Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

  “Why are they still messaging each other?” I asked. “We are all under the same roof, we don’t need to message each other any more. We can just go into a room and say what we need to say.” Lola wasn’t listening, she was hypnotized by her phone screen. “I think I should take your phone from you.”

  “Do you think something might have happened to his phone, some technical glitch which means it shows that he’s online on WhatsApp all day, but actually he isn’t? Do you think that could be possible?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I don’t think that could be possible.”

  * * *

  —

  Dinner had a dress code of dresses and heels which I, unsurprisingly, resented. I wore the plainest black dress I owned as a small act of protest and Lola forced some red lipstick on me, which made me look like a vaudeville performer.

  “I’ve never seen you look so glam!” Lucy said as we entered the dining room to take our seats for dinner. “You should wear lippy more, it looks so good on you.” Lucy was wearing a white minidress with a rah-rah skirt of white tulle, just in case we forgot the reason twenty-five women in their thirties were gathered in a rented house for the weekend.

  “Everyone in their seats!” Franny shouted. She was wearing an apron over her dress to mark herself as head chef and head bridesmaid. “I’ve done a placement,” she said, in a French accent.

  “A what?” I asked Lola.

  “It means a table plan,” she said.

  “You’re like my Google Translate for Middle England.” I found my name, next to a pregnant woman named Claire. Lola was sitting opposite me, next to pregnant Ruth.

  “Nice to meet you,” Claire said. “How do you know Lucy?”

  “I know Joe,” I said. “From university. How do you know her?”

  “We used to work at the same PR agency,” she said.

  “Right,” I said. I had nothing left to ask. I glanced over at Lola, already merrily chatting away to Ruth about where to visit in Florence. I offered a glass of wine to Claire, who declined while rubbing her stomach. I poured myself an extra-large one for the both of us.

  “Right, we’ve got some Middle Eastern sharing platters to begin with,” Franny said, ushering in some hen-do-participants-turned-handmaidens who carried large plates. Nothing made my heart sink more than a person telling me they’ve made Middle Eastern sharing platters, code for: heated-up supermarket falafel and a can of chickpeas blended with some bland oil and repurposed as homemade hummus. “So it’s very relaxed. Everyone just tuck in.” My section of the table politely divided up the plate between us, leaving us with a grand total of two falafel balls, a tablespoon of tabbouleh and a teaspoon of tzatziki each.

  “Do you have children?” Claire asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Claire nodded. “Would you like them?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I don’t know if the process of getting there looks especially appealing at the moment.”

  “Does your partner want children?”

  Partner. I noticed people often assumed this was a word I used when they spoke to me. I think my lack of make-up suggested I was more humourless than I am.

  “I don’t have a partner.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said.

  “I did have a partner. Well, a boyfriend, until about six weeks ago. Then he disappeared.” I looked over at Lola’s wine glass. It was diminishing as rapidly as mine.

  “Where did he go?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. He just stopped talking to me.”

  Her eyes widened in horror. “Could something have happened to him?”

  “No, no, he’s definitely still alive,” I said. “Lola and I collected sufficient intelligence to prove he’s alive.”

  Lola’s head turned towards me on hearing her name. “What’s this?”

  “I’m just saying that we have reason to believe Max is alive,” I said across the table.

  “Oh, he’s definitely alive, yeah.”

  “Who’s Max?” Ruth asked.

  “Man who ghosted Nina.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard about this ghosting,” said Ruth excitedly. “It happened to my sister recently.”

  “Yeah,” Lola said. “London is basically one big haunted house fairground ride for me now.”

  “Are you both single?” Ruth asked.

  “Yes,” we said in unison.

  “And are you both putting yourself out there?”

  Lola topped up her wine glass. “Yes. It’s all I’ve been doing. I hate that phrase, like I’m a worm on a hook.”

  “If I were you,” Claire chimed in, “I would just enjoy being single and relax. There’s no rush for starting a family.” I don’t think there’s anything I found more galling than an expectant mother, who already had two children, in a long-term relationship telling single women in their thirties to relax about starting a family. “I mean, my God, enjoy your freedom!”

  “What are your kids called?” I asked.

  “Arlo and Alfie,” she said.

  “I have two godsons called Arlo,” Lola said. “Can you believe that? From two different mothers.” I have never loved her more.

  “Yes, it’s very popular now, it was hardly known when we chose it,” Claire said. “It was between that and Otto.”

  “Otto’s on my list!” Lola said, retrieving her phone from her pocket. I knew her baby-name list off by heart. “Let me read it to you, hang on.” She unlocked her phone screen and tapped. “Nina.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s still online.”

  “Who? Max?” Ruth asked.

  “No, this is a man I’m seeing who is always online on WhatsApp.”

  “So?”

  “It means he’s talking to other women all day,” I said.

  “Can I tell you my secret?” Claire said.

  “Yes,” Lola enthused.

