Afterwife (6 page)

“She was a beautiful woman who died too young. But she wasn’t my wife, Jenny. I’m not going to phonily pretend my life is decimated
by her dying.” Sam pulled on his white underpants, rearranged his balls. “I refuse to emote on call.”

“I’m not asking you to emote, I’m asking you…to…to give a bit more of a shit, that’s all!”

He looked at her in disbelief. “You think I don’t give a shit? Bloody hell. You really don’t know me at all, do you, Jenny?”

A
t Sam’s persuasion—exercise is a mood enhancer!—she’d gone to a punishing class of Legs, Bums and Tums with a Leo Sayer lookalike instructor who’d shouted, “Hey, you at the back with the hair!” when she could go no further with the star jumps that were making her tits ache. (And what was wrong with her hair? Pots and bloody kettles.) Hamstrings singing with pain, ears ringing with Girls Aloud, she’d reversed badly out of the gym parking space beneath the gaze of three sniggering teenage girls; and now here she was, still a bit BOish, sitting in a snarl of traffic on route to Muswell Hill, London’s tightly packed heart now behind her, pulsing beneath its gray layer of grimy snow.

She wondered if Ollie’s mother, Vicki, would be at Ollie’s today, and hoped not. Sophie used to call her “Joan Collins’s long-lost sister from Basingstoke.” Still, rather Joan Collins’s long-lost sister than Soph’s poor mum, Sally, who was a sodden tangle of tears, hurt and neediness. She’d called Jenny every night the week before, wanting to go over the fateful evening in detail. What had Sophie drunk? Eaten? What had they talked about? As she spoke her pain was audible, like nails scraping a blackboard. A mother’s pain, no lessened by her daughter’s age. Sophie may as well have been five.

Stopping at the traffic lights, she glanced about her and exhaled the tension of crowded inner London.

Trees. That was the thing she first noticed about Muswell Hill.
All the trees, skeletal now but in summer shivers of green. Yes, trees, wider roads, lots of white people, and a lovely view. From different points in the neighborhood you could see the whole of London spread out below you like a meal on a plate. Jenny pulled up outside Ollie’s house. A typical suburban Edwardian house, it had a fashionable circus-style number thirty-three transfer on the upper windowpane, a soft gray door, and a recycle box alarmingly full of empty wine bottles and beer cans next to the pathway. The blinds were shut and the frosted front path was unscuffed by footprints. She knocked, waited for a few minutes before Freddie opened the front door, wearing his Superman pajamas and clutching a battered stack of Match Attax cards.

“Hey, Freddie!” She hugged him, sniffed his hair. It didn’t smell how it usually smelled, fresh and boyish, like wind and soil. No, he smelled sockish today and his angelic curls were matted at the back. “You alright?” Stupid question.

“Yes, thank you.” Freddie smiled politely, as Sophie had taught him, but he didn’t maintain eye contact for long. She wondered if the horrible truth—his mother wasn’t coming back—had dawned yet. A notably slimmed-down Ping Pong curled around his ankles and mewed pitifully.

Inside the hall it was chaotic, more chaotic than the previous week. Not just mess, but layers of mess, stratified in the manner of an archaeological dump, Monday’s mess on Tuesday’s and so on. Coats. Boots everywhere. An empty chip tray nestled inside Freddie’s bicycle helmet. It was as if Sophie’s death had frozen it in situ like petrifying volcanic mud. The television was on in the living room, frozen to a Sky menu. The potted palm in front of the bay window was drooping pathetically, its leaves curling and yellowing at the edges. A duvet was balled into the corner of the velvet sofa. It didn’t contain Ollie. “Where’s Daddy, sweetheart?”

“Kitchen,” said Freddie matter-of-factly.

She put her hand lightly on his soft cheek, still as adorably convex as a baby’s. But he shrugged her hand off and ran upstairs.

Ollie, or a man who vaguely resembled Ollie, was hunched pathetically beneath the huge Sex Pistols’
No Future
original print in the kitchen, staring at a small, crumpled sheet of white paper. He was wearing the same black jeans he’d been wearing the last time she saw him, as well as the same navy cashmere jumper with the giant hole on the left elbow. “Ollie?”

