This is the story of loss – and what happens afterwards… When Emma gets home after work one evening, she calls hello to her husband Jay, as she always does. Stepping into the kitchen, she sees he has done the shopping, as she had reminded him to; remembered to buy peppercorns; has bought her flowers. Everything is neatly put away. But Jay is not there. A photographer, all Jay has left behind is his camera containing five photographs, which are unlike his other work. Emma follows the images to Cornwall, beginning a journey in which old relationships are re-written and new ones are formed. As the visual mystery of each photograph unfolds, Emma finds herself unravelling and perilously close to breaking point. But could her unlikely salvation lie in the sea, a small community of swimmers and the promise of something Emma thought she didn't want?'Truly beautiful' Debbie Johnson 'A stunning story about love, longing and learning to live again after loss. Utterly immersive, and brimming with exquisite prose, AFTERWARDS is a thought-provoking and powerful debut with a message of hope at its heart. Emma's journey is guaranteed to stay with you long after you turn the final page' Holly Miller 'A delicately crafted literary novel, capturing in pin-sharp prose the myriad of emotions that grief can cause and how even in the darkest of circumstances, we can learn to live again' Living Magazines' I've already given this debut novel to my mum and my best friend. It's a raw and very human account of what happens "afterwards"' Back Story
Frequently asked questions
Yes, you can cancel anytime from the Subscription tab in your account settings on the Perlego website. Your subscription will stay active until the end of your current billing period. Learn how to cancel your subscription.
No, books cannot be downloaded as external files, such as PDFs, for use outside of Perlego. However, you can download books within the Perlego app for offline reading on mobile or tablet. Learn more here.
Perlego offers two plans: Essential and Complete
Essential is ideal for learners and professionals who enjoy exploring a wide range of subjects. Access the Essential Library with 800,000+ trusted titles and best-sellers across business, personal growth, and the humanities. Includes unlimited reading time and Standard Read Aloud voice.
Complete: Perfect for advanced learners and researchers needing full, unrestricted access. Unlock 1.4M+ books across hundreds of subjects, including academic and specialized titles. The Complete Plan also includes advanced features like Premium Read Aloud and Research Assistant.
Both plans are available with monthly, semester, or annual billing cycles.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes! You can use the Perlego app on both iOS or Android devices to read anytime, anywhere — even offline. Perfect for commutes or when you’re on the go. Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Afterwards by Charlotte Leonard in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literature General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
The doorbell rings and I glance down at my phone to check the time. It’s too late to be the postman. I think about ignoring it and going back to bed but I’m scared my mother has arrived again without an invite and will shortly try to break the door down. At least her leggings would be used for actual exercise for once. But it isn’t her. It’s Anne, Jay’s mother, waiting in the winter rain. She compresses her umbrella in the doorway, wraps and binds it tight then seals it with the Velcro tab, rainwater catching in the fabric of the folds.
‘Can I come in?’
I do not answer her but cross my arms and watch the rain that’s falling heavy on her greying roots. The water drips are trailing down the contours of her face and the cheekbones that are Jay’s. I want to tell her to ‘Fuck Off’ and that Jay wouldn’t want her here, but it feels like more effort than just nodding ‘yes’ so I step aside to make some room. I watch her, silent, as she settles her umbrella up against the wall inside the door and the water slowly leaks to form a pool. She fumbles with the buttons of her coat.
‘I’m sorry, Emma,’ she blurts out fast. ‘I never should have said those things. I just… It’s just so hard to comprehend. But I never should have said that just because you married him you would have all of the answers.’ I stare at her in silence. She peels off her gloves and rubs her hands like tinder. ‘Please, Emma. Can I sit somewhere?’
I nod, but just because it’s raining and the way she looks reminds me of a kitten being drowned. I keep my arms folded tight across my chest, and watch her walk into the kitchen, select the chair that Jay liked best and pull it out to sit. I flinch as wooden chair legs scrape against the wooden floor. She turns more slowly than she should and hangs her coat over the square framed back of the chair and smooths it flat. She is neat, just like her son.
The rain knocks hard against the windows as if begging to be let in too.
‘I… I don’t know exactly why I came,’ she finally says. I just stand still and wait. ‘I…’ she tries once more.
‘Are you here to tell me that I killed your son? Again?’ I ask coldly, my lips compressed.
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘No, not at all. I wanted to say sorry. I’m so angry and…’
She smells of strong perfume mixed with the farmyard scent that’s escaping from her sodden, woollen coat.
