Ghoster

by Jason Arnopp

  All this rain feels useful, because I can tell myself it’s the only source of moisture on my face. After all, if I were crying over Scott Palmer, gaslighter extraordinaire, then what kind of flimsy excuse for a person would I be?

  Doesn’t matter how much the wind tries to rock me, or how close the sea dares to get to my shoes, because anger sees me through. Anger keeps me walking straight.

  I am the rage of each white-crested wave, as it slams onto the glistening stones.

  I am the howl at the heart of this gale.

  I am the unearthly shriek of each and every gull that flies overhead.

  I am the open white and screaming mouth of the moon.

  I am a scorned woman with extremely wet feet.

  Look out: my pocket is buzzing and here’s the True Romance ringtone. The screen says Unknown Number.

  Buoyed by anger and alcohol, I answer straight away.

  After what feels like one whole minute of static, an unfamiliar woman’s voice cuts through the line. Her voice carries the same flat, dark tone as Mr You’re Going To Love It Here. “Listen to me. I don’t know how you came to have this phone, but you need to stop using it, right now.”

  The phrase red rag to a bull springs to mind. “No, I really don’t need to stop – you only want me to. Is this Samantha? I’ll bet Scott’s right there with you, the fucking coward, getting you to do his dirty work. Well, you can tell him from me that—”

  She cuts me off. “This is not your phone, so don’t use it.”

  “Why not?”

  “For your own fucking good. Trust me.”

  Wow, death threat klaxon! “Am I supposed to be scared or something? You’ll be pleased to know I’m recording this conversation.” I’m totally not recording this conversation, but really wish I was. “I suppose you daren’t tell me who you are, right? Not to worry, though, I’m sure the police will find out for me.”

  A dead tone hums in my ear.

  I stop to rest in a seafront shelter with my heart pounding, an out-of-shape boxer after a prize bout. Jesus, that was… something. This woman was definitely connected to Scott: surely one of his Tinder squeezes. Or could this have been Gwyneth?

  By the time I reach the short front path that runs up to the Van Spencer, I’m dying to get inside and pass out. Someone’s standing outside the front doors, pressing buttons on the entryphone panel. A guy, I think, wearing a sharp and rain-spattered suit. His smooth-shaven head reflects the glow of the spotlights that surround the entrance.

  If I were a proper resident here, I might be concerned about this random bloke gaining access to the building if I open the door. As it is, I couldn’t care less.

  Producing my keys, I say, “Excuse me,” and he steps aside.

  As I jam my key into the door, I side-eye the person’s face and jump clean out of my skin, because this guy is Scott.

  IZZY

  wtf so scotts back… whats the deal then… was it all a big misunderstanding

  KATE

  No. This person wasn’t Scott, but he looks exactly like him.

  IZZY

  whaaaat some guy who happened to look like your ex… u need glasses or have u lost it

  KATE

  This guy looked like Scott because he was his brother, Raymond. He much prefers Ray, though.

  IZZY

  jesus okay but…

  KATE

  his twin brother

  IZZY

  jeeeeezus woman… u could really be in trouble now… whatever u do dont bang this twin too

  KATE

  Too late.

  IZZY

  whaaaaaaaat tell me ur fuckin jokin

  KATE

  Okay, I’m joking.

  IZZY

  phew

  IZZY

  … but are u really joking tho

  KATE

  Yes, of course I’m bloody joking. What do you think I am?

  IZZY

  a slut lol… so what happened… paint me the rest of the picture hun… u jumped like fuck and then what

  KATE

  Well… I’m having a drink with him right now. He’s coming back from the loo, gotta go.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  5 October

  “So you’d like me to dish all the dirt on Scott, is that what we’re saying here?”

  Ray Palmer sparks a cigarette and winks, actually winks. He and I have settled around a heavy stone table in the front beer garden of the Amsterdam Hotel. A short walk from the Van Spencer, this place looks out over the seafront. A huge beer-branded parasol keeps steady rain off us, while an overhead heater fends off the cold.

  I’m still recovering from the shock of seeing “Scott” at that front door.

