Afterwife (2 page)

My phone beeps.

It’s a text from Jenny in the new tapas bar on Beak Street where we’ve only got a table because swanky London is still drinking mulled wine beside log fires in their bolt-holes in the Cotswolds. “Pitying look from waiter. Where r u?”

“On way!” I fib back, yanking on a shaggy black fake fur coat. (Like to think that it gives me a slutty Hollywood glamour. Ollie
says it makes me look like a giant goatee and is only acceptable if I go nudie underneath.) Freddie sinks back against Ollie’s chest, drinking me in, studying me intently, as he always does when I’m dressed up, as if I’m morphing into someone who isn’t just his mum—which is about the size of it.

“You’ve dropped something, Soph. Behind you,” says Ollie.

I bend down, nothing. “What?”

“Just wanted to see what you looked like when you bent over.” Ollie grins. It’s his filthy rock star grin.

“Ollie!” I roll my eyes, enjoying that after all this time my bottom still rocks his world. I blow them puff-puff kisses like the movie star I was certain I’d be when I was a kid, before I got booted out of the Saturday club, aged fifteen, for snogging my drama teacher. “Boys, be good.”

“What time you back, beautiful?”

“Won’t be late.” I step out of the warm hug of number thirty-three into the exhilarating possibilities of the London night. “Love you,” I call over my shoulder, as I always do, but meaning it all the same.

Forward three hours, Jenny and I are at the tapas place, second bottle of white wine almost finished. I can no longer feel the blister on my left pinkie toe caused by those damn boots—is it possible to put weight on one’s toes?—and the evening is beginning to fray pleasantly at the edges. I am probably talking too much because I’ve spent too long brooding on things over Christmas and am feeling the need to unburden myself, dropping my sticky, undigested gripes onto the restaurant table like the remains of the figgy pudding in my fridge.

“Do you want the hard, bitter January truth?” Jenny is refusing to indulge me.

I peek out at her from between my fingers. “If you must.”

“Most people would kill for your problems.” Satisfied by this
decree, Jenny slumps back into her wooden chair as the waiter uncorks another bottle of wine and pours it into our lipstick-smudged glasses. “And…” she says, wiggling her finger, “most women would kill for a man like Ollie, and you know it, Soph.”

“They would change their mind once they’d tried living with him for longer than it takes to finish a
Mad Men
box set.”

She laughs, eyes me fondly. Her eyes are pink rimmed because she’s a little drunk. We both are. “You’re a hard woman, Sophie Brady.”

“Nocturnal, totally unpractical. He’s less domesticated than Freddie.”

She gives me a sharp look.

“Yeah, yeah. Obviously, I wouldn’t have him any other way.”

“So the problem is…?”

“No problem. It’s just rubbishy life stuff.” I sip my wine, not really tasting it now. It’s got to that stage of the night. “Not something to be
solved
, Jenny. Not everything can be solved. Life is not a Sudoku puzzle.”

“Hmm,” she says, unconvinced. Jenny is an optimistic skeptical pragmatist. She believes there is a global conspiracy to make us all worry too much so that we buy newspapers and insurance “and comfort products like Babybel cheese, the world’s weirdest food.” Her words, not mine. I like Babybel. The color of that red wax is the same as the lippy that I wear every day, naked without it.

“If you’ve been with someone since you were twenty-two and…Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure it’s the same for him. He only ever got to have two other girlfriends before I came along. We were both so young! And now we’ve been together longer than Blair was in government! Or Thatcher!” I sluice my wine around the glass. “The truth is, and God, I’d never say this to Ollie, so swear on your life not to repeat this, but I miss how it used to be, Jen. You know, in the early days. It’s sad knowing that I will never feel that adrenaliney lust rush
thing again. That, you know”—I assume a bad cockney accent—“me and Ollie is for keeps, like.”

“That’s actually a far sweeter sentiment than you realize, Soph.” Jenny looks a bit wistful.

I feel bad for having what everyone wants and not being grateful enough. I’ve brought us down. I must bring us up again. “But what about the
grrr
?”

“The what?”

I growl again. “The
GRRR
. Come ’ere! That feeling.”

Jenny laughs. A couple at the adjacent table who don’t look like they have much
grrr
going on pretend they’re not listening in. The woman’s feet curl around her chair legs. She frowns.

