by Julie Cohen
‘Yes,’ said Jo. She searched Lydia’s face. ‘Yes?’
Lydia nodded.
‘She tells me this is at least partly in response to bullying at school and online.’
‘The school knows about it. They’ve promised to help.’ She felt Lydia scrutinizing her, the same way Jo had just scrutinized Lydia, and she turned to her and smiled. Incredible how she could smile now, here. ‘We’re all going to help. I’m not going to get distracted, Lydia. I’m going to be there.’
‘My experience is that she’ll need significant support at home.’
‘And she’ll get it. You’ll get it, Lydia. Your grandmother and I will give you everything you need. We love you and we want you to come home.’
‘I want to come home,’ said Lydia, and her voice was so small and vulnerable that Jo gathered her up in her arms, ignoring the pain from her shoulder.
‘Nothing,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘Nothing is more important than you.’
Chapter Forty-Four
Lydia
BEING HOME WAS weird. She felt like she’d been away for much longer than a few hours. She kept on walking around touching things: OscanIrie’s toys, the vase of flowers on the kitchen island, the soft face of her childhood teddy bear. Thinking that she might not have been able to touch any of this again. She might have been gone, nothing more than an absence.
OscanIrie were at their dad’s for a few days, but it felt as if they were going to be back any minute. Oscar’s wellies had toppled over by the front door, and Iris’s beaker sat on the draining board. Lydia ran her finger over the marks Iris had made in indelible marker on the tablecloth. If she’d jumped, would it have felt this way for the people she left behind? As if she were about to come back? She remembered it feeling that way when Dad had died. It was the reason she’d waited for the post and spirited away the letters. She’d been angry, as a child, at Jo for clearing Dad’s stuff away: getting rid of his clothes, his books, his shoes by the door. But picturing herself in her father’s place, she started to understand the reason for it. That brief moment of hope when you saw something that belonged to your dead loved one, that split second of believing they were still there, must be the worst torture in the world.
She wore pyjamas and slippers, as if she were ill. She kept on hugging her mum, all the time, even when her mum was in the middle of something – making tea or whatever. She was taller than her mother – she’d never even noticed it happening, growing taller than her mother – but she ducked her head under Jo’s chin as if she were still a little girl and inhaled her scent of rose perfume. She kept curling up on the sofa with Honor as well. Honor was bony and you had to be careful of her broken wrist, but she touched Lydia’s face and hair and hands in a way that made Lydia feel understood. It was Honor’s way of seeing.
‘Why didn’t you tell us you were blind?’ she asked her grandmother.
Her fingers trailed over Lydia’s mouth and chin. ‘I was afraid that admitting it would change everything. I would no longer be allowed to remain in my home; I would be seen as useless and vulnerable. And I was ashamed.’
She tilted Lydia’s face towards hers. Lydia could see now, that Granny H’s eyes moved too much; that she was looking out of the sides rather than the centre, looking at parts of things instead of wholes. She’d thought it was diffidence, before. It was sort of amazing how knowing one simple fact about a person could change your entire perspective of what they were like.
‘Did you feel that way,’ Granny H asked her, ‘about how you are? Ashamed? Afraid?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘But now it’s the truth that’s important.’ Honor lowered her voice. ‘Except about those flapjacks your mother made this morning. I had to hide mine under a cushion before it broke all my teeth.’
‘Mostly I felt alone,’ confessed Lydia. ‘All alone, even when I was with other people.’
‘Yes. Loneliness is powerful and terrible.’
She nodded against her grandmother’s meagre shoulder, feeling her fingers seeing her. Said, ‘I’ll read to you. You must miss reading.’
‘We shall have to teach you Russian.’
Now that she was without the mask she’d worn for so many years, she felt raw and delicate, like newly formed skin. But clean, in a way. She thought of the things that had been said to her and they still hurt, but it was at a distance almost. It was like the idea of exams going on without her: something that belonged to a different girl, a different life, somewhere far away from this house with her mother and her grandmother and her. Those moments on the bridge had been more real.
