The Two Lives of Lydia Bird(97)

He sold it to me as a challenge, a chance to get my teeth into overhauling the place, a project. And I’m grateful, I really am. I’ll still be at the town hall and able to see everyone upstairs, though just in passing, rather than working together every day. I won’t lie, I feel like the black sheep of the family being banished downstairs for my misdemeanours, but I know the reality is that I’m lucky to still have a job at all.

And, actually, when I think about it, taking on the library revamp might be good for me. There’s a couple of part-time staff to manage and the system needs digitalizing. I could start some reading events. Meetings, author visits. A book club, even. Phil really wants me to see it as something I can take charge of and make my own. He even gave me twenty quid out of petty cash and told me to go and buy myself a planner and pens from the fancy stationery shop in town. I appreciate the gesture. I’ll try to do as he suggests: make some plans for the future.

‘Support her head,’ Elle says, lowering a naked and rather angry-looking Charlotte into my waiting arms. We’re kneeling on the floor in Elle’s bathroom; she’s allowed me up to help with bath time, an olive branch of sorts. The baby bath is inside their regular bathtub, and as I lower the wriggling baby into the water, miraculously, she calms.

‘She loves it,’ Elle says, resting her face on her arms beside me as she gazes down at her daughter. ‘I bathed her four times the other day just to stop her from crying.’

‘She’ll be a mermaid,’ I say.

‘A prune, more like,’ Elle says.

I smile, scooping up handfuls of warm water to ladle over Charlotte’s tummy. She really is a water baby, it’s like magic.

‘Maybe it feels womb-like,’ I say.

Elle reaches out and tickles Charlotte’s foot. ‘Maybe. Thank you. For being there for me when she was born. For us.’

I hear the struggle she has to get the words out and my throat thickens as I remember the day Charlotte was born. My wedding day.

‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ I say.

And it’s then that I know. If I’d had to make a conscious choice between the wedding and delivering Charlotte, hard as it is to acknowledge, I’d have stayed here in this world. The baby’s tiny fingers grip around one of mine, acknowledgement that there’s more holding me here than there is for me there. That it’s time to face up to the inevitable.

I’ve been through a catastrophic, all-consuming event. The worst thing happened. I lost the love of my life, and then, miraculously, I found my way back to him again – but at what cost?

In the beginning it was dazzling, all of my dreams come true, and it’s taken until now to understand that however beautiful it was, it’s unsustainable – for both the woman I am here and the woman I am there. The woman I am there should enjoy her long, wonderful life with Freddie. God knows I need to believe there’s a world out there where Freddie and I make it, where we’re happy and have time to build a family of our own, where we’re lucky enough to grow old together.

Travelling back and forth, visiting a place where my grief doesn’t exist, where extraordinary pain hasn’t irrevocably changed me … it was magnificent. Honestly, it was. Who in the world wouldn’t grab the chance to see their lost loved one again? And not just once, but often?

The human brain is wired to cope with grief. It knows even as we fall into unfathomably dark places, there will be light again, and if we just keep moving forward in one brave straight line, however slowly, we’ll find our way back one day. But I didn’t do that. I stumbled in every which direction, blindfolded, two steps forward, three steps back. The pills have been my comfort, my crutch and my escape, but they’ve also been the blindfold sending me in the wrong direction. For every version of me that exists, I need to remove my blindfold now. I need to say goodbye.





Tuesday 1 October


I knew Freddie wouldn’t be here, of course. I could have waited a couple of weeks in the hope that he’d be back from Rio, but there are no guarantees when that would be and, now my decision is made, I need to see it through.

The bedside lamp is on, a low night-light glow, and the clock tells me it’s just after five in the morning. My iPad is where I hoped it would be, on Freddie’s pillow. I’m a night-time reader, sometimes a middle-of-the-night reader when I can’t sleep, which is often the case when I’m alone. I reach for it now and check the battery level. Eighty-seven per cent. That’s okay. So I’m here, in our beautiful Savoy bed, and I have my iPad ready. FaceTime isn’t the way I’d ever have imagined or wished to say goodbye, but it’s all I have. Coming back here again after tonight isn’t an option I can allow myself.

I put the iPad down and lie back against the pillows. I can afford a few minutes to myself before I make the call. I’m warm and comfortable, and for a few minutes I soak in the stillness, try to slow down my breathing, to be calm in these last moments because they matter so much.

And then, when I’m sure I’m ready, I prop myself up on the pillows and reach for the iPad.

He’s not going to pick up. I feel my calmness start to ebb as the ringtone beams out somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the world. He’s not going to pick up. The beginnings of panic tighten my throat; I can feel my heartbeat racing too fast as I gaze at my pale reflection on the screen. I brace myself for the message to flash up telling me Freddie Hunter is unavailable. Of course he is; it’s the middle of the night in Rio.