Ghosting

by Jonathan Kemp

  ‘No, I’m fucking not!’ he says.

  ‘Why did he do that?’

  ‘I just asked him what was so wrong about people knowing about us. I said, “Are you ashamed or something?” – which really pissed him off. He said he wasn’t ashamed, it just wasn’t the right time. I asked when would be, and threatened to tell Linden right that second if he didn’t; and then he fucking lamped me.’

  ‘Dear God,’ she says.

  ‘Linden saw it all from across the room and came running over, and then all fucking hell broke loose.’

  ‘Did he hit her?’

  ‘No, but when she found out about me and him she hit him – right on the jaw!’

  He lets out a laugh recalling it, and then winces with pain.

  ‘She turned to me and said, “He’s been fucking me, too, you know,” and then stormed off. I’ve no idea where she is.’

  ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘About an hour ago. I went back to the gallery to pick up the van and then I remembered you; came straight back. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Are you all right to drive?’

  As he assures her he is, a police car passes in the opposite direction and Grace feels briefly anxious that they might get pulled over, though his driving is competent enough, she has to admit. Her heart keeps racing like a hamster in a wheel, edgy and fearful.

  ‘Have you got any water?’ she says.

  ‘I haven’t; here, have some of this,’ he says, holding out a small carton of mango juice, a straw like an antenna. She sips.

  ‘Christ! To think I thought I was in love with that sleazebag!’ he says in a voice shrill with pain and incredulity. ‘What a fucking twat!’

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ she says, placing a quick hand on his knee.

  ‘Could you light me a cigarette?’ he says.

  ‘Where did you get the van?’ she asks, suddenly anxious it’s stolen.

  ‘It’s mine. I used to live in it pretty much all the time before we moved on to the boat.’

  ‘Were you homeless?’

  ‘No, this was my home. Is my home.’

  She hands him a lit cigarette and thinks about the day ahead. Should she try to get some sleep or head straight up to Jason’s? She tries to remember where Gordon had said he was going, to work out how long it might take him to get back, only to realise he’d never actually mentioned where.

  ‘I’m sorry, Grace. You must be furious with me.’

  ‘I was when I woke up surrounded by strangers; I was embarrassed, and cross that you’d left me stranded. But I’m OK now. Thanks for coming back for me.’

  She knows only too well how it feels to be assaulted by the one you love, and lets her fury go. How strange to see this image of Pete with a battered face. Almost redemptive.

  ‘I had no idea he was fucking Linden as well,’ he says, ‘did you?’ She isn’t in the mood to talk but knows she can’t very well ignore him.

  ‘She told me the other night. I didn’t know whether to tell you or not. It’s none of my business, really, is it? I hardly know you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Besides, you both swore me to secrecy.’

  They drive in silence through the waking streets as London, in a beatific light, sighs and receives the day. She doesn’t want to get tangled in someone else’s emotions, but she knows the only way to avoid that is to avoid other people all together; be entirely alone. And she doesn’t want that, either. Not yet.

  ‘Of course, it all makes perfect sense now,’ he says, parking and switching off the engine, ‘Why he didn’t want her to know. He was telling her the same fucking thing. Two-faced prick!’

  She notices the cuts on the knuckles of his left hand. ‘I punched a wall,’ he says, wincing as he flexes his fingers. ‘Listen, is there any chance I can crash at yours? I don’t wanna risk either of them coming back to the boat.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘I just need to stop off and pick up a few things.’

  He reappears with a battered guitar case in one hand and the lace curtain in his other, like a jilted bride’s veil. ‘And I’m taking this back!’ he says, jumping off the boat, and landing with a slight stagger. ‘There’s no fucking way he’s having it now.’ They make the short journey to her boat accompanied by birdsong and their own exhausted silence.

