Afterwife (9781101618868)

by Williams, Polly

  Freddie grabbed it. The cover’s green holographic cover threw shards of light against his smooth cheek. There was a photograph of him and Sophie on the cover, above which she’d written The Mummy Memory Book in her best swirly handwriting in gold pen. He pulled his finger down over it slowly.

  “There are boxes, little boxes for you to fill in,” she explained, heart in her mouth watching his reaction, willing him to like it.

  “So it’s like homework?” Freddie looked up apprehensively.

  Jenny laughed. “No, not at all,” she said, kneeling down to his level. “You just write in it if you want to. Like your favorite holiday with Mummy. Mummy’s favorite TV program…”

  “I like the photos best,” said Freddie decisively, pointing to one of Sophie wrapped in a huge yellow towel on the beach, as if trying to absorb the essence of her back through his fingers. He flipped the pages and smiled at the old photographs. Soph’s mum had given Jenny a hoard to use: infant Sophie sitting on the beach, all doughy thighs, curly toes, and gripping a sandy red spade; a young Sophie sticking dampers—a flour and water paste—on a stick in front of a bonfire. Jenny had picked through lots of photos of bonfires, actually, the leaping and furious kind that Jenny had never been allowed to build in her own childhood on account of health and safety and the fact that it was a waste of good firewood. She remembered how entranced she’d always been by Sophie’s tales of family camping trips to the woods—Jenny’s own mother was “allergic to camping” because she swelled up like a whoopee cushion when bitten by midges—and crabbing and sunbathing. It always seemed to be summer in Sophie’s childhood.

  Jenny’s own childhood summers were about fluorescent ice pops from the freezer in the garage, cardigans and picnics on shingle beaches in Sussex aborted because of the rain. They weren’t well documented either. Jenny’s parents had never come to grips with the “newfangled” camera they’d bought in 1974 and there was a gap of two years, when the camera broke and had not been replaced, when absolutely no milestone of hers was recorded.

  As a reaction against her own parents’ lack of enthusiasm for posterity, when she went to university she made a real point of photographing as much as she could. This meant that she had a huge mine of memories, so many pictures of Sophie laughing, head thrown back, all her teeth showing, including that funny little chip on her left canine, the result of surfing down the stairs on a teenage boyfriend’s skateboard when she was fifteen. No wonder everyone fell in love with her.

  At university their photographs, and memories, had become even more collaborative, twisted together like tights spinning in a washing machine. Flashbacks rushed through Jenny’s head like a speeded-up silent film: old jokes, fake tan disasters, favorite bands, losing then finding each other at parties, scrawled messages exchanged silently during dull lectures, singing along to Happy Mondays’ “Step On” in Soph’s crappy old Renault Clio at the top of their voices, holiday scrapes involving too much alcohol and too much sun, bad drugs, bad sex, good sex, one-night stands, shocking home hair dye kits, unrequited love, swapped essay notes, shared lip glosses, pregnancy scares, fertility scares, period pains, the joy of dancing all night and watching the sun come up over a cornfield in the morning and knowing that they’d be friends forever, whatever. Back then absolutely the worst thing that could ever happen was getting dumped by somebody you thought you were in love with. (They’d invariably be fully recovered within three weeks.) Life was about possibilities. Now it just seemed to be about consequences.

  She jumped, yanked back from the flashcards of her past. Out of the blue Ollie had put a hand on her lower back, in the gap where her T-shirt had ridden up! It tingled. “Thank you, Jen. The book’s amazing.”

  Her skin fizzed beneath his palm. Horrified by the idea that he’d somehow sense this, she leapt away from his hand as if stung. He looked at her curiously—a look in his eyes she hadn’t seen before, registering something—and she blushed fiercely, feeling transparent and caught out.

  “Look at that one, Daddy.” Freddie laughed and pointed to a picture of Jenny and Sophie as students—Mummy at College—before the Halloween ball. Jenny was dressed as a pumpkin, Sophie a far more glamorous wicked witch of the west with black-and-white-striped tights and a billowing black cape.

  “Have you seen the one of you and Mummy at the zoo last year?” She flicked through to one of her favorites, still feeling flustered and midsummer hot. “Ah, there’s Mummy and Daddy getting married.”

