This love story is narrated by a wife who is dead but isn't going anywhere until her beloved husband meets someone else. After all, this is a man who once watered a plant for a year before realising it was plastic...

ONE

So I get run over by a bus and I am wearing my worst knickers. Yellow knickers the size of the O2. I lie there in Regent Street, skirt hitched up around my waist like one of those binge drinkers you see on the news. As a crowd clusters, I pan back from the indignity of that crumpled body, fast, shakily, until the figure recedes to a lump on the road, surrounded by a circus of flashing lights. Still you could have seen those knickers from space.

Am I dead? Not sure actually. Don’t feel dead. Maybe it’s that I don’t feel dead in the way that an old person doesn’t feel old. Or I have a phantom self, much like an amputee has a phantom limb. Either way, totally weird. I am a christened non-believer who never goes to church apart from midnight Mass at Christmas – soft spot for carols and candles – but I don’t believe. Not in that stuff. I believe in a bit of yoga (lapsed) and the healing power of cold white wine of an evening (unlapsed). But I don’t believe in heaven. I don’t believe in ghosts. Or angels.
And yet. I am at my own funeral. Look up. I am here, near the rafters, where pigeons poo and virulent woodworm has set in, unbeknown to the gay rev. (Colin. He would be called Colin.) There is a drone of shuffling damp shoes on cold dry stone. It’s my Facebook page sprung to life. Heads down, frowning, they walk solemnly through the church’s heavy wooden doors. They all look at least ten years older than their profile photographs, ashen-faced, wearing charcoal and black and sunglasses, like an army of glum fashionistas. Some I haven’t seen in the flesh for years – can’t quite believe my ex Chris Adderson has the nerve to show up after screwing Sara, also here, shameless – and I watch as they sing, cry and, yes, yawn. (True to form, Danny Brixham taps on his BlackBerry during the prayer.)
Among the throng I spot the tight cluster of my Muswell Hill friends, neighbours, school mums, the people who’ve populated my daily life since I had Freddie and moved out to the ’burbs, the people who make up my favourite coffee circuit in the world. Yep, there’s Tash, cutting a dash in black with red shoes. (Red shoes at a funeral? Me neither.) Lydia, the loudest sobber in church – there’s always one, and if you knew Lydia you’d know it absolutely would have to be her. And Suze, dear old Suze with her wild blonde ’fro, twitching her speech notes, raring to go. She loves public speaking of any kind (entirely wasted on the PTA, should be running a small nation) and I can see she has written reams of absolute tosh about my role in the school community, the volunteering that she’s repeatedly bamboozled and guilt-tripped me into at the school gates: cake sales, international evenings, Christmas fairs, let’s-make-bunting parties, the 5K I ran in a red polka dot fifties ballgown for the twin school in Bolivia.

Standing in the same block, directly in front of them, is my poor darling family. Mum, broken. Dad, disbelieving. Mad aunt Pat, looking like she’s rather enjoying the drama, certainly the opportunity to wear what looks like a giant Oreo cookie on her head. And then there’s my little sister, Mary. If ever anyone needed a bit of privacy. Poor sis. And my best mate Jenny, just behind her, who looks like she’s been breakfasting on crystal meth and has put her make-up on in the dark. There is so much I want to say to my dearest Jenny, not least that she always used to say that I’d be late for my own funeral. (Wrong!)
Funeral. That means I’m really dead, doesn’t it? I’m presuming someone’s actually checked my pulse. Fuck. What if they haven’t? What if there’s been some terrible error?
Ollie’s handsome face says that something awful has happened. His eyes are puffy, slitty, unlit windows. He is cloaked in a cold blue aura like a surgical overall. While Freddie . . . No, I can’t go there. My darling, beautiful little Freddie.
Whenever I think about either of them living even one minute longer without me I hear a whistling sound, a terrible roar, like a vicious wind howling across a featureless moor, and it fills me with darkness.
There are no words.
Five days ago I was alive enough to get riled by the way Ollie stacked the plates in the dishwasher. Alive enough to worry about the six pounds I’d put on over Christmas and vow to start the Dukan diet. Alive enough to make a new year’s resolution, assuming I’d make one the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that, and . . .

OK, let’s rewind. Forget my funeral, here’s how the curtain fell.

Five days ago

It’s only a damp Tuesday night, but after the hungover drear of New Year’s Day I am really quite keen to get out of the house, to see someone who isn’t my immediate family. But I am late. I am always bloody late. This time I’ve lost a boot, and this is slowing my progress out of the house. My husband is not helping.
‘You love me how much out of ten?’ Ollie asks, sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, head resting on his knees, watching me with those heavy-lidded black eyes of his. They are the eyes of a young Italian lover, even though he’s not that young, nor Italian. He’s originally from Wigan.
‘Nine and a half.’ ‘When we first met it was eleven.’ ‘That was before we shared a bathroom.’ I hop down the
hall on my solo boot. Daft Punk blasts. ‘Turn it down, Ol, seriously. Where the hell is my other boot?’
Ollie shrugs, pulls Freddie on to his lap. ‘We have means of stopping Mummy going out in sexy boots, don’t we, Freddie?’ Ollie and Freddie. Their faces repeat the same handsome features in a different colour palette. They look at each other and grin an identical Brady-patented grin.
‘Ollie, I haven’t seen Jenny in yonks!’ ‘Must be at least twenty-four hours.’ ‘Not since Christmas, actually.’ ‘Sweetheart, it’s January the sixth.’

