Ghoster

by Jason Arnopp

  When I dial 100 to call an actual old-school operator, I picture them sitting bored, playing solitaire or a doing a crossword, then greeting the ringing phone with stunned surprise. Feels like I’ve hopped back in time to the nineties, but thanks to my humble Nokia, an operator is my only means of contacting the local hospitals.

  No one’s willing to tell me if they have any record of a Scott Palmer on their wards. Apparently, I’ve failed to pass their security procedure, despite having given them this flat’s correct address and his date of birth. Thought I knew the latter, because we celebrated Scott’s thirty-seventh birthday on 3 August, but apparently I was wrong.

  Hmm. A guy on Tinder lying about his age? Whoever would have expected that?

  Everyone except gullible old Collins here.

  With a hollow sigh, I dump the Nokia back on my lap. Sparse tufts of snow drift down over Marine Parade. I’d planned to bring a frosty bottle of champagne, so that Scott and I could sit out here and toast our new domestic union. I’d pictured better weather and an overwhelmingly magical sense of Everything’s Finally Going To Be All Right. Moving into this flat was going to fix me like a Coldplay song.

  With the benefit of hindsight, I can see this was one big ask. But why couldn’t it have happened anyway? Why couldn’t something truly great have happened to me?

  Because you’re not worth it.

  Because you don’t deserve it.

  Because you’re never enough to keep any one man hanging around for too long. The likes of Andy, Calvin, Zane, Rory, Rudolpho and now Scott, they all had the true measure of you.

  Shut up, brain. This could still be all right. Scott might still turn up and explain everything. He may have temporarily freaked the hell out, then changed his mind. We could still work with that.

  Dream on, you worthless sack of shit. Scott Palmer’s movin’ on up. Eat his dust.

  I pull the collar of my jacket tight, trying to forget about my numb face and hands. I should call the police. What if it turns out that Scott really has been abducted, or something equally unlikely, and all I’ve done is sit here on the balcony until I froze solid?

  Still feels too soon to dial 999. The police would only try and gently break it to me that my boyfriend’s flown the coop.

  Back on the Nokia, I speed-dial Scott one more time. There’s no way he’ll pick up, but that’s not why I’m calling. I need to leave him a new voicemail, in which I take a different approach. Over the last twenty-four hours, the messages I’ve left have become aggravated, but now I need to assure him that, no matter what, he can speak to me. If he’s in trouble, we can work this out together. He doesn’t have to hide from me like this.

  Sure, go ahead and debase yourself. See if I care.

  As the line connects, I rehearse the words in my head. I’m going to sound as calm and as loving as I possibly can. In case it helps, I’ll even call him baby and I’ll—

  From out of nowhere, Hans Zimmer’s orchestral theme from True Romance pipes up and kills my plan stone dead.

  Huh? I’m hearing two things at once. Right up against my ear, amplified by the tiny speaker inside my Nokia, my line to Scott’s phone has connected. But as it makes that beep-beep calling sound, I can also hear the Hans Zimmer ringtone.

  Which is really bizarre. Because of course, you only hear a customised ringtone…

  … when the actual phone handset itself is ringing…

  … within earshot.

  Oh my God.

  Prickles shoot up my back. I didn’t hear the sliding door bust open, but it never makes much noise. Could Scott be right behind me, about to inflict one of his surprise Titanic hugs? Christ, will everything be great again, once I’ve abused him for scaring the hell out of me?

  Breathless, I spin around.

  No Scott.

  No one.

  Beyond the closed door, inside the flat, a lone, startled Beardie Boy reacts as though I’m pointedly checking on their progress with my boxes. From his perspective, as he gazes out through the glass, my face seems to be demonic and drawn with white pen, which probably doesn’t help.

  Hans Zimmer’s steel drums play on, as I try to work out where this ringtone’s coming from. My first instinct is to activate my Nokia’s torch, but it doesn’t have one.

  Then I see it. The unmistakable glow of a phone screen. The handset faces upwards on the ground where the barbecue used to be, concealed partly by an empty bag of nachos and two dead beer bottles.

