Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

  “Top-tier fancying,” I said indifferently, deciding not to tell him about the platters of memory canapés or how I’d imagined him at home doing his laundry.

  “The last girl whose arms I remember wanting to kiss the backs of was Gabby Lewis. She sat in front of me in chemistry. She had a ponytail that swung every time she turned from side to side. Which she did a lot. I think she did it on purpose actually, I think she knew it drove me crazy.”

  “You sound like an incel.”

  “She had these perfect arms, like yours. And I used to stare at them, counting every freckle. I actually blame her for my D, I was predicted a C.”

  “I think that’s adorable.”

  “Bit creepy?”

  “It would be creepy if I didn’t find you so hot. The rules of attraction are so unfair.”

  “I was very much not hot.”

  “Come on.”

  “I wasn’t, honestly. I was a huge hairy teenager with no friends. I played chess with my grandpa after school every day. He was the only person who wanted to hang out with me.”

  “So that’s why I like you so much. Accidentally hot people. They’re the best.”

  “What were you like as a teenager?”

  “I was nearly exactly the same as I am now.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, it’s so boring. Same height, same face, same body, same hair, same interests. My level of attractiveness was fixed at thirteen and has never really gone up or down.”

  “I’ve never met anyone who’s said that before.”

  “Can I tell you my theory?”

  “Go on.”

  “I know it’s much more compelling to have a story of transformation. But I think having twenty years to get used to how you look is no bad thing. I think about the way I look much less than my friends who are still striving to be beautiful, waiting for the final stage of their transition.”

  “You are beautiful.”

  “I’m not saying it to be modest. I don’t think I’m unattractive. But I have never and will never be a great beauty. And it’s freed up a lot of energy to be other things. Also,” I said, then paused for a short while to wonder if I was talking too much. “I think that’s why I’ve been doing quite well on Linx so far.”

  “Why?”

  “I think men are all so insecure that too much beauty overwhelms them. I think they probably see a profile like mine—sweet face, very unremarkable hair, sense of humour—and they feel like they’re home.” Max laughed loudly, tipping his head back into the grass. “You know what I mean though, don’t you?”

  “I suppose you do have a…welcoming quality, but not for the reasons you think you do.”

  “I’m like a service station on a motorway. They know they can stop in for a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich. They know what they’re getting with me. It’s familiar. Men like what’s familiar. They don’t think they do, but they do.”

  When we’d finished the bottle, we walked back towards Archway through the cool, dark summer sunset. We stopped at the gates of the Ladies’ Pond and peered in, along the dirt path. The black silhouette of delicate branches spread across the indigo sky like a chinoiserie plate.

  “I wish I could take you in to see it. We could break in, I suppose.” I said it weakly because I am not and never have been a rule-breaker.

  “No, no,” he replied. “You’ll just have to describe it to me.”

  “So, that”—I gestured to the left—“is where everyone leaves their bikes. Further down this path on the right there is a patch of grass everyone calls the meadow. That’s the bit that feels like a scene from a Greek myth. It’s magical in the summer. A carpet of half-naked women languorously drinking tins of G&T. Then further down on the right, there’s the pond.”

  “How deep is it?”

  “Really deep—you can’t see or feel the bottom. And it’s always cold, even in the summer. But lots of women pretend it isn’t. In the spring, the ducklings are tiny and they swim alongside you. We swam here in the spring on Katherine’s hen do. And on solstice last year, my friend Lola made me come here at the crack of dawn and do a ceremony.”

  “Is she a pagan?”

  “No, just neurotic,” I said. “It’s my favourite place in London. If I ever have a daughter, I’m taking her here every week as an education on women’s bodies and strength.”

  “See—this is why we’re so frightened of all of you.”

  “Are you frightened of us?”

  “Of course we are. That’s why we’ve always tried to keep you quiet and lock you up and bind your feet and take away all of your power. It’s because we were so scared of what would happen if you were as free as we were. It’s pitiful.”

  “What’s there to be frightened of?”

  “All of it. You can communicate and synchronize with each other in a way men never will be able to. You have tides within your own body. You’re nurturing and magical and supernatural and sci-fi. And all we can do is…jizz on our own stomachs and hit each other.”

  “And make small talk in car parks.”

  “But barely, though.”

  “And change fuses.”

  “I can’t even do that.”

  “Girl,” I whispered, my face closing in on his.

  “I fucking wish,” he said, pushing me against the railings and kissing me. The wet, weedy smell of earth and wild water drifted out towards us—the English scent of Special Brew cans floating on canals and lily pads floating on lakes.

  We walked hand in hand all the way home, which I hadn’t done since Joe and I were students. I had been transported back to a time of promise and pleasure. I was a teenager again, but with self-esteem and a salary and no curfew. I had discovered a second type of life that could happen with Max—a life that could run parallel to the everyday one with the ill dad and the disintegrating friendships and the monthly mortgage payments. I thought about reality—the sciatica I’d developed the year previously, the physiotherapy I couldn’t afford, the black damp in between my shower tiles that no amount of scrubbing could remove, all those news stories I’d never fully understand, all those local elections I never voted in, the incessant emails from my accountant that always began with: “Nina—you appear to be confused.” As I felt the warmth of Max travel up into me through our hands, I felt like I was uncontactable. Reality could try as hard as it liked—it could text, email and call me—when I was with Max, it wouldn’t be able to get in touch.