I ignore him and start pulling things out of the wicker basket in the hall: gloves, trapper hats, fleecy wellie warmers, umbrellas, remnants of Christmas wrapping paper that survived my new year cleaning purge. Ping Pong, north London’s least affectionate tabby, pounces on a glove and kills it, shaking her head from side to side with the offending item in her jaws. ‘How can a boot just disappear into thin air? How is this possible?’
‘Mummy’s boot has made a break for it.’ Ollie laughs and nuzzles his nose into Freddie’s brush of blond hair. ‘It’s passed through the portal into that world of lost things never to be found again.’
‘Like Doctor Who,’ Freddie nods gravely.
‘Like my sunglasses. Did you ever find those flash snowboarding glasses that your sis gave me for Christmas, Soph?’
I give him an exasperated look – he is constantly losing things, which is why I suspect him of playing a key role in the disappearance of the boot – and hop into the living room. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘What’s for our dinner?’
Annoyed by this assumption – albeit correct – that I am in charge of all things fridge, cupboard and supermarket, I say nothing and bend down to look beneath our grey velvet sofa, the underworld where Lego bricks and hair balls breed.
‘Soph? I’m marvin’. What’s for supper?’ ‘Last night’s lentil and hock soup.’ ‘Aww. Can’t we have fish and chips?’ asks Freddie. Ollie
winks at him. And I know that they will have fish and chips, probably with one of those artery-fuzzing battered sausages
and one of those pickled eggs that looks like a rude body part preserved in a jar.
‘AHA!’ Lost object found. I grab a plastic segment of Hot Wheels track, prod the boot determinedly into my reach and tug it on. My foot collides with something hard and sharp. A Transformer. I zip the boot up and it feels tight, too tight, like the waistline of my skinny jeans which have also miraculously shrunk. I know that my legs have been stuffed like Christmas stockings with brandy cream, champagne truffles and mince pies. I know that some long, hard weeks of denial lie ahead of me and this is depressing. I hate dieting. It’s not in my nature. I’d like more of everything: more food, sex, sleep, shoes, and more time. Why am I always running out of time?
My phone beeps.
It’s a text from Jenny. She’s in the new tapas bar on Beak Street, where we’ve only got a table because swanky London is still drinking mulled wine beside log fires in boltholes in the Cotswolds. ‘Pitying look from waiter. Where r u?’
‘On way!’ I fib back, yanking on a shaggy black fake fur coat. (Like to think it gives me a slutty Hollywood glamour. Ollie says it makes me look like a giant goatee and is only acceptable if I go nudie underneath.) Freddie sinks back against Ollie’s chest, drinking me in, studying me intently, as he always does when I’m dressed up, as if I’m morphing into someone who isn’t just his mum.
‘You’ve dropped something, Soph. Behind you,’ says Ollie.
I bend down. Nothing. ‘What?’
‘Just wanted to see what you looked like when you bent over.’ Ollie grins. It’s his filthy rock star grin.
‘Ollie!’ I roll my eyes, enjoying that after all this time my bottom still rocks his world. I blow them puff-puff kisses like the movie star I was certain I’d be when I was a kid, before I got booted out of the Saturday club aged fifteen for snogging my drama teacher. ‘Boys, be good.’
‘What time you back, beautiful?’
‘Won’t be late.’ I step out of the warm hug of number thirty-three into the exhilarating possibilities of the London night. ‘Love you,’ I call over my shoulder, as I always do, but meaning it all the same.
Forward three hours. Jenny and I are at the tapas place, second bottle of red wine almost finished. I can no longer feel the blister on my left pinkie toe caused by those damn boots – is it possible to put weight on one’s toes? – and the evening is beginning to fray pleasantly at the edges. I am probably talking too much because I’ve spent too long brooding on things over Christmas and am feeling the need to unburden myself, dropping my sticky, undigested gripes on to the restaurant table like the remains of the figgy pudding in my fridge.
‘Do you want the hard, bitter January truth?’ Jenny is refusing to indulge me.
I peek out at her from between my fingers. ‘If you must.’
‘Most people would kill for your problems.’ Satisfied by this decree, Jenny slumps back into her wooden chair as the waiter uncorks another bottle of wine and pours it into our lipstick-smudged glasses. ‘And . . .’ she says, waggling her
finger, ‘. . . most women would kill for a man like Ollie, and you know it, Soph.’
‘They would change their mind once they’d tried living with him for longer than it takes to finish a Mad Men box set.’
She laughs, looks at me fondly. Her eyes are pink rimmed because she’s pissed. We’re both pissed. ‘You’re a hard woman, Sophie Brady.’
‘Nocturnal, totally unpractical. He’s less domesticated than Freddie.’
She gives me a sharp look.
‘Yeah, yeah. Obviously I wouldn’t have him any other way.’
‘So the problem is . . . ?’
‘No problem. It’s just rubbishy life stuff.’ I sip my wine, not really tasting it now. It’s got to that stage of the night. ‘Not something to be solved, Jenny. Not everything can be solved. Life is not a sudoku puzzle.’
‘Hmm,’ she says, unconvinced. Jenny is an optimistic sceptical pragmatist. She believes there is a global conspiracy to make us all worry too much so that we buy newspapers and insurance and comfort products ‘like Babybel cheese, the world’s weirdest food’. Her words, not mine. I like Babybel. The colour of that red wax is the same as the lippy I wear every day, naked without it.
‘If you’ve been with someone since you were twenty-two and . . . Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure it’s the same for him. He only ever got to have two other girlfriends before I came along. We were both so YOUNG! And now we’ve been together longer than Blair was in government. Or Thatcher.’

I sluice my wine around the glass. I think as I do this that I’ll never get tired of seeing red wine stain the sides of a glass pink. Simple pleasures. ‘The truth is, and God, I’d never say this to Ollie, so swear on your life not to repeat this, but I miss how it used to be, Jen, you know, in the early days. It’s sad knowing that I will never feel that adrenaliney lust rush thing again. That, you know,’ I assume a bad cockney accent, ‘me and Ollie is for keeps, like.’
‘That’s actually a far sweeter sentiment than you realise, Soph.’ Jenny looks a bit wistful.
I feel bad for having what everyone wants and not being grateful enough. I’ve brought us down. I must bring us up again. ‘But what about the grrr?’
‘The what?’ I growl again. ‘The grrr. Come ’ere! That feeling.’ Jenny laughs. A couple on the adjacent table who don’t
look like they have much grrr going on pretend they’re not listening in. The woman’s feet curl around her chair legs. She frowns.
‘Overrated.’ Jenny’s eyes dance. I love the way her eyes dance. She’s one of those rare women who looks prettier drunk, loosened up a little.
‘I think it’s just that I’d like to feel that grrr one more time before . . .’ I slam my hands on the table. Jenny is glazing over. ‘Sorry! I’ll shut up. Clearly I’m going through some kind of horribly clichéd mid-life crisis. It’s boring and I apologise.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ she laughs. ‘Just tell me when it peaks. Because we’ve not even started, Soph.’
‘Actually, I think it might have peaked already.’
‘When?’ she laughs.
‘Sainsbury’s, this afternoon.’ I gulp back some wine, warming to my theme. ‘You know those self-serving tills that never work and you always end up having to wait for a real live human being to come and unlock the damn thing because it malfunctions if you use your own bag? “Unidentified object in the bagging area!” Fuck, I hate them. I hate supermarkets. And no, I don’t have a Nectar card. No, I don’t want a Nectar card!’
‘Don’t be poncy.’
‘The day I get a supermarket loyalty card it’s all over, Jenny.’ I gulp back more wine. ‘See, a clear case of mid-life crisis.’
Jenny leans back in her chair and studies me in that scrutinising way of hers. ‘You’re not old enough for a mid- life crisis, Soph. You have to be forty. You’re thirty-five.’ Jenny is very exact. She has an ordered walk-in wardrobe of a mind. Mine is more like an overstuffed knicker drawer.
‘I could die when I am seventy and that would make me mid-life exactly.’ (Posthumous note: no discernible shiver of irony felt at the time.) I scoop a spoonful of crème caramel into my mouth and its sweetness is like a kiss.
‘Women don’t die at seventy any more. We die at eighty- two or something.’ Jenny breaks into the crust of the chocolate torte with the edge of her spoon, releasing a river of sweet goo. It looks better than my crème caramel. ‘The blokes go first.’
‘Just as well. Ollie would confuse the laundry rack with his zimmerframe and hang underpants on it.’
‘This is amazing. Taste?’