  The handset feels cold as a tombstone. I glimpse the words Kate Collins Mobile before the screen goes dark. Quickly, I kill the outgoing call from my Nokia, so as to not leave a voicemail message in which I repeatedly gasp the word fuck.

  Not that Scott can access his voicemail now, of course, because his phone is right here in my hand.

  I wipe water off the protective case, one corner of which has incurred spider-web cracks. Without the case, though, this handset would have become a brick.

  That might have been for the best, Kate. Because you know what you want to do next, right?

  Brain, I simply have no idea what you mean…

  The Beardie Boys place my final box on the living room floor, with the kind of reverence usually reserved for the Queen’s crown. It’s conceivable that these people have detected a soupçon of tension in me tonight.

  I muster one final grateful smile as they leave, then close the front door and press my back up against the wood.

  No, wait. I’d thought I was standing, but I somehow find myself seated, with my back against the door and my arms wrapped around my knees, as my heart taps out a conga beat on my ribs.

  While down here, I might as well make myself useful, so I rip open the small pile of Scott’s mail. It’s all spam, apart from a written notification from Unicorn Energy that they’re about to cut off the flat’s electricity supply due to non-payment. These guys don’t make threats lightly.

  For some reason, the bristly post-mat I’m sitting on is littered with chips of wood. Seems they’ve fallen from the door, which has a few chunks missing. Must have inflicted this damage myself, when I needlessly kicked my way inside… unless The Beardie Boys were heavy-handed. Gathering these fallen chips, I pocket them. Feels therapeutic. Distracting.

  So. I have Scott’s phone. I don’t know why, but I do, and its random presence on the balcony only deepens my worry. If Scott had left his phone on the breakfast bar or something, this might have signified he was planning to come back. But outside, on the ground? Clearly a mistake and one made in a hurry.

  The guy couldn’t wait to get away from you.

  Scott having lost his phone does explain the lack of contact from him. It’s not as if he has any other means of getting hold of me, since I no longer have email, or at least no email I ever check. At one point, Scott and I acknowledged that if one of us ever lost their phone, we’d lose contact… but then we never fixed that distinct flaw in our comms. These days, losing your smartphone feels unthinkable, like losing your arm or your leg, or… your anything.

  What if Scott’s mum or dad has died or been hospitalised, and he’s driven off in a mad emotional panic to be with them, leaving his phone behind?

  That wouldn’t explain the hurried flat clearance. Look, Kate, you know it’s most likely that Scott’s fallen for someone else and has gone off to be with them instead. This may have been his last-minute decision, or he may have always planned to do it, because he’s an enormous bastard. And you may never know… unless you unlock this handset. And you know that’s going to happen.

  For once, my brain is right to be so cynical. Behind all this concern of mine lurks a horrid rush. A sick excitement. Having found this phone may well count as some kind of progress, but it also spells danger. This horde of hidden data invites me to return to my bad ways and then some. Still… should I really fret over my smartphone addiction when my boyfriend might be in serious trouble, or even danger? What’s the worst thing that could happen if I open his phone?

  Well�
� have you already forgotten the worst thing that happened, the last time you used a smartphone? Cast your mind back to Leeds and Flat Ninety-Two…

  I would normally ask Izzy for her opinion on any given problem. Over the last six years since we met, we’ve plagued each other with every worry under the sun, but she’s the wrong person to advise on this matter, for the same reason I ended up with the world’s most basic phone in the first place.

  This happened through necessity, rather than desire.

  This was penance.

  Day after day, I repress this memory, but I don’t deserve that privilege.

  What I deserve is to forever relive the event that ended my days as a dopamine rat.

  Before my very eyes, Scott’s glum hallway morphs into the far brighter lobby of a high-rise residential building, somewhere on the northern outskirts of Leeds.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  28 March

  OUT OF ORDER. ENGINEER HAS BEEN CALLED.

