‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘You know what . . . Who is making you smile like a cat?’
‘Like a cat? That just sounds odd, doesn’t it? Maybe Cheshire is a funny place or something?’
‘Stop avoiding the question.’
‘It’s a . . . friend.’
‘A friend?’ I grin. ‘Like a girrrrlllfriend?’
‘Oh shush.’
‘Oh my God, you’re blushing!’
Kerry slams the rest of the orange into the bin, the stainless-steel clang of the lid closing ringing around the room.
‘It’s . . . look, it’s early days yet. She’s a writer. We were both working in the pub and got talking. It’s no big deal. Right, let’s go before we miss the start. I hear that the first five minutes is terrifying.’
‘Right. Good. I mean, the scarier the better.’
Nessa walks ahead of me and I stop myself from turning to my dead sister and checking that she’s OK, that she is happy that we are all moving on without her.
Chapter Seventy-One
Jennifer
‘OK, so . . . our killer playlist,’ Kerry begins, sitting next to me on the sofa.
You. Are. Hilarious.
I know.
This is one of the things that Dr Popescu has suggested in preparation for Kerry’s . . . departure. We’ve spoken more and more about complicated grief and the more I hear about it the more I want to believe that this will be the way to get my life back . . . because if Kerry doesn’t go, well . . . I push back the image of the page in my notepad, the page with stained carpets and—
‘Well, obviously we’re going to go with Aretha first . . .’
I add ‘Respect’ to the playlist, scrunch up my nose and close my eyes, trying to think of songs that remind me of Kerry. Oh, I know!
I add ‘Someone Like You’ by Adele to the list.
She peers over my shoulder at my phone screen and laughs. We’d played that song over and over the first time we got drunk together. She starts singing, begging not to forget me.
I laugh. Chance would be a fine thing.
‘Can you remember the colour of my sick? It was bright orange.’ She shudders. ‘It was ages until I could stomach another cheese puff after that night.’ But a smile remains on her face. ‘I was only sixteen, it was very irresponsible of you.’
It’s a life skill! That’s why I was making you eat plenty of cheese puffs, I say in my defence. I was giving you weak white wine with lemonade, I didn’t know you were sneaking into the kitchen and helping yourself to Dad’s whisky every time I went to the loo.
‘Ooh, how about Olly Murs? You had such a crush on him!’
I still do.
‘What was that Bruno Mars song we played in the car the day you passed your driving test and took me to Barmouth?’
‘Grenade’?
I add that to the list.
Once we’ve exhausted our musical memories, finally adding Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ – a memory of a drunken night at a karaoke bar where I declared my love for Ed in front of a busy pub on New Year’s Eve – I sync the speaker, hit shuffle on my phone, and turn up the volume. With elaborate dance moves and enthusiastic smiles on our faces, we start singing along to Olly while he asks if I want to dance with him tonight.
‘Ooooh-hooo-oooh-uh-oh-oh-baby!’ I warble as Ed and the kids come into the lounge. I take Ed’s hands and swing him around as the kids start jumping up and down on the sofa.
‘Are we having a party?!’ Hailey asks mid-air. Ed spins me around and bends me backwards, a laugh caught in my throat. Kerry is shoving a handful of cheese puffs into her mouth while her head bobs from side to side to the music.
‘Kind of!’ I shout back as Ed pulls me back up.
‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T!’ Aretha begins. Oscar stops jumping, his face forming one of concentration while he tries to spell the letters into a word.
‘R-E-P-T-T?’
Kerry stops with a puff half-way to her face. ‘How does your son not know this song?’ She shakes her head in mock disappointment.
‘Respect, dummy!’ Hailey tells him mid-bounce.
‘Mummy, watch this!’ Oscar star-jumps off the sofa. Ed pulls me into a slow dance. Kerry twists the top of a bottle of beer and takes a slug, dancing behind us, with her eyes closed, lost in the moment, swinging the bottle as she does. My head rests on Ed’s shoulder as he dances with me. I close my eyes and concentrate on this moment: the feel of Ed in my arms, the grins on the kids’ faces as they bounce up and down on the sofa and the image of my sister singing. My eyes open as Ed pulls back from me.
‘Why have you got the conga on your playlist?’ he asks, humour creasing around his eyes.
‘Butlin’s.’
‘Oh God, the night of the sambuca?’
‘And the night I got pregnant with Oscar,’ I say quietly.
‘I’m amazed I was able to perform.’
‘It was conga night . . .’
‘It sure was.’ He winks and I laugh.
‘Come on!’
Kerry stands in front of us, turning her back and gesturing me to put my hands on her shoulders. I wish I could. Instead, I turn my back to Ed and pull his hand to my waist. Ed shouts instructions to the kids to join our conga line as I lead them through the lounge, Ed and I singing loudly and ‘Oh-eh-oh-ing’ up the stairs, circling the middle of each of the bedrooms before finally snaking back down the stairs into the lounge, where we all slump onto the sofas in a fit of giggles.
The playlist moves on to Bruno Mars. My heart hammers in my chest as Kerry begins singing into her beer bottle, her face changing from amusement to serious intensity as she looks me straight in the eyes, beginning to repeat the lines of the song: she would catch a grenade for me, step in front of a train for me . . . she would die for me, she tells me slowly, putting down her beer bottle onto the mantelpiece.
‘Please don’t do the same.’ Kerry echoes Bruno as the playlist finishes.
Chapter Seventy-Two
Ed
‘I don’t know why anyone would enjoy it!’ Jen says as she double-checks the locks on the front door for the third time. ‘I mean, the guy was normal, all geekily shy, endearing and then . . .’ she shivers, ‘you hear his inner dialogue and he’s all . . .’ She shudders again. Jen has been enjoying a round of horror films since her trip to the cinema with Nessa. She had popped her horror-film cherry and now couldn’t get enough – Jen’s words, not mine. But we’ve just watched a box-set on Netflix about a stalker and it has turned her off.
I follow her up the stairs, pulling my dressing gown around me. Yep, I’m Dad-who-wears-a-dressing-gown; he’s not quite as cool as Park Dad, but is still infinitely cooler than Dad-who-wears-slippers. I’m freezing, and we haven’t even left England yet; God only knows how I’m going to cope with being in Lapland. We fly in a week’s time, the anniversary of Kerry’s death and two weeks before Christmas. When the tickets came, my heart sank; how was I going to tell Jen? But she already knew, of course she did. She said it was the best way to spend the day, that we’d be so busy travelling and finding our luggage that she wouldn’t have time to think about it.