‘Well, you’ve said it now,’ I say.
She doesn’t leave but takes a breath and spins her wedding ring in circles, the gold band loose beneath the knuckle of her thin ring finger. There is silence for a while.
‘I really am so sorry, Emma. I know it’s not your fault. It’s just…’ Her words drop off the cliff edge of the sentence and she puts her hand towards her hair and tries to recompose herself, to smooth the saturated strands of brown into an ordered shape.
I look at this wet woman in my kitchen, a stranger tied to me across a generation with a surname that we added to ourselves along with wedding rings. A tie that is now half undone. Her eyes sit low inside their sockets and her skin is taut and thin over the canvas bone frame of her face. I really want to hate her but I’m tired and the person I despise, she isn’t here. Instead there is someone just as lonely, just as lost as I am.
‘It’s fine,’ I say at last, possibly meaning it.
She’s shaking just a little, from the cold or from the grief. I do what others do to me and offer tea, forgetting for a moment that the fridge is almost empty. She takes a beer to my surprise. I want to laugh out loud at this prim and uptight woman swigging beer from out the bottle before lunch. Anne looks around the kitchen at all the flowers in the vases and all the flowers in the sink and all the photos on the walls.
‘Are those ones Jay’s?’ she asks confused.
She stands to get a closer look at the A4 prints tacked up along the wall in random spaces between frames, surrounded by small Blu-Tack spots. I sit and wait. She takes another swig of beer, then shakes her head a little side to side as if to readjust her thoughts. I imagine all her thoughts like flecks inside the snowglobe of her brain and wait for them to settle down, to rearrange themselves into a landscape that is new. ‘But these two here are Cornwall. Why on earth did he have those?’ She points towards the wooden door and the sun which hovers low above a beach and strip of sea.
How would I know? I want to say. How does she know? I bite my lip and shrug, go back to stand before the open fridge.
‘I have no idea. I’m not sure what they’re of, or even where. I thought that they might tell me something but I’m not sure what I thought they’d say.’
She paces up and down the room and finally stills, shaking her head in what looks like deep confusion.
‘Yes, these are both of Cornwall. This door right here, it’s from The Nook.’
An almost-laugh escapes her mouth. She seems slightly hysterical.
‘The what?’ I hold the handle of the fridge a little tighter in my hand. I can smell the kitchen cleaner someone’s used to scrub the empty shelves. I stare into the artificial glow and remember the bright dahlias.
‘The Nook,’ she says again. ‘It’s a cottage down in Cornwall. Did he never mention it?’
I think about the fact that there is yet another thing I didn’t know.
‘No. He never said a word,’ I say.
My speech sounds strangled, strange, detached.
‘I didn’t know he’d been there since…’ says Anne. I hold the handle of the fridge and grip it tight. ‘The cottage was my parents’. I grew up there. After Jay was born my parents let us stay there every summer while they visited my uncle. But then… then… Well, I haven’t been there since Jay started boarding school. And once my parents died I planned to sell it, finally have some money for myself, but Martin thought it better that we kept it as a rental. He has managed it for all these years.’
‘So, Martin knew that Jay was there?’ I ask.
‘No.’ She slowly shakes her head. ‘Jane must have given him a key.’
‘Who’s Jane?’ I ask.
‘She lives next door. She was my friend.’ Anne looks back at the image of the cottage door. ‘It’s usually empty in the winter. No one wants to go on holiday to a seaside village in the cold.’
She laughs again. Too animated, her laughter and intensity unnerving.
‘But why would Jay go there?’ I ask.
‘I’ve no idea,’ says Anne, shaking her head again.
The energy seems suddenly to dissipate and she takes a seat, slumps in the chair. There are things I didn’t know about her son. So many things. I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing.
‘But why?’ I ask again, confused. ‘Why there? Why then?’
‘I’m not sure, Emma.’ Her voice is tired suddenly, all languid, loose and slow. ‘You know he didn’t speak to us. The last few years… His father…’ She bites her lip and a single tear threatens the tight composure of her face.
This woman who I hardly know beyond the fact that she’s the mother of the man I loved is now crying silently. Her suffering is hard to watch and I wish that she’d just go away. But I find my body moving to her, folding itself round her fragile shape as she tilts her head into the cradle of my neck, her head too weighted down with feeling to hold up. We sit there with our beer bottles, swaying just a little. Two women locked inside a strange embrace; an awkward dance of mutual loss and separate loves, both grieving for the Jay we knew and the Jay we clearly didn’t know.
