The Two Lives of Lydia Bird - Josie Silver Page 0,56

I recognize: photographs and familiar holiday mementos that cost hardly anything but have been rendered priceless by absence.

Mum picks out a photograph and lays it flat, her fingers absently smoothing a tiny bent corner.

‘I think this is the first photograph I have of the two of you together,’ she says. ‘You’d have been about fifteen.’

‘Fourteen,’ I say softly. ‘I was fourteen.’

She nods, her eyes on the photo. ‘I worried he was too much of a lad, at first,’ she says, laughing a little, shaky. ‘Too likely to break your heart.’

I can’t recall the photograph being taken, but I can vividly remember our first long, sun-filled summer together. I lived every day on a delicious knife-edge, drunk on a giddy first-love cocktail. I stare into my own eyes in the photograph when Mum pushes it across the table and I briefly wonder if it would have been better if she’d been right about Freddie, if he’d broken my heart that summer instead of fourteen years later. I don’t mean that. I can’t imagine how my life might have been without him. Colder, certainly, and duller. Less … less everything. Just less.

‘Look at Jonah’s hair,’ Elle laughs, and I’m grateful to her for trying to lighten the mood.

‘Perms were in fashion, back then,’ David offers in Jonah’s defence, running a hand over his own already-balding head. I can’t really remember David with hair; he’s blond anyway so his transition from buzz cut to balding wasn’t notably stark.

‘That’s not a perm,’ I say, a small laugh making its way out. ‘It’s Jonah’s actual hair.’

‘Shit,’ David mutters into his mug.

Freddie has his arm slung across my shoulders in the photo and Jonah is there too, looking away, distracted by something off-camera.

I gaze at it, warmed by vague school memories. Jonah with his big dark curls, my shock of blonde hair, and Freddie grinning at the centre, already the charismatic frontman even at fourteen.

‘Remember when he gave me this?’ Mum hands me a fragile fan. It’s blood red, made of intricately carved bone and paper.

‘He picked it especially for you,’ I say, remembering him laughing to himself as he rummaged through the different-coloured fans on a beachside stall in Crete.

‘For your hot flushes,’ I say, at the same time as Mum says, ‘For my hot flushes.’

She shakes her head and swipes away a rogue tear. ‘Cheeky so-and-so.’

There’s a photo from that same holiday, Freddie in neon-lime swim shorts and a baseball cap, me with scorched shoulders in a pale-blue sundress I still have somewhere in the loft because it reminds me of our first foreign trip together.

Elle drags the blue-and-white box towards her. ‘This is from me,’ she says, pulling out a birthday card. I remember it easily; it’s her thirtieth birthday card from February just gone. I spent an age searching for the perfect ‘sister’ card, and opening it now I cringe as I read the rambling message I wrote for her after an evening at the pub. But it isn’t my message that makes the card box-worthy, it’s Freddie’s red felt-tip pen missive.

‘Happy Birthday, Smelly Ellie, my favourite makeshift sister! You don’t look a day over forty!’

‘Makeshift sister,’ she whispers, then sighs, juddery and long. ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ I say, closing the card again slowly. Elle and I have always been content for it to be just the two of us, but over the years Freddie came pretty close to being her brother, much in the same way David has to me. He reaches for the box now and digs out a photograph of himself with Freddie, both of them sporting truly hideous Christmas jumpers.

‘This is the one year I was the indisputable winner,’ he says, unable to keep the note of pride from his voice. I can’t argue; he’s dressed in a lurid lemon-and-lime-striped hand-knitted jumper that reaches below his knees and is splattered with rainbow-bright woollen 3D adornments: sleighs, Santas, gift boxes, reindeer. It’s one hundred per cent hideous in both style and scale. David had it especially made, right down to the baubles embroidered with all of our names. That jumper quickly became the stuff of Christmas legend in our family. Then David reaches inside the box again and hands me the knitted Christmas bauble bearing Freddie’s name.

‘I took it off the jumper this morning.’ He bites his lip. ‘Wanted it to be in the box.’

I fold my fingers around it and a sob rises sharply up my windpipe, urgent and unwilling to stay down, and I find I can’t put