Free Afterwife by Polly Williams Page A

site, missed all the acts we had gone to see, which I assured her was par for the course. Anyway, I’d been struck by how pretty Jenny looked asleep, not blank pretty like conventionally pretty women, but thoughtful, like someone who had drifted off over the pages of an engrossing book. She is far prettier and far smarter than she imagines. I’ve told her this lots of times—notenough, I realize now—but she never believed me. Self-doubt. She blames her parents. Personally I blame Sam.
    Anyway, to get back to Damien Hirst’s fancy shark…I made a list this morning while waiting for Ollie to wake up and feed poor old neglected Ping Pong. (Needless to say, the concern isn’t mutual. He still hisses every time I pass.) Okay, the list. I do like a list.
    A few random things I wish I’d realized before the bus hit
    • That, all in all, I would spend twenty-two years of my thirty-five years of life counting calories. That’s a lot of unnecessary math.
    • That I would only ever wear one-quarter of my wardrobe. That’s a lot of unnecessary clothes.
    • That I should have had more sex. You can’t have sex when you’re dead.
    • That rare is the friend who inhabits your single life and is still there when your kid starts school. (Step forward, Jenny.) Most disappear into the vortex somewhere between the “we must meet up soon, LOL” email and the Facebook friend confirmation.
    • That one-third of the people we invited to our wedding we would not see again in the six years since. (Apart from my funeral, but that doesn’t count.)
    • That it is okay to imagine marriage will be like New York City and discover that it’s more like Brussels. It does not mean that something is wrong, or that you are doomed to divorce. It just means you’ve hopped on a different plane.
    • That turbulence isn’t going to bring the plane down. You will live to touch the tarmac again.
    • That the guy sitting next to you on the Northern Line, the one with the rucksack and the frenzied, darting eyes, is not a terrorist. He’s just been dumped by his girlfriend.
    • That every phase passes. The baby stops teething. The tantrums become sulks. The darling baby bootees will no longer fit. He will learn to spell “because.” (This said, not sure Ollie will ever remember to put the recycling out on a Wednesday night.)
    • That, yes, you can have too many tea lights.
    • That I did drink too much. That those glasses were not one unit. They were three. But they didn’t kill me in the end.
    • That I sunbathed too much. It gave me laughter lines. But it didn’t kill me in the end.
    • That no life is too short to stuff a mushroom. Stuffing the mushroom is one of the nice bits. It’s washing up the baking tray afterward that is to be avoided.
    • That no one will notice if you don’t bake a cake for the school cake sale unless you apologize profusely.
    • Revision: only Suze will notice.
    • If you harbor a secret from your friend and you agonize whether to tell them and are
almost
on the eve of telling them when you get knocked down by a bus it means the secret is irretrievable. It’s like dropping a laptop in the bath.

Six
    N o, it was hardly a blood-soaked favela. It was leafy. It was lovely. It was the kind of street where children chalked hopscotch on the pavement and people hung children’s dropped gloves on the neighbor’s hedging. So why was the 4×4
Free Zone
sticker on Suze’s living room window making her so bloody anxious? Suze’s text message yesterday afternoon—“Bake cake guys!”—hadn’t helped either. Who were the “guys”? And baking?
Baking!
Jenny hadn’t baked since home economics. What did it mean that she was in her midthirties and childless and had never baked so much as a scone? Jesus. It must mean something. Panicked, she’d bought a cake from a posh bakery, a whole wheat apple cake that looked like it would take at least six months to digest, and could in fact double as a bulletproof vest