okay? I’m not going anywhere.’
My fingers close around the handle. I’ve kept the door shut since the day Mum changed the bed linen, not
wanting to catch even an accidental glimpse of the pristine bed on my way to the bathroom. I’ve built it up into this thing in my head, this alien place, as off-limits as a crime scene criss- crossed with yellow tape.
‘It’s just a bed,’ I whisper, slowly pushing the door open. There’s no yellow tape blocking my entry and there are no monsters under the bed. But there’s no Freddie Hunter either and that’s every kind of heartbreaking.
‘Just a bed,’ Elle says, her hand soothing on my back. ‘A place to rest.’
But she’s lying. We both know it’s so much more than that. This room, mine and Freddie’s bedroom, was one of the main reasons we bought this house. Airy, bathed in daylight thanks to the low-slung sash windows and honey floorboards, striped by bright slices of moonlight on clear summer nights.
Someone, Elle presumably, has been in already to switch on the lamp on my side of the bed, a pool of mellow light to welcome me, even though the sun hasn’t quite set yet. She’s turned the bed down too; it’s all more hotel than bedroom. The overwhelming scent in here when I close the door is line-fresh bed linen. No traces of my perfume mingled with Freddie’s aftershave, no office-crumpled shirts slung carelessly over the armchair or shoes kicked off before they could make it as far as the bottom of the wardrobe. It’s neat as a new pin; I feel like a visitor in my own life.
‘It’s just a bed,’ I whisper again, sitting on the edge of the mattress. I close my eyes as I lie down, curling on to my side beneath the quilt.
We spent more than we should have on bedding befitting of our Savoy bed; white cotton sheets with a higher
thread count than most hotels I’ve ever stayed in. As my body slides against the sheets, I realize they’re already warm. Elle’s put a hot-water bottle in here for me, my lovely sister, taking away the chill of clean sheets. My bed, our bed, envelops me like an old friend I feel guilty for neglecting.
I lie on my side of the mattress, my body painful with sorrow, my arms outstretched to find him as always. Then I push the hot-water bottle to his side, warming the sheets before I move across and lie there myself, clutching the heat of the bottle to my chest with both arms. I bury my wet face in his pillow and wail like a wounded animal, a noise as alien as it is uncontrollable.
And then, little by little, it subsides. My heart rate begins to steady and my limbs turn lead-heavy. I’m warm, cocooned, and for the first time in fifty-six days, I’m not lost without Freddie. I’m not lost, because as I slide under the coat-tails of sleep, I can almost feel the solid weight of him depress the mattress, his body spooned around mine, his breath steady against my neck. Save me from these dark, uncharted waters, Freddie Hunter. I pull him close and breathe him in as I fall into a deep, peaceful sleep.
Friday 11 May
You know those blissful dawn moments, summer mornings when the sun rises before you do, and you half rouse and then fall back asleep, glad of a few more hours? I turn and find Freddie still here with me and the relief is so profound that it’s all I can do to lie perfectly still and try to match my breathing pattern to his. It’s four in the morning, too early to get up, so I close my eyes again; I don’t think I’ve ever known such absolute comfort. The bed warmed by our nested bodies, the golden half-light before dawn, the muted music of birdsong. Please don’t let me leave this dream.
Friday 11 May
I know before I open my eyes for a second time that he’s gone. The bed is colder, the six a.m. sunlight harsher, the birdsong like nails down a blackboard. Freddie was here, I know he was. I burrow my head into the pillow and screw my eyes tight shut, searching the darkness behind my eyelids for sleep again. If I can only sleep, I might find him. Panic starts to bubble low in my gut; the harder I try to relax, the more my brain fires up, preparing itself for the day ahead, full of dark thoughts and desperate emotions I don’t know what to do with. And then my heart judders, jump leads on a dodgy battery, because I remember: I have sleeping pills now. Pink pills designed to knock me out. I reach for the bottle Elle has placed on my bedside table and clutch it in both hands, relieved, then unscrew the lid and swallow one down.
