Ghoster

by Jason Arnopp

  Note to TrooSelf: never, EVER introduce Kate to Ray. She’s so his type, too. This is painfully obvious, because he and I always had the same taste in that way, which is why he ended up stealing Mandy Fuller away from me at high school. He and I have never been the same since then. Which is probably why he’s really trying to make me feel bad for this whole debt thing. I swear, he only bailed me out with the loan companies to gain power over me, in order to make me feel bad. But what the hell has he got to feel resentful for? He has everything in life. Dad even left him the Chanctonbury house in his will! What a punch on the nose that was. It still smarts, and it only happened because I never forgave Dad for knocking us around as kids, supposedly to set us straight, whereas Ray took that abuse as the cue to become the devoted Daddy’s boy, even after our folks split.

  If I could afford psychotherapy right now, I would most likely give it a go. But until my finances are back up and running, TrooSelf will have to do.

  Anyway! Anyway! Sexting is afoot. And even more astonishingly, today Kate agreed to come down to Brighton. I am thrilled and terrified. For a start, this means I have one week in which to throw out all the clutter and junk in this shithole, not to mention clean the place! Really need to make the flat live up to its true potential, which I should have done before anyway. But when it was only for my benefit, why bother?

  Another thing I need to deal with in this place is the Weird Crumbling Door.

  A couple of times lately, I’ve found bits of splintered wood on the inner doormat. At first, I honestly thought one of my neighbours had randomly developed a grudge against me and pushed this stuff in through the letterbox! But no, the door does seem to be falling apart and I’ve no idea why. This is not a natural way for wood to behave. All I can do is buy a putty knife and some wood-filler.

  Demon-wise, I’m not doing well. In fact, I’m doing badly. Sometimes I lose whole mornings, afternoons or whole days to demonic activity and it’s really screwing up my work. I’m bending deadlines like nobody’s business here and I’m having to start making excuses.

  Really need to get a grip on my life! In an attempt to help myself, I’ve been reading up on demonic addiction.

  Fuck it, you know what? From the stuff I’ve read, I’ve already gathered that denial about this stuff is no good. So calling this stuff The Demon, even in a super-secret diary, probably doesn’t help that cause.

  TrooSelf hasn’t been hacked in all the months I’ve been using it, so let’s call a spade a spade.

  My name is Scott Palmer and I am addicted to porn.

  Yes, porn. Porn porn PORN.

  Porn is my very own demon. I have been addicted to this stuff in varying degrees, ever since I found a single page from a porn mag, aged eleven.

  You know… this diary really has made me think about my life and help me put things into perspective. More and more as I grew up, then crossed over into adulthood, smut became my shield. It provided me with my safe place away from the world, while all the time only making it harder to talk to real women.

  All the educational stuff I’m reading now makes me realise how much online porn in particular has damaged me and transformed me into a dopamine slave. People don’t realise that porn literally burns new pathways into your brain! It makes brand-new connections, in a way that fucks up your physical response to actual naked human beings.

  I have to work on my computer all day – or at least, I’m supposed to be working – and yet there’s a whole world of porn out there, yelling for me to watch. And when I’m not at my desk, the phone yells porn-notifications at me, too.

  Bloody hell. Working with screens all day has to be the equivalent of an alcoholic owning a pub.

  The only way out of the whole sorry mess, I’m fast learning, is to reboot yourself. You have to cut porn out of your life altogether, like a troublesome weed, and give your brain at least ninety days in which to rewire itself and return to its default settings.

  I’m sceptical, but I’m also game.

  And so the challenge begins here. No more porn. And the fact that the amazing Kate Collins, my sweet saviour, is travelling down here to see me in ONE WEEK surely will provide me with the ultimate motivation to do this right.

  Come on! Sort yourself out, Scott. A whole new life beckons.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  7 October

  Plump grey clouds line the coast, as we rocket along the seafront towards the snow-capped Palace Pier.

  Scott is dead.

