“Really?”
“Probably,” she said with a shrug.
“You’re right,” I said, clinking her glass. “That’s a very, very useful addition to the Schadenfreude Shelf. Thanks, mate.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, turning the wine bottle upside down, dribbling the last drops into our glasses. My phone, lying face up on the table, pinged. The screen illuminated with a message notification from Max. Lola’s startled eyes locked with mine.
“Oh my GOD I’m going to be SICK,” she bellowed. Concerned drinkers on the bench next to ours turned to look at her.
“She’s fine, don’t worry, she’s just excited.”
Lola grabbed my phone, tapping in the passcode with the familiar intimacy of two women who have spent countless nights together in a pub, showing each other messages. She stared at the screen.
“Oh fuck, it’s good, it’s really good.”
I grabbed the phone out of her hand.
I just listened to The Edge of Heaven five times in a row and you’re still not out of my system. What have you done to me, Nina George Dean?
I couldn’t really remember what Max looked like. My brain had grabbed hold of just four specific details of him. I had spent the week since we’d last seen each other circulating those memories around my mind like four separate plates of canapés at a party. Once I’d had enough of memory platter one, I’d take a bite from memory platter two. When I was satisfied with that, I’d switch to another one and so on and so on. Not only were these four memories just enough to satiate my daydreams, working out exactly why my memory had clung on to the specific vignettes also fascinated me.
Memory number one. The angles of his face as he went in to kiss me. Particularly the strength of his nose, the hoods of his eyelids and the knowing half-smile as his mouth opened slightly right before his lips touched mine.
Memory number two. Very, very specific. There was a point in the evening when we were talking about a female TV chef, and I was saying, both quite tipsily and remorsefully, that I didn’t think her recipes worked. As I was saying it, he said “Miaow!” in a fairly camp way, and half raised his hand like a paw scratching, but decided to not really commit to it when it was already aloft. I could tell that whole thing was a bit mortifying for him, and I think my brain held on to this for a very specific reason, which was to stop the version of Max I would build in my head from becoming too perfect. I needed some bumps and chinks for the sculpture my imagination would make of him. It reminded me that he was real—existing in this realm and completely within my reach.
Memory number three. When Max laughed, the perfect severity of his face was briefly screwed up and discarded, revealing a goofy mouth, swimming eyes and a nose that slightly crinkled at its sides like a cartoon bunny. It was the only trace of the adolescent I could see in him—everything else seemed so entirely formed. When he laughed, I was reminded that he had been a dorky boy in a classroom, a student dressed up in a Hawaiian garland and a teenager in a hoodie watching South Park with a homemade bong in his hand. His laughter was, so far, my only crack of light through the door and into his vulnerability.
Memory number four. The feel of his white cotton T-shirt on his warm body as we danced. His T-shirt was velvety with the fuzz of someone who uses fabric softener. My suspicions of fabric softener use were confirmed when I smelt the dampness of his skin rise through his top, lifting the scent of soapy lavender with it to the air. It was the only slightly synthetic thing about him. It made me think about his domesticity, otherwise so concealed, and picture him in his flat in Clapton on his own, doing chores and sorting things out. I imagined he did his laundry on a Sunday evening, with a Dylan live album playing. I spent some time wondering if he owned a tumble dryer (ultimately decided no) and whether he bought his household items in bulk online (ultimately decided yes, and that his friends were the sort of well-meaning, awkward men who might take the piss out of him for it, exclaiming, “You got enough loo roll here, mate?!” as they opened his bathroom cupboard).
* * *
—
The day after he messaged, when I’d sobered up, I replied. I wanted to just call him, but Lola told me that was tantamount to turning up at his flat unannounced and throwing rocks at his bedroom window. I didn’t understand why a messaging process was still so necessary after you’d already met—it slowed everything down to a frustrating pace. Max’s texting style was quite antiquated in that he liked to address every point I had made in my last message and respond to it—he also usually left four hours between reading my message and replying to it. This meant it took three days of this staggered back and forth chit-chat about what we’d been doing over the week before we even broached the subject of when we would see each other again.
He suggested a walk and a few drinks on Hampstead Heath after work. I was nervous about walking on the Heath—it was where Mum and Dad used to take me at the weekends when we were still living in Mile End and being there could make me feel violent grasps of nostalgia unexpectedly. I thought I was in direct contact with all my memories from this time—the funfair they took me to near the Kentish Town entrance, the dinky tub of strawberry ice cream I ate on a bench outside Kenwood House, as I glanced down at a ladybird crawling up my five-year-old arm. It’s so hard to trace which memories are yours and which ones you’ve borrowed from photo albums and family folklore and appropriated as your own. Sometimes I took a wrong turn on the Heath and ended up in woodland or a field and felt the unique disorientation that comes from involuntary memory, like I was standing in a half-finished watercolour painting of a landscape. Returning to it gave me the same satisfaction as finally remembering a word I’d been searching for, then haunted me with a sinister sense that there were important things I couldn’t remember and never would. Hundreds of black holes in who I was, as bottomless as a night spent drinking tequila.
