Ghosted

by Rosie Walsh

  I am not the sort of man to thump a table. When Alan says he reckons he’ll come back to mine to drink whisky and watch the Olympics, I don’t argue. I’m not sure I’d leave me to my own devices if I were him, either.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Dear You,

  Enough: I have to let go of Sarah. Not just tell myself to do it and then spend all my time thinking about her—I have to stop the thoughts as soon as they’ve begun. Because they’re not just unhelpful, they’re dangerous. Once they’re out of the starting gates, they spread faster than a virus and I find it almost impossible to control them—and when I look at Mum, I see how far they could take me.

  So this is it, Hedgehog. It’s time to exercise that power of choice I like to bang on about.

  Thank you for being my witness. As ever.

  Me x

  I reread the letter before reaching for an envelope, as if trying to hold on to Sarah for a few moments more. Early morning sun falls steeply through the window, across the forest of detritus that lives on my desk: dusty catalogs, invoices, a ruler, endless pencils and offcuts, cold cups of tea. Through these obstacles a narrow finger of light makes it through to the rectangle of purple paper on which I’ve just written. It points at the letter, seems almost to trace along the words as the trees move outside. Then a cloud passes, gobbles it up, and the letter lies once again in the thin gray of morning.

  I pull out a purple envelope, just as a creak overhead announces Alan’s awakening. A muffled voice: “Ed? Oi, Ed!”

  He fell asleep on the sofa while writing a text to Gia about the state of my mental health. I need to keep an eye on him, he’d written, before passing out. I finished the message and sent it to Gia, so she wouldn’t worry. He lost it in the pub, I wrote. Best that I stay over. Gia is extraordinarily tolerant when it comes to Alan and me.

  Alan snored from time to time. Team GB won bronze in the men’s synchronized diving. I sat on the sofa, trying not to think about Sarah.

  Sounds of hungover padding above my head. Alan’ll be poking around in the kitchen now, like a hungry bear, sniffing out tasty things he can stick his paw into. He’ll want a large cup of tea, at least four pieces of toast, and then a lift to work. Probably some clothes, too, because his are covered in strawberry yogurt.

  I’ll gladly provide these things, because Alan is a real friend. He knew I needed the company last night. He knew I’d be miserable about Sarah, and he also knew, somehow, that I’m not in a good place with Mum. The least I can do is make him toast.

  I turn back to my letter, sliding it into a purple envelope and writing Alex’s name on the front. Quietly, so that Alan won’t hear me, I cross over to the drawers under my workbench. I open the one marked CHISELS.

  Inside, there’s a soft sea of purple paper. A sad treasure chest; my dark secret. The drawer’s filling up again: some of the letters at the back are in danger of falling into the drawer below, where I really do keep chisels. Carefully, I slide them toward the front. It’s stupid, really, but I hate the thought of any of them getting lost. Or bent, or crushed, or hurt in any way.

  I breathe slowly, staring down at them.

  I don’t write all the time—maybe once a fortnight, less if I’m really busy—but this is still the third drawer I’ve filled in the past two decades. I scoop my hand in among them now, tender and ashamed. What’s wrong with him? I imagine people saying. Still hanging on to a dead girl? He should get help.

  It was a lady called Jeanne Burrows, a bereavement counselor, who suggested I write to my dead sister. I couldn’t stand the thought of never being able to talk to her; it made me dizzy with panic. Write her a letter, Jeanne had suggested. Tell her how you’re feeling, how you miss her. Say the things you’d have said if you’d known what was coming.

  In those silent hours spent driving between the Crown Court, the psychiatric hospital, and my empty childhood home, I found comfort in those letters. I had friends, of course: I even had a new girlfriend back up in Birmingham, where I’d just finished my first year as an undergrad. Mum’s sister, Margaret, phoned daily, and Dad came down from Cumbria to help organize his daughter’s funeral. But nobody really knew what to do with me, nobody really knew what to say. My friends were well meaning but useless, and my girlfriend escaped as soon as she decently could. Dad deferred his own grief by spending most of the time on the phone to his wife.