I reach across the table and attack her pudding with my spoon. (Calories don’t count if they belong to someone else.) It is better than my pudding. ‘But isn’t the really tragic thing that we’ll be too old to enjoy our freedom when we finally get it?’
‘No! I’m looking forward to us being old.’
I try to imagine us old, like proper old. It’s hard. We’ve been young forever. I still buy polka dot tights at Topshop. Last year I rolled around in the mud at Glastonbury, naked.
‘I don’t want to be one of those exhausting women who try to stay thirtysomething forever. I want to wear different shades of beige and write letters of complaint about bad language to the BBC. I’ll feel cheated otherwise.’
‘Why is it you always order the better pudding, Jenny?’
‘I just go for the most calorific option. Simple tactic.’ She wipes her mouth with her napkin. It takes off the last bit of her pink lipstick. She looks about ten without make-up, like a frighteningly intelligent schoolgirl with her pretty soft baby face, wide blue eyes, and permanent frown of studied comprehension. Jenny is my only girlfriend who tackles the weekend newspapers before the magazine supplements. She devours all the big, heavy books you’re meant to read, rather than the fun ones. She actually finished Wolf Hall! That said, Jenny knows all the lyrics to Dolly Parton’s back catalogue, too. ‘I intend to eat more puddings all year,’ she adds cheerfully. ‘My new year’s resolution is not to beat myself up for being over ten stone. I’ve thought about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather eat pudding than be skinny.’
‘Me too, me too.’ I reach across for another spoonful.
‘Fat, happy and gobby.’
I pick up my wine glass with a camp flourish. ‘My new year’s resolution was not to drink in January.’
Jenny raises her glass and we giggle. ‘Fat faces age bloody well, you know,’ I reflect. ‘True, true.’ ‘The brilliant thing is, fat people don’t have to choose
between their face and their ass. They say, I’ll have both please! Like in a restaurant.’
‘Good point.’ Jenny licks her spoon. ‘And you know what, Soph? When we’re old, like proper old, we will eat pudding for every meal because . . . who gives a toss?’
‘All the men will be dead, anyway. And all the skinnies will have died of carb deficiency.’ I rest my chin on my hand and reflect on the happy gluttony awaiting me. ‘For the record, Jenny, when I’m old I’m going to wear one of those see-through plastic headscarves to keep the rain off my blowdried bouff. And I’ll be rocking those orthopedic shoes with padded soles. I’ve always fancied some of those.’
‘We can go on cruises together. I’ve always wanted to go on a cruise, one of those really cheesy ones with a songstress in red sequins on a white grand piano belting out Shirley Bassey.’
‘Me too! Me too!’ I raise my glass. It wobbles in my hand. ‘We can cruise to the Galapagos. I’ve always wanted to go to the Galapagos.’
‘To see turtles and those giant spooky stones.’ ‘That’s Easter Island, div.’ ‘OK, Easter Island, too.’ ‘And St Barts. I will dreadlock my pubes and smoke psychotropic skunk on the beach, because hell, why not?’ ‘Shall we do Vegas, too? We could gamble our pensions.’ ‘Fuck yeah.’ We sit in easy silence for a few moments, scraping the last
smears of sweetness off the pudding plates, enjoying the crushed happy hubbub of the restaurant and being away from the dog end of the Christmas holidays. We devour the remains of the breadbasket and chortle childishly when a waiter drops a tray beside us in a slapstick manner. The tea light is at the end of its wax, smoking and spluttering a salty blue. It is in this happy drunken blur that I decide this is the moment to bring the subject up. ‘Dare I ask, Jenny?’
Something flickers across her eyes. She doesn’t want me to ask. ‘The answer’s no.’
I lean sloppily over the table, warming my hands on the dying tea light. ‘But I thought you were going to have the Big Conversation?’
‘It shrank. It became a conversation about the best way to cook the rack of lamb,’ she says briskly, looking away from me into the restaurant.
‘I guess you’ve got to set a wedding date at some point,’ I say carefully. ‘I mean, you don’t want to end up walking down the aisle in your seventies looking like Vivienne Westwood.’
She doesn’t laugh like she’s meant to. Instead she sniffs. ‘It’s perfectly normal to be engaged for one year.’
‘I was joking, Jenny.’ This is my cue to tell her. My mouth opens then closes. Nothing comes out. I can talk absolute nonsense until my larynx bleeds, but I can’t talk about this. Best friends, no secrets? True. But I don’t want to ruin our
supper, or worse. Anyway, I’m probably too pissed. Yes, yes, too pissed. So I promise myself that I’ll call round to her flat next week, during the day, while Sam’s out, and we’ll have coffee and passion fruit cheesecake and we’ll talk then. She loves cheesecake. The cheesecake will help.
She looks at me, narrows her eyes. ‘I know you don’t approve of him, Soph.’
‘That’s not true.’
Silence. We both know that the conversation has hit a protrusion, like a speed bump in the road. We do the same thing, look away from each other and around the restaurant, smiling hazily, women who’ve drunk too much and know each other well enough to drop the topic before we start whacking each other over the head with our handbags. Some diners are beginning to leave now, picking up bills, bustling to the loo, while the late-night crowd, flushed from a theatre or bar, take their tables and over order tapas.
A waiter asks us if we want to order anything else, like he wants us to leave. I glance at my watch. ‘Where has the evening gone? I feel like I only got here five minutes ago. I should get home.’
Jenny looks disappointed. ‘But we haven’t dissected Sarah’s affair yet.’
‘I know, nor Maxine’s new teeth. They file the real teeth to Shane McGowan pegs before they put veneers on. Isn’t that totally gross?’
‘I’ve heard that the veneers drop off all the time. Imagine, you’d never want to bite into an apple again.’
Giggles snort through my nose. ‘Do you remember when my hair extension blew off on Primrose Hill and landed on
David Walliams’s labradoodle?’ I don’t know why I suddenly remember this, but I can see it vividly. That gorgeous gusty day on top of Primrose Hill, the whole of London before us, Freddie, a baby then, sitting on the picnic blanket, squashing strawberries into his mouth with his fist. A lifetime ago, literally.
‘And the dog humped the bouff!’
I catch the time again on the oversized watch face of the woman sitting adjacent to us. It really is getting late.
Jenny catches me looking. She knows what I am thinking. ‘Isn’t it bad karma to leave so much wine?’ She draws a finger down the bottle’s label. ‘Good wine, too.’
‘It would be a bit studenty to ask to take it home, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would, Soph. Yes.’ ‘It does seem rather a shame.’ ‘And you were late, Sophie. Had you been on time then
we would have finished the bottle by now.’ ‘Excellent point. What do you suggest then?’ Jenny fills our glasses. ‘Rude not to.’ ‘I hold you fully responsible, Jenny.’ I hiccup. ‘And I want
you to know that I will put all the blame on you when Ollie’s on my case about me coming home rat-arsed.’
She raises her glass. ‘Yes, I take full responsibility. That is what unmarried friends are for, isn’t it? To get their married friends off the hook with their husbands.’
When we finally leave the restaurant it is raining outside, hard rain that comes at you at an angle. It is icy cold, threatening sleet. The street is splashy and full of people who’ve drunk too much, have not got an umbrella, and want to get home; people like us, desperately trying to get a cab. We give up trying to find one on Beak Street and walk towards the promising river of traffic on Regent Street, the leather soles of my boots skiddy on the wet pavement. Occupied cab after occupied cab zooms by, some maddeningly clicking their lights off just as they pass, others command- eered by new groups of revellers filtering in from Great Marlborough Street and Fouberts Place, nicking cabs that are rightfully ours seeing as we’ve waited for years already. A newly stolen cab throws a wash of dirty puddle over our feet.
‘This is rubbish, Jenny. Time to get a dodgy cab.’ ‘Mini cab drivers all look like criminal photofits.’ ‘I’m not doing the flippin’ Tube at this time.’ ‘Yay!’ Jenny grabs my hand. ‘Ye of little faith. Look.
There’s one. Just behind that bus.’ We watch as a yellow light, a warm, happy smudge in the
wet darkness, moves towards us, slowly getting brighter. ‘Right,’ I say, jaw set, arm outstretched. ‘Watch this. I’m
going to get this cab if it kills me.’

