Afterwife (9781101618868) Page 5

  Inside the hall it was chaotic, more chaotic than the previous week. Not just mess, but layers of mess, stratified in the manner of an archaeological dump, Monday’s mess on Tuesday’s and so on. Coats. Boots everywhere. An empty chip tray nestled inside Freddie’s bicycle helmet. It was as if Sophie’s death had frozen it in situ like petrifying volcanic mud. The television was on in the living room, frozen to a Sky menu. The potted palm in front of the bay window was drooping pathetically, its leaves curling and yellowing at the edges. A duvet was balled into the corner of the velvet sofa. It didn’t contain Ollie. “Where’s Daddy, sweetheart?”

  “Kitchen,” said Freddie matter-of-factly.

  She put her hand lightly on his soft cheek, still as adorably convex as a baby’s. But he shrugged her hand off and ran upstairs.

  Ollie, or a man who vaguely resembled Ollie, was hunched pathetically beneath the huge Sex Pistols’ No Future original print in the kitchen, staring at a small, crumpled sheet of white paper. He was wearing the same black jeans he’d been wearing the last time she saw him, as well as the same navy cashmere jumper with the giant hole on the left elbow. “Ollie?”

  He looked up with puffy eyes and tried to smile. “Hey, Jenny.” His voice rasped, like the throat of a forty-a-day smoker. She swore he had peppercorns of gray on his temples where he didn’t a week earlier. She wanted to put her arms around him and hug him close but still felt as if she didn’t quite have permission, or familiarity. The truth was she’d actually always felt quite shy around Ollie—he was too good-looking—and she had only known him through the prism of Sophie. Sophie had been her best friend. Ollie was Sophie’s husband. If they’d divorced—always the test—she’d have been in the Sophie camp. And now, here they were, thrust together in the most unlikely of circumstances.

  “You’ve got a starter beard.”

  He ran his fingers through it. “Bit Bin Laden?”

  “No, sort of Jim Morrison.”

  “Rider on the storm.”

  A pop cultural reference! A good sign! He was functioning. Feeling a wave of relief, she smiled properly for the first time that day. She liked it at number thirty-three. Apart from anything else, her misery paled against his and this made her feel like the sane one. “Any grannies in the house?”

  “Sent Mum home.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t worry. She’s still phoning every couple of hours. Like a speaking clock.” He pushed the bit of white paper up beneath his fingernail and put on a high woman’s voice. “‘It’s four o’clock, Oliver. Have you got dressed yet? Have you canceled Sophie’s bank accounts? It’s five o’clock, Oliver, has Freddie had his tea? Have you spoken to the lawyers? When is the case coming to court?’ And on and on.” He shook his head. “Bless her. She’s driving me nuts.”

  “Er, I guess there’s a lot of stuff to sort out.” She could only imagine.

  “We die and do you know what we leave behind?” Ollie kicked back in his chair angrily. “Admin. We leave admin. Fucking great.”

  “Maybe it’s too soon to send your mum home, Ol,” she said, wondering when she’d slipped into calling him Ol rather than Ollie and whether this was overfamiliar. Sophie had called him Ol. “How about Soph’s sister? Would…”

  “I need to do this on my own.” Eerie choral medieval chanting music started to pour out of his speakers. It reminded her of churches and crypts. No, it was not going to help. He needed Emmylou Harris.

  He glanced at her, reading her mind. “It’s this or replaying Sophie’s voice on the answer machine.”

  Déjà vu suddenly hit her with such force she stepped backward. Two years before. A dark winter’s afternoon. Walking up the path of number thirty-three, hearing music, loud music, soft, smooth, old soul. The lights were on in the house, the curtains open, and she saw Sophie and Ollie clutching each other, dancing around the living room, oblivious to anything but each other, his arm tight around her waist, her eyes fixed hungrily on his face. Like Taylor and Burton, she’d thought. Shocked by the erotic intensity and not wanting to intrude, she’d turned right round and walked twice around the block, realizing that she’d never danced like that with anyone. From that to this. It was pitiful. “You can’t be alone,” she said quietly. “Not right now.”

