Afterwife (9781101618868) Read online

  Lydia bars him with her sheepskin Ugg boot. “Washing?”

  “Washing?” repeats Ollie, puzzled.

  “Would you like us to do your washing, Ollie?” Lydia speaks slowly as if addressing a small child, even though Ollie towers over her fairy frame.

  “Washing,” he repeats, as if it were something he hadn’t ever considered before, and probably hasn’t. “My mother…”

  “Or shopping?” Liz agitates her foot on her son’s blue scooter.

  “I…I…” Ollie is a man of few words but is never normally lost for them. He stares blankly at the scooter.

  “Would Freddie like to sleep over?” Tash jumps into his hesitation, stepping closer so that he can smell the perfume caught within the soft pelt of her white fake fur stole. (Even I can smell the perfume and I’m near the school hall guttering.)

  A lemony sun breaks through the cloud. Ollie’s pupils shrink to pencil points. In the last three weeks he’s spent a lot of time alone in the dark, like a miner. His olive skin is pale and flaky. “I’m trying to keep Freddie close. Just at the moment.”

  “As normal as possible. Of course, of course,” gushes Tash apologetically. “But if you ever need me to take Freddie to school, when, er, you go back to work.” She blushes, wondering if she’s said the wrong thing. “Not that I want to…”

  I feel for him. Normally, at this juncture I’d read the signs, swoop into the conversation and pluck him out, the sunny, social one to counterbalance his northern, Heathcliffian tendencies. “Thanks. That would be great,” he mumbles, giving them what they want, waiting to be released.

  Tash looks around at the other women with a look of unmistakable triumph.

  Ollie digs his hands into his jeans pockets, attempts to walk away again.

  Not so fast, buster! “You will let us know, won’t you?” says Suze. She’s somehow standing in front of him without anyone being sure how she got there. It’s social kung fu. “If you need anything, Ollie, anything at all? Just pick up the phone. You’ve got my number, haven’t you? Let me write it out for you just in case. Oh, bollocks. Anyone got a pen?”

  Ollie grunts, like he always grunts when he begins to feel obligated. Ollie is one of the world’s kindest men, the best of men, but he hates obligation. He likes to think he can be selfish if he wants to. It’s an adolescent thing that lots of wives of music producers have to contend with. Most of the time his main selfishness, apart from nicking my moisturizer and refusing to cook, manifests itself merely in putting on headphones and sinking into his music, annoying but not up there in the great pantheon of male selfishness, clearly. I complained about this in the past but now wish I hadn’t, firstly because I knew about his antisocial solipsistic tendencies from the beginning—I’d wake up in bed to find him wearing these big fat headphones over his long hair and I thought it quite the sexiest thing ever—and also because the flaw, if it is a flaw, is just Ollie. I should have realized I’d have been bored to tears with the man I often complained he wasn’t, the domesticated, fully socialized, Muswell Hill thirtysomething dad behind the cake stall. Why did I not tell him more often that I just loved him as he was?

  Like secrets, words that are left unsaid get buried with you.

  Four

  Firecracker.” Sam rolled off Jenny with a skin-sucking squelch. “I needed that.”

  Jenny flopped back into the slightly sinister microclimate of their Tempur-Pedic mattress. She did not feel like a firecracker. Since Sophie had died—three weeks, three days, fourteen hours ago—sex didn’t work, not for her at any rate. Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever orgasm again. Part of her hoped she wouldn’t. Sophie couldn’t. Why should she? She’d grown a giant retro bush. She’d stopped shaving under her arms. Yes, she was morphing into the world’s unsexiest creature. And she didn’t give a damn.

  She just wished her heart would stop slamming, that’s all. It was a frantic tattoo. She’d ditched coffee after one p.m., forced herself to bathe by candlelight before bed—setting fire to a tinderstick loofah in the process—but still her heart jumped about inside her chest like someone who’d snorted a kilo of amphetamine and was prancing about on a speaker in a nightclub.

