BONUS BACKSTORIES
Evie, Finn and Sean
When you have read Like A Bird Without A Song, you may like to read some scenes which add extra flavour to the story and explain some of the emotional impact of events on Finn, Evie and Sean. These contain spoilers, so maybe read them after you have read the book!
The Coat: Because when the fabric settles around her shoulders it feels like arms.
Sean is sitting cross-legged on the faded rug in Evie’s room in the Oxford house, jottings spread around him like a paper sea, making notes for their essay about the management of chronic illness. He is tapping lightly on the keys of his laptop. Outside, tyres crunch on gravel.
They both hear it.
Evie’s breath catches before she can stop it.
‘Who’s that, Evie?’
‘Gianni and David,’ she says, a beat too late. ‘I forgot to tell you. They’re bringing the last of the things from Cambridge. The house has been sold. David’s been sorting everything out. He asked me what I wanted. Apart from my bedroom stuff. I made a list.’
She doesn’t look at him, but she can feel him look at her. Sean has that way about him. Alert without intruding, protective without crowding. He has learned the topography of her grief the way some people learn maps: where the cliffs are, where the sinkholes open without warning. He knows when to reach for her and when to let her steady herself alone.
He has no idea what that does for her. No idea how much it saves her.
Nine months.
Nine months since the knock at the door. Since the police stood in their hallway and rearranged the atoms of her life with careful, rehearsed sentences. Sometimes that day feels like yesterday, sharp and blinding. Other times it feels like something that happened to another girl entirely. A girl she vaguely remembers being.
The books talk about stages. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Acceptance. As if grief were polite. As if it queued.
Evie thinks of it as circles or cycles. She moves through them and back again. Anger that scorches. Numbness that frightens her more than pain. Sudden drops - like missing a step in the dark. But maybe the circles are widening, like the ripples on the surface of a pond when you drop in a large stone. Maybe the air inside them is easier to breathe.
There are even moments, improbable, almost indecent, when she finds herself laughing. With Sean. With Clare and Darius in the kitchen at midnight, arguing about nothing, music too loud, toast burning. Moments that feel almost like living.
The van door slams.
Gianni is climbing out, all warmth and outstretched arms.
‘Cara Evie,’ he says, wrapping her so tightly she almost believes she might not fall apart today. ‘How lovely to see you. How are you doing?’
It is never a casual question. It is always an offering.
David follows, steady and kind, his embrace quieter but just as solid. They decide, almost immediately, that food must come first. There are some battles you do not fight on an empty stomach.
Afterwards, they open the van.
Ten packing cases. Four large parcels stacked neatly to one side. Her mother’s watercolours, carefully wrapped. And a small antique table, scarred and elegant, the only piece of furniture she could bear to keep. It had been her grandmother’s. The knowledge of that lineage steadies her. Women before her, women who survived their own unnamed storms.
‘Did you find the coat?’ she asks, her voice softer now.
Gianni smiles at her. ‘Yes, cara mia. In the hall cupboard. And we brought the scarf your father always wore with it in winter.’
The coat is folded on top of a box of her summer dresses. She lifts it carefully, as though it might bruise.
It is early March. The cold lingers. Without hesitating too long, because hesitation might undo her, she slips it on.
It is too big. The shoulders fall past where they should on her narrow frame. The sleeves swallow her hands.
‘Surely you’re not going to wear that?’ David says gently. ‘It drowns you. And it’s hardly stylish. My brother was never particularly interested in how he looked.’
‘Unlike his impossibly stylish twin,’ Gianni says, pulling him into a playful embrace.
Evie sees Sean watching them. Covertly observing the easy affection, the unselfconscious touch. There is something wistful in his face. Something hungry. Poor, darling Sean. Kind-hearted, loyal Sean. For a flicker of a second she sends up a prayer to a God she no longer believes in: let him know this kind of love one day. Let him be chosen and held and certain.
She doesn’t answer David.
Because the coat is beautifully warm.
Because it smells of her father. Not in a cloying way, but in that clean, book-dust and winter-air way that was uniquely him. Because when the fabric settles around her shoulders it feels like arms.
Holding.
Steadying.
When she slips her hands into the pockets, her fingers brush against plastic.
His Cambridge University staff library card.
She stares at his name. The neat institutional font. A small, ordinary proof of his brilliance. Of his life beyond being her father. Scholar. Colleague. Mind alive with ideas.
In the other pocket: fifty pounds, crumpled, forgotten.
The card makes her throat tighten with pride. The money makes her want to laugh through tears. He had never cared much about material things. Ideas mattered. People mattered. She mattered.
What does she care if the coat looks scruffy?
She hardly looks in mirrors anymore. Clothes feel irrelevant, like decoration on someone else’s body. The coat is warm. The coat is practical. The coat is him.
She buttons it carefully.
From now on, when the weather turns cold, she will wear it.
Not as a costume. Not as a refusal.
But as a bridge.
This will be how she mourns him. How she honours him. The man who had shown her every single day how adored she was. The man whose pride in her had been a constant, radiant thing. The man who taught her, quietly, by example, how to live fully and think deeply and show affection without embarrassment.
Perhaps one day she will be able to take it off for the last time and fold it away.
If that day comes, she thinks, she will know something has shifted. Not that she misses him less because that will never be true, but that the missing has changed shape.
Maybe it will happen in some distant future when she is standing beside someone she loves with that same wholehearted, unguarded certainty. When she understands, in her bones, that love goes on as it transforms.
