Afterwife by Polly Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

of animals in cages freaks me out.”
    “You know you really should have become an animal rights lawyer.” It was meant to be a joke. But he shot her a dark look over his coffee cup. “Aquarium?”
    “A tank is a cage.”
    “So is an apartment. Oh, go on, darling. Come.”
    He shook his head, serious suddenly. “You know what I’m like with kids, Jen. I never know what to say at the best of times. Let alone…”
    “Forget it.”
    “Why don’t I take you for lunch first?” he said, trying to appease her for refusing to play zoos with Freddie. “Then I can drive you up to Muswell Hill.”
    “Thanks, but I’m having lunch with Ollie first.”
    Sam’s face clouded. He ground out the cigarette with a long stub and got out of bed. Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” started to crash out of the speakers. He turned it up and mouthed along to it.
    “What?”
    “You’ve spent more time with Ollie than you have with me recently.”
    “Come on, Sam.” She shook her head at the futility of explanation.They’d been here before. “He’s no good on his own. I owe it to Soph to be there now.”
    He rolled his eyes. “You make it all sound like a country and western track. Sweetheart, Ollie’s a
man
. He just needs the space to drink himself into oblivion and shag himself stupid.”
    “Sam!” She felt everything tense between them again. It had been building over the last few weeks. Like an electrical storm about to break.
    “You can’t make it better, Jenny, don’t you get it?” His voice was higher now, that odd pitch he used when he was angry but tried to hide it. “You can’t bring Sophie back.” He took her hand, pressed the tips of her fingertips to his soft morning mouth. They would smell of cigarettes all day.
    “Sophie would have looked out for you had I died,” she said gently.
    He made a scoff noise in the back of his throat.
    She yanked her hand away. Rage was starting to build in perfect synchronicity with Jimmy Page’s guitar solo. “Did you even
like
Sophie, Sam?”
    He visibly started, paling beneath his smooth skin. “What are you saying?”
    “You don’t seem that affected, that’s all. It’s like everything is the same as it was.”
    “What do you want me to do, wear a T-shirt?”
    No, grief had made neither of them better people. It was almost banal. This bickering. The way she’d put on seven pounds. That constant feeling that something was lost. Her keys? Her phone? She’d scrabble around in her handbag before realizing that the lost thing was Sophie.
    “She was a beautiful woman who died too young. But she wasn’t my wife, Jenny. I’m not going to phonily pretend my life is decimatedby her dying.” Sam pulled on his white underpants, rearranged his balls. “I refuse to emote on call.”
    “I’m not asking you to emote, I’m asking you…to…to give a bit more of a shit, that’s all!”
    He looked at her in disbelief. “You think I don’t give a shit? Bloody hell. You really don’t know me at all, do you, Jenny?”
    A t Sam’s persuasion—exercise is a mood enhancer!—she’d gone to a punishing class of Legs, Bums and Tums with a Leo Sayer lookalike instructor who’d shouted, “Hey, you at the back with the hair!” when she could go no further with the star jumps that were making her tits ache. (And what was wrong with her hair? Pots and bloody kettles.) Hamstrings singing with pain, ears ringing with Girls Aloud, she’d reversed badly out of the gym parking space beneath the gaze of three sniggering teenage girls; and now here she was, still a bit BOish, sitting in a snarl of traffic on route to Muswell Hill, London’s tightly packed heart now behind her, pulsing beneath its gray layer of grimy snow.
    She wondered if Ollie’s mother, Vicki, would be at Ollie’s today, and hoped not. Sophie used to call her “Joan Collins’s long-lost sister from Basingstoke.” Still, rather Joan Collins’s long-lost sister than Soph’s poor mum, Sally, who was