Ghosted

by Rosie Walsh

  (Stop it!)

  “Frankie’s not going to get here for a good hour. He says Lucy’s broken out of a field down by the pub.” He turned to the sheep. “You came a long way. I’m impressed.”

  The sheep carried on eating, so he looked at me instead. “I’m going to try and get him back down the lane. Fancy helping me?”

  “Sure. I was heading down there for lunch anyway.”

  I hadn’t been heading down there for lunch. I’d actually been waiting for the 54 to Cirencester, because there were people in Cirencester and there was no one at my parents’ house. Last night an emergency room nurse from the Royal Infirmary in Leicester had called to say my grandfather had been admitted with a hip fracture. Granddad was ninety-three. He was also infamously offensive, but had nobody other than Mum and her sister, Lesley, who at the moment was in the Maldives with her third husband.

  “Go,” I’d told Mum when she wavered. Mum didn’t like letting me down. Every June she would put on a towering production for my visit: seamless logistics, a house full of flowers, exquisite food. Anything to persuade me that life in England was far better than anything California could offer.

  “But . . .” I watched her sag. “But you’ll be on your own.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Besides, Granddad will be thrown out of hospital if he doesn’t have you there to apologize for him.”

  Last time my grandfather had been admitted to hospital, he’d had an unfortunate showdown with a consultant to whom Granddad kept referring as an “imbecilic medical student.”

  There was a pause as Mum struggled with her filial and parental responsibilities.

  “Let me get the next couple of days out of the way,” I’d said, “and then I’ll come up to Leicester.”

  She looked at Dad, neither of them able to choose. And I thought, When did you two become so indecisive? They looked older this time, smaller. Especially Mum. As if she didn’t quite fit her body anymore. (Was this my fault? Had I shrunk her, somehow, with my insistence on living abroad?)

  “But you don’t like being in our house,” Dad said, unable to find a better way of putting it. And his inability to find something funny to say—for once—made the space in my throat swell until it felt like nothing could get past.

  “Of course I do! What nonsense!”

  “And we can’t leave you our car. How will you get anywhere?”

  “There’s the bus.”

  “The bus stop’s miles away.”

  “I like walking. Seriously, please go. I’ll relax, like you’re always telling me to. Read books. Eat my way through this mountain of food you’ve brought in.”

  And so this morning I’d waved them off down the track and found myself alone suddenly, in—yes—a house I didn’t like being in. Especially on my own.

  Which meant I had not been heading to the Daneway for a solo pub lunch. The fact of the matter was that I was trying to coerce this complete stranger into having a drink with me, in spite of this morning’s app notification that flirtation with other men would only end in tears. Try to remember, you’re stratospherically vulnerable right now, it had said, with an accompanying soft-focus picture of a girl crying into a mountain of comfy pillows.

  The man’s phone rang again. This time he let it ring out.

  “Right, let’s be having you,” he said. He moved toward Lucy, who glared at him before turning and running. “You go over there,” the man called at me. “Then we can funnel him into the lane. Ow! Shit!” He hopped awkwardly over the grass and then ran back for his flip-flops.

  I swung round to the left, as fast as I could in the syrupy heat. Lucy swerved off to the right, where the man was waiting, laughing. Accepting he was trapped, Lucy grumbled off toward the little lane that led down to the pub, offering the odd baa of protest as he went.

  Thank you, God, or the universe, or fate, I thought. For this sheep, this man, this English hedgerow.

  What a relief to talk to someone who knew nothing of the sadness I was meant to be suffering. Who didn’t put his head sympathetically to one side when he talked to me. Who simply made me laugh.

  * * *

  • • •

  Lucy made several breaks for freedom on the road down to the pub, but with some strong teamwork we managed to return him to his field. The man snapped off a branch from a tree and braced it across the gap in the fence through which the sheep had escaped, then turned to me and smiled. “Done.”

  “Indeed,” I said. We were standing right next to the pub. “You owe me a pint.”

