Chapter 27.
On a hot Friday night after work, Lara picks me up in a silver convertible.
I afford the vehicle the staggered gawp it deserves. ‘What is this ?’
She pulls a face, despite the fact that with her shades and floral headband, the whole look really quite suits her. ‘It’s Mum’s, she loves it, she bought it right after Dad died, so no-one can say anything. It’s horrible, it’s embarrassing, get in.’
I smile, and do as I’m told.
‘Felix thinks she’d be offended if we got a hire car while we’re here. So... we’re just going to act like delusional OAPs for the evening, okay?’
‘Why act?’ I say, pulling on my seatbelt. ‘I’m knackered. I quite fancy early retirement.’
Lara laughs, and starts the engine.
It doesn’t escape me how carefully she pulls away from the kerb.
There is a nature reserve a ten-minute drive from Norwich, on the south bank of the river Yare. Lara tells me she can’t be arsed to walk, that she knows a good bench. At this, I’m relieved – being July, it’s way too hot for hiking, and anyway, I’m wearing sandals.
She leads the way along a winding grassy path to a bench overlooking a glistening web of silver streams spun into the heart of the reed bed. It’s a private and tranquil corner of the reserve, a summer-lit segment of solitude, our only company the frogs and grebes and reed warblers and coots.
‘This is actually my dad’s bench,’ Lara says, as we gaze out over the cluster of lush green wetland. Above our heads, tiny vaporous clouds roll past, soft like kettle steam. ‘He loved this place.’
I turn to look at the brass plaque behind my right shoulder.
For Billy, who liked to watch the world go by.
My throat clots with emotion. I swallow it down. ‘That’s beautiful. He’d have loved it.’
She smiles. ‘He’d have told us off for being sentimental tosspots, actually, don’t you think? But yeah. Deep down, you’re right – he would.’
I don’t have the monopoly on grief here , I think, suddenly. How long should I go on punishing her for what happened to Jamie?
The thought comes out of nowhere, and it feels foreign and alarming. Did I get everything wrong? Was my anger misdirected? Over the years, it has kept me safe, in lots of ways. Has given me focus when the pain of losing Jamie became too much.
‘It’s so weird,’ she says. ‘That Dad dying was the thing that eventually brought me and Mum together again, after a decade of me acting like a total brat. We’re closer than we’ve ever been now.’
‘Billy would be happy about that.’
‘Yeah. But he’d probably also want to know what took me so long.’ She shakes her head. ‘Anyway. Talk to me, Neve. What was it that you couldn’t say on the phone on Saturday night?’
Talk to me . Just three words, but they flicker to life at the back of my brain, like an old bulb I’d forgotten was there. She used to say it all the time, instead of, All right? or What’s up?
I feel the urge to backtrack, tell her it was nothing. But Lara is the only person on the planet who might be able to help me understand what’s going on with Ash. Because she knew Jamie too, and she loved him. There’s no-one else who can reliably discern whether or not I’m going mad.
‘This is going to sound... a bit out there, okay? You might think I’m nuts.’
She’s probably expecting me to say I still miss Jamie. That Ash reminds me of him a little too much. But she doesn’t yet know how deep it goes. How messy it’s all become.
She slips me a smile. ‘Come on. That ship sailed when you confessed to fancying Attenborough.’
I smile back at her. I once admitted to finding David’s voice soothing, and she’s never let me forget it.
‘I feel as though Ash... might be Jamie.’
She blinks a couple of times, takes a breath, lets it out. ‘No. Sorry. Don’t understand.’
I shake my head. ‘I know that sounds insane. Believe me, I know it. But I think... Jamie might have come back to me. He always said he would.’
Lara touches my hand with her fingertips. She’s wearing a stack of gold bangles that reaches halfway up her forearm. ‘Talk me through it,’ is all she says, very calmly.
So I tell her everything. About Ash’s job and flat, and taste in art and music, about his handwriting and favourite aftershave, and the myriad other weird little similarities between them. I describe all the ways in which he already seems to know me so well. I tell her about the lightning strike, about Ash becoming a completely different person afterwards. I insist it can’t be coincidence, in the hope that she doesn’t try to tell me that’s what it must be.
It’s comforting as it always was to talk to her. Like no time has passed at all. It’s as though we’re back in the bedroom at Edinburgh Road, lying on her bed with our feet propped up against the wall, taking it in turns to offload and trying together to make sense of how the world works.
When I’m finished, she draws a deep breath. ‘And what does Ash think about this?’
‘I haven’t told him yet.’ I shake my head. ‘Honestly, Lar, I feel like I’ve gone back in time. Thinking about Jamie constantly, unable to forget him. I moved on from all that. But now I’m right back there.’
‘That must be tough.’
‘I mean, it is... but at the same time, Jamie was the love of my life. So, in a way...’
She nods, waits patiently, like there’s nothing at all unusual about the things I’m saying.
‘What do you think? I mean, you’ve met Ash, and you... knew Jamie, too.’
I notice her eyes pool briefly with tears before she swallows them away. ‘You know as well as I do there’s only one way to get to the bottom of this. You need to talk to Ash. Tell him everything. You never know, it might make complete sense to him.’
I consider this for a moment, then shake my head. ‘What would you say, if someone said that to you?’
‘Well, that would depend.’
‘On what?’
‘On whether I felt on some level like I wasn’t myself, I guess.’
‘His personality changed completely. He admits that. But he just puts it down to the accident. I swear, this walk-in thing makes total sense. Everything – everything – about it adds up. If I could just show him some of the things I’ve read... he wouldn’t be able to dismiss it. I know he wouldn’t.’
‘Maybe not.’
‘So you think it’s possible?’
‘I mean, who knows if it’s possible?’
I swallow. ‘Do you ever... think Billy’s still about?’
At this, she laughs, loudly. ‘Oh God. All the time . Remember that thing he used to do with peaches? He’d leave one on my pillow, or on my chest of drawers, because he knew how much I loved them. Well, after he died, I found a peach in my fruit bowl at home, and I swear – I swear – I didn’t buy it, Neve. To this day, I have no idea where it came from. And once, a lightbulb blew when I was helping myself to his whisky, back at Mum’s. Literally as I took the stopper out. Bam .’ She shakes her head. ‘I’d bet my life savings that was Dad saying, Hands off .’
I smile. If Billy were ever to reach out from beyond the grave, of course it would be to protect his precious drinks cabinet. ‘So, you do believe in that stuff? People’s souls still being around.’
I don’t think we discussed this kind of thing much when we were younger. I suppose we never really needed to.
Lara shrugs, gently. ‘The point is that nobody knows. We can guess, but we don’t know.’
‘What Ash and I have is really good. I don’t want that to change,’ I admit with a frown, watching dragonflies skim the surface of the stream by our feet.
‘But what you have isn’t real if you’re not being honest.’
A beat. ‘Just so you know, this is more than me just missing Jamie. I... believe this.’
‘I can tell.’
‘I actually wish it was that simple. That I just missed him.’
‘Since when was grief ever simple?’
After that, we just sit there together for a while, watching the iridescent beauty of the dragonflies making rainbows among the golden beams of evening.