  “I’m not alone. I’ve got Fred.” He looked out the window, eyes focused on something invisible in the middle distance. “It was airless in the house with everyone here, Jenny, all of us choking on grief. Believe me, this is easier.” He shook his head. “A few days ago, I had this energy surge and ran about sorting everything out, phoning the idiots at Orange, calling her building society, some twat at London transport, and feeling almost positive, even though that sounds mad, and then…I…I just crashed.”

  “Oh, Ollie.” This big, wonderful chunk of a man as vulnerable as a little boy, it wasn’t right. But he’d get through this. He had to. She was going to make sure of it.

  “It keeps going round and round my head. If you’d both left the restaurant thirty seconds earlier…If you’d got a cab…” His face crumpled. “The what-ifs of it all make me want to rip my skin off. Fuck. Fuck. I can’t explain.” He looked up at her desperately. “I can’t be, Jenny. I can’t just be anymore. Tell me how. Please.”

  She leaned toward him then, needing to be close to him. He smelled different from Sam. Saltier. She recognized the smell from Sophie, who’d always smelled slightly of Ollie in the way other people smelled of their houses.

  “I don’t want to be here, Jen,” he said so quietly, she could barely hear him.

  “Don’t even say that, Ollie. Freddie needs you.” She noticed that there was a Coco Pop trapped in his beard.

  His eyes darkened. “I need him more. And I hate that. It should be the other way round.”

  “I think you’re holding up really well, Ollie. I do, really.” Should she tell him about the Coco Pop?

  “Every day I wake up knowing not only that she’s gone but that I’ve got to face another day missing her. Then I spend the whole day waiting for her to come back, expecting her to be late.”

  The medieval monks started chanting more incessantly, the same Latin words, over and over. “Ollie, bereavement is a process.” She wished desperately that she could offer less trite words of comfort. “It’s not always going to feel like this.”

  He snorted. “You believe that, do you?”

  “Yes, yes, I do. I have to.” It just hadn’t happened yet. And in a weird way, part of her didn’t want it to happen. Her grief was all she had left of Sophie. She wondered if Ollie felt the same. Or were there different types of grief, Jenny wondered, different strains and hybrids? So that the grief a mother who lost a child suffered was fundamentally different from the pain of losing a friend or wife? Or was everyone stuck in the same long, dark tunnel, maybe just in different places, some closer to the light than others?

  Ollie rolled himself a cigarette, licking the paper with the efficiency of someone who did it all the time, rather than someone who had supposedly stopped smoking when Sophie was pregnant with Freddie. The blue-gray smoke curled out of his mouth, over his beard, into the room like a Scooby-Doo spirit. “I woke up yesterday and I swear I couldn’t remember what she looked like. The past is fading, Jen.”

  Jenny bit her lip, trying not to cry. Hopeless. She’d come here to comfort Ollie. She didn’t want him comforting her. She had to be strong. Strong and organized and helpful.

  “No one else was there, you see. It was our world, the two of us. She was the witness. Now it’s gone. All fucking gone.”

  I was there, thought Jenny. I saw it. I saw you two fall in love. I saw how happy you made Sophie. You two were the yardstick by which I measured every relationship, my relationship. You two were the real deal. She saw them dancing again, dancers on their private stage, the look in Ollie’s eyes as he gazed at Sophie, a gaze of wonderment and ball-busting lust.

  Freddie barreled into the room. “Hungry.”

  “Are you? Um…” Oll
ie scratched his head, as if trying to make sense of the meaning of the word. “Fancy some toast?”

  “We had that already today. Daddy, you have something in your beard. Euch.” He picked out the Coco Pop that Jenny had been longing to pick out and flicked it to the floor.

  Ollie walked over to the fridge and surveyed it blankly. The open fridge door released a stale cheesy waft into the kitchen.

  “I’ll pop out to the deli,” she said. Now this was something practical she could do. Something maternal. “You’ve got a nice one, haven’t you, up on the high street?”

  “Can you get some chocolate cake?” Freddie asked.

  “Sure. Whatever you fancy.” She winked at Ollie. “Chocolate cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

  Freddie pulled on Ollie’s hand. “Can I watch Deadly 60?”

  Ollie shook his head. “Too much telly already, Fred.”

  “Strictly Come Dancing?”

  Jenny smiled. “You like Strictly, Freddie?”

  “Freddie loves Strictly.” Ollie grinned. “Soph got him into it. She had it all ramped up on the Sky Plus.” He looked down at the floor. “It’s still there. He watches it over and over.”