  Sam yawned, releasing a mist of morning breath. Inside his mouth his uvula looked pink and animate, like it might have an opinion. It probably did. Later, she knew that he’d brush his tongue. He was the only person she’d ever met who brushed his tongue. She watched him fiddle with his omnipresent iPhone; Mumford & Sons poured out from a hidden speaker in the bedpost. The apartment was full of hidden speakers. Music suddenly blasting out of cabinets and walls and baths like raucous ghosts, making her jump. It was a boy’s apartment, home to families of remote controls, gleaming with hard, aeronautical steel surfaces, smelling of freshly ground coffee. It was like waking up in Business Class every morning.

  He trailed a finger down her shoulder. “Shall we ambulate down to the greasy spoon?” He didn’t look up, back on the phone again. Tap tap tap. “I need trans fats.”

  “No, I’m taking Freddie out, remember?” She smiled as brightly as she could manage, trying to look normal. But nothing was normal. Sophie being alive was normal. This wasn’t.

  You’ve got to find a way of moving on, that was what Sam kept saying. But, damn, move on where? For the last fifteen-odd years of her life she and Sophie had been on the same train, Sophie sitting beside her, her favorite apple green boxy handbag on her lap, shopping bags at her feet, body tilted toward Jenny at an angle so that their shoulders touched and sometimes she’d get a mouthful of Sophie’s luscious long dark hair, which always tasted of expensive, honey-scented shampoo. Even a train journey with Sophie was a hoot. She was one of those women who would cheerfully chat loudly and unself-consciously in a crowded carriage about anything: gossip, politics, the shoes of the woman down the carriage, the headlines on the man opposite’s newspaper and sex. Sophie loved talking about sex. (“Okay. Sex in a tent. Boris Johnson or David Cameron? No, no, no! You have to choose one, you have to, Jenny. My God, you’re blushing! You’ve thought about this before, haven’t you? I reckon you’re a Boris bonker. Fess up. No, I’m not going to shush.”) What she wouldn’t do now for just one more journey from Oxford Circus to King’s Cross with her. One more gossip. One more chat. There were so many more things they still had to say.

  Sam looked up and eyed her with a mixture of wariness and concern. “You alright, babes?”

  She snapped back to the bedroom, to the present. “Fine!”

  Sam started doing one of the morning stretches that Big Eric, his trainer, had taught him last month for an extortionate sum, something weird and painful looking involving his arm being bent back over his shoulders and a fair amount of clicking. “Stiff as a corpse this morning,” he muttered through the exertion. “I told Big Eric no more fucking weights. Masochist.”

  Wishing he hadn’t said “corpse,” she watched his arms bulge. They’d certainly gotten bigger. Secretly she preferred them before, sinewy but strong, the way he was naturally meant to be. Funnily enough, out of all of his handsome frame it was his head she loved best, the only thing he couldn’t work out in the gym. His head was like Bruce Willis’s, closely shaved to hide the spreading bald patch, symmetrical, satisfying, like a slightly furry pet. She liked to place her palm across it and feel its alive heat. And she liked that it flowed seamlessly into his smooth, unusual face without the interruption of hair. Sam’s good looks were architectural, vulpine. He had a face that could have been designed by the architect Norman Foster.

  She’d noticed him instantly at the small book launch in a Marylebone bookshop all those years ago. He’d been smartly dressed, swaggery—red socks!—not the usual publishing type, no surprise, as he wasn’t. She’d felt the burn of those bright LED blue eyes following her around the room. Shyness had prevented her from returning that confrontational gaze. Of course she’d had no idea at the time that this shyness would be misinterpreted as hard-to-get hauteur. That he’d see getting his finge
rs into her pants as the ultimate challenge. (She would have said yes please if he’d asked politely.) Sam loved a challenge. He liked his women “slightly difficult, chewy like hard toffee,” he’d once said, qualifying it with, “it was only afterwards I discovered you were more like fudge.” That had made her laugh. He used to make her laugh a lot.

  Sam released his biceps and lay heavily back onto the bed, his jaw cracking as he yawned. “RoboCop, I am not.”

  “You’ve been working late all week.” She meant this nicely but it came out wrong, more like an accusation. This kept happening, words coming out wrong.

  He looked up at her sharply. “It’s good that I’m this busy, bloody brilliant in the current climate.”

