Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

  “I don’t know if I’d call it sudden,” she shouted over the top of the electronic roar. She turned the blender off and poured the fibrous-looking liquid into a pint glass.

  “That sounds great, Mum,” I relented. “I think it’s really cool to be so engaged and curious.”

  “It is,” she said. “And I’m the only one who has a spare room, so I’ve said we can use it for Reading Between the Wines meetings.”

  “You don’t have a spare room.”

  “Your dad’s study.”

  “Dad needs his study.”

  “It will still be there for him, it just doesn’t make sense to have a whole room in this house that’s only occasionally used, like we’re living in Blenheim Palace.”

  “What about his books?”

  “I’ll move them to the shelves down here.”

  “What about his paperwork?”

  “I’ve got everything important on file. There’s a lot of stuff that can be thrown away.”

  “Please let me go through it,” I said with the slight whine of a stroppy child. “It might be important to him. It might be important for us further down the line when we need as much as possible to jog his memory, to remind him of—”

  “Of course, of course,” she said, taking a sip of her smoothie with her nostrils flaring in displeasure. “It’s all upstairs in a few piles, you’ll see it on the landing.”

  “Okay, thank you,” I said, offering her a muted smile as a peace offering. I took a deep, invisible yoga breath. “What else has been going on?”

  “Nothing really. Oh, I’ve decided to change my name.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’ve never liked Nancy, it’s too old-fashioned.”

  “Don’t you think it’s weird to change it now? Everyone knows you as Nancy, it’s too late for a new name to catch on.”

  “I’m too old is what you’re saying,” she said.

  “No, I’m just saying a more appropriate time to workshop a new name would have been your first week at secondary school, probably not in your fifties.”

  “Well, I’ve decided to change it and I’ve looked into how to do it and it’s very easy, so my mind’s made up.”

  “And what are you changing it to?”

  “Mandy.”

  “Mandy?”

  “Mandy.”

  “But,” I took another deep yoga breath, “Mandy isn’t all that dissimilar to Nancy, is it? I mean, they sort of rhyme.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “They do, it’s called assonance.”

  “I knew you’d be like this. I knew you’d find a way to lecture me like you always do. I have no idea why this should cause you any trouble, I just want to love my name.”

  “Mum!” I said pleadingly. “I’m not lecturing you. You must be able to see this is quite a strange thing to announce from nowhere.”

  “It’s not from nowhere, I’ve always told you I like the name Mandy! I have always said to you what a stylish and fun name I think it is.”

  “Okay, it is stylish and fun, you’re right, but the other thing to consider,” I lowered my voice, “is that this might not be the best time for Dad to get his head round his wife of thirty-five years having a completely different first name.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s a very simple change,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be this huge thing.”

  “It’s just going to confuse him.”

  “I can’t talk about this now,” she said. “I’m meeting Gloria for Vinyasa Flow.”

  “Are you not eating with us? I’ve come all the way here for lunch.”

  “There’s loads of food in the house. You’re the cook, after all. I’ll be back in a few hours,” she said, picking up her keys.

  I went back in to see Dad, still engrossed by the paper.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, Bean?” he said, turning his head round to me. I felt the glow of relief that came with him using his childhood nickname for me. Like all good childhood nicknames, it had had many nonsensical and convoluted iterations—what was once Ninabean turned into Mr. Bean, Bambeanie, Beaniebean, then finally just Bean.

  “Mum’s gone out so I’m going to make us some lunch in a bit. How do you feel about a frittata?”

  “Frittata,” he repeated. “Now what’s that when it’s at home?”

  “It’s a tarty omelette. Imagine an omelette on a night out.”

  He laughed. “Lovely.”

  “I’m just going to sort through some things upstairs first, then I’ll make it. Do you maybe want a piece of toast to keep you going? Or something else?” I looked at his face and instantly regretted not making the question simpler. For the most part, he was still completely capable of making quick decisions, but occasionally I could see him get lost in potential answers and I wished I’d saved his confusion by saying “Toast, yes or no?”

