Twelve Months and a Day

A poignant, modern love story about a young widow and widower and the two ghosts that bring them together because although love changes form, it never dies.

“Heart-stoppingly romantic.”—The Express (UK)

Two couples. Four unfinished lives. A love that transcends space and time.

Rasmus and Jay, Róisín and Nico: two couples, strangers to each other. Two beautiful, ordinary love stories, cut short. Both in their thirties and too young to be widowed, Róisín swears she still feels Nico beside her in bed and Rasmus hears Jay as he writes songs at the piano.

Jay and Nico don’t even believe in ghosts, yet here they still are. Still in love with Rasmus and Róisín. And maddeningly powerless. Until Jay has an idea that Nico wants no part of—bringing Róisín and Rasmus together. It’s crazy enough that it just might work, but playing matchmaker to the living is no easy feat and one that will require all four of them to discover the meaning of love after loss, and the importance of fighting for happiness against all odds.

Moving and thought-provoking, playful and bittersweet, Twelve Months and a Day asks what is love? And what are we to do with it?People’s Book of the Week
One of People’s Best Books of 2023 So Far
One of Library Journal’s 13 Genre-Blending Novels

“One of the freshest love stories I’ve read in years.”—Colleen Oakley, author of The Invisible Husband of Frick Island

“A heartfelt valentine to hope.” —People

“A haunting love story—literally.”—Best magazine (UK)

“Equal parts tender, sparkling, and authentic, Louisa Young’s prose is like watching a flower open, each moment beautiful, mesmerizing, and better than the last. Twelve Months and a Day will have readers captivated from beginning to end.” —Amy E. Reichert, author of Once Upon a December

“Deeply emotional...An impressive and poignant romance.” —Publishers Weekly

“Readers of this novel full of wisdom, joy, and sorrow should have their tissues handy as they read.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Riveting…In this poignant tale of redemption and hope, we find unforgettable characters on both sides—the living and the dead—who are fated to find new strength, joy and purpose.” —BookTrib

“A tale of two love stories with a supernatural twist…[Caused] a bitter-sweet pang in my heart as it ended.” —Monique Roffey, author of Archipelago and The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

"The words 'emotional roller coaster' seem coined for Louisa Young’s beautiful, bittersweet novel, as heart-stoppingly romantic as it’s heartbreakingly sad...A lovely, moving, ultimately hopeful read."—The Express (UK)

"A wonderful and inventive novel, sorrowful and hopeful in equal measure. It was a true pleasure to read." —Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper PalaceLouisa Young was born in London and studied history at Cambridge. She co-wrote the Lionboy series with her daughter and is the author of nine further books including, the bestselling My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, which was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award and was a Richard and Judy Book Club choice, and Baby Love, long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her work is published in thirty-six languages. She lives in London.1
Bloody Boats

February

London

Róisín Kennedy – thirty-three, observant, clever, a slight rockabilly look to her (blue-tipped hair, at the moment, and a little fringe) was feeling good in the pale sunshine of the gastropub garden. She and her fiancé Nico Triandafilides – thirty-six, nicely shaved, clean white shirt, quite the lad even on a Saturday lunchtime – hadn’t seen much of each other that week. He’d been working nights and she’d had a deadline in the editing suite. They hadn’t been getting on that well: for three months they’d been on a promise to discuss whether or not they wanted to have a child, though it was something neither of them actually wanted to talk about. They each thought that the other felt differently about it to them and was secretly upset. They were both wrong, and therefore they were both, secretly, upset. So this long-weekend morning of unexpectedly hot sex and breakfast out was bloody lovely.

It was the first sunny morning of springtime: too early for the crocuses, but the unmistakable secret sign had gone out. The light was a breath lighter; even London’s sooty black walls and spit-raddled grey curbstones had an air of imminence. When the breeze lifted your hair, the sun was almost warm on your skin. The swans in the park had started with the neck-coiling; there was mimosa on the flower stalls. She was having avocados and stuff; he was going the full English, with triple espressos and extra black pudding.

