Afterwife (9781101618868)

by Williams, Polly

  Oh, no, here comes dear old George, looking for the wife. His belly arrives ahead of him, obliviously bumping into people like someone carrying a rucksack on a crowded Tube.

  “You okay?” He slides his hand around Lydia’s slim waist.

  She steps aside and the hand slips down to the small of her back, then off.

  “What the matter?”

  Lydia sways on her heels. “Nuffink.”

  “You must be dead tired from Flora waking up last night.” He strokes her cheek. “Darling, she’s got to learn to take herself to the toilet. You can’t be getting up night after night.”

  “It’s not that.” Her bleary eyes are still focused on one person and one person only and it’s not her husband. George follows her gaze.

  “Why are you staring like that?” Insecurity makes George’s voice higher than normal. A muscle clenches in his jaw.

  Lydia continues staring with what can only be described as longing at Ollie, who is chatting to Tash and Jenny now and refusing the figs wrapped in Parma ham. He’s never going to be a canapé kind of man.

  “You’re drunk, Lyds.”

  “Oh, God, like, who cares?”

  “And you’re being kind of embarrassing.”

  “Yeah? And you’re being ridiculous.”

  Wonder if in fact he is being ridiculous. Wonder if Lydia is at least thinking of elbowing her way onto Ollie’s new wife list, ignoring the minor impediment of herself being married already.

  “Lydia, stop fucking staring at Ollie!” George is cuckold red now.

  Lydia shrugs, as if she doesn’t give a shit. And she doesn’t. Yes, she’s really drunk.

  Fear this cannot end prettily.

  “What’s this about?”

  “God, you’re boring, George. Please stop going on.”

  “Or is it so obvious that I’ve refused to see it?”

  She turns round fiercely. “What’s so flipping obvious, George? That Ollie has made me think, think hard about things that matter?” Her pale pink pussy-bow blouse trembles on her breasts.

  “Now you sound totally adolescent.”

  “We have one life, George. One!”

  He snorts. “It’s taken you this long to work it out?”

  “Our relationship. It could be the only one we’ll ever know! It could be…be…this, then death! I thought my life would be”—she wrings her hands together—“bigger somehow.”

  George sighs wearily. “Do you think you’ll ever reach your limit for drama and self-obsession, Lydia?”

  Lydia’s bottom lip wobbles—what’s taken it so long?—and I feel sorry for both of them. I think of all the times that I’ve seen Lydia and George at parties or PTA meetings and outside the school gates and how I’ve always thought they were an odd couple but a happy one and that it is nice when two different people come together to prove to the world that you don’t have to be samey—me and Ollie are a bit samey—to have a good marriage. Has me dying not only smashed a hole in my own family, but punched small holes in the glasshouses of other people’s marriages too?

  With a loud sniff Lydia turns on her gold heel and storms toward the toilet, leaving a bewildered George standing with his hands fisted at his sides in impotent fury, trying to look like nothing has happened.

  Everyone at the party knows that something has happened, of course. Tash’s and Liz’s eyebrows are question marks. Ribs are elbowed.

  When Lydia emerges from the toilet she is tear-streak free, pink lippy on. The pussy bow has been smartly rearranged. She smiles at George, a cold, hard smile that doesn’t crease her eyes, but refuses to talk to him and the party continues apace. When George takes a call on his mobile then announces that Flora has been sick and he’s going to go back to take over from the babysitter a cross-stitch of knowing looks threads across the party. The main show over, I settle onto Suze’s mantelpiece, sliding between the wedding pictures and children’s piano certificates, thoroughly exhausted. I am no longer the life and soul of the party.

  Ever gone to a party and not drunk while those around you get plastered? Being dead is a bit like that. Being dead at a party is even more like that. I try not to dwell on the aching sadness that I am not on Ollie’s arm or fall into the memory trap of Parties Past. Like the warehouse party in Hoxton in 1995 when we actually got stuck in the building’s industrial lift for two hours and when the thing finally juddered to the top floor and we were caught on the job by a whooping huddle of partygoers. Or the dinner parties we threw when we lived in Peckham when the words “dinner party” seemed so ironic and hilarious and everyone put on their most glam seventies Halston-style dresses from Oxfam and the only thing I knew how to make was chicken curry with Patak’s paste. Or indeed our wedding party, where I shook and whirled my dress to our very own hired Elvis while my girlfriends clapped me in a circle and I felt like the luckiest woman alive. Anyway, that stuff.

