Afterwife (9781101618868)

by Williams, Polly

  “You’ve got to think of Freddie, that’s all.” She put her cup down. “Stating the obvious, sorry.” The atmosphere in the kitchen tightened. She really must get back. It was a stupid idea coming here. “Look, it’s late. I better go.” She did up the buttons on her coat with clumsy fingers. Her head was messy all of a sudden, all whooshes and hisses, a tangle of contradictory thoughts. And then there was that strange, curdly excited feeling in her stomach that she couldn’t explain.

  He put a hand upon her arm. “I see Sophie in you, Jenny.”

  Words clumped in her throat. The silence of the house started to pound around them.

  “You two were so tight it’s almost like a little bit of her has brushed off on you.” He hesitated. “Or maybe it’s the other way round.”

  She didn’t want to be compared to Sophie. No woman would. “I better get back.”

  He studied her intensely. “You’re spending too much time up here, aren’t you? Sam pissed off yet?”

  She bit her lower lip hard, fighting tears, suddenly feeling immensely gullible for having driven through the night to be with Ollie, imagining she was so important when all he wanted was permission to shag Tash. It was embarrassing. She was embarrassing. “If I’m crowding you out, I’m sorry.”

  He stroked featherlight fingers across her cheek. “Jenny, Jenny. You’re not crowding me out.” She was paralyzed by his touch, the slight rasp of his fingertips. “I’m so pleased you exist; you’ve no idea how pleased I am that you exist.”

  The curdly feeling in her stomach became something else, a tugging in her lower body, something so tidal, so powerful, that it stole her breath away. Suddenly it felt like anything might happen.

  “Daddy,” a little voice whimpered from the landing. They both jumped. “I’ve wet the bed.”

  Eighteen

  Is it just me or might Jenny be going ever so slightly crackers?

  She keeps twitching the curtains of her apartment, staring out at the street like an actress in an TV domestic crime drama. Who is she looking for exactly? And why on earth did she wake up at five a.m. this morning and bellow, “Don’t touch the box!” scaring the living daylights out of Sam, and me too, quite frankly. Sam had to shake her to make her calm down and bring her back to wakeful sanity. And did I mention that she has still done absolutely nothing, nothing about her wedding dress? She has not even bought her wedding shoes! She’s only got three months to find the shoes, and it takes her two years to choose a flip-flop. Her roots are three inches long too, slightly green. Dolly Parton would be appalled. Although I do not think that marrying Sam is the best idea in the world—could in fact be the worst—if she is going to do it, she’d better do it properly.

  No, she’s not herself. Really not. Picture this. Earlier Sam popped out and brought her back a bunch of daffs, which was sweet, give him that. Jenny seemed to barely notice them. She stuffed them into a vase, snapping their stems and making the petals fall off. Inconsequential? I think not! This is a woman who has a photograph of her favorite tree (wild cherry) above her desk, who collected cactuses rather than Barbies as a child and occasionally sings Dolly’s “Jolene” to her pet bonsai tree.

  It’s evening now, eight p.m. And she’s still looking a tad deranged. Sam is cooking dinner. She tells Sam she’s going to change and disappears off to the bedroom. Is she changing into something slinky? Is she hell! She has put on flannel pajamas and, Jesus wept, knitted bed socks. Jenny, have I taught you nothing? The bed socks are purple. Purple! No woman under seventy who is in charge of her own marbles and wardrobe wears purple bed socks.

  She emerges without a hint of shame. Sam glares at the bed socks as if they are a personal affront, which of course they are. If socks could talk these would be saying, “You’re not getting laid tonight.”

  She stares dreamily out the window from her parrot perch on the bar stool while Sam stirs prawns and noodles around the gleaming wok and tells her about his client who is fighting his wife for custody of the Aga. She smiles like she’s pretending that she’s listening. He tells her that his mum has invited them for lunch on Sunday and that she is making beef Wellington and trifle and could Jenny bring the cheese? Nothing too French and stinky. That there’s a Tube strike on Monday. That the TV license needs renewing. That Berlin is the hottest city right now and they should go for a weekender, shouldn’t they? Jenny nods, not meeting his eye now, suddenly looking stricken. She cannot manage more than a few noodles and does that gulpy thing when you’re trying to eat and not cry at the same time. It never works. The throat’s not wide enough. You’ve got to do one or the other. I’m not sure if Sam’s noticed or not.