"Funniest thing this week?" she cued him, their old habit, a guaranteed mood-enhancer—mood-changer if need be—and that started up the run of stupid jokes. One of her many sisters, Nell, had pointed out that the term Leider-hosen—like Lederhosen, the well-known and arguably regrettable dungaree-style Alpine leather shorts, only with an extra i—meant, in German, literally, "regrettable trousers." This alone provoked some hilarity. "Yeah, I’ve had a few pairs of them in my time," Nico said, and they remembered one brown tweed suit that had made him look like a confused sheep farmer.

"Or an Irish intellectual," Róisín had said kindly. "Irish!" Nico squawked, which was fair enough as he really couldn’t have looked more Greek, from his brown eyes and hairy chest to his quizzical mouth and not-very-secret desire to have a mustache like his granddad’s.

"So does that make Lieder-hosen trousers for singing classic Germanfolk songs in?" Nico said, and it went downhill.

Lido-hosen, she suggested, for urban swimming.

"You could wear them when you go to Crouch End," he said. "With Lilo-hosen to change into, for wearing on your lilo. Inflatable,maybe."

Lipo-hosen, she suggested, which make you thinner.

"We don’t need them,” he said. "Lager-hosen,for drinking beer in! Indistinguishable from the original Lederhosen.”

“Luger-hosen,” she said, "with a built‑in holster."

Wader-hosen, with long wellies attached for fishing. Yoda-hosen, Data-hosen, Gator-hosen, and make it snappy. Hater-hosen, for Twitter trolls; Mater- and Pater-hosen for Latin teenagers to address their parents; Straighter-hosen, if you’re going for the skinny-leg look. They were in such hysterics by then that people turned to look. All those couples with nothing to say to each other after fifteen years, glancing across at the couple in fits of giggles. It wasn’t because the jokes were that funny, because obviously they weren’t. It was just that they were having such a lovely time. He’d even rolled up his sleeves, pretending they were by some sunlit blue bay in Ithaca, at Frikes in the morning sun, with bitter coffee and baklava – God, summer, so far away – and then something in the sound of his laughter changed and she was calling out.

Twenty-one minutes while she and the barmaid took turns giving him CPR, till the ambulance came. Paramedics who didn’t know that he was one of them. But everybody knew that it was too long. Her eyes were still full of the tears of laughter he’d reduced her to. She didn’t feel it was right for him to die while her hair was this stupid blue. She wanted to kiss him but once the pros arrived, she couldn’t get near him for kit. CPR, our last kiss.

After a while, alone and almost furtive by the trolley in A&E, she took her father’s wedding ring from her forefinger and put it on his finger, third finger, left hand. And she took his stupid rock ’n’ roll silver skull ring, and put it on her own.

"I do," she tried to say. "You do too."

They’d been going to. He’d actually proposed the day they met: in the mudbath of a Glastonbury crowd bouncing around to The Fratellis. Nico had intervened when a drunk stranger was being difficult during "Chelsea Dagger" ("Listen," he’d said. "Go away"), and the resultant joshing ended up with him proposing to her. A year later he’d given her a diamond. No mud. But they’d never got round to the actual wedding. It seemed absurd, actually getting married. But a romantic revelation had crept up on them. This was love. This every day. This supporting each other. Me supporting him, mostly, she often thought, but you know. The diamond fitted snugly now with the skull, like a tiny flower behind its ear. Holding it on.

***

She stood on the deck of the launch in the black and white Dalmatian-print fake-fur coat she had decided was just the thing for the occasion. Well, what the hell do you wear? she thought. To denote courage, devil-may-care desperation, determination, I’m going to make it through today, I am, it’s required.

She’d cut her hair, because she didn’t know what to do: slaughtered the peroxide strands with the blue tips and the little tumbling fringe; sent it to the cancer charity for children. Her head now wore a soft fuzz of its natural dark brown and she’d a feeling she looked like Sinéad O’Connor back in the day. Sinéad was a lovely-looking woman, but it wasn’t what she wanted people to be thinking about when they were shouldering his coffin to the boat. Still, she’d done it now, so.

To the north-east she saw the red and white lighthouse of the Needles standing proud against blue sky. South-west was the wide horizon down to the Atlantic. Behind her, a hundred people on a bright, terrible, unseasonably sunny morning out on the Solent in boats, all saying "I had no idea he wanted to be buried at sea!" But that’s the good thing about dying young. Lots of friends still around to come to your funeral. Look, darling, they all came! And they’re all in bloody boats!