For now, though, she pulls the scarf around her neck and lets the coat hold her.
And for the first time that day, she does not feel as if she is falling.
Sean Saves Finn’s Future:
This moment will bind them long after the fear has faded.
It’s a wretched night altogether when Sean pushes open the door of the pool hall, the warmth hitting him at once, the smell of stale drink and damp coats. He’s glad to be out of the sleety rain, gladder still to be out of his mother’s way. He’s only been home from Oxford for the Christmas vac a single day and already she’s been at him - the state of his room, the amount of dirty washing, the wasted promise of him. And going on about the girlfriend. Always the girlfriend. When was he going to get himself a proper one?
If she knew, Sean thinks.
Thank God she doesn’t. Not yet.
He spots Finn straight away, perched on a stool at the bar, and his face lifts with relief. But as Sean reaches him and claps him on the back, Billy, the barman, looks up from the taps and gives a small shake of the head, barely perceptible. A warning.
Sean sees it then: the slackness around Finn’s mouth, the glassy insistence of his stare. Early evening and he’s already well down the road.
‘Good to see you, Sean,’ Billy says, cheery as ever. ‘Home for Christmas, is it? What’ll you have?’
‘A pint of the black stuff, Billy,’ Sean says. Then, quieter: ‘You alright, Finn?’
Finn squints at him, as if the question itself is complicated.
‘Good question’, he says at last. ‘Good question. Fucked if I know.’
Sean catches Billy’s eye. Nothing needs saying.
‘Come on,’ Sean says after a moment. ‘We’ll get out of here. I’ll finish this and you’ll have yours, and we’ll go somewhere quieter.’
It takes both of them, Sean and Billy, to get Finn into the car. Sean is acutely aware that it’s his mother’s new one, still smelling faintly of expensive leather and polish, and he spends the short drive half-praying, half-bargaining with God that it won’t be christened by Finn in the worst possible way tonight. If she found out he’d ferried a drunk lad home in it, there’d be war.
Thank Christ Finn’s digs are close. When they pull up, Ryan is just heading out. One look at Finn and he helps Sean steer him inside, where Finn collapses onto the couch like a man whose strings have been cut.
‘Sorry, Sean,’ Ryan says, already edging for the door. ‘I’m late. Can you mind him?’
‘Yeah,’ Sean says. ‘I’ve got him.’
He barely makes it from the kitchen in time with the bucket. Afterwards, when the worst of it is over, Sean cleans up, removes Finn’s trainers and settles him as best he can on the sofa. He finds a copy of The Master by Colm Toibin on a shelf and sits with it, though it’s hard to concentrate, listening instead to Finn’s breathing, to the house settling around them.
It’s close to eleven when Finn stirs. His eyes are red-rimmed and unfocused, but there’s more of him present now. Sean hands him a glass of water.
‘Jesus,’ Finn says. ‘My head is in bits. Did I make a show of myself?’
‘No,’ Sean says. ‘And you missed my ma’s new car entirely, which is nothing short of a miracle.’
‘Thank Christ.’
Sean studies him. ‘What’s going on, Finn? I’ve never seen you like that.’
Finn’s face crumples. He bends forward suddenly, head in his hands, and the sound that comes out of him is raw and shocking, like something tearing. Sean moves without thinking, sits beside him, puts an arm around his shoulders.
It’s ok,’ he says softly. ‘I’ve got you. Tell me what’s going on.’
Finn wipes his face with the kitchen roll Sean presses into his hand.
‘Sophie’s pregnant,’ he says. ‘About twelve weeks. You’re the first person I’ve told.’
Sean feels the words land, heavy and final.
‘There’ll be murder when her mother finds out,’ Finn goes on, voice breaking again. ‘Soph’s already terrified of her even suspecting something’s up. She thinks her ma’ll force us to get married. I’m twenty, Sean. She’s eighteen. We’ve nothing. Nothing.’
He dissolves again, repeating it - what am I going to do, Sean what the fuck am I going to do - like a prayer said to the wrong god.
Sean waits. When the crying eases, he says carefully, ‘Would Sophie consider going over water?’
Finn looks up at him, stunned, hope and disbelief warring on his face.
‘I can help with that if you want.’ Sean says. I'm a medical student after all. I know people. I can make calls. But it has to be what she wants too. It’s her body.’
Finn nods, almost violently. ‘She doesn’t want it’, he says. ‘She’s petrified. And her mother…’He gives a short, humourless laugh. ‘That wagon would curdle milk.’
‘Alright,’ Sean says. ‘Meet me tomorrow. Lunchtime. We’ll figure it out, but we’ll need to get a shift on - before Christmas.’
Colour creeps back into Finn’s face, followed quickly by panic again.
‘But…I’ve no money. And Sophie can’t touch hers without her mother asking questions.’
‘ll lend it to you,’ Sean says. ‘I trust you. Pay me back when you can.’
Finn breaks down once more, this time from relief. The weight that’s been pressing on him for weeks lifts slightly, just enough for him to breathe.
They stand and hold each other. Finn clings to him, unashamed now, like a man hauled back from the brink, his hands fisted in the back of Sean’s sweater as if letting go might undo it all.
‘I’ll never forget this,’ Finn says, his mouth pressed into Sean’s shoulder. ‘Not ever. You’ve saved my life.’
Sean doesn’t answer. He knows that if he does, he’ll lessen it somehow. So he stays still and lets Finn hold on, accepting the words as they’re given, knowing - without quite knowing how - that this moment will bind them long after the fear has faded.