Katherine, my oldest friend who I’d known since my first day of secondary school, asked me what I wanted from the following year. I told her I thought I was ready to meet someone. She responded with unbridled glee—I think she felt that my decision to search for a relationship was once-removed approval of her choice to get married and have a baby. I’d noticed this was a thing that people did when they got into their thirties: they saw every personal decision you made as a direct judgement on their life. If you voted Labour and they voted Lib Dem, they thought you were voting Labour specifically to let them know that their politics were incorrect. If they moved to the suburbs and you didn’t, they thought you were refusing to solely to prove a point that your life was more glamorous than theirs. Katherine had defected to long-term monogamy in her mid-twenties when she met her husband, Mark, and, since then, she wanted everyone to come and join her.
I had been inactively single—single and not dating—for two years since the end of my relationship with Joe (together for seven years, lived together for four, our lives and friendship groups were completely conjoined, I began to notice him say things like “on the morrow” instead of “tomorrow” and “the book of face” instead of “Facebook”). After we broke up, I tried to catch up on all the sex I hadn’t been having in my twenties with a six-month promiscuity spree. But a “promiscuity spree” for me meant sleeping with three men, all of whom I tried to make my boyfriend. After self-diagnosing as a co-dependent, I decided to stop dating before my thirtieth birthday and see what really being on my own felt like. Since then, I’d lived on my own for the first time, travelled on my own for the first time, made the transition from teacher and part-time writer to full-time published writer and generally unlearnt all the habits accumulated in a near-decade of cosy, comfy monogamy. Recently, I’d started to feel ready to start dating again.
It was last orders at eleven o’clock. Katherine left shortly before then because she was pregnant. She hadn’t told me she was, but I could tell by the way she kept eating pickles—she picked gherkins off everyone’s burgers and then ordered a plate of cornichons. She craved intensely savoury food all through her pregnancy with Olive. I asked if her craving of umami is what inspired the name of the baby—she didn’t like that. I’d learnt a lot about what pregnant women and new mums don’t like over the last few years and one of them is when you have any questions or comments about their baby’s name. One friend stopped talking to me when—I thought rather helpfully—I let her know that Beaux is a French plural and she should spell her son’s name Beau instead. It had already been registered. Another got cross when she had a daughter named Bay and I asked if it was in reference to the herb, window or parking space. They particularly didn’t like when they told you their baby names “in confidence” and you accidentally told someone else and it got back to the mother.
But the worst faux pas—the asking-someone-how-old-they-are, belching-in-public, eating-off-your-knife no-go—is when you can tell a woman is pregnant and you ask her if she’s pregnant. You also can’t say you knew all along when they do finally tell you they’re having a baby—they hate that. They like the touch of theatre that comes with the big reveal. In all honesty, I understood and would probably be the same. You’ve got to get your thrills from somewhere if you’re not allowed a cocktail for nine months. Which is why I nodded along and said nothing when Katherine left the party with a made-up reason of “having to get the car fixed” the next morning.
At around ten p.m., there were mutterings of heading to a twenty-four-hour club in King’s Cross, mainly from the newly arrived trainee vet, who Lola was already talking to and twirling her wig at, but come 11:15, no one followed through. Eddie and Meera had to get back to relieve the babysitter and, on their behalf, I dreaded the twitchy, sleepless night that lay ahead of them as I watched their jaws rhythmically jut from side to side. Lola and the vet went to go find “a wine bar,” which meant somewhere dark where they could talk some drunken nonsense at each other until one of them made the first move and they could dry-hump on a banquette. This suited me just fine as I was ready for bed. I hugged the remaining guests goodbye and told them, not entirely soberly, that I loved them all.
When I got home, I listened to half an episode of my current favourite podcast, which was a light-hearted romp through the history of female serial killers, and I removed my mascara, flossed and brushed my teeth. I put my new old copy of The Whitsun Weddings on my bookshelf and placed my Chinese money plant on my mantelpiece. I felt unusually and perfectly content. On that August evening, in the first hours of the second day of my thirty-third year, it felt like every random component of my life had been designed long ago to fit together at that very moment.
I lay in bed and downloaded a dating app for the first time in my life. Lola, a veteran of online dating, told me that Linx (with a silhouette of a wild cat out on the prowl as its logo) had the highest yield of eligible men and the best success rate for matching long-term relationships.
I filled in the About Me information boxes. Nina Dean, 32, food writer. Location: Archway, London. Looking for: love and the perfect pain au raisin. I uploaded a handful of photos and fell asleep.
My thirty-second birthday was the simplest birthday I ever had. Which was a perfectly lovely way to begin the strangest year of my life.