Who knew!

She’d let his mum arrange it all. She was hardly going to make a fuss when Marina was ringing her wanting to know if she thought it would be all right, as there was no grave in the earth, to ask the sea-burial people if they could throw the grains of wheat into the sea, or should they just do it without saying anything? Róisín had no opinion about that.

Nobody knew where his will was.

Lots of his family were there, lighting candles in loaves of bread, and keening. Twenty-three of hers. Declan with the good voice sang "The Parting Glass"; Dmitri with the even better voice sang the one about he gave you rosewater and she gave me poison... The works. He died. Damn you, you utter bastard darling – Cavafy was recited, of course: "Ithaka".  Kind of compulsory. Don’t hurry the journey at all, better if it lasts for years... She hardly heard it; there was nothing in her to consider how inappropriate that was. And Tennyson: Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea... The kind men in uniform put the lilies aside and flicked the flag away. Nico’s coffin – plain new wood, heavily weighted – had been drilled through with more holes than she had expected. It was so quick! The men tipped it into the sea, green and choppy here, mercury-silver in the distance, bloody sea, you can’t trust it, and it sank. She wasn’t crying, because she didn’t want to set people off, to raise the water level. She watched the bubbles swaying as they rose. Goodbye. Aντίο φίλε μου. Slán.

Everyone else cried anyway, friends and relations, throwing flowers on the water. Gulls appeared from nowhere and wheeled beautifully among them. The boat circled, and for a moment she thought she felt a hand on the back of her neck. She jumped – but there was nobody.

Someone put a glass of whiskey in her hand.  She hurled it overboard, towards him.

Why did you die? But she knew why he died. Dying is what people do, who drink and smoke and argue and work all the hours God sends and, it turns out, have an undiagnosed heart condition. And anyway it was her fault. Making him laugh so much.

Even she realized that was stupid. It’s normal to think it’s your fault but that really is stupid.

***

Róisín lay in bed on her back. No position comfortable. Her body had knotted itself up in response to the absence of his. "Where are you?" she cried. "For God’s sake, Nico, where are you?"

She did the usual human things. She lit candles, so his spirit if it was wandering about would have a light to see by. She went to Mass! Which wasn’t like her, but there’s nothing like death to turn you to religion. The Hail Mary hadn’t looked so attractive for decades. Pray for us now and at the hour of our... She stood in the aisle of Sainsbury’s on Fortis Green Road, staring at the bottles of San Pellegrino she used to get for him when he was cutting down on booze, and at bottles of ketchup she needn’t buy any more because it was him that liked ketchup. Supermarkets were comforting. She came out with three kinds of cream cheese and no washing-up liquid.

She went over to the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath for her usual Sunday swim, no Nico at the Men’s Pond, no coffee together afterwards, put on her little neoprene socks and gloves and her woolly hat, all so black against her white, white skin, and prepared to slip into the cold, forgiving water. But the ponds drain to the river which goes to the sea... She dived in off the steps and thought about staying there, underwater, in the murk; the natural animal feeling of it, and the strange gleams of Old-Testament light.

As she came up, a robin made a side-head special-face at her from the fence.

In the changing room she stared at herself in the mirror. Her face so round and pale, her eyes so round and blue, her little mouth. Everything was normal, except for everything.

Her friends were being fantastic. Her sister Nell rang five times a day. "You can’t live on alcohol and marzipan," she said. "You’ve to eat vegetables. Vegetables. In soup or something." Vegetable soup made Róisín cry.

"How are you doing?" Nell asked. "What’s going on?"

"Dame Helena Handcart has introduced Monsieur Shit to Madame Fan," Róisín said.

"Ohhhh," said Nell.

"I looked up what happens without the will and guess what it said? It said: 'The following people have no right to inherit where someone dies without leaving a will: unmarried partners'."

"It’ll turn up," said Nell.

"Maybe," Róisín said faintly.

She didn’t do anything about it. It was surprisingly easy. For a bit. Then at four in the morning she’d wake up terrified.