  “You’ve got to show him what he’s missing.” She left a dramatic pause. “That’s the key—he’s got to always be aware of what he could be missing.”

  “How do I do that?” Lola asked, leaning across the table.

  “Number of ways. Men just have to be reminded of how lucky they are all the time.”

  “What, do you do that even now?” Lola asked reverently. All at once I realized she was prime for a cult.

  “Every day,” Claire replied.

  “Grim,” I said under my breath, pouring more wine in my glass.

  Dinner continued with both themes—unappetizing catering from Franny in small portions and unappetizing advice from married women in large portions. Lucy made an hour-long speech in which she went around listing everything she loved about each hen-do attendee—she did a gallant job by managing “a great sense of humour” when it came to me. Franny pretended we’d run out of wine allocated for that day and instead suggested we help ourselves to the gin-flavoured chocolate truffles. We all took turns to do some karaoke around a machine plugged into the TV, then everyone was upstairs in their rooms before eleven.

  * * *

  —

  “I think Claire is right about showing him what he’s missing,” Lola said as we changed into our pyjamas. “I might get you to take a really flattering photo of me tomorrow morning when the light’s good so I can post it on Instagram. Andreas is always on Instagram.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not having any of this. Women shouldn’t have to trick men into keeping their attention.”

  “I know you’re right.” She got into bed and unlocked her phone, her blank expression lit up by the white glare of the screen. She shoved another gin chocolate into her mouth in one.

  “And if he has to be reminded of what he’s ‘missing,’ then he’s not the man for you. Now please put down your phone or I will have to confi
scate it.”

  Lola gave a defeated smile and put it on the floor next to her. I turned off our bedside light and we lay silently in the dark.

  “Problem is, it does work,” Lola said. “Posting a hot photo on Instagram. I’ve done it before, and it always gets their attention.”

  “Do you really want that from these men? Their attention?”

  “No,” she said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Their love.”

  * * *

  —

  Lola and I left the next morning after breakfast of undercooked sausages, with the lie of respective family events in the afternoon. Lucy was gracious about it—if anything she seemed a little relieved—and Franny didn’t give us much grief but for a few passive-aggressive comments about making sure they had an even-numbered group for the “rap battle in the paddock” later.

  “I don’t want anything like that when I get married,” Lola said as we sat opposite each other on the train and looked out on the nondescript fields of Home Counties England. “You’ll be organizing it all, so just to let you know I don’t want anything like that.”

  “Good,” I said. “Glad you cleared that up.”

  “I want something very casual, very me,” she continued. “Not a weekend away anywhere, just a weekend in London.”

  “Weekend in London?”

  “Yeah, so like, a Friday night just my bridesmaids, maybe a dinner you can host at your flat or my flat, with all my favourite dishes. Then you can give me my something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue and a sixpence for my shoe.” I couldn’t be bothered to ask for the translation of this. “Then Saturday-morning brunch somewhere. Then afternoon activities with all the other hens, then a dinner, then a night out, then a Sunday with everyone at a spa. And we should include family members for the Sunday—my mum, my mother-in-law and sisters and sisters-in-law, if I have any.”

  I always forgot that, despite her occasional company in the stalls of cynicism—watching the show with one eye as we made wry observations to each other—Lola wanted a part in it. She wanted the whole production—the full regalia. She wanted the attention, the gift registry, the hymns, the hen do, the marquee, the multi-tiered cake of fruit, coffee, lemon and chocolate sponges. She wanted a man to ask her dad for permission to pass her over to him. She wanted to discard her surname in favour of one that proved someone had chosen her. When my friends first started getting married, Dad used to tell me, “You never know someone’s true politics until you go to their wedding.” How right and wise he was. Lola—a girl so outwardly preoccupied with wokeness; who only read overhyped memoirs written by women under thirty having feeble epiphanies about themselves; who had “she/her” written in all her social media bios despite very clearly never being in danger of being misgendered—well, all she really wanted was to walk down an aisle wearing a £2,000 dress and a sixpence in her shoe.

  “I’ve got something for the Schadenfreude Shelf,” she said.

  “Go on,” I said. “I need it.”

  “So my cousin’s best friend, Anne, had always wanted to fall in love and get married. She was a bit like me, never had a boyfriend, thought she’d be alone for ever.”

  “Right.”

  “Until one day when she’s in her late thirties she meets this man on a dating app and they have an amazing first date. He’s a lawyer, really kind, really lovely man. After about six months they move in together—it’s a bit whirlwind, but it’s like we always say: as you get older things move faster because when you know, you know.”

  “Sure.”

  “After two years of being together, they got married.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now she’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Completely dead.”

  “Oh my God, how did she die?”

  “Pancreatic cancer.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So those two elements of the story aren’t related.”

  “Perhaps they are, perhaps they aren’t.”

  “That’s a slightly false crescendo to the anecdote, I think.”

  “All I’m saying is, she thought all she wanted was a marriage, she got married and then she got ill and died.”