  “Maybe,” he said, frowning slightly. “I don’t know, I’ll wait a bit.”

  “Okay, just let me know.”

  I dragged the three boxes into my bedroom, which hadn’t changed since I moved out over a decade ago and looked like a museum replica of how teenage girls lived in the early to mid-noughties. Lilac walls, photo collages of school friends on the wardrobe and a row of frayed, greying festival wristbands hanging from my mirror that Katherine and I had collected together. I sifted through the papers on the floor, most of them marking time and plans but no feelings or relationships: wedges of Filofax pages of dentist appointments and term times from the late nineties, stacks of old newspapers containing stories that must have caught his interest. There were letters and cards that I took off the scrap heap: a garrulous postcard from his late brother, my Uncle Nick, tightly packed with complaints about the food being too oily on Paxos; a card from one of Dad’s former students thanking him for his help with his Oxford application, and a photo of him beaming on graduation day outside Magdalen College. Mum was right, he didn’t need these relics of mundanity, but I understood his inclination to hold on to them. I too had shoeboxes of cinema tickets from first dates with Joe and utility bills from flats I no longer lived in. I’d never known why they were important, but they were—they felt like proof of life lived, in case a time came when it was needed, like a driving licence or a passport. Perhaps Dad had always anticipated, somehow, that he should download the passing of time to papers, Filofax pages, letters and postcards, in case those files inside him ever got wiped.

  Suddenly, I heard the piercing cry of the smoke alarm. I rushed downstairs, following the smell of burning. In the kitchen stood Dad, coughing over a smoking toaster, removing charcoal-edged pages of the Observer from its slots.

  “Dad!” I shouted over the thin, shrill beep, flapping my hands to try to break up the smog. “What are you doing?”

  He looked at me with a jolt, as if he had snapped out of a dream. Ribbons of smoke rose from the singed piece of folded newspaper in his hand. He gazed down at the toaster, then back up to me.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  He chose the pub. This was an enormous relief. Lola had been giving me a crash course in modern dating over a series of drinks and emails since my birthday and had warned me of all the impending disappointments to expect. One of them was that men were completely incapable of choosing or even suggesting a place for a date. I found this sort of apathetic, adolescent, can’t-be-arsed, useless-intern-says-he-still-doesn’t-know-how-to-use-the-printer attitude an immense turn-off. Lola told me to get over it, because otherwise I’d never confirm a date and the rest of my life would be spent in a sexless semi-coma on my sofa, sending the message “Hey, you still free tomorrow? What time? What do you fancy?” back and forth on Linx to men I’d never, ever meet.

  Max told me where we were going to meet within an hour of talking.

  “Dive bars and old-man
pubs okay?” he wrote.

  “They’re my favourite,” I replied. “No one wants to go to them with me any more.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I feel like everyone loved them when we were students, but now they don’t because they’re no longer ironic.”

  “I think you’re right,” he replied. “Maybe they think we’re edging too close towards being the old man to enjoy the old-man pubs.”

  “Maybe old-man pubs only bookend a person’s drinking life. Ironically when we’re teenagers, then earnestly when we’re retired,” I typed.

  “And in between we’re stuck in a hell of gastropubs serving £9 sausage rolls.”

  “Totally.”

  “Meet me at The Institution in Archway at seven o’clock on Thursday,” he wrote. “There’s a darts board, an old Irish landlord. Not a Negroni or industrial light fitting in sight.”

  “Perfect,” I wrote.

  “And there’s a dance floor I can throw you around on if all goes well.”

  I had been on Linx for three weeks, but my drink with Max was my first date. This was not through lack of trying. I had, in total, twenty-seven conversations on the go with twenty-seven different men. Which sounds like a lot, but given that I had initially spent approximately four hours of each waking day on the app, green-lighting hundreds upon thousands of men, to know just twenty-seven of them wanted to match me back seemed meagre. I asked Lola if this was normal. She said it was and informed me that her matches halved when she turned thirty, as lots of men put their preferred age limit to thirty and under. She said once she found that out, she was much more accepting of how few matches she got. For a while, she said, she combed Reddit threads for her name because she was convinced there was “a rumour” about her online that was rapidly mutating without her knowledge and was putting men off. I thought Lola’s “rumour on the dark web” theory was quite a self-aggrandizing paranoia to have about yourself, but I was reminded that she also was long-convinced she would die by “assassination” and I didn’t have the heart to tell her only famous people get assassinated. Normal people just get shot in the open.

