Afterwife (9781101618868) Read online

  “Lovely to meet you all,” she managed, relieved to find only three women sitting round the table. She’d feared an Amazonian tribe in Breton stripes and ballet pumps, heatedly discussing organic baby food and breastfeeding rights.

  “Hello!” the voices chimed back. A noisy metal boiling kettle clicked somewhere. It reminded her of a long-forgotten sound from her own childhood. Something in her relaxed a little.

  “Take a pew,” said Suze, pushing the face-eating frizz away from her face. No wonder. “How do you take your tea, Jenny?”

  “Milk. No sugar, thanks.” She sat down on the nearest chair, not realizing that there was a gaping hole in the wicker of its seat. She perched on the edge of its hard frame, grateful for her well-upholstered sitbones. “So this is Soph’s other life,” she said, speaking her own thoughts.

  “Yep, welcome to our world.” Suze dunked a tea bag in a Union Jack mug of boiling water with her pen-scribbled fingers.

  Their world—Sophie’s world—certainly looked different from hers. Everything was on a different scale. The kitchen made her and Sam’s kitchen seem like a tiny, clinical laboratory. The wooden kitchen island was the size of a small island. Whereas her and Sam’s black granite worktops gleamed with lack of use, here the scratched wooden worktops were stained and piled with paper, crayons, glittery pipe cleaners, dirty empty baby bottles, and there was an orange nappy bag, clearly heavily loaded, sitting right next to a fruit bowl. Saucepan handles protruded out of overstuffed drawers. So much kitchen equipment, so industrial. And the fridge! Forget 4x4 carbon emissions; surely this fridge alone was like having a huge cow farting vast quantities of methane round the clock.

  “I’m Liz. My daughter is in Freddie’s class,” said a woman with a smattering of caramel freckles and a cropped pixie haircut, the tips of which were dyed bright red, like they’d been air-dried in ketchup. She was breastfeeding a child that looked too old to be breastfed, ruching up one side of an old T-shirt that said Talentless but connected and exposing a blue-veined breast that resembled one of the root vegetables in the cardboard organic delivery box under the table. Although she was wary of anyone who wore slogan T-shirts, let alone someone in a slogan T-shirt with a boob hanging out, there was something genuine in her smile that Jenny immediately warmed to. “I remember Soph mentioning you,” she said, only half sure she was right.

  The truth was Sophie hadn’t told her much about her mum friends or her neighborhood community life. It wasn’t until her funeral that Jenny had realized how important it had been to her, or quite how many mumfriends there actually were. Seeing them sitting around this table like this, with the easy, slightly competive edge of sisters, they all seemed so tight. She couldn’t help but wonder why she had never been invited into this world before. Had Sophie really thought her socially inflexible?

  “Tash,” said another woman, in one of those posh, croaky, north London accents that had always made Jenny feel provincial. She leaned across the table and offered a slim, tanned hand bejeweled with large silver rings set with enormous colored stones.

  Tash was so beautiful it was hard to look at her directly. She had a swishy curtain of licorice black hair. Feline gray eyes. And full lips—Soph would have called them “blow job lips”—slightly parted, as if she were blowing out air discreetly. (Jenny had read that this was a trick used by Nigella Lawson to look hot in photo shoots and had once tried it herself, only to free a strand of spinach from a canine and shoot it across the room at the photographer at high velocity.)

  Tash swished one leg over the other. It was a long, lean leg, shod in a lovely Cuban-heeled boot, the kind of boot with just the right height, a walkable heel that Jenny was always looking for but could never find. A heel height between frumpy flat and foot killer. “My son, Ludo, he’s in Freddie’s class too. We’re the cult of 2Bers, I’m afraid.”

  Cult? What was 2B? Or was it, to be? 2B or not to be.

  “Lydia. Call me Lyds.” The woman opposite waved like a little girl, fingers starfished. She was petite and milk-top blonde with delicate pointy features, the kind of fairy-woman Jenny imagined might blow away in the wind unless weighted down by a big expensive handbag.

  A pudgy girl peppered in alarming, livid red spots sat, in startling contrast to her mother’s fragile beauty, on her knee. “And this is wee Flora.”

  “Hello, wee Flora.” Do not stare at medieval skin condition. Do not mention skin condition.

