Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

  “Talk me through it. You can tell me anything.”

  She put the mug down on the bedside table. “I’m just so tired this time round,” she said. “I’m so tired I feel like I’m losing my mind. I can’t remember what happened when I was awake and what was a dream, I can’t remember whole conversations I have with people. I can’t seem to keep Olive happy and look after Freddie. She’s taken it so badly. I’m worried she doesn’t feel safe and loved.”

  “Of course she’s taking it badly, she’s a toddler. Every toddler goes mental when a new baby arrives.”

  “I’m a bad mother, Nina,” she said, her eyes becoming glassy. “I’m not doing a good enough job.” Tears fell down both her cheeks, dappled pink as they always were when she cried.

  “No, you’re not. I know what sort of mother you are. You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me.”

  “The other day, I was going so fucking insane, I went outside, locked Olive in the house, sat on the side of the road and didn’t go back in for fifteen minutes. When I came back, I found her in the bathroom, drinking the juice from the loo-brush holder like it was a beaker.” This image made me desperate to laugh, but I managed to stifle it. “I was lucky. Anything could have happened.”

  “It’s okay, she wasn’t hurt.”

  “And last week, I was making her tea while Freddie was sleeping in his basket. When I wasn’t giving her enough attention, she went to hit him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What I swore I’d never do, I grabbed her and I shook her. I was so angry.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “No, it’s not, I’m the adult, I’m meant to know better. I’m not meant to lose my temper like a toddler.” She looked to the ceiling and more tears spilt from her eyes. “All I am at the moment is a mother. I’m not interesting, I’m not engaged with the world. My whole life is feeding and changing and bedtime. If I’m not even doing that well, then I truly am totally fucking useless.”

  “Katherine, listen to me. I love your daughter—I would do anything for her. But Olive is, plain and simple, being a cunt.” Katherine let out a piercing yelp of laughter. “She herself isn’t a cunt, she’s a delight. But at the moment, she’s behaving like a cunt. And that would test the patience of anyone.”

  “She is,” Katherine said, wiping her face. “My daughter is being a cunt.”

  “Well done.”

  “My daughter is being a total and utter cunt.”

  “There we go.”

  She retrieved her mug of coffee and leant her face into the warmth of its fumes.

  “You have to be able to talk to me about this stuff, Katherine. You’ve got to drop the Stepford act, it does no one any good. It annoys me and it makes you feel isolated.”

  “I know.”

  “If we have to pretend to each other like we pretend to the rest of the world, then we might as well not bother with the effort friendship takes.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been an unreasonable bitch.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  “I haven’t been here for you at all.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I hoisted myself under the duvet, still facing her so we could natter into the night, resuming the position of all our childhood sleepovers.

  “I think I will be,” I said. “Mum and I might have turned a corner, which I hope will make everything easier. I think now Max is out of my life for good, I’m realizing that being in love with someone who was so clearly dangerous was a distraction from the actual tragedy in my life.”

  “Which is?”

  “Saying goodbye to Dad.”

  She reached her hand out to mine. “Do you think you really loved Max?”

  “Yes, I really did,” I said. “I don’t know if he loved me. I think he thought he did. But it’s like he imagined me—I provided him with a feeling that he enjoyed. But he couldn’t quite see the actual outline of me. I don’t know if it counts as love if it was genuinely felt on my side but imagined on his.”

  “But—” She stopped herself.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, whenever you’ve described him to me, it sounds like you’re imagining him a bit as well. He sounds sexy and interesting. But other than that, he seems pretty unfeeling and self-obsessed.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I have to accept some responsibility with what happened. I wonder how much I really wanted to actually get to know the real him, and how much I wanted a storybook hero.”

  “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

  “But I think you might be right, I think I’ve created a version of him too. Or maybe that’s all love is. So much is how we perceive someone and the memories we have of them, rather than the facts of who they are. Maybe instead of saying I love you we should say I imagine you.”

  She wriggled down into the bed and pulled the duvet up to her neck. “Do you think we’d ever be friends if we met now?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Sort of magic, isn’t it? To know that we could meet the most exciting person in the world, but they’d never be able to recreate the history you and I have. What a unique superpower we have over each other.”

  “It is,” she said, turning off her bedside light.

  “Is that how you feel about Mark?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, turning her head on the pillow to face me. “I don’t know what I feel about Mark at the moment. It’s like we just share a house and a schedule. Maybe that’s having kids. But then again, it’s never been some big romantic love story. That’s not who we are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think I need the sort of passion other people need. Do you remember how he asked me to move in with him?”

  “Yeah, he sent an email to your work address with the subject heading ‘Next Steps.’ I think about it at least once a week.” We both laughed into our pillowcases.

  “I know he can be a bit clueless, but he’s a good dad,” she said. “And he’s always got my back.”

  “You two are so solidly on the same team.”

  “We are,” she said, closing her eyes.

  I turned off my bedside lamp. “Sounds pretty romantic to me.”

