‘Shit. Is Josh okay?’
Polly tips her head back and forth. ‘There’s so much going on for him right now, I don’t think he’s had much of a chance to feel sad about it.’
‘He’s talking about a launch,’ Ingrid says casually. ‘Will you go?’
I frown. ‘I’d like to, but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘But Oliver.’
68.
Josh
February 2018
As I make my speech at the standing-room-only launch ofGraveyard Heart, I wonder how many of the audience are looking at me through the lens of my being Andrea Bewley’s ex. Or if any of them are wondering how old I actually am.
So far, I’ve still told only my friends and family about the pill. But everyone I work with will soon have to know. I assume they’ve been too polite to ask until now. Or maybe they think I’m just really into fillers. But at least a handful of them – and possibly the few loyal readers I have – must be wondering why this supposed forty-seven-year-old doesn’t look a day over twenty-nine.
I’ve been worrying, constantly, about the world discovering my secret. I panic in interviews about slipping up, getting my birth decade wrong. Saying something that doesn’t quite add up, to a journalist who’s on the ball enough to notice.
I have had minor concerns, too, that raising my head above the public parapet might reignite the interest of the lunatics who kept breaking into my flat before. I’ve been quite enjoying the feeling of Big Pharma not being on my back. And I don’t want any renewed attention swinging Wilf’s way, either.
The afternoon after the launch, Mum and I make a trip to Dad’s headstone. We sit wrapped up on a bench beneath an aluminium sky, next to a bare-boned silver birch. I’ve filled a flask with hot chocolate, and we pass it back and forth.
‘I half-thought we might see Andrea last night,’ Mum says, after a while.
Six months have passed since Andrea left. I’ve not heard a thing from her, and she’s blocked my number. It’s as though I never even existed. ‘No, that’s well and truly over.’
‘And no Rachel?’
I shake my head and let out a breath, watch it turn to mist. The graveyard is deserted, the ground rock-solid with cold.
The last time I saw Rachel, she arrived on my doorstep a few days after her dad’s funeral with a box of his old vinyls, and informed me she thought we probably shouldn’t speak again. I knew it had to be related to the way Oliver had been looking at me during the wake, as if he was waiting for a good window to slip something lethal into my G&T.
Still. I wanted to ask why. I wanted to talk to her about Andrea. I wanted to sit on the sofa together and go through those old records and reminisce about her dad.
It was unfortunate, I suppose, that I had my top off at the time. I’d been doing yoga in the living room, hadn’t thought to retrieve a T-shirt.
‘Was it about her, then?’ Mum asks me now.
‘Was what about who?’
‘Graveyard Heart. About Rachel.’
‘What? No. Why does everyone keep asking me that? I told you, I don’t base my books on real people.’
At this point, amazingly, she starts trying to talk me through the concept of dating apps. She rummages around in her bag, produces a scrap of paper, holds it at arm’s length. ‘Plenty. Of. Fish. Quite clever, isn’t it?’
I know Mum was sad for a long time, after Rachel and I split. But it’s coming up for seventeen years now. So I guess the pain of our parting has faded slightly, for her.
‘Is it?’ I smile faintly. ‘Look, dating apps are no place for people like me.’
She looks outraged on my behalf. ‘Why aren’t they?’
‘Because I look nearly two decades younger than I actually am.’