I walked to the Lido in my navy-blue linen sundress and brown leather sandals, carrying a bag of cheap white wine and overpriced olives. Had it been my way, I would have packed a whole picnic, but Lola advised me that it was best to go low-key at this stage. I hadn’t realized quite how much of early-days dating was pretending to be unbothered, or busy, or not that hungry, or demonstratively “low-key” about everything. I wondered if Max felt the same pressure. I hoped this phase would be over soon so I could ask him about it.
As I approached the brick-wall entrance of the Lido, I saw his instantly recognizable shape. I scanned his face and body, to quickly remind me of the man I’d been inventing for the previous week. I’d forgotten how long his legs were, how wide his shoulders; how cartoonishly masculine his frame—like the silhouette of a superhero drawn by a child with a crayon. He was reading the same book, and he looked up from its pages with the same familiarity he had done when he saw me on our first date.
“Slow reader,” he said, gesturing at the paperback as I walked towards him. We hugged, quite awkwardly, and he rubbed my back in a way that made me worry he thought of me as more of a sad friend at the pub after their football team lost, rather than a potential girlfriend.
“Oh, me too,” I said. “I basically can’t read a book now unless my phone is switched off and in another room.”
“We’re all fucked.”
“I know. I remember being little and being so absorbed by a Peter Pan picture book that I hid a torch under my mattress so I could read under the covers after I’d been put to bed. I was one of those annoying little girls who just wanted to be a boy. I had my hair cut short when I was seven and I refused to grow it until I went to secondary school.” He smiled, his gaze breaking away from mine and roaming inquisitively across my face, as if it were a painting in a gallery. “What?” I said, feeling the pinpricks of self-consciousness on my cheeks. I was nervous and talking too much.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just the thought of seven-year-old you, with short hair, reading a book by torchlight. Makes
me smile.” I felt my knees unhinge.
“Shall we walk?” I asked, jarringly formal and clearly not at ease.
We walked side by side towards Parliament Hill, talking as we went, as I tried to keep up with his long-legged strides while not running out of breath. I was used to doing this with Katherine, who had been statuesque since we were teenagers and always loved pointing out on her iPhone how many fewer steps she’d taken on a walk we’d done together (all tall people are smug, whether they know it or not). Walking meant I could take him in with stealth side-eye; correcting the mistakes I’d made in my mind’s composite sketch. The distraction of navigating and looking ahead was also welcome, as a daylight activity date heightened all possibility for embarrassment. One of us could trip over a stick, or get shat on by a passing pigeon, or have our crotches sniffed by an overenthusiastic labradoodle at large. Every possible decision made me self-conscious.
As we paced up Parliament Hill, we talked about the city. I told him about the few memories I have of growing up in Mile End—looking up at palms three times the size of me on Columbia Road Market on a Sunday; the pub my dad used to read the newspaper in while I was allowed to eat chips and take sips of his beer; the bike I learnt to ride around the square we lived on. He told me how confused he’d been when he first moved here in his early twenties—how he’d assumed city-living meant a flat above a Chinese restaurant in Soho or a bookshop in Bloomsbury. He was surprised when he discovered all his graduate salary gave him was a matchbox-sized room in a six-person house-share in Camberwell. He told me about the domestic eccentricities of these strangers-turned-housemates, but I found it hard to not let my mind drift to what Max must have looked like as a twenty-three-year-old arriving in London—as fresh and rosy as a Somerset apple, his belongings boxed up on a Camberwell street, a Red Hot Chili Peppers poster rolled up in his backpack.
When we reached the summit, we sat on a bench that overlooked the sprawl of London’s central nervous system. Around us were a couple of groups of students drinking tinnies and being showily extroverted the way students in parks always are, and a few sets of couples who all looked like they’d met on Linx. Max and I tried to deduce at what point in their burgeoning relationship they all were. We agreed that the couple comprising a woman in a pair of large cork wedges, carrying a pearl-studded clutch bag and a man in a pair of utility shorts were definitely on date one and he’d surprised her with the location. The pair on the grass whose legs were tangled up like messy wires underneath a telly had definitely seen each other naked for the first time very recently—perhaps even the night before—and we concluded they’d bunked off work to stay in bed together all day and were taking their sexual compatibility out for a public spin. We decided the two men holding hands and grinning at the city skyline while talking about what they remembered of “life before the Shard” had the comfortable, inane-but-devoted cosiness of two people teetering on the verge of saying “I love you.” I liked being a commentator and co-conspirator with Max. I could have done it all night.
We walked further north, on winding paths and through woodland scattered with sunset slices through gaps of branches. We managed to keep in step while always staying about ruler-width away from each other as we talked. I was fascinated by how he responded to nature—instinctively touching bark as he passed tree trunks and holding his face to the lethargic sunlight.
We emerged at the field beneath Kenwood House and found a patch of grass to sit on. I opened the wine and olives and we lay back on our elbows—I forgot to pack glasses, so we took turns to drink from the bottle. It was nearing mid-evening and the walkers and drinkers were disappearing. A little boy in a yellow sunhat scuttled across the field with the speed of a wind-up toy on a laminated floor.