  He laughed and said that seemed reasonable.

  And so that was that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Seven days later Eddie and I had said good-bye. But it was a French good-bye: an au revoir. An until the next time! It was not a farewell. It was not even remotely a farewell. When did “farewell” involve the words “I think I’ve fallen in love with you”?

  I had followed the river Frome home to my parents’ house, happy and humming. The water was brilliantly clear that day, brindled with green, mossy cushions and clean gravel riffles, watched over by spiked clusters of cattails. I passed the spot where Hannah had once fallen in trying to pick crowfoot flowers and surprised myself by laughing out loud. My heart was full, singing with memories of the last week: late-night conversations, cheese sandwiches, belly laughs, bath towels drying on a rail. The broad mass of Eddie’s body, the wind sifting gently through the trees outside his barn like fine trails of flour and, over and over again, the words he had said when I’d left.

  I’d arrived that evening in Leicester. In the taxi to the hospital, a rainstorm had broken; the town turned dark and the red lights of A&E had slid down the windscreen like soup. I’d found my grandfather up in a hot ward, surly but shaken, and my parents exhausted.

  There had been no call from Eddie that night. No message detailing his return flight. Briefly, as I put my pajamas on, I’d wondered why. He was probably in a hurry, I told myself. He was with his friend. And: He loves me. He’d call!

  But Eddie David hadn’t called. And he hadn’t called, and he hadn’t called.

  For a couple of days I’d convinced myself it was fine. It would be absurd—deranged, even—to doubt what had happened between us. But as the days bled painfully into a week, I found it harder to hold at bay the rising ocean of panic.

  “He’s having a great time in Spain,” I lied, when I arrived in London for my planned stay with Tommy.

  A few days later, over lunch with Jo, I’d cracked. “He hasn’t called,” I admitted. Tears of panic and humiliation fattened in my eyes. “Something must have happened to him. It wasn’t just a fling, Jo; it changed everything.”

  Tommy and Jo were kind to me; they listened, told me I was “doing really well,” but I sensed they were shocked by the disintegration of the Sarah they knew. Was I not the woman who’d turned her life around after running off to LA in a black cloud of tragedy? The woman who’d started a brilliant children’s charity, married an all-American man; the woman who now flew round the world making keynote speeches?

  That same woman spent two weeks skulking around Tommy’s flat, reduced to stalking a man with whom she’d spent seven days.

  In that time Britain had nearly exploded in the pressure cooker of the EU referendum, my grandfather had undergone two surgeries, and my parents had become virtual prisoners in his house. My charity had won a substantial grant, and Jenni was well into the last cycle of IVF for which her insurers would pay. I was in a landscape of very real human highs and lows, yet I’d struggled to register any of it.

  I had seen friends do this. I’d watched in amazement as they claimed that his phone was broken; his leg was broken; he was broken, wasting unseen in a ditch. They insisted that some careless comment they’d made must have “scared him off,” hence the need to “clear up any misunderstandings.” I had watched them shre
d their pride, break their heart, lose their mind, all over a man who would never call. Worse, a man they barely knew.

  And here I was. Sitting in Tommy’s car, my pride shredded, my heart broken, my mind lost. Composing a desperate message saying that I really wasn’t married anymore. That it had been a very amicable breakup.

  Tommy pulled up near the gates of our old school just as rain began to print gentle patterns on the windscreen. He parked uncharacteristically badly, one wheel on the curb, but—even more uncharacteristically—made no attempt to straighten out. I took in the fat beech hedge, the yellow zigzags on the road, the sign up by the gates, and an old bass line of unease strummed in my pelvis. I put my phone in my handbag. Texting Eddie would have to wait.

  “So, here we are!” The weight of unfelt enthusiasm made Tommy’s voice sag in the middle like an overburdened washing line. “We should get going. I’m due to speak in five minutes!”

