LOVE'S GHOST (a romance)

by Ellis, T. S.

  I took deep breaths and told myself to calm down. What a lovely bath. What could be more relaxing than this? But I couldn’t relax. I just couldn’t. My breathing remained shallow, like an impending panic attack.

  A bead of sweat appeared on my brow, not caused by the heat of the water, but by the intensity of my emotions. Another bead joined it. Then suddenly it had lots of friends. Beads of sweat appeared everywhere on the skin that wasn’t submerged. I hung my arm over the side of the bath and grabbed a towel from the rail, dabbing my arms, my face and my neck.

  But no sooner had I put the towel back on the rail than the sweat reappeared on my skin. I snatched at the towel again and rubbed. But it just wouldn’t stop pouring out of me. Russell had gone to all this trouble and I couldn’t enjoy it.

  I stood up in the bath, hoping that would cool me down. But I still felt like I was overheating. There was nothing for it but to get out.

  I should have taken my bath robe and slipped it on, letting the bath oil remain on my skin, drying slowly. I didn’t. I grabbed the towel and rubbed furiously; rubbed my face, my breasts, my stomach, and both legs.

  Even then, I should have put on my robe. But I didn’t. As quickly as I could, I put my clothes back on. The steam had made my hair damp, but I didn’t care about that. I scrunched it a couple of times with the towel, then rushed out into the hallway.

  I’d hung my coat on the hook on the back of the door. I grabbed it and slid my shoes on my feet. I picked up my handbag, opened the door and scurried out into the hallway. But I couldn’t stop there. I ran down the stairs as fast as I could in my heels, holding onto the banister for support. The front door had never been opened so quickly. The stained glass in the middle panel shook. In my haste, I slammed the door shut and ran down the steps into St Andrew’s Square.

  I didn’t know where I was going, but I headed for the train station. I wanted to find a bar, any bar. A pub, a wine bar; any place that had alcohol. But it couldn’t be here, not here in Surbition.

  I clip-clopped along, past the street lamps, stepping in and out of pools of light. I didn’t run, but I walked as fast as I could. The colder air outside helped me to stop sweating. In fact, it gave me a chill.

  I would go to Wimbledon, I decided, where Emily lived. I knew the bars there, especially the ones that wouldn’t look twice at a lone female slugging back drinks as if her life depended on it. The train journey wasn’t long, either, so I’d be ordering my first vodka and tonic in about half an hour.

  I walked to the railway station. It was almost deserted.

  The rails vibrated and rang a high pitched tone, preceding the arrival of a train that would stop at Wimbledon. I was the only one in the carriage, which was fine by me.

  The phone in my coat pocket bleeped. I took it out and looked at the display. I had a text message from Emily. She wanted to know how my evening was going, wanted to know if I was all right. I went to call her, but didn’t, unsure if any words would come out, or if they would be drowned by tears.

  At Wimbledon I left the railway station and headed for a pub that was in a side street off the Broadway. I chose it because of its size. It was large enough for me to hide in a corner.

  On entering the pub, I ordered multiple drinks, pretending there were people with me. Ordering three doubles at a time meant less visits to the bar. The bartender would take longer to work out that I was the only one draining these drinks, that I had no friends with me.

  The evening descended into the anticipated slurring of the world around me. The vodka and tonics calmed the world around me in a way that the luxuriant bath could not. I knew the after-effects would be uncomfortable but I didn’t care. I just wanted everybody in the world to become a blur, their words to become nonsensical sounds.

  Though I drank quickly, it took a while for the alcohol to work its way round my body. But when it had completed its tour, my vision, my hearing and my thought process all gave way at the same time. I went from a sentient being to a rag doll within the space of about half an hour, I think.

  I must have passed out, because the next thing I remember is Emily slapping my face. The bartender had rung her from my phone. Apparently, I’d closed my eyes with Emily’s number showing on my phone’s screen. I must have surrendered, tried to call her, but had been unable to keep my eyes open.

  When I’d opened my eyes, she’d wanted to take me to hospital. But I flat out refused.

  Instead, we walked the few yards to her flat. Even in my drunken stupor, or especially in my drunken stupor, I decided it was time to talk. Time to tell her everything. Everything.

  6. Rescued by Dawn

  EMILY’S FLAT SITS above a Chinese takeaway. It was a bargain. She got it for a snip. At the time, we both wondered why it was so cheap. It was so central, near the shops, and if you felt peckish you could nip down for a takeaway.