  On the boat she cleans his face, thinking about the many times she’d done it to her own. The intimacy, the proximity move her; the shape of his lips moves her, the brightness in his eyes, the clarity of his skin; each curl of each eyelash stirs something. His face doesn’t look so bad once the blood has been cleaned off, though the eye is swollen and bruised, and the lip is split. When their eyes lock, his gaze makes her melt into air. She feels a surge of love, all over again like the first time: the repetition of love like a memory replayed in all its furious glory. She knows it is hopeless, knows how it ends, but she can’t seem to make it go away. ‘See? I said you were Florence Nightingale,’ he says when she’s finished, and gives her a kiss on the cheek, making her blush. She is sixteen again, all bluster and ignorance, bold as a knife. A strange mixture of fear and desire takes hold as she turns and kisses him full on the mouth, holding his precious face in her hands, lost in knowing nothing at all. He gives a gentle push and the moment rips apart, revealing the here and now of her shame.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what – I can’t imagine what I thought I was doing.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he says, at which point she bursts into tears, and he takes her in his arms. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ he says.

  When her tears subside, embarrassment sets in and she gently pushes him away. ‘I’m so ashamed!’ she says.

  ‘Don’t be. Honestly. Try and get some sleep.’

  She goes into the bedroom and sits on the bed, pushes the shoes off her tired feet; unzips the dress and steps out of it; folds it and puts it in the open suitcase. Pulls her nightdress over her head and climbs beneath the duvet. She feels tired down to the bone but nowhere near sleepy. In the van she’d been practically sliding into a coma, but now she’s in bed her mind is buzzing, her heart banging away in her chest. She can’t stop visualising it getting bigger and bigger, imagining it bursting, like a blood-filled balloon, which only makes it beat faster. She tries to calm herself down with slow, shallow breathing, tries to empty out her mind; but it still keeps coming back to her: an unnamed guilt, a sense of having done something wrong, something irreparably grievous. She turns the pillow over and rests her hot cheek on the cool underbelly, wishing the fatigue in her bones would hush her frantic mind.

  She can hear birdsong, and the windows are hung with pallid light, and from the other room the slow, sweet notes of Luke’s guitar begin to flutter through like butterflies; followed by his voice, unexpectedly high and fragile. The words she is able to discern tell of the age-old tortures and woes of love, his angelic voice full of anger and heartache. Singing that man right out of his hair. The music fills the room, floating out upon the morning, over the rooftops, the curves of the river, losing itself in the silence of the upper air.

  She dreams she is on a plane, crawling around on all fours, searching for her wedding ring. Frantically looking under seats, peeling back the carpet in her quest to find it. None of the other passengers takes any notice; it’s as if she’s invisible to them. And then she sees Gordon sitting at the back of the plane in his blue serge uniform, holding out his hand. She crawls over to him, and there in his palm is her wedding ring. Placing the ring in her mouth, he forces her to swallow it; he says, ‘You’re going nowhere, you cunt.’

  She awakes with a choke to the sound of raised voices in the other room. Recognising Gordon’s, she sits up, fighting for breath. Behind her eyes two dustbin lids clatter inside her echoing skull. The bedroom door flies open and Gordon enters, shouting, ‘Grace, where are you? Who’s that man out there?’ His voice cuts through her head like a smoke alarm. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he says, his eyes wide
with disbelief.

  Grace climbs out of bed and reaches for her dressing gown. ‘Nothing’s going on.’

  ‘Who’s that man? And what have you done to your hair?’

  ‘I fancied a change.’

  ‘You look so different.’

  ‘I feel different,’ she says, thinking, He must have noted Luke’s resemblance to Pete; it can’t have escaped him. It just can’t. It gives her a pleasurable thrill to have Gordon see Luke. See, I’m not mad, she wants to say. She walks past him and into the kitchen, wincing from the bite of the light. She greets Luke with a smile.

  ‘Good morning, love.’ The memory of the shameful kiss stabs at her insides.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he says.

  ‘Like I just got down off a cross,’ she says, swallowing two painkillers. ‘I see you’ve met Gordon. Don’t be frightened, he’s harmless enough.’

  She raids her bag for cigarettes.

  ‘Oh, that’s right, go straight for the cancer sticks!’ Gordon says.

