Chapter 68
Josh
As I make my speech at the standing-room-only launch of Graveyard 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.’
‘Never stopped Mick Jagger.’
‘Mick Jagger’s in his seventies. What’s he got to do with anything?’
‘You’re very peculiar sometimes. Eternal youth is what everyone dreams of. Take it from an oldie. Imagine if I could rewind to being twenty-nine. Wonderful,’ she says, with a wistful sigh.
As she passes back the flask, I can’t help noticing the liver spots on her hands. The way they quiver now, ever so slightly. How she keeps clearing her throat, as if the years have somehow lodged there.
‘Why don’t you try dating someone in their fifties?’ The edges of Mum’s eyes crease up with affection. ‘You’re such a catch, darling. I’m sure there would be ladies queueing up to—’
I raise a hand. ‘Can we not.’ I appreciate the sentiment, but I am very keen never again to hear my own mother describe me as a catch.
Mum looks crestfallen, so I attempt to explain. ‘I look as though I should be dating twenty-somethings. But in reality, yes – I should be with someone closer to fifty. Even you must understand how messed up that is.’
Navigating this stuff is only becoming more challenging as the years go by.
Because the truth is, just as sleeping with a twenty-something would feel too weird these days, so would undressing someone of my own chronological age.
I’d find the physical disparity too hard to get over.
Nor could I bear to think of people assuming that was my particular kink.
And this was always Rachel’s big fear. She refused to accept that I wouldn’t eventually start to think of her that way. But, with us, it was different. I knew her too intimately. She was wrong, when she concluded I’d one day become uncomfortable with being married to her.
Her next big birthday will be fifty. But I have never thought of her as anything other than the girl I fell in love with.