Chapter 29

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Text from Birdie: A date! A real livedate!

Text from Olive: It’s not a date. It can’t possibly be. We live in different countries. What would be the point?

Text from Birdie: Fair enough. But you could have a fling with him? If you fancy him that much it would be a great way to dip back in, so to speak! If it’s not good it doesn’t matter because you’ll be back in Manchester soon, far faraway!

Text from Olive: I do fancy him… I finally get what all the fuss is about. My loins are gagging forhim.

Text from Birdie: Haha. Also, that’s gross. Text me later. Doctor BJ just came in for his rounds and he’s wearing a shirt with SHORT SLEEVES. He might be too much of a professional to get it on with a sexy patient but that doesn’t mean I can’t do some high-quality ogling.

Text from Olive: He’s a fool for not crossing the boundaries of patient-doctor relationships with you. A fool to resist you! A damn fool! Also do you know how much I love you? I miss you and I love you and I think you are amazing and brave and pretty and smart and cool and strong. Just thought I would tell youthat.

Text from Birdie:Gushmuch?

Text from Olive: Shuddup. I love you, all right.

Text from Birdie: Not as much as I loveyou.

I wakeup the next morning with a brand new feeling in my stomach. It’s a feeling I’ve not had before, at least not that I can properly remember. Maybe I had it when I was in school – when I did my creative writing lessons and the teacher said I’d done well. Or maybe the day I met Birdie and we talked for six hours straight. I’m not sure. Either way, it feels entirely unfamiliar. Like everything is in colour. Like everything is louder and crisper and more and less terrifying all at the sametime.

Like I’m alive.

After showering in Anders’ wet room, stocked with as many Sisley products as I could ever hope to see and white towels that are as soft as puppies, I pull on my jade-green long-sleeved jersey dress, and head downstairs to the kitchen. Anders is already sitting at the large white marble table, Mrs Ramirez sitting right up next to him. The pair of them are hunched over a laptop, chatteringaway.

‘You’re here already?’ I remark to Mrs Ramirez. ‘Thank you! That’s so kind ofyou.’

‘Anders here had a car sent for me,’ Mrs Ramirez says proudly. ‘Not a cab. Acar.’

‘Of course,’ Anders says with a benevolent smile on his tranquil face. ‘You have to take care of thatknee.’

I give them a curious look. They appear to have made firm friends. I’d never have put them together in a million years. But they seem completely relaxed in each other’s company, Anders not quite as stiff and sinister-seeming as he was the day I methim.

‘Why are you staring at us?’ heasks.

‘Come on!’ Mrs Ramirez claps her hands together. ‘We have work todo!’

Over three hundred brightly coloured leaflets are printed off, showcasing a close-up picture of Chuck’s head from the old photo that Anders kept from college. The text at the top of the leaflet asks, ‘Where In The World is Chuck Allen?’ And below that there’s the number (of a burner phone that Anders has acquired for the occasion) for people to call if they have any information.

We spend the rest of the morning walking all over Manhattan, giving out leaflets to everyone we see, asking shops, cafes and delis to display them in their windows. It takes us a little longer than anticipated: Mrs Ramirez’s bad knee slows us down a tad, but mostly, we’re held up because she wants to know the life story of everyone we meet and ends up exchanging phone numbers with around half of them. I’ve never met anyone who makes friends so easily. I don’t know what we’d have done without her actually. I reckon Anders’ ghostly aristocratic presence either intimidates or terrifies most people (I’ll go for terrify), and me? Well I am polite and awkward and British. Not exactly great for getting busy New Yorkers to stop and talk tome.

Mrs Ramirez returns to the Upper West Side after lunch so she can take her usual siesta, while Anders and I head back to his place. While he slides off to do a yoga session in his home gym, I shoot off a bunch of emails to all the media contacts Sharon gave me. Immediately after sending them I refresh my emails about five times in the hope of speedy replies. The thought of going on the radio makes me want to burrow down into a hole of my own making, but I can’t deny that the opportunity to reach people on a national level, to really have a great shot of finding Chuck, is too amazing to not completely gofor.

