Page 56 of The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

Dee’s wearing a canary-yellow vest top and black leggings, her dark hair scraped severely back into a high ponytail. She has the look of someone perpetually on their way to the gym; she’d definitely be Sporty at a Spice Girls fancy-dress bash.

‘I need to ask you for some advice. Well, some help really …’ she falters. ‘With Jonah.’

Fear kicks in. ‘Is he okay?’

She nods, and then shrugs, anxious. ‘Yes and no. I’m really worried about him, Lydia. He won’t talk to me about the accident – he clams up every time I even mention Freddie’s name.’

I look at her across the table, at the way she’s twisting the plastic hairband around her wrist and biting the corner of her lip. It probably took a fair amount of courage for her to ask me here today.

‘I never met Freddie,’ she says. ‘I mean, I know they were best friends, obviously, and I know some of what happened, but beyond that I’m in the dark. I haven’t even seen a photo of him. Can you believe that?’

It’s news to me that Jonah is so closed off about things with Dee. He’s always been a talker, much more so than Freddie ever was, but now I think about it, he and I don’t talk much about the accident itself. I don’t especially want to go over it again, so I haven’t noticed his reticence. I sat through his painful account of events at the inquest and then he didn’t mention it again until the unpalatable truth tumbled out of him at the grief session. We talk about Freddie often, but the accident itself? Not so much.

I rummage in my bag for my phone and flick through until I find a photo of Freddie and Jonah together. It doesn’t take long, I have loads. Dee studies my phone screen when I hand it to her.

‘Wow,’ she says after a while. ‘That isn’t how I imagined Freddie at all.’

‘No?’ I’m not sure what she means.

‘I expected them to look like brothers, I guess,’ she says, and then she smiles and hands my phone back. ‘He was very handsome,’ she says. ‘You must miss him terribly.’

What do I say to that? ‘It’s been fifteen months since he died and, yes, I miss him every day’? Or ‘Of course I miss him, but I secretly see him in a parallel universe sometimes which eases the pain considerably’? ‘Yes, but I’m trying to get on with my day-to-day life, in fact I have a date planned soon with a guy I met at silent speed dating’? All of the above are true, but I don’t think Dee really came here to talk about me, so I just nod and shoot her a tiny, tight smile.

‘They might not look like brothers, but they were as good as,’ I say. ‘Jonah spent most of his teenage years in and out of Freddie’s house.’

I don’t add that Jonah’s home life was less than ideal; she probably already knows about his past, but if she doesn’t, it’s not my place to fill her in. Maggie, Freddie’s mum, once told me she gave Jonah an old BMX from their shed for his fourteenth birthday; it was his only gift. She realized he couldn’t ride a bike when his foolhardy teenage pride saw him swing his leg over the crossbar and attempt to pedal away. She fished him out of the gutter, bathed his bleeding shoulder and then spent the next week holding on to the saddle while he got the hang of riding it in the privacy of her back garden. It probably isn’t a story Jonah likes to think back on, and I don’t expect he’d appreciate me sharing it with Dee.

‘I think a change of scene might be what he needs,’ Dee says. She’s chewing her lip again, nervous.

‘A holiday?’ I suggest. ‘Well, if you’re going to surprise him, don’t go for somewhere too hot because he’s not much of a sun-lounger kind of guy. Italy, maybe? Somewhere historic, he’d like that.’

She looks uncomfortable. ‘I was thinking more long-term,’ she says. ‘My mum moved to Wales a few years ago and it’s so beautiful where she is, Lydia, really pretty walking country.’

‘Wales?’ I say, alarmed. I’m aware Dee has family there – she and Jonah spent time with them over Christmas – but what does she mean by long-term? Surely not as in moving there?

Dee wraps her hands around her mug and sighs. ‘Have you noticed the circles under his eyes? He doesn’t sleep very well, he barely touches the piano, he’s even tuned the radio to those crappy talk stations to avoid music in the car. I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve heard him properly laugh – it’s as if he catches himself and feels guilty.’

I only half hear what she’s saying because my brain is struggling to get past the idea of Jonah moving to Wales. This town might not mean much to Dee, but it’s Jonah’s home. He and Freddie forged their friendship on these streets, in these pubs. The DNA of their teenage years, of all of our lives, is here. I’m big enough and old enough to understand that things can’t stay the same for ever, but so much has changed already, and the selfish part of me wants what’s left to stay the same.