  It was only after she moved in that we discovered the pitfall. If you did fancy a Chinese takeaway, you didn’t need a menu. A few sniffs of an evening and you could smell their entire range of dishes.

  Sometimes it was appealing. But late at night the appeal wore thin. And it made you hungry the whole night. Emily had put on a few pounds since moving in.

  As Emily dragged me up the stairs, I wasn't thinking about the Chinese takeaway. When she opened her front door, I couldn’t avoid it. The aroma of a chicken chow mein assaulted my nostrils with, if I’m not mistaken, egg fried rice. The impact was so sudden, so unexpected, that I made a dash for the bathroom and vomited immediately.

  Emily chased after me and was kind enough to make sure my hair wasn’t in the way as I hunched over the toilet bowl. Not much came out as I hadn’t eaten. I mostly retched. This must have gone on for ten minutes before it stopped. My stomach muscles hurt with all the involuntary heaving.

  Emily handed me a glass of water, and I sipped it tentatively.

  I washed my face and looked at it in the mirror. What a pale and drawn mess. My dark hair looked bedraggled. I’d run my hands through it a thousand times, as if that would solve my problems. Now it looked like a witch had dipped my hair into her cauldron of newt’s eyes and frog tongues. My face didn’t look any better. It was as if a painter had been whitewashing a wall and mistook me as part of it. And as for my eyes, they were smaller than I had ever seen them. They just wanted to shrink back into my skull for the night.

  We went into the lounge. Emily liked bright colours. She said they kept her cheerful. On one wall, there was a tribute to the 1960s. Colourful disks hung on the wall in vivid orange, yellow and greens. Though she hadn’t lived through the decade, Emily always wished she had. She once had a theory that she was Mick Jagger in a previous life. Until I pointed out that Mick Jagger was still alive.

  So how would that work?

  She then went on to believe that she was JFK. It was based almost exclusively on the fact that she very often suffered from headaches in November. But that passed, too.

  I don’t mind bright colours, but not when I’ve spent the last couple of hours exploring the depths of a bottle of vodka. The lounge was lit with low key spotlights. But ouch, those bright colours hurt when I looked at them. Another wall featured black and white polka dots. And to think I used to like retro-chic.

  “This has got to stop,” Emily said.

  I didn’t even have the energy to reach the sofa. I slumped down on the furry mat that occupied the middle of the lounge. It was like lying on top of a big bear. A big bear that couldn’t eat me of course.

  Emily joined me. “Do you hear me?”

  “All too well.”

  “I’m not going to tell you to get over him, because that obviously doesn’t work.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” I spoke in short sentences, because if I used more than three words, my head throbbed.

  “Why do this to yourself, Fay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to make you a bucket of coffee. In the meantime, there’s a bottle of water on the table. I want y
ou to drink all of it. If you do, you might still come out of this alive.”

  I wanted to smile at her little quip but that, too, hurt my head. I realised how silly I’d been. I should have just given Emily a call and come over for a chat. That would have been the sensible thing to do. But, no, I had to punish my body, punish myself. So stupid.

  Slowly, I began to get used to the smell of chicken foo yung that was now rising up through the floorboards. It wasn’t as bad as the chicken chow mein.

  I closed my eyes for a couple of minutes. But that didn’t work. Blotting out the coloured disks and the polka dot wallpaper did nothing to stop my head spinning. So I opened my eyes again.

  Emily returned with the coffee. She’d found the biggest cup she could find. I felt like Alice in wonderland at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. But I took large gulps. Emily didn’t let me get away with just the coffee. She opened the bottle of water and waited for me to drink from that as well.

  “You make an annoying nurse,” I croaked.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  I smiled. It hurt. “It is a compliment. Thank you for looking after me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  I didn’t want to feel sorry for myself, but I did. The demon drink was still working its chaos inside me. I lowered my head, too ashamed to show my face to my friend.

  “Oi,” she said. “Look at me.”

  I slowly raised it. There were more tears falling down my cheeks. Emily sidled up to me and gave me the largest, most loving hug I could remember.

  “You’re keeping something from me,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  “Come on, tell me. It’s obviously not doing you any good keeping it bottled up.”

  I took another gulp of coffee and another swig from the bottle of water.

