Afterwife (32 page)

He wiped a tear off her cheek with the pad of his thumb. “In another life we could…”

“Please don’t, Ollie.” Sophie had been dead not quite eight months. Eight!

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He closed his eyes and a tear glistened in the corner of his eye. “I’m lost, Jen. I’m a fucking mess.”

His mouth was inevitable then. He tasted like cigarettes and old coffee and tears. His beard rasped deliciously against her cheek. His lush soft lips moved down her face, buried into her neck, and the scent and feel of him filled her world completely.

“No. We can’t, Ollie,” she finally managed, gasping for breath.

His lips reluctantly moved away from hers. “You’re right. We can’t.” He fell back on the pillow, stared up at the ceiling, breathing heavily. She didn’t speak. He didn’t speak. There was nothing left to say. The rightness and the wrongness were irresolvable. Slowly his lids began to close and his breath found the long, drawn-out rhythm of the jetlagged. She lay there, awake, heart slamming—the letter beneath her, Ollie beside her—fevered with longing and self-disgust. Soon, there was a pink glow at the crack in the curtains. Dawn was breaking. And with it, a terrifying new day.

W
hat the hell’s been going on? I take a minibreak and everything goes tits up at number thirty-three! Obviously I had no idea that poor little Freddie had chicken pox or I wouldn’t have gone on my weekender. I feel horribly negligent. I only went because after my recent solitary in Ollie’s trainer I was yearning for fresh air. I caught a keen southeasterly from the street’s highest chimney—number fifteen’s wonky one—and hung on to it as it picked up speed, bouncing over rooftops and electricity pylons, until I clipped the canopy of Highgate Woods. What can I say? Joyous. I was more air than anything else, a shape only, a balloon without its rubber skin. I could freefall with no fear, spin round and round the uppermost branches of the trees, elastic as a teenage Russian gymnast, then rest for a while in a blackbirds’ nest alongside twigs, feathers and a scrap of Snickers wrapper. I need to rest more and more now. Getting old.

It’s not just London’s air pollution levels—soaring now in this sticky summer—I am definitely getting fainter, a fading footprint on
the beach. In the heady early days of my afterlife I was able to slice through the days like a hot knife through butter. But now it feels as if the air is thick and viscous. I seem to get stuck in it like one of those crumbs that are impossible to remove from the Golden Syrup tin.

Anyway, I’m back from my treetop weekender now. And something has clearly happened in my absence. Freddie is spotty, obviously, but over the worst. It’s Ollie I’m worried about. He is subdued and has been staring out the window for hours. The house itself feels altered too, in some way that I can’t put my finger on, like it might have subsided a millimeter or two into the ground or is leaning a teeny bit sideways. I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel like it did. Not like the number thirty-three of old.

I check in on Jenny too, and discover she is in an even worse state. There’s a dissonance in that horrible sterile Camden apartment, crackling, hissing, like a melting nuclear reactor. The atmosphere is so poisonous I have to limit my exposure. It’s just as well Sam has stropped off to the country with his parents. Imagine he’d be freaked to see Jenny like this too, crying like a baby in the bath. Worried about her, really worried about her now, I stay close, dangling from a leather tassel on her bag, wondering where we are marching to and with such demented purpose. Which is how I find myself here, in Starbucks, Great Portland Street, stuck to the air vent above the coffee machine like a bit of chewing gum.

Not crying now, Jenny has got a face as long as Lyle Lovett’s. Her eyes are still pink. Her hands are shaking. She’s checking her watch. Nibbling a finger. Checking that watch again. Has she been stood up? She takes the last swig of her coffee. She picks up her handbag off the floor.

She’s been stood up.

Then the glass doors swish open. A rash crawls up Jenny’s collarbone.

A woman walks in—the woman I once saw Sam secretly meet?
Yes, I think so. She looks around. She sees Jenny and starts. The woman’s hair is pulled back into a ponytail, like I wore mine on bad hair days. She is dressed in a nude jersey dress, bright yellow ballet flats. “Jenny?”

“Dominique?”

Oh, my God. Dominique. I’m settling into my front-row seat here.

“I’m sorry I’m so late.” Dominique smiles nervously, scrapes the chair across the floor.

“I hope you didn’t mind me emailing. Tash said…” Jenny falters, as if unsure whether she’s allowed to declare her source. She can’t take her eyes off Dominique’s face. “Can I get you a coffee?”