  “It is,” she said quietly, before falling almost instantly asleep.

  I sent Mark a text.

  “Kat’s with me. She is well and fine and all is good. Call me if you want to talk x”

  * * *

  —

  We slept in the next morning. I awoke, dry-mouthed and nauseous from spirits that left a sticky ring-mark in my head, to a text from Mark that I read aloud to Katherine: “Thank you for letting me know. Please tell her there is no rush to come home. I’ve got it covered—and I can take a day off work next week and look after the kids. She deserves a break. Mark x”

  We celebrated her first hangover in nearly four years by behaving like we did every weekend afternoon of our early to mid-twenties. We put on tracksuits, I made us toad-in-the-hole with peas and mash, we heaved the duvet on to my sofa and watched three musicals back to back. After the credits of West Side Story, her third helping of mash, two glasses of red wine and a bath, she left at ten p.m. to catch the train back to Surrey. She hugged me, thanked me, told me she loved me and that she’d call me the following week.

  I went to the kitchen and filled the sink with water, soap and washing-up. I tied my hair in a ponytail and switched on the radio to the soothing classical Saturday-night show with the radio DJ I liked. An operatic piece reached its denouement with settling strings and a soaring male tenor. There was a brief silence. “That was from the little-known cantata ‘The Spectre’s Bride,’ ” she said—the voic
e I’d been listening to since the year-seven school run. “And it’s a reminder to all us ladies that sometimes when your ex-boyfriend gets back in touch, really, he’s just trying to take you down with him to the grave. I think we’ve all been there, haven’t we!” She chuckled to herself. “Just a little joke there for the hard-core Dvorˇák fans. And now—for something a bit more mellow. A seasonally appropriate number from Vivaldi’s…Four Seasons.” I snapped the rubber washing-up gloves over my hands and sank them into the hot water, contemplating which station she’d end up at next. Where do you go after a late-night classical music show? The shipping forecast? And where would I be listening to it? This flat? A family home? A retirement bungalow?

  I heard a knock on the door and knew that Katherine had realized in the hallway that she’d left something.

  “Come in!” I shouted down the corridor. “Door’s open, Kat, sorry. Just doing the washing-up.” I heard footsteps approach.

  “Where are my packages?”

  I turned around to see Angelo, unusually fully dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. I stood with my back against the sink.

  “You can’t barge into my flat.”

  “Where are my packages?” He stood in the doorway; his face and voice were calm and still.

  “I don’t have your packages.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said, walking towards me, stopping about a metre away by the cooker. “I see the delivery man today out of the window and I run down the road and ask him where he puts the packages for Angelo Ferretti and he say, ‘I leave them with your wife on the first floor.’ ”

  I quickly spun through a choice selection of excuses, but I could find nothing. I had not thought of an alibi. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said breezily, using my elbow to brush my fringe out of my face while my hands were still in washing-up gloves.

  “WHERE ARE MY PACKAGES?” he shouted.

  “Angelo, just get out of my flat and I will leave them by your door. I will leave them there right away.”

  “No. Show me where they are.”

  I gestured to the compartment above the oven fan. He was so tall he could open it on his tiptoes. He reached in, pulled out the three parcels one by one and put them on the floor. He spluttered bemusedly in Italian. “I only took three,” I said, like a surly teenager defending something indefensible.

  “You opened them?!”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You went through my things?”

  I had angered a psychopath who now had direct access to a handy selection of machetes. I allowed my eyes to quickly flicker to the knife block on my kitchen counter to assess whether I could reach for it with one quick motion.

  “I didn’t have any other choice. You made everything so difficult for me, I wanted to make something difficult for you.”

  “What is the matter with you?”

  “What is the matter with YOU?”

  “You cannot steal things!”

  “You wanted me to do this.”

  “AH?!” He snarled in confusion.

  “Yes. You did, you wanted me to lose it. And I did. I snapped. You win.”

  “I did not do this.”

  “This is all because of you!” I said, flinging my be-gloved hands into the air and inadvertently spraying him with drops of water. “This is ALL your fault. Why have I never ever, ever had a problem with my neighbours before I lived above you? Why did I use to love living here and now I dread coming home?”

  “You,” he said, pointing at me with narrowed eyes, “are crazy.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “It means nothing when a man says that to me any more because I know the truth. You can say it as many times as you like, it will have no effect on me.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “It means nothing, Angelo. I know the truth. I know what happened. I know how you behaved. The more you say it, the saner I feel.” I pulled the rubber gloves off.

  “Fucking crazy.”

  “Don’t believe you,” I said, edging closer to him. He stepped back like a frightened animal.

  “You’re FUCKING CRAZY!”

  “I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED. I KNOW THE TRUTH. I AM NOT FRIGHTENED OF THAT WORD ANY MORE.”

  “YOU’RE A CRAZY FUCKING BITCH,” he shouted.

