I opened our second pack of cigarettes and withdrew one. “Beats me.”
“We have to download Linx again.”
“No,” I said, lighting my fag. “No way. I’m done with dating.”
“You can’t be done with dating if you want a family.”
“I was so much happier before this year. I don’t want to think about it or look for it any more. If it happens, it happens.”
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to love someone, Nina.”
“I know that.”
“It’s not a weakness, to want that for yourself,” she said. “I don’t want you to give up hope.”
“I think that might have already happened.” We both leant out of the window, exhaling smoke into the sky. The recently planted tree waved its nascent branches at us in the breeze.
“I know,” she said. “You should give your hope to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like what Joe said in his groom’s speech: love is being the guardian of another person’s solitude. Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person’s hope. Leave it with me and I’ll look after it for a while, if it feels too heavy for now.”
“I can’t do that, you’re already carrying yours.”
“Oh, I’ve been carrying mine for a decade,” she said. “I won’t notice if I chuck a bit more in.”
I tucked her hair tightly behind her ear. “I couldn’t be less of an advocate for relationships right now. But, for what it’s worth—I know there is a love ahead of you, Lola. Grander than either of us can imagine. He might not be a celebrity magician. He might not be anything like the sort of man we thought he would be. But he’s on his way.”
“I know that, Nina,” she said. “I’ve always known that.”
“You really have, haven’t you?”
“So I can know it for you too. And then you don’t have to think about it any more. You just keep writing your books and looking after your dad. I’ll keep your hope safe for you until you’re ready for me to hand it back.”
Angelo approached the front door and saw us leaning out of my window.
“Hello!” he shouted up to me.
“Hello!” I said. “How are the hams?”
“Okay,” he said. “I hang them on hooks on the washing line, but I have a problem with flies.”
“You wanted the bicycle,” I said.
“Ah, yes.”
“I have something you can cover them with that will let the air get to them.”
“You do?”
“Yes,” I said. He smiled and turned the key in the door. I turned to Lola; her face was aghast.
“What. Was that?”
“He’s okay.”
“The possible-murderer?”
“He’s not a murderer, he’s a depressed man who has bought knives to take up the art of charcuterie to distract him from his broken heart and remind him of home.”
“How do you know?”
“We talked, had it out and came to a truce.”
“How?”
“We fucked.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m actually being serious.” Lola’s mouth hung open in shock and her drunken, dancing eyes came into focus. “He came over to confront me about the stolen packages, I confessed and we ended up having sex in the kitchen.” The cavern of her mouth widened. “I know.”
“Will you do it again?”
“No, no. It was a one-time thing.”
“Do you fancy him?”
“I don’t know. I did, a lot, when it was happening. I think I needed to have sex with someone who couldn’t disappear. We live in the same house. We share an electricity meter. I can basically hear his heartbeat through the floor.”
Lola thought on this, removing another cigarette. “Lush,” she concluded sadly.
* * *
—
We sat in drunken exhaustion—a mostly silent cycle of pouring, drinking and smoking.
“I have got something new for the Schadenfreude Shelf,” Lola said. “And it’s the best one yet.”
“You say that every time.”
“No, trust me, this one really is the best one yet. I heard it a while back and I’ve actually been saving it up for our lowest low.”
“I don’t think other people’s misery is going to do anything except make me feel more miserable.”
“Why don’t you try it?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, so,” she said, bringing her feet up to her chair so she sat cross-legged like an excitable teenager during a secret-swapping session. “Do you remember my friend Camille?”
“Yes.”
“So, not Camille, but—”
“Don’t believe it, the source has already been weakened.”
“We can call her right now for clarification.”
“I’m not calling your friend Camille.”
“So, Camille’s friend Emma moved to California. And in the first month she’s there, she decides she wants to take ayahuasca.”
“What’s ayahuasca?”
“It’s a psychoactive drug that’s administered by a shaman and apparently it’s like doing ten years’ therapy in one night.”
“Right.” It worried me how fluent I had become in Lola-babble.
“So, she’s at this ceremony in Joshua Tree with a bunch of other strangers and they all take the ayahuasca. Emma goes on this crazy emotional trip, like she’s gone back in time, and she heals all these awful rifts between her and her mother. She comes out the other side and stands in the desert, sand under her feet and stars over her head.”
“All right, get on with it.”
“And she realizes she’s at total peace for the first time in her life. Then—a man is next to her. This other guy who has taken it too. He holds his hand out to her and she takes it. They say nothing to each other, but she knows she’s just met the love of her life.”