She would have to go out into the world without her mask soon. Not yet. But soon. She’d stand up straight, like Granny Honor did. She’d believe that things would get better, like Mum did.
And yet the ache for Avril didn’t go away. It stayed with her all the time. Sometimes it melted into the background, but mostly it was a sharp knife in her middle. The person she had lost; the person she was never getting back.
Chapter Forty-Five
Jo
TWO DAYS PASSED in the sort of slow-and-fast-motion that Jo remembered from having a newborn in the house. Lydia seemed to be sleeping a lot, mostly on the sofa under a blanket. Honor and Jo crept around her when she slept, and when she was awake, they held her and talked with her – about everyday things, normal things, but sometimes about things that mattered. Sometimes they just watched television.
Sara came round the first afternoon with an enormous takeaway curry and two bottles of white wine, which she put straight into Jo’s fridge. ‘I can’t cook for shit, not compared with you,’ she said, ‘but I can use a telephone, and you need to eat.’
‘Sara,’ Jo began, and then she faltered. ‘I … haven’t told you everything.’
‘OK,’ said Sara. ‘You will. Later. Right now, look after your daughter, and yourself. And don’t forget to eat.’
She hugged Jo before she left, and sent Bob round after work to cut Jo’s lawn.
When Jo held Lydia, she felt calm, with a sense of purpose. At other times, she drifted around the house and tried not to think. She missed Oscar and Iris, even though their absence was only temporary; her body craved their little bodies, their wriggling and their scent and their high voices. She missed Marcus. She found herself standing at her kitchen sink, looking over at his house through the gap in the hedge. She tended the sweet peas he had given her, removing dead heads, trimming the stems, replacing the water. They would fade very soon and so would this feeling. So would the memory of his hands on her, his clothes discarded on the floor, the cups of tea he had brought her in bed, every one of which he made sure she would drink right to the bottom. The way he looked at her and made her heart sing.
‘You’ll stay with us,’ she said to Honor in a hushed voice when Lydia had drifted off whilst watching EastEnders. ‘As long as you like. And that’s an order, not a request. I know you love your own house, but you always have a home with us here.’
Honor nodded curtly, but a compression of her lips revealed that she understood what Jo was saying and how much she meant it.
‘How long are you going to torture yourself?’ she asked, instead of replying to Jo.
‘I’m not torturing myself.’ Jo got up and went to put on the kettle. Honor followed her.
‘She needs a mother, not a martyr or a saint.’
‘I’m pretty far from a saint.’ Jo turned, folding her arms. ‘Is that why you suddenly offered to babysit, by the way? Because you knew I was seeing someone?’
‘At first that’s why I offered. Then I started to enjoy it.’
‘And you weren’t concerned about being in charge of children without being able to see?’
‘I was concerned. Especially after our trip on the scooter.’
‘You drove them on the scooter?’
‘Only once.’
‘This is what I mean. I didn’t even notice that I was leaving my children with a blind woman. Which by the way, Honor, was
not a good idea at all.’
‘I know. It was a mistake. I make them on occasion.’
‘You are a piece of work, Honor Levinson.’ Jo couldn’t help smiling when she said it.
‘And you are making yourself needlessly unhappy, Joanna Merrifield. You can be a mother and be a woman as well. Though I never seemed to achieve it, myself.’
‘No. Not now. My children need me.’
‘Talk to me again when you haven’t had sex in forty-five years,’ said Honor, ‘and tell me then whether you think you’ve made the right decision.’
She coaxed Lydia out for a walk on Saturday morning. In some ways, it was lovely, having Lydia so dependent, but she knew it couldn’t last. She watched as Lydia tilted her head up to soak in the sun and she thought about her daughter going back to school, facing all those people. Lydia coming out as gay to everyone. Lydia living the rest of her life, fighting her battles, moving away, becoming an adult.