TWO

The coffin was white, decorated with a trembling bunch of marshmallow pink lilies. To Jenny it seemed too small, piti- fully insubstantial. The idea that Sophie’s body – beautiful, funny, larger than life Sophie – was inside, dead five days, cold as clay, was almost unbelievable. She squeezed Sam’s hand harder, feeling the stiff rim of his shirt cuff push into her wrist.
A sob echoed around the overcrowded church. Each time this happened, which was frequently – every four or five breaths, she’d counted – Jenny’s teeth ground together and her fillings twanged. Not knowing where to look, she kept her gaze on the forlorn figure of Ollie standing in the front pew. He had a new stoop in his coathanger shoulders and his face was full of shadows, even in the flat bright daylight. It was as if all his energy had pooled into his left hand, the hand knitted tightly to Freddie’s. No wonder. Freddie looked so heartbreakingly tiny, shrunk to Lilliputian proportions by the soar of the stained glass windows and the yawning width of the church.
Ollie and Freddie, the two great loves of Sophie’s life,
were flanked by Ollie’s formidable-looking mother, Vicki, and, holding Freddie’s other hand, Soph’s mother, Sally, slighter than ever, all angles and elbows in a black skirt suit, the lone black feather on her hat shaking. Mike, Soph’s dad, had one arm belted tight around her shoulder – squishing the jacket’s shoulder pad up oddly – his other around Sophie’s sister, Mary. Poor Mary, whose normally pretty face was puffy as a mushroom from crying and given a strange pallor by light streaming through a yellow pane of glass.
She had no doubt that they must wish it were her, Jenny, who’d stepped out in front of the bus instead of their beautiful daughter. She wasn’t a mother, a wife, didn’t and would never burn as brightly as Sophie. If she could have taken her place she would. But it had all happened in an instant. A hand outstretched, a slip of sole, a knuckle crunch of metal and bone. She could still see Sophie lying in the road. The image was imprinted in her brain forever, like a bright light bulb after you close your eyes.
‘Deal.’ That was her word. And it kept coming back to haunt her. She’d selfishly cajoled Sophie into drinking more wine when she should have realised that Sophie was a mother, that they weren’t twentysomethings any more. Sophie had responsibilities: most women their age did. She was the oddity, needily trying to squeeze more out of her friend, unable to let go. If she’d let her return home earlier then it wouldn’t have been raining and the road wouldn’t have been slippy and that particular bus wouldn’t have been on Regent Street, it would have been somewhere else on its route. And so would they.
As requested by the rev – Colin, she thought how much
Sophie would appreciate the fact he was called Colin – she held up the photocopied hymn sheet. Sophie’s beautiful face was stamped at the top, so that it resembled a press release. The paper shook and the ink smudged beneath her sweating fingers. Could she sing? She was amazed that song was coming out of her mouth, not screams. ‘Jerusalem’. She and Soph had sung this many times over the years at weddings. Some couples had worked out, others hadn’t. None of them were ever as glamorous and besotted as Ollie and Sophie. Had been. Oh God. The hymn sheet shook harder in her hand. So, so wrong. She looked up at the sweeping church rafters, eyes prickling with tears. Sophie, where are you? Please stop being dead. It’s not big and it’s not funny. No one’s bloody laughing.
All she wanted to do was lie down in bed with a pillow over her head and listen to Sophie’s answer machine message over and over – ‘Soph’s phone, don’t you dare hang up before leaving a message!’ – and pretend none of this was happening.
‘You alright, babes?’ whispered Sam, looking down at her from his six-foot height.
She nodded, mouth dry. She could sing but not speak. Which did not bode well for her speech. (Unless she sang it?) The service continued, painfully slowly. It was like Sophie’s wedding, she thought, but in reverse.
Oh God, eulogies. She was nowhere near ready. She needed another six months of prep. Sophie’s sister Mary was the first to go. Never lifting her swollen eyes from her notes, she attempted some anecdotes about Sophie as a child – how she’d once found a kitten in the street that she’d named Sock
and, fearing that her father wouldn’t allow her to keep it, had nurtured Sock in her knicker drawer for three days on milk-sodden digestive biscuits before anyone realised he was there – and then tried to articulate what a wonderful mother she had been. At that point Mary’s voice crumpled like a brown paper bag and she had to be led back to her pew.
Not her yet. Not her yet. She had a few minutes to pull herself together. Come on, Jenny.
A new speaker started to walk purposefully down the aisle. She checked the service notes. Suze. Suze Silver. She vaguely remembered Sophie mentioning her name. A school mum? Yes, she was pretty sure she was a school mum. Suze. Long on the z.
Suze had a rubbery face beneath an extraordinary helmet of frizzy hair, oddly fascinating in its extreme of unflattery. (How could she still notice unflattering hair even in the depths of grief? What was wrong with her?) Suze tilted her chin upwards, revealing a large mole resembling a squashed raisin beneath her jaw, and started to speak, her thunderous voice submitting the congregation into still, respectful silence like an evangelical pastor’s. She rhapsodised about Sophie’s contribution to school life and the community, her volunteer- ing, her cake baking, her quiz night organising, the fact that she was the most glamorous mother at the school gates. How the other mothers used to joke that she never wore the same shoes twice. Then, minutes later, the frizzy orator had finished. Colin was looking at her expectantly, one bushy eyebrow raised.
