Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

  “He’s not here. He’s gone. What does that mean?”

  “It means he either deleted the app and his profile…” Lola said, fiddling with the pearly ear-cuff that sat like a miniature tiara on her cartilage.

  “Or?”

  “Or he’s unmatched you.”

  I put down my phone and stared ahead at Lola’s framed print of her own face made to look like a Warhol silkscreen.

  “I think he’s done this before,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s gone out of his way to make himself as untraceable as possible. Who else is this untraceable nowadays? It’s strategic. He doesn’t want women to be able to find out where he is or what’s going on after he vanishes.”

  “That can’t be true. He knows you know where he lives and works. That’s hardly an effective vanishing act.”

  “Yes, but he also knows that I would never ever go to his flat or his office for an answer. He’s safe there. It would be too humiliating for me. He knows that I would hate to seem that mad. I’m strong-armed into silence by the fear of being called mad. So instead I just have to go actually mad with no answers.”

  “Do you want a glass of wine?”

  “How have you done this for a decade, Lola?”

  “Rioja?”

  “It’s eleven in the morning.”

  “It’s an emergency, I think.” Lola stood up and walked to her kitchen counter to retrieve a bottle from the wine rack.

  “This is only fun for the boys,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “Dating in your thirties. The boys are all in charge. We have no control in any of it.”

  “Don’t make this political, it’s not political.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “If you’re a woman in your thirties and you want a family, you’re at the behest of the impulses of flaky men. They make all the rules and we just have to obey. You’re not allowed to say what you want or what has upset you because there’s always this undetonated bomb underneath the relationship that goes off if you seem too ‘intense.’ ”

  Lola poured the wine into two glass tumblers. “But you weren’t intense.”

  “Of course I wasn’t! He told me he wanted to marry me on our first date. Can you imagine what would have happened if a woman had said that on a first date? He would have alerted the authorities. Why does he get to say that? Why does he get to be the one in charge of saying ‘I love you’ first, then ghost me?”

  “In my experience, that’s when ghosting is most likely to happen.”

  “Why?”

  “Okay, so here’s my theory,” Lola said, sitting back on to the sofa’s mountain of velvet cushions, clearly delighted that her PhD in dating was finally being put to good use. “Men of our generation often disappear once they’ve got a woman to say ‘I love you’ back to them, because it’s almost like they’ve completed a game. Because they’re the first boys who grew up glued to their PlayStations and Game Boys, they weren’t conditioned to develop any sense of honour and duty in adolescence the way our fathers were. PlayStations replaced parenting. They were taught to look for fun, complete the fun, then get to the next level, switch players or try a new game. They need maximum stimulation all the time. ‘I love you’ is the relationship equivalent of Level 17 of Tomb Raider 2 for a lot of millennial men.”

  I took a large gulp of Rioja that tasted more sooty than earthy when mixed with the lingering taste of my morning toothpaste. I thought about the hours that I had spent in my and Joe’s flat with the grey background noise of his football videogame permeating through the walls of the living room, dark with the curtains shut. I thought about Mark passed out in a cupboard and pissing himself in his sleep, while his wife breastfed their newborn baby in the lonely silence of the dawn. I thought about Max playing hide and seek—watching me through a crack in the wall and giggling at my disorientation in the game I didn’t know I was a participant in. I thought about all these men in their thirties—ageing on the outside with receding hairlines and budding haemorrhoids—running around a nursery, picking up and putting down women and wives and babies from an overflowing trunk of toys.

  “Can we talk about something else?” I said. “Literally anything else.”

  “Of course,” Lola said, giving my knee a squeeze. “I think if my split ends get any worse, I’m going to have to throw myself in the River Thames.”

  “Lola.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t think about your split ends that much. Surely they can’t be causing you more than a second’s thought a year?”

  “I do,” she said, holding the end of her hair between her two fingers and studying the strands forensically. “I think about my split ends I would say for thirty-eight minutes every day, mostly on my commute.”

  “How is this still the reality of our lives?” I said, gulping the rest of my wine in one. “Waiting for men to call us and reading our own hair like it’s a book. I feel so grim to be a woman. That’s not how I’m meant to feel.”

  “For God’s sake, Nina. This isn’t about being a woman. Most people are self-obsessed, gender regardless. Most people pretend they care about single-use plastics more than they care about their own split ends, but they don’t. I’m just not scared to be honest about it. And THAT’S feminism.” She said it with a camp flourish, like it was a gameshow host’s catchphrase. I leant down to put my head in the cradle of my palms and closed my eyes. Lola soothingly played with my ponytail.

  “I know this is so awful right now,” she said. “But you just have to trust me when I say: you shall not pass.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You shall not pass,” she repeated sagely, giving me a gentle smile.

  “Pass where?”