  “I must ask you immediately, Jenny,” said Lydia as her daughter jumped off her knee and pegged it out of the kitchen. She stared at the roll of flesh swelling over Jenny’s ungenerous waistband. “You’re not preggers are you?”

  The shock of the question rocked her back into the rattan hole in the seat. “Er, no,” she said, extracting herself from the hole and feeling exposed and embarrassed. “Not. Definitely not.” She sat up straighter and sucked her tummy in.

  “Jenny,” said Liz quietly, sweetly coming to her aide, “Flora, Lydia’s little girl, she’s got chicken pox.”

  “Oh, right!” Perhaps she wasn’t so fat that she looked like she should be in a birthing pool. “I’ve had chicken pox. Really, don’t worry about it.”

  “Swap chairs?” whispered Liz kindly.

  “No, I’m fine, thanks.” Actually her bum was beginning to ache.

  “I thought your speech at the funeral was so lovely,” said Liz, placing her baby/teenager down on the floor, where it promptly toddled off toward a kitchen cupboard and started noisily disemboweling it of pans. “Soph would have appreciated it.”

  “Thanks. Thanks so much,” said Jenny gratefully, relaxing a little. Perhaps the meeting wouldn’t be so bad after all. They weren’t so different. They were all friends of Sophie’s. All women!

  “It was spot-on.” Tash smiled, flashing a broad, perfectly even row of tiny white teeth. Jenny hadn’t seen dentistry like that outside Hollywood movies. “You know what? It’s so nice to meet someone from Soph’s pre-mum life, putting all the bits of the jigsaw together. From what I remember Soph saying, you two go back a long way?”

  “Yeah, we shared student digs in the first year of uni.” Something tightened in her throat again, remembering the early days. How she’d been mesmerized by Sophie, the loud, garrulous beauty. How honored she’d been to be her friend. “Manchester Uni. We were in the same hall apartment. She made me cheese on toast that first night.”

  “She was always good on cheese, wasn’t she?” Liz smiled, running her hands through her red hair. “Every time I went round to hers for dinner I’d leave with a certain nagging doubt that the lump of supermarket cheddar sweating in my fridge drawer didn’t quite cut it.”

  Jenny remembered the sight of Ollie’s pitiful fridge. She doubted it even contained cracked cheddar. She sat up straighter, reminding herself why she was here. This was not about her. It was about Ollie and Freddie. She must put her reservations aside and remember this at all times. It was time for her to step up. What was she scared of?

  “So did you meet your husband at uni too?” asked Lydia curiously.

  “No.” Jenny coughed, remembering Suze’s comment in the deli about her having a complicated…well, love life, surely? They’d obviously muddled her up with someone far more interesting. “We’re not married.”

  Suze looked at the blue stone ring on her finger and winked. “Engaged I see.”

  “What does he do?” asked Tash, sipping her tea nonchalantly, like this question was a perfectly acceptable first line of inquiry when you’d known someone ten minutes.

  Jenny had always disliked the “What does he do?” question. On principle. (Were people their jobs?) But also because…“He’s a lawyer,” she said quietly, trying to wrap the subject quickly.

  “Ooh.” Tash brightened. “What kind of lawyer, Jenny?”

  She braced herself, feeling her shoulders rise toward her ears. “Divorce lawyer.”

  “A divorce lawyer!” marveled Tash.

  “Oh, my God, that’s just so romant
ic.” Lydia closed her eyes. “Despite everything he knows about the statistics.”

  “I should take his office number,” muttered Tash, digging into the large mouth of her vast handbag. “I could do with a new lawyer. May I?”

  She was too awed by Tash’s self-assured beauty to say no.

  “Ladies, shall we start the meeting proper?” Suze sat down heavily on the chair next to Jenny’s, knees cracking. “We’ll have tons of time to get to know one another in the next few weeks.”

  Tons of time? So this wasn’t a one-off meeting? Jenny’s stomach clenched.

  “Okeydokey.” Suze busily rummaged for a pen in a pile of school homework. Pen located, she spoke officiously. “Thanks for coming here on this freezing afternoon.” She smiled at Jenny and angled her pen toward her. “Especially you, Jenny, taking a day off work.”

  Tash coughed.

  “And you, of course, Tash. And Liz. Sorry, Tash, I’d forgotten you’d gone back to work,” said Suze quickly.

  “Three days a week,” said Tash, examining her nails, which were painted a shade of taupe that Jenny guessed must be fashionable. It would never occur to Jenny in a million years to paint her nails taupe. “Toby’s alimony saw to that,” Tash muttered.