  Sophie wore a vintage dress, the skirt bouncing out from her hips fifties-style, a tiara wound from ivy and white flowers on her head, a flower behind her ear. She looked like a naughty rock-and-roll wood nymph.

  Ollie pointed to a dumpy-looking figure in a blast of Monsoon cerise in the background. “And there’s our Jenny.”

  She glanced up at him and smiled. Again, there was a funny look in his eye. It felt as if something had passed between them, some silent collective recognition that this was the photographic evidence of how they used to be when things were…different.

  She was much relieved when he finally left to go back to the studio, leaving her babysitting. The house felt different without him, more reassuringly Sophie’s space once more, safer, girlier, less complicated territory. She gave Freddie a bath, admiring his lovely lean boy’s body and feeling a fresh twist of sadness that Sophie would not see his shoulders widen, his legs grow long and hairy, his chin develop angles. She tucked him up in bed, next to the uncuddlable beeping Buzz Lightyear toy that he so adored, and read him Dahl’s Twits. “Just one more page,” he begged, until the last page. She stooped down to turn off his side light. “Night, night, sweetheart.”

  “But…”

  “It’s really late now.”

  “Tell me about Mummy. Or I won’t sleep. Daddy always tells me about Mummy before I go to sleep.”

  She hesitated. “Does he? Okay. Well, um, Mummy was…well, she just wasn’t like most people, Fred.” She sank back down on his bed again, feeling a maternal buzz of contentment when Freddie nestled his head against her shoulder. Is this how Sophie had felt every night? She’d played it down, but, God, she’d had so much to lose, so much more than Jenny. The injustice that it was Sophie who died, rather than her much more dispensable self, hit her hard again. There was no justice.

  “And?”

  “Well, Mummy was funnier than most people and cleverer and very beautiful.” Freddie didn’t look too impressed. He expected better. “She could also be a bit silly, couldn’t she?”

  Freddie brightened. “I remember her being silly.”

  “Do you? And do you remember how she loved to laugh? Silly practical jokes. And parties, especially if they involved fancy dress, like in the Mummy book.” She wondered if all the stories about Sophie were suitable for Freddie, as so many of the best ones had happened in their twenties and involved copious amounts of cheap white wine. Oh, well, one day he’d be old enough to understand. “Given half the chance I think she would have worn fancy dress every day.”

  Freddie grinned. “She made me a pirate outfit with a sword holder and everything. I was the best pirate at Josh’s party. I won a huge lollipop that cracked my baby tooth.”

  “That sounds worth cracking a tooth for. I’d like to see that outfit someday.” She paused for a moment, remembering. Sophie dancing. Always dancing. Sophie bursting out of dressing rooms in mad red dresses. Sophie playing cards, raising them flirtatiously over her face like a veil. “She was also a very good card player, did you know that?”

  Freddie shook his head. “I always used to beat her at Snap.”

  “That’s because you’re very clever too. She could thrash Daddy at poker. And she was excellent at chess.”

  His eyes brightened. “I’m learning to play chess at school.”

  “She would be very pleased about that.”

  “I want to learn chess so I can beat Joe. He’s in my class. I don’t like him.”

  Who was this Joe? She bit down on her bearlike
protective rage, suspecting an outburst would not be helpful. “Why don’t you like Joe?”

  Freddie shrugged, clammed up. “Dunno.”

  She remembered how Sophie used to tell her that extracting any information about school from Freddie was like trying to get his Buzz Lightyear to engage in conversation about the Nobel Prize. “If you keep practicing, you will beat Joe at chess. That will feel good.”

  “Yeah.” He pressed his head harder onto her shoulder. “Tell me more things about Mummy.”

  “Ah, let me see.” There was so much stuff about Soph it was almost impossible to pick one thing. “She had a very sweet tooth.”

  “So her tooth tastes of sweets?”

  Jenny laughed. “No, a sweet tooth means you like cakes and sweet things. If we were in a café and I ordered a cake she’d always want the cake I ordered too. A cake monster, Mummy was. Almost as bad as me.”

  Freddie giggled.

  “And you know what, Freddie? You know how Mummy was so good at cooking cakes?”

  “Chocolate crispy cakes. We made them with cornflakes. We stirred in melty chocolate. I wasn’t allowed to lick the bowl until afterwards.”

