Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

  All these hobbies and preferences and politics and history—were those the essential ingredients of a human? Were those the pillars of ego and id? If these declarations were the construction of a self, then Dad was in the long, slow process of dismantling and destroying his. He couldn’t remember where he was born or his favourite meal, his daughter’s name or the students he’d taught. What would be left of him as the knowledge, predilections and memories accumulated over a lifetime—so precise and vivid—were removed? I thought about what Mum had said—that who you are is just what you wake up and do every day. I hoped that she was right.

  * * *

  —

  I took the train from the suburbs into central London where I was meeting Katherine for dinner. It was the first time I had seen her since I’d gone to her house to meet the baby. She had since been mostly unresponsive to my texts and ignored all my calls. Once every ten days I would get a message that was frantic in tone with no punctuation and many typos which, cynically, I suspected to be strategic to further make a point of how rushed and stressed she was. She claimed that messaging had become “impossible” because she never had any hands free now she had both a toddler and a newborn. Her Instagram content, however, continued to thrive daily.

  She was sitting at the table when I arrived, scrolling on her phone, her face tight and twitchy. She looked up and gave me a thin half-smile.

  “Hi, I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

  “You’re half an hour late.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I did send you a text to let you know. I’ve come from Mum and Dad’s and you know what the trains are like.”

  “I’ve come from Surrey.”

  “All right, mate, I’m sorry, as I said. You know me, I’m never late normally.”

  “I’m never ever late for you either.”

  “That’s because you can’t be late because we usually meet up at your house, so you never have to go anywhere.” Her head jolted as if caught by a cold gust of wind—she was unused to this sort of candour from me. “Which is understandable, of course, because you have young kids but just…can you give me this one, please? It won’t happen again. I’ve had a really horrible day.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I’ll bore you with it later, I need a glass of wine first. Shall we get a bottle?”

  “I’m not drinking.”

  “Okay.”

  “You go ahead.”

  “I will.” I caught the waiter’s attention and ordered a large glass of Chenin Blanc. “Sure you don’t want one?”

  “Yes, Nina, I’m sure.”

  “I was just checking.”

  “You’re not really meant to while you’re still breastfeeding. And I’ve just really enjoyed my body feeling clean and pure during pregnancy, so I thought I’d carry on.”

  “Is Mark drinking?”

  “Of course he is,” she said.

  There was a slightly too long pause. I wracked my brain for a question to ask, but thankfully she got there first.

  “How was the launch?”

  “It was nice,” I said. “You were missed.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry I couldn’t be there, I just couldn’t get out of Anna’s birthday.”

  “Who’s Anna?”

  “You’ve met Anna—Mark’s school friend Ned’s wife. They’re local to us.”

  “I thought you said you couldn’t leave the house while Freddie was that young?”

  “I could for a few hours, Mark’s mum babysat him. I just couldn’t come into town.”

  The waiter placed the glass of wine in front of me.

  “What are you doing on July the sixth?” she asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said, taking a large sip and letting the cold, honeysuckle liquid anaesthetize me back into trusty, taciturn passive-aggression.

  “Okay, can you check when you’re in front of the diary because we’d like that to be the date of the naming ceremony for Freddie and Olive.”

  “Will there be a sorting hat?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, it was a joke. Sounds like something from Harry Potter.”

  Her face was expressionless. “It’s just a secular christening.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you let me know tonight as soon as you’re home? Because I want to be able to confirm all the godparents can come before I book the venue.”

  “I will do.”

  “So what’s up with you, anyway?” she said, opening her menu. “Why have you had a horrible day?”

  “It was Dad’s birthday lunch and he was in a bad way. Didn’t recognize me at one point. Kept asking for his mother, who’s been dead for twenty years. Then he tried to open a tin with a chopping knife and cut his hand, there was blood everywhere. Thankfully, he didn’t have to go to hospital.”

  “Oh dear, everything’s very dramatic with you at the moment, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every time I meet you it seems there’s another big drama.” She looked up from her menu.

  “Katherine.” I took a deep breath. I couldn’t believe I was finally going to say it—the speech I’d been angrily rehearsing for months, that I never thought would be spoken anywhere other than when I was alone in the shower. “I may not have a baby. But I do have a life.”

  “Of course I know you have a life.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “You don’t. You don’t ask me about it, you don’t take it seriously, you don’t come to my home, you don’t take any interest in my work, you couldn’t even come to my book launch when I had no family there. You’re my best and oldest friend and not only did you not want to be there, you didn’t even feel a sense of obligation to pretend to want to be there.”