  For the first few days, I was totally enamoured with Linx. I fell under its enchantment. I’d cheated the system of romance—all these handsome and interesting men, just waiting for me in my pocket. For years, we’d been told finding love was like an impossible quest of endurance, timing and luck. I thought you had to go to awful pop-up events and specialist bookshops; keep your eyes peeled at weddings and on the tube; strike up conversation with other solo travellers whenever you were abroad; get out of the house four nights a week to maximize your chances. But none of those strategic man-hours were needed any more—we didn’t have to put in the time like we used to. As I flicked through prospective love interests on the tube, on the bus, in the loo, I realized how time-efficient this method was. Looking for love didn’t have to be factored in to my schedule in the way I’d dreaded—I could do it while watching TV.

  Lola told me this was a completely normal reaction for a first-time dating app user—that the dreamy haze would plateau in a couple of weeks and then dull to a despondent ennui and ultimate deletion of the app in about three months’ time. She said it worked in this cycle until you met someone. Lola had been on and off dating apps for seven years now.

  She also warned me that the way the apps initially hook you in was by offering up their best produce to new users. She seemed to think there was an algorithm that determined this—the most-ticked people were offered up as bait for the new user’s first month, then they leave you with the rest of the riff-raff. She said it worked because you’d wade through the bottom-dwellers indefinitely, always holding out hope that you’d find the chest of buried treasure again.

  The most common type of conversation I’d had on Linx was stilted chit-chat as insubstantial and fleeting as a summer breeze. They always began with an anodyne: “Hey! How’s it going?” or an emoji of a waving hand. There was a minimum of three hours’ delay in their response; three days was more common. But the anticipation was never rewarded with quality of content. “Sorry, been insane at work, food writing that’s cool. I work in property” was all the long silence afforded. These conversations also revolved a lot around the mention of days—How’s your day going? What does Tuesday look like? How’s Thursday treated you? What are you doing this weekend?—which didn’t carry much topical relevance anyway as the day he was referring to or I was asking about was only addressed a full week later.

  I had also quickly identified another, very different, type of nuisance, but a nuisance none the less. This was a type of man I labelled “pretend boyfriend man.” Pretend Boyfriend Man used his profile to push an agenda of a dreamy, committed reliability. His photo selection always included an image of him holding a friend’s baby or, worse, stripping wallpaper or sanding a floor with his top off. His profile included supposedly throwaway phrases such as “on the lookout for a wife” or “My dream evening? Snuggling on the sofa while watching a Sofia Coppola film.” He knew exactly what he was doing and I wasn’t having any of it.

  Equally as useless, but earning slightly more respect from me, were the men who were unabashedly forthcoming about the fact they wanted a night of sex and nothing more. I had one of these virtual encounters early on with a bespectacled primary school teacher called Aaron who I exchanged pleasant small talk with for half an hour, before he asked if I wanted to “go on a date tonight.” It was half eleven on a Tuesday. I asked him if he meant a date or whether he just wanted me to come over to his flat. “I suppose I could force a quick pint down,” he replied sulkily. That was the last of mine and Aaron’s dialogue.

  There were a number of effete subgenres of language employed by many of the men I spoke to. “Good evening to you, m’lady—doth thou pubbeth on this sunny Saturday?” one asked. “If music be the food of love, play on, but if a food writer love both love and music—shall we go out dancing next week?” another wrote in an incomprehensible riddle that reminded me of those questions I got in my GCSE maths papers (Shivani has ten oranges, if she gives the square root of them away, how many does she have left?). It was a unique style of seduction that I hadn’t come across before—wistful and nostalgic, meaningless and strange. Humourless and impenetrable.