  “Yummy! But do you know the funny thing? Before she had you she couldn’t cook anything. Well, she could make toast and boiled egg and maybe pasta. But after she had you she learned to cook. She learned so much. And she became one of the best cooks I know.”

  He smiled. “Because of me?”

  “Because of you.”

  She peered down and saw that Freddie’s eyes were beginning to shut. “You made her happier than anything, Freddie.”

  “I miss her.” His voice choked.

  “I know, sweetie. She knows too.” Atheism be damned. This boy needed to believe. “And she’s watching over you.”

  “Oh, I know that,” he said, as if she’d stated the bleeding obvious. “She talks to me all the time.”

  She thought of the conversations that she and Sophie hadn’t had and the conversations that they could have had—should have had—conversations about Soph’s desire for another baby. Those letters.

  He twisted Buzz Lightyear’s arms upward. “Does she talk to you too?”

  “No,” she said sadly, as a blast of air shivered Buzz’s fabric wings and blew up her nostrils. “She speaks to you because you’re special.”

  Sixteen

  This place, whatever it is, this world that runs parallel to yours, is a bit like one of those hard-core Austrian spas where you pay thousands to eat nothing and float around white rooms feeling hungry and helpless. Just without the enemas. It makes me long for simple, sensual things. A crashing Atlantic wave. A warm wind on my face as I cycle. The first lick of an ice cream on a slippery hot day. A cup of sugared tea. God, I’d love a cuppa.

  My craving is not helped by the fact that everywhere I turn there are kettles! There are four kettles—four!—on the kitchen counter. Three are gifts from mothers at the school: Lydia, Tash and Posh Brigid with the IVF twins in year four. The nicest kettle is from Jenny, of course. (She knows I’m not the kind of woman who’d ever let a white plastic Russell Hobbs anywhere near my work surface.) Still, no one needs four kettles.

  You can’t take them with you. I can tell you that for sure. Death is for minimalists.

  It’s ten a.m., Saturday morning. Ollie is staring at the kettles, rubbing his fingers anxiously through those stiff black hairs exploding from his chin. I know from the exact angle of the arrow between his eyebrows that the kettles are upsetting him. That the kettles are making him feel obligated to the givers of the kettles; i.e., the gift of a kettle will almost certainly require the offer of a cup of tea to the giver of the kettle. It is like the flowers that he had to vase: easier if they didn’t arrive in the first place.

  No, Ollie is not a sociable beast, nor is he a tea fan. He likes his caffeine, and his social life, condensed into an adrenaliney gulp. The exhaustion of the English breakfast tea bags in the tin is therefore nothing to do with him and everything to do with the endless roll of—mostly female—visitors. That’s what we English women do when someone dies. Drink tea. And shop. Incidentally, Lydia’s online shopping habit is spiraling out of control. How much smart kitchenware does one household actually need? It won’t bring me back, hon.

  Ollie drums his fingers on the wooden work surface—rotting, since it is now left to puddle with water—waiting for Freddie. And where is Freddie? Freddie is swimming. Drumroll…with Jenny!

  A word on this extraordinary event: Jenny hates swimming. More than this, she hates swimming in municipal pools. She hates the changing rooms with their wet verrucular tiles, their lack of privacy. She hates exposing her body to the indignities of a swimsuit. And she hates getting her hair wet. (FYI, chlorine makes her highlights go green.) So imagine my shock when a few minutes ago I spread out through the filter vents into the lukewarm, urinated water of the local pool. There was Jenny standing upside down, her hair whipping around her, her navy swimsuit—Speedo, only Jenny would wear Speedo, as if it were Basingstoke, 1985—gaping at the top, those fantastic bristols dropping toward her chin, only her pale chunky feet stamping above the surface, like a drunk synchronized swimmer. A couple of feet away, swinging on a metal ladder, wearing his red goggles, was Freddie, howling with laughter. And I realized then that Jenny will do anything, absolutely anything, to make Freddie happy, even if it involves standing upside down in a pissy municipal swimming pool on a Saturday morning when she could be in bed with Sam. And I love her completely for that. Feeling reassured and not wanting Freddie to pick up on my distracting wavelength—am wondering if he is in fact sensitive to my presence and has a hardwired mum-sensor—I shot back through the vent, deep into the labyrinth of heaters and pipes in the pool room; then, passing like a small cloudette of chlorine-scented vapor back over the streets of north London, I came home. And here I am.

