Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

  “Look, Olly, Aunty Neenaw. She’s come to see us. That’s nice, isn’t it? Will you give her a big hug hello?”

  “I DON’T LIKE YOU, AUNTY NEENAW,” she shouted, pointing at me as she wrinkled her face up in vengefulness.

  “Oh dear,” I said, stroking the top of her head. “Now, I just don’t think that’s true at all.”

  “It is, Neenaw, it is, I don’t LIKE you.”

  I laughed and Mark took my coat. “I’m so sorry, this is a new thing she’s saying to everyone. You mustn’t take it personally.”

  “Please. She’s a toddler.”

  “I know, I know, but it’s just so embarrassing. It started about a week ago, when”—he glanced down at Olive, who had stopped crying and was now listening intently—“when our new friend arrived.”

  “Got it,” I said, walking towards the living room. “Well, that’s to be expected. And she can get lots of attention from me today.”

  “Thanks, Aunty Neenaw,” he said, briefly placing his palm on my back. I always preferred Mark softer—I’d forgotten a newborn and no sleep did this to him.

  Katherine was sitting in the corner of the sofa, her legs folded under her body in her neatly feline way, and a small cotton-swathed bundle in her arms.

  “Oh hello,” I said in a hushed voice, taking a seat next to her. I kissed her on the cheek and gazed down at the tiny sleeping baby who smelt of warm milk and warm laundry.

  “Hello,” she said with a smile. Her face was bare, her lids were heavy. She looked ethereally gorgeous. “This is Freddie. Freddie, this is Aunty Nina.”

  “I DON’T LIKE HER, GO AWAY, AUNTY NEENAW,” Olive shouted from the hallway.

  “Olive’s having a difficult week,” Katherine said.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got brownies and I’m going to use them tactically.”

  “Clever Aunty Neenaw.”

  “Look at this perfect little boy,” I said, gently stroking his cheek with my forefinger. “Brand new.”

  “Guess his life expectancy? Mark and I couldn’t believe it when the doctor told us.”

  “What?”

  “One hundred and twenty years old.”

  I gasped and put my face closer to his, to examine every micro-pore. “Magic baby dinosaur.”

  “Isn’t he?”

  “I hope you’re reserving your energy, little Freddie. You’re going to need it.”

  * * *

  —

  I made us all tea and heard the birth story, well paced and succinctly told, having had a number of performances, with Mark and Katherine taking a line each. There had been a two-day labour, forceps and bruised—yes, bruised—labia. For someone so otherwise reserved, Katherine never spared any detail of birth. I loved hearing about it—it’s strange how quickly you can become a natal connoisseur by proxy of those around you. Five years ago, I could have barely differentiated between a one-year-old and a one-day-old baby. Now, I knew about Braxton Hicks and mastitis and pre-labour perineum massage. I knew about sleep training, growth spurts, teething and potty training. The lexicon of our peer group morphed in every decade. Soon I would know about school-catchment areas, then university applications, then pension schemes. Then care homes, then the name of every funeral parlour in my postcode.

  * * *

  —

  I took Olive out for the afternoon. We went to the park, then the soft-play—she was calm and distracted, her little squeaky voice overexplaining everything to me solemnly. “This is the cars, Aunty Neenaw, and they drive you,” she said as we walked hand in hand down the road. “This is the grasses and they are green,” she said in the park, crouching down to collect a blade and examining it closely. “And sometimes you can eat them like the cows and the snakes but not every day.” We came home in time for tea, which was fish fingers, peas and oven chips.

  “Nutrition is out the window this week, I’m afraid,” Katherine said as she squirted a small puddle of ketchup on Olive’s plate. “Will only be for a week though.”

  “Relax, Kat,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  “I am relaxed!” she said. “I’m just saying don’t judge us for dinner out of the freezer.”

  “I wouldn’t judge you for anything you gave me for dinner.”

  “What time is it, Mark?”

  “Six.”

  “Right, feeding time for you,” she said, scooping her swollen breast out of her bra and attaching Freddie’s mouth to it.

