Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

  I showed Lola Max’s profile and she eagerly said she’d “seen him on there,” which I didn’t love. I had thought of these men as offerings from Mother Destiny—hand-selected possible partners, chosen especially for me (“It’s not cock couture,” Lola said). While speaking with pictures of my potential soulmate, I had forgotten that hundreds and thousands of other women were assessing their prospective futures from their sofas and commutes too. Lola told me this was a classic reaction of a co-dependent monogamist who hadn’t properly dated before and that if I wanted to get anywhere in dating apps, I’d have to toughen up. “It’s cut-throat,” she informed me. “You can’t personalize this process. You’ve got to be in it to win it. You need to be fighting fit and stay focused. It’s why it’s a young man’s game.” She told me that Max could be something of a Linx Celebrity, which she had encountered a handful of times—dastardly men who were prolific on apps thanks to their good looks and pre-packaged charm (she once discovered she and her colleague were dating the same one: all the messages from him had been copied and pasted). They wouldn’t commit to anything substantial, she explained, because they wouldn’t stop being single until they’d finally run out of options and they knew that women would never, ever stop right-clicking on their profile.

  Max was ten minutes late. I hated lateness. Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can’t be bothered to take up an instrument. I tried reading my book, a detailed but digestible account of North Korea, but I was so nervous, my eyes kept flicking up from the page in search of Max and I couldn’t absorb any of the words.

  “Hello!” I finally texted him after fifteen minutes had passed. “I’m at the bar. What are you drinking?”

  “Got us a table outside so I can smoke,” he replied. “Pint of pale ale would be great, thank you.” This slightly annoyed me, not only because he had not checked whether I smoked before planting us outside on what was quite a cold evening but because he hadn’t sent me a text to let me know he was sitting outside. Was he waiting for me to do a full external recce of the site to happen upon him before our date could begin? How long had he been waiting there? I was reminded that the behaviour around dating had its own set of rules and standards, which all the participants had to seem overly relaxed about at all times. It was completely different to having a drink with a friend. How strange it would have been for Lola to have done this if we’d agreed to meet at a pub she suggested that I’d never been to before.

  I ordered a gin and tonic and a pale ale and took one last glance at my face in the mirrored panel that lined the back of the bar behind the bottles. I had put on some token mascara and little else, and my fringe was on its best behaviour. I walked out to the beer garden, which was empty other than for Max, who was sitting on a bench reading a book. I wondered if he was reading it, or just pretending to read it like I was. He wore a white T-shirt, blue jeans and brown leather boots. The first thing I noticed were his very, very long legs, one of which stretched out to the side of the picnic table.

  I walked towards him and he looked up and smiled at me in recognition. He glowed like an ember—his eyes shining, his beard golden brown, his skin burnished from sunbeams. His tousled hair looked like it had been washed in the sea and dishevelled by the windy afternoon. There was dirt on his boots. There was dirt on his jeans. He was as solid as a Sequoia, high as a Redwood and as broad as the prairie. He was earthly and godly; elemental and ethereal. Both not of this earth and a poster boy for it.

  “Hey,” he said and stood up to tower over me. His voice was low and soft; the distant rumble of thunder.

  “What are you reading?” I asked. He kissed me on both cheeks and held up the cover for me to see.

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s a story told from the perspective of a man on his deathbed looking back on his life and reflecting on what he’s learnt. It’s all about the passage of time, which I used to find moving and I now find terrifying.”

  “The passage-of-time stuff is the worst,” I said, sitting down and placing the drinks on the table, hoping he hadn’t noticed the nervous warble in my voice. “My favourite genre of literature used to be old-person-inches-towards-death-and-thinks-about-the-past-with-epiphany. I can hardly bear it now.”

  “Me too,” he said.

  He looked older than thirty-seven in the flesh. His pictures hadn’t captured the strands of grey in his hair that laced through strands of white blond, streaked by the sun. The camera also hadn’t caught the creases, crinkles and lines of his skin, in which I could see cigarette smoke, late nights, sunshine, hard soap and hot water. This softened his sturdiness and made me like his face even more—I wanted to know all the pleasure and pain that had left his features rumpled. I also resented how much the visibility of his ageing seduced me—had it been worn by a woman, I might have found it haggard rather than weathered. Only a species as accommodating and nurturing as women could fetishize the frame of a sedentary middle-aged man and call it a “dad bod” or rebrand a white-haired, grumpy pensioner as a “silver fox.”

  He rolled a cigarette and asked if I wanted one. I told him the truth, which was that I was desperate for one, but I hadn’t had a cigarette in three years since I gave up. As I spoke and he rolled, he glanced up at me from time to time in a gaze that made his irises seem all the more verdant. In the milliseconds in which he licked the edge of the tobacco paper he looked me in the eyes.