He looked up with puffy eyes and tried to smile. “Hey, Jenny.” His voice rasped, like the throat of a forty-a-day smoker. She swore he had peppercorns of gray on his temples where he didn’t a week earlier. She wanted to put her arms around him and hug him close but still felt as if she didn’t quite have permission, or familiarity. The truth was she’d actually always felt quite shy around Ollie—he was too good-looking—and she had only known him through the prism of Sophie. Sophie had been her best friend. Ollie was Sophie’s husband. If they’d divorced—always the test—she’d have been in the Sophie camp. And now, here they were, thrust together in the most unlikely of circumstances.

“You’ve got a starter beard.”

He ran his fingers through it. “Bit Bin Laden?”

“No, sort of Jim Morrison.”

“Rider on the storm.”

A pop cultural reference! A good sign! He was functioning. Feeling a wave of relief, she smiled properly for the first time that day. She liked it at number thirty-three. Apart from anything else, her misery paled against his and this made her feel like the sane one. “Any grannies in the house?”

“Sent Mum home.”

“Really?”

“Don’t worry. She’s still phoning every couple of hours. Like a speaking clock.” He pushed the bit of white paper up beneath his
fingernail and put on a high woman’s voice. “‘It’s four o’clock, Oliver. Have you got dressed yet? Have you canceled Sophie’s bank accounts? It’s five o’clock, Oliver, has Freddie had his tea? Have you spoken to the lawyers? When is the case coming to court?’ And on and on.” He shook his head. “Bless her. She’s driving me nuts.”

“Er, I guess there’s a lot of stuff to sort out.” She could only imagine.

“We die and do you know what we leave behind?” Ollie kicked back in his chair angrily. “Admin. We leave admin. Fucking great.”

“Maybe it’s too soon to send your mum home, Ol,” she said, wondering when she’d slipped into calling him Ol rather than Ollie and whether this was overfamiliar. Sophie had called him Ol. “How about Soph’s sister? Would…”

“I need to do this on my own.” Eerie choral medieval chanting music started to pour out of his speakers. It reminded her of churches and crypts. No, it was not going to help. He needed Emmylou Harris.

He glanced at her, reading her mind. “It’s this or replaying Sophie’s voice on the answer machine.”

Déjà vu suddenly hit her with such force she stepped backward. Two years before. A dark winter’s afternoon. Walking up the path of number thirty-three, hearing music, loud music, soft, smooth, old soul. The lights were on in the house, the curtains open, and she saw Sophie and Ollie clutching each other, dancing around the living room, oblivious to anything but each other, his arm tight around her waist, her eyes fixed hungrily on his face. Like Taylor and Burton, she’d thought. Shocked by the erotic intensity and not wanting to intrude, she’d turned right round and walked twice around the block, realizing that she’d never danced like that with anyone. From that to this. It was pitiful. “You can’t be alone,” she said quietly. “Not right now.”

“I’m not alone. I’ve got Fred.” He looked out the window, eyes
focused on something invisible in the middle distance. “It was airless in the house with everyone here, Jenny, all of us choking on grief. Believe me, this is easier.” He shook his head. “A few days ago, I had this energy surge and ran about sorting everything out, phoning the idiots at Orange, calling her building society, some twat at London transport, and feeling almost positive, even though that sounds mad, and then…I…I just crashed.”

“Oh, Ollie.” This big, wonderful chunk of a man as vulnerable as a little boy, it wasn’t right. But he’d get through this. He had to. She was going to make sure of it.

“It keeps going round and round my head. If you’d both left the restaurant thirty seconds earlier…If you’d got a cab…” His face crumpled. “The what-ifs of it all make me want to rip my skin off. Fuck. Fuck. I can’t explain.” He looked up at her desperately. “I can’t
be
, Jenny. I can’t just be anymore. Tell me how. Please.”

She leaned toward him then, needing to be close to him. He smelled different from Sam. Saltier. She recognized the smell from Sophie, who’d always smelled slightly of Ollie in the way other people smelled of their houses.

“I don’t want to be here, Jen,” he said so quietly, she could barely hear him.

“Don’t even say that, Ollie. Freddie needs you.” She noticed that there was a Coco Pop trapped in his beard.

His eyes darkened. “I need him more. And I hate that. It should be the other way round.”

“I think you’re holding up really well, Ollie. I do, really.” Should she tell him about the Coco Pop?

“Every day I wake up knowing not only that she’s gone but that I’ve got to face another day missing her. Then I spend the whole day waiting for her to come back, expecting her to be late.”

The medieval monks started chanting more incessantly, the same Latin words, over and over. “Ollie, bereavement is a process.” She
wished desperately that she could offer less trite words of comfort. “It’s not always going to feel like this.”