One
“It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”
Marcel Proust
Living in suburban North London was nothing but an act of pragmatism for my parents. Whenever I asked them why they chose to leave East London for the suburbs when I was ten, they would refer to functionality: it was a bit safer, you could buy a bit more space, it was near the city, it was near lots of motorways and close to schools. They talked about setting up their life in Pinner as if they had been looking for a hotel that was close to the airport for an early flight—convenient, anonymous, fuss-free, nothing special but it got the job done. Nothing about where my parents lived brought them any sensory pleasure or cause for relish—not the landscape, nor the history of the place, not the parks, the architecture, the community or culture. They lived in the suburbs because it was close to things. They had built their home and therefore entire life around convenience.
When we were together, Joe often used his northernness in arguments against me, as a way of proving he was more real than I was; more down to earth and therefore more likely to be right. It was one of my least favourite things about him—the way he lazily outsourced his integrity to Yorkshire, so that romantic implications of miners and moors would do all the hard work for him. In the early stages of our relationship, he used to make me feel like we had grown up in separate galaxies because his mum had worked as a hairdresser in Sheffield and mine was a receptionist in Harrow. The first time he took me home to his parents’ house—a modest three-bed in a suburb of Sheffield—I realized just what a lie I’d been told. If I hadn’t known I was in Yorkshire, I would have sworn we were driving around the pebbledash-fronted-leaded-window gap between the end of London and the beginning of Hertfordshire where I’d spent my adolescence. Joe’s cul-de-sac was the same as mine, the houses were all the same, his fridge was full of the same fruit-corner yogurts and ready-to-bake garlic bread. He’d had a bike just like mine, to spend his teenage weekends going up and down streets of identical red-roof houses just like I did. He was taken to PizzaExpress for his birthday like I was. The secret was out. “No more making out that we’ve had completely different upbringings, Joe,” I said to him on the train home. “No more pretending you belong in a song written by Jarvis Cocker about being in love with a woman in a tabard. You no more belong in that song than I belong in a Chas and Dave one. We grew up in matching suburbs.”
In recent years, I’d found myself craving the familiarity of home. The high streets I knew, with their high density of dentists, hairdressers and bookies, and total lack of independent coffee shops. The long wal
k from the station to my parents’ house. The women with matching long bobs, the balding men, the teenagers in hoodies. The absence of individualism; the peaceful acquiescence to mundanity. Young adulthood had quickly turned into just plain adulthood—with its daily list of choices to confirm who I was, how I voted, who my broadband provider was—and returning to the scene of my teenage life for an afternoon felt like a brief holiday back in time. When I was in Pinner, I could be seventeen again, just for a day. I could pretend that my world was myopic and my choices meaningless and the possibilities that were ahead of me were wide open and boundless.
* * *
—
Mum answered the door like she always answered the door—in a way that demonstrably made the point that her life was very busy. She did an apologetic wonky smile as she opened it to me, portable landline pressed up to her ear on her shoulder. “Sorry,” she mouthed, and rolled her eyes. She was wearing a pair of black jersey-fabric bottoms that didn’t look assertive enough to be trousers, weren’t tight enough to be leggings and weren’t slouchy enough to be pyjamas. She wore a grey marl round-neck T-shirt and was decorated in her base-coat of jewellery: thick gold bracelet, one gold bangle, pearl stud earrings, snake chain gold necklace, gold wedding band. My guess was she was coming from or going to some form of physical exercise—my mum had become obsessed with physical exercise since she turned fifty, but I don’t think it changed her body by even half a pound. She was wrapped in a post-menopausal layer of softness, a small bag under her chin, a thicker middle, flesh that now spilt over the back of her bra, visible through her T-shirt. And she was gorgeous. The sort of big-bovine-eyed gorgeous that is not hugely exciting but evokes familiar magnetism in everyone—like an open fire or a bunch of pink roses or a golden cocker spaniel. Her espresso-brown bob, although sliced with grey strands, was lusciously thick and her golden highlights shimmered under the light of the overhead IKEA lamp. I inherited almost nothing of my looks from my mother.
“Yeah, fine,” she said into the phone, beckoning me into the hallway. “Great, well, let’s do coffee next week then. Just send me the dates. I’ll bring you that teach-yourself-Tarot kit I was telling you about. No, not at all, you can keep it actually. QVC, so easy enough. Okay, okay. Speak then, bye!” She hung up the phone and gave me a hug, before holding me at arm’s length and examining my fringe. “This is new,” she said, looking curiously at it, like it was 3 down on a crossword.
“Yes,” I said, putting down my handbag and removing my shoes (everyone had to remove their shoes on arrival, the rule was more stringent here than at the Blue Mosque). “Got it before my birthday. Thought it would be good for covering my thirty-two-year-old lines on my thirty-two-year-old forehead.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, flicking it gingerly. “You don’t need some mop on your head for that, you just need some effective foundation.”
