“Excuse me,” she began, about to start the “this is not actually a public carpark” speech, before tumbling backward in shock.
Forty-six
Smell that air!” Suze pushed her briar of hair out through the car window and sniffed. “Bloody lovely.”
There was a scuffle in the back of the van, a series of shouts, small sticky palms pressed against the windows. The vehicle juddered on its wheels.
“Flora, stop hitting Ludo!”
“He’s stolen my raisins. Evil raisin stealer. I so hate you.”
“Now look what you’ve done!”
“Ludo! I’m at my wits’ end.”
“Get out. Ow. That’s my foot.”
Jenny watched, speechless, as Liz appeared, trailing a child. Then Tash’s leg, one, then the other. She smiled shyly, as if unsure of her reception, and looked relieved when Jenny smiled back. Then Lydia, bundled in meters of cashmere and a cutesy white bobble hat. More children. More noise. She blinked, unable to take in the surreal sight.
“Found you at last.” Suze put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed.
Jenny was speechless. She no longer had the social skills. Still, no one seemed to mind, all leaping up and kissing her at once. It was delightful and horrifying in its unexpectedness.
Liz reached for her hand and held it tight. “Bloody good to see you, Jenny.”
“God, you too!” She only realized quite how much she’d missed Liz now that she was here. “But…” She shook her head in amazement, laughing. “How on earth did you know where I was?” They all began to talk at once.
“Ollie dug your folks’ address out of Sophie’s address book, duh.”
“If you won’t come to Muswell Hill, Muswell Hill will come to you.”
“We’re the persistent friend equivalent of Japanese knotweed.”
“Does all countryside smell of poo, Mummy?”
“Aren’t you going to ask us in for tea? I’d kill for tea.”
“Hurry up, I’m bursting to pee,” said Lydia, hopping from one leg to the other.
It was then that Jenny noticed Lydia’s tummy, its perfect convexity swelling like a giant egg from between the folds of beige cashmere.
Lydia grinned and patted it. “A happy accident.”
“Bloody hell! Congratulations,” said Jenny. It had been decades since she last saw them! “Come in, come in.”
Inside her parents’ not-big-enough house, she distracted the children with a scratchy Star Wars VHS tape and the seasonal tin of chocolates. It was harder to know what to do with their mothers. “Drink?” Feeling a little gauche and unused to company, she rummaged through the drinks cabinet. It consisted of a sticky and unfashionable mix of supermarket whiskeys and yellow liquors. “Sorry, no wine. Anyone stomach sherry? It’s that or strawberry liquor from duty free.”
“Sherry, lovely!” they all chimed, then winced as they took their first sip.
Suze raised her glass. “Happy Christmas, Jenny!”
“Happy Christmas. Now will someone tell me what the hell you’re all doing here?”
“We could ask you the same question,” said Liz, peering out the window.
“You might as well have emigrated to Alaska,” said Tash, also looking out the window and surveying the scrub of field with an undisguised look of horror.
Jenny smiled, pleased that she felt no animosity toward Tash, that the scene in Tash’s kitchen felt like it happened three thousand years ago. And Tash smiled back, knowing she was forgiven. “Probably would have been more going on,” Jenny said.
“God, you are brave,” sighed Lydia. “Having the guts to run for freedom days before your wedding. I think there’s something kind of Thelma and Louise–ish about it.”
Oh, how Jenny wished that was the case, rather than the sad, shameful mess it had begun to feel like. She looked down at the floor. “Hardly.”
“What on earth happened?” demanded Suze, leaning forward over the dining table, so that her breasts swelled across the polished dark wood.
“Suze, I’m sure Jenny will tell us, if and when she’s ready,” Liz said protectively. “You don’t have to say anything, Jenny. We’re just all horribly nosy, as you know.”
“The honest answer is…well…” No, it wouldn’t come. Honesty failed her.
“No matter,” said Liz, helping her out of the tight spot. “Tell us when you’re ready, Jenny.”
She smiled gratefully at Liz. “Seriously, have you just come to say hi? I am very, very touched. I don’t deserve it at all.”
“Actually there is another agenda.” Suze sat up straight, switching right into meeting mode. For a moment it was like being back in Suze’s kitchen.
