Ghosting

by Jonathan Kemp

  Vertiginous, she wavers. She could ask Luke to let her out; go back to everything; stay. Or she could go along. For the ride. She looks at Luke, at Pete’s profile, trusting nothing but her own instinct to flee. This is the day, the moment; she feels nauseous. ‘Just drive,’ she says.

  As they turn on to Warwick Avenue, he says, ‘So that’s Gordon!’

  ‘I’m so sorry about that.’

  ‘I thought for a second there he was going to punch me!’

  She looks at his glorious profile.

  ‘Gordon would never do that,’ she says, adding, ‘Pete would have, though.’

  ‘So you’re leaving him for good?’ Luke says.

  She pauses. ‘What’s that Liz Taylor film where she says to Paul Newman, “We don’t live together, we just occupy the same cage”? It’s been a bit like that with Gordon for a while now. But we were muddling along fine till I clapped eyes on you. Now my life feels like a jumper worn the wrong way around.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t be; I’m not. All this is long overdue, believe you me. Have you ever daydreamed about just packing up and sodding off somewhere? Not telling anyone where you’re going? Escaping your life. Starting again. That’s how I feel. Like being someone else for a change.’

  ‘I feel like that most of the time,’ he says. ‘Actually, all of the time.’

  ‘I used to dream about running away to some small country village and working as a barmaid or a waitress or something like that.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘The kids, I suppose. You can’t do that when you’ve got a husband and kids, can you?’

  ‘So do it now,’ he says, making it seem so possible. ‘I can understand why people go missing. That desire to remove yourself entirely. Absolutely fucking understand. Personally I’d like to fake my own death, because I do like to put on a show.’

  They both laugh, breaking the tension. That he understands her and doesn’t think she’s gone completely off the rails relaxes her. She runs through all the people she knows, wondering if any of them would be so accepting of her walking out on her marriage like that.

  ‘Do you still love him?’ he says.

  The question stumps her, but it has to be answered. For herself, more than anything.

  ‘I don’t think I was ever in love with him. Not like I was with Pete. Perhaps you only get to love like that once; I don’t know. I’ve certainly never felt it again. But he’s been a good provider, and I’m thankful for that.’

  It’s surreal to be talking about her feelings for Gordon with this replica of his nemesis – a betrayal and a liberation; necessary and uncalled-for. A luxury afforded.

  Luke says, ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to take those vows, to make that kind of commitment. I’m not sure I’d ever want to. And yet I’d love someone to ask me. How fucked up is that?’

  ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she says, and he laughs, momentarily childish and bright.

  ‘With Gordon, even on the actual wedding day I didn’t feel excited at all. I remember thinking to myself as I walked down the aisle, You shouldn’t really be doing this, you know you don’t love him. Not the best way to start married life, is it?’

  ‘So why did you marry him?’

  ‘I thought I had to have a husband, and the kids a dad. It sounds mercenary, doesn’t it, put like that? But I was more grateful than lovestruck, if I’m honest.’ She lets out a quick laugh and says, ‘He must have had a bloody shock seeing you there just now, in the flesh. He thought I was going mad, seeing ghosts.’

  ‘I feel like a ghost,’ he says. ‘I feel like you could pass your hand straight through me.’

  She taps a finger against his arm and says, ‘No, you’re real enough.’

  ‘Sadly,’ he says, and begins to cry.

  ‘He’s not worth your tears, love,’ she says, patting his leg.

  His mobile begins to ring. He presses ‘end call’ before throwing it over his shoulder, into the back of the van, where it lands on the bedding without a sound. ‘So where do you want a lift to?’ he says.

  ‘I was going to stay with my youngest, Jason, in Macclesfield,’ she says, ‘but now I’m not sure. I don’t want Gordon knowing where I am, and I think Jason would tell him. I don’t want to see him for a while. But that’s about all I do know right now.’

  ‘Well, I’ve decided I need the healing power of the Highlands, so I can certainly give you a lift to Manchester if you’d like, or I can drop you off at Euston.’

  ‘If it’s no trouble, Manchester would be great.’

  ‘No trouble at all.’

  ‘I’ll give you money for petrol. I’d have had to pay for a ticket anyway.’