  The party crackle rises and falls around me. The alcohol fumes get stronger and stronger, the body heat turns the air pink and there is a smell of BO that can no longer be masked by Suze’s scented candles. So I take a minibreak around the house to get some air. After gliding upstairs on a thermal of body heat, I gaze longingly at Suze’s children asleep angelically in their beds. They make me pine for Freddie. Quibble the hamster freezes with fear as I pass. He is so still I worry that I’ve brought on cardiac arrest, then, thankfully, he scuttles back into his hay nest. I have a good nose around Suze’s bedroom. (A vibrator in Suze’s sock drawer! Suze, who knew?) I am touched by the fact that she and Chris sleep on two pillows embroidered, albeit slightly cheesily, with the word “LOVE” and their names. And it makes me realize how the unsexiest couples can be the ones most happily humping away. There is a certain majesty in a solid middle-aged marriage, no? We value youth and passion but perhaps it’s here, among the gray pubes and middle-aged spread and loose pelvic floors, that the real romance exists, having been tested to the point of exhaustion.

  Moving on. Into the bathroom. Posh Brigid is texting somebody while sitting on the loo. Even though there is a sign saying Only loo paper, please! she flushes her Tampax down the toilet. The woman after her—Sara, the upholster to the stars, once did three chairs for Kate Moss—rifles through Suze’s bathroom cabinet and borrows Suze’s mascara. (Brave. Suze’s family is blighted by recurrent conjunctivitis.) Another woman borrows her deodorant. (Rather her than me.) While Adam Cross from number thirty-five is sick in the toilet, leaving the tap running to hide the noise of the retching while another woman waits impatiently outside, crossing her legs tightly.

  Out through the fan in the bathroom window, slitting between its blades like someone in a revolving door. Outside the fresh air is cool, luxurious, like a waterfall tumbling down a rock. There is the peaty smell of barbecues. The social smokers puff away, united by a feeling of contraband naughtiness. When they come back into the party they carry the tang of tobacco in their hair. As everyone gets drunker, the sensible school gossip burns away and is replaced by the hot fumes of bawdiness, bad jokes, drunken confessions of how they voted Tory for the first time in the last election and crushes on tennis coaches and other parents. And, of course, outrageous flirtation.

  Suze has unbuttoned her blouse so that her Grand Canyon cleavage is on show. Every time she laughs it undulates. (Middle-aged romance or not, kind of wishing I didn’t know about the vibrator now, actually. Not sure I will see her in the same light ever again.) Pete from four doors down has a hand on the romper-suit-clad bottom of the hot New Zealand single mum, Zara. Someone has found the courage to skin up a spliff in the kitchen. Tash is zigzagging round the party making An Impression: she is one of those women for whom a good time means feeling like the hottest female at the party. Fear I might once have been a little like this.

  Jenny and Ollie are locked in deep serious conversation, which is hard to make out over the rolling noise of the party. She is wearing her intense listening face, head cocked at an angle, saying very little. She’s one of the f
ew people that genuinely want to hear what you say, as opposed to those people who are merely looking for an opportunity to slide their views into the gaps in the conversation.

  Oh, what’s happening? Jenny is looking down at the floor. She is shifting from foot to foot. She looks sad all of a sudden. Ollie is putting down his drink on the fireplace, picking his jacket up to leave.

  Suze spots the dissent immediately and strides over so purposefully her cheeks wobble like jellies. “You’re not going?”

  “Yeah, going to call it a night, Suze,” he says, flipping his hair off his face.

  “Very wise. I’d make your escape now before she pins you to the sofa with a cocktail stick,” says Liz.

  Ollie slips on his jacket. “Thanks. It’s been great.”

  “Has it, really?” Suze wants more. She wants more juice, more reaffirmation of her own social skills to lift the grief-struck widower from the tear-sodden depths of his misery.

  Ollie just wants out. Even at the best of times, he’s the kind of person who would always rather just slip away without saying good-bye.