  When I laid eyes on Ray’s face, I physically recoiled, because the resemblance is un-fucking-canny. He has the same eyes as Scott, which annoyingly means I find myself gazing into them for a little too long. His accent might be more harshly East London than Scott’s, but the voice itself is the same, which leaves me with the uneasy sense that I really am talking to my ex. What if Scott went mad for a few days, cut his hair off, joined a cult alongside Gwyneth Cooper…

  … Joining The Death Grip Cult…

  … then got brainwashed into thinking he was his own twin? Or what if he’s consciously pretending to be his brother? Could this be the next step of his plan to terrorise and humiliate me?

  Pah, sheer paranoia. What did I ever do to Scott to deserve such punishment? And besides, it would be ludicrously brazen of Scott to masquerade as his own twin.

  Would it be any more brazen than the combined weight of the lies he already told you? How do you know that Scott Palmer isn’t a dangerous sociopath – a real wild one?

  If so, then he’s doing a very convincing job of impersonating his twin. Besides the shaven head, Ray carries himself so differently. His grey suit, snazzy-collared red shirt and pointy shoes all create the look of a Las Vegas pimp, or a poker player fallen on hard times. And whereas Scott’s default facial position was an open smile, Ray’s natural manner feels far less trusting. From the second we met, he’s been shrewdly looking me over, as if trying to work out what makes me tick… while blatantly glancing at my chest.

  Back at those front doors, there had been awkward introductions. Interestingly, whereas Maureen had clearly never heard of me, Ray actually said, Oh, Kate! I’ve heard so much about you. This could so easily be drunken bullshit, of course. His tell-tale glazed eyes and slurred words belong to a wino straight out of a Laurel and Hardy film.

  When Ray inflicted a big, overly familiar hug upon me outside the Van Spencer, I’d made a snap decision to keep my story consistent with the one I told his mum. That story was basically the truth, after all, apart from having omitted the little matter of Scott leaving me.

  What I must do here is capitalise on Ray’s inebriation and drill him for info. While taking care not to say too much, I’ve switched on whatever charm I might have, and used my last reserves of energy to make my eyes all keen and bright and sociable. Ray is enjoying the attention and especially the large Jim Beam on the rocks I’ve bought him.

  He’s already surrounded by so much cigarette smoke, it looks like he’s on fire. “So how did you guys meet?”

  I’m supposed to be asking the questions here. Pretty sure I can turn this one around with only one cunning word. “Guess.”

  Ray ponders the challenge. “Okay… let me see… you were in a bar and he sleazed up to you with one of his dodgy chat-up lines? Something like, Am I dead? Because you look like an angel?”

  The words Am I dead? echo in my head, followed by the words You Will Die. Shaking them off, I try to summon a convincing image of Scott as a cheesy bar-butterfly. Never saw him that way. When he approached me, after Tomm’s poem, it had felt so natural. He’d seemed almost shy.

  “Nope,” I say. “He can be pretty cheesy though, right?”

  Ray sniggers. “He learnt all them lines off a Kindle pick-up manual! But I ain’t sayi
ng no more. Don’t wanna get myself in trouble.”

  I store the words pick-up manual for later use, glug on my G&T, then snap back into focus. “Scott and I actually met at a digital detox retreat.”

  The wind puffs Ray’s cigarette out. “What the bloody hell’s one of them when it’s up and dressed?”

  I can’t be bothered to explain. “So, has he mentioned me much?”

  He tries to relight the cigarette, without success. “Are you kidding? The legendary Kate Collins?”

  Jesus. Scott not only told someone about me but told them my surname? This comes as a genuine surprise. “Legendary, eh?”

  Ray cups his hands around his smoke and finally fires it back up. “He definitely made you sound legendary when we met for a drink. This was a few months back. The afternoon of our fortieth birthday, in fact. I know you must be shocked to hear I’m forty, but what can I say?”

  True age alert! So, Scott hit the big 4-0 this summer. Could this fact have any bearing on his behaviour? People do often lose the plot when they reach a round number. Putting on a pitch-perfect display of casual forgetfulness, I say, “Oh yeah? God, when’s his birthday again?”

