‘You’re the love of my life, Freddie Hunter,’ I say, forcing the words out clear and true.
He lowers his head and kisses me. ‘I love you more than Keira Knightley.’ He laughs softly as he plays our game.
‘That much, huh?’ I say, rounding my eyes because we usually start low and work our way up – to Keira in his case and Ryan Reynolds in mine.
‘That much,’ he says, blowing me a kiss as he backs out of the bedroom.
Panic rises from my gut, hot and bilious, and I curl my toes into the floorboards to stop myself from running after him. I listen to his footfall on the stairs, the sound of the front door closing, and I run to the bedroom window to watch him half stride, half jog towards the corner. Too late, I open the windows, struggling with the old catches, yelling his name even though I know he won’t hear me. Why did I let him leave? What if I never find him again? I clutch the windowsill, my eyes pinned to his back. I almost expect him to fade away, but he doesn’t. He just rounds the corner, lost to the world, to some corporate coffee client, to the girl on platform 4, to all the places I cannot be.
Friday 11 May
My face is wet and my mouth is caked with what tastes like blood when I wake. I grab my phone and on closer inspection I’ve bitten the inside of my bottom lip quite badly; I can see the indentations my teeth have left and my lip has swollen as if I’ve had bad Botox. It’s not my best look – Freddie would have no doubt found my uncanny resemblance to a pufferfish amusing.
Freddie. I close my eyes, winded by the hyperrealism of my dream, or whatever it was. I can only liken it to when you go into an electrical store and see the latest, flashiest TV, the kind that costs a small fortune. The colours are brighter, the edges sharper, the sounds clearer. It was Technicolor brilliant, like watching a movie at an IMAX theatre. No, more like being in a movie at an IMAX theatre. It was too real to not be. Freddie was alive, and showering, and running late for work, and making Keira Knightley jokes once again.
I rack my brain, trying to dredge up a memory of any mention of a corporate coffee client before he died. I’m sure there wasn’t one; it’s as if Freddie has been living the last fifty-seven days behind a veil, going about his day-to-day business without a care in the world.
I’m once more overcome with the need to try to fall back asleep, to go and find him, back to the life where Freddie’s heart is still beating, but in that world he’s already out slaying the advertising business with a flash of his cufflinks and a smile. For someone who didn’t even want to go to bed last night, I now find myself absolutely unwilling to get up and face the new day. It takes me a good fifteen minutes to convince myself that leaving the bedroom is even a remotely good idea. In the end, I strike a bargain with myself: if I get up and do Friday, if I shower, eat and maybe even leave the house for a while, then I can take another pill. I’ll have an early dinner, come back to bed, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get to spend the evening with my love.
Saturday 12 May
‘I’ve been dreaming about Freddie,’ I say, wrapping my hands around my coffee mug for comfort rather than warmth. Elle looks at me across the kitchen table, nodding slowly.
‘I do that every now and then too,’ she says, stirring sugar into her drink. ‘I’d be more surprised if you didn’t dream about him, to be honest.’
‘You would?’ I look at her sharply, willing her to meet my eye and pay full attention because this is important. ‘It hasn’t happened to me before.’ Disappointment twists in my gut. What’s happening to me feels too intimate to be a run-of-the-mill kind of thing.
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.’