“No, thanks, I’ve got to be somewhere pretty soon.” There is tension around Dominique’s mouth that purses, like it’s got a drawstring inside.

“I needed to meet you properly,” says Jenny finally, twisting her fingers together in her lap angularly like crab claws. “There’s been a lot of stuff…” She blows out air, collects herself. “Between me and Sam. So many unanswered questions. I need to know what’s going on, that’s all. I’m not looking to blame anyone.”

Dominique shifts on her chair. She’s already regretting coming. “Look, to be perfectly frank, Jenny, I always thought that one day Sam and I would get back together.”

“Back together?”

“I wondered if he was with anyone, what his situation was, so I tracked him down.” She looks down at the table. “I realize this all must sound a bit bunny boiler. I didn’t mean to freak you out. Sorry.”

“You must have liked him a lot.”

Dominique glances up from her hands. “I thought we’d marry actually.”

Jenny closes her eyes, bracing herself. It’s bigger. It’s bigger than she thought. “When were you two together?”

“Summer, two years ago,” Dominique says in the definite manner of a woman who’s been counting the hours ever since.

“Two years ago?” Jenny repeats in a whisper, her hand crushed over her mouth, paling.

Two years ago! Then we’re talking about around the time he made a pass at me too. The little turd.

“We overlapped?” Dominique looks down guiltily as she speaks, like she may not have been entirely ignorant of the fact.

“We did.” Jenny shakes her head in disbelief. “Jesus.”

Yes, we
all
did.

The two women stare at each other across the round dark wooden table, me from the air-conditioning vent. An irritated Starbucks person sweeps Jenny’s empty cup off the table.

“I better go.” Dominique, clutching her large red tote, stands up to leave.

“One more question.” The clatter in the café seems to quieten for Jenny’s inevitable question. “Why did you think I was called Sophie?”

Dominique hesitates, wondering what the right thing is to say. The mouth purses again. She holds her handbag tighter.

I wait. Jenny waits. Her left knee jumps up and down inside her trouser leg.

“Did you know there was someone else?”

“Look,” Dominique says, defensive now, “all I knew was that he’d got this…this
thing
, some stupid schoolboy crush, unreciprocated, on some woman. Sophie, her name was Sophie.”

“Unreciprocated?” Jenny asks in a scared whisper. “You’re sure?”

“Yes, unreciprocated, definitely,” she answers firmly. “That was what was so totally frustrating about the whole situation.” Dominique speaks faster, harder, like aggrieved exes do. “He said I reminded him of her. That I was like her, but…but better.” She shakes her head and laughs hollowly. “I thought if I hung in there…I can’t believe how stupid this is making me sound. I’m not that woman, not the
woman you must think I am, Jenny. He was just one of those men, you know, who turn you into someone you’re not. Do you know what I mean?”

Jenny nods. She knows exactly what she means. And so do I.

Dominique leaves quickly, with a worried backward glance, wondering what she’s done. I flatten against the ceiling, desperate to be human again and wrap my arms around Jenny and hug her and kiss her and tell her it is going to be alright and that he had a silly, stupid crush on me but she was always the woman he really loved, that it was just my vanity he flattered, that it never went anywhere because I would
never
do that. I didn’t act faultlessly. I’m a flirt, a tease, an erotic fantasist, but I’m not a traitorous friend. Instead I have to watch helplessly as my dear friend finally breaks, there and then, in the middle of Starbucks, oblivious to the people staring. She sobs noisily until a barista brings her a tissue then steers her firmly by the elbow out the door to the crowded street.

H
ave you lost your fucking
mind
?” Sam shouted, kicking his weekend bag along the floor. “I’ve just got back from a marquee meeting onsite. We can’t possibly cancel the wedding.”

Jenny held on to a steel ridge of chair for support. If only she could think straight. But she’d been crying for so long her brain had gone smeary. She could not think. She could not breathe. All she knew was that if she put on that wedding dress she’d evaporate in a shower of green sparks like the Wicked Witch of the West. It would be the most dishonest thing she’d ever done. “I’m sorry, Sam.”

