Her voice is steady and her eyes are bright. It doesn’t exactly fool me, but, for now, it will do. So I grin, leaning across to hug her tightly. Her wild curls tickle at my nose, just like always. “It won’t be for a while, I’m sure. Plenty of time to get used to the idea.”
Violet makes a thoughtful noise, appraising me in that examining way she often does. It makes me shift uncomfortably, an insect under the microscope.
To escape this examination, I clap my hands together and stand up. “Anyway. Tea?”
Violet’s turned back to her phone now I’ve stood up, but spares me a guilty look. “You’ll need to go to the shop for milk, then...”
Typical. “You promised me that when we lived together you’d stop consuming a damn dairy every day.”
She shoots me a grin, one finger tracing an invisible halo above her head as she watches me hunt around for some better shoes. “Love you, tit.”
“Love you, dickhead,” I reply automatically, following our usual routine.
So a moment later I’m stepping back out into the night, with stupid heels back on because my trainers were buried somewhere under Violet’s vast collection of shoes. Gripping my keys tightly in my hand (I don’t want to be outside for any longer than I need to be), I start down the street.
Tugging my coat tight around me, I quicken my pace. The night is silent—or as silent as London nights can ever be—which is a nice change. No buses hissing to a halt, no planes roaring across the sky and nobody else mad enough to be out in this weather. Just me and the stars. Perhaps I should stop and appreciate this moment. But it’s too cold.
Just as I pass the bus stop, that’s when it happens.
I don’t know what’s going on at first, just that the pavement seems to disappear beneath me. My foot tries to go one place, but the frozen ground has other ideas, sending it sliding out to the left. For a moment it feels as if my balance has saved the day, but then the other foot skids against the icy patch I’ve stumbled onto and the world tips. Like somebody has trapped me in a snow globe and turned it upside down.
There’s a brief second when all I see is the sky, burnt orange from the streetlights and scarred with the fuzzy trails of unheard airplanes. Then gravity grabs at me and drags me down to the pavement in one swift, heartless motion. I hear—no, feel—a crack somewhere on the back of my head.
Distantly, I hear a whistle. Like an old-fashioned kettle boiling on the stove. And then everything goes black.
Rule Two
We Can’t Be Prepared For Everything
THERE’S A DANGER to be found in complacency. Maybe you’ve heard this before. Don’t become complacent, don’t settle, don’t get comfortable. Prepare for the unexpected.
Of course, this is fine when the unexpected is a new job offer or a surprise trip to Lapland. We all can learn to adapt to that. The human brain is remarkably well built for adaptation, like it’s still preparing to evolve into something else. You shoulder new responsibilities, you settle into new routines.
Sometimes, though, change leaves no room for adaptation. It creeps up behind you in the shadows, smirking to itself as it hides its nasty secret. It waits until the opportune moment; until you’re happy, cozy, settled. It waits until you’re just feeling like life is heading in the right direction.
Then all it takes is one unsteady paving stone, one patch of ice, and everything goes to shit. Change washes through your life like the cruelest tsunami and you can bet there will be casualties.
So, really, the saying “prepare for the unexpected” is a whole load of crap. You can’t prepare for it. You can just hope that when the wave of change is coming by, it somehow leaves you be.
* * *
So, death goes like this. First comes unconsciousness, from the pavement. Then it feels like being shoved in the back, but instead of tumbling forward, there is a distinct sensation of tumbling out. There is no moment of looking back and seeing your body below, floating away from you (or you away from it). Instead there’s simply an awareness that you’re no longer on the Earth.
Then comes the white. So bright that it feels like it will burn right through your skull. Until suddenly, it clears. No pearly gates, just a desk in a flat gray office that could have been anywhere in the world.
Except somehow, I know that this is it. That I, Daisy Cooper, am dead.
I was only twenty-three. Was that really it?
On the desk is a slim manila-colored file, and a red telephone with one of those old-fashioned spin dials and with three squat lights on top that are all flashing red. A chair sits on either side of the desk. There are three doors; one door directly behind the other side of the desk while one is off to the side. Another stands just behind me and I think I came through it, but my memory feels like it’s been put in a blender. Behind the desk is a calendar on the wall, with countless tally counts squished into each day’s box, in dainty pencil marks. And that’s it.
Instinctively, I know I need to sit. But I can’t move; is there even anything to move? It feels like I’ve been vaporized, and now I am nothing but smoke in the wind. I hear the side door open with a slight huff as it gets stuck on a bit of threadbare carpet, and I’m struck by how ordinary this all is. Perhaps I’m not dead.
“Hello, I’m Death.”
Bang goes that theory.
Death, then, comes to sit on the faded office chair that waits on his side of the desk, adjusting its position with a scowl of concentration. I distantly feel my toes curling tightly in my shoes. Like I’m getting ready to run. A tight feeling starts in my throat; running probably won’t do much good here. I force myself to focus on this newcomer, try to stop my hands from shaking.
He is tall and lean, though not, as you might expect, skeletal. His skin is definitely present, and even comes with a smattering of freckles and precise dimples in his cheeks. He wears his hair, which at least attempts to stick to the stereotype by being jet-black, in a precisely mussed style, with carefully selected wisps falling just above his eyes. A pointed nose, and then eyes the color of the morning grass, a moss green that darken slightly as he glowers at the file on his desk. Is it wrong to call the Grim Reaper attractive? Undecided.
He wears a periwinkle-blue shirt with the buttons done right up to the top, tucked into a pair of black skinny jeans. He could have been any guy in a bar, except for the white tag on his chest that says “Death,” with a cartoon skull doodled beside it. Someone’s idea of a joke, perhaps.
“Sit, sit please Mrs. Aberdale.”
I don’t know why he’s calling me that. I stare, and I’m sure if I do have a body, my mouth is hanging open. He looks up, raising an eyebrow before beckoning with a hand I note to be covered in flecks and smudges of pen. “Come on. Today’s a busy one and you’ve been a right pain to locate. We weren’t expecting you for another hour.”