  He walked me into my building, up the stairs and stood in the communal corridor with its stained petal-pink carpet, peeling wallpaper and dirty yellow light from the bare overhead bulb. I didn’t know whether it was an act of chivalry or seduction—or maybe both those motives hoped for the same outcome. I leant against the frame of my front door.

  “I am obviously desperate to invite you in,” I said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I just think, maybe, you know. We should be grown up. Wait.” This was only partly true—I also knew there was a pile of laundry on my bed. And possibly some gusset-side-up knickers in the bathroom. There was no milk in the fridge for tea in the morning. And most probably a tab open on a search like: How many hairs on nipple normal for woman 32??

  “We’ve got time.”

  “How are you getting home?” I asked.

  “Bus.” Silence hung between us. “Goodnight,” he finally said.

  “Goodnight,” I replied. He leant down and placed his mouth against my bare shoulder, then kissed along the back of my right arm to my wrist. He held me by my hips as he pulled himself round to the other side of my body and slowly kissed along the back of my left arm, as if taking its measurement with his mouth. My skin felt as thin and transparent as cling-film and I was sure he could see the insides of me. He turned to leave and I instinctively pulled him back by his hand. He p
ushed me up against my hallway wall and kissed me like I was the only thing that could satiate him.

  Only now do I realize that the first night I spent with Max, I was looking for evidence of past lovers. I wanted him inside me so I could search for the ghosts inside him. In the absence of any context for who he was, I was gathering forensics from the inerasable fingerprints that had been left by those who had handled him. When he pressed his palm over my mouth, I could see the woman who fucked him to feel freedom in disappearance. When he held a handful of my flesh in his hands, I could tell he’d loved a body more yielding than mine. His lips running along the arches of my feet let me know he had worshipped a woman in her entirety—that he had loved the bones of her toes as much as the brackets of her hips; that he had known her blood on his skin as well as he’d known her perfume on his sheets. He held me like a hot-water bottle when he slept and I knew that night after night after night he had shared a bed with another body and together they’d constructed an oasis from just a mattress.

  In the morning, he woke up early for work. He didn’t shower, because he said he wanted to wear me like aftershave. He kissed me goodbye, stood up and left. As I groggily stretched across my sheet—filthy and feline—I heard him walk along the corridor and close the heavy front door to the building. But I could still feel him there—invisibly surrounding me like water vapour. Max arrived at my flat that night and he didn’t leave for a long time.

  We moved through the milestones of the following month with a new, easier pace. We stopped sending each other measured texts that needed to be analysed and annotated, Lola acting as my CliffsNotes, and we started calling each other instead. The communication between us became regular—an on-off week-by-week conversation in which we knew what the other one was doing and checked in on how we were. We saw each other three or four times a week. We kissed on the back-row seats of the cinema. We learnt how we both liked our tea. I met him at work for his lunch break and we ate ham and piccalilli sandwiches in the park by his office. We walked round an exhibition, and I took in nothing of the art but instead marvelled at the spectacle of what it was to hold hands in broad daylight. I saw his flat—mostly white, mostly tidy and completely lived-in, with faded, frayed rugs from travels, stacks of records on the floor and towers of paperbacks on every surface. There were comedy mugs in his cupboards from well-meaning but estranged aunts, given as Christmas presents. There were piles of shabby equipment for adventuring—walking boots, wetsuits and helmets. There was just one photo in his entire flat—a close-up black-and-white image of a smiling, closed-eyed man with his nose leaning in to smell the head of a little, white-haired boy. I asked about him only once, then never mentioned it again. Max and I edged around our respective locked rooms marked “dad” and we both understood how important that was, without ever acknowledging it.

  At night and first thing every morning, we journeyed through the new lands of each other’s bodies, marking our territory wherever we went. We colonized each other and I always left Max knowing exactly where he’d been for days afterwards—where he’d kissed and pinched and bitten. I couldn’t ever imagine getting to the end of him.

  I sat in the reception of my publisher’s office and pressed the barely visible bruise he’d left a few nights before on my right wrist as he had held me down. It had turned light yellow, like a piece of gold jewellery. I gazed at the books on the shelves that lined the Soho townhouse that the company occupied as its office, the hundreds of books they’d published, and spotted Taste’s sage-green spine. I felt the same sense of belonging I’d felt since I came in for my first meeting with my editor, Vivien—a feeling of security that I knew was naive. I was the publisher’s product, not their child, and the fate of products was even more unpredictable than children.

  “Nina?” a scratchy, lethargic male voice called. I turned round to see a slouchy man in his early twenties with an ironic mop-top haircut died copper orange, wearing a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt tucked into tracksuit bottoms and a pair of sliders. His lids hung heavy over his eyes like a pair of half-drawn venetian blinds.

