Probably the Best Kiss in the World

by Pernille Hughes

  Jen was well aware Lydia was missing. She should be there, being part of it. Jen was unhappy doing something so big in her life without her.

  “I know,” Jen sighed, “I sent an invite and I’m going to call her. I’ll sort this thing out so she can be here.”

  Alice stood right in front of Jen so she had her full attention. “No, Jen, she’s gone missing. Neil here’s a friend of hers, he’ll tell you.”

  “I’m Neil Finch, a journalist at the Echo,” said Neil. He talked very fast. “I’m really sorry to meet under these circumstances. Lydia speaks very highly of you.” Jen resisted a snort. That was unlikely given the current emotional climate between them. Journalist Neil needed to check his facts. “I’m not here on a story. Not now, anyway.” He was getting upset. Possibly one of Lydia’s conquests, Jen decided. He seemed very emotional. She might have picked a clinger this time. “She was having a paramotoring lesson today. I was covering it for the paper – you know, a human endeavour story – only she hasn’t come back down to land. She was in a tandem trike with an instructor and some cloud suddenly came in and I think they might have come down in that.”

  From the point of ‘she hasn’t come back down to land’, Jen’s reality had taken on the guise of a slowed-down record. All the blood drained out of her face and the air seemed custard-thick around her. Old memories came rushing back to her of policemen at her door, suggesting she came with them because her sister needed her. They’d left it for her to piece together herself why her parents weren’t in a position to do it. Alice clutched her hand to bring her back to the here and now.

  “Can you take me to where you were?” Jen asked. The Capri was at home.

  “You can get on the motorbike. That’s how I got there with Lydia.” Jen didn’t even want to think of Lydia on the back of a motorbike. Oh dear God.

  “Alice, I need the Bongo.” If Lydia was injured, then at least Jen could lie her down. Jen found herself in the position of wishing her sister was just injured, but it didn’t take a maths boffin to work out High Height + Hard Ground = Bloody Hurt.

  Alice was already holding out the keys.

  “Want me to fold the front doors open, Jen,” asked Jim, wandering to their group, oblivious to the predicament. “Sure to be early birds when there’s beer.”

  All eyes turned to Jen. Jen’s eyes, wide and twitchy, took a long scope of her baby. She’d worked so hard on this and she needed it to be a success. She needed everything to go right tonight. Lydia hadn’t even seen it yet.

  “I’m sorry. I have to go.” She pulled off her pristine Attison’s staff apron and handed it to Jim. “I need you to man the pumps, Jim, you know how to change a barrel. Robert, can you help out until your meeting? If Celia could lend a hand too, that’d be grand. All the prices are on the chalk board. Alice and Max know how to work a till.”

  Jen grabbed Neil’s shirt by the shoulder and frogmarched him out past a lurking Celia, to his bike and the Bongo, not looking back as she left her baby in their hands.

  Chapter 36

  The Bongo speedometer had strained to the far right for the last ten minutes, as it hurtled down the narrow lanes towards the sea. Neil, leading the way on his motorbike, only fractionally ahead of her front bumper, hadn’t mentioned that part. Neither the beach, nor the sea made for improved conditions in Jen’s current horror scenario. She was pinning every hope on the instructor having control of the situation, but Neil seemed pretty sure something was amiss. Jen was driving on auto pilot, the tears well and truly blocked off for now. Tears had nothing useful to bring to the party and she needed her sight for the road. If any bleeding caravaner dared to come towards her now she was going to have him.

  Finally, Neil pulled into a small woodland car park, the type Lydia always referred to as “Dogging Central”, and yanked off his crash-helmet. His distressed hair matched his expression.

  “I was over there when I last saw them.” He pointed to a low hill, which would have given him an uninterrupted view of the sky and the sea beyond. “I ran around shouting for ten minutes trying to find her, then raced into town to find Alice.” Jen kept a lid on the pang it gave her, that someone would consider anyone other than herself as next of kin. Next of kin, stop it, Jen. She’s here somewhere, you’ll find her. Jen took a look around. To the right was a low bluff down to the sea and the stony beach, to the left dense woodland. If he’d been running about for ten minutes and then driven ten minutes to find her and ten back, that was thirty minutes Lydia could have been bleeding out somewhere. Or drowning.