“Lola, this story is not true.”
“Now—wait a minute. So. They go back to LA, where he also lives, and they spend the weekend together. She is happier than she’s ever been—she has never felt so understood by another human. He moves into her apartment. They have three blissful months together.”
“Okay.”
“Then—something happens. This guy starts to actually really annoy her. They start having all these fights about things. She says to him: ‘I think this might not be right.’ He says: ‘We just have to go back to the desert to take more ayahuasca.’ ”
“So it was like a long, low-level hallucination?”
“Precisely. So she says, no, take your stuff, leave my apartment, and he does. Then, about a week later, there’s this horrific smell everywhere. In every room, she can’t escape it.”
“Oh no.”
“She gets cleaners round—they deep-clean the whole place, the smell doesn’t go. After a month of living in hell, she finally traces where it’s coming from.”
“Where?”
“He had dismantled the air-conditioning unit, stuffed it with raw prawns, then screwed it back up. The smell dispersed with the airflow.”
“Oh my God.” I sat with the magnitude of this anecdotal finale for a minute. “That’s a really, really good addition to the Schadenfreude Shelf, Lola. Our worst break-up will never be as bad as that.”
“What would you have done? If you had been her?” she asked.
I swallowed the last of the sickly sweet coffee liqueur. “I think I might have gone back to the desert,” I said. “And taken more.”
“But then it would have all been a lie.”
“Think about Demetrius and Helena.”
“Were we at uni with them?”
“In A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The happy ending is about two c
ouples who are all in love with the right person. But Demetrius only loves Helena because he’s under the cast of an earlier spell.”
“Is that really the ending?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“There are different theories. Probably because Shakespeare needed to resolve everything, so the story could follow the rules of what made a comedy. It was really hard to explain it to the kids when I taught it—they found an illusion so impossible to accept as a happy ending. They always used to ask me if I thought that Demetrius stayed in love with Helena after the play ended.”
“Do you think he did?”
“The question isn’t whether he stayed in love, it’s whether he woke up,” I said.
Lola looked out on to my road, the street lamp bathing her face in amber light, the amber light that had illuminated these late-night scenes of our friendship for so many years. She picked up my phone, unlocked it and went into the app store. The Linx logo appeared with an option to download it.
“I hope he didn’t wake up,” she said. She placed the phone in the palm of my hand and the screen shone with bright uncertainty.
Epilogue
It is clear-skied when I wake up on the 3rd of August. It is the kind of weather that reminds me of childhood—of ladybirds on freckled arms and strawberry ice cream in the park. I know there must have been white-skied and drizzly days in my early years, but I can never seem to remember any of them. I brush my teeth and wash my face and, for the sake of tradition if not historical accuracy, play “The Edge of Heaven” from the living-room speakers. It really is the best song to dance to.
I go for a walk around my neighbourhood, stepping over kebab-shop debris from the late-night moveable feasts. I walk past the flaking red-painted front of The Institution which, in daylight, looks like a kids’ party entertainer without its costume. I do my preferred circuit of Hampstead Heath and pick up a flat white on the way home (double shot, full-fat milk).
Angelo’s leaving as I arrive. We exchange pleasantries, both smoke a cigarette in the sun, and I tell him it’s my thirty-third birthday. He informs me I’m the same age as Jesus was when he died and asks what I plan to do to rival his achievements. I tell him I am sure I can save mankind in the next year. Or if not, I’ll definitely donate to food banks more.
In the mid-afternoon, I head to Albyn Square. I wanted a small afternoon picnic to celebrate this year and couldn’t think of anywhere lovelier than the road of my first home. I take a rug, some fold-out chairs and a cool box of wine and food. The guest list is just seven: Katherine, Mark, Lola, Joe, Lucy, Mum and Dad.
Katherine and Mark arrive first, Freddie on Katherine’s hip, Olive holding Mark’s hand, no one complaining about how long it took to get to East London, even though I know that’s what they’ve been talking about on the train journey. I asked everyone to bring their favourite snack from childhood as research for the final chapter of my new book. Kat brings salt-and-vinegar chipsticks, Mark brings Scotch eggs.
Joe and Lucy arrive shortly afterwards, with packets of Babybels and Jammie Dodgers piled up in their arms. Lucy spends the afternoon going from cheese to biscuit, then biscuit to cheese. At one point, I see her sandwich a Babybel between two biscuits and eat it in one bite. Her bump is showing now and Joe can’t stop touching her. He is the sort of expectant father who refers to the birth as a joint venture and knows every answer to every question about pregnancy. They arrive in their new navy car, with Lucy shouting at him about parking. It’s already been fitted with a seat for the baby. One day that baby will sit on a bench, wondering if that navy car is scrap metal somewhere, wishing it could come collect them.