  “Yes. Hello,” I replied.

  “You here to see Vivien?” he asked. I could see the chewing gum roll around his mouth like a ball in a lottery draw machine.

  “Yes.”

  “Come this way,” he said, jerking his head to beckon me. He barely picked up his feet and shuffled towards the lift like his shoes were cardboard boxes.

  Vivien was sitting in a glass-fronted meeting room, her shoulders rounded and her head lowered intently towards a piece of paper. She had a shoulder-length, messy-fringed shaggy blonde haircut that implied a former life of lots of parties. The sort of hair that suits a woman of her age, but also would look completely appropriate on an iconic ageing male rock star. She was in her mid-fifties, which you could see in the gentle sag and folds of her face and the milky blue of her irises, but she had the energy of the most powerful and popular girl at school. She was decisive, exacting, confident and mischievous. She liked scandal, gossip and salaciousness. She orbited in high glamour—well connected, well versed in style and taste—while being decidedly unglamorous herself, which made her all the more intriguing. She was bookish and bespectacled, always in black trousers and an androgynously cut simple shirt, no matter where she went. Her glasses were square and cartoonishly thick-rimmed, her earrings were always large and geometric—you could tell that all her accessories were chosen on account of being “funky.”

  But the most compelling thing about Vivien was the spell of guruism she cast on whoever she met while being unaware of her own addictive didacticism. She would utter throwaway thoughts that would become fundamental truth to whoever heard them. She once told me to “always order turbot, if turbot is on the menu” (I always order turbot) and that “all scents are tacky other than rose” (I have since only worn rose perfume). I had never met a woman surer of her own thoughts and instincts, and it was an invigorating thing to behold.

  Vivien stood up when I entered the meeting room and gave me a kiss on both cheeks.

  “Nina the Brilliant,” she said in her deep voice of full vowels and sharp consonants, as she gripped me firmly by the shoulders. “So much to talk about. Now, Lewis,” she said formally, turning to the man who accompanied me, “I’m going to have to ask you to listen very carefully. We would like two coffees, please, from the shop downstairs not from the ghastly machine here. Nina likes a flat white, not skinny, I like a double espresso, no milk. Can you remember that?”

  “So just, like, black coffee?” he said, leaning against the door frame.

  “Well, yes, but don’t say a black coffee because otherwise they will give me something completely different to what I’d like. And get one for yourself.”

  “I’ve actually given up caffeine, I’ve read it’s the silent killer—”

  “All right, Lewis, thank you,” she said briskly, before turning to face me with a weary smile. The door closed and he sloped off. “I’ve only ever hired earnest girls with bobs and lots of canvas book bags who love Sylvia Plath, so I thought I’d try something different for an assistant this time.”

  “Is he good?”

  “Disaster.” An earnest-looking girl with a bob and leather brogues tapped on the glass door. Vivien turned to her. “Yes?” The girl stepped in, nervously tucking her hair behind her ears.

  “Vivien, I’m so sorry, no one was actually allowed to book this meeting room for the next three hours.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because every employee in the building has been asked to go to the ‘Take the Stairs Week’ talk.”

  “What is a ‘Take the Stairs Week’ talk?”

  “It’s a government initiative that we’re backing. We’re encouraging people to take the stairs rather than the lifts to improve cardiovascular health.” Vivien looked at her blankly, awaiting further explanation. “And we have someone here telling us all a
bout it.”

  “Out of the question,” she replied plainly, turning back to me. The girl hovered in the doorway for a few moments, then took her cue to leave. “You wouldn’t believe some of the guff they make us do here. I am convinced it’s what finally drove dear old Malcolm away. Our best designer.”

  “Oh no, has he gone for good?”

  “Yes, he’s had a breakdown. He’s sold his house to go live in Belgium. But I’ve always thought Belgium would be a rather splendid place to go mad in, so good for him.” Another phrase I knew I would adopt as my own. One day, someone would tell me about Belgium and I would say confidently: a splendid place to go mad in.

  “So. The Tiny Kitchen. The campaign is coming together nicely, we’re sending all the information to you in an email this week.”

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  “And Taste continues to sell, your numbers were up last month, which is fantastic.”

  “I just really hope this book isn’t a disappointment for anyone who liked Taste.”

  “No, no,” she said, flapping her hand dismissively. “It’s your voice, which is exactly the same voice from the first book, tackling a very common issue for a lot of households, which is entertaining and cooking and storing food with no space. It’s a winner.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “I know so,” she said, nodding reassuringly. “Now. The not-so-fun news.”

  “Go on.”

  “Book three. I read the proposal over the weekend.”

  “You didn’t like it.”

  “I’m afraid to say I didn’t.”

  I was grateful for Vivien’s straightforwardness. I couldn’t bear the pandering language of feedback in publishing and journalism. It had taken me years to work out that when a magazine editor says “lots to love here” they nearly always meant “very little we can do with this.” Mine and Vivien’s working relationship was efficient, thanks to our honesty.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Boring. Unengaging.”

  “Okay.”