Afterwife (25 page)

“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 swimming 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.

T
he rap on the car window made her jump.

Jenny squinted into the dirty Camden sunshine. The first thing she saw was the hand. A tiny dolphin tattoo on the wrist. Her eyes zipped from hand to face, a beautiful face wearing large white sunglasses. She froze. It was the woman from the white Fiat, the one who looked like Sophie but seen up close was patently
not
Sophie. She had the same thick dark hair. The same oval-shaped face. But she was most definitely not Sophie. Well, of course she wasn’t.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” the woman’s mouth was saying. She had a soft lilting voice, well spoken. Nice even teeth.

Jenny opened the car door, warily, heart starting to pound. “Can I help you?”

The woman’s eyes glittered. “I hope so,” she said, sounding just a little bit crazed. “I do hope so.”

Oh, God, a nut. Camden was full of them. She’d got a nut on her tail. A nut who looked a bit like Sophie. The hairs prickled on her arms. Wanting to get away, she got out of the car and locked the
door, in case the nut was hoping to nick the car. She conceded that the woman was a surprisingly well-turned-out nut. Maybe it was someone normal who had had a breakdown. Someone who’d bought lots of nice clothes before she lost the plot. “Excuse me,” she said in her polite nut-avoidant voice, stepping past her to the sunny pavement and edging closer to the safety of her apartment.

“I just need to talk to you, if you don’t mind.” The woman started walking next to her.

Jenny felt properly uncomfortable now. What did this woman want from her?

She put a hand on Jenny’s arm. “Please, Sophie.”

The blood drained from her head. It took a few moments to collect herself. “What? What did you just call me?”

“Your name is Sophie, isn’t it?” The woman squinted in the sunlight, more unsure now.

“No, no, it isn’t.”

The woman looked puzzled. “Really? Sorry. I…I…”

“Why did you think I was called Sophie?”

The woman looked down at the ground. “I got confused.” She stopped, looked up, her brown eyes panicky. “It’s just Sam,” she blurted out. “I know Sam. There was something…”

Jenny’s stomach knotted. “Sam?” She was beginning to get a really, really bad feeling about this.

She narrowed her eyes. “You’re his girlfriend?”

Jenny didn’t answer immediately, not taking her eyes off the woman’s face. “Fiancée.”

“Fiancée?” The woman’s face fell. She started walking backward. “Right, right.”

“Wait! Why do you want to know? Hang on a minute,” Jenny called out as the woman turned on her blue heel and started to walk smartly away down the street, glossy dark hair swinging behind her.

S
he looks like Sophie?” Sam exhaled tusks of smoke from his nostrils. It scarved up toward the speaker in the ceiling, trembled by the bass of the Kaiser Chiefs.

“A dead ringer.” Jenny sat on the cold black granite worktop. For a moment she felt like she was perching on the edge of a building, ready to jump off.

“Don’t be weird, babes. Sounds like a Camden nut job to me.” He flicked his ash into his favorite fifties-style pink glass ashtray.

“Sam, she thought my name was
Sophie
. How freaky is that?” She leapt off the worktop. It was giving her vertigo. “She said she knew you!”

She noticed that he’d paled a little beneath his weekend stubble. Aware of her scrutinizing him, he turned and started fiddling with a foil packet of coffee, letting his cigarette burn down. “I told you, babes, you need to chill out.”

“I don’t! I am chilled out!” she shrieked, spitting in an unladylike
fashion across the kitchen. “Sam, she asked if my name was Sophie. Why would she ask that?”

He picked up his fag, shifted behind a veil of smoke, glancing up at her sideways. “A white Fiat, you say?”

“A white Fiat. One of those ones shaped like soapsuds. And she had a tattoo!” she said, suddenly remembering. “A little dolphin on her wrist, poking out from under her watch strap.” He closed his eyes and pinched the skin at the top of his nose very tightly so it went white. “You know who it is, don’t you? You do. Tell me.”

“Dominique.”

“And who the hell is
Dominique
?”

Sam drew his hands across his jaw, as if even the memory of her exhausted him. “She always was a bit Looney Tunes.”

“You’ve never mentioned her before!”

Sam crossed his arms. “Haven’t I? Well, I guess I wouldn’t. It was no big deal.”

Okay, she had never been one of those women who demanded a detailed biography and score out of ten on the attractiveness charts for every ex. But still. Who the hell was Dominique? And what would he give her out of ten?

“It was before you. Obviously.”

“When?”

“I can’t give you the precise calendar dates, I’m afraid.”

“When, Sam?” She was shaking now.

He reached for her hand. “Look, Jenny, there were quite a few women before you. I’ve never pretended there weren’t.”

“So she was a fling, just a fling?”

He nodded. “A fling.”

She looked away from him, eyes blurring with tears. “I suspect you meant more to her.”

“Come on, darling. We’re getting married in a few weeks. Let’s
forget about the past.” He touched her jaw lightly, drawing her toward him. “I love you. You have no reason to worry about other women.” He picked up her hand and kissed it. “Don’t get in such a flap about everything.”

“But
why
did she think I was called Sophie?” She couldn’t let this one go, she just couldn’t.

“Maybe she just got confused.” Giving up on the bodily contact approach, he spooned some coffee beans into the grinder and flicked the switch. “Sophie is a common enough name.”

She leaned back against the wall, spent. She was no longer sure of anything. The grinder sounded like her own brain, reducing all certainties to pulp. They were silent for a few moments while he made coffee. She watched him and wondered.