  This is precisely the kind of sign that Izzy and I never want to see sellotaped to lift doors at 2.50 a.m., when we need to reach the ninth floor ASAP. Not even the fact that someone has used a Sharpie to add the words THIS IS BANG before the OUT OF ORDER raises a titter from us. As a special extra treat, the air-con’s either broken or never existed, leaving the stairwell thick with the kind of heat that makes you crave two showers, one after the other.

  We’ve been called out to Flat Ninety-Two to see what’s wrong with a man in his late forties who’s complained of severe dizzy spells and nausea. On the face of it, this seems like a pretty straightforward job. All we need to do is get him to A&E to wait three hours and fifty-nine minutes for a check-up. Over four hours is a breach, so that’s our standing joke: everyone gets seen in three hours and fifty-nine.

  What ultimately transforms this job into a complete nightmare, however, will be me.

  Me and my Rudolpho obsession.

  Up until the Venezuelan ghosted me, I thought I was a pretty normal online user. But nobody’s normal these days, are they? The new normal is establishing itself faster than anyone can track.

  These last few weeks I’ve found myself in Singlesville, stuck watching The Rudolpho Show via social media.

  Every time he tweets about a great night out, I’m right there, reading that tweet.

  Refresh, refresh, refresh.

  Every time he posts on Facebook, there I am. He hasn’t unfriended me on FB yet, but that wouldn’t even matter, because all his posts are set to public. Much like me, Rudolpho is far from the world’s most private or technically proficient person. Which, of course, was fine when he was proudly showing me off as his latest squeeze… but now? Less fine.

  Refresh, refresh, refresh.

  Here he is on Instagram, nursing a drink in a club with his arm around some super-tanned girl, younger than me, with drawn-on eyebrows.

  Refresh, refresh, refresh.

  What’s he doing now? Who’s he left me for? What is so very fucking wrong with me?

  At the end of each day, I’m still refreshing long after I should be asleep. When I see him post pictures of his latest mad evening out, my nauseous self-loathing only reinforces the insomnia.

  At the same time, my own social media use has exploded. Even though I very much doubt Rudolpho has thought about me at all, let alone thought to check my posts, I’ve gone out of my way to paint myself as enjoying quite the carefree lifestyle.

  In bars, I’ve persuaded hot strangers to pose for selfies with me, our drinks raised to the camera as if we’ve been partying all night.

  I’ve drunkenly subtweeted about certain people, all of whom are clearly Rudolpho.

  I’ve always been a paid-up member of social media’s attention-seeking army, but lately I’ve gone above and beyond. I go all-out in my quest for attention, as if trying to compensate for the shortfall in my so-called life.

  I’ve grabbed and repurposed any Twitter meme I can, in the hope that they’ll go viral and people will somehow like me more. I ingratiate myself with celebrities in a transparent bid to get them to retweet my inane gibberings.

  Whenever there’s an earthquake in LA or some other natural disaster, I post on Facebook about how I hope all my friends there are staying safe. I have zero friends in LA.

  Tiny squirts of dopamine drag me through my days. I am a lab rat, feverishly pressing a lever, only to receive ever-diminishing returns. A hopeless consumer, who’s bought into the illusion that social media means always having company.

  I have genuinely tried to focus on my work, first and foremost. I’ve tried to feed off the adrenaline of the job and the enormous rewards that come with helping people. Some days I succeed, but all too often I end up exhausted after a night of refresh-refresh-refreshment. Rather than allow my work to suffer, I sometimes rely on amphetamine sulphate to see me through a shift. It happens, I reassure myself. Lots of paramedics do this.

  I know this is wrong. I know I’ve passed through a bad gateway and fallen into a hole. I know I should block Rudolpho on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else. I should get on with my life, such as it is. And yet I can’t stop watching. In my head, The Rudolpho Show keeps getting renewed, season after season.

  This cannot be true heartbreak, because I only fell in love with having someone in my life again.

  I fell in love with not being alone.

  Tonight at Flat Ninety-Two, three weeks post-Rudolpho, I’m slap-bang in the thick of the madness, checking his socials whenever I can. Sometimes, these glances at my phone become obsessive stares that untether me from reality.