When I FaceTime Birdie to update her on our progress, she answers not with her usual bright smile, but with tired, tearyeyes.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ I say at once, my chest tightening.

Birdie sighs, rubbing her hand across her face. ‘I shouldn’t have answered. I’m sorry. I’m not having a great day. I’m tired and achy. I feel rotten.’

‘Oh Bird. Tell me. What’s happening? How can Ihelp?’

Birdie looks up into the screen. ‘I’m just… I’m scared today. I’m really fucking scared. I’m fine most of the time. I know what’s going to happen and I’ve made my peace with it. But today… I feel terrified.’

My eyes immediately sting with tears. Birdie always puts on a brave face about her situation. Through the surgeries and tests, through the hopes that they would find a way to fix her, and the disappointments when they couldn’t. She’s always always been stoic.

This is new. My heart cracks. I wish I was there with her rightnow.

‘Tell me,’ I say. ‘Let’s talk aboutit.’

Birdie fiddles with her earlobe and exhales through her cheeks, making a sound like a horse. ‘I just keep thinking. What if, when I’m gone, no one remembersme?’

I almost laugh, it’s so outrageous.

‘That will never happen.’ I say firmly. ‘How could anyone forget you? You’re literally unforgettable.’

Birdie half smiles. ‘You won’t forget me willyou?’

‘Are you for real? I could never forget you. There are some things about you I wish I could forget. Like your crap taste in music and the time you considered becoming vegan. But that shit’s sticking around forever, dude.’

Birdie nods. ‘Good.’

‘And I will tell everyone I ever meet about you, for as long as I’m lucky enough to be walking this earth. I will bore them silly with stories of you and how amazing you are, how everyone who meets you falls in love withyou—’

‘Except DrBJ.’

‘Yes, except that fool DrBJ.’

‘Damn fool.’ A small smile tugs at the corner of Birdie’s mouth. That’s better.

‘Damn fool. Then I’ll show them photos upon photos of you and all the wonderful times we’ve had together. It will be intense, Birdie. People in the street will start to avoid me in case I collar them to talk about you. They’ll be like, “There’s that curly-haired girl obsessed with Birdie Lively! I didn’t think she had any more Birdie stories to tell us! But, oh boy, she does! She has never-ending Birdie stories!”’

Birdie laughs. ‘Will you show them videos of metoo?’

‘I will make a fucking reel of them. And set them up on one of those projector thingies. I will project the videos of you onto Manchester Town Hall. It will be like an art installation. It will be a veritable fucking BirdieFest.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’

Birdie yawns. ‘God, I’m really tired.’

‘Have anap.’

She nods, her voice going small. ‘Will you stay on FaceTime. Just until I fall asleep? Ijust…’

‘It would be my pleasure.’

As Birdie’s eyes drift close, her breathing settling into a steady rythym, I watch her. Not in a creepy way. Just in a way that allows me to memorise every inch of her face. Which I guess sounds a little creepy. But I don’t want to forget a thing.

I sigh, utterly full to the brim with adoration for this American livewire. And completely heartbroken that, in the not too distant future, she’ll only be alive in videos and stories and dear, dear memories.

I lean down and whisper into the phone, into her dreams.

‘Birdie, Lively, You will never be forgotten.’

* * *

Later,when Birdie is deep in Naptown, Snoozeville, I check my emails for any response on the Chuck search. But there’s zilch. I turn the burner phone on and off a few times, just to make sure it’s working properly. It is. And no-one has called.

Anders returns from his workout session, holding a black briefcase an excitable glint in his eyes. Hope blooms in my chest. Has he found something?

‘Hair time!’ hesays.

Oh. Yeah. I agreed that in exchange for letting me stay here he could do my hair once aday.

He opens the briefcase onto the dining table to reveal that it is actually a briefcase full of hairdressing tools, gleaming like chef’s knives. Wow. He means business. What have I let myself infor?

‘I… can we do it tomorrow?’ I ask. ‘I’m, um, going for dinner tonight.’

‘With the comedian?’ Anders says, raising an eyebrow. From the way he says it, I can’t tell if it’s derogatory or complimentary. ‘All the more reason to have a little pampering!’