  “Naughty naughty,” says Ray, waggling a finger at me. “Forgetting your fella’s birthday? It’s May the fourth. Scott told me it’s easy to remember, cuz of all that geeky Star Wars bollocks. ‘May the fourth be with you’, or something.”

  Ray must be wrong about Scott having mentioned me back then, because I didn’t even meet him in deepest darkest Wales until the first day of June. Ray is, after all, quite tipsy.

  When I tune back into the conversation, he’s saying, “… have to admit, he told me quite a few things that day that he probably came to regret. Drunk as fuck, he was, all confessional like I was some kind of priest. Ooh! Do pardon my language. I really shouldn’t have said ‘priest’.”

  He laughs heartily at his own gag, and I chuckle along to keep him on side. “So what was he saying about me that day?”

  Ray taps the side of his nose, cartoon confidential. “Now that would be telling. You’d have to buy me a drink.”

  “Er… I already did?”

  Ray considers his Jim Beam. “Oh yeah. But I probably already said too much.”

  “Are you sure it was me he mentioned that day?”

  “After a few shandies, he couldn’t stop saying your name. Evangelical, he was! Kate Collins, Kate Collins, Kate Collins. Insisted you were gonna sa—’

  Forcibly cutting himself off, Ray mimes zipping his mouth shut. Sabotaging my own casual façade, I lean forward, urgent. Damn this drunkenness, robbing me of subtlety. “He insisted I was gonna… what?”

  Ray’s laugh wafts smoke phantoms my way. “Sorry, Kate. Me and Scotty ain’t been seeing eye to eye this summer. Don’t wanna make things worse by getting indiscreet.”

  “Ah c’mon… you and me, we’re family now. There should be no secrets here. Chances are, this is probably something Scott’s told me himself anyway.”

  Ray’s zip-mouth mime proves even more irritating the second time around – especially now that he accessorises it by placing the tip of one little-finger against his mouth like Dr Evil, which nobody’s done for at least a decade. His cackle deteriorates into a gruesome cough.

  “Can I buy you another Jim Beam?” I say, willing to try anything now. Well, almost anything. “I’d like to hear what’s up between you and Scott. Perhaps I can help?”

  Ray’s already checking his flashy wrist-watch. Alarmed by what he sees, he drains his glass. “Sorry, Kate Collins. I’ve got somewhere to be.”

  His eyes flit boob-wards once again as he says, “I don’t mind saying, my brother’s really punching above his weight. Just don’t tell him I said nothing about nothing.”

  I can barely disguise my exasperation. “What did you even tell me?”

  Ray says, “Don’t be a stranger, sweetheart,” then swaggers back out onto Marine Parade, as I blurt out how we should swap numbers. Either he ignores me, or the wind scoops up my words to sweep them out over the foaming mayhem of the sea.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  5 October

  Soon as I cross the threshold, the flat feels different.

  On a purely physical level, this place ain’t getting any warmer. I may as well have walked into a meat locker. The hallway and living room feel eerily still and quiet, but there’s something else, too. A kind of tension, like I’m standing on one big loaded mousetrap.

  That’s because something terrible is going to happen.

  The night is a wire, stretched so taut that it might snap without warning. But of course, this oddly brooding atmosphere must be all in my drunk, shattered head. Tomorrow is another early start on the wagon, and I shouldn’t have even stayed awake this late, let alone gone out and got loaded.

  Screw lighting any candles tonight. Not only am I too pissed to be tooling around with fire, I have no fear of the dark or anything else.

  Plus, in the absence of light, you can’t see that demon face on the window.

  I slump straight down on my makeshift floor-bed, close my eyes, then groan at myself. Sleep, now? Who am I kidding? New unanswered questions make it utterly impossible for me to keep my hands off Scott’s phone. On my way back here from the Amsterdam, all I’ve been able to think about is how an evangelical Scott could possibly have spoken to Ray about me in early May, before he even knew I existed.

