Ghosts
Page 1
Also by Dolly Alderton
Everything I Know About Love
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2020 by Dolly Alderton
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Fig Tree, an imprint of Penguin General, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2020.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Alderton, Dolly, author.
Title: Ghosts : a novel / Dolly Alderton.
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020043812 (print) | LCCN 2020043813 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593319857 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593319864 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PR6101.L4425 G48 2021 (print) | LCC PR6101.L4425 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043812
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043813
Ebook ISBN 9780593319864
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph by ViDI Studio / Shutterstock
Cover design by Kelly Blair
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Contents
Cover
Also by Dolly Alderton
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
A Note About the Author
For Mum and Dad,
for never disappearing
Prologue
On the day I was born, 3rd August 1986, “The Edge of Heaven” by Wham! was number one. Since I can remember, an annual tradition was playing it as loud as possible as soon as I woke up. I remember all the birthdays of my childhood through the sound of George Michael’s defiant “yeah, yeah, yeah”s in the opening bars—jumping on my mum and dad’s bed in my pyjamas, eating sprinkle sandwiches for breakfast. It is why my middle name is George—Nina George Dean. This mortified me throughout my adolescence when my flat chest and certain jaw gave me a masculine enough energy without also being named after an ageing male pop star. But like all abnormalities and embarrassments of childhood, adulthood recalibrated them into a fascinating identity CV. The weird middle name, the birthday breakfast sandwich spread thick with margarine and dipped in hundreds and thousands of sprinkles—all of it strung together to form my own unique mythology, which I would one day speak of with bewildered pride to airtime and intrigue.
Mortifying oddity + time = riveting eccentricity.
On my thirty-second birthday, 3rd August 2018, I brushed my teeth and washed my face while playing “The Edge of Heaven” from the speakers in my living room. Then I spent the day on my own, doing and eating all the things I loved the most. For breakfast, I had a poached egg on toast. I can confidently declare at thirty-two years old that there are three things I can do flawlessly: arrive anywhere I need to be on time with five minutes to spare; ask people specific questions in social situations when I can’t be bothered to engage in conversation and I know they’ll do all the talking (Would you say you’re an introvert or an extrovert? Would you say you are ruled by your head or by your heart? Have you ever set anything on fire?); and poach an egg to perfection.
I checked my phone and found a grinning selfie of my parents wishing me a happy birthday. My best friend, Katherine, WhatsApped me a video of Olive, her toddler daughter, saying “Happy birday, Aunty Neenaw” (she still couldn’t get it quite right despite extensive tutoring from me). My friend Meera sent a gif of a luxurious-looking long-haired cat holding a Martini in its paw with the message “cannot wait for tonight, birthday gal!!!!!,” which meant she would certainly be in bed before eleven. This is what happens when people with children get too worked up for a night out—they tire themselves out with anticipation, set themselves up for a fall with their bravado, get stage fright then ultimately go home after two pints.
I walked to Hampstead Heath and went for a swim in the Ladies’ Pond. On my third circuit, the inoffensive lick of summer rain began to fall. I love swimming in the rain and would have swum for longer had the matronly lifeguard not ordered me to get out for “health and safety reasons.” I told her it was my birthday and thought this might grant me an off-the-record bonus circuit, but she informed me that if there was lightning, it would directly strike me in the open body of water and “fry me like a rasher of bacon,” not a mess she wanted to clean up—“whether it’s your birthday or not.”
I came home in the afternoon, to my new flat and the first home that I’d bought. It was a small one-bed in Archway, on the first floor of a Victorian house. The estate agent’s generous description of the property was that it was “warm, eccentric and in need of modernization”—it had a carpet the colour and texture of instant coffee granules, a peach-tiled eighties bathroom replete with abandoned bidet and two broken doors on the pine kitchen cupboards. I was sure it would take as long as I lived there to afford to do it up, but I still felt lucky every morning I woke and looked up at the swirly crusts of my Artex ceiling. I never imagined I would ever be able to own a flat in London—the actualization of this once-impossible dream alone made it the best place I’d ever set foot in.
I had two neighbours: an elderly widow named Alma who lived above me, whose hallway small talk about how best to grow tomatoes on a windowsill and generous donations of leftover homemade kibbeh were both delightful; and a man downstairs, who I hadn’t yet met despite having moved in a month ago and made a number of attempts to introduce myself. I’d knock, but there was never an answer. Alma said she’d never spoken to him either, but she did once talk to his female flatmate about the building’s electricity meter. I only heard him—he came in from work at six o’clock and made virtually no noise until midnight when he cooked and ate his dinner and watched TV.