  ‘Fuck off, Gordon,’ she says. She’s never said that to anyone before. And it feels great. She wants to repeat it over and over into his face, into the face of the world.

  ‘There’s no need for that kind of language!’

  ‘If I want to smoke I’ll bloody well smoke,’ she replies, emboldened by his shock, enjoying the feeling of liberation that comes with speaking her mind, accessing a rage she hadn’t known was there.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls? I rang a dozen times or more.’

  She digs her mobile phone out of her bag, remembering she’d turned it off the night before. She switches it on. Ten missed calls.

  ‘I was having a lie-in. It’s not a crime.’ She fills the kettle and switches it on, wondering where this fire inside her has come from. She notices her hands are shaking and feels charged with a fearful energy.

  ‘But what’s going on? Why is he here?’ Gordon says.

  ‘Nothing’s going on! I didn’t want to speak to you; I’ve nothing to say to you right now.’ Looking down at a bowl of fruit that had looked fresh only yesterday, she notices the bananas have blackened and a green underbelly of mould is creeping from underneath the oranges. Stick that in a gallery, call it Neglect.

  Luke stands up and says, ‘Right, I need to hit the road. Grace, will you be OK?’ She nods and watches him pick up the lace curtain and the guitar case and start heading for the door, to leave her with Gordon and her fury.

  ‘Wait!’ she says, and he stops, turning to look at her. ‘Can I get a lift?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll meet you at the van in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Cool,’ he says. And then he is gone.

  ‘Van? What van?’ Gordon says, flustered, unsure how to act in the presence of this woman he barely recognises. He can see plainly that she is not herself. That is, he cannot see she is becoming herself, and daily casting aside that fictitious self that people assume like a garment in which to appear before the world.

  ‘I’m leaving. I told you, I want a divorce.’

  ‘But we have to talk about this! Where will you go?’

  ‘I’ll ring you in a few days.’

  ‘I’m your husband and I demand to know where you’re going with that man!’

  She turns to face him. ‘I’m going for a shower. Please be gone by the time I’m finished,’ she says, walking over to the bathroom door. He follows her and she wonders briefly whether he will try and physically stop her leaving.

  And how hard would she fight to get away?

  ‘You can’t just disappear with a total stranger without telling me where! For heaven’s sake, woman, think about what you’re doing! And what the hell happened to his face – has he been in a fight?’ He’s desperate again. She is about to close the bedroom door on him when he looks her in the eye and says, ‘Why did you marry me, Grace? You didn’t love me.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. Not really. Oh, you tried, I’ll grant you that. I could see you trying your best.’

  She says nothing, can say nothing, for he speaks the painful truth, the truth they have both spent their time together avoiding, and upon the denial of which they tried to secure some happiness.

  ‘And that’s OK, I gave up on you ever loving me a long time ago, but we get along, don’t we? We muck along. What else are we going to do, at our age?’ His voice is plaintive now. ‘Don’t go. Have a word with yourself. What on earth will you do if you leave? Where will you go?’ He shakes his head. ‘Who else will want you, at your age?’

  ‘Goodbye, Gordon,’ she says, closing the door on his baffled, frightened face.

  Her whole body is straining to tremble. She just has to get away, and then everything will be all right. She needs to leave this life; it left her a long time ago. She removes her wedding ring and puts it inside her toiletries bag before stepping under the shower. Is this what it amounts to? she thinks as she dresses afterwards. Two sons I never see and a husband who’s a stranger? There is an empty sorrow where her life should be. And her life had fitted so neatly into one small case that it makes her want to cry.

  When she steps out of the bathroom, she’s relieved to see Gordon has gone.

  In the bedroom, Hannah’s diaries lie on the floor beside the case. She doesn’t want to take them, but nor does she want to leave them for Gordon to read. He doesn’t even know they exist; they are hers, hers and Hannah’s. She carries them into the kitchen and over to the empty sink. She tears out a page and holds the flame of her lighter to the corner of it, then drops it into the sink to watch it blacken and reduce. Page by page, she destroys each book in turn, reducing them to a scatter of ash.

