Afterwife (9781101618868) Read online

  Relying on her husband’s income had struck Jenny as an uncomfortable dynamic. How she’d hate to have to rely on Sam’s. But Sophie, of course, took it in her breezy stride. She still had funds from her single working years to fall back on, as well as friends with discounts in the fashion industry, and an eye that could whip up showstopping outfits out of the most unlikely sartorial components: Doctor Who scarves bought secondhand from the school Christmas fair, holey jeans exposing a tanned knee, a furry gilet from Topshop and one of Ollie’s old The The tour T-shirts from the early nineties. She once accessorized her yellow gingham bikini with a boa made of slimy seaweed on a beach in Cornwall. Needless to say she looked amazing.

  Jenny pushed open the heavy glass doors of the deli into a fog of noise and smell and warmth—frothing milk machines, the hushed gossiping of huddled mothers, the sound of babies burping up milk, the smells of cake, coffee and suede boots dampened by the snow—and pushed her way past the buggies to the salad and deli dishes behind the gleaming glass counter. Having glimpsed the interior of Ollie’s fridge—beer and milk—she placed a generous order of food with the pretty ginger girl behind the counter.

  “Jenny?” said a voice behind her. “It is Jenny, isn’t it?”

  She turned. A swathe of pink sweater was emerging from the back of the queue. A frizzy halo of brown hair held back in the jaws of two enormous tortoiseshell plastic hairclips.

  “Suze?” It was the woman who’d done the speech before her at the funeral. The booming voice. That hair.

  “You look totally different out of your funeral outfit!” Suze lunged forward. It was a full-on kiss on the cheek, tea wet and compounded with a hug so that Jenny found herself spluttering into the bobbly cerise sweater. As she did so she came eye to eye with a ginger-haired baby strapped to Suze’s back in a sling.

  “Here, Lucas!” Suze yanked a fluff-haired blond toddler back by the strap of his denim dungarees. “Stay here or no muffin.” The toddler looked outraged.

  “Wow! How amazing to meet like this,” said Jenny, weakly. “How are you?”

  Suze rolled her eyes. “Don’t ask. You know what it’s like with young kids. I feel like I’m losing control of the monkey cage at the zoo.”

  Monkey? Zoo? What on earth was she talking about? She kept having this problem, not getting stuff. Like everything was happening under water.

  “Night feeding problems,” explained Suze, reading her lack of comprehension. “The reason I look seventy-five.”

  Jenny smiled, nodding politely, not wanting to encourage further expounding of Suze’s tiredness. She’d noticed this a lot about people with kids: they spent hours talking about tiredness. The Eskimos’ dozens of words for snow had nothing on a mother’s vocabulary for tiredness.

  “Don’t look at your mama like that!” Suze smiled and squeezed toddler Lucas’s cheek. He muttered something ungracious about the muffin and ramped up the cross look. Suze turned to her. “How old are yours?”

  “I don’t have any kids myself. I’m just up here seeing Ollie and Freddie,” she said quickly, feeling like she should explain herself. After all, what the hell was she doing in Muswell Hill if she didn’t have kids? She wished the girl behind the counter could be a bit more slapdash and shove the food into the brown cardboard boxes so she could leave now.

  “Ah.” Suze’s eyes narrowed. “Ollie. How is Ollie?”

  “Well…” Jenny hesitated, not wanting to gossip about Ollie behind his back but not wanting to gloss over the situation either. “Could be better, obviously.”

  “Poor, poor man. Well, at least he’s got his mum living with him. Thank God for mothers, eh?”

  “She’s gone back home, actually. I think he wanted a bit of space.”

  “Oh, has she?” Suze’s face brightened. She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Between you and me, Jenny, I’ve tried to help out a few times in the last few weeks and I’ve always found the mother a bit of a, well, a bit of a brick wall, to be perfectly honest. She doesn’t seem to want anyone else getting too close.” She shook her head, as if trying to stop herself from saying more. “So how’s Ollie coping alone?” She drew out the words slowly, as if hinting at the comprehensive length of answer she expected in reply.

