The Two Lives of Lydia Bird(100)

‘Need a bed for the night, old timer?’

He tolerates an ear rub in return for dinner, and although I open the back door to give him the option, he decides not to chance the rain. I take my cuppa up to bed to read, leaving him asleep on Freddie’s armchair.





Thursday 31 October


‘There you go,’ I say, sitting back on my haunches to admire my handiwork. ‘It looks suitably hideous.’

I’ve decorated Freddie’s grave with garish orange and purple flowers and a small ready-carved pumpkin for good measure. I realize it’s not in the best taste to make a thing of Halloween in a graveyard, but Freddie loved it; Frankenstein’s monster was his default fright-night alter-ego. I know he’d get a laugh out of this if he could see me now. In fact, he’d urge me to add fake cobwebs and cut-out ghosts, really go all out. I still visit him often, weather permitting. It’s where I feel closest to him, or where he feels closest to me, especially these days.

‘Library’s going well,’ I say, clearing up the flower cuttings and wiping the stone. ‘Mary and Flo are hilarious – they can’t even switch the computer on between them so how they’re going to manage the new system is anyone’s guess.’

My workdays are different now, but not in a bad way. I’ve traded my upstairs colleagues for two ladies from the local sheltered accommodation unit; Mary can’t see very well and Flo is stone deaf in one ear, but all the same, they’ve folded me into their circle. I haven’t actually been to their bingo evening yet, but I can see it coming. They’re the kind of women I hope Elle and I turn into when we’re in our nineties, full of stories and trouble, with better social lives than most twenty-one-year-olds.

‘You should see Charlotte,’ I say. ‘She seems to get bigger every day. She’s holding her head up herself and she has Elle’s eyes.’ I laugh. ‘She’s quite the madam. She filled her nappy when I was there this morning. I could hear David literally gagging when he changed her.’

I pull my coat sleeves down over my cold fingers. ‘Jonah’s still in LA,’ I say. ‘I think they’re haggling over the script.’

We still speak several times a week; his updates are invariably more exciting than mine. He’s fluent in the terminology of the world he moves in now, his conversation peppered with writing-room talk and contractual meetings.

‘He told me they’ve been having some creative differences,’ I say as if I have a clue what that means. ‘Reading between the lines, the studio are pushing for some changes to give it more mass appeal and Jonah has been fighting their urge to cookie-cutter his story. I don’t pretend to follow everything he tells me, but that’s the gist of it.’

He called me last night distinctly down in the mouth about it all. But life in LA has put the spring back in his step and the colour back in his cheeks, so I hope he can find a way to ride out this bump in the road.

‘I even offered to read it for him,’ I say. ‘Not that I know anything about it.’

But I did know Freddie, and if this story is about their friendship, perhaps I’ll see something Jonah doesn’t, or at least help him find a way to compromise.

Movement in the distance catches my eye. A funeral cortège pulls in through the gates, two black limousines rolling down the central path. I sigh into my scarf as they pass, my heart heavy for whoever sits in those cars today. I know the long road that lies ahead of them all too well and I can only stand sentry and send out quiet thoughts of solidarity and fortitude.

It’s bitter here this lunchtime, the nip of winter well and truly on the wind. I button my winter coat, then kiss my fingertips and touch Freddie’s gravestone before I head back into work.

It was never about getting over Freddie Hunter. It doesn’t work that way, despite what my doctor’s chart might say. There isn’t a handy grief blueprint. You don’t get over losing someone you love in six months or two years or twenty, but you do have to find a way to carry on living without feeling as if everything that comes afterwards is second best. Some people walk up mountains, others throw themselves out of planes. Everyone has to find their own way back and, if they’re lucky, they’ll have people who love them to hold their hand.





Monday 4 November


‘Any books for cranky babies?’

I look up from the box of books I’ve been unpacking and find Elle standing in front of me. She looks so much better than she did a few weeks ago, pink-cheeked from the cold and less drawn thanks to the fact Charlotte has started to sleep for longer stretches. I peep inside the pram at the bundled-up baby, positively angelic as she naps.

‘I won’t hear a word said against her,’ I say. I’ve spent as much time as I can with them lately, anxious to make up for the weeks I missed. Elle and I are mostly over the blip in our relationship; we need each other too much to let it linger. We had a couple of glasses of wine last weekend and snivelled together over a movie, and I found the words to tell her how sorry I was for not being there when she needed me.

‘Mum thought I had postnatal depression,’ she said. ‘But I knew it wasn’t that. I was just so bloody furious with you for leaving me and too knackered to be able to talk myself out of it.’

It’s only now that I understand how much my absence hurt her, and Mum too.