  “I wish I was allowed to watch Strictly. Sam won’t let me,” she whispered to Freddie. “You and I must have a secret Strictly sesh together, Freddie.”

  A smile lit up Freddie’s face. “Now?”

  “Not right now, Fred,” said Ollie quickly. “I’m talking to Jenny.”

  “Daddy…”

  “Oh, okay, Deadly 60.” Freddie ran out of the room before Ollie had a chance to change his mind. Ollie rolled his eyes. “Can’t refuse him anything.”

  “Totally understandable.”

  “He’s my little warrior. He doesn’t deserve this shit.” Ollie took one more pull on his cigarette and stubbed it out, half smoked. He looked out the window. A cream puff of snow was settling on the sill, airy and solid at the same time. Like love, Jenny suddenly thought. Like how true love is meant to be. Like what Soph and Ollie had. Airy but solid, like meringue. “How has Freddie been?”

  “Nightmares.” Ollie rested his square jaw in his hands. She noticed a crescent of grime beneath his fingernails. “Although he’s better when he sleeps in my bed. He dreamed of Ben Ten last night. Progress?”

  “Definitely progress.” Jenny tried to stop her eyes from filling by blinking really fast. She could cope with most things, just not the idea of Freddie losing his mother. “And the counseling?”

  “Nice lady, says he’s doing okay. Well mothered, she says.” He raised his eyebrows at the irony. “It helps.”

  “Well fathered too.”

  Ollie turned to her, dark eyes blazing. “Jenny, he thinks that Sophie is still here. That she talks to him. That she’s in the room.”

  Jenny felt the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. “I sometimes feel Sophie is still here,” she confessed quietly. She’d never tell Sam that. Sam would tell her to get a grip. “Do you?”

  Silence. He looked at her long and hard before speaking. “Yes.”

  She felt a wave of relief. It wasn’t just her. “Do you talk to her?”

  “Doesn’t talk back” was all he said, turning to face the window despondently. The sky was a cushiony blue above the rooftops now, framing the crow’s-wing black of his shoulder-length hair. “But the bond between her and Freddie was so close, so…so umbilical that maybe she can connect with him.” He shook his head, closing his eyes again. “I’m going back to the studio Monday.”

  It took a moment to sink in. “Already?”

  “I need to do something.” Ollie started rolling another cigarette. “Anyway, there’s no one else who’s going to do it.”

  “What about Freddie’s pickup times and stuff?” Jenny didn’t really know what childcare was involved but she’d heard Sophie talk about it often enough, the endless deadlines. It had always struck her as an enormously complicated business requiring military planning. The reason Sophie hadn’t been able to go back to work was because Ollie worked such erratic and long hours, sometimes not leaving the studio until late evening. How on earth would Ollie, not the most practical of men, fill her shoes?

  “Don’t worry, Jenny. I’ll sort it.”

  “I’ll help you all I can. Happy to take him swimming, whatever. I mean, I’d love to, if you want me to,” she stuttered, suddenly worried that she might be intruding. “I wish I could do more, Ollie. I wish I lived closer.”

  Ollie got up and walked slowly to the fridge and pulled out a beer.

  Should she say anything about the drinking? No, no, she shouldn’t. Not now. Let it go. “Is there anything I can help you with today? Like now, as I’m here? I feel like I should be doing something.”

  He snapped the can and looked at her sharply. “Maybe you can explain that list on the table.”

  “Sorry?” She started at the change in the tone of his voice.

  “That piece of paper on the table.”

  She bent forward, peering at the crumpled square of paper, Sophie’s large, rounded writing. “What is it? A to-do list.” She smiled. “Sophie was queen of the to-do list.”

  Sophie used to say that without her to-do lists she’d be the most disorganized mother in the world. Jenny never believed this. Sophie had always had a knack for the domestic. Although she was often late—she made being late glamorous rather than just annoying—she always knew where she was going, where she needed to be. She didn’t forget stuff. Like smear tests, or her grandmother’s birthday. She organized and decorated any environment she was in for more than ten minutes, whether that was a tent—Sophie camped with battery-powered fairy lights—or her room at university, which had boasted nondead orchids, sidelights dangerously draped with Indian silks, black-and-white professionally framed photographs and a dressing table with little white china-lidded pots for her cotton wool, all of which had seemed impossibly chic at the time. Jenny had taken her own makeup off with wet cheap toilet paper and the only decoration on her walls consisted of her lecture timetables.

