Page 65 of It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
I calculated from the shaky timestamp in the corner of the screen that the concert had taken place less than a year before the unthinkable had happened. Before my selfish actions hadallowedthe unthinkable to happen.
Twenty years earlier
Date: 09/10/2005
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: re: Cardiff visit sooooooooooon?
Livvviiiiieee! So I’ve got your Cardiff visit all planned out.
I’ll meet you at the station on Friday evening and we can walk backto my halls (I know packing light doesn’t come naturally to you butpleeeeeease try and squeeze everything into a backpack cos there’sbarely any floorspace in my room!).
There’s so much cool stuff to show you in the city – and of coursethere’s THE X FACTOR to watch on the Saturday night!
Btw, Elle doesn’t know if she’s going to be around that weekend, soshe might end up tagging along with us for some of it if she is.
Big sissss xxxx
Date: 09/10/2005
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: re: re: Cardiff visit sooooooooooon?
Yay that plan sounds so amazing, I honestly can’t wait!!!! Yes yes yes,FINE I’ll try to pack light. I was planning on bringing the floor pianofrom the garage AND my cello, but I guess I’ll have to save myinstruments for when I visit you in your grand student mansion nextyear.
Yikes, gotta go, Mum needs the phoneline to call Auntie Sandra aboutChristmas plans.
SOOOOO EXCIIIIIITEEEED!!!!
Liv xxx
Chapter 17
?Character confronts loss
Twenty years later
Everything changed that Saturday morning in October.
While I was still occupied by the throes of freshers’ mayhem in Cardiff, Livvie had gone along to her weekly orchestra club, just like she always did. But, this time, she never made it home.
She’d been waiting outside the church hall for her lift from Josh. He picked her up every Saturday on his way home from the gym; it was their little weekly ritual. Sometimes she’d convince Josh to go home via the nearest McDonald’s drive-thru so she could pick up a milkshake. Back when I’d still been living at home, she’d always bring one back for me, too.
But that Saturday was different. Josh had been running late – only by a couple of minutes, but those precious seconds altered our trajectory, forever. According to one of her friends who’d been waiting in a car on the other side of the road, Livvie had been sitting on the wall behind the bus stop when a bus had pulled in. As the bus pulled away, Livvie had begun to cross the road, her trusty cello on her back.
Josh saw the moment it happened. He saw her flash of red hair out of the corner of his eye, quickly followed by the oncoming van, hidden from Livvie’s view by the back of the bus. And that was that. Life destroyed.
Livesdestroyed, really. Because the remaining Allisters’ souls leaked away with hers that day. Our family had never been perfect. But it was only with brutal hindsight that we could see that our lives before Livvie was taken from us had been so full of ordinary everythings and incredible nothings. We’d belonged to each other. We’d been at such oblivious peace.
That morning, afterthatphone call from Dad, I was bundled into a taxi back to Scarnbrook with Elle in tow, but our destination was no longer ‘home’; it was hell itself. I knew as soon as Mum pulled me from the taxi and we wailed and contorted and collapsed onto the lawn of our small front garden that home was gone for good.
Once our tears had stopped flowing continuously, the funeral had passed and the lasagnes stopped arriving from neighbours, each of us retreated back into ourselves. None of us knew how to live without her. None of us had emerged again since. And, soon, each of us had left Scarnbrook for good. Separately, not together.