“Oh. Things are okay?” she asked.
“Well, Help Ollie more or less disbanded after you left. Cecille was, I suppose, doing a good enough job,” Suze said reluctantly.
“Great.” She was relieved to hear that. All was okay.
“But I fear we are needed again,” declared Suze solemnly.
Jenny felt the blood drain from her head. “Oh, no. Is Freddie okay?”
Liz put a hand on hers. “Freddie’s fine.”
“Ollie?”
“Ollie is less good,” said Suze cryptically, exchanging glances with Liz. “Despite all our best efforts.”
“We’ve done what we can, Jenny,” said Lydia, her eyes beginning to well dangerously. “We ordered his Christmas tree, helped decorate it, gave him a list of the hot toys in year two, put in the Christmas supermarket delivery order…”
“He was baked about three million mince pies by the local ladies,” laughed Liz. “As you can imagine.”
Jenny smiled. She could imagine.
“He’s had so many offers for Christmas,” sighed Suze, reaching for another chocolate. “I’d say pretty much everyone on the street has invited him for lunch or tea or something Christmassy since school broke up. I even bought them both stockings, just in case.”
“Oh, no. Don’t tell me he’s on his own for Christmas. Where’s Cecille?”
“Gone home to France.” She raised an eyebrow. “And not coming back. She’s got a new Italian boyfriend and is following him to Milan like a lovesick puppy.”
Jenny felt a shot of relief. “But his mum…”
“He muttered something to Brigid about going up to his folks’ house in the lakes,” said Suze. “That was last week. But there’s no sign of any movement. He’s still at number thirty-three as we speak. I’ve had a few peeks at the house—”
“In other words, she’s been stalking him,” said Liz matter-of-factly, peeling the colorful wrapper from another chocolate.
Suze ignored her. “And I see no sign of imminent departure, Jenny. No sign at all! None of us can bear to see him so miserable. And no one, no one, least of all poor Ollie and Freddie, should be alone for Christmas.”
“Tell her about the incident,” said Lydia, sniffing hard now. “Sorry, ladies.” She waved her hands in front of her face. “Hormones.”
“What incident?” She feared the worst. Ollie felt very close all of a sudden. She’d pushed him as far back in her mind as she could and now he was back again. She could feel him, smell him, peel the memory of him back like a clementine.
Suze cleared her throat. “He did agree to one drink, last week. And he got very, very drunk.”
“So drunk he ended up in Chicken Cottage,” added Tash. “With Posh Brigid.”
Posh Brigid! Oh, God. Another. She didn’t want to hear. She knew it was just a matter of time before Ollie met a woman and she didn’t want to hear it from someone else. She didn’t want the indignity of failing to look happy for him.
Liz, as if reading her mind, put an arm on her hand. “Nothing like that, Jenny. No funny business. Brigid is a mum at the school, very happily married.”
“He got very, very drunk. And he started crying.”
“Oh, no.” Jenny started to bite her fingernails, thrown back into her chair with the horror of it
all. “Christmas without Soph was always going to be very hard. Poor Ollie.”
“It’s not just Sophie he is missing,” said Liz gently.
There was a crashing silence, broken only by the plaintive cry of Obi-Wan Kenobi. She felt all their eyes burning into her.
“He misses you, Jenny,” said Tash with an openness that Jenny had never witnessed before. “He told Brigid. He misses you desperately, darling.”
Jenny’s throat contracted and closed. She couldn’t breathe.
“I think you disappearing like this…” Suze tried to choose her words carefully. “Not to lay on the guilt, but he’s been really struggling these last few months.” She hesitated. “Did you not think…”
Jenny bit down on her lip. She could not possibly explain. Never. Her feelings for Ollie were her own dark dirty secret.
“We know you’ve been going through your own shit,” Liz said kindly. “And it must be horrible for you, it must feel like your world has fallen apart.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” said Lydia quickly.
The tears came then. There was no stopping them. Suze immediately pressed her into the fleshy mound of her bosom. A small child’s fingers pressed the last Caramel Keg into her hand. Another small hand dabbed her cheek with tissues.
