Page 77 of The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

Vita is my new favourite person. She looked me over for a few silent seconds when Petar produced me from his taxi, a shepherd with his lost sheep, then she nodded and hugged me. She caught me off guard and I stood there stiff as a board in the middle of their shaded family restaurant, still clutching the pull-along handle of my suitcase. It wasn’t an overenthusiastic, clap-on-the-back kind of hug; it was more of a therapeutic folding of her arms around me, and then she stepped back and looked into my eyes and into my head all at once.

‘You can stay with me.’

She unhooks my heavy flight bag from my shoulder and hangs it over her own as she speaks. ‘Your secrets are your own here.’

It’s such a simple yet profound thing to say. Is my life story written all over my face, there to be read by anyone who takes the time to notice? Or is Vita some kind of mystic, able to read my mind without the need for words? I’m not fanciful enough to believe in all that stuff, but there is something about Vita, about her quiet calmness, that I’m drawn to. She’s a little taller than me and probably a decade or so older, slender and understated in jeans and a faded red apron, her dark hair drawn back from her make-up-free face.

‘Follow me. I’ll show you the room.’

She dismisses her husband with a wave and inclines her head towards the open patio doors.

I do as she’s asked and find myself stepping out on to the restaurant’s beach-front terrace. For a moment, I’m too dazzled to speak. Dazzled by the quality of the morning sunlight, by the warmth, by the glitter of the ocean. I stand amongst the simple wooden tables and chairs, turning my face up to the warmth, and a wash of something like freedom slides over my skin. No one knows me here. No one knows my story. I can just be.

‘This is you,’ she says, calling out. ‘Up here.’

I leave my case at the bottom of the stone staircase running up the side of the restaurant and follow her, waiting behind her when she fishes in her apron pocket for a key. The room is spotless and plain: white walls, a low wooden double bed with clean sheets folded on a red mattress. There’s a monastic simplicity to it that I appreciate as Vita opens the shuttered double doors to reveal a small balcony overlooking the sea. A single wooden deckchair, low slung with a red cushion. There’s no call for art on the walls in here with a view like that.

‘There’s a bathroom through there,’ she says, pointing towards a closed door.

‘It’s just what I was looking for,’ I say, even though I’d had no real idea what I was looking for until now. ‘Thank you.’

She nods as if it’s a given as she explains the weekly cost. ‘Or you can help downstairs, if you’d prefer? Mornings, evenings. It’s our busy time.’

So, I have a room, and now I have a job too if I want one. How easy, I think, to reinvent myself, to be someone else.

‘Okay.’ I smile and laugh a little. ‘I might do that. Can I think about it for a day or two?’

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Take a couple of days for yourself first. Get used to the place.’ She hands me the key. ‘It’s yours for as long as you need it.’

I fold my fingers around the key as she leaves. As long as you need it, she said. It’s distinct from as long as you want it; I get the feeling Vita knows the subtle difference perfectly well.

I sigh as I walk out on to the balcony. God, this place. It’s like something from a postcard; eye-popping colours, a scattering of simple buildings, an easy sense of unhurried calm. I’m in Croatia, in a town I can’t even recall the name of. This time yesterday I was at home surrounded by people who know me. Today I’m a stranger in a foreign land. It’s a weight off my shoulders.

‘What the hell do you mean, you’re in Croatia?’ Mum shouts, the brief delay on her voice evidence of our distance. ‘You were here yesterday.’

‘I know,’ I say. I’ve been on the phone for about thirty seconds and the conversation spiralled from ‘hello, darling’ to this pretty quickly. ‘It was, umm, a spontaneous thing, Mum.’ I falter, trying to explain away the fact that I ran away from home.

‘But your sister has just had a baby,’ Mum says, incredulous even from a thousand miles away.

‘I do know that,’ I say, mild. ‘I was there.’

‘But, Lydia …’ She runs out of words. ‘Why?’

Why. There you go again, Mum, straight to the heart of it.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I just … I needed to get away for a while.’

She pauses. I can hear the upset in her silence. ‘How long for?’

I don’t know, so I tell her what she wants to hear. ‘A week or so. Maybe two. I’m off work.’

‘And then you’ll come home again?’

‘What else am I going to do?’

‘I honestly don’t know, Lydia,’ she says.

Her tone suggests she’s worn out by my reckless behaviour, which rankles with me because I’m hardly a bloody tearaway.

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