The Love of My Afterlife(21)

I have no clue what he’s talking about.

“Name?” he eventually says with a little huff.

“Delphie Denise Bookham.”

“Only need your first one, but fine!” He hands me the mic. I take it from him with a trembling hand, down the cocktail that’s in the other.

The piano man starts to play the opening vamp of the song. Shaking, I lift the microphone to my lips.

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

“You have to actually sing!” the piano man hisses, playing the same opening vamp once again.

The surrounding crowd looks at me, blank-faced, but then the sequin-vested bar guy walks over to stand next to me and quietly starts singing the song, his voice unreasonably beautiful. He gives me a nod of encouragement. But despite that and the tequila and the threat of Merritt taking a day away from me, I can’t do it. I think my ears are sweating. Just yesterday my life involved interacting with as few people as I could get away with. And now, somehow, I’m standing on a platform in front of a bunch of total strangers being forced to sing a song I only sort of know for a pushy Afterlife Therapist who wants to laugh at me before she kills me.

Just when I think things can’t get any worse, I spot a woman towards the back of the room. She’s with the group wearing the feather boas and is clearly the leader—her alpha energy creating a sort of aura around her.

My breath catches in my throat as it dawns on me that the woman is Gen. Best friend turned evil tormentor Gen. She’s pointing at me and saying something to her friends, smirking.

Bile jets into my throat. How is she here? Why is she here? My stomach swoops and I worry I’m going to be sick. I drop the microphone onto the piano, where it makes a discordant jangle on the keys.

“Hey!” Piano Man scolds. “That’s a premium Sennheiser 430!”

“S-sorry,” I call back as I dart away from the piano.

My jaw tightens as Gen starts to walk towards me. And it’s only then that I realise that the woman is not Gen at all. Just a skinny, confident-looking woman with blond hair but, actually, a completely different face. I wait for my heart to stop pounding, but it doesn’t. The very notion that it might have been Gen has set waves of cortisol off in my bloodstream. My heart drums.

“Are you alright?” I hear the sequinned barman ask, though his voice sounds like it’s coming from underwater.

“Sorry,” I mutter again.

Then I whirl around and race as fast as I can out of the basement bar and onto the crowded street.

I don’t stop running until I reach the bus stop.





11





I get off the bus at Paddington, and as the summer evening breeze hits me I realise that I am drunk. I don’t drink often, so the cocktails have really hit me, and I find myself stumbling down past the library, tripping over thin air around every thirty seconds.

“Delphie? Delphie Bookham? Goodness, is that you?”

I look behind me to see a lanky man jogging over to me. How does he know my name? And why is he running after me?

I speed up my walk, managing about two meters before my lack of co-ordination means I go tumbling onto the pavement.

“Nooooo!”

The chaser catches up while I’m still splayed on the ground. Relief softens my shoulders as the glow of a streetlamp reveals that my “assailant” is actually just the man I met this morning at the library. The one who helped me out with all the books.

“You silly goose!” the man says, holding out a hand to help me up.

I ignore the hand because I can get up myself. Except that everything seems to be swaying the wrong way.

“It’s me, Aled!” the man says, holding out his hand again.

I have no choice but to take it. He yanks me upright, surprisingly strong for someone so skinny.

“I’m fine now!” I say brightly to Aled. “Thanks for the help. All the best to you and yours!”

As I make my way down the street, I immediately careen into the wall, bouncing off it right into a bollard. This walking-straight thing is not working out for me at all. Aled catches up and steadies me.

“How far have you to go? Let me walk you. Unless it’s more than a ten-minute trek, in which case I’ll call us a cab. I’m returning from my crime lovers’ book club at the library.” He thumbs backwards towards the old library building. “And, frankly, I’m shattered. People are bloody exhausting.”

I give him a sideways glance and point over the road. “I only live down there. And I agree. People are exhausting.”

“Exhausting but necessary.”

“Not necessarily necessary,” is what I intend to say but it comes out more like “Not nesha neshararraaa.” Somehow Aled seems to understand.

“Come on. Let’s get you back, you enormous pisshead.”

I let him angle me towards my house and only half listen as he tells me more about the books he gave me today along with a few others he could recommend. “How Do They Sleep at Night? isn’t in stock, but I could order it in and it’ll be at the library within seven to ten days.”

“I probably won’t be here in seven to ten days,” I mutter, uncertain of anything after tonight’s disaster.

“Off on your holidays, are you?”

“Something like that,” I say, realising that we’re now right outside my front door.