Friday 11 May
‘Morning, Lyds.’ Freddie rolls over and kisses my forehead, his arm heavy over my shoulders as our alarm informs us it’s seven a.m. ‘I don’t want to play today. Shall we stay in bed? I’ll call in for you if you call in for me.’
He says something along the same lines most mornings and for a couple of minutes we always pretend to entertain the idea.
‘Will you make us breakfast in bed?’ I mumble, sliding my arm around the warmth of his body, burying my face in the soft down of his chest hair. There is a solidity about him that I love; he’s a commanding physical presence thanks to his height and broad shoulders. People at work sometimes underestimate his business brain because of his stereotypical rugby-player build and he’s more than happy to play that to his advantage. He’s competitive to the core.
‘As long as you want breakfast at midday, yeah.’ I hear the laugh behind his breastbone as he strokes the back of my head.
‘Sounds about right,’ I say, closing my eyes, breathing him in deep.
We stay like that for a few lazy, exquisite minutes, clasped, half sleeping, knowing we need to get up soon. But we linger, because these are the moments that matter, the ones that make it Freddie and me against the world. These moments are the bedrock our love is built on, an invisible cloak around our shoulders when we are out in the world going about our business. Freddie won’t return the interested look from the striking girl on platform 4 waiting for the 7.47, and I never allow Leon, the barista in the cafe I sometimes buy lunch from, to cross the line from messing around to flirting, even though he’s movie-star gorgeous and writes outrageous things on my coffee cup.
I’m crying. For a few seconds I don’t know why, and then I remember, and I suck down great lungfuls of air, like someone breaking the surface after falling into deep water.
Freddie startles, jerking up on one elbow to stare at me, concern on his face as he grips my shoulder. ‘Lyds, what’s the matter?’ His voice is urgent, ready to help, to soothe whatever pain I’m in.
I can’t breathe; my breath burns in my chest.
‘You died.’ I sob out the shocking words, my eyes scanning his beloved face for telltale signs of the accident. There’s nothing, no hint of the catastrophic head injury that claimed his life. His eyes are an unusual blue, dark enough to be mistaken for brown unless you’re close enough to really look. He sometimes wears a pair of blackframed glasses for important work pitches, clear glass, an illusion of weakness where there isn’t any. I stare into those eyes now and run my hand over the harvest-blond stubble on his jawline.
A soft laugh rumbles from him and relief passes through his eyes.
‘You daft cow,’ he says, hugging me in. ‘You were dreaming, that’s all.’
Oh, how dearly I wish that were true. I shake my head, so he takes my hand and lays it over his heart.
‘I’m fine,’ he insists. ‘Feel, my heart’s beating and everything.’
It is. I press hard enough to feel it jumping beneath my palm, and yet I know it isn’t, not really. It can’t be. He covers my hand with his own now, not laughing any more because he can see how distressed I am. He doesn’t understand, of course. How could he? He’s not real but, God, this doesn’t feel like any other dream I’ve ever had, either. I’m awake in my sleep. I can feel the heat of his body. I can smell the trace of his aftershave on his skin. I can taste my tears when he leans down and kisses me, tender. I can’t stop crying. I try to take shallow breaths as I hold him, as though he’s made of smoke and will blow away if I breathe too hard.
‘A nightmare, that’s all,’ he whispers, stroking my back, letting me cry it out because there’s nothing else he can do.
If only he knew that this is the opposite of a nightmare; nightmares come when you’re impatiently waiting for your boyfriend to arrive on your birthday, your family already assembled at the table in the restaurant on the high street.
‘I miss you. I miss you so very much,’ I gulp. I can’t keep a limb still and he folds his arms around me, really tight this time, and he’s telling me that he loves me and that he’s fine, that we’re both fine.
‘We’re going to be late for work,’ he says gently after a few minutes.
I lie still, my eyes closed, trying to memorize the feel of his arms around me for when I wake.