  “We need to work on what stories are eligible for the Schadenfreude Shelf,” I said. “We need to reassess the vetting process. That hasn’t made me feel better about anything.”

  “Really? Oh, it has me,” she said, gazing out at the approaching brown bricks of Guildford. “Poor Anne, I think about her often.”

  * * *

  —

  That night, I was grateful for an evening at home rather than the “indoor rounders with inflatable bats and balls” as listed on the hen-do itinerary when the noise began again. It started at exactly seven o’clock—the same roar at the same volume that made it impossible to do anything but listen to it through the floor. It was the first time it had happened since the night I had called noise patrol before Christmas and Angelo had lingered menacingly outside my door. I opened my laptop, brought up the number for the council and waited for the eleven o’clock curfew. I tried to distract myself, but my eyes were fixated on the slow-moving hands of the clock.

  Then, at exactly 10:59, the music stopped. At first, I thought his speakers must have cut out or that he was changing music. But a minute later, there was nothing—not a sound, not even his footsteps.

  And I realized: 10:59 was not a coincidental time for Angelo to stop making a noise that he knew I hated. He must have read the rules of antisocial neighbourhood behaviour online like I had. As long as he was quiet at eleven p.m., he wasn’t eligible for any reprimanding. There was nothing I could say to him—there was no one I could call. This was a torture game of egos. This was a non-verbal proposal of warfare.

  At 11:01 I realized I was sitting in a noise that was harder to ignore than anything I had heard all night. Silence.

  “Pervert,” Dad announced. “But a ruddy talented one.”

  We were standing at the centre of a Picasso exhibition, in front of his 1932 portrait Nude Woman in a Red Armchair. Dad had loved Picasso since he was a student, and I thought that seeing some of his works in the flesh might stimulate the part of his mind that made him feel knowledgeable and confident. My hunch was right—the art seemed to be able to penetrate through the increasing thick clouds that passed through his brain. It seemed as though he and the works were in a conversation I didn’t understand that he could explain to me, rather than the other way around. While Dad was housed in the mind of a cubist—where there were no rules for reality; where the morphing and merging and reversing of structure was beautiful and celebrated—he was right at home.

  “They met at an art gallery,” he said. “He and Marie-Thérèse. She was seventeen and he was married.”

  “How many portraits did he paint of her?”

  “Over a dozen. Some of his best.”

  “Did he leave his wife?”

  “No. But he moved Marie-Thérèse on to the same road as his family home. He got far more from the relationship than she did. She arguably revived his career.”

  “How awful.”

  “Yes. Wrong’un. A very brilliant wrong’un.”

  I didn’t know how much of what Dad was telling me was fact according to history or fact according to him, but I was so enjoying returning to the parental dynamic in which he was the person with more information and insight than me.

  “Do the transgressions of the artist undermine the pleasure to be found in the art? If you could answer that, you might solve the internet, Dad.”

  We both stared at the lilac-grey curves of her body and the brown swirly arms of the chair that held it.

  “Maybe I’ll meet a nice lady here and move her into the house,” he said. “What would your mother say to that?” I laughed. “I’m going for a wander.�
�� He placed his hands behind his back and walked slowly along the gallery, gazing up at the paintings as he went.

  “All right,” I said, watching him intently, like a child I didn’t want to lose. “See you in a bit.”

  I stayed in front of Marie-Thérèse in her red armchair and examined every part of her exquisitely scrambled form. The impossible positioning of her breasts stacked on top of each other, the surreal placement of her mismatched shoulders. How her face was split into two parts, one half of which could be another face kissing the other in profile, if you looked for long enough. Was the second face that Picasso saw symbolic of Marie-Thérèse’s hidden multitudes? Or was it his profile—did he imagine he dwelled within her, his lips on her cheek wherever she went? What would it be like, I wondered, to be seen through such adoring eyes, that they could not only capture you in a painting, but rearrange you to further exhibit who you were? I stroked the rounded right angle of where my neck met my shoulder like it was the hand of a lover and thought about being put inside a Rubik’s Cube of someone’s gaze. I couldn’t imagine ever being studied and known like that.

  As soon as Dad and I left the gallery and stepped out into the rush of central London, I could see his brightness and confidence diminish and be replaced with confusion and fear. It was hard to know if it was a symptom of his illness, or whether that was simply a result of old age. Dad—a man who had never lived anywhere but London; who had known its streets off by heart from cycling through them as a boy and striding across them as a man—now looked nervous.

  We went to a Hungarian bakery that was a short walk from the gallery. He’d taken me there a few times in my childhood—he loved the wood-panelled walls, the coffee cakes, the surly waitresses he could charm and the fact that it was an institution nearly as old as he was. We sat at a table by the window, and I could see he was hypnotized by passing strangers as he gazed out of the window quietly.

  “What do you fancy?” I asked. He glanced down at the menu and didn’t respond. “One of the coffee cakes?” I knew not to give him too many options to avoid risk of further confusion.