  He didn’t get going, so neither did we. Rudi stared at us. “Why aren’t you getting out of the car?” he asked, incredulous. Nobody answered. After a few seconds he exploded from the backseat, running at speed toward the school gates. We watched in silence as he slowed to a hands-in-pockets saunter, stopping casually at the entrance to assess the possibility of fun on the school field. After squinting for a while, he turned back to the car. He wasn’t pleased.

  Poor Rudi. I didn’t know how Jo had sold today to him, but I doubted she’d told the whole truth. A sports program launch at a secondary school might have held some appeal if he’d been in with a chance of wearing one of the fitness watches or heart-rate vests that were part of the project, or even if there had been children his age to play with. But the tech toys that formed the centerpiece of Tommy’s program were to be showcased by a tribe of “promising athletes” selected by the head of physical education, and the youngest participant was fourteen.

  Rudi stood near the car looking grumpy. Jo got out to talk to him, and Tommy, suddenly wordless, leaned over to check his reflection in the rearview mirror. He’s terrified, I thought, with a swell of sympathy.

  The boys at our mixed grammar had not been kind to little Thomas Stenham. One of them, Matthew Martyn, had accused Tommy of being gay when he had turned twelve and his flashy mother installed a fashion hairstyle on his head. Tommy had cried, and so, of course, it had stuck. Matthew and company had sprayed Tommy’s seat with a “de-gaying” formula every day; they stuck pictures of naked men to the inside of his desk lid. He had started going out with Carla Franklin at age fourteen; they had called her a beard. Tommy had taken to spending hours in his mother’s home gym, but his new muscles made things a good deal worse: they took to casually punching him on the school field. By the time his family emigrated to the States in 1995, he had had an exercise disorder, a mild stammer, and no male friends.

  Years later—long after he’d returned to England—a wealthy tech lawyer named Zoe Markham had hired Tommy to be her personal trainer. He’d had a large number of successful London women on his books at the time, many of whom flirted quite openly with him. “I think it’s a sort of fantasy,” he’d told me. He was caught somewhere between flattery and disgust. “I’m like a sexy handyman with a tool belt. Blue collar with muscles.”

  Zoe Markham, apparently, was different. They got on “fantastically well” and had a “genuine connection,” and, crucially, she saw him as a “whole person,” not just an employee who had the power to make her look slim and beautiful. (She was already both.)

  After a few months of casual flirting she had offered him a leg up into sports consultancy via an old friend. Tommy had taken her to dinner to thank her. She had taken him home and removed her clothes. “I think it’s time for a real one-on-one, don’t you?” she’d said.

  She was his first girlfriend of any real significance; certainly the first he believed to be entirely out of his league. To him, she was a goddess, a marvel—the liniment for each and every one of his old wounds. “I wish I could tell those bastards at school,” he’d told me, the day she invited him to move into her Holland Park flat. “I wish I could show them I’m capable of attracting a girl like Zoe.” And I’d said, “Yes, wouldn’t that be brilliant?” because I never imagined it could happen. That sort of thing never did.

  Except, in Tommy’s case, it did.

  About a year ago he’d sent a brochure for his secondary sports program to every head teacher in the UK. The program included a donation of wearable sports technology—heart-rate vests, fitness watches, that sort of thing—from one of Zoe’s biggest clients, a tech multinational, and was Tommy’s pride and joy. When he received a call from the head of our old school, he was touchingly delighted. “She wants me come and meet her head of PE!” he told me during one of our Skypes. “Isn’t that brilliant?” He had found the situation to be marginally less brilliant when he discovered that the head of PE was his teenage bully, Matthew Martyn.

  But it had been a good chat, Tommy assured me. A bit awkward, at first, but Matthew had said something about how they’d all been dickheads when they were teenagers, and punched Tommy on the arm and called him “mate.” Later, like two old friends, they had compared notes: Matthew showed Tommy a photo of his family, and Tommy—unable to believe his luck—showed Matthew a picture of his beautiful, smartly liveried, fiercely toned girlfriend in her splendid London kitchen.

