The Love of My Afterlife(24)
I drag a kitchen chair over to the tall cupboard by my front door and, standing on my tiptoes, yank the plastic bag out. It’s much heavier than I anticipated and it bounces off my head before plopping onto the ground with a crinkly thud, me following swiftly behind.
I get my bearings and eagerly untie the yellow plastic strings at the top of the bag. As it opens, I’m hit with a scent that triggers a heady rush of emotion. Sadness and longing and nostalgia and anger tumble around in my stomach. I pull out a cotton dress, the fabric a red-and-white-love-heart print. How can these clothes still smell like Chanel No. 5 and Lenor and Nivea sun cream? Like Mum? I made sure to wash them all before I packed them away—I’d meant to take them to the charity shop but I’d somehow never got round to it.
I press the dress to my nose for a millisecond. I’m rewarded for my idiocy with a surge of recollections about Mum. In my memories she is never still. Always zipping from one room to the other, racing through chores, arranging parties, chatting to her pals on the phone, helping Gen and me with homework because Gen’s own mum was at work all the time. Mum treated home life like a project, giving it her all in an effort to make it a total success. After Dad broke her heart, it’s like she suddenly saw the whole project as a failure. Not just the marriage, but her entire life, including me.
She spent the next six months barely functioning, often sleeping in until 5:00 p.m., or having cocktail hour at 11:00 a.m., crying loudly in the bath every night. After Gen and I got home after school one day to find Mum passed out on the sofa, an empty saucepan burning away on the hob, I stopped inviting Gen over. I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of Gen knowing that since Dad had gone, life at home had become so bleak. By the time Mum came through the other side, Gen had decided she hated me. And then, of course, Mum met Gerard and moved to the artists’ commune in Texas, deciding to pick back up on the art she used to make before she got pregnant with me.
The dust layered over the old clothes makes me sneeze four times in a row before I recover enough to search through the bag for anything that might be suitable for a momentous kiss in the park.
Aha! There it is! I unearth the outfit Mum used to wear to go running. It’s much skimpier than I remember, though. A cool grey sports bra with orange stripes down the side and a pair of matching leggings. Mum was much smaller than my size 12 but that might be a good thing. If TV shows are anything to go by, then tight clothes could do the trick. I quickly pull the clothes on. I don’t have a full-length mirror to check that the bottom half looks good, but it seems to fit quite well. I check my top half in the bathroom mirror. The tightness makes my boobs splodge out at the top. Other than that it’s fine. Way better for running than anything else I have.
I blast my hair with the cool setting of the hair dryer and tie it up into my usual braids, fastening them securely at the top of my head with ten bobby pins and a shit-ton of hairspray. Then I dab some concealer under my eyes in what turns out to be a futile attempt to cover the grey circles caused by last night’s cocktails.
I slip my feet into my good old Nikes and I leave the flat.
13
I’m not sure I’ve ever been out of the house this early before. The four streets surrounding my building are much quieter without the arrivals and departures of the tourists from the station and surrounding hotels. Despite the hour, the temperature is already blazing, the scent of hot tarmac heavy in the air. I feel grateful to be wearing something so light. As I cross the road, the woman who runs the little florist’s hut by the estate agents gives a wave. I glance behind me to see who she’s waving at then realise that I am who she’s waving at. I tentatively wave back, but as I get closer to her, she gives me the strangest look. A cross between horror and amusement. That’s the exact way Gen and her gang used to look at me whenever I’d raise my hand to answer a question in class. Usually followed by a chorus of giggles and sometimes a wad of chewing gum somehow finding its way into my hair, hence the beginning of my daily extra-tight-braids ritual.
I scowl at the woman and chastise myself for not knowing better than to wave at people. I march past the gleaming white rows of buildings, taking a shortcut through a set of pretty cobbled mews. It’s less than a five-minute walk to the Italian Gardens in Kensington Gardens, and when I get there, I’m immediately taken by how serene it is. The ornate fountains send out a light mist that forms a miniature rainbow in the sunlight. There’s a heron perched on one of the statues. Up the hill to the left there’s a man setting up stripy green deck chairs in haphazard rows. A lone woman in a wide-brimmed hat lounges on a wooden bench, breakfasting on an icy Solero.
No wonder Mum used to come here every morning. It’s peaceful and open, just a gentle buzz of dog walkers and joggers passing by every so often.
Okay. Cooper’s note says that Jonah runs here with his group every morning at seven. I pull my phone from where it’s tucked into the waistband of my Lycra trousers. It’s 6:59 a.m.
I have no idea which entrance of Kensington Gardens Jonah will be coming from, so I decide that my best bet is to power walk around as fast as I can and save the jogging for when I’ve spotted him. I’m pretty sure that I only have around five minutes of full-on speed running available in my body, and I don’t want to use it up before I absolutely need to.
I pass a slick-looking jogger, who stares at my chest.