Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

“Great. It’ll be off before eleven.”

  “Don’t play it again,” he said, turning back into his flat.

  “I won’t play it if you don’t play that death metal racket. That feels like a fair deal.”

  “Pathetic,” he said, before shutting his door.

  “YOU’RE pathetic,” I shouted after him.

  * * *

  —

  I went upstairs and turned off the music. What I wanted now, more than anything, was an ally. Someone to pick apart the dispute with in a hushed voice. I wanted co-conspiring, giddiness. I wanted to be the couple on the platform at Waterloo station who cheered each other on. The only time I found myself missing Joe romantically was when I thought about what a good teammate he had been when we were together. In every situation, we noticed all the same things. I would never feel as close to him as when we’d both overhear someone in the pub say something particularly moronic and we’d give each other a smile across the table that said: You, me, bed, one a.m.—full debrief commences.

  My solitude was like a gemstone. For the most part it was sparkling and resplendent—something I wore with pride. The first time I met with a mortgage adviser, I told him my financial situation: no parental help, no second income from a partner, no pension, no company that permanently employed me, no assets and no family inheritance in my future. “So, it’s Nina against the world,” he said offhandedly as he shuffled through my bank statements. Nina against the world, I’d hear on rotation in my head whenever I needed emboldening. But underneath this diamond of solitude was a sharp point that I occasionally caught with my bare hands, making it feel like a perilous asset rather than a precious one. Perhaps this jagged underside was essential—what made the surface of my aloneness shine so bright. But loneliness, once just sad, had recently started to feel frightening.

  Unable to sleep, I turned on my bedside radio and tuned in to a classical music station. “Good evening, night owls,” I heard in a voice as sugary and slow-moving as caramel. “Some of you might just be getting into bed, some of you might be well on your way to sleep. Some of you, I know, are just starting your shift at work.” I recognized her instantly, although she sounded lower and slower than I remembered. “Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I send this ultra-relaxing Brahms…straight to you.” She was the top drive-time radio DJ on the most popular pop station when I was a kid—as famous for her raucous off-air partying as she was for her wacky phone-ins. My dad and I used to listen to her when he drove me to school every morning in his blue Nissan Micra. I stopped listening to the show in my mid-teens, when breakfast pop radio stopped being cool. But I returned to her again years later when I was a student, tuning in daily to her afternoon show on a try-hard indie station that played newly signed, little-known bands. And here I’d found her again, doing a late-night slot on a classical station. How strange, to have her age with me—to be able to mark the decades of my life by her transition through various music genres. Everyone gets old. No one can stay young for ever, even when youth seems such an integral part of who they are. It’s such a simple rule of being human, and yet one I regularly found impossible to grasp. Everyone gets old.

  I wondered if Max ever thought of me before he went to sleep. The drifting, floating seconds right before blackout—when thoughts start turning inside out and synapses turn psychedelic—are when I felt his presence most. It felt like I was reaching out to him, waiting to feel his hand touch mine back. I hoped, that night, that I could go meet him somewhere while we were both asleep—that I could speak to him without seeing him, somewhere in the London night sky.

  I turned my phone over as soon as I woke up the next morning. There were no new messages.

  I knocked on the mahogany door next to mine on the long, dark corridor.

  “Come in,” he croaked. Joe stood in his socks, boxers, shirt and two components of his three-piece navy suit. He fiddled with his tie in the mirror.

  “I don’t want to be cruel on your wedding day,” I said. “But I don’t know if you’ve got the legs for that.”

  He sighed. “They’re in the trouser press. They’re all crumpled and Lucy will lose her shit if she sees creases in them when I walk down the aisle.”

  “Why are they all crumpled? I told you to hang them up when we got here yesterday.”

  “Because,” he said stroppily, “when I got into the room last night I had a shower and got confused and used the trousers as a towel then chucked them on the floor.”

  “You shouldn’t have been chucking a towel on the floor even if it was a towel.”

  “Nina. Please.”

  “I am so glad you’re getting married and someone else can manage your cavalier attitude to towel storage for ever.”

  His face looked pale and fragile, like unshelled crab meat, and his eyes were beady and small, making him look even more like a crustacean. We were both very hung-over. The ushers’ dinner had taken place downstairs at the pub the night before and had ended at half three in the morning with all of us doing a cheerleading tower in the car park. “How are you feeling?”

  “Terrible,” he replied.

  “Okay, I can expertly make you look and feel incredible, having been a bridesmaid four times already. What can I get you? Face mask? Green juice?”

  “Quarter pounder with cheese.”

  “No, I’m not getting you that, you just had a massive fry-up.”

  “Maybe a cheeky half.”

  “Okay, I think that’s allowed. Hair of the dog,” I said. I took his trousers out of the press and rehung them correctly. “When are the ushers’ photos?”

  “Dunno,” he said. “Like, half an hour, I think.”

  “And is there anything else we need to do to get you ready for that?”

  “What would I need to do other than get dressed?”