  This afternoon, Madeira Drive lies wide open, straight as a die. Which is just as well, because our damned lights make all this snow on the road resemble blue glitter. Sometimes it can be hard to see past all this glitter to the actual road.

  Scott is dead.

  Seems a fight has broken out in Nelson’s Bar at the end of the pier, and it’s been bad enough for the staff to frantically summon us. Bloody afternoon drinkers.

  Scott is dead.

  Now that the drugs have worn off, this fact is sinking in way too deep.

  Tyler’s engrossed in his phone. I want to toss him a warning, to tell him not to photograph or film anything when we reach this bar. I want him to know that I know, but my fatigue barely leaves me with enough energy to drive and ponder those new pathways that Scott burnt into his brain.

  So… porn, seriously? That was Scott’s big bad secret? I mean, I hadn’t quite realised porn addiction was such a thing, but he and I could have so easily worked on the problem together. I meet addicts on a daily basis – and we were in love, weren’t we? Despite all the other lies he told me, I now know we did have some kind of connection.

  Can’t help remembering what he said, back in that detox retreat tent. Sometimes I’ll find myself scrolling through, you know, whatever, and I’ll catch myself… and I’ll wonder what the hell I was even doing. It ends up being just… mindless. It’s like you get sucked in, you know?

  Kills me, to think that he felt unable to talk about this, being so convinced I’d abandon him the moment I discovered the real Scott. And yet, if anything, these diary entries make me like him even more. The Scott I once loved, he now feels like a fake billboard. Some kind of soft-focus cologne advert, concealing the real, three-dimensional, fucked-up Wizard of Oz.

  Seems obvious that Scott never meant to leave me. I picture his vulnerable Tinder face, then his dead blue flicker-face, before making myself snap out of it.

  Tyler squints over at the pier as it draws closer on the left. With a mouth full of Frazzles, he says, “At least the bar’s not on fire. That’s gotta be a plus.”

  The True Romance ringtone rises up from the dashboard.

  I glance at the phone’s screen, expecting to see yet another incoming call from Idiot. Instead, it’s Unknown Number. Oh God, another dead person?

  My throat seizes up, as I consider one potential caller.

  Tyler is saying something about how familiar this music sounds, when I snatch the phone from the dashboard.

  Bouncing my attention back and forth between the blue-glitter road and the glowing screen in my hand, I put the call on speakerphone, then sling the phone back onto the dash.

  “Kate,” Tyler snaps, “what the hell are you doing?”

  I would fire back some cutting retort about people in glass houses and stones, but my head is mush. All I want is to hear whose voice will rise out of the dead static that now issues from the phone.

  “Mate, you can’t answer your phone when you’re bloody—”

  “Shut up, Tyler, I’m on the phone.”

  “Don’t tell me to—”

  Tyler stops talking as soon as the caller starts. Must be something about how Scott’s voice sounds so very flat, dark and dead.

  “Kate,” Scott says, “get rid of this thing. I’m begging you to throw it away.”

  Tears blur the road and I swipe at them. “Is that really you? Are you really dead?”

  Tyler yells my name and I don’t understand why, but then I see the imminent nightmare.


  Running across the snow, in the road right in front of us: a small child in blue wellies, chased by a frantic adult.

  Too close to brake.

  I swing the wheel left. Adult and child fly off to the right.

  The whole cab judders as we mount the pavement.

  Tyler’s voice runs high enough to attract dogs. “Brake, Kate, brake!”

  I already fucking have, but now we’re skidding on ice. Narrowly missing a statue, we zoom towards the metal rails that separate this pavement from the crazy golf course down at beach level.

  I stomp the brake again.

  Scott’s phone flies off the dash and smacks me in the face.

  The van’s front bumper comes to a soft rest on the rails. Tyler yells so loud, I’m convinced he must be physically hurt. “What the fuck? What the fuck was that?”

  Seeing that Tyler’s sustained no damage, I roll down the window and stick out my head, searching for the people we…

  … you…

  … almost hit. Please, please, tell me they’re okay.

  Back across the road, the young mother stands unscathed, physically at least. Her arms are wrapped around the child, whose face is buried in her belly.

