Afterwife (10 page)

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.”

“You’re joking. He’s just lost his wife.”

“Exactly.”

She put her hand over her mouth. “Blimey. It had never occurred to me that…”

“He’s a wonderful father, handsome, successful, clearly capable of love and commitment and, heartbreakingly,
tantalizingly
, in need of rescue.”

“But aren’t this lot coupled up?”

Liz glanced at the kitchen door, checking that no one was coming through it. “Loosely,” she answered in a hushed voice. “Tash divorced last year, although there’s a Polish builder, otherwise known as Marko the Wildebeest. Lydia is married to some City guy whom she never sees. Suze…well, Suze’s motivation is probably purer. She loves being needed and even the PTA cannot channel all her energies, but then again you never know. And there are many, many others waiting in the sidelines, believe me.”

Jenny threw her candor back at her. “And you?”

Something sad and wordless passed across Liz’s face. “I loved Soph.” She shrugged simply, sweetly. “That’s all.” And Jenny believed her.

“All good! All good!” Suze burst back into the kitchen, kissing the startled marsupial ginger baby that Jenny remembered meeting in the deli the week before. She was accompanied by a whiff of poo and as she bounced the baby on her knee the smell got stronger. “So our Help Ollie project is full steam ahead, eh?”

“Let’s go for it.”

“Brill. I’ll sort out rotas and stuff from the Muzzy Hill end…”

“I wish I could do more…” She needed to come clean about her own general uselessness. “I’m a bit in the dark where kids and stuff are concerned, to be honest, Suze. I’m probably the least useful person, much as I want to help.”

“Oh, you don’t understand, do you?” said Suze. “We
need
you involved in this. We really do. In fact you are crucial to the operation.”

“I am?” She hadn’t been crucial to anything or anybody for months, maybe never.

“Completely,” insisted Suze.

“Why?”

“You know Ollie better than any of us,” said Liz, taking a sip of her tea. “We need someone in the group who can speak for him.”

“I can’t possibly speak for him.”

“Look, someone has to,” said Liz. “Our job is to organize his domestic life over these coming weeks. Your job is to stay close to him, so that he’s got one woman by his side, a woman who is not his mother, or sister-in-law, a woman who doesn’t
want
anything from him.” She gave Jenny a meaningful look. “A safe place. You know what I’m saying?”

Jenny nodded. The ginger baby reached across for her gold bracelet. His fingers felt silky soft against the skin of her wrist. She studied the top of his scabby cradle-capped head and felt a wave of tenderness for his unphotogenic qualities.

“The fact is,” said Suze, trying to hold the wriggling baby still, “you knew Sophie better than anyone, didn’t you?”

She nodded, but a little voice in her head had begun to wonder. There were clearly whole parts of Sophie’s life that she didn’t know at all.

C
urious goings-on in north London, let me tell you.

Three days ago, I nudged my nonatomic self—take that, Stephen Hawking, and suck on it—through the muddy cat flap of Suze’s house and gripped onto the tail end of a conversation between Jenny and Liz as it writhed about the room like a barracuda. Something about the local women
fancying
my husband! I’m barely dead, for Pete’s sake. I’ve still got five hundred free mobile minutes left.

But then, people keep surprising me. They are far weirder than I ever realized. Get this.

Two days ago I watched as Jenny sat in her bedroom, bolt upright, absolutely still, like one of those keeno yoga devotees, as the clock ticked and the room fell into darkness. My mother kept ringing on her telephone. Once, twice, three times over the course of a couple of hours. She didn’t answer. Sam came back from work and found her in the dark, still sitting upright, tears pouring down her cheeks. He asked her what was for supper. She didn’t reply. And yesterday,
I found her making what looked suspiciously like a collage. Jenny crafting! I swear she was actually cutting out bits of paper and sticking them down with the ever useless Pritt Stick—winding the damn thing up, down, trying to pick off the old crust of glue on the top that stops it from being a glue and makes it a smearer of white snotty gloop. No, she’s not her usual self at all. I’m
so
relieved that Sam is the Wedding Date Shirker. Jenny needs time to paddle around in her sadness before she makes any big decisions about her future or is let loose anywhere near a bridal department without me.