  I pushed him and he stumbled backwards into my fridge. I heard pickle jars clank as he landed against it. He straightened up—I was inches away from him and looking at his eyes, bulbous in shock. He smelt of a recent shower and the toiletries that teenage boys find in their Christmas stocking in a gift set. I searched for evil in his face—for signs of violence, detached cold-bloodedness. The push had felt good, but I needed more. I wanted to use more of my anger on him, more of my body on him—show him that he couldn’t scare me. Show him that this was my home as much as his—that he couldn’t force me out. I wanted to hit him—swipe my hand cleanly across his cheek, to both leave something on him and take something of his. But I’d never hit anyone before.

  I pressed my mouth up against his, so hard that I pushed through the cushion of his plump lips and could feel the bone-hardness of his gums. I pulled away, horrified, and examined his face like a stab wound.

  He pushed me back towards the sink as he kissed me. His hands grasped both my cheeks, then his fingers dragged through my hair, pulling it out of its ponytail. He kissed hungrily along my jaw, my chin, then moved down my neck. He tugged my vest top off, threw it on the dish rack and pressed me in towards him, running his hands up and down the juts and curves of my bare shoulders and spine. He kissed me, slower, making noises of satiation that echoed as a hum from my mouth into my ears. He was warm and pulsing and moving. He was flesh and blood. He was breathing. He was steadfast—he lived below me. He never left. He was here. He wouldn’t disappear. He couldn’t disappear.

  I wanted to feel more of him. I hurriedly pulled off his T-shirt—his chest was hard, his skin the colour of almonds. It hugged round the surprisingly muscular curves and hollows of his shoulders and arms that were lean and coltish, at odds with the sallow weariness of his face. He dropped to his knees as he pulled down my tracksuit bottoms so they bunched at my bare feet, which looked laughably adolescent, and turned me around by my hips so I faced away from him. He took a mouthful of my thigh in between his teeth as I heard him clumsily unbutton his jeans. He held on to the counter as he stood up and pushed himself inside me. I leant forward—we were completely still and breathed slowly as my body got used to him. The steam rose from the sink and on to my face as I felt him move. My hands slipped and plunged into the water, splashing suds on to my bare skin. I felt his laughter reverberate through me, which made me laugh too. He leant down so his stomach pressed against my back and the thin silver chain he wore around his neck tickled my spine. He lifted my hair so it spilt over my face, the tips of its strands dipping in the water.

  My hands, wearing soapsuds like lace gloves, reached behind and grabbed on to his forearms, like I was checking he was still there. I dug my fingers into him and let out a guttural noise of relief. I didn’t fragment and travel the room, every part of me remained in my body. I kept my eyes wide open, staring at glasses with red wine sediment and crusty forks that lurked beneath the water and knocked against each other. I felt him slow, stop and shudder. He gasped. We were still again. It had been brief and uncomplicated. Unplanned and ungainly. And real. Soapy, dirty, clattering, awkward. Real.

  We sat opposite each other, half dressed on my kitchen floor, his back against the oven, my back against the cupboard under the sink.

  “I thought we hated each other,” I said.

  “What?” he said, his vowels stretched in outrage. “No!”

  “Why have you been so rude to me?”

  “It’s not you—fuck.” He looked at the floor. “Do you have water?”
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  I nodded and stood up, aware I was now topless in tracksuit bottoms like a brickie on a warm day. I took a tumbler from the cupboard and put it under the tap while strategically using my arms to cover myself, suddenly self-conscious.

  “I struggle. This year,” he said slowly, presenting chunks of thoughts to me like Scrabble tiles.

  “With what?”

  “Living.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, handing over the glass and joining him on the floor. I thought of his dressing gown. His vests. How he’d ignored me. How he’d seemed to ignore everything—rules, light, time, bin collection, manners, the world outside his flat. “Can I ask why?”

  “My girlfriend, she was living here.”

  “Is she the woman you were having the argument with?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “She cheat on me last year. I forgive her, she stay a while, but then she leave anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  He shrugged as he took a sip of water. “I try all this year to be better but now there is no…” He put his glass down to avoid my gaze.

  “I understand,” I said. “No purpose. No fun. No point.”

  “Same for you?”

  “Yeah, he disappeared. Stopped speaking to me.”

  He nodded sympathetically, like we were strangers in the same community support group. Which I suppose we were. I thought of the three flats on top of each other, how they each housed a broken heart. Betrayal, disappearance, grief. Cuckolded in the basement, abandoned on the first floor, widowed on the top floor. “You know you will be fine again, Angelo,” I said. “We were fine before and we’ll be fine again.”

  He pushed the side of his hand methodically along the floor, like he was cleaning crumbs. The overhead kitchen lights illuminated the skin at the back of his head where his hair had become diaphanous.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, looking up at me with a repentant smile that seemed painful for him to hand over.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry I took your packages. That’s a completely unacceptable thing to do. I didn’t realize you were in so much pain, I thought you were just horrible.”