The Two Lives of Lydia Bird - Josie Silver Page 0,8

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