‘Let’s stay here,’ I whisper. ‘Let’s stay here for ever, Freddie.’
His hand slides into my hair and he draws my head back so he can look me in the eyes. ‘I wish I could,’ he says, the trace of a smile on his lips. ‘But you know I can’t. I’m chairing that meeting this morning with the PodGods,’ he says, reminding me of something I know nothing of.
‘The PodGods?’
He raises his eyebrows. ‘The coffee- pod people? Remember, I told you? They all turned up to the pitch wearing Day- Glo green PodGod T- shirts and baseball caps?’
‘How could I forget them,’ I say, even though I’ve no clue.
He untangles himself from me, kissing my cheek.
‘Stay here this morning,’ he says, his eyes concerned. ‘You never take a day off. Do it today, yeah? I’ll bring you a cup of tea.’
I don’t argue with him. I haven’t been to work in fiftysix days.
My life has been entwined around Freddie Hunter’s since the first time he kissed me, breathing himself into my DNA one late- summertime afternoon. It had been coming between us for a while, building like steam in an engine – his seat always beside mine in the school canteen so he could steal my ice cream, flirty comments batted back and forth across the classroom like tennis balls. He began to walk home the same way as Jonah and me even though it was out of his way, usually making up some
flimsy excuse about collecting something for his mum or visiting his nan. When Jonah came down with chickenpox and had to stay home for a week or two, I didn’t stand a chance. I get nostalgic butterflies thinking about it even now: Freddie gave me a yellow plastic flower ring, the kind you get from a Christmas cracker, and then he kissed me sitting on my neighbours’ front wall.
‘Won’t your nan be worried about you?’ I asked him after the five most exciting minutes of my life.
‘Hardly. She lives in Bournemouth,’ he said, and then we both laughed because it was at least a hundred miles away.
And that was that, I was Freddie Hunter’s girl, then and always. The next morning, he slid a chocolate bar into my bag along with a note telling me he was walking me home. From someone else it could have come off as possessive; my tender teenage heart saw only thrilling directness.
I watch him move with purpose now, heading into the bathroom to switch the shower on, pulling a clean white shirt off the hanger.
‘I don’t want to jinx it, but I think this one’s in the bag,’ he’s saying, answering a work call briefly, his mobile tucked under his chin as he grabs underwear from the drawer. I watch his everyday moves, my answering smile shaky when he rolls his eyes at me because he wants whoever is on the phone to wind it up.
He disappears into the bathroom and I sit up and push the quilt back when I hear the water sluicing around his body.
‘What’s happening to me?’ I whisper, lowering my feet to the floor, sitting on the edge of the bed like a hospital
patient after open-heart surgery. Because that is what this feels like. As if someone opened my chest and massaged my heart back into working order.
‘I don’t believe in fairy tales or magic beans,’ I mutter, biting down on my trembling bottom lip hard enough to taste blood, metallic and harsh.
Freddie emerges from the bathroom on a cloud of steam, shoving his shirt into his trousers as he buttons them.
‘I’d better go,’ he says, reaching for his phone. ‘If I stick the kettle on, can you make the tea? I’ll make the train if I dash.’
We chose this house for exactly this scenario, mornings when we were running late and grateful to have a train station around the corner. His city- centre job in Birmingham demands much of his time, so the less added for travel the better. My own commute to the local town hall is shorter; ten minutes and I’m in the car park at work. I love our listed building though, it reminds me of something out of a children’s storybook. It’s believed to be the oldest structure in the town, standing half-timbered and crooked at the end of the high street. Much of the architecture is similar along the rambling high street; our little Shropshire town is ancient, fiercely proud of its entry in the Domesday Book. There’s much to be said for growing up in such a tight-knit community; many families have been here from generation to generation, cradle to grave. It’s easy to dismiss the value of something like that, to feel smothered by the fact that everyone knows everyone else’s business, but there’s richness and comfort to it too, especially when someone’s in trouble.