‘Sure you’re up to it?’ Sam looked doubtful. Jenny started the long walk to the podium, her hard-soled shoes clattering unpleasantly on the stone floor. Her new black trousers, bought in haste online for the occasion, dug into her hips as she walked. They were a size too small, she realised – she was a fourteen, not a twelve, kidding nobody – and frumpy in their bland formality, like a campaigning regional MP’s. She wished she’d worn something more flamboyant in homage. Sophie would have worn black and leopard print, a vintage fifties full-skirted suit. Something like that. The walk went on forever, the trousers shifting around her waist with every step, so by the time she finally stood up on the podium, raised her eyes to the congregation, the zipper was twisted and pulled up inside her crotch. Camel hoof. Great. Sophie would be
laughing.
All eyes were on her now. The tension in the church was a pulse. She could hear it. Tick, tick, tick. Like an electric fence.
Notes. She just needed to read her notes and she’d be fine. But the handwriting swam before her. She gulped, refocused. The words she’d written and practised reading aloud to Sam over the porridge she couldn’t eat that morning suddenly seemed wrong, written about someone who wasn’t Sophie. She looked up helplessly at the rows and rows of expectant, flushed, strained faces, then quickly down again. Sweat dripped down her nose and splodged onto the paper. I’m going to fuck up. I’m going to fuck up explosively.
The pause stretched, taut, painful, like a doctor pulling a stitch from a wound. She glanced at Sam. His face was knotted with embarrassment. She looked at Ollie and his wounded black eyes surprised her by their softness. He was the one person who should hate her and didn’t.

‘I’ve written these notes,’ she began, taking courage from Ollie. If he could be brave, so could she. The microphone amplified her voice. She didn’t sound like her. She sounded like Margot Leadbetter. ‘And they’re all about what a wonderful person Sophie . . .’ She couldn’t say ‘was’. She couldn’t. ‘But you all know that. That’s why this church is crammed. So I’m going to go off-piste with this. Please bear with me.’ Sam was biting his fist now, shaking his head and looking at her like she’d completely lost the plot. ‘I was the last person to see Sophie alive.’ A collective intake of breath. ‘And for this I am hugely privileged. We had fun that night, the night she died. Apart from anything, Soph, my oldest, dearest friend, was the best laugh. And she found humour in the blackest places – she’d find it here today.’ Ollie cracked a small, surprised smile. The rest of the congregation looked stony-faced, like she’d said something terrible. ‘And that night, she was more alive than most of us will ever be. She was one of those people, full of . . . light and dazzle, the central point in any room. And she had the rudest, loudest laugh. We used to call it The Honk.’ She choked up then. Her mouth made an involuntary pop-pop noise, as if her heart was exploding like space candy on her tongue. It was unimaginable that she’d never hear The Honk again. ‘Whenever I think of Sophie I think of Sophie dancing. She loved to dance and she never gave a sh—’ She caught herself. ‘. . . monkey’s what anyone thought. She didn’t have hang-ups like the rest of us. In fact she loved people looking at her. Which I guess brings me to . . .’ She paused, suddenly unsure what to say next. ‘. . . hats! Sophie loved hats, especially vintage ones with plumes. And swirly skirted dresses. Sequins and shoes. She was the high priestess of shoes.’ There was a ripple of laughter, a sense of people finally relaxing. ‘Sophie could get away with anything because she was beautiful, but also because she was happy. She made happiness glamorous. And it was her family who made her so very happy, so secure in who she was.’ Ollie was wiping away tears on the sleeve of a crumpled black jacket. ‘She was madly in love with Ollie. And Freddie . . .’ Freddie was staring down at the floor, as if willing himself to disappear. ‘Freddie made her just the proudest mother on earth.’ Her voice broke. She sniffed, collected herself. ‘I guess all I want to say is that I will miss Sophie forever. As a girlfriend, as a human being, she is totally irreplaceable.’ She looked down at her unused notes, a wave of doubt crashing down on her. What on earth was she thinking? Wrap, wrap! ‘That’s it, um, thanks.’
As she began the excruciating walk back to her pew, eyes boring into her navy Marks and Spencer shirt, Neil Young’s ‘Harvest Moon’ started to crackle through the church’s ancient speakers. Rows of people – the friends, the cousins, the exes, Freddie’s teacher, Sophie’s hairdresser, her cleaner, the music industry friends of Ollie’s, all the people who’d ever known and loved Sophie, for to know her was to love her, Jenny realised, wishing she’d said that too – dissolved into tears. Jenny wondered how many of them recognised the song. It was Sophie and Ollie’s first dance at their wedding reception. Sucking the tears down her throat, she joined the mass shuffle to the graveyard. The light was yellowy and dark clouds were boiling over the steeple of the church. The air smelled of rain.