  I wrote the first letter in my empty room at halls, the day I drove up there to clear my stuff out. Mum was being treated in a secure unit at the time. There was no way I’d be going back for my second year.

  But I slept, after writing that letter. I slept all night, and although I cried when I saw the purple envelope the next morning, I felt less . . . stuffed. As if I’d made a small puncture, allowed some of the pressure to escape. I wrote another letter that night, when I had unpacked back in Gloucestershire, and I never really stopped.

  I’ve booked in to see Jeanne in a couple of days. She’s still practicing out of her house on Rodborough Avenue. Her voice sounds exactly the same, and she didn’t just remember me, she said she was delighted to hear from me. I said I wanted to see her because my involvement with Sarah Harrington had reopened some “old wounds,” but I don’t know if that’s quite it. I just feel—have felt since I got back—like everything is wrong. Like I’ve arrived back in the wrong life, the wrong bed, the wrong shoes.

  What’s really alarming is the sense that everything’s been this wrong, without my fully realizing it, for nearly twenty years.

  I turn to look at my workshop, my safe house, my retreat. The place where I’ve hammered and sawed through fury and despair. Drunk hundreds of thousands of cups of tea, sung along to the radio, pulled out a raft of splinters, had the odd drunken bonk. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had this.

  And it’s Mum I have to thank for it, really. Dad, whose fault it was that I’d become fascinated with wood in the first place, was dead against me doing this for a living. During the ten years between him running off with Victoria Shitface (this was the name Alan made up for her at the time: it’s never really lost traction) and Alex dying, Dad continued to interfere with my life and decisions as if he were still sitting at the head of our table. He went mad when I said I was considering a furniture-making foundation course instead of A levels. “You’ve an academic brain,” he shouted down the phone. “Don’t you dare waste it! You’ll destroy your career prospects!”

  In those days Mum was still capable of engaging with conflict. “So what if he doesn’t want to be a bloody accountant?” she’d said, grabbing the phone from me. Her voice shook with anger. “Have you ever actually looked at what he makes, Neil? Probably not, given how rarely you come down here. But let me tell you, our son has an exceptional talent. So get off his back.”

  She bought me my first No. 7 jointer, a fine old Stanley. I still use it today. And so it’s always her I’m grateful to, when I consider what I’ve got.

  “Bonjour,” Alan says, his voice a little woolly. He’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing pants and one sock. “I need tea, and toast, and a lift, Eddie. Can you help?”

  An hour later we pull up at his house, right at the top of Stroud. I keep the engine running while he runs inside to find a suitable work outfit (he flatly rejected everything I own) and gaze down at the old cemetery falling away below me, a chessboard of loss and love. There’s nobody there, save for a cat picking its way along a row of limey gravestones.

  I smile. Typical cat. Why walk respectfully on the grass when you could walk disrespectfully on a human grave?

  A church bell starts ringing somewhere—it must be nine o’clock—and I’m reminded suddenly of that funeral procession yesterday. The hearse, polished and quiet and disconcerting in every way. The careful set of the driver’s face, the cascades of wildflowers trailing down the coffin, that heady fear that comes with any reminder of human mortali
ty. I cross my arms across my chest, feeling suddenly queasy.

  Who died? Who was it?

  But then I remember the promise I made to my sister, a mere ninety minutes ago. No more thoughts of Sarah. Not now, not ever. And I draw a screen across that part of my mind, forcing instead a plan for the working day ahead. Number one: a bacon sandwich from the roadside café at Aston Down.

  “Meow!” I call to the cat, but it’s busy plotting the death of some poor shrew.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Six Weeks Later

  Autumn is here. I can smell it in the air, rough and unprocessed and—I’ve always thought—oddly apologetic. As if it feels slightly embarrassed, dismantling the heady dreams of summer to make way for another cruel slog.