  There is movement in the hall. Suze swivels, eyes widening. “You’re not going too, are you, Lydia?”

  Lydia is in her white fake fur bolero, still swaying. “George has gone already. I’ll walk back with Ollie.”

  “He’ll have to carry you, at this rate,” says Jenny, looking none too pleased at this idea.

  Lydia hiccups. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, Tash is galloping toward them, a fluttering vision in silk leopard print, breathing heavily through her nose like a horse. “But I thought we were walking back together later, Lydia.”

  “Oh, sorry, Tash,” Lydia says, not sounding that sorry at all. She hiccups again. “I need to check on Flora.”

  “Well, maybe I should call it a night too.”

  Suze grabs Tash around the waist. “You are not going anywhere, lady! It’s only eleven thirty. It’s socially unacceptable to leave a party before midnight.”

  “But…”

  “And, missy, I know that Ludo is at his dad’s, so you haven’t got the babysitter excuse either.”

  Checkmate. Tash is stuck. She doesn’t look happy about it.

  Outside, a soupy summer fog is licking the pavements clean. Lydia slips her arm through Ollie’s and leans against him. Seeing them walking together like that, two dark figures in the romance of summer mist, I splutter helplessly. They look pretty together, no denying it, Lydia all fluffy and bundled up, a babe in the woods in that bolero. Ollie’s hair long and damp with fog, his walk drunken and laid-back, his boots dragging on the slippery pavement like a cowboy’s.

  I must stop.

  This is Lydia we’re talking about, sweet little Lydia. Lydia, who learned how to make lasagna especially for Ollie. Lydia, who sobbed throughout my funeral and still cries herself to sleep about me. Lydia, who has spent three hundred pounds on bereavement kitchenware. I cannot blame her when she leans her body more and more to the left. When she rests her blonde head against Ollie’s shoulder. When she tells him he is “a total inspiration.” Can I?

  We get to the door of number thirty-three. Lydia lives about two hundred yards away. They hesitate. Ollie says to Lydia, “I’ll walk you to your door.”

  “Can’t I come in?”

  “Come in?”

  “Yes. I’d kill for a quick cup of tea. If I go home I’ll wake up George.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Right!

  They walk down the paved path, and as they walk, Lydia moves closer and closer to him, as if she wants to dive into him like a sleeping bag. By the time his key is in the lock the toe of her boot is scuffing against the heel of his, her hand on his back. He turns the key, knocks the door fully open with his knee. They are in the hall. They don’t get any farther.

  Lydia starts to sob.

  “Lydia?” he says, aghast.

  “I’m so sorry, Ollie, crying like this.”

  “What is it, Lydia?” The tenderness of his voice fills me with longing. He always was the world’s best shoulder to cry on.

  “George.”

  Ollie frowns. His face is full of shadow. His unease taps out a rhythm through his foot.

  “It’s gone wrong, Ollie. Wrong between me and George.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “It sounds weird.…”

  “Go on.”

  She takes a deep, shaky breath. “He doesn’t love me like how you loved Sophie. And now I’ve realized it, I can’t unrealize it and it’s completely doing my head in.”

  There is a whirring silence. A smile twitches at the corner of Ollie’s mouth, like he’s trying not to laugh. “Hey, you just need to sleep it off. Let’s get you home, honey, come on.”

  “No. I’m going to pull myself together and we’re going to have that cup of tea,” Lydia says firmly. She lets go of his arm and staggers into the kitchen, tripping over Freddie’s football boots that he’s left in the middle of the hall. When they are both in the kitchen she closes the door behind her, leans against it and giggles coquettishly. “Don’t want to wake Freddie.”

  It takes Ollie four minutes to find the tea bag. Yes, he is definitely inebriated too.

  “Sit next to me.” She pats the chair next to hers.

  Ollie sits obediently. The tea is forgotten.

  For a moment Lydia appears relatively normal and sober. “I can’t bear this any longer.” She starts to cry.

  “Oh, Lydia, don’t cry.”

  “I could leave him.” Her head falls against his shoulder.

  “All marriages are hilly.”

  “Yours wasn’t.”

