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‘Camping tonight. Jonah’s given me his sister’s old sleeping bag which is better than sheets. We had Birds Eye burgers and hot dogs on the barbecue and some of Jonah’s mum’s homemade cake. Jonah asked me if I wanted to join the rugby lot. I said I’d think about it…’
She turned to another passage.
‘Jonah said hello to me by the lockers today and everyone was looking at us. I feel really proud that he’s my friend. I don’t know why he is, but I don’t care cos he really is…’
And another.
‘Jonah and I helped each other with our exam revision tonight. He’s got such a cool bedroom. It was magic just being the two of us. It was a brilliant night and I can now understand CALCULUS!!!…’
Finally, she read:
‘It’s stupid, I know we won’t but I wish that when we grow up, us three would get a house together and live in it. I love Shay…
… but I’m in love with Jonah.’
‘Mentions of me get less and mentions of you get more in the last two diaries.’ Shay smiled.
‘I never guessed,’ said Jonah.
‘He didn’t want you to know. He didn’t mind that you’d never feel the same, it was enough for him to be your friend.’ Shay gave a little laugh. ‘He was so made up when you and I got together. He said that the two people he loved most in the world loved each other and yet he never felt in the slightest cut out. He said the three of us made a perfect circle.’ Shay closed the diary and pressed it to her heart. ‘Poor, darling Denny.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Jonah. ‘I don’t know what I expected to hear but it wasn’t this.’
‘I think Ella has been waiting for me to turn up at her door ever since it all happened,’ replied Shay. ‘She said once she put them on a pile to burn and the match wouldn’t strike. She took it as a sign from God that she had to keep them safe.’
Jonah’s expression said exactly what he thought about that.
‘She kept those diaries for her, not you. She’s fooling herself.’
‘Well, whatever the reality, I have them. I have the truth.’
Jonah gave his head a shake of disbelief. ‘It’s all so… warped.’
‘That’s why she never sold up. They’d have unearthed her father’s bones and possessions in his grave. So she stayed put and became their custodian and served her own twenty-nine-year jail sentence.’ Ella’s logic was undeniably firm and flawed in equal measure.
‘They were no more free of him than when he was alive,’ said Jonah. ‘What a total waste.’
None of it should have happened, but it did. And now Shay could, at last, begin to mend. Now she could move forward.
They opened a bottle of wine and raised their glasses to their friend and wished he was there with them with his gawky, awkward smile and his mad hair and kind, bright eyes and the way he could get so excited over finding a beefsteak fungus or a kestrel’s nest. And Shay wondered if there was any truth in the passage of his diary that read:
When anyone asks me what I want to be when I leave school I say, working for the Forestry Commission, but I can’t ever imagine me as an adult. I can see Shay married and having a baby and I can see Jonah with a beard and a car, but me… I have the feeling, I’ll never have those things. I don’t think I’m meant to grow up.
Chapter 40
She’d had too much wine to drive home and he’d had too much wine to drive her home. Shay stayed over in his spare room and when Jonah had asked her if she’d be okay alone, she’d replied yes, though she hadn’t wanted to. Taking off her rings had been the first step to singledom, but she wasn’t ready to rush anything; not even with this lovely man who had carved a shape out of her heart so long ago that only he could fill.
She was woken by birdsong chirruping, sounds from the floor below and then the aroma of fresh coffee drifted into her nostrils. She sat up quickly in bed, momentarily disorientated; she couldn’t remember sleeping as soundly as she had for a long time. She felt inexplicably light, as if a weight she had been carrying around her neck, like Jacob Marley’s chain, had lifted.
‘I was just about to call you,’ said Jonah, when she came down the stairs. He was in the kitchen frying something in a pan. The three dogs were loitering hopefully nearby.
‘Bacon, eggs, toast, pancakes and maple syrup. Anythingthere you fancy?’ He smiled at her and again she saw the beautiful boy who had loved her.
‘All of it,’ she said.
‘Then please, take a seat, m’lady and dig in. Did you sleep well?’
‘Better than I have for a long time.’