  “Have you called the emergency services, Neil?”

  He looked momentarily confused, then distressed. “No, I um, sort of panicked.” He looked out to sea and then back around. “I didn’t know which one to call either. And Lydia says you always sort everything.”

  The fear she was currently feeling easily extinguished any pride at that.

  Jen pulled out her phone and swiped at the screens. There was just a chance … come on, come on …

  Bloody yes!

  “This way!” she shouted at Neil turning for the trees, but didn’t really care if he followed or not. She certainly didn’t slow her sprint for him.

  “LYDS!!!” she shouted under the tree canopy. Jen’s eyes were struggling, flicking from the dot on the GPS app to the terrain in front of her, but the last thing she needed was to face-plant on the way. She’d imagined the trees might carry her call from trunk to trunk through the woodland, maybe even amplifying it, but apparently it didn’t work that way. There was no reply, but nevertheless she persisted, running deeper into the woods. “LY-DI-A!!”

  There were plenty of bird squawks and nature sounds, but nothing that gave any clues. The earthy smell of the tree litter did nothing to comfort either. Jen kept running, hurdling over fallen trunks, ducking under the lower-hanging bows, her adrenalin glossing over the fact she was too unfit for this. Her body would get the memo tomorrow. But she’d happily take it, if she could just find Lydia in a state where she could listen to Jen whinge about it.

  Further and further in she went, the little red dot getting nearer and nearer.

  “LYDIA!!” She came to a relatively sparse area, where she could see between the tree trunks for a fair distance, looking for something of a synthetic colour. God, she hoped paramotorers were required to wear high-viz.

  But there was nothing. No neatly parked trike, no Lydia sitting calmly whittling or whistling waiting for collection. Nothing. Jen studied her app. She was on the spot. Right on the spot. Bloody thing. Why wasn’t she here? Jen refreshed the app with shaking fingers as finally the tears of fear and frustration caught up with her. Lydia was her family. She couldn’t bear to have got her this far in life only to lose her. And the thought of never getting the chance to tell her how much she loved and missed her was just about to fell her.

  “Fuck’s sake, Jen! You bloody tracked me again.”

  Jen’s joy was instant. Lydia’s swearing was music to her ears. Wiping her nose with the back of her hand she looked up into the canopy and then didn’t know whether to laugh or sob. The mangled mess of paramotor trike, red canopy nylon, branches and Lydia was an alarming sight. Jen held her hands together at her face, as if praying, but more planning how to proceed.

  “Are you bleeding, Lyds?” Lydia sat in the front seat of the triangular trike, the mass of canopy around her obscuring Jen’s view of who was behind her.

  “Not that I can see. Maybe my head.” Lydia felt about on the back of her scalp, then looked at her hand. “No, we’re good. I had my helmet on, but I clocked it in the landing. I might have passed out for a bit.”

  “Is your instructor OK?” She wanted to thank them for bringing her little sister down alive. Safely was still debatable.

  “He’s conscious and moaning a bit. I’ve checked his pulse, but he needs some help.”

  Thundering footsteps came up behind Jen, but she didn’t turn around. She didn’t want to let Lydia out of her sight ever again. Lydia
’s head followed the sound however and her smile spread. “Hi Neil.”

  “Hi Lydi.” Jen did turn to look at him now, then back up at Lydia. There was something in the way they spoke to each other … surely not … good grief. Neil was more than a One-night Wonder.

  Now was not the time for soppiness.

  “Neil, phone for an ambulance and the fire service. We’re going to need a ladder and possibly some cutting gear.” Jen squinted at the crushed knot that was her sister, her instructor and their aircraft. They were wedged rather than hanging, so Jen didn’t think they were about to fall, but it looked highly uncomfortable. Then Jen saw a limb crushed between metal and wood at the front and her stomach plummeted.

  “Lyds?” she asked tentatively, hoping her tone sounded chilled enough not to scare her, “can you move your toes?” She didn’t seem to be in any particular pain, but what if she in fact couldn’t feel any? What if she’d broken her spine?