  “It’s so weird that newborns basically just eat all day,” I said. “It’s like they’re permanently on a long boozy lunch, like a PR girl from the 1990s.”

  Katherine laughed. “Sounds like a nice life. Speaking of which, how is Lola?” It was a joke I would have found funny from anyone other than Katherine, who I knew thought all childless women did was have long lunches.

  “Fine, I think. Weirdly, I haven’t really seen or heard from her the last month. I hope she’s okay, I think she’s just busy.”

  “How often do you speak normally?”

  “Every day,” I said. “And we see each other at least once a week, so it’s been a bit strange, actually.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot. I’m surprised you don’t get sick of each other!” She’d made comments like this before—hinting that my and Lola’s relationship was intense or untenable, when we’d been friends now for just shy of fifteen years. She’d had to be sceptical about the omnipresence of Lola to normalize the fact of her own increasing absence. There was a loud bang and we turned to see Olive had accidentally bashed her face on the side of the table while enthusiastically trying to hoover up the peas with her mouth. She had the foreboding wide-eyed expression of a toddler in pain.

  “Olive,” Katherine said calmly, “darling, you’re going to be a brave gir—” But before she’d finished her sentence, Olive was on the kitchen floor banging her fists on the tiles and letting out siren sounds. Mark went over to comfort her.

  “Don’t pick her up,” Katherine said. “She won’t like it. When she gets like this you just need to sit close to her.” Mark lay next to her on the floor as she wailed, barely able to breathe as her face reddened in overexertion. Mark breathed deeply and slowly to calm her and said the same sentence over and over again: “It’s okay, I’m here. It’s okay, I’m here. It’s okay, Olive, I’m here.”

  Eventually, Olive recovered. She stood up slowly, holding on to the chair as her little legs wobbled. “Good girl,” we all said to congratulate her standing up again. “Good girl, what a good girl.” How do we ever manage our emotions single-handedly when this is the introduction to the world we’re given? Where do we learn to do it? How do we find a way to cry quietly on our own, in showers and loos and into pillowcases, then stand up again unassisted and with no words of encouragement?

  “Let’s put on The Lion King soundtrack, hey?” Katherine said, removing the baby from her breast and tucking herself back into her bra.

  “PLAY LION KING,” Olive shouted at the sound system, still sniffing in the aftermath of her violent sobs. The opening chants of “Circle of Life” began.

  “LOUD,” Olive shouted again and the song boomed off the kitchen tiles. Mark went to turn it down.

  “Let her,” Katherine said.

  “Dance, Neenaw,” Olive demanded as drums reverberated around the room. I crouched down and held her hands to twist her back and forth. She grinned.

  “Dance, Mummy, dance, Daddy!” Mark rolled his eyes and stood up, swaying enthusiastically in time to the music. “MORE!” she shouted and Mark waved his arms around in the air with uncoordinated gusto. I laughed and scooped Olive up, hoisting her on to my hip and sashaying around the kitchen. The chorus built and Katherine lifted Freddie up above her head, like Rafiki holding Simba to the sky. Olive broke into giggles. Freddie made a burping noise and white spittle dribbled down his chin.

 
“Chuck me a muslin, babe?” Katherine said, resting him back on to her chest.

  “DON’T STOP DANCING, DADDY!” Olive shouted. Mark dance-walked to the cupboard and picked up a cloth that he threw across to Katherine, who grabbed it with her free hand. The choreography of well-coordinated parenthood—they’d never know what those brief moments were like to watch, from the outside looking in. It was worth spending an exhausting day of tantrums and stinking nappies with a young family, just to get a glimpse at these short-lived shooting stars of togetherness.