It wasn’t just location that made us fall for the house though. We viewed it early one spring weekend morning, the sun at just the perfect height to show off the honeyed stone and deep bay window. It’s mid-terrace, and decorating it proved to be a bit of a nightmare because there isn’t a straight wall or door in the place. It all adds to the charm, I argued, every time Freddie banged his head on the low, exposed kitchen beam. I like to think the decor has echoes of Kate Winslet’s cottage in The Holiday, all stripped boards and cosy clutter. It’s a look I’ve cultivated carefully at car boots and flea markets, occasionally reined in by Freddie’s preference for more modern things. It’s a battle he was always set to lose: my magpie eye loves pretty things and my Pinterest game is strong.
A couple of days ago, after I’d forced myself to get dressed and nip round to the off-licence for wine supplies, it occurred to me that I didn’t want to go home. It’s the first time I’ve felt that way about the house since the morning we collected the keys, and another piece of my heart snapped off at the realization that home wasn’t home any more. I could never have conceived of the idea of selling the house, but in that moment I felt cut adrift and I walked in the other direction, two circuits of the children’s play park before I could face going home. And then, curiously, once I was back inside, I didn’t want to leave again. I am a mass of contradictions – it’s no wonder my family are worried to death about me.
It was our house, and now it is mine, though there is little pleasure to be gained from becoming mortgage-free at twenty- eight when I’m Freddie-free too. We both felt as if our financial advisor stitched us up like a pair of kippers
on life insurance at the time; the concept of something happening to either of us before the house was paid for seemed ludicrous. How wonderfully lucky we were to feel so secure. I pull myself out of my thoughts, realizing I’m close to tears again. Freddie is looking at me questioningly. ‘Okay now?’ he asks, cupping my jaw, rubbing his thumb over my cheekbone.
I nod, turning my face to press my lips into his palm as he kisses the top of my head. ‘That’s my girl,’ he whispers. ‘I love you.’
As undignified as it would be, I want to cling to him, beg him not to leave me again, but I don’t. If this is to be my final memory of us, I want it to seal itself around my heart for all of the best reasons. So I stand up and hold the lapels of his suit jacket and look up into his beautiful, familiar blue eyes.
‘You’re the love of my life, Freddie Hunter,’ I say, forcing the words out clear and true.
He lowers his head and kisses me. ‘I love you more than Keira Knightley.’ He laughs softly as he plays our game.
‘That much, huh?’ I say, rounding my eyes because we usually start low and work our way up – to Keira in his case and Ryan Reynolds in mine.
‘That much,’ he says, blowing me a kiss as he backs out of the bedroom.
Panic rises from my gut, hot and bilious, and I curl my toes into the floorboards to stop myself from running after him. I listen to his footfall on the stairs, the sound of the front door closing, and I run to the bedroom window to watch him half stride, half jog towards the corner. Too late, I open the windows, struggling with the old catches,
yelling his name even though I know he won’t hear me. Why did I let him leave? What if I never find him again? I clutch the windowsill, my eyes pinned to his back. I almost expect him to fade away, but he doesn’t. He just rounds the corner, lost to the world, to some corporate coffee client, to the girl on platform 4, to all the places I cannot be.
Friday 11 May
My face is wet and my mouth is caked with what tastes like blood when I wake. I grab my phone and on closer inspection I’ve bitten the inside of my bottom lip quite badly; I can see the indentations my teeth have left and my lip has swollen as if I’ve had bad Botox. It’s not my best look – Freddie would have no doubt found my uncanny resemblance to a pufferfish amusing. Freddie. I close my eyes, winded by the hyperrealism of my dream, or whatever it was. I can only liken it to when you go into an electrical store and see the latest, flashiest TV, the kind that costs a small fortune. The colours are brighter, the edges sharper, the sounds clearer. It was Technicolor brilliant, like watching a movie at an IMAX theatre. No, more like being in a movie at an IMAX theatre. It was too real to not be. Freddie was alive, and showering, and running late for work, and making Keira Knightley jokes once again. I rack my brain, trying to dredge up a memory of any mention of a corporate coffee client before he died. I’m sure there wasn’t one; it’s as if Freddie has been living the last fifty-seven days behind a veil, going about his day-today business without a care in the world.