  Although personally, I’ve never minded winter. There’s something exquisitely unworldly about this valley when frost spikes the ground and the trees fling long shadows across the bare earth. I love the sight of smoke twisting out of a lone chimney, the fairy-tale pinch of light in a remote window. I love how my friends brazenly invite themselves over so they can sit in front of my fire and eat the hearty stews they seem to think I cook all the time just because I live in a rural barn.

  Strangely, Mum always seems a little happier in the winter, too. I think that’s because it’s more acceptable to stay indoors once the temperatures drop. Summer is fraught with the expectation of increased socializing and outdoor activity, whereas in the winter her small existence needs little explanation or defense.

  But today it’s only September and I’m still in shorts as I march up the composty hillside of Siccaridge Wood. Shorts and a jumper I still can’t bring myself to wash and debobble, because the last person to wear it was Sarah.

  I walk a little bit faster. A mild burn spreads through my calf muscles as I stump on up the hill, too fast to let my feet sink into the layered mulch. I start singing Merry Clayton’s part from “Gimme Shelter.” The only people who can hear me singing about rape and murder being just a shot away are the birds, who probably thought I was mad already.

  My voice reaches the final section of the song, where Clayton is basically screaming, and I start laughing. Life is not feeling all that tranquil right now, but refusing to think about—well, about unhelpful things—definitely gives me a breather.

  The problem is, Jeanne Burrows is not really on board with my plan to block all thoughts of Sarah from my mind. My sessions with her make me feel so much better, so much less alone, and yet she is breaking my balls every week. I didn’t imagine you could break someone’s balls in a deeply kind, gentle, respectful way, but Jeanne seems to be doing just that.

  Today’s session, however, was unprecedented.

  Just as I reached the end of Rodborough Avenue, where Jeanne lives, I saw none other than Hannah Harrington reversing out of Jeanne’s parking spot. She was concentrating on not hitting a neighbor’s car, so she didn’t notice me, but I got a good look at her. She looked not dissimilar to the last time I saw her: tearstained, tired, lost.

  Of course, I wondered immediately why Hannah was seeing Jeanne, and before I knew it the old fear engine had fired up again. What if it was one of Sarah’s parents who died? Sarah would be distraught. She told me in those letters how guilty she’d felt, all these years, insisting on living thousands of miles away. I decided it was my duty to help her.

  “I want to call Sarah Harrington,” I announced to Jeanne on arrival. “Can I do that here, with you?”

  “Come and sit down,” she said calmly. Oh brilliant, I imagined her thinking. Here we go.

  Within a few minutes I had calmed down and accepted that I had no business calling Sarah Harrington, but it did inevitably lead to a conversation about her. Jeanne asked again if I felt that blocking all thoughts of Sarah was helping me let her go.

  “Yes,” I said stubbornly. Then: “Maybe.” Then: “No.”

  We talked about the process of letting go. I told her I was fed up with being so bad at it, but that I didn’t know what else to do. “I just want to be happy,” I muttered. “I want to be free.”

  Jeanne laughed when I complained that there was not a manual for stopping loving someone. I admitted that that was actually Alan’s joke, and then she threw me a neutral look and said, “While we’re talking about setting ourselves free, Eddie, I wonder how you feel about that in relation to your mother? How do you feel when you imagine freedom from your duties to her?”

  I was so shocked I had to ask her to repeat herself.

  “How does the idea of lessening some of that burden feel?” Her tone was friendly. “That’s how you described it last week. Let me see . . .” She peered at her notes. “A ‘nightmarish burden,’ you said.”

  My face blew warm. I pulled at a loose thread on her sofa, unable to look her in the eye. How dare she bring that up?

  “Eddie, I want to remind you that there is no shame—none at all—in finding it hard. Family carers might feel great love and loyalty toward their relative, but they also experience resentment, despair, loneliness, and a whole range of other emotions about which they would not want the patient to know. Sometimes they reach a point where they need to take a break. Or even completely rethink the care arrangement.”

  I stared at the floor. Back right off! I wanted to shout. This is my mother you’re talking about! Only nothing came out of my mouth.