  Liz raised an eyebrow. There was a moment of awkwardness.

  “Right,” said Suze briskly, pushing the willful wall of hair away from her face. “I don’t think anyone will disagree with me when I say that Ollie and Freddie need help right now. And I’m talking proper, controlled, organized help. Don’t you think, Jenny?”

  They all turned to face her. Feeling spotlit, she felt her right eyelid twitch. What had she got herself into? “Yes, yes, absolutely.”

  “And we’re going to step in. We’re going to do what Sophie would have done for us.”

  “Abso-bloody-lutely!” exclaimed Liz.

  “Too right,” said Lydia, licking icing off her fingertips. “I mean, have you seen the mess in Ollie’s house, Jenny?”

  “Nothing that a cleaner couldn’t sort out in a couple of hours,” she said. What did they expect? Dusted dado rails?

  “A cleaner!” Suze scribbled furiously in her notebook. “Ace idea, Jenny. There’s that Brazilian who works at number seven who’s meant to be great. I wouldn’t inflict mine on anyone. Too la-di-da to do toilets. And I’m too bloody liberal to make her.”

  “But not liberal enough not to care,” added Liz wryly.

  Suze ignored this. “Now, shall we tell Jenny our concerns?”

  “Freddie was sent back from school last week for being too tired. Apparently he fell asleep on a crash mat during PE,” Lydia said, her fine-boned face wimpling into a frown. “I don’t think he has a proper bedtime anymore.”

  What was a proper bedtime for a six-year-old boy? She had no idea. “Right,” she said, hoping she sounded like she knew what she might be talking about.

  “Lola’s mum told me he’s got lice.” Suze winced.

  “Oh, God, not again.” Lydia groaned, dropping her head into her hands. “My whole life is infested with bloody lice. Flora’s head was hopping for weeks last year. I treat it, they come back! I reckon that school has developed some superhybrid of lice, a master race.”

  “Nazi lice!” said Liz. “Ve ’ave vays of making you itch.”

  “Leave it to me,” said Jenny, feeling her own head itch. She seemed to remember some carcinogenic potion from her own childhood that could nuke an army of locusts.

  Suze did a big red tick in her notebook. “Anything else, ladies?”

  Liz rested her face in her hands. “Ollie’s listening to weird, churchy music, Jenny. All the time. It makes Leonard Cohen sound like the Beach Boys. I worry it’s going to make him depressed—well, obviously he’s depressed. But more depressed. It would make me totally suicidal.”

  “And dare we mention the beard?” ventured Suze.

  “Oh, I do like the beard.” Tash smiled dreamily.

  “Me too,” sighed Lydia. “It’s kind of…biblical. He looks like Jesus.”

  “Lydia,” groaned Liz.

  “Unhygienic,” decided Suze. “It’s like having pubic hair on your chin. I’ve never understood beards.”

  Not as unhygienic as leaving a nappy bag next to the fruit bowl, Jenny wanted to point out. “I don’t think we can get involved in every aspect of his life.”

  Suddenly there was a loud sniff. Jenny turned toward the direction of the sniff and saw that Lydia’s eyes were full of tears. She waited for someone to do or say something sympathetic but no one did. Should she say something? Or was it some kind of winter hay fever?

  “What about food, Jenny?” said Suze.

  “Food?” Jenny said blankly. She had no idea how to run Sophie’s domestic life. She, Jenny, didn’t have a domestic life. She had Sam and takeaways and meals out and a cleaner. For the first time ever she wondered if Sophie had ever secretly thought her best friend’s life a tad tragic.

  “Do you think we need to hatch a supper strategy?” Suze reached for a homemade chocolate chip biscuit the size of a saucer, as if just the mention of food had whetted her appetite.

  “Er, sorry, what’s a supper strategy?”

  “It’s America’s new tactic for smoking out members of al-Qaeda from caves,” deadpanned Liz, and Jenny laughed.

  Suze rolled her eyes, not amused. “It’s a home delivery service of meals, Jenny.”

  “Hey, that’s a great idea. I think he’d really appreciate that. I really do.”

  “Do you?” Suze beamed, delighted to have Jenny’s approval. She glanced over at Tash with a look that was not unlike triumph. “Then a supper strategy we shall arrange.”

