The Day Of Second Chances (39 page)

‘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.

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 Frappucchino,' 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.'

But after that Avril just sat there, watching the boys playing football. They could hear them shouting good-natured abuse to each other. Lydia felt a burning in her chest. She knew why Avril couldn't say it.

This was the moment, the moment she'd been thinking about for almost as long as she'd known Avril. The moment where she was supposed to open her heart and let the truth shine out. Where she was supposed to be brave enough not to care about the consequences, where she was supposed to wait, holding her breath and hoping for the answer that would make her happy rather than the answer that she knew was the truth.

Her mother had said: it was the time to trust. The time to be truthful to each other, and let love sort everything out.

But there were all those other moments with Avril. Not the ones where Lydia was silently wanting, where she yearned to touch but couldn't. There were the moments of laughing together, or watching a television programme in separate houses while they were texting to each other, throwing Maltesers into each other's mouths and missing. The moment where Avril had asked Lydia to walk into school with her that first day because both of them were invisible and visible in the wrong sort of ways, because both of them wanted to be normal and be liked.

Those moments were truth, too. And they were precious enough not to be lost to another kind of truth.

‘No, you're not my type,' she said to Avril. And when she smiled at her, it was mostly a real smile. One that would become more real as time went on. Because she was beginning to discover that there was a sort of freedom in hopelessness. It let you look for other, new things to hope for.

AFTER AVRIL HAD
gone home to revise, Lydia walked around the corner to her house. She sped up when she saw the postman, out of instinct almost, and intercepted him before he turned into her drive. He gave her a small bundle of post, circulars and bills. ‘Nice day for it,' he said to her, and walked off on the rest of his round. Lydia put the bundle under her arm. Mum was on her knees in the flower bed near the front door, weeding with her good hand. She glanced up and Lydia knew that she'd been watching out for her.

‘You shouldn't be doing that with your shoulder,' Lydia said. She held out the post and her mother shook her head.

‘Dirty hands. Anyway, I wanted to get this done before Richard brings Oscar and Iris back tomorrow. How did it go with Avril?' She wiped hair away from her forehead, leaving a smear of soil.

‘Yeah. We're friends.' Her mother studied her. ‘It's OK,' Lydia said. ‘I mean, it's not OK, but I'd rather have her as a friend than not having her at all.'

‘Are you sure she isn't …?'

‘No, Mum, she isn't. You really have no Gaydar whatsoever, do you?'