‘Why did you change your speech at the last minute?’ asked Sam.
‘Was it rubbish?’
Sam pulled her towards his dark blue suit. His second best suit. ‘No, your speech was . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Sweet, really sweet, Jenny. Don’t worry about it.’
She fisted her hands deep in her jacket pockets. All she wanted to do was go home, pour herself a humungous glass of wine and phone Sophie. That was what she always did after a bad day. And this was the baddest of days. She turned to Sam and saw him being pulled into the crowd by Seb, the bisexual gardener with the gold tooth who Sophie had recommended for their flower boxes. Without Sam sand- wiched next to her, she felt exposed, watched, the last person to have seen Sophie alive, the bad influence. She wished she could scoot away like the other guests, sink back into the north London streets, into her altered life. She checked her watch. Not long now. The burial in Highgate cemetery was to be just a small family affair, thank goodness. She didn’t have the stomach for it. Her job was to take Freddie back to Ollie’s and make him supper. She was glad she had a job, a use. Yes, she must find Freddie. Where was he? Peering over the obfuscating hats and feather fascinators in the crowd, she noticed a woman ploughing determinedly towards her. ‘Jenny!’
She froze. It was the woman being eaten by her own hair.
‘Suze Silver.’ An extended purple-gloved hand. The hand- shake crunched Jenny’s fingers. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’
‘You have?’ she said, taken aback.
‘From Sophie,’ Suze explained. She felt the heat rise on her cheeks. ‘Yes, of course.’ Suze moved closer, conspiratorially, biscuit breath on
Jenny’s face. ‘You were brave speaking off the cuff like that, really brave.’
‘Thanks.’ She smiled back, not knowing what to say. Sophie’s death had left a smouldering gap in her conversation. Yet it was all anyone wanted to talk about.
Suze persevered. ‘You must feel terrible. Being there.’ She paused, giving Jenny the space to fill in the gory details. ‘Seeing the accident and everything,’ she added when no details were forthcoming.
Jenny looked away. She could still see Sophie’s body in the road. Hear the crunch and thump.
‘Look, sorry, any time you want to talk.’
‘Thank you.’ I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to talk to you, she thought. And I don’t like your purple gloves.
‘And if you don’t mind, I may get in contact anyway.’
‘Yeah?’ Perhaps she could climb up and over Suze’s hill of hair and flee over the shoulders of the crowds.
‘Ollie will need all the help he can get now, won’t he?’
‘Yes, yes, he will.’ She smiled, feeling a stab of guilt for her earlier irritation. Suze was clearly a nice, practically minded woman. She was Sophie’s friend. Making a renewed effort, she riffled in her handbag and found a curly-edged business card. ‘Here’s my number.’
Suze looked down at the white card – ‘Jenny Vale, copy editor’ – with a glint of triumph. ‘Brill!’
Jenny sidled away, faking an obligation somewhere else. Before she could get very far, Ollie touched her lightly on
the arm. ‘Hey, Jenny.’ His voice was barely audible. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry, Ollie.’ The dark grey cloud had engulfed the steeple. It started to rain suddenly, pinprick-
sore against the raw skin around her eyes. He glanced at his watch. ‘We’re going to . . .’ He hesitated
for an eternity. He couldn’t say ‘bury’. She took his hand because it felt like the right thing to do. But once she had it she didn’t know what to do with it. ‘. . . go to the cemetery now.’
‘I’ll take Freddie back.’
They stood for a moment, transfixed by the back of Freddie’s tousled blond head, neither of them moving, not wanting to take him away from his mother’s body. And she was still holding Ollie’s hand. She needed to drop it.
‘Jenny, there’s something I need to ask you.’
‘Yes?’ She had a bad feeling about what he was about to say next. She dropped his hand.
He fixed her with sleepless baggy eyes. ‘Did Sophie talk about us, about me and her, our marriage, the night she died?’
The bad feeling got badder. What could she say? If she told him the truth he might take the words of Sophie in a drunken, restless mood and hold them against his heart forever. And she’d promised Sophie she wouldn’t repeat them.
‘I need to know if—’
Colin the rev interrupted them. ‘Ollie,’ he whispered, a ringed pink hand on the sleeve of Ollie’s black wool suit. ‘It is
time.'