“Let it all out, Jen,” said Suze, slapping her hard on the back, as if she were trying to burp her. “Let it all out.”
“Oh, God, you’ve set me off now too,” wailed Lydia.
“Oh, no, Lydia’s started,” howled Liz. “Hit the flood sirens!”
Jenny snorted with laughter through her tears. As she emerged gasping for breath from the group hug—friends who may never be as dear as Sophie but had become real friends all the same—she felt different. Like a heavy bag had been picked off her back. Girlfriends were a tonic. Her mother, for once, was right.
“It’s snowing!” yelled Ludo. All the children jumped up from the floor and pressed their noses against the cold window, entranced as snow whirled in eddies over the field. “Wow.”
Jenny was not sure whether it was something to do with the snow or something to do with the hug or the fact that Ludo reminded her so unbearably of Freddie at that moment, but forty minutes later, against her better judgment, she found herself scrawling a note on her parents’ telephone pad and picking her car keys off the duck hook on the wall.
Forty-seven
I’ve been dead for almost a year. In that time Freddie has lost two baby teeth, jumped from a size ten foot to a twelve and grown two inches. He has six chicken pox scars on his stomach where he scratched. He is, like, totally over Beyblades and into the canoeing game on the Wii. He has a crush on Ani, a Sri Lankan beauty in year four. He has learned six handy new swearwords to toss about in the playground when necessary and wants to watch X Factor instead of Deadly 60 or Strictly.
Ollie meanwhile has gone gray, gained and lost a beard, shed fourteen pounds, worked his way through the entire Mad Men box set twice and no longer listens to Tibetan monks chanting for light background music. He doesn’t wank over my knickers either. The boiler is up for its yearly service, which he’ll undoubtedly forget. The smoke alarm batteries are almost dead, and he’ll forget to replace them too. Against all the odds Ping Pong and my potted palm appear to have survived.
My grave is covered in a crisp crust of snow today, the first Christmas snow we’ve had in decades, ruining all the bookies’ coffers. There is a Gothic shoot of vivid green ivy fingering my gravestone. Over the last year there have been bluebells growing beside it, daisies, dandelions, layers of mulching autumn leaves alive with beetles and bugs and, on more than one occasion, a pregnant badger. The mound of earth that duvets my coffin no longer has that morbid freshly dug-up vegetable patch look either. See. I’ve almost settled in.
And yet.
I’m still here, aren’t I? Not in a dank patch of cemetery but curled beside the rows of Christmas cards on the mantelpiece above the hissing log fire like Ping Pong’s elderly, dozy grandma. No, I’m certainly not what I was. I am smaller, weaker, gray as a cup of old tea. As in life, as in death, it seems: we’re all only going one way and there’s fuck-all anyone can do about it. On the other hand, I do sometimes wonder if I am fading because I am fading from the lives of those I love. There are very few obvious traces of me left now. No scent of my perfume, none of my pubes rolling on the bathroom floor. My voice has been deleted from the answer machine. The clothing catalogs have stopped falling through the door. My email account no longer exists. There has been a settlement with the bus company stored away for when Freddie’s older. (I want him to spend it sensibly on lost weekends at music festivals, Italian leather shoes and whisking beautiful girls to Paris. I want him to feast on life itself.) I am fragments of memory now, photographs on the wall, footage on the video camera, an echo in Freddie’s beautiful features, his sweet tooth, his bubbly laugh, the glistening ore of love in his heart. And this is okay. I tell myself this is okay. This is enough.
What is far less okay is the fact that I have not been able to alter the fates of those I leave behind! My pitiful lack of supernatural powers has rendered me totally hopeless as either matchmaker or kibosher of weddings: I’m afraid I can claim none of the credit for Sam and Jenny’s torching. It makes me sad that Ollie and Freddie will spend their first Christmas alone. And probably their next too.