  “It’s a phrase my mum always used to say to me when I was sad. It means: this will end at some point, then you’ll be happy again.”

  “This too shall pass.”

  “Yes, exactly, it will.”

  “No, that’s what you’re meant to say.”

  “Is it? Why do I know the proverb ‘You shall not pass’?”

  “It’s not a proverb, it’s what Gandalf says in Lord of the Rings.”

  “That’s it!” She clicked her fingers, as if finally proven correct.

  “I feel very comforted,” I said, patting her hand. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  —

  When I left Lola’s house in the late afternoon, with a foreign type of hangover from a mid-morning drink, I was ready to go home, turn off my phone and get straight into bed. As I walked to the tube station, the four letters that I increasingly dreaded seeing most on my phone screen appeared: HOME.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  “Hi, Ninabean. How are you?”

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “I’m okay. Quick one—has Dad called you today?”

  “No, why?”

  “He’s missing.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since this morning.”

  “What time?”

  “About six. I heard the door go, and I assumed he was just going to have a wander about in the garden, so I didn’t bother going to get him.”

  “Why would he be going out to be in the garden? It would have been freezing cold and pitch-black. Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “This is EXACTLY why I didn’t want to call you,” she squawked. I heard her speak to someone away from the phone’s mouthpiece. I could make out a few spat-out words: “Nina,” “having a go,” “how bloody dare” and “has the nerve.”

  “Mum,” I said, trying to regain her attention. “Mum. MUM.”

  “WHAT?” she roared.

  “I’ll get on the train and come to you now.”

  * * *

  —

  Gloria ans
wered the door, wearing a grey zip-up hoodie studded in diamanté butterflies. Her overly blow-dried claret-coloured bob was as smooth and bulbous as a conker. She gave me an inappropriately large smile, considering the circumstances of my visit. She was an emotional bollard of a woman, always getting in the way when we were in the middle of a sensitive family situation. When I was in my difficult, argumentative adolescent years, she was constantly at the house collecting all sides of the story like a tabloid reporter. She was in her early sixties, but she still had the air of the all-girls school about her—desperate for gossip, frantic to be the receptacle and dispenser of information in a crisis and strangely fixated on being my mum’s “best friend” like two Year 11s with matching tattoos drawn in marker pen.

  “Nina!” she said, stretching out her arms and drawing me in for a reluctant hug. “How are you?”

  “Worried about Dad,” I said, unnecessarily.

  “Well—we all are.”

  “Where’s Mum?”

  “Would you like a bagel with some sandwich spread?”

  “I’m good, thank you—where’s Mum?”

  “Mandy’s in the living room.”

  “Her name isn’t Mandy.”

  “Her name is whatever she wants it to be, sweetheart. It’s Mandy’s right to express herself how she likes, and if that’s with a new name, it’s not our place to dictate to her who we think she is.” She had obviously spent hour upon hour bitching about me being difficult about “the Mandy problem” with Mum over instant cappuccinos made from packets of powder, winding her up by quoting a life coach.

  I went into the living room, where Mum was sitting in the corner of the sofa, holding a mug in one hand and examining her cuticles on the other.

  “Have you called the police?”

  “Of course I’ve called the police.”

  “Have you told them about Dad’s condition?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are they searching for him?”

  “Yes, they’ve made it an urgent case. They’re currently checking with all the hospitals, then if there’s still no sign of him, they’re going to look at local CCTV.”

  “Okay,” I said, sitting down at the opposite end of the sofa. “Well done.”

  “You don’t mean that, you think this is all my fault.”

  “I don’t, Mum, I was just shocked earlier, I didn’t mean it.”

  Gloria walked in. “What’s this?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I was just telling her that she made me feel very guilty earlier about Bill going missing.”

  “Yes, it really is just an unfortunate accident, your mum didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I think what I was trying to say, Gloria,” I said on a long, patient outbreath, “is that we need to look at how we handle and speak to Dad as his condition progresses. We can’t carry on as if everything’s normal, as much as we’d all like to. I think this is the final warning that something has to change.”

  Mum was staring ahead blankly at the black TV screen.

  “It’s just such a waste,” she said.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “It can all be frozen, it can all be frozen,” Gloria cooed. She turned to me and spoke in a hushed voice as if Mum couldn’t hear. “You mum was meant to be hosting Reading Between the Wines tonight. There was a big group of us who were all meant to come over here and she’d already bought all the food.”

  “Right, so where have we looked so far?” I said, ignoring Gloria. “Have you rung all your friends in the area?”

  “Yes, everyone’s aware of the situation,” Mum replied.

  “What about the golf club? Maybe he thought there—”

  “We went,” Gloria butted in. “First thing. He wasn’t there but everyone knows to look out for him.”

