Read Afterwife for Free Online Page B

up, back on the phone again. Tap tap tap. “I need trans fats.”
    “No, I’m taking Freddie out, remember?” She smiled as brightly as she could manage, trying to look normal. But nothing was normal. Sophie being alive was normal. This wasn’t.
    You’ve got to find a way of moving on, that was what Sam kept saying. But, damn, move on
where
? For the last fifteen-odd years of her life she and Sophie had been on the same train, Sophie sitting beside her, her favorite apple green boxy handbag on her lap, shopping bags at her feet, body tilted toward Jenny at an angle so that their shoulders touched and sometimes she’d get a mouthful of Sophie’s luscious long dark hair, which always tasted of expensive, honey-scented shampoo. Even a train journey with Sophie was a hoot. She was one of those women who would cheerfully chat loudly and unself-consciously in a crowded carriage about anything: gossip, politics, the shoes of the woman down the carriage, the headlines on the man opposite’s newspaper and sex. Sophie loved talking about sex. (“Okay. Sex in a tent. Boris Johnson or David Cameron? No, no, no! You have to choose one, you
have
to, Jenny. My God, you’re blushing! You’ve thought about this before, haven’t you? I reckon you’re a Boris bonker. Fess up. No, I’m not going to shush.”) Whatshe wouldn’t do now for just one more journey from Oxford Circus to King’s Cross with her. One more gossip. One more chat. There were so many more things they still had to say.
    Sam looked up and eyed her with a mixture of wariness and concern. “You alright, babes?”
    She snapped back to the bedroom, to the present. “Fine!”
    Sam started doing one of the morning stretches that Big Eric, his trainer, had taught him last month for an extortionate sum, something weird and painful looking involving his arm being bent back over his shoulders and a fair amount of clicking. “Stiff as a corpse this morning,” he muttered through the exertion. “I told Big Eric no more fucking weights. Masochist.”
    Wishing he hadn’t said “corpse,” she watched his arms bulge. They’d certainly gotten bigger. Secretly she preferred them before, sinewy but strong, the way he was naturally meant to be. Funnily enough, out of all of his handsome frame it was his head she loved best, the only thing he couldn’t work out in the gym. His head was like Bruce Willis’s, closely shaved to hide the spreading bald patch, symmetrical, satisfying, like a slightly furry pet. She liked to place her palm across it and feel its alive heat. And she liked that it flowed seamlessly into his smooth, unusual face without the interruption of hair. Sam’s good looks were architectural, vulpine. He had a face that could have been designed by the architect Norman Foster.
    She’d noticed him instantly at the small book launch in a Marylebone bookshop all those years ago. He’d been smartly dressed, swaggery—red socks!—not the usual publishing type, no surprise, as he wasn’t. She’d felt the burn of those bright LED blue eyes following her around the room. Shyness had prevented her from returning that confrontational gaze. Of course she’d had no idea at the time that this shyness would be misinterpreted as hard-to-get hauteur. That he’d see getting his fingers into her pants as the ultimate challenge. (She would have said yes please if he’d asked politely.) Sam loved achallenge. He liked his women “slightly difficult, chewy like hard toffee,” he’d once said, qualifying it with, “it was only afterwards I discovered you were more like fudge.” That had made her laugh. He used to make her laugh a lot.
    Sam released his biceps and lay heavily back onto the bed, his jaw cracking as he yawned. “RoboCop, I am not.”
    “You’ve been working late all week.” She meant this nicely but it came out wrong, more like an accusation. This kept happening, words coming out wrong.
    He looked up at her sharply. “It’s good that I’m this