  I’m reminded of what Maureen told me about Scott and Ray’s differing accounts of the fights Scott got into at school. So how much of what Ray said about Scott can I trust? Funnily enough, despite Ray having come across like a bad second-hand-car salesman, I feel I can place more trust in him than I ever should have in his twin.

  There’s one easy way to put this to the test.

  The Kindle reader app on Scott’s phone previously failed to pique my interest, but now Ray’s made his claim about the pick-up book, this thing feels like compulsory reading.

  Hey. You didn’t check the bathroom or the bedroom, so look over to that archway and the hall. Just one glance to make sure nobody’s standing there in the darkness, watching you. Scott, for instance.

  Nope. Don’t have to look to know there’s nobody there.

  Oh, really? Or are you too scared to see your ex-boyfriend standing out there… possessed?

  You might also see another blue, flickering thing… right?

  Exhaustion makes me twitchy and impatient as I scroll past a load of crime thrillers and unofficial Prince bios. Just when I’m about to give up and confirm Ray’s status as a drunken bullshit-artist, here it is: The Cunning Man’s 69-Step Guide To Luring And Keeping Women.

  Well, how delightful. The Cunning Man. Luring. Keeping. I feel dirty, just from having seen the book cover.

  The table of contents lists the chapter titles, so I skip the author’s no-doubt-ugly foreword and go straight to the part about luring all these suggestible li’l kittens. A few pages later, I linger on Step Sixteen, which suggests how to break the ice with the laydeez.

  The tl;dr version? Make eye contact with women and find an opportunity to bond over something you agree on. The author gives an example of mutually tutting over slow service at a bar in order to break the ice, then offering to buy the poor naïve waif a drink.

  Bonding over something you agree on? Sounds familiar. Out in those Welsh woods, when Scott and I first made eye contact, we bonded over our shared mockery of Tomm. A deliberate tactic on his part, then.

  An important note here, writes the author. In order to non-verbally express agreement with the woman’s point of view, you don’t even have to share it. In fact, you can privately disagree. All that matters is the bond made and the hot sex you’re getting tonight.

  Prickling and driven by instinct, I search for “Tomm” in Scott’s Kindle library.

  Three days after the digital retreat, Scott downloaded Tomm Kale’s self-published poetry book, then gave it a four-star review on Amazon.

  Even our first shar
ed moment has become tainted. Our porcelain castle was built on sleazeball, woman-fearing crap, and I want to hurl Scott into the moat.

  Psst! Was that movement, out there in the hall, or did clouds pass over the moon? Go on, take a look.

  Kindly fuck off, brain. I only have eyes for this screen.

  The wind rallies enough force to rattle the window frames as I meditate on how Ray told the truth about the pick-up manual. Could this mean Scott really did talk about me on their birthday, in advance of the detox retreat?

  I search Scott’s browser history for “Kate Collins”.

  Nothing comes up. Propelled by a brainwave, I Google to see if there’s any way to dig up his private browser history. Yep, there is. As the instructions warn, this is far from the entire history, or even the entire recent history. But still, these are results I wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

  Scott’s private browsing history is dominated by searches for cheap loans and porn. Hey, might one of these smut sites explain those bizarre screen grabs? Let’s head off on a quick tangent. Can’t hurt.

  When I click on the URLs Scott visited, most of them lead to your standard porn… even though he has more of an appreciation of BDSM than I’d realised. He’d dealt me the odd playful spank, but never so much as broached the ball-gags, whips and bunny-tail butt plugs I see in some of these clips. Or indeed, thankfully, the watersports. Some of this stuff’s pretty out-there, but nothing like the otherworldly madness in those screen grabs that I’m still really praying were taken from horror movies.

  You really should check on that dark hallway now. Anything could be happening through there…

  Staying on my tangent, I zoom over to Facebook, where none of my friends have convincingly identified those screen grabs I posted. One person vaguely reckons they’ve been taken from the orgy scene at the end of some lurid 80s horror film called Society. This raises my hopes until gore-movie fans queue up to insist that this person is entirely wrong.

  Argh. I really should get back on track and solve the riddle of Scott having spoken about me before we met. Then I can sleep. Returning to his private history, I scroll all the way back to May.