Lola turns up with sherbet and strawberry laces, wearing a blue gingham maxi dress and a matching parasol. She has a date later this evening. A man from a new app, which matches you on mutual dislikes rather than mutual likes. They’ve been talking about their shared hatred of country music and tomatoes in panini for five days solid now. Despite the fact he’s a Gemini, she thinks he may be the one. (We persuade her not to take the parasol.)
Dad remembers Albyn Square as soon as he arrives. He remembers teaching me to ride my bike in circles, he remembers the day I fell out of the mulberry tree and needed stitches on my knee, he remembers the bench where they sat with me a few days after I was born. I have given up sifting through the timeline of his memories, trying to work out which is the sediment that will stick. Some days he can’t remember who I am, sometimes he remembers the grades of all my violin exams. I like to think of everyone he loves as a gallery of Picasso paintings that hang in his mind—in a constant state of fascinating rearrangement, rather than in the process of erasure.
He sits on the bench and talks to Joe about cricket. Mum sits on the grass and Lola shows her how she’s learnt to fishtail braid her own hair. Olive eats all the sherbet while no one is looking.
Katherine’s made me a cake—she asks me to sit on the bench next to Dad while she indiscreetly takes it out of its carrier behind Mark’s back. It is three-tiered and lopsided and covered in buttercup-yellow icing.
Everyone sings “Happy Birthday.” Lola harmonizes badly, Freddie giggles in my lap, Mum takes a photograph. Olive crawls under the mulberry tree. The tree that lives inside me and is impossible to demolish, only hide or lose through ever-moving mists. The tree that grows up through me, the trunk of which forms my spine. Katherine holds the cake below my face and the candles flicker lightly in the still heat of the day. “Make a wish,” she says. I close my eyes and think of all the paths that lie ahead, none of which I can see yet. None of which I can plan for, only walk towards with faith. I blow out the candles of my cake for the thirty-third time. Another year begins.
Acknowledgements
I could write ten pages of thanks to Juliet Annan. For her instincts, wisdom, wit, insight and straight-talking. But she’s already had to edit enough of my rambling in recent years, so instead I will say this: I loved every single moment of writing this book. This is entirely thanks to Juliet, who is, I’m pleased to say, right about everything.
Thank you to Clare Conville for her unwavering guidance, passion and kindness. There is no better woman to have in your corner.
Thank you to Jane Gentle, Poppy North, Rose Poole and Assallah Tahir—celebrants and strategists, guardians of my work and sanity.
Thank you to Ruth Johnstone, Tineke Mollemans and Kyla Dean—grafters, go-getters, total and utter dames.
Research was needed to write a part of this story and I am grateful for the generosity of the people who shared their experiences, expertise and information with me. Thanks to Julian Linley, Hannah Mackay, Hilda Hayo, Holly Bainbridge, Howard Masters and Dementia UK.
Thank you to my first readers for their encouragement: Farly Kleiner, India Masters and Edward Bluemel.
Particular conversations with friends inspired much of these chapters—I’m especially thankful to Tom Bird, Sarah Spencer-Ashworth, Monica Heisey, Caroline O’Donoghue, Eddie Cumming, Octavia Bright, Helen Nianias, India Masters, Laura Jane Williams, Farly Kleiner, Will Heald, Max Pritchard, Ed Cripps, Sabrina Bell, Sarah Dillistone and Sophie Wilkinson.
Thank you to Lorraine Candy, Laura Atkinson and the Sunday Times Style for their support as I wrote this book.
An ongoing, lifelong thank you to Lauren Bensted, with whom I have been in the middle of a conversation since we were fifteen. Every writer dreams of having access to a brain like yours. I’m so lucky to get it second-hand. Thank you for everything you say at the pub (even the bollocks) and thank you for always letting me write it down.
And thank you to Sabrina Bell, for a great many things—but particularly for always knowing it, when knowing it seemed impossible.
A Note About the Author
Dolly Alderton is an award-winning author and journalist based in London. She is a columnist for The Sunday Times Style and has also written for GQ, Red, M
arie Claire and Grazia. She is the former co-host and co-creator of the weekly pop-culture and current affairs podcast The High Low. Her first book, Everything I Know About Love, became a top five Sunday Times best seller in its first week of publication and won a National Book Award (UK) for Autobiography of the Year. Ghosts is her first novel.
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