  As time goes on—can you believe I’ve been dead for more than four months now?—I’m getting more confident about leaving the house and getting out and about, like a person learning to live with a new disability. My disability is that I don’t exist—quite a handicap, when you think of it. And I really don’t like being invisible. There are no second glances. No whistling builders. I can’t help but wonder if this is what old age would have been like.

  On the plus side, there are no fares up here. No queues. No sticking an Oyster card into a machine and the machine not being able to read it and dozens of people behind you clicking their tongues. (Whenever I see that now I want to swoop down and yell, “One day you’ll be dead!” in their ears, just to see if it makes them jump the turnstiles. Really, what’s the worst the London Transport police can throw at you?)

  Sometimes I can get to a place miles away in the time it takes a live human to inhale and exhale their coffee breath: I’m a Japanese high-speed train of a spirit. Other times I cannot move, just cannot; I’m leaves on the line. It’s as if I’m falling asleep, or zoning out, or whatever you call sleep when you’re in my state—dead to the world?—and when I come to hours later, sometimes days later, I am filled with a terrible fear that something might have happened to Freddie and Ollie while I wasn’t watching over them. But, thank goodness, it never does. It won’t strike twice, will it?

  Ollie is walking upstairs now, one hand on the banister, the other dug deep into his pocket. He’s always got his fisted hands thrust into his pockets these days, giving him the air of a moody teenager. I follow softly behind him, like a whisper of breath against the iron filing black hairs on the back of his neck. With every step, his body releases a tiny whiff and I gorge on it, swilling his essence round and round inside of me, like a sommelier with a fine wine. It is never enough.

  He walks into our bedroom, slumps on the blue velvet throw and drops his head into his hands. I curl around his shoulder blades like a feather boa and feel the rise and fall of his bones. He sits like that for some time, head in hands, listening to the sounds outside the window. A car revving. Birds. Someone cal
ling their dog. He flicks through photos on his iPhone. Me in different settings—leafy parks, Cornish beaches, coming down a slide in Kew Gardens with Freddie on my knees, naked in bed eating an almond croissant—and he stops at the naked in bed one, which I think was taken in the summer because I’ve got strap marks. Then he clicks off his phone, gets up and walks to the dresser. For one awful moment, I wonder if he’s going to rummage through my drawers and find the letters. But he doesn’t. He opens his sock drawer, that unfathomable cargo hold of mismatched socks. And he pulls out…

  My knickers! Lordy. The palest pink Agent Provocateur knickers he bought me for Christmas last year, the ones with the little red ribbon ties at the hips. How did they escape Jenny’s knicker cull?

  Ollie always did love these knickers. They are the kind of knickers that proved their worth by the rapidity with which they were removed. I can barely watch as Ollie takes the knickers and buries his nose in them. He falls onto the bed, knickers still covering his mouth and nose, red ribbon tickling his chin. And then…Oh, God. He unzips his fly, shoves his hand down his jeans, grabs his erection and starts to move his arm.

  O-kay. Weird now. I sink back into the wall. He has always had a high sex drive. And sex is life, so I don’t know why I’m shocked. Perhaps it’s because the sight of Ollie masturbating reminds me of everything I have lost and will never know again: his pumping heart against my breastbone, his soft groan, the salty stickiness dripping down my thigh.

  Doorbell! It’s like a scream in the softly panting silence. Once, twice. Ollie curses and starts hopping downstairs, one sock on, the other in his hand. Flushed and sleepy—he’s a postcoital dozer—he is shoving his shirt into the back of his jeans, lolloping down the stairs two at a time. He trips over Ping Pong, who is regurgitating a Garibaldi biscuit onto the sisal matting.

  Tash is standing in the doorway. Tash! Wearing red lipstick.

  Now, call me paranoid, but I have never seen Tash wear red lipstick. She is not a red lipstick woman. She wears soft pinks and taupes. She is from the Bobbi Brown school of discreet makeup, not a woo! M.A.C. girl. Things have changed.