Free Afterwife by Polly Williams

whether she was free or not.
    “Sorry, I’m hounding you.” Suze’s face fell, and without her big smile it looked saggy and defeated and Jenny felt sorry for her. “I’ll let you get on.”
    She was hardly running the treasury. She could take off
one
morning if she wanted to. What if it was a genuine help to Ollie? “Actually, you know what, Suze? I’ll work it out somehow. I’ll come on Thursday.”
    “Fan-bloody-tastic!” Suze dug into her handbag and pulled out a baby yoga leaflet, scrawled her address on the back of it with a redpen and thrust it into Jenny’s hand. “I can’t believe I’ve finally got Jenny Vale, the real-life Jenny Vale, coming to my house.”
    “You know my surname?” This was all bewildering on some level she didn’t quite understand.
    Suze winked. “Sophie always spoke so warmly about you, Jenny.”
    Jenny felt a warm glow inside. “Did she?”
    “Although, you were a figure of much intrigue, let me tell you. Her clever copy editor friend with the complicated—” Suze suddenly stopped and flushed from neck to hairline, as if she’d caught herself just in time.

Five
    N othing like dying to give you a sense of perspective. The strange thing is that from up here, a few centimeters below the bathroom ceiling, engulfed in bubble bath steam (I’ve been watching over Freddie while he has a bath, willing him to wash behind his ears; he hasn’t), I’ve realized that certain universal truths passed unnoticed beneath the radar while I was alive, like, properly alive. I was so busy living I forgot to think about the things I’d miss when I was dead, which is kind of understandable once you think about it. Like that famous Damien Hirst shark in the tank of formaldehyde,
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
. I always liked that shark. I used to joke that I’d get Ping Pong preserved like that and call it
The Physical Impossibility of Ollie Remembering to Feed the Cat
. Ha!
    Anyway, first, the obvious stuff. Family and friends are the most precious things in the world. But you know what? I knew that. (
You
know that. Sorry.) I can honestly say, hand on the place my heart used to be, that I was never someone who took either for grantedwhile blood was pumping pink around my veins. Every time Freddie kissed me it gave me a little bloom of pleasure. I’d watch other women watching Ollie at a party, everyone wanting more of him than he ever gave—so elliptical, my rock ’n’ roll Darcy—knowing that I was the one going home with him, the one who got to talk to him for hours late at night, roll around the bed with him, read him stories from newspapers that made him laugh, the Ted Hughes poems he loved, placate him with kisses when I’d accidentally deleted
The Wire
from Sky Plus and filled up all the recording space with daytime cooking programs. And I got to see them both asleep—there but not there, dangling on the edge of dreams—Ollie, the most handsome man asleep; Freddie, just the most delicious boy who ever fell to earth. I always used to wonder if I filmed Freddie and speeded that film up whether you’d actually get to see him growing, like one of those wildlife films. I guess you would: he’s grown five millimeters since I died.
    I even watched Jenny sleep once, not that I ever told her, because she’d get embarrassed about it, being Jenny. It was the time I forced her to come to Bestival by stealthily buying her a ticket and a sleeping bag. (Brief character note here: Jenny is
not
a festival type of person; she thinks that the “all together now, one love” vibe is distinctly phony, whereas I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for it. She’d much rather visit a stately home garden with sculpted hedges and a tea garden.) We were sharing a leaking tent, lying side by side in our new damp sleeping bags, having already lost one phone (hers) and one brand-new North Face anorak (mine) and, on account of getting hopelessly lost on the festival