  “What was the last conversation you had with him? Do you remember what you were talking about last night?”

  “We had an argument. And please don’t have a go at me about it, you have NO idea what it’s been like here, Nina.”

  “What was the argument about?”

  “Urggggghhh,” she growled, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “He woke me up in the middle of the night because he was banging about, bringing all the chairs from the kitchen into here and arranging them in a circle.”

  “Why was he doing that?”

  “He said he had a staff meeting the following morning.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I lost my temper, I told him he retired fifteen years ago and there are no staff meetings any more.”

  “And how did he respond?”

  “He got very frustrated. We went round and round in circles for such a long time, Nina, honestly, I thought we were going to throttle each other.”

  “Have you checked Elstree High?” I asked.

  “I don’t think he’d be there.”

  “It’s the last school he taught at. He could be misremembering that he’s retired, so he might have got up early to go to school. Ring Elstree High.”

  “It’s a Saturday.”

  “It’s still worth trying. Did he take his phone?”

  “No, just his wallet.”

  “Okay, so he could have got on a bus or a tube. Or a taxi, even.”

  I went into my bedroom for a moment of quiet and I sat on the carpet, closed my eyes and tried to imagine where Dad might have felt a pull so urgent he had to get out of bed, dress and leave the house before sunrise. I leant my back up against the bed, my legs crossed on the floor. Whenever I was in a crisis, I found myself on the carpet. I wrote the last two chapters of my book on the floor. Most of my and Joe’s break-up conversation took place sitting on our living-room floor. When things became too big, I needed to make myself as small as possible. I thought about sitting cross-legged with my toys under the mulberry tree in Albyn Square. I thought about being there the last time I’d seen Max—how it had felt like I was sucked into it by a life force; how all the markers and memories of time and place had twisted in on themselves like a black hole as I stood in its centre. I thought about Lola’s face on the floor of the club toilets the first night we’d met: I miss home.

  I went into the hallway where Gloria, for reasons I couldn’t understand, was applying sparkly lip gloss.

  “What was the road Dad grew up on in Bethnal Green?” I asked Mum.

  “I don’t know,” she replied.

  “You must remember. Grandma Nelly lived there right up until she died.”

  “How could I possibly remember the name of that street? She died twenty years ago. Wait until you go through the menopause. You won’t be able to remember your own name.”

  Gloria laughed knowingly, then smacked her glossy lips.

  “Don’t you have an address book with everyone’s old addresses in it?”

  “No, not from that far back. It might still be in my Christmas card address book, but I’m not sure where that is off the top of my head.” Now was not the time to ask Mum why it was necessary to have both an address book and a Christmas card address book.

  “Can you find the exact address for me now? Text it to me? I’ll go to Bethnal Green.”

  “He’s not going to be there.”

  “I just have a gut feeling. It’s at least worth checking. Text me the address.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time I arrived at the road where Dad grew up, it was mid-evening and there was still no sign of him. I walked along the row of identical two-bed terraced houses, all with white sash windows and sills that looked like the icing on gingerbread houses. My childhood mind had remembered these buildings as grand and imposing but they were compact and closely packed. Mum and Dad often laughed about the story I once wrote in my school exercise book, in which I described going to my gran’s “
manshun” at the weekend. I couldn’t believe her house had an upstairs and a downstairs.

  I rang the bell at number 23. A woman opened the door—she was middle-aged and soft-faced, with hair transitioning from red to white in a chignon, which made it look like a scoop of butterscotch ice cream.

  “Hello, I’m so sorry to disturb you, my dad is missing—”

  “He’s here,” she said, ushering me in and closing the door. “He’s here, he’s safe. Go through.” I walked along the hallway, so different to the house I remember, now painted in creams and greys and adorned with the tastes and treasures of another family.

  “Dad!” I walked through to him, where he was drinking tea at their kitchen table, reading the newspaper. The sound of Saturday night TV gently bubbled in the background, as comforting as the sound of simmering soup. He looked up at me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him.

  “I’m here to see my mother,” he said. “My mother, Nelly Dean, lives here.”

  “She used to live here.”

  Dad sighed. “Christ on a bike—this is her bleeding house! I know it like the back of my hand. I’m not leaving until I see her.”

  “But the problem is, Dad—”

  “Would you like a drink?” the woman asked.

  “I’m okay, thank you.” I imagined the long night ahead, trying to convince Dad to leave this stranger’s house. The woman beckoned me back into the hallway where we stood by the door. “I’m sorry. It’s his memory, he—”

  “My dad had the same,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder in a gesture that I found so disconcertingly caring, it made me realize how much I yearned for maternal solace. “I understand. It’s not a problem, don’t worry. It was clear as soon as he arrived what was going on. We haven’t told him that his mum doesn’t live here, we’ve tried to distract him.”