  Embattled by nausea, I follow Tyler as he marches along the sludge-soaked floorboards of the pier, his bag slung over one shoulder.

  I can’t speak. I can barely think. All I can do, right now, is feel appalled by myself. I want to turn back time and never go on that digital detox retreat. Or go back even further and never buy a smartphone in the first place. Or best of all, go all the way back to a time when messages were sent by smoke signals and trained birds.

  I could’ve killed both of those people. With an ambulance.

  A young mother and her child.

  I’m going to do my very best to redeem myself. Could saving a hundred more lives make amends for nearly taking two? No. I doubt I can ever make full amends for such dereliction of duty.

  Scott’s voice comes back to haunt me. His dead and dismal voice, telling me to get rid of the phone.

  Is he still really that desperate for me not to discover the whole truth? What if there’s more, beyond the porn?

  Enough. Focus on the job. The. Fucking. Job.

  An alternative take: could it be that Scott knows his phone has become my obsession? He may have been trying to warn me that disaster lay ahead… and as a result he helped to cause this disaster. Fucking hell, that’s the kind of irony that would have Alanis Morissette strumming herself.

  A snowflake lands on my forehead as I arrive at Nelson’s Bar. Need to forget about my impending mental breakdown, strap on my game face and help people.

  Tyler, still ahead of me, barges in through the bar’s doors, then allows them to slam shut in my face. Following him through, I take in the wide space. The room has emptied, apart from the flustered bar staff and a burly security guard. Several chairs and tables have been up-ended. Broken glass litters the floor, some of it bloody.

  “Where are the injured?” Tyler asks the guard.

  “They all left,” he says. “Did you not see them on your way up here? One of them had blood coming out of his neck.”

  “How hard?” I ask, feeling like the trainee, desperate to contribute.

  Makes sense. Only a trainee would make an insane decision like answering their phone while on the way to a job.

  The guard frowns. “What do you mean?”

  “How hard is the blood coming out of his neck?” Tyler says. “A gush, a dribble, somewhere in between?”

  “More like a paper cut,” he says, giving me and Tyler our cue to relax.

  When we get outside, Tyler says, “Come with me.”

  I hate the fact that he’s about to rip into me. Much more than this, though, I hate the fact that I deserve it, so I follow him to the far end of the pier. Here, we settle at the railing beside a vertigo-inducing ride called The Booster, which makes me feel even more like throwing up. Beyond the railing, a turbulent sea stretches to the horizon.

  With snow resting like dandruff on each shoulder, Tyler says, “I’m gonna do you one hell of a favour.” He holds an object in the air. What is it?

  Scott’s phone.

  Panicked, I slap my pocket where the thing usually lives. How the hell did he get that? Must’ve grabbed the thing when I left the van to check on the mother and her kid. I’ve been in such a state that I didn’t even think to check where it had landed.

  Oh God. Tyler is going to throw Scott’s phone in the sea.

  “Hey,” I hear myself bark, “you’d better give that back, right now.”

  “Sure,” he says. “I could give it back. But if I do, I’ll also tell Akeem exactly what happened, back there on the road. And the bloody pavement. Bang, there goes your stupid fifteen-year badge.”

  I present him with the palm of one hand. “Give me back my fucking phone.”

  This thing isn’t even mine. I should let Tyler toss it. This is literally what Scott would’ve wanted.

  “I don’t know who that was, calling you,” Tyler says, “or why the hell you asked him if he was dead… but you need to take his advice. You never stop looking at this bloody phone and you could have killed all four of us back there. So I’m chuckin’ this thing in the drink, love, and—Hey!”

  With one cat-snatch move, I steal Tyler’s own phone from its stupid belt-holster. He swipes a beefy paw at me, but I hold his phone out over the rail, ready to drop, and he turns to stone.

  “So, Tyler… bet you were disappointed that the paper-cut guy hadn’t been slit from ear to ear, right? You could’ve scored a few more Hero Points from your fellow SikkFuxx…”

  Tyler’s feral eyes weaken at this, but he keeps Scott’s phone raised. What we have ourselves here is a Mexican standoff.