  Grace allows herself to relax a little, now that at least the next few hours of her future are accounted for. What she’ll do in Manchester is anyone’s guess. When what you are doing is not what you want to be doing, what do you do?

  ‘I’ve never been to the Highlands,’ she says. ‘Always wanted to but never got around to it.’

  ‘You’d love it,’ he says. ‘The remote wildness of the glens is just what I need right now.’

  ‘Your dad lives in Scotland, doesn’t he?’

  Grace wonders how she would respond if he invited her to go there with him now.

  ‘Yes – near Inverness. I’m thinking of calling in to visit. I haven’t seen him since I told him I was gay five years ago and he threw me out of his house.’

  ‘I wouldn’t stop loving a child of mine for something like that,’ she says.

  ‘That’s because you’re a decent human being, while he’s a homophobic arsehole. I decided then I never wanted to see the bastard ever again. But he rang me last week – first time in five years – to tell me he’s got fucking lung cancer.’

  ‘How far gone is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. He won’t tell me. When I ask he says, “What do you care?” And we end up arguing until one of us hangs up. Usually me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, love. And do you care?’

  ‘Sure – he wasn’t the greatest dad in the world but I love the old bastard. Anyway, I’ll go and see him. Him and Mum haven’t spoken in years so I’m really all the family he has left. He never remarried. Loves the bottle too much.’

  They fall into silence again and she starts reading the road signs and shop-fronts to stop herself from thinking. Won’t someone please teach me how to be in this world?

  At a red light she stares into the window of a pet shop, reading a sign for a self-cleaning fish tank above a tank of dirty green water, brief flashes of orange appearing and disappearing against the filthy glass. At another red light they watch someone bellowing into a megaphone about how much Jesus loves everyone.

  ‘Bloody nutter,’ Luke says, and they laugh.

  ‘Not the best advert for the church, is it?’ she says.

  ‘Or maybe it is.’

  They stop at a garage in Chalk Farm to fill the tank. Grace pays for the petrol on her credit card, along with a litre bottle of water, two coffees, an egg and cress sandwich, and a packet of ready salted crisps for Luke. As they turn on to the A1, she says, ‘When did you know you were gay?’

  ‘I’ve always known. I was such a delicate, dreamy child. Always on my own, drawing or playing the guitar. And as far back as I can remember I’ve known I liked men rather than women when it came to sex. I started having sex with men at the age of fourteen. Came out when I was nineteen.’

  ‘Have you ever slept with a woman?’ she asks, surprised at how easily the question comes, and how readily he replies.

  ‘Not since I was a teenager. I only really did it, I think, because I couldn’t accept being gay. The world gives us a hard time sometimes, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘I didn’t know what a homosexual was till I met Pete,’ Grace says. ‘We were in a pub one night on our honeymoon and these two fellas walked in wearing make-up and when I pointed them out Pete said, “They’re queer.”
I didn’t know what he meant and he had to explain.’

  She asks about Given and he says, ‘Lind and I met him at a party six months ago. The three of us instantly started hanging out together. He and I started fucking almost immediately, though I’ve no idea how long it’s been going on with Linden. And I really don’t feel like discussing it with either of them right now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, love – would you rather not talk about it?’ she says.

  ‘I don’t mind. Linden and I will be fine; I know we’ll get through this. But I never want to see his face again.’

  Her mobile starts to ring. Gordon. She puts the phone on mute and hurls it behind her, to join Luke’s, and they both exchange a laughterful glance.

  In the homogenised anonymity of a service station café, they sit down and eat. Or, rather Luke eats, tucking into a fry-up. Grace orders a baguette, but it’s sharp as broken glass against the roof of her mouth so she leaves it. Instead she eats the biscuit perched on the side of her saucer, dunking it in her coffee first to soften it. Their silence is masked by muzak and the chatter and clatter of people. The harsh lighting illuminates the pale blue of their fatigue. Luke starts to cry quietly, and Grace wonders why it never gets any easier to watch a grown man cry. She recalls Jason’s first teenage heartbreak. How she’d tried to comfort this six-foot giant of a young man sobbing like a little boy, knowing there was nothing she could do to remove the pain, not like when he was a kid with a scraped knee; a rub of Dettol and a kiss on the head and he’d be off out again. None of that with a broken heart. Always been too sensitive, that one, she thinks, whereas his brother is the complete opposite. Skin like a rhino.