  “Well…”

  “As Tash suspected.” Suze shook her frizz. “She had a peek through the letter box on Tuesday and said the hall looked like a festival site.”

  “He’s not that domestic at the best of times,” she said and then felt disloyal.

  “And as soon as he goes back to work…”

  “Next week. He’s going back next week.”

  “Next week! Blimey,” Suze exclaimed, oblivious to the surge of lunchtime diners trying to get past her to the till. She grabbed the sleeve of Jenny’s coat urgently. “This is fate, you know, me and you, meeting like this. Fate!”

  “Er, fate?” She didn’t like the idea of fate anymore. It had pulled some nasty tricks.

  “I actually tried to phone you last week, but of course, I’d lost your number.” Suze slapped her temple hard with the side of her hand. “I changed handbags and…Oh, I won’t bore you with the details.”

  Jenny smiled politely. Alarm bells started to ring.

  “It is time, Jenny,” Suze announced as her baby regurgitated something onto her left shoulder.

  She now had absolutely no idea what Suze was talking about. “Time for what, sorry?”

  “Sophie’s girls to come together.” She rubbed at the milk stain on her shoulder with a wet wipe that she’d plucked from her handbag. “I’ve always said we need a Help Ollie committee and, you know what?” she added determinedly. “We’re going to start it!”

  Suze obviously didn’t realize that of all the people most likely to start a support group with a bunch of women she didn’t know, she, Jenny, would be at the bottom of the list. She even found the idea of a book group kind of excruciating, and hen nights only under severe duress. She had never, ever been a girlie pack animal.

  “Lucas!” Suze hissed as her son stuck a finger into the golden disc of carrot cake on the counter. “That was your third warning. You are now out of warnings.” She blew her fringe up off her forehead in exaggerated exasperation.

  The girl behind the counter finally finished the food boxes.

  “Well, I really must be getting back to Ollie’s…”

  Suze grabbed her arm again. It was a viselike grip. Jenny felt a surge of sympathy for the disobedient Lucas. “How are you fixed Wednesday morning next week?”

  “Um, working, I’m afraid.”

  “The afternoon?”

  “Working too. Sorry.”

  “Thursday?”

  Jenny shook her head before she even considered whether she was free or not.

  “Sorry, I’m hounding you.” Suze’s face fell, and without her big smile it looked saggy and defeated and Jenny felt sorry for her. “I’ll let you get on.”

  She was hardly running the treasury. She could take off one morning if she wanted to. What if it was a genuine help to Ollie? “Actually, you know what, Suze? I’ll work it out somehow. I’ll come on Thursday.”

  “Fan-bloody-tastic!” Suze dug into her handbag and pulled out a baby yoga leaflet, scrawled her address on the back of it with a red pen and thrust it into Jenny’s hand. “I can’t believe I’ve finally got Jenny Vale, the real-life Jenny Vale, coming to my house.”

  “You know my surname?” This was all bewildering on some level she didn’t quite understand.

  Suze winked. “Sophie always spoke so warmly about you, Jenny.”

  Jenny felt a warm glow inside. “Did she?”

  “Although, you were a figure of much intrigue, let me tell you. Her clever copy editor friend with the complicated—” Suze suddenly stopped and flushed from neck to hairline, as if she’d caught herself just in time.

  Five

  Nothing like dying to give you a sense of perspective. The strange thing is that from up here, a few centimeters below the b
athroom ceiling, engulfed in bubble bath steam (I’ve been watching over Freddie while he has a bath, willing him to wash behind his ears; he hasn’t), I’ve realized that certain universal truths passed unnoticed beneath the radar while I was alive, like, properly alive. I was so busy living I forgot to think about the things I’d miss when I was dead, which is kind of understandable once you think about it. Like that famous Damien Hirst shark in the tank of formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. I always liked that shark. I used to joke that I’d get Ping Pong preserved like that and call it The Physical Impossibility of Ollie Remembering to Feed the Cat. Ha!