  Then he has to notice. As he swerves toward the table, glossy Patisserie Valerie tarte tatin balanced precariously on his palm, she starts to cry. Is it the tarte tatin? Sam asks. Not. Is it Sophie? Sam asks. Jenny says maybe, but she doesn’t know. Sam looks irritated. Men hate this kind of answer. They’d rather women wouldn’t cry in the first place and if they do cry they like to have the reason hoisted like a flag on a ship so that they can offer a practical solution and move the issue on so it doesn’t ruin their supper. He unwisely suggests that she go shopping for her wedding dress tomorrow. This will cheer her up, won’t it?

  Oh, dear, this will not! Jenny drops her head into her hands and sobs a goddamn river.

  Sam puts his arm around her shoulders. She rests her head against his belly and frowns.

  I watch the evening slide uneasily around them. Telly noise. Wine. A bubble bath. Jenny’s head held too long beneath the froth of bubbles so that she emerges red faced, gasping for breath. They’re in bed now. And she’s still wearing those damn bed socks. Undeterred, Sam puts a hand on her hip, turns her toward him. He slips his other hand between her legs.

  I shouldn’t be watching. But it’s kind of compelling watching your friend having sex. You know you shouldn’t look but you do. I’m a little shocked. I’d have thought Jenny would be a bit more of a live wire actually—she used to be. But her body is very still as he makes love to her.

  He’s doing the jiggy finger between her legs now, cradles the back of her head in his hand, tells her she’s sexy. He enters her with two small ricochet movements. Pummeling faster now, eyes shut. She’s looking over his left shoulder. Her lashes are wet, half closed. And it’s then that I see it. That look.

  That, unless I’m much mistaken, is the look of a woman making love to a man and thinking of someone else.

  Nineteen

  This is beyond a joke. Tash is back in my boots again. You’d never know that she had twenty-one pairs back at her house in transparent plastic storage boxes and that’s not including her multicolored Hunter Wellie collection. She wore my boots when she shagged Marko the Wildebeest against the bathroom wall last week too, leaving a slick of Frizz Ease on the paintwork. And she’s had the gall to wear them to the school gate this morning. It’s not just me. Other mothers are noticing too, these dead wife’s shoes. Those Pistol boots that everyone commented on when I bought them—they were the hot boots of the season, featured in every magazine—and much lusted after.

  Posh Brigid is staring, looking puzzled, the collection box for the school playground fund frozen in her hands. Now this is something. Brigid wouldn’t notice if she went out of the house with a bra on her head. She wafts through life trailing children—she has five, looks like she’s had none—and is so posh that she is a second cousin three times removed to Prince Philip and sometimes in the summer doesn’t bother to wear shoes at all. Meanwhile Emily, a key PTA orator, bossily manning the cake stall, is talking to Tash’s boots rather than her face and thoughtlessly handing a child cupcakes, not the requested flapjacks. Tash curls the right foot self-consciously behind the left.

  I tried to tell her earlier while skimming over the dust-free edges of her wardrobe doors. I really did. But all I could do was ruffle the air molecules. I keep forgetting that I cannot speak, that the words just roll back and forth, cold and hard on my icy tongue like
frozen peas. And why was I on her wardrobe doors, you ask? Spying. That’s what.

  Come on, she’s a 34D and two genes short of Katy Perry! Plus, she’s looking after Freddie two afternoons a week, which gives her an inside advantage. While there appears to be nothing I can actually do to stop the military march of her seduction other than activate smoke alarms—of all the paranormal powers to have, honestly—I still feel that it is my duty as a dead wife and mother to fully investigate her suitability to the post of shagging my lonely, heartbroken husband. Let alone replacing me, which is, I’m beginning to suspect, her end game.