  “I know, I know.” Had she made Sam defensive about his career? That wasn’t her intention. He had once dreamed of being a human rights lawyer and had grown up to be a divorce lawyer. This was what happened in life to most people, a gradual distillation of intent. One had to be pragmatic. She’d once dreamed of being a gardener, and she was a copy editor. How did that happen? Well, the rent happened. London happened. Her “career” happened while she was thinking about other things. Like nights out with the girls in karaoke bars in town. Chris. Tim. Sam. Chelsea Flower Show. Her highlights. Her waxing schedule. How to avoid going home for lunch every Sunday. Dolly at Wembley Arena. The demanding full-time vocation of being Sophie’s best friend. Her love of books.

  So she dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s and realigned paragraphs. She was good at it. Although sometimes it felt like her pastime was copyediting and her real job was trying to get her printer to work. Her specialty, her passion, although she would take on anything, was the kind of sumptuous gardening and house books that few bought, much less read. She’d always loved detail, the antlike march of letters across a page, the excitement of undressing a manuscript from its large padded envelope. But she’d made some embarrassing mistakes recently. Only last week she’d not spotted that a manuscript had three chapter fives. If there were a disacknowledgments section for people who’d made the production of the book infinitely more difficult she’d take pride of place.

  “Let’s go somewhere fancy soon. I don’t know, Barcelona? Rome? Business is good, all good, babes,” Sam added, rubbing a hand along her thigh.

  She smiled. “As long as you’re not one of the divorcing couples.”

  “As long as you’re not the husband! Some of the payouts. Woo-wee!” He whistled, stared up at the ceiling. “It’s a miracle anyone gets married.”

  The elephant in the room swished its tail. She remembered Sophie asking her about the wedding date that fateful night. Pushing the conversation out of her head, she quickly sat up and slipped her feet into her sheepskin slippers. She didn’t want to think about that.

  “Interesting look.” He smiled, glancing down.

  “Oh!” She’d put the slippers on the wrong feet. Yesterday she’d gone out to buy a newspaper with her jumper inside out. How she missed her old brain, her tidy, organized, optimistic brain. Where had it gone? It was as if someone had crept in the night Sophie died and emptied all her boxes, books and files all over the floor, like a demented ex-employee sabotaging the boss’s office.

  “Chuck over the lighter. Thanks, darling.”

  She handed him the bullet-cold weight of the Zippo and gazed out the window at the poised row of grubby Georgian houses on the opposite side of the Camden street. They looked different since Sophie had died, in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She felt the faint vibration of a Silverlink train, heard its rumble, then the deaf bloke’s telly next door. Again, these familiar noises now sounded foreign, like something outside a hotel window the first morning in a new city.

  Sam exhaled a curl of smoke. “Where you taking Freddie, then?”

  “Thinking zoo, but it’s a bit arctic, isn’t it?” The freezing February sky looked heavy and white. “I remember being dragged to the zoo as a child when it was like this. The only thing you get to see are llamas and rare breed pigs.”

  “Nothing wrong with a rare breed. Preferably between two slices of bread with a dollop of ketchup.”

  She bit down on her bottom lip, where she had developed a permanent dent like the pothole Camden Council wouldn’t mend outside the apartment. “Why don’t you come?”

  “Don’t do zoos, babes.”

  Sam didn’t do north of London or easyJet or rubber-soled shoes. The zoo thing was a new one. “Huh?”

  “The sight of animals in cages freaks me out.”

  “You know you really should have become an animal rights lawyer.” It was meant to be a joke. But he shot her a dark look over his coffee cup. “Aquarium?”

  “A tank is a cage.”

  “So is an apartment. Oh, go on, darling. Come.”

  He shook his head, serious suddenly. “You know what I’m like with kids, Jen. I never know what to say at the best of times. Let alone…”

  “Forget it.”

  “Why don’t I take you for lunch first?” he said, trying to appease her for refusing to play zoos with Freddie. “Then I can drive you up to Muswell Hill.”

  “Thanks, but I’m having lunch with Ollie first.”

  Sam’s face clouded. He ground out the cigarette with a long stub and got out of bed. Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” started to crash out of the speakers. He turned it up and mouthed along to it.

  “What?”

  “You’ve spent more time with Ollie than you have with me recently.”

  “Come on, Sam.” She shook her head at the futility of explanation. They’d been here before. “He’s no good on his own. I owe it to Soph to be there now.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You make it all sound like a country and western track. Sweetheart, Ollie’s a man. He just needs the space to drink himself into oblivion and shag himself stupid.”