  Ollie pulls at his beard. For the first time, I really don’t know what he’s thinking. He looks gaunt and a little bit like Jesus.

  “Men like you know how to love a woman properly.”

  Ollie laughs then, really laughs, like this is the funniest thing he’s heard in years. He doesn’t look like Jesus now.

  Lydia abruptly stops laughing. The lids of her eyes lower. “I’d leave George for you, Ollie.”

  Ollie starts away from her. There’s a terrible silence. The little red light on the smoke alarm is beginning to flash. “You’ve had a lot to drink. Come on, sweetheart, I’ll take you home.”

  Lydia wipes the tears away from her eyes. “I wouldn’t expect to take Sophie’s place, I really wouldn’t.…”

  Ollie’s eyes are filling with tears now. And I don’t know whether this is because he fancies Lydia or because he misses me or because he hasn’t held a woman in his arms for so long. He puts one finger very softly on Lydia’s mouth. “Shush.”

  I didn’t expect this. The finger-on-the-lips thing. I didn’t expect it at all.

  Oh, fuck. It is going to happen. It’s going to happen. Lydia tilts her face toward him and closes those lovely green eyes. The smoke alarm is flashing wildly now.

  Then I hear footsteps. The shiny orb of kitchen door handle is slowly rotating in the gloom.

  “Ollie?” The kitchen door flings open. Cecille stands there in her short satin nightgown, hands on her hips. “Iz everything okay?”

  Thirty

  Unsettled by the near-miss kiss, I helicopter off, moving directly up and out, and spend the night in the wonderful peaty wetness of Queen’s Wood, only coming back home as the streets are beginning to smell of cooking bacon and lumps of Sunday newspapers thump onto doormats. And who do I see? I see Jenny, hiking up the road, slipping backward in her sandals up the hill, carrying her swim bag. She hesitates outside Ollie’s door and takes a deep breath, as if summoning courage for something that is not just municipal swimming.

  “Jenny!” Freddie barrels into her arms. He is already wearing his red swimming goggles. “You going to walk upside down today?”

  “No chance!” She kneels down and peers directly into his goggles, as if looking through a telescope. “I’ve had my hair tinted. I don’t want to look like Shrek again.”

  “Smoky bacon?” The highlight of any s
wimming trip for Freddie has always been putting coins in the vending machine, watching the spirals rotate and that shiny packet of crisps falling magically into the black tray.

  “If you swim a length.”

  Ollie steps out of the kitchen into the hall, stifling a yawn. His face lights up when he sees her. “You look criminally well after the party last night.”

  “Croissants and painkillers.”

  Ollie tussles his floppy dark hair, runs his finger through his bison beard. He looks like he hasn’t slept. “Come on. Coffee.” He pulls her by the hand toward the kitchen.

  “Allô,” interrupts Cecille.

  How long has Cecille been standing on the stairs? She wears a navy silk dressing gown that gapes open over her pert décolletage. The same one she wore last night. The one that foiled the near-miss kiss. I owe this dressing gown.

  “Morning, Cecille,” says Jenny, trying and failing not to stare at the décolletage. “How are you?”

  “Very, very well.” Cecille flicks her eyes coquettishly at Ollie, head poised, one hand on the banister in a cinematic manner.

  Freddie is pulling on Jenny’s hand. “Come on, Jenny, let’s go. Let’s go swimming.”

  “Okay.”

  “What about coffee?” Ollie looks disappointed.

  “Best to beat the crowds,” Jenny says quickly.

  “Oh.” Ollie rubs his eyes. “I’m going back to bed then.”

  “I cook fry-up first,” purrs Cecille, pulling the belt tight on her dressing gown, showing off her slim waist.

  He grins. “Cecille, you’re an angel.”

  Whoa! Who’s the angel here?

  “Have a good breakfast,” Jenny says tightly, as she rushes out of the house with Freddie, a great spume of emotion trailing behind her, thick and white as an airplane trail. I get caught up in its tailwind, spun in its vortex as we hurtle toward the door and I am sucked in, in, inward into Jenny. Suddenly I’m somewhere very red, pulsating. It’s like being inside a small red tent at dawn. Ba-boom, ba-boom. It’s a heart, alright. And, I tell you what, Sam isn’t in it.