I’m once more overcome with the need to try to fall back asleep, to go and find him, back to the life where Freddie’s heart is still beating, but in that world he’s already out slaying the advertising business with a flash of his cufflinks and a smile. For someone who didn’t even want to go to bed last night, I now find myself absolutely unwilling to get up and face the new day. It takes me a good fifteen minutes to convince myself that leaving the bedroom is even a remotely good idea. In the end, I strike a bargain with myself: if I get up and do Friday, if I shower, eat and maybe even leave the house for a while, then I can take another pill. I’ll have an early dinner, come back to bed, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get to spend the evening with my love.
Saturday 12 May
‘I’ve been dreaming about Freddie,’ I say, wrapping my hands around my coffee mug for comfort rather than warmth. Elle looks at me across the kitchen table, nodding slowly.
‘I do that every now and then too,’ she says, stirring sugar into her drink. ‘I’d be more surprised if you didn’t dream about him, to be honest.’
‘You would?’ I look at her sharply, willing her to meet my eye and pay full attention because this is important. ‘It hasn’t happened to me before.’ Disappointment twists in my gut. What’s happening to me feels too intimate to be a run- of-the-mill kind of thing.
Elle glances up at the kitchen clock.
‘Ready to go?’
We’re going to Mum’s for breakfast; it’s something we’ve started to do most Saturday mornings before I visit Freddie’s grave, Mum’s way of adding structure to my weekend, I think. Elle doesn’t pass comment on my unbrushed hair and yesterday’s T- shirt. It’s one of Freddie’s. My hair was for him too; he loved it long so I’ve barely had more than a trim for years now. I mean, I can’t
sit on it or anything yet, but it’s slowly become one of my defining features. Lydia, Freddie’s girlfriend, the one with the long blonde hair.
Had this been last week, I probably would have shrugged on my denim jacket and dragged my hair back into an elastic, tangles and all, and considered myself good to go. But it isn’t last week. If my recent encounters with Freddie have taught me anything it’s that I am alive, and people who are alive should, at the very least, be clean. Even Freddie, who technically isn’t alive, took a shower.
‘Give me ten?’ I shoot Elle the barest of smiles. ‘I think it’s time I put on some make -up.’ I haven’t so much as touched my make-up bag since the funeral.
She looks at me strangely; I can tell that I’ve surprised her.
‘Well, I didn’t want to say, but you have been looking a little bit shit lately,’ she says, making light.
Her joke makes my stomach lurch, because we’ve always been as close as, I don’t know, two close things. Two peas in a pod? I don’t think that’s quite it, because we aren’t very alike to look at. As close as sisters doesn’t cut it either, because there are sisters like Julia at work and her elder sister, Marie, who she denies could even be from the same gene pool because she’s such a cow, and then there are sisters like Alice and Ellen, twins I went to school with who wore matching clothes and finished each other’s sentences, but would throw each other under a bus to get picked to captain the netball team. Me and Elle, we’re . . . we’re Monica and Rachel. We’re Carrie and Miranda. We have always been each other’s loudest cheerleader and first- choice shoulder to cry on, and it’s only now that I
catch a glimpse of how much I’ve withdrawn from her. I know she doesn’t for a minute resent it or blame me, but it must have been hard on her; she’s lost me as well as Freddie, in a way. I make a mental note that one day, when I’m better, I’ll tell her how sometimes on the dark days she’s been the only light I could see.
‘I won’t be long,’ I say, pushing my chair back, a scrape of wood against wood.
‘I’ll make myself another drink while I wait,’ she says.