  So that’s why I’ve been on Tash’s trail all week, waiting for her to slip up. As yet she has not fully incriminated herself. She has not attended an STD clinic or shown any signs of an addiction to cocaine or Calpol Night. There was a wobbly a couple of days ago when a gym-bulked plumber lingered for an unnecessarily long time around her sink’s U bend and Tash girlishly twiddled a tendril of dark hair around her finger then sucked it, letting down all of womankind who try their damnedest to speak in gruff, matter-of-fact tones to builders so that they’re not overcharged. But the inappropriate divorcée sex didn’t actually happen. But then Tash is no fool. She’s not about to waste her erotic energies on a plumber. Not when a recently liberated music producer is living a few meters from her house.

  I’m not stupid. I can see, objectively speaking, that Tash is hot. If one was to go there—too late for me now—she is one of those women you could almost imagine getting it on with. There’s nothing yuck about her. No hairy chin. Nothing that suggests feminine hygiene issues. She’s as lickable as a lollipop.

  And she has another ace up that draped designer sleeve. Ludo. Ludo, her improbably named son (should be called Battleships or Twister), is notorious as a right pain in the arse. The oldest and tallest in his class, he has become more dominating and difficult since Tash and Toby divorced, someone who has to be invited to parties because of the fear of repercussions in the playground if you don’t, like a third-world tyrant invited to a UN convention. But the funny thing is he has been a good friend to Freddie in the last few months. He used to ignore Freddie. He didn’t notice him in the same way he wouldn’t notice a scab on his knee or a toddler in the path of his football in the park. But now Ludo and Freddie appear to have forged an unlikely bond. They certainly look an odd couple. Ludo, tall, cleft jawed and daft looking: Freddie, the small-for-his-height beauty who looks like he might have dropped off the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In the playground when the other children play “don’t step on the bogie” Ludo will even make sure that no one pushes Freddie at the bogie on the playground floor. Maybe it’s because they have both lost a parent from the household—one to divorce, the other to death—but he’s become Freddie’s unlikely protector.

  Sometimes I imagine them getting together. Tash and Ollie, not Ludo and Freddie. The two single parents. The two boys. There’s a symmetry to it, a ready-made family for Ollie, the child that I couldn’t conceive emerging straight from the wrapping, skipping the sleepless nights stage, flat-packed into boyhood.

  So what’s my problem? This is my problem. Looking over my stone-cold shoulder back to my life I have a new clarity when it comes to friendships. The group of friends that I hung out with on a regular basis are beginning to separate like oil and vinegar in the French dressing jar. They have formed three distinct groups.

  1. Proper old friends. Like Jenny. Friends who’d stand upside down in a swimming pool for Freddie while their highlights go green. Friends who know your failings and think they’re really amusing. Friends who will never say you look tired even if you haven’t slept in years. Friends who genuinely think you look better at thirty-five than when they knew you at eighteen. Those kinds of friends.

  2. Circumstantial friends. Like Suze. Or Liz. Really Nice Women who I was grateful to be befriended by at the school gate when Freddie started school. The type of friends who surprise you by being your friend. Some of these circumstantial friends were on the path to becoming proper blood sister friends. Like Liz. I think I just needed to live through one more excruciating PTA fundraising disco with her and we would have been friends for life.

  3. Friends you don’t particularly like. Tash falls into this category. Funnily enough the FYDPL usually starts out by being a God-I-totally-love-this-person when you first get to know them. They’re funny and glamorous and have an interesting life story and proper signed art on the walls rather than prints. They make your old friends seem dowdy and irrelevant. It’s like a crush. Then gradually you become aware of a sinking feeling when you’re scheduled in to see them. You know that you’ll emerge from that cappuccino drained. Your hair will feel frizzier. You will feel poorer and fatter. Did I mention that Tash falls into this category? Tash falls into this category.

  Anyway, back to my ankle boots. Off they go again! Click clack. They’ve dropped Ludo off at the classroom, where the moment her back is turned he swings his school bag hard against little Rex’s eczema-raw knees. She is back at the school gate now. She is looking around for somebody. Ollie, I suspect. But, unbeknownst to her, Ollie has made a quick getaway and is dashing up the stairs to the school office to deliver the check for Freddie’s school lunches, which is four months late. Tash hovers, then gives up and starts click-clacking back to her house, checking her phone repeatedly and texting as she walks.