I scraped together the money for the flat with savings, the royalties from my first book, Taste, and the advance on my second cookbook, The Tiny Kitchen. Taste was a recipe book, inspired by my family’s cooking, my friendships, my only long-term relationship, my travels and my favourite chefs. It also had a thread of memoir spun in between the recipes. There was an overarching theme of discovering my own tastes in life as I learnt about my culinary ones—what I liked and what satisfied me. It told the story of how I’d balanced a night-and-weekend occupation as a supper club owner with my day job as an English teacher at a secondary school, and how I eventually saved enough to quit and become a full-time food writer. It also touched on my r
elationship and ultimate amicable break-up with my first and only boyfriend, Joe, who was supportive of my decision to write about us. The book was a surprise success and off the back of it I got a column in a newspaper supplement, a number of soul-destroying but bank-account-enhancing partnership deals with food brands and a further two-cookbook deal.
The Tiny Kitchen, which I had just completed, was about what I’d learnt from cooking and entertaining in a rented one-room studio flat with no kitchen storage space, an oven the size of a Fisher-Price cooker and only one hotplate for a hob. It was my first solo home after Joe and I broke up. I preferred to talk about my third book, a temporarily unnamed project about seasonal cooking and eating, which was in its proposal stage. I’d now learnt from years and years of writing that the very best version of a piece of work was when it was still just an idea and therefore perfect.
I ran a bath and put on a long-loved iTunes playlist that was called “Pre-lash” in my twenties, which I’d renamed “Good Times” in recent years, to mark a move away from reckless, bodily abandon and towards mindful, considered pleasure. I created the track-list to listen to before a night out when I was a first year at university and the shape of its journey played out in full was always in tandem with the same tireless rituals of feminization I had been following for fifteen years: wash hair, dry it upside down and try to increase its volume by ten per cent, pluck upper lip, two layers of mascara, second drink, walk into two spritzes of perfume—by the time the penultimate track came around (“Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang”) a cab was always waiting outside while I cut my legs to ribbons with a disposable razor over the sink because I’d forgotten to shave them in the shower.
My hair was back to its natural dark brown and cut to shoulder-length. There was a recent addition of a fringe to hide the new creases in my forehead, as light as concertinaed tissue paper, but visible enough for me to want to not think about. Luckily, I saved time when it came to make-up. My face had never worn make-up well. I was grateful, as I already felt grooming took up far too much time and was a constant source of feminist guilt, along with my total disinterest in all DIY and all sports. Sometimes, when I felt despondent, I liked to calculate how many minutes of my remaining life I would spend removing upper lip hair if I lived until I was eighty-five and think about how many languages I could have learnt in that time.
I wore a high-neck, low-back black dress to my birthday drinks. I didn’t wear a bra, simply to show off that I don’t have to wear a bra, which is a paltry consolation for having such small breasts. But I didn’t mind any more—I had become mostly indifferent to my body. I was an irritating size 11, totally average height at 5 foot 4 and happy that big arses had come back into fashion, so much so that I had observed with pride that we now occupied more than two categories on any given porn-streaming platform.
There were a number of people I didn’t invite to the birthday drinks this year. In particular, my ex-boyfriend. I wanted Joe to be there, but inviting Joe meant inviting his girlfriend, Lucy. Lucy was harmless enough, despite the fact she owned a handbag in the shape of a stiletto shoe, but Lucy always felt like there were unsaid things between us. Once she’d drunk her three glasses of specific rosé (“Is it blush?” she’d ask the weary barman, the 134th white woman to do so that day), she wanted all the things to be said. She’d ask if I had a problem with her, or if I sensed awkwardness between us. She’d tell me how important I was to Joe and how special he thought I was. She would give me a series of hugs and repeatedly tell me that she hoped we’d be friends. We’d met at least five times, and she and Joe had been going out for over a year, yet she still believed there were declarations we had to make to each other in quiet corners of social situations. I had thought about why she did this a lot and, rather generously, had come to the conclusion that Lucy was a woman who’d watched too many structured reality TV shows. She evidently felt a party wasn’t a party until two women in peplum dresses clutched hands while one says: “After you slept with Ryan, I stopped liking you as a friend, but I will always love you like a sister.”
There were, in total, twenty guests who came to the pub, made up of mostly university friends, a couple of school friends, old colleagues and a handful of people I was currently working with. There were also a couple of friends who I saw precisely twice a year—once at their birthday drinks, once at mine—and there was a new-found mutual understanding that while we didn’t want to let go of the friendship altogether, we had absolutely no interest in investing time in it beyond these biannual meet-ups. I found this unsaid pact to be both sad and cheering in equal measure.