  “What are you thinking?” Jeanne asked.

  I don’t get angry very often—I’ve had to learn not to, for Mum’s sake—but suddenly I was furious. Far too angry to appreciate what she was trying to do for me. To be grateful that she had waited weeks before bringing it up. I wanted to pick up the vase of peachy snapdragons on her mantelpiece and throw it at the wall.

  “You have no idea,” I said, to a counselor of thirty-seven years’ experience.

  If Jeanne was shocked, she didn’t let it show.

  “How dare you?” I went on, voice rising. “How dare you suggest I just run off and abandon her? My mother tried to kill herself four times! Her kitchen looks like a fucking hospital dispensary! She’s the most vulnerable person I know, Jeanne, and she’s my mother. Do you have a mother? Do you care about her?”

  It took nearly half an hour for me to apologize and calm down. Jeanne asked kind and respectful questions, and I responded with curt monosyllables, but she kept going. Nudging me, with those clever bloody questions, closer and closer toward an acknowledgment that I was dangerously near to breaking point with Mum. With life. Nudging me toward a grudging acceptance that it might be my own grief that had stopped me admitting this.

  Jeanne seemed convinced that Derek could help find a solution. “It’s his job,” she kept saying. “He’s a community psychiatric nurse, Eddie, he’s there for both of you.”

  And I kept replying that there was no way I could hand my mother over to Derek. However wonderful he was. “I’m the only person she wants to call when she needs help,” I said. “There’s nobody else she’d trust.”

  “You don’t know that for certain.”

  “But I do! If I told her she couldn’t call me—even if I said she couldn’t call me as often—she’d either take no notice and carry on as before, or she’d become dangerously ill. You know her history. You know I’m not just being pessimistic.”

  By the time our hour was up, we had made no real progress, but I had promised I’d continue next week without any tantrums.

  Jeanne laughed. She said I was doing really well.

  * * *

  • • •

  I reach the top of the hill, finally, arriving underneath the beech tree I’ve come to check. (It’s meters from the mystery welly.) Back in June, when I was tramping the countryside, thinking angry and confused thoughts about Sarah, I noticed it was suffering dieback—only it’s looking much worse now. I’m guessing some sort of beetle, as there’s no obvious pathogen in the bark, but it’s definitely a gon
er. I rest a hand on the trunk, saddened to imagine this magnificent beast felled by a snarling chain saw.

  “Sorry,” I tell it, because it feels wrong to say nothing. “And thank you. For the oxygen. And everything.”

  I check the surrounding trees (the welly is still there) and then walk back down the hill, hands in pockets. My brain keeps trying to slide me back in the direction of Sarah, and her sister’s visit to a grief counselor, but I resist. I make myself think about the tree instead. The tree is a problem I know how to solve. I’ll call Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust tomorrow, see if they’d like some help bringing it down.

  By the time I get back to my barn, I’m feeling quite normal again.

  Then I step inside and find my mother standing by my drawer of purple letters. My secret drawer of purple letters, which nobody on earth other than Jeanne knows about. And I realize that Mum is reading—she is reading quite calmly—one of my letters to Alex. She holds it in one hand, an ugly expression on her face.

  I have to take a moment to be certain this is really happening. To be certain that my mother—my dear mother—is committing a breach of privacy on this level. But at that moment Mum turns the letter over, so she can read the back of the page, and I know there’s no doubt.

  Disbelief melds slowly into fury.

  “Mum?” I say. My hand is clamped to the doorframe like a bench vice.

  In one movement she slides the letter behind her and turns to me.

  I reread in my head the text message I sent her before going out: I’m going for a walk. Just to warn you, I’ll be leaving my phone, for a bit of peace. But I’ll be back in a couple of hours.

  I always deliberately overestimate the time it’ll take me to do something. She panics otherwise.

  “Hi, darling!” It’s that voice again, the one she does when she’s pushed me too far. Only today it’s even higher. “You were very quick.”