  I left after “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” slipping out as quietly as possible so as not to aggravate Olive. As I closed the front door, I was illuminated by the golden light of Saturday dinner time streaming out of their front window. The cacophony of laughter, shouting, clattering plates and “Hakuna Matata” faded as I walked down their road. I knew the deal—shortly after I left, there’d be the struggle to get Olive into the bath, then calming her down before bed, then storytelling under the covers while they longed for a glass of wine. There’d be washing-up and breast-pumping and sterilizing bottles. Mark and Katherine would be in bed before ten and one or both of them would silently recollect all their past Saturday nights of total freedom. I didn’t romanticize child-rearing—I couldn’t, having spent so much time observing it close-up through my friends over the last few years. But I didn’t need to. Katherine was so desperate to hide the mess of her home life from me, little did she know it was the mess that I longed for. It was not the domestic, cuddly quiet I envied—the sleeping baby in the pram or the perfectly arranged family portraits on social media. The shambles of raising children was what I craved—the toys on the floor, the Disney soundtrack filling a kitchen, the rainfall of tears followed by the rising steam of laughter, the wet jumper after bath time with a wriggling, splashing toddler. My flat had begun to feel so quiet—my shelves too neat, my surfaces too crumbless, my diary pages too blank.

  I tried to call Lola on the train home to see if she was free and fancied meeting up, but I went straight to her voicemail. I scrolled through my phonebook to see if there was anyone who might like to go for a drink, but they were all tied into unwritten contracts of relationships and families, which meant I’d have to confirm a night with them a fortnight in advance.

  * * *

  —

  I got home, noticed that Angelo had put a black bin bag in the recycling bin again, ignored it and went upstairs. I didn’t have the energy for neighbourhood warfare tonight. I opened my laptop and worked on the new book. Almost immediately I turned away from the manuscript and googled Max’s name, which I now did about once a week. Like always, I stared at the one small picture of him that existed online—the LinkedIn profile photo of him in a white shirt and green tie that became pixelated if I zoomed in on it. I had recently abandoned my other bizarre habit of going on to the LinkedIn profiles of his colleagues, to see if they might have information on where he went to. They didn’t, they just had lots of information about their client experience and relationships with HMRC and Treasury. I wondered how long I would be indulging in this ritual—Max and I had now been apart for as long as we’d been together.

  I googled Freddie’s full name. There was, of course, nothing. He was seven days old. If only he could know how lucky he was, to exist on a blanket of untouched snow, with not one footprint yet to be found. If only he could consciously savour this period. What would appear when you typed his name at the end of his estimated 120-year-long life? What mess would he leave?

  I typed “Bill Dean secondary school teacher” into Google. Up came the familiar results purpled by the exhaustion of my countless previous clicks. There was an interview with Dad in a local paper about being a headmaster, which he did when he retired. There was a photo of him from another newspaper article in the early noughties, about his support of a national literacy campaign. But just like Max’s online edifice, crudely constructed and bare, there was little to excavate. The vast majority of Dad’s life had happened in a world that wasn’t yet online. Now my dad was fading, I wanted to keep in touch with as many past versions of him as possible. But the internet had failed me—I could look up the full names of all of the parents of the cast of Friends, but I couldn’t find one photo of my dad as a student. I could get a street-view photograph of a road on the other side of the world that I’d never visit, but I couldn’t find one video of my dad. I remembered meeting Dad’s former student in the bakery after the Picasso exhibition and what he’d said about there being a Facebook group in his honour. I typed “Bill Dean teacher” in the Facebook search bar, but nothing came up. I tried “Mr. Dean teacher St. Michael’s” and there it was—“MR. DEAN WAS A LEGEND” and a photo of my smiling dad as I remembered him in my childhood, thick salt-and-pepper hair like a Border collie, skin wrinkled but capillaries yet unbroken. Eyes as dark as molasses, alert and bright. I went on to the description: “For anyone who went to St. Michael’s and was taught by the LEGEND Mr. Bill Dean.”

  I scrolled down the wall of the group to find discussions of Dad’s unusual snacks that he’d eaten during class (smoked oysters from a tin with a cocktail stick, pickled walnuts wrapped in foil) and his unusual lessons (the derivatives of cockney rhyming slang, Leonard Cohen lyrics as poetry). There were photos of him dressed up as Huckleberry Finn for World Book Day. There were numerous posts from ex-pupils who said Dad’s enthusiasm for literature had ignited their love of reading. The latest post was from Arthur, saying he’d bumped into Bill Dean recently and that, while he’d seemed a little older, he looked exactly the same. He made a self-deprecating joke about the fact Dad hadn’t recognized him and said this was understandable as he must be the favourite teacher of any kid who was taught by him, he couldn’t be expected to hold every single student in the same regard. I logged into Facebook and wrote Arthur a direct message.

