The Two Lives of Lydia Bird(32)

I nod, smiling softly. ‘I’m keeping it as a surprise.’

‘It’s good to see Jonah with someone like Dee,’ Freddie says, unbuttoning his shirt in our bedroom later.

‘Mm.’ I perch on the edge of the bed and carefully take my earrings out.

‘What?’ He pauses, his fingers on the buttons. ‘I thought you liked her?’

‘I do, I do,’ I say, a little too loudly to be convincing.

‘Doesn’t sound like it …’ he presses. He knows me too well, which is a good and a bad thing depending on the circumstance. ‘Did she say something to you in the loo? Graphic details about shagging like rabbits in the chemistry lab, maybe? If she did, tell me everything.’

‘No, of course not,’ I laugh, glad his guess is wide of the mark. ‘No, they seem pretty good together.’

He chucks his shirt on the chair and pushes me back on the bed, his chest a warm, welcome pressure. ‘Not as good as us,’ he says, his lips against my collarbone as his hand rucks up the hem of my dress.

‘No one is,’ I whisper, and he raises his head and kisses my mouth, fierce and tender all in one. It’s a combination that gets me every time.

‘I love you more than Naomi Campbell,’ he says, and I start to laugh because she’d eat him for breakfast and then spit him out.

‘I think you pick Naomi because she reminds you of Julia,’ I say.

‘Julia’s way more terrifying,’ Freddie says, his fingers on the small shell button at the back of my dress.

‘I love you more than Dan Walker,’ I say, throwing the BBC breakfast presenter into the mix.

‘He’s a new one,’ Freddie says musingly.

‘He was on the TV with puppies the other morning,’ I say, smoothing my hands over his shoulders. ‘It swung it for me.’

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I love you more than …’ He’s popped the button and slides my zip down the length of my spine. ‘Carol, the woman who does the weather.’

‘You can’t choose someone else from breakfast telly, it’s copying.’

He laughs; shrugs. ‘It’s your fault, I can’t think straight. Let’s skip straight to Keira and Ryan so you can take this dress off,’ he says, all thoughts of Dee and Jonah long gone. ‘I like you in it, but I’d like you a whole lot more out of it.’

I help him pull it over my head, relieved when we’re naked, when his skin is pressed against mine. Our love is too big to hide in a broom cupboard or behind a bike shed or in a chemistry lab. Call me conventional, but there is nowhere on earth I’d rather be than here in my Savoy bed with Freddie Hunter.





Sunday 16 September


‘Are you sure about this?’

It’s not much before nine on Sunday morning and Jonah and I are standing outside the local cat rehoming centre waiting for it to open.

‘You don’t sound as if you think it’s a good idea.’

Phil and Susan adopted a cat from this very shelter a couple of months ago and Phil is relentless in his photo-and-funny-story sharing of their sweet blue-eyed cat, so much so that he’s convinced me my life will be all-round better if it includes a feline friend. I’ve roped Jonah into coming to help me choose, mostly just for something I could ask him to do with me. We haven’t really spent any time together since the grief session. We’ve texted each other sporadically; he eventually replied to me just as I was on the edge of being offended, and then he sent me a text a month or so back when he was chaperoning his class at a theme park. He’s not a huge roller-coaster fan; he sent an image of himself in the front car, with the message:

Freddie would piss himself if he could see me now, the kids made me do it.



He was right. Freddie was always in the bigger-is-better camp when it came to roller-coasters and he found it hilarious if he could talk Jonah on to one with him. We knocked a few texts back and forth that day, but then nothing again, until I bumped into him on my lunch break on Friday. Before I knew what I was saying, I asked him to come with me this morning, and he couldn’t think of a reason to say no; so here we are, and someone has just opened the door for us.

‘Do you know what you’re looking for?’ he asks me as I fill in an application form.

Phil’s cat springs to mind. ‘Something pretty?’ I say. ‘One who’ll sit on my lap while I watch the TV.’

‘Boy or girl?’

‘Girl, I think,’ I say. I don’t really know why. I just fancy having another female around.

We file into the viewing area behind a green-haired girl who can’t be more than eighteen. The first pen has a brawl of black-and-white kittens and their tired-looking mother. I bypass it; I don’t have the time or the energy for a kitten. Jonah pauses by it, watching them, laughing as one of them hurls itself at the mesh and nips his finger.

Next along is a pair of adult black cats. There’s a note written on a whiteboard on the front of their cage telling potential new owners that these brothers need to stay together. Another no-no, so I move along.

‘Not these guys either?’ Jonah looks in on them. ‘Sorry, boys.’

‘I can’t manage two,’ I say, looking into the next cage along. The note tells me this is Betty, a two-year-old tortoiseshell.