Afterwife (9781101618868) Read online

  As she began the excruciating walk back to her pew, eyes boring into her navy Marks and Spencer shirt, Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” started to crackle through the church’s ancient speakers. Rows of people—the friends, the cousins, the exes, Freddie’s teacher, Sophie’s hairdresser, her cleaner, the music industry friends of Ollie’s, all the people who’d ever known and loved Sophie, for to know her was to love her, Jenny realized, wishing she’d said that too—dissolved into tears. Jenny wondered how many of them recognized the song. It was Sophie and Ollie’s first dance song at their wedding reception. “Because I’m so in love with you, I want to see you dance again,” Young sang, filling the belly of the church. Sucking the tears down her throat, she joined the mass shuffle to the throng in the graveyard. The light was yellowy and dark clouds were boiling over the steeple of the church. The air smelled of rain.

  “Why did you change your speech at the last minute?” asked Sam.

  “Was it rubbish?”

  Sam pulled her toward his dark blue suit. His second best suit. “No, your speech was…” He hesitated. “Sweet, really sweet, Jenny. Don’t worry about it.”

  She fisted her hands deep in her jacket pockets. All she wanted to do was go home, pour herself a humongous glass of wine and phone Sophie. That was what she always did after a bad day. And this was the baddest of days. She turned to Sam and saw him being pulled back into the crowd by Crispin, the bisexual gardener with the gold tooth who Sophie had recommended for their flower boxes. Without Sam sandwiched next to her, she felt exposed, watched, the last person to have seen Sophie alive, the bad influence. She wished she could scoot away like the other guests, sink back into the north London streets, into her altered life. She checked her watch. Not long now. The burial in Highgate Cemetery was to be just a small, immediate family affair, thank goodness. She didn’t have the stomach for it. Her job was to take Freddie back to Ollie’s and make him supper. She was glad she had a job, a use. Yes, she must find Freddie. Where was he? Peering over the obfuscating hats and feather fascinators in the crowd, she noticed a woman determinedly plowing toward her. “Jenny!”

  She froze. It was the woman who was being eaten by her own hair.

  “Suze Wilson.” An extended purple-gloved hand. The handshake crunched her fingers. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “You have?” she said, taken aback.

  “From Sophie,” Suze explained.

  She felt the heat rise on her cheeks. “Yes, of course.”

  Suze moved closer conspiratorially, biscuit breath on Jenny’s cheek. “You were brave speaking off-the-cuff like that, really brave.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled back, not knowing what to say. Sophie’s death had left a smoldering gap in her conversation. Yet it was all anyone wanted to talk about.

  Suze persevered. “You must feel terrible. Being there.” She paused, giving Jenny the space to fill in the gory details. “Seeing the accident and everything,” she added when no details were forthcoming.

  Jenny looked away. She could still see Sophie’s body in the road. Hear the crunch and thump.

  “Look, sorry, anytime you want to talk.”

  “Thank you.” I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to talk to you, she thought. And I don’t like your purple gloves.

  “And if you don’t mind I may get in contact anyway.”

  “Yeah?” Could she perhaps climb up and over Suze’s hill of hair and flee over the shoulders of the crowd?

  “Ollie will need all the help he can get now, won’t he?”

  “Yes, yes, he will.” She smiled, feeling a stab of guilt for her earlier irritation. Suze was clearly a nice, practically minded woman. She was Sophie’s friend. Making a renewed effort to be friendly, she rifled in her handbag and found a curly-edged business card. “Here’s my number.”

  Suze looked down at the white card—Jenny Vale, copy editor—with a glint of triumph. “Brill!”

  Jenny sidled away, faking an obligation somewhere else in the crowd.

  Before she could get very far Ollie touched her lightly on the arm. “Hey, Jenny.” His voice was barely audible.

  “I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry, Ollie.” The dark gray cloud had engulfed the steeple. It started to rain suddenly, pinprick-sore against the raw skin around her eyes.

  He glanced at his watch. “We’re going to…” He hesitated for an eternity. He couldn’t say bury. She took Ollie’s hand because it felt like the right thing to do. But once she had it she didn’t know what to do with it. “Go to the cemetery now.”

  “I’ll take Freddie back.”

  They stood for a moment, transfixed by the back of Freddie’s tousled blond head, neither of them moving, not wanting to take him away from his mother’s body. And Jenny was still holding Ollie’s hand. She needed to drop it.

  “Jenny, there’s something I need to ask you.”

  “Yes?” She had a bad feeling about what he was about to say next. She dropped his hand.

  He fixed her with sleepless baggy eyes. “Did Sophie talk about us, about me and her, our marriage, the night she died?”

  The bad feeling got badder. What could she say? If she told him the truth he might take the words Sophie had uttered in a drunken, restless mood and hold them against his heart forever. And she’d promised Sophie she wouldn’t repeat them.

  “I need to know if—”

  Colin the rev interrupted them. “Ollie,” he whispered, a pink, beringed hand on the sleeve of Ollie’s black wool suit, “it is time.”