Gift
‘I’m actually going there tomorrow…’ Anne re-finds herself. She takes a clutch of keys from the pocket of her coat, a slight tremor in her hands resonating through the metal and turning into sound.
‘Going where?’ I ask.
‘The Nook,’ she says. ‘I’m leaving Martin, leaving Jay’s dad.’ She laughs again, that high-pitched nervous laugh that sets my teeth on edge. She fumbles with her fingers, locates a key, unthreads it in a circle from off the awkward looping ring. ‘For you.’ The ice-cold key is pressed into my palm and instinctively my hand contracts, my fingers curl and close to form a fist around the solid shape. ‘You’re welcome to come too. If you need to get away.’
‘That’s kind of you but I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m sure you need your space.’
I’m saying no but my fingers won’t unfurl. She struggles, pushing a large button through an eyelet in her still-damp coat, and rubs at her thin wrist before walking to the door and waiting rain. A sudden wave of want floods in, a wish for her to stay a little longer; this woman who shows me shards of Jay in the way she moves her hands towards her face and the way she sounds out certain words. My heart contracts against her leaving. As she leans to zip her heeled boots she winces slightly, quickly pulls her face back to a smile.
‘Well, if you change your mind,’ she says, ‘there’s a bedroom for you there. You can turn up any time you like. Just call and let me know you’re on your way.’ She sinks the other foot down deep into the second heeled boot and pulls the zip with shaking hands. ‘I’m done with space. I’ve been alone since I was married. I’d appreciate the company and you might find a change of scene is good.’ She looks towards the photographs and shakes her head again.
‘Thank you for this,’ I say, ‘but I just need to be at home right now.’
A steep and frightening dizziness descends from out of nowhere and I grip onto the table edge to stop the room from moving and the ground from rising up to meet me. The world is spinning fast and I can feel its momentum.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Anne concerned.
‘Yes,’ I say. But in the mirror by the door I see myself as she sees me, a pale face with sunken cheeks and clammy skin. My stomach swims with acid bile and there’s a high-pitched ringing in my ears. ‘I just need to be at home,’ I say again, my voice coming from far away. ‘I’m where I need to be.’
Despite the words, the key stays clasped inside my hand, inside a grip that won’t undo.
I do not give it back.
Nightmare
Jay is naked and entwined with Ben. Their limbs are interlocked and gleam slightly with sweat and their faces are so close that they are breathing in each other’s breath.
Jay looks at Ben and grins.
That grin that makes the world wait.
And their eyes burn constellation bright with want and love and lust.
Confession
A doctor I’ve never met before pats the plastic-covered chair beside his desk, his eyes remaining firmly locked on a large computer screen. His desk is piled high with stuff as if a tide came in and dumped an ocean’s worth of plastic round his wrists. He rubs his fingers through the scratch of greying stubble that spreads like algae at low tide covering the contours of his jaw. The room smells of antiseptic, bleach and the burning scent of dust that has settled deep behind the radiators that are always on too high. He brushes a thermometer aside and a pen without a lid to make more space to type.
‘I’m Dr Jones. How can I help?’
‘I… I…’ I stumble over words, unsure of what to say, forgetting in the moment how to speak. The pause becomes uncomfortable.
Eventually he stops typing and looks straight at me, his eyes meeting with mine and suddenly I realize how few people do this to me now. Instead they watch the walls, they search the sky or glance down at their feet as if to check that they’re still rooted to the earth. I wonder if they worry that my sadness is contagious, that some power lies inside my widow eyes, Medusa strong since they’ve seen death.
‘What exactly can I do for you today?’ he asks again.
I take a tissue from the man-sized box that lies among the debris on his desk. I scrunch the tissue, make it small and fiddle with the crumpled ball.
‘My husband died. He killed himself before Christmas.’
I watch the doctor’s body shift a little in his seat as he looks towards the clutter of his desk and finds the pen lid in the chaos and searches for the pen, now lost. He clears his throat.
‘I really am so sorry.’
‘Why do people keep on saying that?’ I ask. ‘You didn’t kill him, did you?’
He doesn’t answer, simply says, ‘I can suggest some things to help.’ He moves the mouse towards the left, pulling up a digital prescription screen. ‘As a start I can refer you for some counselling. I’ll mark it down as urgent. It’s important to keep talking but the wait can be a while. In the meantime there’s a support group close to here called SoBS. You’ll find some people there in the same boat as you. Here. I’ll write it down…’