  “I’ve told you, it’s because I couldn’t come all the way into town for the evening.”

  “So you thought you’d go to a party where you could talk about babies and weddings and houses all night. Because not everyone wants to talk about babies and weddings and houses at a book launch.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true. You couldn’t just be my friend for one night, celebrating my work. I have to celebrate when you get your kitchen retiled, but anything I do is trivial and meaningless because I’m not in a relationship and I don’t have children. I don’t know what’s happened to make you so relentlessly dismissive of anyone whose life isn’t exactly like yours, but you need to sort that shit out.” I slammed my glass slightly too dramatically on the table and wine spilt.

  “I don’t need you to celebrate everything in my life!”

  The waiter came to our table with a grin as wide as a canal. “Would you like to hear the specials for this evening?”

  “Can you give us a few minutes?” Katherine said. He reluctantly nodded and walked away.

  “And actually—yeah, things are dramatic at the moment. And I’m sorry if that’s not what you fancy right now. I’m sorry that I have a terminally ill father and a mother who is clearly not coping. And that I had my heart broken by a man I’ll never see or speak to again. I’m sorry if that’s not quite cashmere-socks-and-pastel-coloured-ceramic-tableware enough for you. But you can’t phase me out of your life because I’m a bit too messy for whatever aesthetic mood board you’re currently living in. That’s not how friendship works.”

  “I don’t think you’re messy, I think there’s just a lot going on.”

  “Yes, there is. And you just can’t be bothered to support me through it?”

  “You don’t get it, Nina!” she said, raising her voice and eyebrows at unnerving speed. “I don’t have the headspace for it! I can’t be that for you any more, that’s what Lola is good for. You’ll understand when you have kids.”<
br />
  I looked at her, completely unable to access my Katherine memory archive—unable to recall how and why we’d been friends for twenty years. I signalled to the waiter for the bill.

  “I don’t want to have dinner with you. And you certainly don’t want to have dinner with me. I don’t know why we put ourselves through this any more.”

  “I’ve come all the way from Surrey.”

  “YES, I KNOW,” I barked. “No one asked you to fucking live there, Katherine. You’re not seventy. You’re not a conservatory salesman. You’re not a retired Question Time presenter-turned-gardening columnist.”

  “Lots of people have to move out of London, you don’t need to act like it’s some enormous betrayal.”

  “Are you only going to want to be friends with me when I get married and have a kid and own a big house? Is that when you’ll decide you love me again? When I do all the things you’ve done so you can feel like you were right all along?”

  Katherine took her jacket off the back of her chair and picked up her handbag. Her face had reddened and she was chewing her top lip with fervour. “I’m going. Don’t call me or message me,” she said, shrugging on her jacket and pulling her hair out from under its collar. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “You haven’t wanted to talk to me in years,” I said as she stood up from the table and left.

  * * *

  —

  I paid for my wine and left the restaurant. It was early evening on a Saturday night and I didn’t want to go back to the flat and sit alone with my rage and the rage of my terrifying neighbour lurking beneath me. I walked, eastwards, not knowing where I would end up. I walked through the inexplicably busy cypher of Holborn and its countless sandwich shops. I walked past St. Paul’s Cathedral with its silvery dome hat like a steel combat helmet, then the Bank of England with its grand Grecian pillars. I walked past the crowds of twenty-something girls in chokers and too much eyeliner smoking outside the basement bars of Aldgate, then the elderly smokers outside the pubs of Stepney Green who wondered why twenty-something girls in chokers were spending so much money to be there. Finally, just under two hours later, I saw the cream-tiled front of Mile End tube station. I made my way by memory to Albyn Square and climbed over the railings into the communal garden, like I had done the last time I saw Max. I sat on the bench cross-legged, my plimsolls tucked underneath my thighs. I could see the door to our basement flat, and the road where Dad’s blue Nissan Micra used to be parked.

  “Love is homesickness,” I once read in a book. The author’s therapist had told her that the pursuit of love in adulthood is just an expression of missing our mums and dads—that we look for intimacy and romance because we never stop wanting parental security and attention. We simply displace it. My dad was nearly eighty and he was still missing his mother. He’d found a way of concealing it for all of his adult life and now, as the facade of togetherness was being slowly taken apart without his knowledge: the truth. All he wanted was his mum. I would make a strong case for the argument that every adult on this earth is sitting on a bench waiting for their parents to pick them up, whether they know it or not. I think we wait until the day we die.

