The Two Lives of Lydia Bird(69)

‘Don’t say anything to him,’ she says, poking her straw into the bottle she’s clutching. I’ve no idea what it is; it’s lurid blue and might not have been her best idea this evening.

‘To who?’

She pulls her straw from her drink and taps the dripping end against her ring finger. ‘To Jonah. Elle’s right. He’s Mick Jagger and I’m no Jerry Hall.’

I laugh, because it’s ridiculous. ‘He’s not Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall would eat him alive.’

Dee shakes her head, unconvinced. ‘I can’t even sing, Lydia. He needs Adele, not me. I’ll never be Adele.’

‘You made a pretty good Beyoncé just now,’ I point out. ‘Come on, stop feeling sorry for yourself.’ I give her shoulders a bolstering squeeze. ‘You’ve got great hair.’

‘No, you’ve got great hair,’ she sighs, dramatic. ‘You’ve got Jerry Hall hair.’

‘I wish I’d got her money,’ I joke to keep things light.

We fall silent and watch Jonah. He’s not even looking at the piano keys as he plays, his hands confident and assured, the crowd with him as they always are in here.

‘It’s in his DNA, isn’t it?’ Dee says. ‘Music, I mean.’

I nod, and I’m suddenly despairing from my hen-party heels to the tips of my ridiculous veil because she’s absolutely right. ‘In his bones,’ I say, thinking of how lost Jonah is in my waking life. If music is gone from his life, he’s in even more trouble than I thought. Maybe Wales is the best place for him after all.

Dee plonks herself down on the table behind us, and I excuse myself to go to the loo.

Locked in the cubicle, I sit on the lowered lid and pull my phone from my bag, as much from habit as the desire to check it. I need a breather.

My screen saver flashes up. Paris in the snow, rather than the stock image I’ve opted for in my waking life. I lean my head against the cubicle wall and stare at it, vividly remembering my numb hands around a cup of coffee, frozen icicles on cafe awnings, cold-lipped kisses. It feels strange when I think of it, more like a scene from a movie than my own life.

‘Okay in there?’

I jump. I’ve obviously been hogging the only cubicle for too long.

‘One minute,’ I say, shoving my phone back into my bag and flushing even though I haven’t used the loo. The woman waiting gives me a bit of a curious look when I emerge, and I can see why when I catch myself in the mirror – I’ve become a rocky-horror bride. Sighing, I rub cold water underneath my eyes with my fingertips to get rid of the mascara streaks. This isn’t how my hen night was supposed to end, crying in the bloody loo.

Outside, I stand in the cool, quarry-tiled corridor, unsure if I want to head back into the noisy bar or just call it a night and go home. The bar door opens, letting through a blast of music and raucous noise and Jonah Jones.

‘Are you hiding?’ he asks, smiling as the door closes behind him, blocking out the noise.

‘No,’ I say as he draws level with me. ‘Yes, a bit.’

‘You’re pretty difficult to miss in that thing.’ He points towards my veil as he leans his back against the opposite wall.

I nod and untangle it from my hair, wishing I’d binned it in the toilets.

‘It isn’t from my wallet,’ he says. ‘Just so you know.’

It takes me a second or two to realize he’s talking about the red-foiled condom.

‘Dee bought them.’

Do I want to imagine Dee buying strawberry condoms? Not really. ‘Nice of her,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ he says.

‘I like her a lot,’ I say, wondering if I should try to shoe-horn in the fact that Dee wants to marry him.

‘She’s easy to like,’ he says.

‘Easy to love?’ I say, keeping my tone light.

He makes a sound in his throat, a mix of frustration and exasperation. ‘I don’t think I even know what love is, Lydia,’ he says. ‘It’s easy for you, you and Fred have been together for ever. You’ve grown up together, you know? You have that short-hand. But what if you don’t have that history, if you don’t have all of those layers of life together to make up a strong foundation?’

It’s a lot more of an answer than I expected from him, so much so that I don’t have a ready reply.

‘Me and Dee, we don’t have any of that,’ he says. ‘I didn’t hold her hair back the first time she got drunk and threw up, and I didn’t carry her stupidly heavy rucksack back from school for her. I didn’t push her first car home for her when she beached it in a snowdrift and I didn’t let her copy my chemistry homework every Monday morning before class.’

He runs out of steam and I’ve no clue what to say because he’s just listed all the things that have made up our friendship over the years. He held my hair back in this very pub when we were seventeen years old, and he pushed my car in the snow when I called him in a blind panic.

‘You don’t need all those things to love someone, Jonah,’ I say in the end, not sure what he means. ‘What happened yesterday, or last week, or ten years ago … those things aren’t important. What really matters is now, here, today, tomorrow, next year. Some people fall in love at first sight and stay together for ever, other people marry their childhood sweetheart and end up in the divorce courts. You can’t predict life, Jonah, you can only try to make the best of whatever it throws at you.’