  “Relax, Jen. It’s the cosmesis that’s trapped. I wore this one because Neil and I are going out later. I’m just working on releasing my stump, but I’m a tad wedged.”

  Somewhere in there, was a blessing. Jen was just too close to the brink to value it right now. And perhaps Lydia was delirious, Jen decided; there was no way she was going anywhere this evening. So much for accepting Lydia was in control of things. She was stuck up a tree for goodness sake.

  “They’re coming, Lydi,” Neil shouted up. Jen watched him scope out the trunks for climbing options, before rolling her eyes. His spindly frame wasn’t built for scaling anything.

  “Thanks Neil,” Lydia called down.

  Jen’s eyes narrowed. Lydia was looking down at him quite moonily. She clearly hadn’t spent the last six weeks holed up at Alice’s weeping over the state of their sibling relationship.

  “How’d you find her?” Neil asked Jen. “They’re quite hidden up there.”

  Could she claim it was a sisterly mind-reading thing? Yes, yes she absolutely could –

  “She’s got a sodding tracker on my leg,” Jen heard from above. “I could have sworn I got them all. Supposedly it’s to keep the prosthetics safe.” Right. She hadn’t let that go yet, then.

  Jen considered her sister and the crumpled wreckage around her. Was this truly Lydia’s response to Jen’s actions and keeping control of things? These reckless, life-threatening things were Lydia’s attempt to be free. How awful was that? And it was her doing …

  Shaken, Jen sat down. Both Lydia and Alice had been right, she had done a horrible thing. And they didn’t know all of it. She saw now she needed to confess, not least because Lydia was at a disadvantage and might be more lenient with her wrath, but also because Jen finally understood what she’d done.

  “It’s not on the leg,” she said, her voice small. “It’s inside the socket. Under one of the manufacturer’s stickers.” Unlike the others, this patch was, as Lydia insisted, purely to keep dibs on where she was.

  Lydia didn’t speak to her again throughout the entire rescue, not even to answer Jen’s cross question of What the bloody hell is that?! as Lydia was carried, hero-style, by a fireman. The “Footloose and Fancy-free” tattoo on her stump was new.

  Given the instructor needed the ambulance bed, the paramedic allowed Lydia to drive with Jen, on the proviso they went directly to A&E to have her checked for concussion. Jen already had that at the top of her to-do list, she hadn’t needed telling, in spite of Lydia being on fine form chatting to the fireman as they made their way to the Bongo.

  The leg was a goner. As was the paramotor trike, which the firefighters had left in a sheared heap at the base of the tree.

  Jen got the silent treatment all the way to the hospital, Lydia continuing her hard stare out of the passenger window. Once in a while she’d turn to check Neil was following them.

  Pulling into the car park, Jen flung the pink Bongo into the first available spot, cut the engine and turned to her sister.

  “I’ve said I’m sorry, Lyds.”

  “Actually, you said ‘I apologise’. That’s not the same.”

  Jen considered this. She had a point. “I am sorry, Lydia. What I did with the patches was a shitty thing to do to you. I … I’m ashamed of doing it … I just thought it would help us.” Lydia opened her mouth to disagree, but Jen carried on, “I know now that wasn’t the case. I am sorry. Truly. And I hope you’ll forgive me …” the contrition had Jen firmly on the back foot, not something she remembered being very often with Lydia. It veered her off message for a moment as she went on, “… given how, as it turned out, it was quite fortuitous today–”

  “Don’t. Don’t try to excuse it, Jen. Yes, as it turned out it was handy today, but it won’t ever make it right. I don’t know what to do to show you that you have to let me be.”

  “No need. I get it now. Honestly.” This still felt uncomfortable. Jen was keen to lighten the mood. She wanted them to be friends again. “The mad sports aren’t the best way, though,” she said joking, but only half. She did understand why Lydia had been doing them – the thought made her shudder – but surely it was just caring, not controlling, to point out the dangers of such activities. “Taking off in a hairdryer-powered go-cart was mad. Thank God the instructor was there to get you down. Surely you see how risky those sports are? I’ve missed you so much Lyds, and I almost didn’t get to tell you–”

  “Stop,” Lydia interrupted, brow furrowed. “You think he saved me?”