  “Sam!” She felt everything tense between them again. It had been building over the last few weeks. Like an electrical storm about to break.

  “You can’t make it better, Jenny, don’t you get it?” His voice was higher now, that odd pitch he used when he was angry but tried to hide it. “You can’t bring Sophie back.” He took her hand, pressed the tips of her fingertips to his soft morning mouth. They would smell of cigarettes all day.

  “Sophie would have looked out for you had I died,” she said gently.

  He made a scoff noise in the back of his throat.

  She yanked her hand away. Rage was starting to build in perfect synchronicity with Jimmy Page’s guitar solo. “Did you even like Sophie, Sam?”

  He visibly started, paling beneath his smooth skin. “What are you saying?”

  “You don’t seem that affected, that’s all. It’s like everything is the same as it was.”

  “What do you want me to do, wear a T-shirt?”

  No, grief had made neither of them better people. It was almost banal. This bickering. The way she’d put on seven pounds. That constant feeling that something was lost. Her keys? Her phone? She’d scrabble around in her handbag before realizing that the lost thing was Sophie.

  “She was a beautiful woman who died too young. But she wasn’t my wife, Jenny. I’m not going to phonily pretend my life is decimated by her dying.” Sam pulled on his white underpants, rearranged his balls. “I refuse to emote on call.”

  “I’m not asking you to emote, I’m asking you…to…to give a bit more of a shit, that’s all!”

  He looked at her in disbelief. “You think I don’t give a shit? Bloody hell. You really don’t know me at all, do you, Jenny?”

  At Sam’s persuasion—exercise is a mood enhancer!—she’d gone to a punishing class of Legs, Bums and Tums with a Leo Sayer lookalike instructor who’d shouted, “Hey, you at the back with the hair!” when she could go no further with the star jumps that were making her tits ache. (And what was wrong with her hair? Pots and bloody kettles.) Hamstrings singing with pain, ears ringing with Girls Aloud, she’d reversed badly out of the gym park
ing space beneath the gaze of three sniggering teenage girls; and now here she was, still a bit BOish, sitting in a snarl of traffic on route to Muswell Hill, London’s tightly packed heart now behind her, pulsing beneath its gray layer of grimy snow.

  She wondered if Ollie’s mother, Vicki, would be at Ollie’s today, and hoped not. Sophie used to call her “Joan Collins’s long-lost sister from Basingstoke.” Still, rather Joan Collins’s long-lost sister than Soph’s poor mum, Sally, who was a sodden tangle of tears, hurt and neediness. She’d called Jenny every night the week before, wanting to go over the fateful evening in detail. What had Sophie drunk? Eaten? What had they talked about? As she spoke her pain was audible, like nails scraping a blackboard. A mother’s pain, no lessened by her daughter’s age. Sophie may as well have been five.

  Stopping at the traffic lights, she glanced about her and exhaled the tension of crowded inner London.

  Trees. That was the thing she first noticed about Muswell Hill. All the trees, skeletal now but in summer shivers of green. Yes, trees, wider roads, lots of white people, and a lovely view. From different points in the neighborhood you could see the whole of London spread out below you like a meal on a plate. Jenny pulled up outside Ollie’s house. A typical suburban Edwardian house, it had a fashionable circus-style number thirty-three transfer on the upper windowpane, a soft gray door, and a recycle box alarmingly full of empty wine bottles and beer cans next to the pathway. The blinds were shut and the frosted front path was unscuffed by footprints. She knocked, waited for a few minutes before Freddie opened the front door, wearing his Superman pajamas and clutching a battered stack of Match Attax cards.

  “Hey, Freddie!” She hugged him, sniffed his hair. It didn’t smell how it usually smelled, fresh and boyish, like wind and soil. No, he smelled sockish today and his angelic curls were matted at the back. “You alright?” Stupid question.

  “Yes, thank you.” Freddie smiled politely, as Sophie had taught him, but he didn’t maintain eye contact for long. She wondered if the horrible truth—his mother wasn’t coming back—had dawned yet. A notably slimmed-down Ping Pong curled around his ankles and mewed pitifully.