Lydia would do it, because she was clever and beautiful and brave. And then Oscar would do it, fighting his own particular battles, and then Iris. They would all leave home, leave Jo behind, and that was exactly what should happen. The normal order of things. Jo would have to open her hands and let them fly.
And what would she be left with then?
Instead of following this line of thought, she walked with Lydia and asked her, ‘How long have you known?’
‘I always knew I was different,’ said Lydia. ‘And I knew I was in love with Avril from the moment I met her.’
‘Like me with your father.’ And like Marcus and me. Retrospectively, she could recognize that jolt she’d felt on first meeting him, that afternoon over the hedge. The way she’d been drawn to him in her kitchen. When she’d been twenty she’d called it love, and when she was forty she called it desire. But it was the same feeling. Different, in a million little ways, but also the same.
‘Except it won’t have a happy ending,’ said Lydia. ‘She’s really angry with me, Mum. She thinks I lied to her.’
‘Maybe she’s ashamed that she never noticed. I know that I am.’
‘I didn’t want you to know. I mean, I did want you to know, and I got angry that you didn’t guess, but it wasn’t really your fault. I was working very hard to hide it.’
Keats Way was bathed in sunlight: the neat hedges, the gravel drives, the mowed lawns – all a perfect façade for the secrets that they had each hidden, all three women in that too-new, blank and cluttered house. ‘We have to tell the truth now,’ Jo said. ‘Even if it hurts. We have to trust each other.’
Lydia nodded. ‘That’s why I left my diary for you to read. It might even be why I kept it in the first place. I wanted people to read it, and understand me. But it was easier to write it than to say it. Mum?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘That last bit I wrote. The bit about Dad.’
‘I read it. It’s the anniversary tomorrow. Ten years. It was beautiful, what you wrote. I could see the love for your father shining through.’ Jo took Lydia’s hand. ‘He suffered from depression. He never let you see it when he was alive, and I never told you about it after he was gone. It wasn’t his fault, and it didn’t mean he loved us any less. In fact, I think it meant that he loved us even more.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘I should have told you. I only shared the good parts, but you deserve to know the bad parts, too.’
‘I think what I wrote was wrong. That’s one thing I was thinking about when I was up on the bridge, before you came. I said that he wasn’t afraid, because I needed him not to have been afraid. But he must have been.’
‘He was afraid for the other man. For Adam. Not for himself.’
‘But when he fell, he must have been scared. Weren’t you scared? When you almost fell?’
Jo stopped walking and closed her eyes. For ten years she had been trying not to think of that moment of terror: Stephen’s last moment, the moment of falling. In daylight hours she had thought, instead, of moving on, of loving him and remembering him, of celebrating the life he had saved. She baked cakes for Adam every year, raised Lydia every day. She saw Stephen’s features on his daughter.
But at night, she thought of the scream he must have birthed, the air torn from his throat, the rush of the ground, the knowledge that this was over, his life was over. His black hole claiming him at last.
When she had nearly fallen, she had looked up, not down. She had thought of Lydia and of Oscar and of Iris. She had thought of Marcus – yes, him, too. She had thought of Stephen and Honor. Not the ending, not the life over, but the love that was for ever.
‘I knew that you would catch me,’ she said to her daughter.
Chapter Forty-Six
Lydia
THEY WERE ON their way back from their walk, laughing about something that Oscar had said on the phone the night before, his sudden obsession with giant space ants, when Lydia saw her walking towards them. She was in shorts and a sweatshirt, sunglasses pushed up onto her head, and she was carrying a plastic cup with a straw in it. Lydia’s heart made a great thump and she stopped walking.
Avril walked faster until she met them. ‘Hi, Lyds,’ she said, her cheeks flushed. ‘I just … I just came from your house. Your gran said you weren’t home. Hi, Mrs M. Gosh, did you hurt your arm?’
‘Hi, Avril,’ said Mum, and she touched Lydia on the elbow. ‘I’ll go in and get that banana bread started.’ And she left the two of them together, on the pavement in the sunshine, looking at each other, almost as if they’d just met for the first time.