  “I can’t believe this is what it’s really like on the other side,” I said. “For all these years, I’ve wondered. While all the brides I know have been on juice diets and sunbeds in the run-up to the wedding and have woken up at six a.m. on the morning for hair and make-up, the men have been down the road in a pub getting pissed and eating fried food and having a great time.”

  “Please don’t have a femmo rant on the morning of my wedding.”

  “I’m not, I’m just saying, it’s nice to finally know what it’s like to be a boy. To have one small insight into it for a day.”

  “You’ve always wanted to be a boy, deep down,” he said. “Peter Pan.”

  “I don’t think a man will ever know and understand me as well as you do, Joe.”

  “Yes, he will,” he said. “And I’m glad it’s not that fifty-foot cunt.”

  “Joe.”

  “I’m sorry, but I am.”

  “I knew you didn’t like him that night you met him. You were rubbish at hiding it.”

  “Can I ask you something now that it’s over?”

  “Yes.”

  “How big was his cock?”

  “I’m not answering that.”

  “I’m not jealous or anything, I’m just intrigued because sometimes those big blokes actually have quite stumpy ones. But then maybe they only look stumpy in comparison to the rest of their body when they’re naked, and actually they’re normal sized?”

  I stood in front of him and adjusted his tie like a mother sending her son off to his first holy communion. “His cock was as big as your heart, my darling Joe.”

  “Oh, shut up, mate,” he said through a guffaw.

  “I’m not that bothered by big cocks anyway. Only prudes claim to love big cocks.”

  “So true,” he said. “And massage oils.”

  I was regularly reminded when I spoke to Joe of how much of ourselves we had created together. In pubs, on our sofas, on long car journeys in those seven years of our relationship, we devised language that was so deeply embedded i
n our brains, I couldn’t trace which jokes were his and which ones were mine.

  “Now,” I said, holding his shoulders, “I get the feeling Lucy doesn’t want people to know we were together, so when people ask me how we know each other today, what do I say?”

  “Tell them the truth,” he said, putting his arms around my waist. “Tell them we grew up together.”

  We held each other tightly. It was a rare moment of unguarded sentimentality for Joe and me.

  “This is exactly how it was meant to turn out.”

  “It was,” he said, placing his lips to my cheek and holding them there for a few seconds before giving it a parting kiss. “And I wouldn’t change any of it.”

  * * *

  —

  When we arrived at the church, Franny was already there performing unnecessary maid-of-honour duties. Lucy was apparently worried the ushers would “hand out the order of services wrong,” so instructed Franny to go ahead early and oversee us. Franny acted out how to pass an order of service to each guest to the four hung-over ushers. When guests started trickling into the church, she stood next to me to monitor the first few and make sure I was getting it right.

  “This is very fun,” she said, brushing the lapel of my navy suit that I’d matched with a pale-blue silk shirt.

  “Thank you.”

  “I can’t get away with tailoring, sadly, too busty.” She pushed her breasts out a little further. She was swathed in long, floaty grey viscose. “Right, I better get going.”

  “When does the bridal party car arrive?”

  “Cars,” she said. “Five cars.”

  “Why five?”

  “There are fourteen of us bridesmaids.”

  “Fourteen?”

  “Yes. Lulu’s got a lot of best friends. We’re very much a sisterhood.”

  “Seems it.”

  “See you down the aisle!” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Katherine and Mark were among the first to arrive. Katherine looked exquisite in high-necked pale-yellow silk that poured over her pregnancy bump like hollandaise on a perfectly poached egg. Olive was with Katherine’s parents for the weekend, but she stressed that it was only because she “might make a noise in the service” and not because she didn’t want her there. Mark told me he definitely didn’t want her there and had, in fact, already drunk two tinnies in the passenger seat on the drive here. Dan and Gethin arrived shortly afterwards, their baby daughter attached to Dan’s chest. Both of their faces were heavy with exhaustion and bliss, languor and panic, which I had come to recognize as the expression of new parenthood.

  Our uni friends trickled in, most of whom I now only saw at weddings, and, as always, I remained perplexed at the cruel lottery of male hair loss. The boys who had once arrived in halls with luscious great big handfuls of golden hair had ended up with flaxen mist passing over their heads. Men who had full coverage at the last wedding suddenly had a perfectly circular patch of bare scalp positioned neatly on the top of their heads like a skin yarmulke. It was almost enough to make me think women have an easier time of it.

  Lola was one of the last to arrive, wearing a neon tangerine maxi dress with a matching floor-length cape that made her look like a Hogwarts pupil at a 2006 new rave party. There were large artificial gardenias positioned in her hair. She had been to a speed-dating event the night before that had ended with no matches but instead all the female attendees going to a nearby bar until four a.m. Andreas, while remaining WhatsApp’s most active member of the community, had started ignoring her messages—the speed dating was to open up her options again.