  I asked him about his job. Job stuff is the first thing you talk about on Linx—it’s the first thing you talk about in life. I hated talking about my job. I’d noticed that anyone who has a job that could be perceived as even vaguely glamorous (art, media, food, writing, fashion) cannot talk about their work at all without everyone thinking they’re being self-important, so I’ve found it best to just avoid it. Also, everyone has an opinion on food, so when I tell someone what my job is, it’s rare that we can then move on and talk about something else. I am normally lectured on where to get the best dim sum north of the river, or which classic French cookbook is the most reliable, or the best nuts to put in brownies (I don’t need to be told this, it’s chopped hazelnuts or whole blanched almonds).

  I was delighted to realize that by the time Max and I asked each other about our respective jobs, we’d been talking for a week on Linx and fifteen minutes in the flesh. Max was an accountant, which I hadn’t expected. He said a lot of people said that. He’d ended up accounting by accident, because he was good at maths and it’s what his dad did, and he’d wanted to impress his dad. When he mentioned his dad, his words were jostled with a tone of either resentment or regret. I knew it would be a subject we returned to at some point when we were drunker and more comfortable with each other and we’d steer the conversational tone until we sounded like Oprah doing a tell-all televised interview, in which we’d take turns to be the guest.

  He said he’d been in a cycle for the last ten years of accounting, saving money, then taking a large chunk of time off to travel. He loved to travel. Recently, he’d become restless. He hated the daily slog of his job and dreamt of a simpler life—teaching surfing, working on a farm, living in remoteness—but he was realistic about the fact he’d probably miss his salary. He couldn’t work out which gave him greater freedom: earning enough money so he could disappear whenever he wanted, or earning no money and choosing a life of semi-permanent disappearance. He said he’d felt untethered in recent years—unsure of the sort of life that would make him happiest. He felt like he had to escape something, but he didn’t know what and he didn’t know where to go. I told him I thought that was the sensation commonly known as adulthood.

  I told him about Taste, which he said he’d seen in bookshop windows. I told him about The Tiny Kitchen and he seemed genuinely fascinated by the concept, asking to see photos of my old studio flat where we did all the book’s photography. He’d read my weekly food column once or twice and t
old me that he’d messed up a recipe for Canadian glazed gammon—he had friends round for lunch and they’d had to order Chinese.

  He asked me if I’d like another drink, I said yes and he said: “Single or double?” I smiled and he winked. We were in this together now, two comrades on a mission.

  When he went into the bar, I grinned to myself and realized I was already tipsy. When he came back from the bar, we talked about Linx, which was inevitable but somehow it felt gauche to talk about the dating app that was the very reason we were on the date. It struck me that the only event where it’s appropriate to talk about the reason you’re at the event is a funeral.

  Max had been on Linx for six months. It was his first time on a dating app. He said he’d initially found it fun, but the hollowness of the encounters had made him feel jaded. He’d been thinking about deleting it.

  “Thanks for squeezing me in before the deadline,” I said.

  “Yeah, but look at you,” he replied. “How could I not?” It was the first of a few disingenuous, dashed-off compliments and I adored every single one of them. I told him he was my first Linx date—we both made lots of bawdy jokes about him taking my app virginity which weren’t that funny at all.

  He insisted on buying the third round and when he emerged back into the beer garden, I felt a strangely historic connection to him; a sense of pride and belonging; of long pre-established togetherness with this man I’d met two hours ago. When he sat down, I wanted to touch his face, which looked like it belonged to a Viking warrior. I sat on my own hand to stop myself. As he rolled another cigarette and turned to ask someone for a lighter, I noticed the unapologetic strength of his profile, particularly the slight curvature of the bridge of his nose. I wanted to put him on a coin.

  I asked for a drag of his cigarette. The act of it felt good, but it tasted horrible. I’d almost forgotten how to do it, and the smoke sat in my mouth and did nothing but feel toxic and hot. My second drag tasted better. The ritual felt shared and I loved passing something back and forth between us with adolescent excitement.

  “I feel like I’ve corrupted you,” he said. I told him not to worry as he hadn’t—I was bound to have a drag of a fag at some point. He told me he’d like the opportunity to corrupt me, if that was okay. I laughed in a knowing way.

  He went back in to order us another round. We talked about our plans for the upcoming weekend—he was getting out of London, as he nearly always did, this time by himself to camp in Sussex. I asked how he was getting there and he said he was taking his beloved car, which was a red 1938 MG TA named Bruce. I couldn’t believe that was his car, and told him the personality hybrid of accountant who drives a classic sports car, wears muddy jeans and swims in lakes at the weekend was almost incomprehensible. He said, “But those are the best things about a person—the contradictions,” with a faraway look in his eyes. I knew that very second that if I ever had a reason to hate Max, if he ever treated me badly, I would return to this sentence as proof that he was the worst person alive. But for now, I was able to nod dreamily and agree.