Etiquette demanded I invited partners and spouses. These were mainly well-meaning men whose charismatic conversational prowess I had long given up on and instead knew they’d spend the evening sipping pints on a bench, saying nothing other than “happy birthday” every time they passed me to get to the loo until they got tired and whingy and made their girlfriend go home. I was fascinated by the men all my friends had chosen to merge their lives with, particularly how they all interacted with each other. When I was with Joe, the girlfriends and wives of all his friends came together at every gathering with something akin to the Blitz spirit. We talked, we listened, we learnt about each other, we gradually grew closer every time we intersected by way of our boyfriends. I had noticed over the years that a group of male other halves do the absolute opposite to this when they find themselves shoved together. Time and time again I observed that most men think a good conversation is a conversation where they have imparted facts or information that others didn’t already know, or dispensed an interesting anecdote, or given someone tips or advice on an upcoming plan or generally left their mark on the discourse like a streak of piss against a tree trunk. If they learnt more than they conveyed over the course of an evening, afterwards they would feel low; like the party hadn’t been a success or they hadn’t been on good form.
The thing they liked the most were instances of trivial commonality. I watched them do it at every one of my friends’ birthday drinks—search for a crossover of thought or experience as a way of feeling instant connection with a fellow man without having to make any effort to get to know or understand him—Oh yeah, my brother went to Leeds uni too. Where did you live? YOU’RE JOKING, oh my God okay so you know Silverdale Road, right by the Co-op? Like, to the left of the Co-op. That’s the one. My brother’s friend’s girlfriend owned a house there! Such a small world. Have you been to the pub on that corner? The King’s Arms? No? Oh, you should, it’s a great pub, really cracking pub.
The one other half I adored was Gethin, who was the long-term boyfriend of my university friend Dan. All three of us were close and had spent some of my wildest nights and most brilliant holidays together. But, in truth, they had disappointed me recently. I’d thought I could always rely on Dan and Gethin to flout tradition, but they had begun making the most conventional choices of anyone I knew. They had “closed” their relationship, which was a let-down because their respective sexual escapades made for riotous stories and I held them up as the only successful example of non-monogamy I had encountered. They’d created an incredibly complicated alcohol-restriction schedule, which meant they were allowed to drink on certain weekends but not other weekends and they definitely couldn’t drink during the week. They’d stopped coming out because they were always saving money for something. They had just begun the adoption process. They had bought a two-bed in Bromley.
Dan and Gethin stayed for two lemonades, told me about the nightmare they were having with an overgrown tree in their neighbour’s garden, which was overspilling into their garden, then left before eight to “make it back to Bromley” like it was a quest to Mordor.
I received a number of thoughtful presents from people, indicating to me that who I was and how that manifests in my taste and lifestyle choices had been received loud and clear. There was an early edition of The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin, a brand of smoky hot sauce
that I love and can only be bought in America, a Chinese money plant that doubled up as a house-warming gift and a lucky mascot for my new book. The only rogue contribution was from my former boss at the school I worked at, who bought me a framed print of an illustrated 1950s woman doing the washing-up, with the caption: If God wanted me to do housework, he would have put diamonds in the sink! This was not the first time I had been given a gift of this ilk, and I decided that it was my prolonged state of singledom plus my fondness for a Vodka Martini that had made people think that I like this sort of kitsch vintage sloganism, which made light of women being drunk, desperate, childless, chocoholics or overspenders. I thanked her.
I was offered a line of cocaine by my friends Eddie and Meera, who were desperate to have their “first proper night out together in eighteen months” because in that time Meera had been pregnant, given birth and had just stopped breastfeeding, which meant she could now fill herself to the brim with booze without passing it on to the baby. Eddie and Meera had a feral look in their eyes that I had come to recognize in new parents on their first night out. I politely declined. I didn’t mind them taking it at the party, but I was very aware of how much Meera talked about the need for paternity leave when high, especially the phrase: “the default patriarchal constructs of parenting.” Eddie did a lot of restless shuffling from foot to foot—he couldn’t get settled—and they both continuously spoke about Glastonbury like they were its founders.
My Only Single Friend, Lola, took me to one side and twitchily told me she felt very judged and isolated by all the married people. She was wearing red lipstick and a very strange up-do which involved a number of tonged segments of hair half pinned up and half down, not unlike a barrister’s wig. She only ever did these sorts of hairdos when she was very hung-over and overcompensating. She admitted to me that she’d had a bit of a heavy one the night before—a date that began in a canal-side pub at seven p.m., moved on to dinner, then a bar, then another bar, then back to hers at three a.m. It was clear she hadn’t been to bed. My Only Single Friend Lola worked in events, but at the time I would have described her as a freelance dater. She’d been single for ten years and was desperately searching for a relationship. She was my closest friend from university and none of our extended group of mates had ever been able to work out why she couldn’t get beyond a handful of dates. She was charming, funny, beautiful and had greedily looted the genetic bank by being the proprietress of not only enormous tits but enormous tits that didn’t need a bra. She told me she was “wigging out” about her date from the night before. I made a joke about her hairdo reflecting her state of mind. She said she was going to get the tube home. I told her that Eddie’s younger brother was arriving shortly who was single, twenty-six and a trainee vet. She said she might have one more prosecco for the road.