  Some, on the other hand, made a spectacle of their tonal plainness. “U ENGLISH??” a red-headed mechanic asked as his opening gambit. A few of the men’s messages had the manner of an unedited, tedious, all-day stream of consciousness, with ramblings such as: “Hey how’s it going just had a cold shower so annoying the boiler’s broken!! Oh well now on my way out for coffee might get a bacon sarnie you only live once. Later going for a swim was planning on meeting my friend Charlie for a drink but he’s having issues finding a dogsitter, the pub we want to go to doesn’t allow dogs how’s your day xx.” “Fantastic profile, Nina” was the opening sentence from one man, in the manner of a headmaster handing out end-of-term reports.

  And the more men I saw, the more I pieced together categories of humans that I never knew existed. There were the men who were incredibly excited about the fact they’d once been to Las Vegas. There were the guys who were obsessed with the fact they lived in London, which made me nervous that they would forgo a pub or bar for a first date and instead choose hiking up the Millennium Dome or abseiling down the Natural History Museum. I kept seeing Festival Man—a bloke who worked in IT by day, wore glitter on his face by night; who saved up all his holiday allowance to go to five festivals a year. There were the men who lived on canal boats, enjoyed fire poi, had had a taste of harem pants and looked like they wanted more. There were the hundreds of men who feigned indifference to being on Linx—some of whom said their friends had made them do it and they had no idea why they were there, as if downloading a dating app, filling in a profile with copious personal information and uploading photos of yourself was as easy to do by accident as taking the wrong turnin
g on a motorway.

  There were the men who wanted you to know they’d read and continued to read a lot of books, and not just the ones by Dan Brown—real ones, by Hemingway and Bukowski and Alastair Campbell. There were graphic designers—Jesus, there were so many graphic designers. Why had I only ever met a handful of graphic designers in real life and yet I had seen at least 350 of them on this dating app?

  The saddest category I’d noticed was the Left-Behind Guys. They would not have been aware that they gave off any particularly melancholic personal brand, but they did. They were normally in their late thirties or early forties, with big grinning faces betrayed by their half-dead eyes. Photos showed them giving a best man’s speech or reverently beholding a friend’s baby during a christening. Their fatigue and longing were palpable. They came up, on average, every ten clicks, and each one broke my heart afresh each time.

  The most simultaneously reassuring and unsettling discovery I made in those first few intense weeks of compulsive right- and left-clicking on Linx was just how unimaginative humans are. None of us would ever fully grasp the extent of our magnificent unoriginality—it would be too painful to process. I-like-the-outdoors-also-like-the-indoors I-love-pizza-I’m-looking-for-someone-who-can-make-me-laugh-I-just-want-someone-to-come-home-to-and-feel-wriggling-next-to-me-in-the-middle-of-the-night unoriginality. There was the evidence, in all these profiles, where who we really are and who we’d like everyone to think we are were in such unsubtle tension. How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million clichés, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nurtured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. None of us are special. I don’t know why we fight it so much.

  Here’s what I knew about Max before I met him: Max had hair that was a shade between sand and caramel and was cropped but just long enough to show its loose, messy curls. He was 6 foot 4, a full foot taller than me. His skin was surprisingly tawny for someone with fair colouring—he was tanned from being outside, which his photos made a point of declaring he did a lot. His eyes were moss green and gently sloping in a way that suggested he was benevolent and might have an elderly, incapacitated neighbour who he sometimes bought groceries for. He was thirty-seven. He lived in Clapton. He grew up in Somerset. He liked to surf. He looked good in a chunky roll-neck. He grew vegetables in an allotment near to his flat. We’d established the following shared interests, experiences and beliefs: the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds was the soundtrack of our childhoods; we loved churches and hated religion; we liked to regularly swim outdoors; we agreed strawberry was the best and most underrated ice-cream flavour due to its obvious nature; Mexico, Iceland and Nepal were next on our respective travel wish lists.