He snorted. “You believe that, do you?”

“Yes, yes, I do. I have to.” It just hadn’t happened yet. And in a weird way, part of her didn’t want it to happen. Her grief was all she had left of Sophie. She wondered if Ollie felt the same. Or were there different types of grief, Jenny wondered, different strains and hybrids? So that the grief a mother who lost a child suffered was fundamentally different from the pain of losing a friend or wife? Or was everyone stuck in the same long, dark tunnel, maybe just in different places, some closer to the light than others?

Ollie rolled himself a cigarette, licking the paper with the efficiency of someone who did it all the time, rather than someone who had supposedly stopped smoking when Sophie was pregnant with Freddie. The blue-gray smoke curled out of his mouth, over his beard, into the room like a Scooby-Doo spirit. “I woke up yesterday and I swear I couldn’t remember what she looked like. The past is fading, Jen.”

Jenny bit her lip, trying not to cry. Hopeless. She’d come here to comfort Ollie. She didn’t want him comforting her. She had to be strong. Strong and organized and helpful.

“No one else was there, you see. It was our world, the two of us. She was the witness. Now it’s gone. All fucking gone.”

I
was there, thought Jenny. I saw it. I saw you two fall in love. I saw how happy you made Sophie. You two were the yardstick by which I measured every relationship,
my
relationship. You two were the real deal. She saw them dancing again, dancers on their private stage, the look in Ollie’s eyes as he gazed at Sophie, a gaze of wonderment and ball-busting lust.

Freddie barreled into the room. “Hungry.”

“Are you? Um…” Ollie scratched his head, as if trying to make sense of the meaning of the word. “Fancy some toast?”

“We had that already today. Daddy, you have something in your beard. Euch.” He picked out the Coco Pop that Jenny had been longing to pick out and flicked it to the floor.

Ollie walked over to the fridge and surveyed it blankly. The open fridge door released a stale cheesy waft into the kitchen.

“I’ll pop out to the deli,” she said. Now this
was
something practical she could do. Something maternal. “You’ve got a nice one, haven’t you, up on the high street?”

“Can you get some chocolate cake?” Freddie asked.

“Sure. Whatever you fancy.” She winked at Ollie. “Chocolate cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Freddie pulled on Ollie’s hand. “Can I watch
Deadly 60
?”

Ollie shook his head. “Too much telly already, Fred.”

“
Strictly Come Dancing
?”

Jenny smiled. “You like
Strictly
, Freddie?”

“Freddie
loves
Strictly
.” Ollie grinned. “Soph got him into it. She had it all ramped up on the Sky Plus.” He looked down at the floor. “It’s still there. He watches it over and over.”

“I wish I was allowed to watch
Strictly
. Sam won’t let me,” she whispered to Freddie. “You and I must have a secret
Strictly
sesh together, Freddie.”

A smile lit up Freddie’s face. “Now?”

“Not right now, Fred,” said Ollie quickly. “I’m talking to Jenny.”

“Daddy…”

“Oh, okay,
Deadly 60
.” Freddie ran out of the room before Ollie had a chance to change his mind. Ollie rolled his eyes. “Can’t refuse him anything.”

“Totally understandable.”

“He’s my little warrior. He doesn’t deserve this shit.” Ollie took one more pull on his cigarette and stubbed it out, half smoked. He looked out the window. A cream puff of snow was settling on the sill, airy and solid at the same time. Like love, Jenny suddenly
thought. Like how true love is meant to be. Like what Soph and Ollie had. Airy but solid, like meringue. “How has Freddie been?”

“Nightmares.” Ollie rested his square jaw in his hands. She noticed a crescent of grime beneath his fingernails. “Although he’s better when he sleeps in my bed. He dreamed of Ben Ten last night. Progress?”

“Definitely progress.” Jenny tried to stop her eyes from filling by blinking really fast. She could cope with most things, just not the idea of Freddie losing his mother. “And the counseling?”

“Nice lady, says he’s doing okay. Well mothered, she says.” He raised his eyebrows at the irony. “It helps.”

“Well fathered too.”

Ollie turned to her, dark eyes blazing. “Jenny, he thinks that Sophie is still
here
. That she talks to him. That she’s in the room.”

Jenny felt the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. “I sometimes feel Sophie is still here,” she confessed quietly. She’d never tell Sam that. Sam would tell her to get a grip. “Do you?”

Silence. He looked at her long and hard before speaking. “Yes.”