  Jen pointedly looked her up and down. “You could have plummeted into the sea or smashed to the ground.”

  “I’m aware of that Jen, but he didn’t get us down. He had some kind of seizure up there and I grabbed the controls. Granted it wasn’t the prettiest of landings, but I did miss the entire sea, there was no smashing and he’s alive and in care.”

  “What? But he talked you through what to do, right?”

  “Not unless my name is now God and ‘Help me’ is shorthand for a manual of landing instructions.”

  Jen was stunned. “But … how?”

  Lydia gave her a “guess what?” face. “I know stuff. I can keep a level head. I can do all sorts of things.”

  Oh.

  Lydia watched deadpan as the knowledge sank in. So Lydia was the hero here? Slowly, Jen was filled with a huge sense of pride for her sister. She didn’t think she could have done what Lydia had done. Remembering a certain flailing panic over a phone in a canal, Jen suspected she wouldn’t have had the presence of mind and courage to bring the trike down. Spreadsheets wouldn’t have helped her there. She had to admit that while Lydia had proved she could look after herself over the last weeks, she’d gone above and beyond here in terms of capability.

  Jen dug out her phone and holding it flat so Lydia could see, swiped to the GPS app and deleted it. Lydia gave a small nod. Then Jen deleted the one showing delays on the trains and then the same for the tube, which garnered her a raised eyebrow. Oh, she hadn’t known about those …

  “Thank you,” Lydia said with a deep sigh, as Jen repocketed the phone. “That wasn’t quite what I was expecting to happen as I flew around earlier.”

  Jen couldn’t help herself.

  “I wish you hadn’t been up there in the first place.” Seeing Lydia’s mouth open to respond she raced on, “I do get it, Lyds. I absolutely see you can look after yourself and do what you want. But can we agree, you never need to deliberately put yourself in danger again or take those risks?”

  “Argh!” Lydia exclaimed frustrated. “I started doing those things in response to your smothering, Jen. And now I do them because I can choose to do them, and I love them. I totally get off on the high-octane stuff. It shows me what it is to be alive.” She turned to face Jen square on. “When I woke up from the accident, do you remember the nurse I had? From the Philippines. Lovely lady. Frannie?”

  Jen nodded, not quite sure where this was going. She vaguely recalled, but there’d been a whole lot of awful going on at the time and much of it was now a blur.


  “When you weren’t at my bed, when they’d kick you out to eat in the canteen, she would come and whisper to me that I should live.” There were tears running down Lydia’s cheeks. “Live, she would say, live because your parents can’t. I heard her.”

  “Jen, there were days when it felt a lot easier to just roll over and let go. It felt like I had a choice, that if I gave up the will, I could go and be with them. That’s what it felt like anyway, but there was this little voice, every day, whispering to me to grab life by the scruff of the neck and hang on.” Lydia sniffed and dug around in Alice’s glove box for a tissue, gave up and used her sleeve. “She sat with me and told me how I’d been given a second chance and now I had to make the absolute most of it. Not let anyone tell me what I couldn’t do, because I’d been kept here to show others I was tough. Those words Jen, those where my real crutch. There were the prosthetics and the physio of course, but they all said the determination was the real backbone. It was the one thing they couldn’t provide, but I had it in spades.”

  That was true. Lydia in rehab had been little short of miraculous – with the exception of her leg not springing back. She had been on a mission, pushing herself to extremes to get on, get moving and get out.

  “Which is why Jen, it’s so hard to deal with you coddling me, trying to keep me super-safe, when what I need to do is spread my wings, even my damaged one. I need to make the most of this life, because we don’t all get a long one, and I got a second go.” Lydia was proper ugly crying now. “I’ve missed you so much these last six weeks, but they’ve told me what I already knew; I can stand on my own one foot. I need you to see it – really see it –so you can let me go and let me live.” She was begging.

  Jen had never seen Lydia so distraught, not since waking up in the hospital with two parents and a leg gone. She started scoping the car park for the quickest route to A&E, desperate to get her checked ASAP.