The Two Lives of Lydia Bird(31)

‘I wouldn’t dare laugh at you,’ he says, mock-innocent.

She rolls her eyes towards me, good-natured. ‘Tell him, Lydia, yoga can be just as demanding as football and rugby.’

Freddie throws his hands out to the sides and grins. ‘Come on. Half an hour of over-sixties stretching doesn’t compare with ninety minutes of pure adrenaline on the pitch. Am I right or am I right, Joe?’

Freddie is the only person in the world who calls Jonah Joe.

For his part, Jonah looks between Dee and Freddie, both of them hoping their connection with him sways him over to their way of thinking.

‘I’m too compromised to be an honest judge.’ He laughs, good-natured, as he drinks from his beer bottle. ‘Looks like it’s down to you, Lyds.’

There’s something different about Jonah tonight, and it takes me a couple of seconds to place it. It’s not just because I’m seeing him without the hairline scar above his eyebrow or the smudge of shadows beneath his dark, soulful eyes. He looks more alive, somehow; there’s colour in his cheeks rather than gauntness. But it’s not just that. He looks … I don’t know, more relaxed? And then it comes to me: Jonah Jones looks like himself again. He’s got his laid-back, feet-in-the-sand look back, and it’s only now I see him here that I realize how much I miss him in my waking life. I think all of this as they stare at me, waiting on my answer. I can barely remember the question.

‘What’s it to be?’ Freddie says, bumping his thumb over my knuckles on the tabletop. ‘Yoga or football?’

Dee looks at his hand on mine and shakes her head. ‘You’re trying to influence her decision. Cheap move, Freddie Hunter.’

‘I am not,’ he blusters, faking offence. ‘I just can’t keep my hands off her.’

I decide to relax into the evening and go with it. ‘Well, firstly I’ll defend yoga and say there’s definitely more to it than gentle stretching, but because it’s your birthday, I pick football.’

‘Never in doubt,’ Jonah says, shaking his head as Dee laughingly punches me on the bicep.

‘What happened to girl code?’ she says.

‘Any other day but his birthday,’ I smile, reaching for the bottle of wine they’ve already ordered.

‘So how’s the big secret romance thing going?’

Freddie looks at Dee as he finishes off my dessert. I wasn’t quite done with it, but he’s had his way because it’s his birthday.

She looks at Jonah, brows raised across the table at him, and I swear he practically blushes.

‘I think they’ve probably sussed us,’ she says. ‘It’s pretty difficult to keep anything under the radar for long in a school. It’s a hotbed for gossip.’

‘People love to talk.’ Jonah shrugs. ‘I don’t see that it matters to anyone else, really.’

Dee swirls her wine and looks at him under her lashes. ‘I do quite like the sneaking around though, Mr Jones.’

‘Hello.’ Laying his spoon down, Freddie rubs his hands together, interested. ‘Have you two been up to no good behind the bike sheds?’

Jonah rolls his eyes and looks like he’d prefer to change the subject. Dee doesn’t though.

‘No …’ She looks at me conspiratorially, and then back at Jonah. ‘Well, not exactly.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Freddie says, enjoying making Jonah squirm. ‘In the broom cupboard?’

‘Cliché,’ Dee says, then after a beat, she adds, ‘In the chemistry lab!’ Her voice rises up the excitement scale, her tongue loosened by wine.

‘Dee,’ Jonah warns, light-hearted. He looks across the table at me and pulls a bit of a ‘sorry about this’ face. I don’t know why; he doesn’t need to apologize to me. I understand though. Our dynamic has always been that we band together if Freddie is being a wind-up, which right now he is, unwittingly aided by Dee.

‘I mean, we weren’t doing it or anything, just messing around,’ she says. ‘I mean, I was still wearing my –’

‘So, you two, how’s the wedding planning going?’ says Jonah. He gives me a pleading stare, so I do him a favour and pick up the bone he’s thrown.

‘Yeah, all good,’ I say, glad to have gleaned a few bits of information from a conversation with Elle and Mum when I last saw them here. ‘We’ve provisionally booked the barn and our rings are stashed in Mum’s safe.’

Don’t ask me why she has a safe. It’s one of those hidden-in-a-fake-book things – from the shopping channel, of course. The worst of it was that she didn’t even own a bookcase; she had to buy a new one plus a set of encyclopaedias just to disguise the safe.

‘And your dress?’ Dee says, shiny-eyed.

I reach for my wine glass, put off. The honest answer is I don’t have a clue about my wedding dress. I know I’ve found the one, and that Mum has insisted on paying for it. It’s all ordered and not due into the shop for some months, another thing that happened when I wasn’t here. I’d so like to have been. I can imagine Mum in tears and Elle not far behind her. I bet Auntie June came too. My mum and her sister are like an older version of me and Elle; she’d have been sitting alongside Mum passing her tissues from her best handbag.