  By the time I arrived at Tommy and Zoe’s London flat earlier in June, already distraught about Eddie, Tommy had delivered the program. He told me his old ghosts had been laid to rest; that he was “over” what had happened to him at school; that he was actually looking forward to seeing Matthew Martyn again at the program launch. Then: “Zoe’s coming,” he added, as if it were a mere afterthought. “It’ll be great to introduce her to Matt.”

  I had wanted to hug him then. To tell him that he was fine, just as he was. That he didn’t need Zoe on his arm to increase his stock. But I went along with it, of course, because he needed me to.

  Zoe had pulled out four days before the launch. “I have to go to Hong Kong for one of my clients,” she’d said. “It’s really important. Sorry, Tommy.”

  Not sorry enough, I thought. She knew what this meant. Tommy’s face was the color of recycled paper.

  “But . . . but the school’s expecting you!”

  She frowned. “I’m sure they’ll survive. They’re showing off to the rural press, not to me.”

  “Can you not fly a day later?” he pleaded. I could hardly bear to watch.

  “No,” she said levelly. “I can’t. But you’ll thank me for going on this trip. There’s going to be a delegation from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. I still think I’ve got a good chance of getting you onto one of their advisory committees.”

  Tommy had shaken his head. “But I told you. I’m not interested.”

  “And I told you, Tommy, that you are.”

  Jo and I had stepped in to replace her.

  Did I want to return to my old school? Of course not. I’d hoped never to see the place again. But Tommy, I thought, needed me, and helping someone in need was just about the only decent distraction I knew. Besides, what did I have to fear? Mandy and Claire had left that school in the nineties. Neither they nor any of the people I’d fled would be there today.

  “Harrington.” Tommy had twisted round to look at me. “Are you there?”

  “Sorry. Yes.”

  “Look, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  I watched him. Tommy’s eyebrows were not carrying glad tidings.

  “When I got that message about the local press earlier, Matthew told me something else. He—” Tommy broke off, and I knew then that it was bad.

  “Matthew married Claire Peddler. I didn’t mention it before because I didn’t think you’d want to hear her name. But when he texted to say that the local press were coming, he also said that . . .”

  No.

/>   “. . . that Claire had decided to come, too. And she’s . . .”

  Bringing Mandy.

  “. . . bringing a little group of friends from our year. Including Mandy Lee.”

  I sank forward and rested my head against the back of his seat.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Day One: The Drink That Lasted Twelve Hours

  Sarah Mackey,” I said. “M-A-C-K-E-Y.”

  The landlord handed me a pint of cider.

  The man from the village green just laughed. “As it happens, I know how to spell Mackey. But thank you. My name’s Eddie David.”

  “Sorry.” I smiled. “I live in America. It’s a more American surname, I think: when I’m over here, I often have to spell it. Plus I’m fond of clarity.”

  “So I see,” Eddie said. He was leaning sideways on the bar, watching me. Tenner folded between large brown fingers. I liked the scale of this man. That he was so much taller, so much broader, so much stronger than me. Reuben and I had been the same height.

  We sat in the pub garden, an oasis of flowers and picnic tables in the little valley below Sapperton village. The thin ribbon of the river Frome spooled unseen around the meadow fringing the pub’s car park; briar roses toppled from a tree. A couple of walkers were slumped over half-pints, a panting cocker spaniel staring at me from under their legs. As soon as I sat down under a large umbrella, the dog came and sat by my feet, settling itself with a great huff of self-pity.

  Eddie laughed.

  Somewhere along the valley, the abrasive cracking of a chain saw started and stopped. A few stunned birds called dazedly from the woods above us. I sipped the cold cider and groaned. “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes,” Eddie agreed. We clinked glasses and I felt an uncurling of pleasure. Being alone in my parents’ empty house this morning had been more upsetting than I was willing to admit, and the walk along Broad Ride had done nothing to improve my mood. But here, taking the rough edge off it all, was cold cider and a very agreeable man. Maybe it could be a good day.