“ORLANDO,” a marching man barked behind him. “Orlando, come back here NOW.” The little boy picked up pace and his grin widened, the hat flew off his head.
“Lando!” the man bellowed again, chasing the errant hat. “Lando, I mean it, stop running RIGHT NOW or there will be NO MORE MEDIA all week.”
“No more media,” Max hissed into my ear despairingly.
“Do you think you can be a parent and not be a bad-tempered tosser?” I turned to ask him, our faces close to each other.
“No,” he said.
“Look at him. He’s fine. He’s having fun. He’s in a field. He’s not running into a road. What’s the problem?” We both watched Orlando, who had thrown himself on the grass and was rolling around like a hound, breathless with hysterical giggles. He definitely would not be enjoying any more “media” for the foreseeable future. “It must be so sad, watching yourself become someone who is wound up and stressed out all the time. I don’t think there’s any way of avoiding it.”
“Not having children?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s true.”
“Do you want to have children?” he asked. Lola had warned me this happens when you date after thirty—she said what was never mentioned before is now usually brought up within the first month. Katherine told me to let them know before we’d even met up.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Me too.”
“But I’m dreading it as much as I’m excited about it. I think watching my friends have babies has made me want them more and less in equal measure.”
“I feel exactly the same,” he said, taking rolling paper and tobacco out of his pocket.
“I remember once seeing my goddaughter, Olive, hit her mum round the face while she was having a tantrum. Full-on whacked her across the cheek, left a bruise on her cheekbone. Three minutes later, she was in the bath, holding a rubber duck to her mum’s lips and saying in the sweetest voice I’ve ever heard: ‘Mama kiss ducky.’ ” He laughed. “She’s going to have another one. My friend, Katherine. I always think that makes the strongest case for having a kid. If it were so bad, then people wouldn’t want to do it again.”
“Why didn’t your parents have another one?”
“I don’t think my mum ever really wanted to be a mum,” I said. “I think she thought she did, then she had me and realized she didn’t.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
“No, no, it’s okay. I’m weirdly fine about it. I don’t think it was anything particularly to do with me, I think I could have been anyone and she would have been disappointed. I feel sorry for her, actually. It must be terrible to have a child and then realize it’s not the right decision for you. Particularly as you can’t say it out loud, so it’s a secret she’s had to keep for all my life.” Max finished rolling his cigarette and lit it. “My dad, on the other hand—I think he would have had ten if he could.”
“Did that cause problems between them?”
“I don’t think so. He was just happy he finally had a family. He was in his forties when he married my mum.”
“Are they happy now?” he asked.
I took the cigarette from him and inhaled deeply.
“I’m smoking again and it’s all your fault, Max. I actually bought a packet last week, which I haven’t done in years.” He looked at me expectantly. “It’s complicated,” I relented. “My dad’s ill.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. I took another drag and shook my head as if to tell him not to worry. He knew that what I meant was not to ask me anything more.
At the end of the bottle of wine, he pulled another out of his satchel. He stretched out on the ground and I lay beside him, watching the sky darken.
“What’s Linx like?” I asked.
“You know what it’s like.”
“No, I mean, for you. What are the women like?”
“Oh.” His fingertips reached out to my hand and the warm palm held mine firmly. “They’re all different.”
“Well, obviously, but you must have noticed some patterns. I won’t think you’re being sexist, I promise. I’m genuinely curio
us.”
“Okay, well”—he stretched his arm out and scooped me into him, so I rested on his chest—“I’ve noticed there’s this big thing for gin. They all say they love gin.”
“Interesting,” I said. “I’ve noticed women using gin as a personality replacement before. There’s an implied sophistication with gin. A woman who is of another time.”
“Yes, they’re usually the ones whose photos are all in black and white.” The depth of his voice reverberated through him and hummed on to my cheek.
“Do you know what the personality replacement is for men?”
“What?”
“Pizza.”
“Really?”
“Yes, they all think pizza is way more of a lifestyle choice than it is. Every other Linx profile includes a reference to pizza. ‘How do you like to spend your Sundays?’ Pizza. ‘What is your ideal first date?’ Pizza. The other day, I saw a man put his current location as Pizza.”
“What else?” he asked.
“They all say they love napping. I don’t know why. I don’t know who told all these grown men that what women really love are giant pizza-guzzling babies who need sleep all the time.”
“Heterosexual women should be decorated like war heroes just for loving us,” he said with a sigh, his fingers gently separating the strands of my hair. “I don’t know how you all do it.”
“I know, bless us,” I said. “We’re really putting our shifts in and it’s such a thankless job.”
He turned on his side so we were face to face and kissed me, soft and tentative, then pulled me closer towards him by my waist.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said. “I think about this curve where your neck meets your shoulder. And the shape of your mouth. And the backs of your arms. That’s next-level fancying, isn’t it? Wanting to kiss the backs of someone’s arms.”
Ghosts Page 7