  I’m through the letter box back in her house before she is, watching from the banister as she fiddles in her cavernous black handbag for her door keys. She opens the door and freezes. Suddenly she is looking right at me. She pales. Like she’s seen a ghost. (Ha!) For one strange moment I wonder if I’ve been spotted. Although, being invisible to everyone but Tash would be like some kind of paranormal sick joke. But no, no, she’s looking away now, flurrying through to her kitchen to make herself a coffee. The moment’s passed.

  I settle in to watch.

  Only now do I understand why womankind designed net curtains. In the space of five minutes, Tash, beautiful, fragrant Tash, sitting at her oak Conran table on her three-hundred-pounds-a-pop Eames Eiffel chair—her house is full of famous designer chairs—farts loudly, goes for a pee, doesn’t wash her hands and takes a bite out of a lump of Parmesan in the fridge. She then sits down, switches on her iPad and spends five minutes updating her status on Facebook and Twitter—“Natasha is having an existential bedlinen crisis”—another ten idling JohnLewis.com’s virtual aisles looking at duvet sets, not buying anything. Another eight minutes is idled away in ASOS’s accessories section. She puts a gold-plated chain bracelet—seventy-seven pounds—in her basket but doesn’t check out. She idly eats some seeds from a jar. One more fart. (Seeds, huh?) She spends the next seventeen minutes of her precious life ordering new socks and pajamas for Ludo from Marks and Spencer’s website, but she can’t remember her password, cocking up the order. Cursing, she spends another seven minutes on email. She goes there to find the new password sent by Marks and Spencer and gets diverted by a sensational email from Brigid regarding the infamous psycho mother who thinks the no-nut policy is an infringement of her son’s human right to have peanut butter sandwiches in his packed lunch and is picketing the school gate with leaflets. Her coffee machine whirs noisily and spits up a coffee, which she throws back into her open pelican throat, chased by a packed lunch fruit bar. She moves a basketful of washing from washing machine to tumble dryer, skim-reads a magazine, then, bloody hell, it’s eleven o’clock!

  Where does the time go, eh? Well, I tell you what, it goes like that.

  My ankle boots are tripping up the sisal stair carpeting now. Tash is looking at her watch like she needs to be somewhere soon. She gets changed. Off come the jeans. She fingers a Spanx half-slip and decides against it. (She doesn’t need it. This woman does so much Pilates her pelvic floor muscles could shoot golf balls into the next postcode.) On goes a short black skirt and gray tights. She zips up some conker brown knee-high riding boots, tongs her dark hair, squirts some Chanel No. 5 behind
her ears and slicks on some pale pink lipstick. Dressed to kill. Or thrill. On a Thursday morning. Where the hell is she going? Interesting.

  I don’t float home as planned but follow her instead, always a few feet behind like a long summer shadow, down the wet tree-lined streets toward East Finchley Tube. She gets on, crosses her legs, assesses the carriage quickly for loons and settles into her newspaper, flicking past the news straight to the horoscope. The Northern line belches and rattles to Tottenham Court Road. She gets out, smoothing her hair with her fingers and swiveling her skirt around on her waist so that it’s centered properly again, and checks her watch.

  Goodge Street. Backstreets. Roadworks. Small, dark Italian café. She looks nervous sitting at the front of the café, near the window, unable to stay still. She reapplies her lipstick using a little gold hand mirror.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  The lipstick is snapped back, shoved into her bag. She is watching someone outside the window now, expression changing.

  He’s pushing open the glass café door, striding across the café’s tiles in his dark suit before I notice him.

  Tash leaps up from her seat, napkin falling to the floor. There is a moment of awkwardness while they decide whether to shake hands or kiss each other on the cheek. They kiss each other on the cheek.

  Sam sits down, smiles, tugs at his shirt cuffs. “It’s good to put the face to the voice at last.”

  She looks a little embarrassed, to her credit.

  “Thanks so much for meeting me like this. I know it must seem a little odd.”

  “No, not at all. I was in town this lunchtime anyway.” She leans forward, resting her face on the cradle of her hands. “So?”

  “I’ll cut to the chase.” He sighs. “Someone’s causing me a bit of trouble.”

  She looks puzzled, her tongue licking her bottom lip. “Sorry. I don’t understand.”