  “What I did with the ambulance was actually worse,” I say, “so yeah, you’ve got me there. But this shit you’re doing has to stop, too. Maybe we’re both driven by the need for something? I need answers to… stuff… and you need… you need… I have no idea what the fuck you need. Why would you upload a picture of someone with half their head gone, for a bunch of gore-hounds to jerk over? Why on Earth would you do that, Tyler?”

  His shoulders rise and fall. A fake calm descends upon him, and I can tell that his new smile is designed to humour me while he slyly lowers my defences. “Okay, Kate. Let’s keep our heads and explore that question. Bear in mind, by the way, that I bought that phone only recently for five-hundred quid, all right? Your phone looks second-hand.” He takes a deep breath. “Okay, I mean, I definitely don’t feel great about these uploads. So… why do I do it? Uh…”

  Silence ensues. Convinced he’s only pretending to examine his own moral fabric, I step up to the plate. “Let me guess: you think you’re not worth all that much. And so sharing sick pictures, these shots that only you can take earns you a micro-dose of power and prestige. It earns you one single gram of leverage in this world. Am I close?”

  A single flicker in Tyler’s otherwise stony gaze suggests I’m right. “You feel addicted, don’t you, mate?” I say. “You’re a runaway train. I know, because I feel it too. That’s my ex’s phone. Ever since he disappeared, I’ve been using this thing to try and figure out why. And I absolutely cannot stop.”

  Tyler tries to speak, but I cut him off. “The thing is, Tyler, I do really need to stop.”

  Scott’s voice echoes in my head. Kate, get rid of this thing. I’m begging you to get rid of it.

  Seeing the reckless glow in my eyes, Tyler looks fit to bust a blood vessel. He takes one quick step towards me but doesn’t dare make a grab for his phone. “Kate… don’t do anything stupid.”

  Scott’s voice, again: Actually… out of interest… do you trust me, Kate?

  “This is the end of stupidity for both of us,” I tell Tyler, and I drop his phone into the sea.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  7 October

  Izzy pulls the blanket over me, as if I’m a sick child. A perfectly fai
r assessment.

  Thanks to the smashed balcony door, the entire flat plays host to temperatures consistent with Reykjavik, even here in the bedroom with the door shut. Izzy hobbles around the foot of the bed, then climbs in beside me on the other side. God bless her for having persuaded a Freecycling couple to not only deliver this queen-sized delight but carry it all the way in here. She even got a second garden chair for the living room. She’s so cool.

  Coming home this morning, we found neither wood chips on the floor nor freshly gouged holes in the front door. I’m really hoping this means Gwyneth’s and Dieter’s ghosts have gone, but what the hell has all this wood-chip phenomena signified? Scott himself experienced it, but why did the door only start to crumble after he and I met, when he’d lived here for much longer? And why did I see the same gouge marks in Gwyneth’s old front door in Whitehawk?

  While I try to analyse everything that’s happened, my fatigue and adrenaline fight for supremacy. Resting on her side, Izzy reaches over to mess around with my hair.

  “Losing that phone is the best thing you could’ve done,” she says. “You must know that, or you wouldn’t have made the decision.”

  “It was almost worth it, to see the look on that prick’s face.”

  “But don’t forget what it’s done for you, honey. You’re free now.”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  So why don’t I feel free? I feel… weird.

  You can’t stop thinking about Scott’s phone, right? You can’t stop picturing that beautiful handset, still packed with so much vital information, lying on the sea bed behind the pier.

  Still stroking me, Izzy says, “What did Tyler do, after you chucked his phone? Apart from chuck yours, obviously.”

  “He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me up against the rails. Then I kneed him in the balls and he kind of folded in half.”

  “Jesus.”

  “By that point, people were gathering and pointing, so we called each other very bad names, then ended the shift. Textbook professionalism.”

  “So what happens next?” she says. “Do you reckon he’ll report you for the whole ambulance thing?”