  I remained in the square a little longer, waiting for someone to get me. Waiting for my mum to call me into the flat for tea. Waiting for a Nissan Micra that no longer existed, that would never come to pick me up again. I wondered who lived in our basement flat now. I wondered where the Nissan Micra was—the safety of my childhood. Now scrap metal somewhere.

  I looked into the windows on Albyn Square, some of them lit up with scenes of a household—human Punch and Judy shows. A woman worked at a desk, a man poured a kettle in his kitchen. It was just before midnight. It was cold. I was an adult woman with a mortgage, a career and a life full of responsibilities. I was a little girl with a dying dad. And I didn’t know where I wanted to go.

  “I miss home.”

  I miss home.

  I miss home.

  * * *

  —

  I took the last tube back to Archway. The streets were scattered with groups of human-ravens, drunkenly flapping at each other—squawking as they pecked at polystyrene boxes of grey kebab ribbons and chips cemented together with mayonnaise. I made my way to my street lined with a few recently planted spindly trees surrounded by their circular black railings and budding with baby leaves. There was one directly in view from my kitchen window. Every morning as I drank my coffee I imagined how big it would be by the end of my lifetime.

  I approached my building and saw that someone was sitting outside the house on the ground, back slightly hunched, long legs splayed outward. I couldn’t make out the face but I could see they were tall and male and wearing boots. I instinctively knew it was Angelo, and I readied myself for an unpleasant conversation.

  But when I got to the front door, I saw someone else. I stood still and took in the sight of him, barely able to believe he was real. There he was.

  Max. Smoking a rollie. Sitting on my doorstep.

  “Hello,” he said. I had thought about this exact moment for five months. So many times, the bell had rung and I’d gone to the front door, or I would turn the corner on to my street, and imagine he would be there. In my fantasies, “Hello” is exactly what he’d say first. It had the classic cadence of romcom dialogue—uncomplicated and yet loaded with subtext. One word that stated cool, stylized offhandedness, assuming that all would be forgiven and forgotten. A greeting that marked a new and simple beginning. I couldn’t remember what my answer had been in my many imagined versions of this exchange. If I had been in a romcom, I would have rushed towards him, thrown my arms around his shoulders, kissed him and said nothing but a one-line statement of relieved gratitude like: “I knew you’d come back.” I wouldn’t bother him with my questions, I wouldn’t demand an explanation, I wouldn’t burden him with the facts of his betrayal, I wouldn’t scare him off with my anger.

  “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “I know,” he said, discarding his rollie and standing up. “I want to explain everything.” He walked towards me.

  “No, no,” I said, holding my arms out to keep him from coming too close. “I want you to tell me where you’ve been.” He stood still. He looked scared of provoking me. “Where have you been, Max? Where the fuck have you been?”

  “I’ve been here.”

  “I thought you’d died.”

  “I know, I can’t imagine how stressful it must have been for you.”

  “What have you been doing here?”

  He looked confused, like a schoolboy who’d been hauled into the headmistress’s office and would say anything to stay out of trouble. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “No, HERE, in this city we both live in, for all this time. What have you been doing that meant you couldn’t call me and let me know you’re alive?”

  “I have wanted to, so much. Just because I haven’t called you doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to every day.”

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “I was scared, Nina. I just got so, so scared and so confused.”

  “Scared?” I said mockingly. “And confused?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you think I felt? A man who I’ve shared my life with almost constantly for months—who I trusted, who I was vulnerable with—tells me he loves me then never sees me again. How do you think that made me feel?”

  Max shrugged remorsefully. I had never known him this quiet.

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “A little bit fucking scared?” I said. “Really, really fucking confused?”

  He nodded and took another step towards me.

  “Can I hold you?” he asked. “I really want to.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t care about what you want.”

  “Can I come inside? Can we talk?” he asked. I knew
I would let him in and I knew that we would talk, rigorously and deeply, into the night. But I saw the words of every sassy self-help book sloganism I’d heard second-hand my whole life: play hard to get, make him wait, show him what he’s missing. I pretended to be in conflict about my decision and continued the silent stand-off for a minute. Then I walked to the front door, turned the key and entered, feeling him close behind me.

  When we got into my flat, I was surprised at how dangerous it felt to have him in my home again. This was a man who was directly responsible for so much of my pain. And I had invited him in, to stand in my living room, both of us either end of the dining table leaning awkwardly on a chair.

  “I hate that I put you through this,” he finally said.

  “I don’t think you know what this has really felt like.”

  “I do know.”

  “You don’t. Because if you did you would never have done something so cruel. I don’t think you have really properly thought what it was like or how you would have felt if I’d done this to you.”