I leave Elle in the kitchen, comforted by the sound of her running the tap and clattering around in the cupboards. She’s always been a frequent and very welcome visitor here. Not nearly as frequent as Jonah Jones, mind – he spent almost as much time here with Freddie as I did, very often slumped on our sofa watching a movie no one had ever heard of or eating pizza out of a box because neither of them were exactly Jamie Oliver in the kitchen. I never said as much to Freddie, but I sometimes felt as if Jonah resented having to give his best friend up to me. I guess three is always an odd number.
‘No David today?’
Mum looks past us as she opens the front door. I sometimes think she’s fonder of David than she is of us. She was the same way with Freddie; she enjoys fussing over the men in that mothers-and-sons way.
‘Just us this morning, sorry,’ Elle says, not sorry.
Mum sighs theatrically. ‘You’ll just have to do. Although I was going to ask him to change the fuse in the plug on my hairdryer – it’s packed up again.’
Elle catches my eye behind Mum’s back and I know
exactly what she’s thinking. David is terrible at anything DIY-related. It’s firmly Elle’s department if they have a shelf to go up or a room to be decorated or indeed a fuse to be changed, but our mother insists on clinging to the outdated suggestion that David is the man of the family and will do all the manly things. She could change her own fuse perfectly well: she raised us single-handedly and we didn’t die, she knows her earth wire from her live. She seems to think it imbues David with an added sense of self-worth if she looks to him for odd jobs, and he in turn looks to us with panicked, help -me eyes. He can’t even climb a step ladder without breaking out in a sweat; I had to distract Mum in the kitchen a few weeks ago while he held the ladder for Elle to clear out the guttering. It’s a game we all play. Freddie was the natural doer of the family, and in his absence David has been unwillingly promoted to family fixer.
‘I’m making cheese and onion omelettes,’ Mum says as we follow her down the hallway. ‘Testing out a new pan.’ She twirls a bright-pink frying pan at us.
‘The shopping channel again?’ Elle asks, dropping her bag by the kitchen table.
Mum shrugs. ‘It just happened to be on. You know I don’t usually buy off the telly, but Kathrin Magyar was so impressed by it, and the handle had just fallen off my old frying pan, so it seemed like it was fate.’
I suppress a smile and Elle looks away. We both know that Mum’s kitchen cupboards are stuffed with unnecessary purchases the super- glam TV presenter Kathrin Magyar has convinced her will revolutionize her life.
‘Want me to chop the onions?’ I say.
Mum shakes her head. ‘Already done. They’re in the mini- chopper.’
I nod, noticing it on the kitchen surface. I don’t ask if that was from the shopping channel too, because of course it was, along with the motorized cheese grater she’s used for the Cheddar.
I make coffee instead, thankfully unaided by superfluous gadgetry.
‘Did you try the pills?’ Mum asks, cracking eggs into a bowl.
I nod, winded by the reminder of Freddie.
She rifles through her jug of kitchen implements until she finds the whisk. ‘And?’
‘And they work.’ I shrug. ‘I slept through.’
‘In bed?’
I sigh, and Elle shoots me a small smile. ‘Yes, in bed.’
Relief smooths the lines from Mum’s forehead as she whisks the eggs. ‘That’s good. So no more sleeping on the sofa, okay? It’s no good for you.’
‘No, promise.’
Elle lays the table, three place settings. Our family swelled to five, and now it’s reduced to four, but in its purest form it has always been three: Mum, Elle and me. We don’t really know our dad. He walked out five days before my first birthday, and Mum has never really forgiven him. Elle was a lively three-year-old, I was a handful, and he decided that life with three females wasn’t his gig and moved to Cornwall to take up surfing. He’s that kind of man. Every few years he sends news of where he is, and he even turned up on the doorstep unannounced once or twice when we were still at school. He’s not a bad person,
just a flighty one. It’s nice to know he’s there, but I’ve never really needed him in my life.
‘I’m thinking of buying a new kitchen table,’ Mum says as she places our plates down and takes her seat.
Elle and I both stare at her. ‘You can’t,’ I say.
‘No way,’ Elle says.
Mum raises her eyes to the ceiling; she’d obviously anticipated resistance to the idea. ‘Girls, this one’s on its last legs.’