“Hey, what do you reckon about Mum’s idea of having the local brass band welcome people into the marquee from church?” he said, pouring the coffee into two little cups.

“What?” She could still see Dominique, those intense brown eyes peering in through her car window, searching for answers in her own face.

“A brass band.”

“God, I don’t know.”

“I like a brass band.”

“I hate brass bands.”

“You’d make Mum very happy if you said yes. Here you go. Coffee.”

“I don’t want coffee.”

“Okay, I get the mood you’re in. I won’t mention traditional Mum’s Morris dancing suggestion.”

“Please don’t.”

He took a sip, winced slightly. “Mum was also asking about the wedding dress.”

“Sam, she gave me a hard time about it last month,” she said,
remembering the dreadful meeting the day of Suze’s party. “I don’t need it again. I will get the wedding dress. I’m not going to walk down the aisle naked.”

“Shame.” He smiled. “Actually, sweetheart, she’s asked me to ask you whether you want her to go shopping with you. For the dress.”

“No!” She caught herself, took a deep breath. “Sorry, that’s very kind of her, but no.”

“I’m trying to be understanding here.” He put his coffee down, eyes flashing dangerously blue. “But are you waiting for Sophie to reappear and go shopping with you or something?”

Maybe she was. Maybe that was what it was.

“Babes, it ain’t going to happen.”

“I’ll get it soon,” she said tightly.

“I think everyone would feel better if you did.” He pulled a strand of hair off her face and tucked it behind her ear. His fingers smelled of Marlboro Lights. She didn’t like it. “By the way, Mum and Dad are coming over for brunch on Sunday. Perhaps you could think what kind of food we need to get in. Mackerel? I rather like a bit of mackerel of a morning.”

“I take Freddie swimming on Sunday mornings.” She hated mackerel. She struggled with oily fish. They were oily.

Sam stirred more sugar into his coffee with an angry vigor. “Maybe Ollie could take his own kid swimming now.”

“It’s our thing.”

He looked up. “Is that wise?”

“What do you mean,
wise
?”

“Freddie’s getting attached to you, Jenny.” His voice became soft and remedial. “Look, I know you’ve pulled back from Ollie a bit since Cecille arrived.” He threw back his head and drained his cup. “But not really from Freddie.”

“Of course I haven’t bloody well pulled back from Freddie!”

“You’re not going to be able to continue being as hands-on as you have been, are you? Not when we’re married.”

“I don’t see what difference me being married makes! I’m there for as long as he needs me, Sam.”

Something hardened in his eyes. “Then it’s a life sentence.”

She stared at Sam in disbelief. “I
love
Freddie, Sam. Don’t you get it? I love him because he’s lovable but also because he’s Sophie’s boy. I will always be there for him. And I don’t care if that’s a life sentence. I bloody well hope it will be.”

Sam broke off a corner of a bagel left over from breakfast and took a bite, then chucked the rest of it to the side, never taking his eyes off her face. It was funny the way he was looking at her. “You’ll feel different when you have your own kids, that’s what Mum says.”

“I don’t see it’s any of her business.”

He didn’t speak for a very long time. “This is about Ollie, isn’t it?”

“No!” How to explain that whenever Ollie was in the room, the room seemed brighter? That was all it was.

“The Hugh Hefner of N10.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

A vein pulsed on his temple. “Did you ever think about how it made me look at that terrible party you cattle-prodded me into going to, when you were locked into deep whispery conversation with Ollie and I’m standing there, like a bloody eejit…”

She spoke carefully. “I was just aware that it was his first party without Soph. I wanted to make sure he was okay.”

He turned to face her, and she felt pinned by his gaze, like it had skewered her there in this life, this moment. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

She closed her eyes. If she kept them shut maybe this would all go away. But Sam was still there when she opened them. Yes, yes, she knew that beneath the bluster, Sam was hurting, jealous even, and that she should be doing more to placate him, convince him that
Ollie meant nothing and that she was all Sam’s, heart, soul, body, forever and ever. Why wasn’t she? Couldn’t she?

She squeezed her eyes shut and saw a flicker book of images on the blood black of her lids: Sophie’s gummy smile; Sophie throwing her head back doing the Honk; her crooked body lying in the road; her yellow knickers; Dominique’s dolphin tattoo; Sam tearing off a bit of bagel, looking at her in a way he had never looked at her before. She couldn’t process any of it. It was all part of a strange algorithm she didn’t understand. “I’m taking a shower.”

She stripped off her clothes and gazed at her naked body in the mirror—in the unflattering bathroom lighting she looked pale, soggy and fleshy, rather like a huge scallop—then got into the shower, turning it on at its hottest so that it was on the very threshold of burning her skin. She stood there for an hour, the hot water pouring down her head, over her eyes, into her ears, trying to wash it all away.

When she reemerged, Sam had gone out. Thank goodness. She peered out the window and took three deep yogic breaths, which made her feel slightly dizzy. Jolted by a hoot from the street below, she opened her eyes to see some schoolchildren pointing up at her and laughing. She was still wrapped in a bath towel! She fled to the sofa and stared blankly into the spotless, expensively furnished sitting room, Sam’s coffee cup still on the side, his cigarette stub in the ashtray. Her skin was cool now, hair frizzing at the ends as it dried. Traffic rumbled outside, the kitchen tap dripped and for a powerful, lucid moment she felt like her life was unraveling, there and then, unspooling like loo paper rolling across the walnut floor. Soon it would be everywhere, sheets and sheets of it, blown about by the wind. And as it was impossible to roll loo paper back neatly onto its cardboard tube, it would be impossible to put her life back as it was too.