  “Lasagna!” Tash slapped the table. She was going to better Suze if it killed her. “Men love lasagna. I make a mean lasagna.”

  “One of my specialties too actually,” said Suze, scribbling lasagna!!! in her notes.

  There was another loud sniff from Lydia. She dabbed at her small nose with a tissue. “Are you okay?” Jenny asked, unable to ignore it any longer.

  “Lydia’s very emotional, Jenny, heart on her sleeve,” Suze explained blithely. “Now, let’s talk about—”

  “Hopeless.” Lydia sniffed, shaking her head. “Hopeless sop, I am. I could only listen to the first couple of lines of your speech. I was in pieces, pieces, wasn’t I, Liz?”

  “You were, Lydia,” Liz reassured her tersely with the minutest flicker of an eye roll.

  “How could someone as beautiful as Sophie die?” Lydia sobbed more freely now. Liz reached for her hand and gave it a patronizing pat. “Freddie, motherless at six. How can a child ever recover?”

  “Deep breath, Lyds. Deep breath. We’ve all been where you are now,” said Suze. “I think we owe it to Ollie and Freddie to be strong now, don’t we, Jenny?”

  “We do,” Jenny said. The others must have hearts of stone to let Lydia sob like this. “But it’s okay to cry too. No point in bottling it up.” She’d had to run out of Legs, Bums and Tums only yesterday because Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” came on and “Survivor” would always remind her of Sophie doing her bootie shake thing in her kitchen. “Or it spurts out sideways.”

  “You’re right, you’re so right, Jenny.” Lydia smiled at her appreciatively.

  “Could we not set up a charity?” Tash wondered, pushing the conversation forward.

  “Hmm?” Suze asked Jenny.

  “I’m not sure,” said Jenny. A charity? For whom?

  “We could do the London Marathon!”

  “A cake sale?”

  “A naked calendar.”

  A naked calendar! Jesus. “Don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade but I don’t think it’s money that—”

  “Jenny’s right.” Liz frowned. “Oh, it feels awful talking about these things. But he earns quite a lot, doesn’t he?”

  Jenny nodded. “I guess so. He’s one of those producers that you and I may not have heard about but who’s very well respected in his field.”

&n
bsp; “Has he ever worked with Take That?” asked Lydia, brightening.

  Jenny shook her head. “Doubt it. It’s advertising, film stuff, you know.”

  “Oh.” Lydia’s face fell. “I so totally love Take That.”

  There was an earsplitting yelp from the sitting room, the sound of something heavy and airborne landing. Lydia jumped up and flew out the kitchen. “Flora!”

  Liz shrugged, like she’d heard it all before. Another bloodcurdling yell.

  “Ludo?” Liz turned to Tash.

  “Sounds like it.” Tash wearily got up from her seat. “Sorry, ladies, better go and umpire.”

  “She’s not joking either,” muttered Suze, the moment Tash left the room. “Ludo’s a bloody nightmare. I’d better go and check that he’s not swinging baba around by his toenails too.”

  As soon as they were all safely out of the kitchen, Liz’s mouth twitched with a smile. “You don’t have to say anything, Jenny.”

  She laughed, feeling a rush of warmth toward Liz. Yes, she liked Liz best. She liked the fact that she dyed her hair ketchup red. Personally she’d never have the balls. For the hair. Or that T-shirt.

  “It’s like a little wagon circle, isn’t it? I’m afraid we must come across as right little interfering Stepford busybodies.”

  “Not at all! I had no idea Sophie had this network.” That niggling feeling that she’d been shut out from parts of Sophie’s life came back to her. “It’s brilliant.”

  “Well, she told us lots about you,” said Liz kindly.

  What exactly had Sophie told them about her? She thought of the list that Ollie had shown her. “Talk to Jenny about it.” But about what? What “it”? Perhaps these women knew what “it” was. Perhaps if she hung out with them they’d tell her. “I hardly know my neighbors. There’s so much neighborly motivation here. It’s amazing, really.”

  “Ah, a lot of local women will become extremely motivated where Ollie is concerned, I suspect.” Liz put her mug to her cheek and winked. Jenny noticed how her pea green eyes clashed with the red of her hair, in a good way.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s the sexiest dad at the school by a few trillion miles. Everyone’s always fancied the pants off him. Dark, devoted and moody.” She closed her eyes in a mock swoon. “And a musician.”