The Two Lives of Lydia Bird - Josie Silver Page 0,32

the same way he approached everything else in life: full tilt. His car was a sporty model with a throaty exhaust and he liked his music cranked up loud, singing with more enthusiasm than his voice warranted.

‘But at the inquest you said he didn’t do anything wrong. I sat there and I heard you say he didn’t do anything wrong.’ I hear my voice ratchet through the scales towards high-pitched.

‘I didn’t want …’ he says, so quiet it’s a strain to hear him. ‘I didn’t want them to say he died because of careless driving.’

‘Not as careless as falling off the roof,’ Maud sniffs, reaching for her tea.

I shoot her a look, ready to snap, but I don’t. She’s not the real reason my heart is thumping. Jonah and I stare at each other. I wonder what else he hasn’t told me.

‘You asked me to come here today,’ I say, rubbing my hand over my forehead. ‘You asked me to come here, and then you throw this … this bomb in, knowing exactly what it’s going to do to me.’

He’s shaking his head even as I speak. ‘You didn’t come, Lydia. I waited for you and you didn’t come, and everyone was talking about the people they’d lost and, I don’t even know why, I started talking too. It felt safe, I guess.’

I look at him, at the words falling from his mouth.

‘You didn’t mention the radio once at the inquest …’ I’m shaking my head, because ever since the accident I’ve taken Jonah’s brief account of what happened in that car and tried to piece together Freddie’s last moments. It was officially recorded as accidental death, one of those freak moments you just can’t predict. There was mention of slippery weather conditions; it had been a particularly cold snap and there could well have been ice. I listened, allowing it to come down to something as mundane as the weather, but now the scene I’ve built in my head is fragmenting in front of my eyes.

‘You lied,’ I say. ‘You lied to a room full of people, Jonah.’ I look at Nell beside me. ‘He didn’t tell them about the radio. He didn’t.’

‘People do strange things for good reasons sometimes,’ she says. ‘Maybe if Jonah could tell you a little bit more …’ She looks apologetically at Jonah, who swallows hard.

‘I didn’t lie,’ he says. ‘I didn’t. There could well have been ice on the road and it had definitely been raining.’ He looks at me. ‘You know that’s true, Lydia.’

‘But you’ve never mentioned the radio …’

Everyone else at the table is quiet now, even Maud. Beside me, Nell sighs and covers my hand for a second, squeezing my fingers. I’m not sure if she’s offering sympathy or asking me to calm down.

Jonah makes a guttural, frustrated sound, and his hand clenches into a tight ball on the table. ‘Why would I? What difference would it have made? It was just Freddie and me there that night, no one else got hurt. There was no fucking way I was going to let the last thing anyone ever said about him be that he caused it himself, that he was careless for even a fraction of time.’ He glances around the table at the others and shakes his head. ‘Sorry,’ he sighs. ‘For swearing.’ His eyes are overbright when he looks back at me; I can see he’s hanging on by a thread. ‘I didn’t want to read it in the paper, for them to print that his death was needless, for people to use his story as a cautionary tale to be more careful.’

Something’s happening inside me. It’s as if my blood is heating up. ‘But you could have told me,’ I say slowly. ‘You should have told me.’

‘Should I?’ He raises his voice a little and Camilla flinches at the sight of his pain. ‘Why? So you could feel even more anguished than you already do, so you could curse him for being such a prat, so you could replay the image of him going a couple of miles over the speed limit and scrabbling around with the stereo?’

And then I can see it exactly. Freddie’s foot on the accelerator, his eye momentarily off the road.

‘Going too fast to get to my birthday dinner, you mean? You didn’t mention he was speeding, either.’

Jonah looks out of the window towards the school gates. So many years the three of us spilled in and out of those gates, carefree and