  ‘You must think I’m insane,’ Luke says, wiping away his tears and laughing with embarrassment.

  ‘I’m hardly in a position to judge,’ she says. ‘I was sectioned once.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘In 1980 I had a breakdown. Gordon had me put away.’

  And there it is, out in the open, for the first time since it happened.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My daughter Hannah died of a drug overdose. It was exactly a year to the day since her death,’ she says, recounting the events of that day up to reading the diaries: going to the grave, rushing back to start clearing her room. ‘Gordon came home from work to find me naked in the front garden eating soil. I can’t remember doing that. Blazed clean out of my wits, I was,’ she says.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Don’t remember much, to be honest. I floated through the whole thing as if I wasn’t there. So numb I couldn’t even cry. I hadn’t the wit or the will to live so I just submitted to it. Took every pill they handed me and lobotomised my grief.’

  ‘And you’re worried he’ll do it again?’ Luke says, rolling a cigarette now his food is finished.

  ‘More worried I’ll do it again.’

  ‘You’re the sanest person I know.’

  ‘That’s not saying much!’

  They laugh again and the mood lightens. She is flushed and feels intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candour. She’s told someone and it hasn’t destroyed her. Or him.

  ‘It’s not really that I’m worried he’d have me locked up again. It’s just, whatever it was that was keeping me with him, it’s run out. I’ve nothing left. I’d much rather be on my own.’

  ‘It’s a brave thing to be doing, at your age.’

  ‘Bravery doesn’t come into it, love. I’ve no choice,’ she says, draining her coffee cup and standing up. ‘I’m just going to use the loo. See you at the van.’

  In the bathroom, she takes the photograph of Pete from her bag and tears it up into eighteen tiny pieces, flushing them away until nothing remains.

  Stepping out into the sunlight, she feels lighter for knowing the photograph is no more, as if that black and white image contained all of her past and she is now finally rid of it. Wherever it was that she was going, she wouldn’t be needing it. It didn’t belong to her, but to another woman who no longer existed and yet who still breathed inside her. Destroying the picture has awoken a dormant self, bringing a courage she tries her best to own. The lost object is the one that never really goes away. She can hear Pete’s voice in her head, saying, ‘There is no love, there’s only fucking.’

  And it’s OK for that love to endure, the way a splinter or a seed endure, despite all he did. But it’s OK to be glad he’s dead, too. Grace pauses and sniffs the air, taking a deep lungful before letting out a sigh. It is done. She’s left him. She’s left them both.

  Luke asks if she can drive for a bit while he tries to sleep in the back. As soon as they’re back on the M1, slow, thick tears start to run down her face. Her thoughts turn to the last time she saw Hannah alive. She’d been out shopping when she’d spotted her among a group of her friends, but Hannah had bolted before Grace could reach her. She hadn’t been home for a month; not since the last time she’d been round demanding money. Grace had given her all she had and she’d left without saying a word.

  Even before she died, Grace was grieving for her; had already lost her.

  And the next time she’d seen her was in the morgue. Her chest tightens at the memory of the point when everything stopped making sense, the order of things upset entirely. When she’d locked herself inside a mood so dark she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face.

  Luke is not Pete, and Hannah is not Hannah, and I am not myself.

  She still can’t decide whether going to stay with Jason is the right thing to do. Will he try and talk her into going back? Will he tell Gordon where she is? How far would he collude in having her locked up again? The more she thinks about it, the more real her fear becomes. Can she trust him? Will she be safe there? Not knowing for certain saddens her. She is gripped by the fear that Gordon might even already be there when she arrives. If he went by train, she calculates, he’d easily get there before her. She pictures him standing there with two orderlies by his side, holding the straitjacket. It makes her feel sick. But, if she doesn’t go to Jason’s, where else? She regrets as never before losing touch with all her old friends. Knows she can’t very well turn up unannounced after all this time. Or could she? Hello. Remember me? Do you mind if I stay for a while? She wonders how cheaply she can get a hotel room, realising she has no clue, it’s been so long since she paid for one.