  Dear Arthur

  My name is Nina, I’m Bill’s daughter. We met very briefly in a café a while back. I just wanted to drop you a message because, understandably, you might have thought that my dad was behaving strangely that day. I wanted to let you know that he’s suffering from

  I sat back in my chair. My dad had always been open with his students—he thought it was important for them to know his interests and passions. But he was private. He said there was a fine line between showing the kids the humanity of who you were and telling them who you were. He was strict in his avoidance of the latter. He felt that making himself too known to students was not what they, or he, needed. Which was surely one of the reasons this Facebook group existed—speculating on who Bill Dean was other than the man who had been completely focused on their education. How much of this message to Arthur would be to save my father’s pride, and how much was it to preserve his legacy according to me? I exited Facebook without sending the message and closed my laptop.

  I unlocked my phone and downloaded Linx, which I’d done a few times since Christmas. I knew I had to “put myself out there,” like the worm on the hook Lola had talked about, but I was still too attached to whatever it was that Max and I had created together. Every man looked exactly the same: “Tom, 34, atheist, London, likes: reading, sleeping, eating, travel”—it reminded me of the biology GCSE syllabus and being taught what living organisms need: “movement, respiration, reproduction, nutrition, excretion.” With every bland profile, I was reminded of a specific memory with Max. The playlist he’d made me called “Happy and Sad Men With Guitars.” The vodka tonic he brought me during every evening bath and how he’d sit on the side of the tub and talk as I washed my hair. The time he brushed the conditioner through it and he felt like my mother and I felt five and for some reason that nearly made me cry as I faced away from him, looking at the shower screen. Fucking clumsily while we were both still wearing jumpers after a long, cold walk along the canal—how we’d spent the last rushed mile telling each other in quiet voices exactly what we were going to do when we got back to the warmth of his fl
at. The thought of trying to replace that closeness with one of these anonymous organisms seemed an impossibility.

  It was strange, to have all your screens finally fail you. I didn’t know where to get the delicious chemical hit psychologists always warned against—I couldn’t seem to feel it, as much as I clicked. Google wasn’t giving me the content I wanted, neither was Linx. Perhaps this was why Lola was always online shopping and sending everything back, like a retail bulimic—to feel something even for just a second. I fell asleep on the profile of a 5 foot 10 man called Jake who lived in Earlsfield and liked Japanese synth music.

  * * *

  —

  On Monday morning, I was recipe-testing in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. It was a man who worked for an international delivery service holding a square parcel.

  “Hi, I’ve got a package for Angelo Ferretti on the ground floor. Would you mind taking it for him and signing for it?”

  I glanced at the recycling bins, which had not been emptied by the binmen that morning because Angelo had filled them back up with black bin bags.

  “He actually doesn’t live on the ground floor, he lives on the first floor,” I said. “With me.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes,” I said, impressed with the ease of my improvisation. “For some reason people seem to get the ground-floor and first-floor flats confused. Angelo lives with me. He’s my husband.”

  “Oh right, okay,” he said, handing the parcel over. “No need to sign then.”

  “Great. So, ring the first-floor doorbell from now on, if you have any packages for him. Don’t want to disturb the poor guy in the flat below.”

  “Will do, thanks,” he said, walking away. I put my ear to Angelo’s door and heard nothing—he was out at work.

  I went upstairs to my flat and into my kitchen. I pulled up a chair beneath the useless cupboard above the oven—too hard to reach to store anything for cooking—and opened its doors. I slid the package straight in and decided it was now the vestibule for hoarding all of Angelo’s packages. No one would ever know. I didn’t feel guilt or fear or even excitement—I felt a calm sense of justice. I was the building’s legal system now—I was the clerk, jury and judge. Someone had to be. I didn’t want to cause him any harm or distress, I just wanted him to feel as frustrated and confused as he’d made me feel. It was what he deserved.