I smiled, unoffended but unamused. I had got used to the fact that Mum was disappointed by quite how ungirly her daughter was. She would have loved a girl with whom she could have gone shopping for holiday clothes and gossiped about face primer. When we were teenagers, and Katherine came round, Mum would offer her all her old jewellery and handbags, and they’d sift through them together like two gal pals at a department store. She fell deeply in love with Lola the first time they met, purely on the basis that they both felt particularly passionate about the same face highlighter.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“Reading,” she said.
I looked through the French doors of the living room and saw the profile of my dad in his bottle-green armchair. His feet up on the footstool, a large mug of tea on the side table next to him. His strong chin and long nose protruding—the chin and nose that also belong to me—as if they were competing to get to the same finish line in a race.
There was seventeen years’ difference in age between Mum and Dad. They had met when Dad was the deputy head of an inner-city state school and Mum was sent there by her secretarial agency to be the receptionist. She was twenty-four, he was forty-one. The gap between their personalities was as large as their age gap. Dad was sensitive, gentle, inquisitive, introspective and intellectual—there was almost nothing that didn’t interest him. Mum was practical, proactive, logistical, straightforward and authoritative. There was almost nothing she didn’t involve herself in.
I took a moment to take him in from behind the glass doors. From here, he was still just my dad as he’d always been, reading the Observer, ready to tell me about where rubbish goes in China or ten things I may not have known about Wallis Simpson or the plight of the endangered falcon. My dad who could instantly recognize me—not the face of me, but everything of who I was—in a nanosecond: the name of my childhood imaginary friend, my dissertation subject, my favourite character from my favourite book and the road names of everywhere I’ve ever lived. When I looked at his face now, I mostly saw my dad, but I sometimes saw something else in his eyes that unsettled me—sometimes it looked like everything he understood had been cut into pieces and he was trying to configure them into a collage that made sense.
Two years ago, Dad had a stroke. It only took a couple of months after he had recovered for us to realize that he wasn’t entirely better. My dad, always so sharp and cerebral, had slowed down. He’d forget the names of family members and close friends. His easy confidence and ability to make decisions dwindled. He’d regularly wander off on days out and get lost. He often couldn’t remember the road he lived on. Initially, Mum and I wrote it off as an ageing brain, unable to face the possibility of something more serious. Then, one day, Mum got a call from a stranger to tell her that Dad had been seen driving around the same large, busy roundabout for twenty minutes. Eventually, someone managed to get him to pull over—he’d had no idea where to turn off. We went to the GP, he did a range of physical tests, cognitive assessments and MRI scans. The possibility we were dreading was confirmed.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, walking towards him. He looked up from the paper.
“Hello, you!” he said.
“Don’t stand up.” I bent down to give him a hug. “Anything interesting to tell me?”
“There’s a new film adaptation of Persuasion,” he said, holding up the review to me.
“Ah,” I said. “The thinking man’s Austen.”
“Correct.”
“I’m going to go help Mum with lunch.”
“All right, love,” he said, before reopening the newspaper and arranging himself back into the repose I knew so well.
When I went into the kitchen, Mum was chopping broccoli florets that were collecting next to a pile of sliced kiwis. From a speaker, a woman was talking loudly and slowly about conforming to male sexual desire.
“What is this?” I asked.
“It’s the audiobook of Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin.”
“It’s…what?” I asked, turning the volume down a few notches.
“Andrea Dworkin. She’s a famous feminist. You’d recognize her, quite a big girl, but not much of a sense of humour. Very clever woman, she—”
“I know who Andrea Dworkin is, I meant why are you listening to her audiobook?”
“For Reading Between the Wines.”
“Is that your book club you’ve told me about?”
She sighed exasperatedly and took a cucumber out of the fridge. “It’s not a book club, Nina, it’s a literary salon.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well,” she said with a slight curl of her lip that couldn’t conceal the glee she felt at having to, once again, explain the difference between a book club and a literary salon. “Me and some of the girls have decided to start a bi-monthly meeting where we talk about ideas rather than just the book itself, so it’s much less prescriptive. Each salon has a theme and includes discussions, poetry readings and personal sharing that relate to the theme.”
“What’s the theme of the next one?”
“The theme is: ‘Is all heterosexual sex rape?’ ”
“Right. And who is attending?”
“Annie, Cathy, Sarah from my running club, Gloria, Gloria’s gay cousin, Martin, Margaret, who volunteers with me at the charity shop. Everyone brings a dish. I’m making halloumi skewers,” she said, transporting the chopping board to the blender and piling the assortment of fruit and vegetables into it.
“Why this sudden interest in feminism?”
She hit the button on the machine, letting out a cacophony of buzzing as the mix pulverized to a pale-green gunk.
Ghosts Page 2