Meanwhile, in deepest Essex, my sister is channeling all her tears into repeat viewings of
The Bridges of Madison County
. Further south, Dad is spending hours and hours in his shed, constructing the world’s most complex hammock frame. He’s never wanted a hammock before. Is it something to do with its cradle aspect? Perhaps he needs to be soothed to sleep. Actually suspect he’s retreating to the shed to escape Mum, who is still desperately sad. Poor, poor Mum, cloaked in an aura so cold and crunchy it looks like she’s been breaded in ice in a dodgy overactive freezer compartment. As for Ollie? My poor love is under siege.

Right now he is staring at the five foil-covered packages that line our kitchen table like crude homemade IEDs. The doorbell rings. He flinches.

“Shall I get it, Dad?” whispers Freddie, running up behind him, Chuppa Chup a lump in his cheek.

Ollie pulls at his beard. He looks like a shipwrecked pirate. “No, it could be…”

Freddie pulls a face. “Not more lasagna?”

The doorbell rings again. Ollie raises his finger to his lips. “Shhh. Don’t make a sound.”

They wait there together in silence, hiding from the enemy. The doorbell rings again. They wait some more. Finally, the sound of
receding footsteps on the path outside. Freddie crouches down by the front door and peeks through the letter box. “Daddy, there is something on the step.”

“Shit,” mutters Ollie, running his hands through his greasy hair. He walks down the hall, stepping over numerous wooden balls—they’ve been using the hall as a bowling alley—and opens the door, glancing uneasily from side to side as if there might be a hidden sniper lurking on the other side of the cherry tree. He grabs the Pyrex dish and slams the door shut behind him. He puts the dish next to the others and wearily reads the note on the top. “Okay, Freddie, we’ve got a new one here. And this one is from Tash, Ludo’s mummy. That makes it her second in three days. This one is, er, Bolognese sauce.” He looks perplexed. “Goes well with the custard pudding, she says. What custard pudding? Oh, right. Here.” He peels foil off another package.

Freddie makes a gagging noise and puts his fingers down his throat.

“Got any ideas, Fred?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Ping Pong.”

“Freddie, my son, your mind is dark.” He raised his hand into a high five. “You are a genius.”

Freddie grins. It’s almost a proper beam. Like he used to do all the time. I’m amazed that he can still smile like this, awed at how resilient he is. He opens the back door. “Here, Ping Pong, here, pussy, pussy! Dinnertime.”

Later, as the evening falls harder and colder—icicles are hanging like frozen tears from the windowpanes by nine p.m.—I curl into Ollie’s old black Converse trainers. They are contained and safe and smell reassuringly of Ollie. I don’t want to smell his aftershave, or the washing liquid on his clothes, or his dry-skin shampoo. I want
the meaty essence of him, the expelled bodily odors, the flakes of skin, the hot stink of his maleness. I’d actually hang out in his armpit if I could, but I fear this might make him itch.

It’s nine thirty now. Ping Pong’s paw prints polka across the snow on the deck. There are bald patches on our little scrap of lawn where Freddie and Ollie have scooped up snowballs in cold, red hands and tossed them at each other. In the right-hand corner of the garden, beneath the plum tree that bears the world’s tartest, most inedible plums, there is a surprised-looking snowman, a muddy parsnip for a nose, his eyes, withered conkers carefully kept by Freddie the previous autumn. Although the house is a mess, it is warm—a veritable sauna in the trainer actually. Ollie has lit a homey fire in the sitting room fireplace. Making fires is the one domestic thing Ollie’s always been good at, having enough of a Bear Grylls bushcraft whiff about it to appeal to him, unlike cleaning the roasting pan. (You never see Bear Grylls washing up his wild fungi cooking pans in the woods, do you? Bet he’s got some poor assistant doing that. Bet she’s female.)