The lack of woman at number thirty-three is obvious. This is a house craving estrogen, or at the very least someone who cares about the removal of the sticky Lucozade-like substance in the hinge of the loo seat. It’s very much a male domain now, more den than home. There are no beauty products or periodphernalia in the bathroom cabinet, no stashes of toffee ice cream, a scarcity of puddings full stop. I fear that the Christmas pud will never make a reappearance in this house again, the pud being a girl’s pud, Ollie and Freddie much preferring chocolate biscuit cake. The Christmas tree is up, though, next to the mountain bikes scuffing the pale wall in the sitting room with their rubber handlebars. The tree is smaller than last year’s—I always was a sucker for a big Disney tree—and has been decorated by Freddie and Suze’s kids, a gaudy riot of multicolored tinsel and plastic balls. (My tasteful wooden angels and pine cones are collecting dust in a box in the loft.) Paper chains made at school by Freddie dangle perilously over the fire. A tin of uneaten mince pies languishes in the cereal cupboard. The fridge is full of beer and Parma ham and sausages and cracked hard cheddar. Needless to say, upstairs there is a vast amount of empty closet space.
With some effort I extricate myself from my warm nest beside the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece and wheezily thread myself through the banister to check on Freddie. My beautiful boy is on the computer in the study playing “Dom from Canberra” and “Brad7 from Milwaukee” on a Matheletics game, yelping with delight when he wins, his pupils dilating with pleasure. I leave him absorbed in his game and slide back down the banister to be close to Ollie, who is dozing on the sofa, cashew nut dust powdering his old sweater. (Who will buy him a new cashmere sweater for Christmas? I always bought him a cashmere sweater for Christmas.) His lips part a bit, his eyes move rapidly beneath their lids like he’s dreaming. The news is rolling on the telly but it is on mute. On the coffee table a bottle of nettle ale is half drunk, warming, alongside a pile of studio CDs, out-of-date newspapers and one of Freddie’s socks. I settle beside him, warming myself on the edge of his thigh, my husband the host. And it is only then that I sense somebody outside the house: the slip of snow under a sole; a melting of a snowflake on a hot cheek.
The doorbell rings. There is a power surge in the house.
Ollie keeps on dozing. Wake up! Wake up, darling! I wham against his side, making as much impression as a baby duck’s feather tickling the steel hull of a ship. He sleeps on, still as a moth. The doorbell rings again. The shadow is moving from one foot to the next. The shadow is a familiar shape. And it is walking backward, receding.
No, the shadow has sto
pped. It is turning. It is walking back up the path, faster this time. One more a quick, sharp ring. Ollie opens a bloodshot eye. He scratches his balls. His brain catches up with his ears and he staggers down the hall toward the door, shedding cashew crumbs. He opens the front door. His face lights up, like all his Christmases have come at once.
“Hi,” Jenny says. There is snow on the tips of her dark lashes, like tiny white pom-poms.
He just stares at her in silence, grinning like a loon.
She smiles shyly. “Er, can I come in?”
They are in the hallway now and the air between them is sparking, ticking, as if we’re in a forest of electricity pylons. She flicks snow off her hair. A flake lands on his neck, melting instantly.
“You look different.”
He rubs his hand over his jaw. “I shaved the biblical beard.”
“Ah,” she laughs, blushes.
They are in the middle of the sitting room now, lit by the firefly glow of the fairy lights. Jenny doesn’t realize that she has a long tail of green tinsel stuck to the bottom of her snowy boot.
“You disappeared,” said Ollie, still staring at her weirdly. He is pulsing with a strange, pent-up energy that is familiar to me yet hard to identify.
She looks down at the floor. “Sorry.”
His eyes don’t leave her face. Like he’s scared it might go somewhere if he looks away for even a second. “I missed you, Jen.”
A bittersweet possibility begins to dawn. Could they? Would they? Have I been…Oh, my God, have I ignored what was under my nose all this time? I consider the match for all of two milliseconds and I’m flooded, for the first time since I died, with a delirious cascading rush of hope.
Jenny smiles twitchily, like she could just as easily cry. “I’m sorry for being such a crap friend.” I can see her backing away. “I really am, Ol.”
I want to fill her heart and tell her it’s okay. There is no other woman on planet earth I’d rather replaced me at number thirty-three. You even helped me choose the living room wallpaper! You have legacy here. Oh, Jenny. Look after my boys. Take them, hold them close; and make them eat some broccoli.
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