‘I don’t know, Dee. At least here he’s surrounded by familiar places and people. Maybe he needs that right now.’

‘Or maybe he’d find it easier to move on if he was somewhere else,’ she counters, and then shrugs. ‘I don’t know, I honestly don’t. I just know he’s miserable and doing nothing isn’t going to fix him.’

I drink a little coffee and mull over what she’s said. ‘You can’t fix grief, it takes as long as it takes,’ I say. ‘My doctor told me you have to pass through it sentiently in order to emerge the other side.’

We look at each other. ‘Well, that sounds like bollocks,’ she says, and we both laugh. It’s the first moment of real connection we’ve shared.

‘Will you talk to him?’ she asks, finally playing her hand. ‘About Wales?’

Any trace of humour leaves me. My gut reaction is no, I can’t possibly advise Jonah to move hundreds of miles away. I don’t see him all that often these days; he’s gone from being an almost permanent fixture on my sofa to a once-in-a-blue-moon run-in, but there’s a certain security to knowing he’s around if I really need him. The possibility he might disappear from my life altogether feels desperate, but what if Dee’s right? What if fresh Welsh air would blow those purple bruises away from beneath his eyes? What if the shadows here are just too long for him to ever see any light?

‘Let me think about it,’ I say. It’s the best I can offer.

Friday 28 June

On a regret scale of one to ten, I’m hovering between eight and eleven, and my nerves are making it hard to swallow my breakfast. I haven’t told anyone about my date with Kris today, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve picked my phone up to cancel. I’m trying to coach myself not to see it as a date; it can be anything I want it to be, so I’m framing it as meeting up with a friend for a casual drink after work. Even though Kris isn’t a friend as such, because I’ve only met him once for a couple of intense minutes. We’ve texted a few times over the last two weeks; he sent me an aerial photo of the coast from the roof of a building he’s designed, I sent him a shot of a dinner I’d burned when he asked if I liked to cook. It’s all been very light-hearted so far, which is the only reason I haven’t pressed ‘send’ on any of the cancellation messages I’ve written. Well, not the only reason. I guess I feel that if I can get one date – or one ‘meeting up with a friend for a casual drink’ – out of the way, then that’s another hurdle jumped. Or at least limped over with the skin taken off my shins. I’m trying not to overthink things, but I’m honest enough with myself to know I don’t want to spend the rest of my days looking at an empty armchair. I eye it now, the blue chair I barely sat on because it was well and truly Freddie’s. I very rarely sit on it now either; it just feels off, somehow. The cushions fit his bum, probably. Piers Morgan is on the TV now lambasting a bunch of vegetarians so I get up for the remote control to turn him off, and as I flick, a tacky advert flashes up for PodGods coffee. I catch my breath, then shake my head and huff, because it’s a sure fact Freddie would have made a slicker job of it. I click the TV off and stand in the middle of the room, then impulse makes me sit on Freddie’s chair to finish my toast. I perch. And I wiggle. I make myself sit there for a minute, two at best, before I get up again and stand in front of the fireplace, disconcerted. I bought a couple of new sofa cushions a few weeks ago on a whim, bright and embroidered, and I grab one now and try it out on Freddie’s chair. It works. I know for a fact that Freddie would have hated the cushions, and he certainly wouldn’t have accepted one on his chair. Pushing the last of my toast into my mouth, I switch the cushion back and head into the kitchen to make my packed lunch.

I’m halfway to the bus stop when I realize I’ve left my mobile on the coffee table. I hesitate, torn because I don’t want to be late and I don’t know the bus schedule well; I only catch it on the occasional days when I’m likely to go to the pub after work. But I don’t want to be without my phone today either in case I decide to cancel my casual drink with Kris. Or he might cancel, which would frankly be a bit of a relief, and I won’t know I’m off the hook because my phone is at home. On balance, I decide that the only thing worse than meeting Kris is being stood up by Kris, so I dash back to grab it. In the living room I pocket my phone, and then before I can change my mind, I move the bright new cushion on to Freddie’s chair again. My fingers linger on the back of his chair, almost an apology, but I leave it there all the same and make a run for the bus.

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