  Anyway, first, the obvious stuff. Family and friends are the most precious things in the world. But you know what? I knew that. (You know that. Sorry.) I can honestly say, hand on the place my heart used to be, that I was never someone who took either for granted while blood was pumping pink around my veins. Every time Freddie kissed me it gave me a little bloom of pleasure. I’d watch other women watching Ollie at a party, everyone wanting more of him than he ever gave—so elliptical, my rock ’n’ roll Darcy—knowing that I was the one going home with him, the one who got to talk to him for hours late at night, roll around the bed with him, read him stories from newspapers that made him laugh, the Ted Hughes poems he loved, placate him with kisses when I’d accidentally deleted The Wire from Sky Plus and filled up all the recording space with daytime cooking programs. And I got to see them both asleep—there but not there, dangling on the edge of dreams—Ollie, the most handsome man asleep; Freddie, just the most delicious boy who ever fell to earth. I always used to wonder if I filmed Freddie and speeded that film up whether you’d actually get to see him growing, like one of those wildlife films. I guess you would: he’s grown five millimeters since I died.

  I even watched Jenny sleep once, not that I ever told her, because she’d get embarrassed about it, being Jenny. It was the time I forced her to come to Bestival by stealthily buying her a ticket and a sleeping bag. (Brief character note here: Jenny is not a festival type of person; she thinks that the “all together now, one love” vibe is distinctly phony, whereas I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for it. She’d much rather visit a stately home garden with sculpted hedges and a tea garden.) We were sharing a leaking tent, lying side by side in our new damp sleeping bags, having already lost one phone (hers) and one brand-new North Face anorak (mine) and, on account of getting hopelessly lost on the festival site, missed all the acts we had gone to see, which I assured her was par for the course. Anyway, I’d been struck by how pretty Jenny looked asleep, not blank pretty like conventionally pretty women, but thoughtful, like someone who had drifted off over the pages of an engrossing book. She is far prettier and far smarter than she imagines. I’ve told her this lots of times—not enough, I realize now—but she never believed me. Self-doubt. She blames her parents. Personally I blame Sam.

  Anyway, to get back to Damien Hirst’s fancy shark…I made a list this morning while waiting for Ollie to wake up and feed poor old neglected Ping Pong. (Needless to say, the concern isn’t mutual. He still hisses every time I pass.) Okay, the list. I do like a list.

  A few random things I wish I’d realized before the bus hit

  • That, all in all, I would spend twenty-two years of my thirty-five years of life counting calories. That’s a lot of unnecessary math.

  • That I would only ever wear one-quarter of my wardrobe. That’s a lot of unnecessary clothes.

  • That I should have had more sex. You can’t have sex when you’re dead.

  • That rare is the friend who inhabits your single life and is still there when your kid starts school. (Step forward, Jenny.) Most disappear into the vortex somewhere between the “we must meet up soon, LOL” email and the Facebook friend confirmation.

  • That one-third of the people we invited to our wedding we would not see again in the six years since. (Apart from my funeral, but that doesn’t count.)

  • That it is okay to imagine marriage will be like New York City and discover that it’s more like Brussels. It does not mean that something is wrong, or that you are doomed to divorce. It just means you’ve hopped on a different plane.

  • That turbulence isn’t going to bring the plane down. You will live to touch the tarmac again.

  • That the guy sitting next to you on the Northern Line, the one with the rucksack and the frenzied, darting eyes, is not a terrorist. He’s just been dumped by his girlfriend.

  • That every phase passes. The baby stops teething. The tantrums become sulks. The darling baby bootees will no longer fit. He will learn to spell “because.” (This said, not sure Ollie will ever remember to put the recycling out on a Wednesday night.)

  • That, yes, you can have too many tea lights.

  • That I did drink too much. That those glasses were not one unit. They were three. But they didn’t kill me in the end.

  • That I sunbathed too much. It gave me laughter lines. But it didn’t kill me in the end.