We’ve sat around this battered, scrubbed wooden table our entire lives, always in the exact same spots. It’s seen our school- morning breakfasts, our favourite weekend bacon and beetroot sandwiches and our family rows. Our mother is by and large a creature of habit; her home hasn’t changed much over the years, and Elle and I have come to rely on it staying more or less the same. Come to think of it, you could say the same for Mum – she’s had the same ash-blonde bob for as long as I can recall. Elle and I inherited our heart-shaped faces from her and we all share the same deep dimples when we laugh, as if someone screwed their fingers into our cheeks. She is our safety net and this house is our sanctuary.
‘We did our homework on this table.’ Elle lays a protective hand on it.
‘Every Christmas dinner I’ve ever had has been around this table,’ I say.
‘But it’s drawn all over,’ Mum tries.
‘Yes,’ Elle says. ‘With our names from when I was five years old.’
She gouged each of our names deep into the surface with a blue ballpoint not long after she learned her letters.
The story goes that she was terribly proud and couldn’t wait to show Mum what she’d done; they’re still there now, childish capitals beneath our place mats. Gwen. Elle. Lydia. A scrawny little bird after each of them.
‘Would you like to take it to your house?’ Mum says, looking at Elle, who has a screamingly tidy home where everything matches or complements, and absolutely nothing is battered or gouged.
‘It belongs here,’ Elle says, firm.
Mum looks at me. ‘Lydia?’
‘You know I don’t have the room,’ I say. ‘But please let it stay. It’s part of the family.’
She sighs, wavering. I can see she knows it’s true. I don’t think she really wants to lose it either. ‘Maybe.’
‘Omelettes are lovely,’ Elle offers.
A thought occurs to me. ‘Did Kathrin Magyar sell you a new dining table?’
Mum reaches for her coffee and pats the tabletop like an old friend. ‘I’ll cancel the order.’
Kathrin Magyar might be good, but she never stood a chance against the Bird family collective.
I look down at Freddie’s grave, at a bunch of cellophanewrapped roses laid along the base of the headstone, garish beside the bedraggled arrangement of daisies and wildflowers I placed there myself last week. Someone else must have been. A colleague, or perhaps Maggie, Freddie’s mum, although she doesn’t come that often – she finds it too distressing. He was her beloved only child, so much so that she found it a struggle to include me in her circle of love. She wasn’t unkind, it was more that she took
underlying pleasure in having Freddie to herself. We’ve met up a couple of times since Freddie’s death, but I’m not sure it does either of us any service. Hers is a different sort of loss, one I can’t relate to.
The fact that I don’t find it maudlin myself has surprised me; I appreciate having a place to come and talk to him. My eyes flicker back to the roses as I open the fresh flowers I picked out at the florist on the way here. Sweet Williams, freesias and some interesting silvery green foliage. Never anything as obvious as roses. Roses are for Valentine’s Day, the romance-by-numbers choice of the unimaginative lover. Throw in a teddy and the job’s a good one. Mine and Freddie’s love was a world away from card-shop clichés and helium hearts. It was big and real, and now I feel like half a person, as if an artist turned their pencil upside down and erased half of me from the page too.
‘Who’s been to visit you, Freddie?’ I say, settling my bum down on the grass, my bag at my feet. There’s something terribly depressing about keeping a bag in the boot of the car with cemetery essentials, isn’t there? An empty water bottle I fill up at the tap, scissors to cut the flowers to size, cleaning wipes, those kinds of things.
When I first started to come here, I used to try to prepare in my head what I was going to say. It didn’t work. So now I just sit in the silence, close my eyes and imagine that I’m somewhere else entirely. I’ve conjured all kinds of places for us. I’ve been at home on the sofa, my feet on Freddie’s lap. I’ve been beside him on a sun lounger in Turkey, an ill-advised package holiday to a godawful hotel survived mainly thanks to endless free shots of raki. And we’ve been opposite each other in Sheila’s small, steamy