  Three

  I can’t bring myself to peek inside the coffin. Not going to be a good look, is it? So I leave my beloved family scattering chocolaty Highgate soil into the hole, soak away past the graves of George Eliot and Henry Moore, the Gothic avenues of tombs, the guarding stone angels, through the damp, dark, ivy-cloaked trees of Highgate woods into the drizzly January morning air. I follow Jenny as she drives back to number thirty-three in her little yellow Mini with Freddie in the backseat staring, puzzled, silent, out the window. I follow them through the gray front door—hours of my short life I wasted locating that exact shade of cloud gray—past the surprisingly tidy hall. Clearly, mother-in-law has been busy and her gray felt slippers sit neatly, incongruously, beside my old knitted moccasin boots. I skirt along the stripped pine floor and into our kitchen, always my favorite room with its wooden units that nearly bankrupted us, the red KitchenAid cake mixer, the big range oven, the Dualit toaster, things I loved so much in a way that Ollie never understood but being Ollie indulged anyway because he’d do pretty much anything to make me happy. Ping Pong hisses as I pass and bolts out through the cat flap. Charming. Missed you too.

  After the cold and damp of the church, the smell of Jenny burning fish fingers is immensely comforting. (Jenny has many talents but cooking is not one of them. She would happily survive on Marmite toast, Minstrels and precut packaged carrot sticks.) Freddie eats it all up, which makes me curdle with maternal pleasure. It’s good to know that he’s not lost his appetite, that nature’s hardwired imperative for his six-year-old body to run and eat and grow overrides his grief. After some warmed rice pudding topped with half a jar of honey on top—Freddie tells her that’s how much I used to put on, the monkey—they curl up together on the velvet sofa. Freddie’s lids slowly shut as Jenny reads Tintin in Tibet, her Captain Haddock voice a dead ringer for Billy Connolly. While he sleeps Jenny cries, stroking his unbrushed mop of curls. I move closer to them, not wanting to frighten her, hoping that somehow, if I wish it hard enough, I will radiate some heat, something that will comfort them, let them know that I am here.

  Ollie and the grannies come back. Jenny does her big bright smile thing that she always does when she’s trying to pretend she’s not been crying, and fools nobody. Freddie doesn’t want her to go. She hesitates, unsure of the protocol, not wanting to disappoint Freddie, not wanting to intrude. Granny Vicki crushes Freddie to that bosom—it’s the Thames flood barrier of bosoms—and Jenny leaves for t
he apartment she shares with Sam in Camden. I become the dust in the dusty shadows, only brightening again as a button moon rises above the slate rooftops and London’s insomniac skyline glows acid orange. Restless to be back where I belong, I feather down the hall, shaken by the tectonic rumble of my mother-in-law snoring in the spare bedroom, sinus problems having taken a turn for the worse.

  It’s midnight. I want to get back to my side of the bed, the side nearest the bathroom because ever since I had Freddie I’ve needed to go in the night. (No, didn’t do my pelvic floors. Does anyone?) My side of the bed is oddly empty. Odd because I normally go to bed before Ollie, who is prone to watching MTV with a beer in his hand late into the night. But nothing’s normal now, is it? Everything is the same but different, like one of those pictures in Freddie’s puzzle books where you have to spot things that are wrong, like the dog with five legs, the lady with a teapot poking out of her handbag.

  Ollie is not sleeping like he usually does, either, which is like a hibernating grizzly, but twisting and turning, ruching up the bedsheets—the same bedsheets that we slept on together last week—asleep but talking indecipherably, then sitting bolt upright, flicking the light on, getting up, walking to the kitchen, pouring himself a large whiskey, downing it, then staggering through to Freddie’s room, crawling under Freddie’s pirate duvet and, with Freddie stirring slightly in his arms, finally falling asleep. I hover a few inches above them, rising and falling on the valleys of their warm breath like a bird. The night is over in a millisecond. Dawn breaks, Ollie breaks wind, Freddie unfurls from sleep in his green pajamas like a new shoot and Vicki starts bustling around the kitchen and begins, I kid you not, to reorganize my spice cupboard.

  Nothing is sacred.

  Hours shuffle like cards. Suddenly it’s Monday. Ollie doesn’t look like he’s slept at all. He can’t be arsed to shower and when I get near him, laminating his body as close as I can, he smells of scalp and skin and sweat. He’s been sweating a lot even though it’s cold. It’s as if he’s carried a stash of drugs through Dubai customs in the sole of his sneaker. He needs to shave, but doesn’t. He attempts to pack Vicki off to the local supermarket while he gets Freddie ready for school. But she won’t budge. She’s fussing. No, Ollie mumbles. He wants to do this himself, he’s got to be able to do it himself. Finally, Vicki takes the sledgehammer hint and is successfully banished to buy a pint of milk. Ollie rummages through the kitchen cupboards, looking for Freddie’s lunchbox. It’s on the shelf above the sink, as it always is, but, maddeningly, he looks everywhere but there. He curses, gives up. He puts two Penguin bars in an old plastic bag—two?—alongside one of Jenny’s cold burned fish fingers, which he wraps in cellophane—impressed by the cellophane bit—and a Marmite sandwich made from bread that has outlived me. He does not brush Freddie’s hair, which sticks out like wings. And he does not notice that Freddie is wearing his Superman pajama top beneath his gray school shirt. Freddie has been trying to wear this Superman top to school for at least a year.

