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a shelf to go up or a room to be decorated or indeed a fuse to be changed, but our mother insists on clinging to the outdated suggestion that David is the man of the family and will do all the manly things.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.’
I nod, noticing it on the kitchen surface. I don’t ask if that was from the shopping channel too, because of course it was, along with the motorized cheese grater she’s used for the Cheddar.
I make coffee instead, thankfully unaided by superfluous gadgetry.
‘Did you try the pills?’ Mum asks, cracking eggs into a bowl.
I nod, winded by the reminder of Freddie.
She rifles through her jug of kitchen implements until she finds the whisk. ‘And?’
‘And they work.’ I shrug. ‘I slept through.’
‘In bed?’
I sigh, and Elle shoots me a small smile. ‘Yes, in bed.’
Relief smooths the lines from Mum’s forehead as she whisks the eggs. ‘That’s good. So no more sleeping on the sofa, okay? It’s no good for you.’
‘No, promise.’
Elle lays the table, three place settings. Our family swelled to five, and now it’s reduced to four, but in its purest form it has always been three: Mum, Elle and me. We don’t really know our dad. He walked out five days before my first birthday, and Mum has never really forgiven him. Elle was a lively three-year-old, I was a handful, and he decided that life with three females wasn’t his gig and moved to Cornwall to take up surfing. He’s that kind of man. Every few years he sends news of where he is, and he even turned up on the doorstep unannounced once or twice when we were still at school. He’s not a bad person, just a flighty one. It’s nice to know he’s there, but I’ve never really needed him in my life.
‘I’m thinking of buying a new kitchen table,’ Mum says as she places our plates down and takes her seat.
Elle and I both stare at her. ‘You can’t,’ I say.
‘No way,’ Elle says.
Mum raises her eyes to the ceiling; she’d obviously anticipated resistance to the idea. ‘Girls, this one’s on its last legs.’
We’ve sat around this battered, scrubbed wooden table our entire lives, always in the exact same spots. It’s seen our school-morning breakfasts, our favourite weekend bacon and beetroot sandwiches and our family rows. Our mother is by and large a creature of habit; her home hasn’t changed much over the years, and Elle and I have come to rely on it staying more or less the same. Come to think of it, you could say the same for Mum – she’s had the same ash-blonde bob for as long as I can recall. Elle and I inherited our heart-shaped faces from her and we all share the same deep dimples when we laugh, as if someone screwed their fingers into our cheeks. She is our safety net and this house is our sanctuary.
‘We did our homework on this table.’ Elle lays a protective hand on it.
‘Every Christmas dinner I’ve ever had has been around this table,’ I say.
‘But it’s drawn all over,’ Mum tries.
‘Yes,’ Elle says. ‘With our names from when I was five years old.’
She gouged each of our names deep into the surface with a blue ballpoint not long after she learned her letters. The story goes that she was terribly proud and couldn’t wait to show Mum what she’d done; they’re still there now, childish capitals beneath our place mats. Gwen. Elle. Lydia. A scrawny little bird after each of them.
‘Would you like to take it to your house?’ Mum says, looking at Elle, who has a screamingly tidy home where everything matches or complements, and absolutely nothing is battered or gouged.
‘It belongs here,’ Elle says, firm.
Mum looks at me. ‘Lydia?’
‘You know I don’t have the room,’ I say. ‘But please let it stay. It’s part of the family.’
She sighs, wavering. I can see she knows it’s true. I don’t think she really wants to lose it either. ‘Maybe.’
‘Omelettes are lovely,’ Elle offers.
A thought occurs to me. ‘Did Kathrin Magyar sell you a new dining table?’
Mum reaches for her coffee and pats the tabletop like an old friend. ‘I’ll cancel the order.’
Kathrin Magyar might be good, but she never stood a chance against the Bird family collective.
I look down at Freddie’s grave, at a bunch of cellophane-wrapped roses laid along the base of the headstone, garish beside the bedraggled arrangement of daisies and wildflowers I placed there myself last week. Someone else must have been. A colleague, or perhaps Maggie, Freddie’s mum, although she doesn’t come that often – she finds it too distressing. He was her beloved only child, so much so that she found it a struggle to include me in her circle of love. She wasn’t unkind, it was more that she took underlying pleasure in having Freddie to herself. We’ve met up a couple of times since Freddie’s death, but I’m not sure it does either of us any service. Hers is a different sort of loss, one I can’t relate to.
The fact that I don’t find it maudlin myself has surprised me; I appreciate having a place to come and talk to him. My eyes flicker back to the roses as I open the fresh flowers I picked out at the florist on the way here. Sweet Williams, freesias and some interesting silvery green foliage. Never anything as obvious as roses. Roses are for Valentine’s Day, the romance-by-numbers choice of the unimaginative lover. Throw in a teddy and the job’s a good one. Mine and Freddie’s love was a world away from card-shop clichés and helium hearts. It was big and real, and now I feel like half a person, as if an artist turned their pencil upside down and erased half of me from the page too.
‘Who’s been to visit you, Freddie?’ I say, settling my bum down on the grass, my bag at my feet. There’s something terribly depressing about keeping a bag in the boot of the car with cemetery essentials, isn’t there? An empty water bottle I fill up at the tap, scissors to cut the flowers to size, cleaning wipes, those kinds of things.