  Increasingly, being alone right now seems her best option.

  She’s still crying as they approach Manchester. The sky has become an unbroken bank of pearly grey cloud from which a fine drizzle starts to fall. She switches on the windscreen wipers, thinking about the years she lived in this city, as a child and as a woman: a daughter, a friend, a mother, a wife. With these concepts a life is built; but where is home? Luke is fast asleep and she decides, on a whim, to make a small detour and drive past Parkside. Her heart is racing and her vision is blurry with tears.

  ONCE INSIDE, Grace was ordered to strip and handed a white hospital gown and slippers. She was fed tranquillisers and ushered into a ward. The building was a riot of noise, night-time giving licence to cries and screams the daylight kept in check. One patient was slowly banging her head against the metal bed-frame. Several were keening or crying. One barked like a dog.

  Grace lay in her bed, exhausted, defeated. Untethered. She could smell old urine mixed with misery, an outcast adult smell of those who had known and then been deprived of their knowing; the smell of stale polish and corners, and of doors that had been kicked and hammered upon for more than a century. She picked the soil from beneath her fingernails with her teeth, tasting the outside she feared she would never see again.

  The next morning she was awoken by a nurse shouting for everyone to get up and slop out. She watched the other women file out of the dormitory, each clutching a slop bucket. Grace hadn’t used hers, but she followed them anyway, to a large bathroom, where the pots were emptied into toilets with no doors on the cubicles. They were ordered back to the dorm to make their be
ds, and then fed more medication and taken to breakfast. After breakfast, all the cutlery had to be counted, a ritual, she discovered, that was practised after every meal.

  ‘Come with me,’ said one of the nurses. ‘You’re to see Dr Reubens now.’

  Dr Reubens was gaunt and officious. The dark circles around his eyes told Grace everything she needed to know about his profession. He asked her to tell him what she remembered from the previous day. She told him she remembered everything up until the moment she had read Hannah’s diaries; after that, everything was a blur. When he told her, she didn’t believe him. Then the edge of a memory flickered; something she didn’t want to accept was real, so like a dream had it appeared.

  ‘Can I leave now?’ she asked, after a timid silence ‘I’m fine now. Really, I am.’

  ‘We’d prefer to keep you here for a while, just to make sure.’

  ‘But I want to go home; there’s nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘I’m afraid yesterday’s behaviour would suggest otherwise. Mrs Wellbeck, things can go wrong with the mind just as they can with the body. The mind too needs to rest, sometimes – when it’s broken, or has undergone some kind of trauma. Losing your daughter has been a terrible wound to your mental wellbeing. You need to rest. Then you can go home. You mustn’t worry about anything while you’re here. Just focus on getting well again. You’ll be out in no time.’

  After the consultation, a nurse walked her to the day room, where, high in one corner, a television poured noise into the silence. She looked around. A middle-aged man was staring out of the barred window, waving at nothing. A woman sat in one corner laughing quietly to herself. One woman called out bingo numbers – Legs Eleven! Two Fat Ladies! Clickety Click! – bursting into hysterical laughter at each one. Another counted the number of chairs in the room, over and over again, stopping when she lost count and starting again. Grace took a seat as far away from everyone as she could and stared at the backs of her hands, wondering how long she’d have to stay.

  It was a week before she uttered a word to anybody. The nurses never required you to say anything, and if another patient spoke to her she would ignore them. Walk away, if necessary. During those first seven days she tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible. She submitted, entirely, to the foggy routines of the hospital, feeling suddenly free of all worry; feeling cared for. She watched and tried to take the measure of the people around her, both patients and staff; tried to figure out the workings of this new reality. The hierarchy among the patients favoured obedience, while the hierarchy of the staff favoured power. The only logic to the meting out of punishment seemed to be based on personality, or perhaps mood. The slightest disobedience could result in a physically violent penalty from some nurses, while others might only issue a verbal reprimand; a small minority would even treat the patients with kindness. If you ‘behaved’, you avoided punishment. Grace knew from what she saw that her best option for getting out was to assume absolute docility. She was good at that.