  Ollie, one of the hungriest men alive, forgets to feed himself and, more cataclysmically, forgets to feed the mightily disgruntled Ping Pong. He can’t find the school bag, which is on a hook in the utility cupboard, the same hook it’s been hung on for the last two years.

  I’m beginning to realize how much I did. How much I micromanaged our lives. And I’m worrying about how Ollie is going to cope. Because there is the domesticated man. And there’s Ollie. This is a man who once watered a houseplant for a year before realizing it was plastic. This is a man who only last week put washing powder tablets in the tumble dryer. Yes, Ollie is a brilliant music producer. His brain can organize an infinite variation of bars and chords and breaks. But it cannot compute how many pints of milk a family of three drinks in a week. (Five.)

  Ollie and Freddie finally leave for school, hands knotted together. How much I want to slip my hands into that tight little knot. How much I want to run my fingers through Freddie’s hair and feel his hot boy’s neck. How I want to yank up Ollie back to his full height to stop that gorgeous body from collapsing in on itself like a wonky old deck chair. He is normally so reassuringly solid—wide shouldered, barrel chested, male and bulky like a hunk of roughly hewn oak—but day by day he looks whittled down. His twisted-fit Levi’s are slipping down his hips. His face is newly angular, unshaven and angry; his jaw is jutting because his teeth are constantly clenched. He reminds me of how he used to look in his twenties when he’d spent too many sleepless weekends on the coke that made him so elated then so utterly miserable, before “his angel of Harpenden,” as he used to call me back then, rescued him and made him drink Chablis instead. But I can’t rescue him now. It seems I’m merely watching them rather than watching over them, more CCTV than celestial being.

  At the school gates there’s a throng of mothers, milling with muted excitement as if waiting for some sale doors to fling open. Freddie and Ollie walk down the street toward them. The hushed talking immediately stops. They part to make room for his passing, buggies are swiftly jerked out of his way, fevered looks are exchanged. Eyes fill with tears.

  My husband, the pope!

  Ollie blanks them, walking determinedly toward the cheerful red door of class 2A to the left on the playground, the farthest class from the gate, and therefore the one with the longest public parade. The crowd’s ventriloquist whispers sound like a distant storm at sea. The mothers discuss protocol beneath their breath. There is no consensus and a few are now breaking ranks and gamely stepping forward to smile sympathetically at Freddie—he looks down, hates being singled out at the best of times—and offer condolences to Ollie, who scuffs his trainer against the painted yellow lines on the concrete playground like a schoolboy. Resisting the urge to hug Freddie—he is still mine, still someone else’s child—the women reach instead for Ollie, maternally patting his arm or hand or, rather less maternally in Tash’s case, the small of his back, near the waistband of his jeans. Even those who are tearful and tongue-tied want to touch Ollie, as if they need to know what a bereaved dad actually feels like. Perhaps touching one makes them feel it won’t happen to them too. I guess we’ve all wondered: having children makes you ponder your mortality, ghoulishly hypothesize the what-ifs. Funny thing is that before this happened I did that too, idly, indulgently. Comfortable that things like this didn’t happen to people like us.

  The school bell rings. There is a twitch in Ollie’s lower lip now, barely perceptible but a sign to me who knows that lower lip as well as I know my own that he is fighting tears.

  If Ollie cries now I swear someone will try to breastfeed him.

  Mrs. Simpson, Freddie’s teacher, greets them at class 2A’s door. She is professional and kind and does not make a fuss—much to Ollie’s and Freddie’s obvious relief—and takes Freddie’s hand and leads him inside his old classroom, which, I hope, will be mercifully the same as it always was, unlike everything else in his life. The door closes. Ollie stands there for a moment, facing the shut door, lost, his face blank like a man who has woken up and no longer has the first clue who he is. His features reconfigure and he takes a deep breath, then walks back to the tall iron school gates, his black eyes drilling into the ground.

  This is not a good enough defense. Oh, no. Without Freddie to shield him, Ollie is open season. Some of the women have been waiting for him to return: I know their migratory patterns and I know that normally they would have flocked to Starbucks by now. Instead, they’re hovering by the gate. Suze. Tash. Lydia. Liz. The usual suspects.

  “Is there anything, anything at all we can do to help?” implores Suze. Her giant breasts quiver in the deep V of her gaping blue blouse as if they are domed conductors for the group’s electrical storm of pent-up emotion.

  Ollie shakes his head and tries to smile. “No. Thanks.” He starts to walk away.