  The ushers took their pews and Joe stood at the top of the aisle, shifting his weight from foot to foot and nervously adjusting his tie. I mouthed at him to stop fiddling. And then, the wedding march began. Seven rows of two bridesmaids, in various arrangements of the same grey viscose, came down the aisle carrying pink peonies, all looking incredibly pleased to be in the chosen cohort. We’re very much a sisterhood—I could never get on board with this sort of girl-gang feminism, the groups of female friends who called themselves things like “the coven” on social media and exhibited moral superiority from simply having a weekly brunch with each other. Having friends doesn’t make you a feminist; going on about female friendship doesn’t make you a feminist. I tried to calculate the original line-up of So Solid Crew, the UK garage band played at my noughties school discos, and I think that Lucy’s array of bridesmaids was the exact same headcount.

  Lucy looked like the perfect classic bride—angelic, feminine, in love and expensive. She wore a cream strapless dress with an enormous A-line skirt that looked like it could house all fourteen of her bridesmaids in its diameter. Over the top, she wore a cream lace jacket as a gesture of modesty and her hair was wavy in a precise way. Her father—rough-skinned, overly roasted from Marbella sunshine and with a squashed face—grasped her hand with his. He lifted her veil at the end of the aisle and kissed her on the cheek, his face pinched with withheld tears. He held on to her hand a little while longer, then she turned to Joe with a smile.

  I still didn’t know whether I ever wanted to get married. I did know that if I did, the likelihood was my father wouldn’t be there. Or if he was still around, at that stage he’d probably be unable to process what was happening. Getting older was an increasingly perplexing thing, but these moments—understanding that potential future memories were being taken from you year on year, like road closures—were the very worst of it.

  I wiped under my eyes with the flats of my forefingers and Joe did the same as he wept and Lucy beamed. She held his hand to steady him. The rest of the wedding was as protracted and anticlimactic as every other English church wedding I’ve ever attended. An old priest who knew nothing about the bride other than she’d been christened at the church thirty years ago made some strange jokes. Everyone ignored references to God and that the couple should inexplicably love God more than they love each other. Everyone giggled at that weird bit in the vows, which I’ve never heard a priest pronounce as anything other than “seksual union.” There were some forgettable readings from some freckly cousins. There was one terrible music performance, which made everyone’s sphincters clench on the cold wood of the benches (Franny, a capella “Ave Maria”). Hymns were pitched too high and collectively sung in a feeble, reedy voice. We chucked some pink and violet confetti that had the texture of gerbil bedding at the exiting bride and groom.

  * * *

  —

  Lola was already holding two glasses when I saw her on the lawn of Lucy’s family home at the reception.

  “It’s real champagne,” she said. “How amazing is that? Here, have one.”

  “This is quite a pad,” I said, looking at the large white 1920s house in front of us.

  “Her dad paid for it twenty years ago in cash, apparently. Gangster.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “You’re being a snob because he wears gold jewellery.”

  “Nina, I’m being serious, ask anyone who knows her. There are photos in the downstairs loo of him with the Kray twins. And he disappeared for six years in the eighties after he killed a man.”

  “Gangsters don’t live in Surrey.”

  “Are you joking, they all live in Surrey. That’s why they do what they do. So they can send their kids to a school with a tennis court and have a Jag XK8 parked on a gravel driveway.” Lucy walked past us and waved regally. Lola beckoned her over. She gave us both a delicate kiss on the cheek so as not to ruin her immaculate make-up.

  “How are you doing?!” I asked.

  “Doing great, thanks,” she said. “Really enjoying the day.”

  “Where did you get your dress from?”

  “Little boutique not too far from here, actually. Never thought I’d go for strapless, but there we go.”


  I could tell she was keen to move on, but she was graciously giving us our allotted three minutes. I realized the tone of our conversation was not dissimilar to two showbiz journalists interviewing a movie star on the red carpet outside a premiere.

  “I’ve got to go say hi to some people, but I’ll see you later.” She glided away, the train of her skirt looped around her wrist like Cinderella.

  “How was this morning?” Lola asked.

  “Great,” I said. “Really fun. You should see it from the other side, Lola. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “Stayed up and got really drunk last night—sang some sea shanties and everything. Woke up at eleven. Ate a massive fry-up. Had showers, got changed, did ten minutes of photos and then came to the church.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I get why men always say they had so much fun on their wedding day and so many women I know have breakdowns.”

  “That’s so unfair.”

  “And I don’t think that men know what happens on the other side either. I don’t even think they know about all the matching dressing gowns with the names of the bridesmaids embroidered on the back.”

  Lola sighed. “I’m going to go get more drinks. Sometimes they only do champagne as the gateway for the first half-hour before they wean you on to the harder street stuff.”

  “Cava?”

  “Yeah.”

  I went over to Katherine, who was standing with Meera and holding her one-year-old baby boy, Finlay. I bent down and looked into his large chocolatey eyes, twinkling from the residual tears of his last tantrum.

  “Where’s Eddie?” I asked Meera.

  “Oh, he and Mark are smoking weed in the car park,” Katherine said with a sigh.

  “We’ve been at the reception for less than an hour.”

  “Yeah,” Katherine said. “Spot the new dads out on the razz.”

  Meera noted the judgement in my face. “I’m sure I’ll get to have some fun later,” she said.