THREE

I can’t bring myself to peek inside the coffin. Not going to be a good look, is it? So I leave my beloved family scattering chocolatey Highgate soil into the hole, soak away past the graves of George Eliot and Henry Moore, the gothic avenues of tombs, the guarding stone angels, through the damp, dark, ivy-cloaked trees of Highgate Cemetery into the January air, filling the empty cavities between grave and home like water. I follow Jenny as she drives back to number thirty-three in her little yellow Mini, with Freddie in the back seat, staring out of the window, puzzled, silent. I follow them through the grey front door – hours of my short life I wasted locating that exact shade of cloud grey – past the surprisingly tidy hall. Clearly, mother-in-law has been busy and her grey felt slippers sit neatly, incongruously, beside my old knitted moccasin boots. I skirt along the stripped pine floor and into our kitchen, always my favourite room, with its wooden units that nearly bankrupted us, the red Kitchen Aid cake mixer, the big range oven, the Dualit toaster, things I loved so much in a way that Ollie never understood, but being Ollie indulged anyway because he’d do pretty much anything to make me happy. Ping Pong hisses as I pass and bolts out through the cat flap. Charming. Missed you too.
After the cold and damp of the church, the smell of Jenny burning fishfingers is immensely comforting. (Jenny has many talents but cooking is not one of them. She would happily survive on Marmite toast, Minstrels and pre-cut packaged carrot sticks.) Freddie eats it all up, which makes me curdle with maternal pleasure. It’s good to know that he’s not lost his appetite, that nature’s hardwired imperative for his six-year-old body to run and eat and grow overrides his grief. After some warmed rice pudding topped with half a jar of honey on top – Freddie tells her that’s how much I used to put on, the monkey – they curl up together on the velvet sofa. Freddie’s lids slowly shut as Jenny reads Tintin in Tibet, her Captain Haddock voice a dead ringer for Billy Connolly. While he sleeps, Jenny cries, stroking his unbrushed mop of curls. I move closer to them, not wanting to frighten her, hoping that somehow, if I wish it hard enough, I will radiate some heat, something that will comfort them, let them know that I am here.
Ollie and the grannies come back. Jenny does her big bright smile thing that she always does when she’s trying to pretend she’s not been crying, and fools nobody. Freddie doesn’t want her to go. She hesitates, unsure of the protocol, not wanting to disappoint Freddie, not wanting to intrude. Granny Vicki crushes Freddie to that bosom – it’s the Thames flood barrier of bosoms – and Jenny leaves for the flat she shares with Sam in Camden.
I become the dust in the shadows, only brightening again as a button moon rises above the slate rooftops and London’s
insomniac skyline glows acid orange. Restless to be back where I belong, I feather down the hall, shaken by the tectonic rumble of my mother-in-law snoring in the spare bedroom, sinus problems having taken a turn for the worse.
It’s midnight. I want to get back to my side of the bed, the side nearest the bathroom, because ever since I had Freddie I’ve needed to go in the night. (No, didn’t do my pelvic floors. Does anyone?) My side of the bed is oddly empty. Odd because I normally go to bed before Ollie, who is prone to watching MTV with a beer in his hand late into the night. But nothing’s normal now, is it? Everything is the same but different, like one of those pictures in Freddie’s puzzle books where you have to spot things that are wrong, like the dog with five legs, the lady with a teapot poking out of her handbag.
Ollie is not sleeping like he usually does either, like a hibernating grizzly, but is twisting and turning, ruching up the bed sheets – the same bed sheets that we slept on together last week – asleep but talking indecipherably, then sitting bolt upright, flicking the light on, getting up, walking to the kitchen, pouring himself a large whisky, downing it, then staggering through to Freddie’s room, crawling under the pirate duvet, and with Freddie stirring slightly in his arms, finally falling asleep. I hover a few inches above them, rising and falling on the valleys of their warm breath like a bird.
The night is over in a millisecond. Dawn breaks, Ollie breaks wind, Freddie unfurls from sleep in his green pyjamas like a new shoot, and Vicki starts bustling around the kitchen, beginning, I kid you not, to reorganise my spice cupboard.
Nothing is sacred.
Hours shuffle like cards. Suddenly it’s Monday. Ollie doesn’t look like he’s slept at all. He can’t be arsed to shower, and when I get near him, laminating his body as close as I can, he smells of scalp and skin and sweat. He’s been sweating a lot even though it’s cold. It’s as if he’s carried a stash of drugs through Dubai customs in the sole of his trainer. He needs to shave, but doesn’t. He attempts to pack Vicki off to the local supermarket while he gets Freddie ready for school. But she won’t budge. She’s fussing. No, Ollie mumbles. He wants to do this himself, he’s got to be able to do it himself. Finally, Vicki takes the sledgehammer hint and is successfully banished to buy a pint of milk. Ollie rummages through the kitchen cupboards, looking for Freddie’s lunchbox. It’s on the shelf above the sink, as it always is, but, maddeningly, he looks everywhere but there. He curses, gives up. He puts two Penguin bars in an old Tesco bag – two? – alongside one of Jenny’s cold burned fishfingers, which he wraps in cellophane – impressed by the cellophane bit – and a Marmite sandwich made from bread that has outlived me. He does not brush Freddie’s hair, which sticks out like wings. And he does not notice that Freddie is wearing his Superman pyjama top beneath his grey school shirt. Freddie has been trying to wear this top to school for at least a year.
Ollie, one of the greediest men alive, forgets to feed himself and, more cataclysmically, forgets to feed the mightily disgruntled Ping Pong. He can’t find the school bag, which is on a hook in the utility cupboard, the same hook it’s been hung on for the last two years.