  Our Flat Ninety-Two patient is the classic mild-mannered accountant type. He seems perfectly lucid and sensible, until he does that thing of asking where Izzy’s from (Leeds), then asking where she’s really from (also Leeds, but her family roots lie in Kingston, Jamaica, thanks for asking). Despite this annoyance, I believe the man when he insists he’ll be fine to take the stairs on foot, provided we all take it nice and steady.

  While Izzy performs one last check of the guy’s blood pressure out on the landing, I hang back in his hallway and pull out my phone. Time to grab a quick, self-flagellating dopamine fix.

  Refresh, refresh, refresh.

  Two minutes ago, Rudolpho posted a picture of himself drunk in a club, with his arms around two equally drunk girls. The tweet simply reads, Decisions, decisions!!!, complete with a cheeky tongue-out emoji.

  Time warps.

  The next thing I know, Izzy’s at the top of the stairs, guiding the guy down onto the first step. As the danger dawns on me, I call out. I tell her to wait, but it’s already happening.

  The guy blurts something about feeling weird, and then his body goes slack.

  I’m running so fast, out through the guy’s front door. But Izzy, being Izzy, tries to drag him back from the brink, despite now having the entirety of his body weight pitted against her.

  If this was the two of us, trying to stop his fall, we might stand a chance. But Izzy by herself? Doomed.

  I call her name, but gravity doesn’t care.

  Gravity only wants to assert its authority.

  Skidding to a halt at the top of the stairs, I hardly dare look.

  Having tumbled at least ten steps, Izzy and the guy now form a twisted, agonised heap on the landing halfway down.

  My first reaction, as I call a second ambulance to help us, is angry self-justification. Izzy should’ve fucking waited! She should never have tried to get the guy down there on her own. But even as my face reddens with this fury, I know damn well that this is a futile attempt to guard myself against the shame.

  Don’t be paralysed.

  Oh my God, Izzy, please don’t be paralysed for life.

  When I’m confident she isn’t looking, I push my phone out through an open window.

  Three heartbeats later, the distant tinkle of smashed metal and glass confirms that my brave new world starts here.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  3 October

  My
mind rejoins my body in Scott’s living room. Facing the turbulent sea with a polystyrene box on my lap, I am shovelling chips and curry sauce into my face while perched on a garden chair I bought from the nearby Morrisons.

  While reliving the nightmare of Flat Ninety-Two, I’d comforted myself by braving the cold to visit one of the chip shops at the front of the pier. These chips have gone down a treat, despite my mum’s shrill voice invading my thoughts: Oh, you’ve eaten the whole lot, you little piglet. Been watching my weight this summer to feel more worthy of Scott, but since he and I really do seem to be over, I can eat whatever I bloody well like. I’m footloose and totally fancy-free once again.

  Fancy-free? You haven’t even come to terms with losing Scott yet. That realisation is a time bomb, waiting to blow.

  I can do anything I like.

  Anything, that is, except look inside Scott’s phone.

  Clearly, that way lies madness. That way lies obsession. That way lies a complete waste of my precious time on this Earth.

  More than anything else, it would be a massive betrayal of Izzy, who’s been such a saint about being temporarily saddled with a desk job in Control. She even keeps cursing herself for having stubbornly hurried on without me that night, even though I constantly apologise for letting her down. Thank God she didn’t see me using my phone before it happened. I don’t know if I could bear Izzy full-on blaming me, even though I so deserve her scorn.

  Do you, though? I think she ought to shoulder at least some of that blame. Go on, open the phone.

  If Scott really has left me…

  … which you know he has…

  … then it’s clear that I never really knew him. I have nothing to gain by getting to know the real him in retrospect. All I can do now is learn from this and move on. I need to learn to stop rushing into emotional attachments for the sake of no longer feeling alone. I need to move onwards and head for a brand-new horizon.

  For better or for worse, I’m starting my new job tomorrow. There must be no distractions. Tomorrow morning, if there’s still no sign of Scott, I’ll call the police, but I will not unlock his phone. Just in case something bad really has happened to him, I’ll let the police deal with his disappearance. If the handset will aid their efforts, then I’ll gladly hand it over.