“Overrated.” Jenny’s eyes dance. I love the way her eyes dance. She’s one of those rare women who looks prettier drunk, loosened up a little.

“I think it’s just that I’d like to feel that
grrr
one more time before—” I slam my hands on the table. Jenny is glazing over. “Sorry! I’ll shut up. Clearly I’m going through some kind of horribly clichéd midlife crisis. It’s boring and I apologize.”

“Don’t apologize,” she laughs. “Just tell me when it peaks. Because we’ve not even started, Soph.”

“Actually I think it might have peaked already.”

“When?” She laughs.

“Supermarket this afternoon.” I gulp back some wine, warming to my theme. “You know those self-service tills that never work and you always end up having to wait for a real live human being to come and unlock the damn thing because it malfunctions if you use your own bag? ‘Unidentified object in the bagging area!’ Fuck, I hate them. I hate supermarkets. And no, I don’t have a Nectar loyalty card! No, I
don’t
want a Nectar card!”

“Don’t be poncy.”

“The day I get a supermarket loyalty card, it’s all over, Jenny.” I gulp back more wine. “See, a clear case of midlife crisis.”

Jenny leans back in her chair and studies me in that scrutinizing way of hers. “You’re not old enough for a midlife crisis, Soph. You have to be
forty
. You’re thirty-five.” Jenny is very exact. She has an ordered walk-in wardrobe of a mind. Mine is more like an overstuffed knicker drawer.

“I could die when I am seventy and that would make me midlife exactly.” (Posthumous note: no discernible shiver of irony felt at the time.) I scoop a spoonful of crème caramel into my mouth and its sweetness is like a kiss.

“Women don’t die at seventy anymore. We die at eighty-two or something.” Jenny breaks into the crust of her chocolate torte with the edge of her spoon, releasing a river of sweet goo. It looks better than my crème caramel. “The blokes go first.”

“Just as well. Ollie would confuse the laundry rack with his Zimmer frame and hang underpants on it.”

“This is amazing. Taste?”

I reach across the table and attack her torte with my spoon. (Calories don’t count if they belong to someone else.) It
is
better than my custard. “But isn’t the really tragic thing that we’ll be too old to enjoy our freedom when we finally get it?”

“No! I’m looking forward to us being old.”

I try to imagine us old, like, proper old. It is hard. We’ve been young forever. I still buy polka dot tights at Topshop. Last year I rolled around in the mud at Glastonbury, naked.

“I don’t want to be one of those exhausting women who try to stay thirtysomething forever. I want to wear different shades of beige and write letters of complaint about bad language to the BBC. I’ll feel cheated otherwise.”

“Why is it you always order the better dessert, Jenny?”

“I just go for the most calorific option. Simple tactic.” She wipes her mouth with her napkin. It takes off the last bit of her pink lipstick. She looks about ten without makeup, like a frighteningly intelligent schoolgirl with her pretty, soft baby face, wide blue eyes and permanent little frown of studied comprehension. Jenny is my only girlfriend who tackles the weekend newspaper comment pages before the magazine supplements. She devours all the big, heavy books you’re meant to read, rather than the fun ones. She actually finished
Wolf Hall
! That said, Jenny knows all the lyrics to Dolly Parton’s back catalog too. “I intend to eat more dessert all year,” she adds cheerfully. “My New Year’s resolution is not to beat myself up for being over ten stone. I’ve thought about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather eat pudding than be skinny.”

“Me too, me too.” I reach across for another spoonful.

“Fat, happy and gobby.”

I pick up my wineglass with camp flourish. “My New Year’s resolution was not to drink in January.”

Jenny raises her glass and we giggle.

“Fat faces age bloody well, you know,” I reflect with my drunk puzzler.

“True, true.”

“The brilliant thing is fat people don’t have to choose between their face and their ass. They say, I’ll have both, please! Like in a restaurant.”

“Good point.” Jenny licks her spoon. “And you know what, Soph? When we’re old, like, proper old, we will eat pudding for every meal because…who gives a toss?”

“All the men will be dead, anyway! And all the skinnies will have died of carb deficiency.” I rest my chin on my hand and reflect on the happy gluttony awaiting me. “For the record, Jenny, when I’m old I’m going to wear one of those see-through plastic headscarves
to keep the rain off my blow-dried bouff. And I’ll be rocking those orthopedic shoes with padded soles. I’ve always fancied those.”