I’m beginning to realise how much I did. How much I micromanaged our lives. And I’m worrying about how Ollie is going to cope. Because there is the domesticated man. And there’s Ollie. This is a man who once watered a houseplant for a year before realising it was plastic. This is a man who only last week put washing powder tablets in the tumble dryer. Yes, Ollie is a brilliant music producer. His brain can organise an infinite variation of bars and chords and breaks. But it cannot compute how many pints of milk a family of three drink in a week. (Five.)
Ollie and Freddie finally leave for school, hands knotted together. How much I want to slip my hands into that tight little knot. How much I want to run my fingers through Freddie’s hair and feel his hot boy’s neck. How I want to yank Ollie back to his full height, to stop that gorgeous body collapsing in on itself like a wonky old deckchair. He is normally so reassuringly solid – wide shouldered, barrel chested, male and bulky like a hunk of roughly hewn oak – but day by day he looks whittled down. His twisted-fit Levis are slipping down his hips. His face is newly angular, unshaven and angry, his jaw is jutting because his teeth are constantly clenched. He reminds me of how he used to look in his twenties when he’d spent too many sleepless weekends on the coke that made him so elated then so utterly miserable, before his ‘angel of Harpenden’, as he used to call me back then, rescued him and made him drink Chablis instead. But I can’t rescue him now. It seems I’m merely watching them rather than watching over them, more CCTV than celestial being.
At the school gates there’s a throng of mothers, milling
with muted excitement as if waiting for sale doors to fling open. Freddie and Ollie walk down the street towards them. The hushed talking stops immediately. They part to make room for his passing, buggies are swiftly jerked out of his way, fevered looks are exchanged. Eyes fill with tears.
My husband, the Pope!
Ollie blanks them, walking determinedly towards the cheerful red door of class 2B to the left of the playground, the furthest class from the gate, and therefore the one with the longest public parade. The crowd’s ventriloquist whispers sound like distant storms at sea. The mothers discuss protocol beneath their breath. There is no consensus and a few are now breaking ranks and gamely stepping forward to smile sympathetically at Freddie – he looks down, hates being singled out at the best of times – and offer condolences to Ollie, who scuffs his trainer against the painted yellow lines on the concrete playground like a schoolboy. Resisting the urge to hug Freddie – he is still mine, still someone else’s child – the women reach instead for Ollie, patting his arm or hand maternally, or, rather less maternally in Tash’s case, the small of his back, near the waistband of his jeans. Even those who are tearful and tongue-tied want to touch Ollie, as if they need to know what a bereaved dad actually feels like. Perhaps touching one makes them believe it won’t happen to them, too. I guess we’ve all wondered: having children makes you ponder your mortality, ghoulishly hypothesise the what ifs. Funny thing is that before this happened, I did that too, idly, indulgently, comfortable that things like this didn’t happen to people like us.
The school bell rings. There is a twitch in Ollie’s lower lip
now, barely perceptible but a sign to me, who knows that lower lip as well as I know my own, that he is fighting tears. If Ollie cries now I swear someone will try to breastfeed
him. Mrs Simpson, Freddie’s teacher, greets them at class 2B’s door. She is professional and kind and does not make a fuss – much to Ollie and Freddie’s obvious relief – and takes Freddie’s hand and leads him inside his old classroom, which, I hope, will be mercifully the same as it always was, unlike everything else in his life. The door closes. Ollie stands there for a moment, facing the shut door, lost, his face blank like a man who has woken up and no longer has the first clue who he is. Then his features reconfigure and he takes a deep breath, walks back to the tall iron school gates, his black eyes drilling into the ground.
This is not a good enough defence. Oh no. Without Freddie to shield him, Ollie is open season. Some of the women have been waiting for him to return: I know their migratory patterns and I know that normally they would have flocked to Starbucks by now. Instead, they’re hovering by the gate. Suze. Tash. Lydia. Liz. Usual suspects.
‘Is there anything, anything at all we can do to help?’ implores Suze. Her giant breasts quiver in the deep V of her gaping blue blouse as if they are domed conductors for the group’s electric pent-up emotion.
Ollie shakes his head and tries to smile. ‘No. Thanks.’ He starts to walk away.
Lydia bars him with her Ugg boot. ‘Washing?’ ‘Washing?’ repeats Ollie, puzzled. ‘Would you like us to do your washing, Ollie?’ Lydia speaks slowly as if addressing a small child, even though Ollie towers over her fairy frame.
‘Washing,’ he repeats as if it were something he hadn’t ever considered before, and probably hasn’t. ‘My mother . . .’ ‘Or shopping?’ Liz agitates her foot on her son’s blue
scooter. ‘I...I...’ Ollie is a man of few words, but is never
normally lost for them. He stares blankly at the scooter. ‘Would Freddie like to sleep over?’ Tash jumps into his hesitation, stepping closer so that he can smell the perfume caught within the soft pelt of her white fake fur stole. (Even I can smell the perfume and I’m near the school hall
guttering.) A lemony sun breaks through the cloud. Ollie’s pupils
shrink to pencil points. In the last three weeks he’s spent a lot of time alone in the dark, like a miner. His olive skin is pale and flaky. ‘I’m trying to keep Freddie close. Just at the moment.’
‘As normal as possible. Of course, of course,’ gushes Tash apologetically. ‘But if you ever need me to take Freddie to school, when, er, you go back to work.’ She blushes, wonder- ing if she’s said the wrong thing. ‘Not that I want to . . .’
I feel for him. Normally at this juncture I’d read the signs, swoop into the conversation and pluck him out, the sunny, social one to counterbalance his Heathcliffian northern tendencies. ‘Thanks. That would be great,’ he mumbles, giving them what they want, waiting to be released.
Tash looks around at the other women with unmistakable triumph.
Ollie digs his hands into his jeans pockets, attempts to walk away again.
Not so fast, buster! ‘You will let us know, won’t you?’ says Suze. She’s somehow standing in front of him without anyone sure how she got there. It’s social kung fu. ‘If you need anything, Ollie, anything at all? Just pick up the phone. You’ve got my number, haven’t you? Let me write it out for you just in case. Oh, bollocks. Anyone got a pen?’
Ollie grunts, like he always grunts when he begins to feel obligated. Ollie is one of the world’s kindest men, the best of men, but he hates obligation. He likes to think he can be selfish if he wants to. It’s an adolescent thing that lots of wives of music producers have to contend with. Most of the time his main selfishness, apart from nicking my moisturiser and refusing to cook, manifests itself merely in putting on headphones and sinking into his music, annoying but not up there in the great pantheon of male selfishness, clearly. I complained about this in the past but now wish I hadn’t, firstly because I knew about his anti-social solipsistic tend- encies from the beginning – I’d wake up in bed to find him wearing these big fat headphones over his long hair and I thought it quite the sexiest thing ever, like Paula on the bed with Michael Hutchence – and also because the flaw, if it is a flaw, is just Ollie. I should have realised I’d have been bored to tears with the man I often complained he wasn’t: the domesticated, fully socialised, Muswell Hill thirty- something dad behind the cake stall. Why did I not tell him more often that I loved him just as he was?

Like secrets, words that are left unsaid get buried with you.

Funny, warm and poignant, a Truly Madly Deeply for the twenty first century

Christina Hopkinson

A funny, incredibly touching and beautifully written story. Loved it

Jenny Colgan

Funny, smart but most of all, incredibly moving. A glorious emotional rollercoaster of a read

Tasmina Perry

Bittersweet, earthy and poignant.

Jojo Moyes

Funny and smart but never insubstantial...A terrific read

Elizabeth Buchan

A comforting tale of loss, loyalty and love, animated with timely humour and characters so authentic they become your friends. Beautifully penned, you won’t want it to end

Candis

This is a stunning book, poignant and funny, once started it is impossible to put down.

Hot Brands, Cool Places, read of the week

An escapist tale that still has its feet firmly on the ground'

Glamour

Well written, with believable and likeable characters, The Angel at No33 will have you laughing through your tears as the plot fizzles and sparkles on every page.

Red

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