Afterwife (8 page)

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.

N
othing like dying to give you a sense of perspective. The strange thing is that from up here, a few centimeters below the bathroom 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.

N
o, 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 without 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!”

“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.