They are sitting beside the fire now, Freddie curled inside Ollie’s knees, resting his head against his chest, listening to the thumpity-thump of his heart, the exact same position I used to snuggle into on winter nights. Freddie’s lids are beginning to droop. Ollie strokes his soft curls off his forehead with the plane of his palm. The fire spits and crackles. Its heat gives their faces a healthy glow and hides the puddles of grief beneath Ollie’s eyes. They look too beautiful for words. And I wonder why I was ever, ever restless in those last few months of my life? What was I hunkering after exactly, if
not
this? Jenny was right. Isn’t she always right? About other people’s lives, at least.

Thing is, how the hell was I to know that I’d end up as roadkill on Regent Street? If one’s demise could be predicted more accurately—“You’re unlikely to last much past Christmas; make it a
good one, Mrs. Brady”—then at least I could have
planned
. Made an imminent to-do list. A memory box. I would have left Ollie final instructions—a domestic kick-the-bucket list—with relevant phone numbers and information. (Remember my mother’s birthday. Take Freddie to the dentist every six months. Do not leave woolens out because of moths. Feed. The. Cat.) And, more than this, much more than this, I would have had a chance to appreciate what I had. Take stock of my lovely life. What’s that quote? “I had such a lovely life, if only I’d realized it sooner.” Dorothy Parker? Anyway, I like to think I would have been able to face my expiration with some grace, although I realize there’s a chance I would have panicked and refused to accept the fact I was dying, like poor Aunt Linda, and spent all my money on an alternative medicine clinic in Austria and massage and vitamin injections.

Did I have an alternative destiny? Was there some small seed of fate buried within my body that I didn’t know about, a lump in the breast too small for detection? A furring of the left aorta? An unknown yet lethal genetic predisposition embedded in my helix of DNA set to activate at age fifty-five like a bomb in the hold of a plane? I guess we all carry the seeds of our death within us. Then you’re hit by a bus. And those seeds are blown to the wind like a dandelion clock. It’s a fucker, it really is. I realize that nothing else in my life was a fucker now, even though I thought so at the time. Not the fact that I couldn’t conceive a second child. Not the fact that I didn’t become a film star. Or never found the perfect boot. No, being hit by a bus is the fucker of all fuckers, end of.

You know the truth? The horrible, grave-chilly truth? I feel robbed. I feel robbed of my beautiful child, the sock and honey smell of him, the concavity of his flexible back, his focus as he makes a Lego spaceship, that pink wet tongue curling out of the corner of his mouth with absolute concentration. I feel robbed of his laughter and love, of watching him grow up. And I also feel robbed of the
man I fell in love with, the man I’d watched for three years at university, shy of his looks and his cool-kid reticence, the man who kissed me in a field one cool summer dawn in Somerset and made my heart corkscrew with happiness.

I even feel robbed of my flipping wrinkles! I never ended up looking like my mother, did I? Or my grandmother, a grandmother who lived in near perfect health to the age of ninety-seven, then fell asleep into her cream of mushroom soup one afternoon and didn’t wake up again. I will never be able to say, “It was better in my day,” or marvel at how no one can remember what an iPhone was. No, I am forever a twenty-first-century thirtysomething, like one of those photographs of women in the forties who died during the war and can only ever be remembered with set curls and red lips. Vintage.

“Was it fun playing at Ludo’s earlier?” Ollie asks, interrupting my thoughts before they get gloomier.

“Ludo’s dad has gone,” Freddie replies, deadpan, cat’s-cradling an elastic band between his fingers.

“No, he doesn’t live there anymore, Fred,” replies Ollie softly. “He lives in another house.”

(FYI, with the old au pair, Astrid.)

“But he still sees Ludo,” Ollie reassures Freddie.

Freddie ponders this for a moment, his eyes wide, processing. “I think that’s better than being in heaven. I wish Mummy just lived in another house.”