At work, her kind colleagues made sympathetic side-head at her like the robin. There’d been white envelopes on her desk, like for a birthday or when you leave. One card at home had a mauve iris on it, and glitter. At first she’d opened them, because she wanted to read the nice things people had to say about him. She’d laughed at how they’d found nice things to say even though he could be a difficult sod. "Nico was one of a kind"; "Such a character"; "I never knew anybody quite like him." Just as well, in some ways, she’d thought.

It turned out lots of people had suffered heartbreaking loss. The most surprising people! The very nerdiest of the IT boys who worked downstairs came shyly to her with a small book of Poems to Save Your Life, and told her about his boyfriend Anwar at school. She’d had no idea there was so much death around. You too, huh. Her boss Ayesha brought her a cup of tea and said, "You take your time." Róisín remembered the cup of tea the nurse had brought her. She went home.

***

"Nell," Róisín said on the phone. "You know how he’d always text me, all day, whatever was going on, and now he doesn’t – so I think something’s happened to him, even though something has happened to him, I know that perfectly well, but my thoughts are just... are just.. so am I being an eejit?"

Nell said, "You’re in bits still. Have you had something to eat yet today?"

"Marzipan..." Róisín murmured. She felt she was boring her friends and her family with her grief; that they would like her to start getting over it. "Mam wants me to come home for a bit."

"Do you want to?"

"NO!" Róisín yelped.

"Don’t, so."

It wasn’t that she didn’t love them. But at least five of them would talk in front of her about how terrible it was their brother-in-law dying. She wanted peace. Nell would come up from Hastings at the drop of a hat. Already had done. Several times.

"What you need to do," said Nell, "is—"

"I don’t want a counselor," Róisín said.

"A counselor would be good for you," said Nell. "But I won’t be dragging you. No, what you want is to meet people in the same boat as you. Have you looked up those bereavement support groups?"

"Fuck off, Nell," she said. "Would you kindly."
 

***

She had a sense that he was looking over her shoulder, was just in the other room. There were dreams: one where he’d been putting a small child in the boot of a car. One where they had a glorious adventure running around in ruined cities, jumping off things on lianas, dancing, ending up in a dive bar with Johnny Cash; one where they were kissing on a shining cloud while tiny fish darted around like dragonflies over their heads, and just before she woke, he shrank, tiny, and ran towards her just at the level of her heart, and opened a door in her chest, and walked inside, waving up to her cheerily as he went.

She bunked off work one day because she heard, she swore she heard, his voice saying "Come here  to me  now, I want you", so she’d jumped on a train and taken the ferry to the Isle of Wight with an armful of hyacinths, in the rain, and she’d thrown them overboard mid-channel,  thinking about him, waving in the weeds, those are pearls that were his eyes – they’d make terrible pearls, an awful colour for a pearl, worse than those shiny purplish ones you’d see on stalls at a craft market that looked like blood blisters, or buboes from the plague. She wanted to think of him being dead because she couldn’t stop thinking about him and the aliveness of him in these thoughts was unbearable. So – physical. She’d smelt his jumper randomly on a bus – a waft of wool and vetiver and the way he had of always smelling of suntan oil. She’d found his T-shirt in her bed, when it had no business being there, though true, she hadn’t yet changed the sheets, and yes of course she knew she should, but he had slept in these sheets. One evening, dancing alone to the radio, drunk in the tiny kitchen they had shared in presumptuous ignorance of what fate had lined up for them, she felt so strongly that he had just slipped into her arms that she hugged him back. Time after time, sang Cyndi Lauper, and on some level – what level? It confused her even now – she was holding him and crying and he was holding her, his arms round her shoulders, the weight of them. She danced with him, a slow rock ’n’ roll, hands stretched out to invisible hands, to and fro, to and fro. Holding her arm up and out to be twirled, spinning lazily back into his non-existent embrace, stars rolling round her head and a moonshine mood pervading her. Then she’d gone in to bed, muttering prayers from her childhood – Now I lay me down to sleep – If you’re lost – I will be there – pray for us sinners now and at the hour – I will catch you. She tripped over a shoe – one of his, a black Chelsea boot – what was it doing there? – stubbing her toe, and then again there he was, the weight of him on the side of the bed, lying down beside her. She felt his hand on her shoulder, and half asleep she reached up to hold it, and that was so sweet but then she woke, shaking, and ran and hid in the bathroom, and cried. Knowing grief is going to be strange doesn’t stop it being strange.