His expression sagged. He finally realized she meant it. “Jenny, please.” He lowered his voice so that it sounded almost like a threat. “I am trying to protect you from yourself. You are angry. You are hurt. Understood. I apologize. I will apologize until the day I die. I am in your debt, okay? Whatever it fucking takes. I’ll do whatever it takes, Jenny, to make you realize that it was nothing, absolutely
nothing
.” He angrily swiped the letter off the table. “I don’t know why the silly bitch kept it!”

“Maybe she was going to show me.” All night she’d been thinking of the times that Sophie had tried to talk to her about something: the
it
in that to-do list Ollie had found months earlier.

“Come on. She probably kept it because she enjoyed it. I bet she kept all her love letters, didn’t she?”

“Sam…” This was a way out. It was her way out and she was going to grab the bucking bronco by the horns and hold on tight.

“She was never happy unless every last man in the room was drooling after her. She fucking loved it.” His face paled with repressed anger. “Do you remember her at parties, dancing? Dancing in those stupid sequiny dresses. Look at me! Look at me! She may as well have written that across her forehead in red lipstick,” he spat. “A tart.”

Her instinct was to leap to Sophie’s defense. Not this time. “It doesn’t change anything.” There was a calmness and conviction to her voice that surprised her. “It’s too late, Sam.”

“I’d say
this
was a bit fucking late actually, Jenny. Would you just snap out of it?” He tried and failed to smile. “Please, Jenny?” he asked, more desperate now. “You want to throw this away? All this?” he said, gesturing around him, as if the apartment itself was something she couldn’t possibly give up.

I hate this apartment, she thought. I hate its high-tech hardness. When I have my own place I’m going to have knitted patchwork cushions and an old wooden work surface stained with tea and a radio with a big fat dial that I can turn. “You fucked around with Dominique too.” She blinked back tears. “And I was so in love with you.”

He groaned. “I really, really tried to get her to back off, stop stirring things up. I even asked Tash to have a word with Dominique, Jenny. I did everything I could to protect you. You’ve got to believe that.”

She turned away from him, still hurt that he’d crept into her Muswell Hill world and taken the confidence of one of her new
friends, used it to his advantage. He used everyone to his advantage. “It makes it worse.”

He dropped his head into his hands. “I don’t understand.”

“Why did you want to set a date, Sam? After all those months. After all that foot dragging. That’s what I don’t understand.”

He looked up at her with red, hurt eyes. “Because I loved you. Because…”

“Why?”

“Sophie’s death. It made me focus. I’d lost her.…” He stumbled on his words before he realized what he’d said.

Something twisted in her stomach. “You mean it was all over and there was nothing left to play for?”

“No, it made me feel I’d been given a second chance. When she was alive I lived in fear of her saying something to you, fucking up everything. It hung over me, my own stupidity. When she died…” He shook his head.

“You thought you’d got away with it?”

He was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t help the way I felt about the others. I love you.”

Others!
How many were there? She couldn’t listen to this. “None of this makes sense to me anymore either. Don’t you see?” she shouted. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“If it made sense before, it can make sense again,” he pleaded. “We have a connection. We always have done. The good times, think of the good times, babes. Me, you, Soph and Ollie, the picnics, the parties, that lovely weekend on the narrow boat in Oxford, do you remember?”

That hot summer weekend. The gentle sway of the boat. She clearly remembered Ollie and Sophie sitting on the roof, Ollie licking a bit of ice cream off the tip of Sophie’s nose, while Jenny watched from the deck, thinking that if she had ice cream on her nose Sam would make a hand gesture for her to remove it or pass her a tissue.
She remembered thinking on that boat that only beautiful people like Sophie got loved like Sophie was loved. That plainer women like herself shouldn’t expect so much. She now also realized that it was likely that Sam had spent the whole weekend ogling Sophie in her bikini. “Sam, it’s over.”

He was angry again. His hands fisted at his sides and for one terrible moment Jenny thought he might hit her. “I smell a rat here. This is all too convenient, isn’t it? Isn’t it?” he hissed. “If you really loved me, you’d believe me.”

Jenny shut her eyes. He was right. She knew he was right. Ollie’s kiss had changed everything. It would have changed everything even if Dominique and the letter had never come to light. It had set her on fire in a way she never thought possible. However sickening and shameful her feelings, there was no going back. She’d rather be single forever than marry someone she didn’t feel that with. It was the
grrr
. The
grrr
that Sophie used to talk about. It had happened to her.