I suspect our definitions of ‘pampering’ differ, somewhat.

Crap. I can’t go to dinner with another unicornhorn.

‘You promised,’ Anders scolds. ‘That was the deal, darling?’

He’s right. I did promise. And Olive Brewster doesn’t break her promises. Whatever he does to my bonce is going to have to stay like that for my date – I get the feeling that taking it out beforehand will hurt his feelings. And I definitely don’t want to dothat.

‘Okay… Can… you keep it subtle?’ I ask. ‘Like, no structures. Bouffants or… horns.’

Anders shrugs a bony shoulder. ‘I’m an artist, Olive. I do what the muse tells me to do. Do you not trust me, after all we’ve been through?’

‘Um… I don’t know you thatwell!’

‘Yet you stay in my house, accept my hospitality.’ He sniffs, looking hurt. ‘Call me to rescue you from incarceration. I think we know each other well enough.’

‘You’re right,’ I say. If it weren’t for Anders, who knows what would be happening to me in jail right now. ‘I’m sorry. Go forit.’

He licks his lips, pulls out his scissors and snaps them together in a way that looks entirely menacing.

Heregoes.

* * *

Two hourslater and Anders blasts my hair with a mist of extra-super-strength hairspray. Once again he has not allowed me to peek at the work in progress, which means that my bum has been glued to this chair for all that time and now I have a numb butt cheek, which I didn’t even realise was a physical possibility. But it is. It reallyis.

I hobble across the parquet floor as Anders proudly leads me to the hallway mirror.

My shoulders hike up to ears, in anticipation of the possible monstrosity he has concocted atop my head. What will it be this time? Medusa style snakes? A ginormous mohawk? Antlers?

And then I see myself.

Ohwow.

Wow.

I look like me. But a polished, put together, confident, sexy version of me. Anders has waved and brushed my hair so that the curls are big and uniform, one half of my hair across my face, almost obscuring my eye, and the other side tucked behind my ear with a hidden clip. I’m practically a Hollywood starlet!

I shake my head in disbelief and look closer. There are shiny copper strands subtly laced throughout the do. They catch the light when I turn myhead!

‘How…?’ I ask, putting a delicate hand to my hair. I vetoed any use of hair dye… But these strands of copper are astounding – they brighten my entireface!

‘Extensions!’ Anders declares, a huge grin stretched across his normally motionless face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look so delighted. He looks crazy. But in a good, happyway.

‘How the heck did you do that?’ I ask. ‘I can’t see where you’ve added them? It looks like my ownhair!’

‘I’ve bonded them at the root. It’s all very understated, like you asked.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘And you can take them out later.’

I’ve had the same hairstyle my entire life. I’ve never wanted to risk changing it in case it didn’t suit me and I couldn’t change it back. But this is epic. I don’t look like oddball Olive, fastest fish filleter in the north anymore. I look like… I look like I belong in New YorkCity.

I spin around and pull Anders into a hug. His lanky body stiffens – I wonder how long it’s been since he had a genuine hug? I squeeze him a little until he relaxes. He hugs meback.

‘You are talented,’ I tell him with a grin. ‘And your college room-mate, Warner, was it? Well, he totally missed out not getting those fiery red locks cut byyou.’

‘Really?’ Anders says, cocking his hip to the side. ‘Do you think?’

‘Yeah!’ I nod emphatically. ‘This is the best my hair has ever looked. I love it. Thankyou.’

Anders takes a deep breath, his eyes filling with tears. He flaps his hands in front of his face like a pageant winner. ‘I think this is what happiness feels like, Olive,’ he says. ‘I’ve taken every drug that has ever been invented, dined at the finest restaurants the world has to offer and been blown by the sultriest male models of New York, Paris and Tokyo. But a happy hair client… there’s nothing likeit.’

And then he bursts into joyful laughter, pulling his phone out of his pocket and taking pictures of my hair from every angle.

‘So much better than doing it on a mannequin!’

I laugh out loud at his laughing.

He may be the weirdest person I’ve ever met. But he’s definitely growing onme…