‘She’s been baking like crazy,’ Lydia told Avril. ‘And her friend brought round all this curry. If I don’t start running again soon I’m going to need that stupid calorie-counting app.’
‘I brought you a Frappuccino,’ said Avril, holding out the cup. ‘I didn’t know what else … did you really try to throw yourself off that bridge? Really, the same one where your dad fell?’
Lydia shrugged. ‘Yeah. I didn’t, though.’ She took the cup from Avril, being careful not to touch her fingers, and sipped through the straw. It was mocha, her favourite. ‘Do you want to go to the park?’
The two of them walked side by side around the corner and into the park. Without needing to speak, they turned left and walked up the slight hill, ignoring the winding path and going straight to the top. Lydia dropped onto the bench and Avril sat beside her. This was the spot where you could see nearly the whole park: the football pitch, the playpark, the pond where the little kids liked to feed the ducks. It was where they had always sat on a Saturday afternoon, and sometimes after school.
‘I’m sorry,’ Avril said. ‘I’m so sorry. I was angry with you, but not about— I don’t care if you’re gay, I don’t care who you fancy. I was just angry because you didn’t tell me. I didn’t think you would … I didn’t know it would get so bad.’
‘We go to school with some real dickheads.’
‘Lyds, they are awful. I told everyone who I saw to shut up, and Harry is doing it, too. School have been calling people’s parents. Erin’s, and Sophie’s. Darren’s already been suspended, though there doesn’t seem much point seeing as we’re only going in for exams. What are you going to do about exams?’
‘We’re not sure yet. My mum’s going in to talk with them on Monday. Maybe I can take them somewhere else, and make the rest up in January.’
‘I miss you,’ said Avril. ‘I miss you a lot. I’ve been trying to ring you for days.’
‘My phone’s turned off.’
‘Yes. I should have come before, but …’
‘You didn’t know what to say to your friend who had tried to pitch herself off a bridge. It’s OK, I don’t think I’d know what to say either.’
‘Why’d you do it, Lydia? Was it them? Was it me? Was it because I was so angry with you? Because me and Harry were spending so much time together and you were lonely? Was it because Bailey didn’t fancy you?’
‘It was a lot of things. It wasn�
��t Bailey; Bailey is a cow. I don’t want to jump off a bridge any more.’
‘Good.’
Lydia drank her mocha. Usually Avril would have asked her for a sip by now, and ended up drinking half of it. She wasn’t sure if she was letting Lydia have it all because it had been a peace-offering, or because of what Avril now knew about Lydia. Like it was too close to kissing to share the same straw.
She thought of all the guilty times when she had savoured this kind of kiss by proxy. All the stolen glances and touches, all the secret feelings. That precious part of herself that she had been hiding from the person she loved most in the world.
‘So we’re friends again?’ asked Avril.
‘Yeah.’
‘And if you find a girlfriend who’s not a cow maybe we can have double dates together?’
‘Maybe. Though probably not. There’s not much choice around here.’
‘If you want to go to college instead of staying at school for A levels, I’ll do that with you. I asked my mum and she said I could.’
‘What about Harry?’
‘Harry might anyway.’ Avril blushed. ‘I know you don’t like him, but he did stand up for you, Lyds, afterwards. He really did, and I didn’t even ask him.’
Lydia nodded. She pulled her knees up to her chest on the bench and rested her chin on one of them. There was a group of boys playing football on the pitch, and some girls chatting near the pond. They were too far away to recognize; they were just normal people, doing normal things. Sitting up here, she could almost picture herself rejoining them one day.
‘It’ll be good not to hide,’ she said. ‘It was pretty tiring.’
‘Do you …’ Avril bit her lip. ‘OK, I’m only going to ask you this once, because it’s sort of weird, and you don’t even have to answer me if you don’t want to. But you’re my best friend so I have to know.’