  • That no life is too short to stuff a mushroom. Stuffing the mushroom is one of the nice bits. It’s washing up the baking tray afterward that is to be avoided.

  • That no one will notice if you don’t bake a cake for the school cake sale unless you apologize profusely.

  • Revision: only Suze will notice.

  • If you harbor a secret from your friend and you agonize whether to tell them and are almost on the eve of telling them when you get knocked down by a bus it means the secret is irretrievable. It’s like dropping a laptop in the bath.

  Six

  No, it was hardly a blood-soaked favela. It was leafy. It was lovely. It was the kind of street where children chalked hopscotch on the pavement and people hung children’s dropped gloves on the neighbor’s hedging. So why was the 4×4 Free Zone sticker on Suze’s living room window making her so bloody anxious? Suze’s text message yesterday afternoon—“Bake cake guys!”—hadn’t helped either. Who were the “guys”? And baking? Baking! Jenny hadn’t baked since home economics. What did it mean that she was in her midthirties and childless and had never baked so much as a scone? Jesus. It must mean something. Panicked, she’d bought a cake from a posh bakery, a whole wheat apple cake that looked like it would take at least six months to digest, and could in fact double as a bulletproof vest if sewn artfully into a Puffa jacket. In order to take the pretense to the next logical level, she would decant it from its white cardboard box into a cake tin. But she didn’t own a cake tin! Of course she didn’t. Why the hell would she own a cake tin?

  She glanced at her watch and groaned. Yes, once again, she’d done her crap shtick of arriving unfashionably early. (She was the only person in London for whom the traffic lights were consistently green and the Tube rarely delayed, as if the great traffic controller in the sky had marked her out for some kind of loser’s social experiment.) She waited a few moments, took a deep breath of the pleasant wood-smoke-smelling air and pressed the bell. Three shrunken Happy Birthday balloons hanging from string on the door knocker bounced jauntily in the wind.

  A heavy plodding, then the cherry red front door was flung wide. Suze beamed at her, a vision in an orange batik blouse with that wedge of hair and, mystifyingly, a round, wet circle on the front of her blouse the size of a twopence piece. “You didn’t flake!”

  “No.” She tried her best not to be offended that Suze had her down as a flaker and tried even harder not to look at the bizarre stain on Suze’s blouse, which appeared to actually be spreading like ink on blotting paper.

  Suze pulled the stained blouse away from her bosom and flapped it. “Sorry. Feeding baba.”

  Jenny blushed. Of course! She hovered uncertainly, wiping her sweaty palms on her pressed navy trousers. Apart from the fact she’d lost all social skills since Sophie died, it felt odd meeting Sophie’s friends without her, as if she’d turned into one of those traitorous people you introduce to a friend and who then goes on to invite the friend to dinner withou
t you. When she stepped into the yeasty heat, the house reminded her of Sophie’s but on a far messier, less cool scale. There was a jumbled row of Wellington boots in tiny sizes pushed up along the hall wall, like the entrance to a classroom. Next to them, children’s scooters, five, six, covered in stickers and elastic bands. Toy cars, a one-eyed doll and a bumper pack of recycled loo rolls were heaped at the bottom of the stairs.

  The hall walls were painted a cheerful apple green and stamped with children’s pictures—collaged topographies made from glued lentils and milk-top foil—and endless family portraits—lots of kids on rainy beaches wrapped in toweling ponchos—blown up too large on canvases so that they’d gone blurry. There was a smell too, yes, unmistakable, a smell of cakes actually baking. And, just as unmistakable, an undernote of urine.

  She followed the swinging slab of Suze’s bottom down the hall and tried to identify the orange blob stuck to Suze’s back jeans pocket—satsuma segment? lone nacho? She heard the crack of female laughter. As she entered the kitchen, a large Keep Calm and Carry On poster bossily glared down from the wall. She’d never liked those posters.

  “Ladies,” said Suze. She stepped aside to reveal her catch. “I bring you the famous Jenny Vale!”