  She lights a cigarette from the last page before dropping it, and it makes her remember someone she hasn’t thought about in years: one of the patients at Parkside whom she befriended, a sixteen-year-old girl who would set fire to her bed once a week. Each time, the nurses would haul her off and confine her, but no sooner was she back on the ward than she was starting another fire. She said they locked her in one of the underground cells everyone talked about with consummate fear, though not all the patients believed her, as she was the only one who claimed to have seen the cells. Grace recalls how they’d all have to huddle in the clock tower until the fire brigade had gone, every time Jane managed to get her hands on a match. Watching the diaries turn to cinders, Grace finally understands why she did it: it feels good to watch things burn.

  JANE ADMITTED to Grace that she started the fires because she liked it in solitary; it was the only place she felt safe. She said her parents had her put away because of her violent mood swings and inappropriate sexual behaviour. ‘When they caught me getting something other than milk from the milkman it was the last straw,’ she said. She was pretty and well-spoken, and flirted with any man who came near her.

  Jane was the first person Grace spoke to, after that first week of not uttering a word. Grace sat next to her in the day room and said, ‘There’s been a terrible mistake and I shouldn’t be in here at all.’

  ‘Me too,’ said the girl, scratching herself all over as if she had fleas.

  ‘But I don’t want to be among mad people,’ Grace remarked.

  ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said Jane; ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’

  ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Grace.

  ‘You must be,’ said Jane, ‘or you wouldn’t have come.’

  Most of the time Jane was placid and sweet, and Grace enjoyed talking to her, but at other times a feral rage would ignite unexpectedly, and she’d attack anyone who came near: mad as the sea and wind when both contend which is the mightier. During one of these fits she walked up to Jane with open arms, slowly reassuring her she meant no harm and calming the girl down enough to let herself be embraced, until she was finally closing her arms around Grace, who held her while she cried, and five burly nurses stood there and watched. This crazy mad girl and this crazy mad woman sobbi
ng embracing sharing a world of grief, Grace wishing the girl in her arms were Hannah, and dying a little because it wasn’t; could never be.

  And their gaolers looking on, devoid of all pity and fear.

  REMEMBERING NOW, feeling once more the beat of the girl’s heart against her, Grace knows, with a knowledge that somehow sets her free, all there is to know about life; which is, nothing. The vertigo of unknowing rushes through her.

  When the flames die down she gives the ash a quick blast of the cold tap before collecting her case and locking the boat up for the last time. Pam appears and asks her if everything is OK; she couldn’t help hearing raised voices earlier.

  ‘It was Gordon. He came back early and we had a fight. I’m leaving him.’

  ‘Fucking ’ell, Grace! I didn’t see that coming.’

  ‘Neither did he.’

  ‘Have you got time for a coffee?’

  ‘I haven’t, love. I’ve got someone waiting.’ Grace smiles when she realises how that must sound, and adds, ‘It’s not what you think. I’m not running off with another man. Well, I am, but it’s far more complicated than that. I’ll call you in a day or two and explain.’

  As she approaches the van, the sight of Luke – looking at his phone and smoking – relaxes her a little; at least she won’t be alone just yet. He opens the passenger door and says, ‘Your carriage awaits,’ taking her suitcase and stowing it inside. Out of nowhere, Gordon appears, begging her to come back to the boat so he can ‘talk some sense’ into her. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ he says, holding up his mobile phone. ‘This is an abduction.’

  ‘Go away, Gordon,’ she says, climbing into the passenger seat, busying herself with the seatbelt to avoid looking at him. ‘No one is being abducted.’

  Luke shuts her door and walks around to the driver’s side with Gordon at his heels, trying to assert an authority he no longer possesses, if he ever did. ‘Where are you taking her? Where are you taking my wife? If you don’t tell me, I’m going to report you to the police.’

  Pedestrians stop and stare at the scene. Luke shuts the door and looks at Grace as Gordon taps on the glass, still shouting.