  “Are you cold?” he asked. I was, and I wanted another drink, so we went back into the pub. A muttering old man wearing two hats (flat caps, one on top of the other) and drinking Guinness on his own started talking to us. He talked a lot about the gentrification of Archway and how he could barely recognize his road any more because of all the blocks of new-build flats. We both listened patiently, nodded along and said things like “Shocking, isn’t it?” Max bought him a pint, which I saw as an act of goodwill but also a definite full stop to our interaction with him. But he was having none of it. He shuffled his bar stool closer to us and relayed a protracted personal history of all the local MPs that had governed the constituency over the course of his lifetime. I was keen to end the conversation, and I could sense Max was too, but we were both proving a point to each other about how down to earth we were. We asked questions we didn’t want to know the answers to and feigned total absorption in his twenty-five-minute description of a particular pub in Kentish Town that he used to drink in that was now closed. We did it because we wanted to earn each other’s admiration and trust: Look how kind I am, look how curious I am. I care about local business and local libraries and the welfare of the elderly.

  As Geoff (his name was Geoff) launched into a detailed account of where the old post office used to be on Highgate Hill, I felt Max’s hand on my waist. At first, I thought this was just a signal that he too wanted this rambling monologue from Geoff to cease. But then his fingers reached underneath the fabric of my top and he slowly and lightly doodled on my bare skin. He did it all without looking at me. Just a few centimetres of flesh, only for a few minutes, then he retrieved his hand to roll another cigarette. Why was that always the most exciting bit? I knew, at some point, I would be naked with this man, our bodies interlocked. That my legs would be wrapped round his waist, or over his shoulders, or that my face would be burying itself into a pillow with the force of him behind me. And yet—I knew this physical sensation was the greatest one he’d ever be able to give me. The sexiest, most exciting, romantic, explosive feeling in the world is a matter of a few centimetres of skin being stroked for the first time in a public place. The first confirmation of desire. The first indication of intimacy. You only get that feeling with a person once.

  We went outside to share another cigarette and we talked, through guilty laughter, about Geoff. He took off his denim jacket and draped it around my shoulders because I was cold. I could tell he was just as cold as I was, but I didn’t want to stop his big show of masculinity. How could I? I’d bought front-row tickets to it. I wondered how much of his behaviour this evening had been dictated by a pressure to perform his gender in such a demonstrative way. But then again, what was I doing? Why was I wearing a pair of four-inch heels that gave me blisters? Why was I laughing knowingly twice as much as I normally do and making half the amount of jokes?

  I went to the loo, rearranged my fringe and texted Lola: “I’m on the best date of my life. Don’t text me back because he might see your reply. Love you.”

  When I returned to him in the bar, he’d ordered us another round and a shot of tequila each.

  “The music sounds so good,” I said as I watched drunken students descend into the basement club, Martha and the Vandellas wailing loudly beneath us.

  “It is, they play the best songs.”

  “Shall we dance?” I asked and realized how stiff I sounded.

  “Let’s dance,” he replied.

  We paid one pound each for entry and our hands were stamped with the words the institution in black ink. Initially, I felt self-conscious on the dance floor. Watching how we moved our bodies felt like an audition for the inevitable. I never used to feel anything but total liberation when dancing, but something had changed recently. I was at a wedding of a university friend a few months ago when “Love Machine” by Girls Aloud came on, and all of us rushed to the dance floor. When I looked around the circle of women, the women I’d been dancing with since I was a teenager, I suddenly saw us as completely different people. Lola in her strapless jumpsuit, using a glass of prosecco as a microphone. Meera moving her hips rhythmically around her clutch bag on the floor. We didn’t look free or wild or mysterious, we looked like pissed-up thirty-something women pointing at each other to the beat of the music we grew up with that would now be played at a nostalgia club night.

  But the mix of gin, tequila and lust loosened me up enough to shimmy off my inhibitions. We danced for about an hour—sometimes comically, away from each other, with over-the-top moves. Sometimes campily, with Max twirling, spinning and dipping me, much to the chagrin of other revellers on the tightly packed dance floor. Then I heard it. The percussion of George Michael’s bassy donk donk donk donk and finger clicks.

  “THIS SONG!” I shouted.

  “SO GOOD!” he replied.

  “IT WAS NUMBER ONE THE DAY I
WAS BORN!”

  “WHAT?”

  “IT WAS NUMBER ONE THE DAY I WAS BORN!” I repeated. “IT’S WHY MY MIDDLE NAME IS GEORGE.”

  “NO!” he bellowed, his eyes wide in disbelief.

  “YES!” I shouted.

  “I LOVE THAT!” he shouted back, grabbing me by the waist and pulling me into him. His T-shirt was damp with sweat and he smelt like the warm earth as the air rises after a summer storm. “FUCKING WEIRDO.” He craned his head down towards me in a smile and we kissed. I draped my arms around his neck and he pulled me closer to him, lifting me off the ground.

  We left the pub in search of a chippie. As we walked down Archway Road, we were side by side and he moved me so he was standing on the outside of the pavement. I was reminded of how annoyingly delicious these patronizing traditions of heteronormativity could be. Of course, the rational part of my brain wanted to tell him that he was no more capable of receiving the oncoming blow of a crashing car than I was, and his act of supposed chivalry made no sense. But I liked him standing on the outside of the pavement. I liked feeling like I was a precious and valuable thing to be guarded, like a diamond necklace in transit with a security guard. Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating? I resented it. It was like good sea salt—just a tiny dash could really bring out the flavour of the date and it was so often delectable.