The Two Lives of Lydia Bird(7)

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loudest cheerleader and first-choice shoulder to cry on, and it’s only now that I catch a glimpse of how much I’ve withdrawn from her.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 David than she is of us. She was the same way with Freddie; she enjoys fussing over the men in that mothers-and-sons way.

‘Just us this morning, sorry,’ Elle says, not sorry.

Mum sighs theatrically. ‘You’ll just have to do. Although I was going to ask him to change the fuse in the plug on my hairdryer – it’s packed up again.’

Elle catches my eye behind Mum’s back and I know exactly what she’s thinking. David is terrible at anything DIY-related. It’s firmly Elle’s department if they have a shelf to go up or a room to be decorated or indeed a fuse to be changed, but our mother insists on clinging to the outdated suggestion that David is the man of the family and will do all the manly things. She could change her own fuse perfectly well: she raised us single-handedly and we didn’t die, she knows her earth wire from her live. She seems to think it imbues David with an added sense of self-worth if she looks to him for odd jobs, and he in turn looks to us with panicked, help-me eyes. He can’t even climb a step ladder without breaking out in a sweat; I had to distract Mum in the kitchen a few weeks ago while he held the ladder for Elle to clear out the guttering. It’s a game we all play. Freddie was the natural doer of the family, and in his absence David has been unwillingly promoted to family fixer.

‘I’m making cheese and onion omelettes,’ Mum says as we follow her down the hallway. ‘Testing out a new pan.’ She twirls a bright-pink frying pan at us.

‘The shopping channel again?’ Elle asks, dropping her bag by the kitchen table.

Mum shrugs. ‘It just happened to be on. You know I don’t usually buy off the telly, but Kathrin Magyar was so impressed by it, and the handle had just fallen off my old frying pan, so it seemed like it was fate.’

I suppress a smile and Elle looks away. We both know that Mum’s kitchen cupboards are stuffed with unnecessary purchases the super-glam TV presenter Kathrin Magyar has convinced her will revolutionize her life.

‘Want me to chop the onions?’ I say.

Mum shakes her head. ‘Already done. They’re in the mini-chopper.’