  Jenny smoothed the paper with the edge of her hand and began to read.

  1. Ollie dentist.

  2. Buy fish oils.

  3. Thank Suze for playdate thingy

  4. Guttering!

  5. Cake stall year two next Friday—bake?

  6. Smear

  7. Car service

  8. Lobotomy

  9. Speak to Jenny about it

  “Speak to Jenny about it?” She frowned, puzzled. Why the glum smiley? “No, no idea, sorry.”

  He frowned. “The lobotomy. She says lobotomy. Was she so bloody bored with her life, Jenny?”

  “No!”

  “She was frustrated. I hate that.” He twisted his hands together. They were hands that she’d seen dance along piano keyboards at parties involving mojitos and improvised renditions of “Bennie and the Jets” in happier times. Today, for some reason, they looked broken.

  “Look, Sophie had a good brain on her.” She tried to sound calm and composed and rational but inside she was panicking. She remembered the question in the churchyard, a question, thankfully, he’d not asked again. But she felt it looming. “She was one of those women who could have done anything. And she chose her family. That was what she wanted. You. Freddie. This. Exactly this. She was so happy, really happy. You two had what everyone wants, Ollie. I knew her, Ollie. I knew her better than anyone. And I know she loved you and her life here more than anything.”

  He leaned against the fridge and letter fridge magnets scattered onto the floor. “I just keep looking for…for proof.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Something…” he said, his voice drifting off, making the hair lift on Jenny’s arms.

  She closed the door of number thirty-three with some relief and strode off purposefully toward Muswell Hill Broadway in search of a deli, freshly fallen snow squeaking under her feet. She wondered again what it was that Sophie had wanted to talk to
her about. Why the glum smiley? It must have been something bad. Something important, for her to underline it. How incredibly frustrating that now she’d never know.

  The Broadway was as it always was, the armada of expensive baby buggies, the glittering shop fronts selling knitted toys and organic beauty creams, the steaming lattes and cinnamon cakes. One second she was finding the familiarity of the street comforting, the next she was winded by loss. She realized there was no one else she could meander along a high street with in the way she did with Sophie. And for this reason only, just one reason among millions of others, she’d miss her forever.

  Sophie had loved shopping for its own sake. She’d loved a bargain. In their twenties they’d spent many weekends meandering around Camden Market, Portobello and Brick Lane. She was a collaborative shopper, as happy to find something for Jenny as she was for herself. She adored buying presents, spending money. Her eyes would glow with pleasure as she handed over a wodge of notes or a credit card, whereas spending made Jenny anxious; she’d been brought up to think she should save and had been the proud owner of a post office account that had earned about twopence a year interest since a small child. While browsing with Sophie was always fun, it sometimes got out of hand. Sophie made her buy things she didn’t often wear. Sparkly things. And there was that time she’d got trapped in a dress. Sophie, being Sophie, had insisted she try on a vintage creation—by an acclaimed designer she’d never heard of—with a strange twisty cut and smocking, in a frighteningly cool shop with unfeasibly thin shop assistants in Notting Hill. The dress, despite its age, was completely unaffordable and, in Jenny’s uninformed opinion, hugely unflattering. It was also impossible to escape from. It took two shop assistants and twenty-three minutes to free her from the dress. Sophie had officially peed herself laughing.

  Things changed when Freddie reached school age and Sophie and Ollie had, bafflingly at the time, left the gritty grooviness of Kensal Rise and settled in the suburbs, muttering darkly about schools. How could a good school compensate for not having a Tube station? She didn’t get it. After that it had become harder to meet up, especially in recent years. Their lunches would no longer spill into the afternoon with the same abandon. There was always the school run, playdates, football lessons and a seemingly endless list of deadlines and responsibilities, none of which involved ingesting Bloody Marys or getting trapped in dresses. Having given up work at the small event organizer that demanded such long hours to look after Freddie, Sophie no longer earned her own money and felt that she wasn’t justified in spending Ollie’s money on the utterly frivolous, although of course the odd splurge still went under the radar, and Sophie was quite happy to throw money at furniture, as well as endless “finds” on eBay.