“We can go on cruises together. I’ve always wanted to go on a cruise, one of those really cheesy ones with a songstress in red sequins on a white grand piano belting out Shirley Bassey.”

“Me too! Me too!” I raise my glass. It wobbles in my hand. “We can cruise to the Galápagos. I’ve always wanted to go to the Galápagos.”

“To see turtles and those giant spooky stones.”

“That’s Easter Island.”

“Okay, Easter Island too.”

“And St. Barts. I will dreadlock my pubes and smoke psychotropic skunk on the beach because, hell, why not?”

“Shall we do Vegas too? We could gamble our pensions.”

“Fuck yeah.”

We laugh and sit in easy silence for a few moments, scraping the last smears of sweetness off the dessert plates, enjoying the crushed, happy hubbub of the restaurant and being away from the dog end of the Christmas holidays. We devour the remains of the bread basket and chortle childishly when a waiter drops a tray beside us in a slapstick manner. The tea light is at the end of its wax, smoking and spluttering a salty blue. It is in this happy drunken blur I decide that this is the moment to bring the subject up. “Dare I ask, Jenny?”

Something flickers across her eyes. She doesn’t want me to ask. “The answer’s no.”

I sloppily lean over the table, warming my hands on the dying tea light. “But I thought you were going to have the Big Conversation.”

“It shrank. It became a conversation about the best way to cook the rack of lamb,” she says briskly, looking away from me into the restaurant.

“I guess you’ve got to set a wedding date at some point,” I say
carefully. “I mean, you don’t want to end up walking down the aisle in your seventies looking like Vivienne Westwood.”

She doesn’t laugh like she’s meant to. Instead she sniffs. “It’s perfectly normal to be engaged for one year.”

“I was joking, Jenny.” This is my cue to tell her. My mouth opens then closes. Nothing comes out. I can talk absolute nonsense until my larynx bleeds but I can’t talk about
this
. Best friends, no secrets? True. But I don’t want to ruin our supper, or worse. Anyway, I’m probably too drunk. So I promise myself that I’ll call round to her apartment next week, during the day, while Sam’s out, and we’ll have coffee and passion fruit cheesecake and we’ll talk then. She loves cheesecake. The cheesecake will help.

She looks at me, narrows her eyes. “I know you don’t approve of him, Soph.”

“That’s not true.”

Silence. We both know that the conversation has hit a protrusion like a speed bump in the road. We do the same thing, look away from each other and around the restaurant, smiling hazily, women who’ve drunk too much and know each other well enough to drop the topic before we start whacking each other over the head with our handbags. Some diners are beginning to leave now, picking up bills, bustling to the loo, while the late-night crowd, flushed from a theater or bar, take their tables and overorder tapas.

A waiter asks us if we want to order anything else, like he wants us to leave. I glance at my watch. “Where has the evening gone? I feel like I only got here five minutes ago. I should get home.”

Jenny looks disappointed. “But we haven’t dissected Sarah’s affair yet.”

“I know, nor Maxine’s new teeth. They file the real teeth to Shane MacGowan pegs before they put veneers on. Isn’t that totally gross?”

“I’ve heard that the veneers drop off all the time. Imagine, you’d never want to bite into an apple again.”

Giggles snort through my nose. “Do you remember when my hair extension blew off on Primrose Hill and landed on that labradoodle?” I don’t know why I suddenly remember this but I can see it vividly. That gorgeous gusty day on top of Primrose Hill, London unrolling before us, Freddie, a baby then, sitting on the picnic blanket, squashing strawberries into his mouth with his fist. A lifetime ago, literally.

“And the dog humped the bouff!”

I catch the time on the oversized watch face of the woman sitting adjacent to us. It really is getting late.

Jenny catches me looking. She knows what I am thinking. “Isn’t it bad karma to leave so much wine?” She draws a finger down the bottle’s label. “Good wine too.”

“It would be a bit studenty to ask to take it home, wouldn’t it?”

“It would, Soph. Yes.”

“It does seem rather a shame.”

“And you
were
late, Sophie. Had you been on time then we would have finished the bottle by now.”

“Excellent point. What do you suggest, then?”

Jenny fills our glasses. “Rude not to.”

“I hold you fully responsible, Jenny.” I hiccup. “And I want you to know that I will put all the blame on you when Ollie’s on my case about me coming home rat arsed.”