  “It’s hard,” I said. “Harder than I thought it would be. I’m just so sad. I mean ‘sad’ as in ‘silly’. It’s not really him that I miss… No, that’s wrong, I miss him loads. What am I saying? But our relationship towards the end was… it was just nothing… Well, that’s not true. There was love, yes. For me at least. But it was a lazy kind of love. Those seven years we spent together, then nothing. And, at least for me, it’s just so difficult not to see him daily. It might not be anything more than that. But that alone is so difficult.”

  Emily rubbed my back.

  “I’m sorry, I have to…” I jumped to my feet and rushed to the bathroom, visiting my old friend the toilet bowl. But it was a false alarm. My stomach was settling a little. My head was not.

  I returned to the lounge. Emily thrust the cup of coffee back under my nose. It couldn’t stop the smell of the latest order downstairs from attacking my nostrils — number thirty-seven, beef chop suey. But it retreated, defeated. I’d got through the worst.

  “Sorry about that,” I said, and sat down on the rug next to Emily again.

  “We don’t have to talk,” she said.

  “No, you’re right. It’s about time I did. It’s been over six months. That’s too big a portion of my life.” I took a deep breath. “I’ve been doing the weirdest thing just lately.”

  I shook my head, astounded by myself. But again it hurt, my eyes seemingly free to rattle around in my head. I took another sip of my coffee.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to go to the loo.” I got up again and left Emily there. Our evening was turning into one of those dramas on TV that is destroyed by all too frequent commercial breaks.

  In the bathroom, I had time to think about things. Did I want to tell Emily everything? Was I too embarrassed? I had a lot of time to think: it was the longest pee I’d ever had. All that vodka, all that coffee, all that water.

  Eventually I returned to the lounge.

  “I imagine that Russell is still with me. I mean, I really imagine it. I make up scenes in my head. Like tonight, I imagined that he’d left work early, gone to Harrods just to buy me a ridiculously expensive bath oil, then gone home to run me a bath. When I walked in through the door I imagined he’d lit my favourite candles in the bathroom. It developed into a glorious daydream — he gave me a passionate kiss then left me to cook a meal while I luxuriated in the bath. And the night before that, I imagined that I gave him the best sex of his life.”

  I could feel my cheeks blushing. And this time it wasn’t the alcohol. What did Emily think of me? How pathetic of me. How needy, to pretend that I was still with Russell.

  So far, I’d bludgeoned my way through telling her what I’d done. But it was becoming more difficult to get the words out. The tears were building up, fogging my eyes. I wanted to keep them in, but they lolloped out one after the other. And I was spluttering.

  “But the thing is, this Russell that I was imagining wasn’t like the real Russell. Russell would never have left work early to go and buy bath oil, then go home and run the bath. It was like some perfect Russell, a Russell that never existed. A figment of my imagination.”

  The tears were rolling down my cheeks, following the curves of my face, worming their way into my mouth. I burst out crying, full on. I was sad, I was ashamed, I was confused, I was pitiful.

  Looking back on my experiences of the last few months, it was so odd. I’d never seen myself as the type to wallow in self-pity. But here I was, so desperate to cling on to a dead relationship that I was recasting my ex-partner as the perfect man. The perfect man does not exist. And yet, I was so desperate for him, I’d created him.

  Emily hugged me as tightly as she could. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  I couldn’t speak for the next ten minutes. I just blubbed and caught my breath. The room was still spinning and the water in my eyes turned it into a whirlpool. So I let my eyelids lower and kept them shut.

  “How about I get the spare duvet down and you can settle down on the sofa for the night? There’s no way you’re going home tonight.”

  I nodded with my eyes still shut. I heard her get to her feet but still I didn’t want to open my eyes. When I heard her footsteps return I did open them.

  She handed me a box of tissues. “I always have a box for emergencies.”

  I gave her another hug. I wanted to carry on with my explanation, but I didn’t have the energy anymore. Sleep was the only appealing state.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said. “I’ve got some croissants in. We’ll have a nice breakfast. And you’re not pathetic. You’ve just been hurt. You’re a lovely, gorgeous person. Don’t forget that.”

  Although I was in no state to believe her, I nodded gratefully and she left for the bathroom. I laid the sheet and the duvet on the sofa and tried to settle down.

  It wasn’t the best night’s sleep I’d had. My body wanted to carry on punishing me. I got around four or five hours all told, but woke up frequently. And a hangover ambushed me as soon as I opened my eyes to be greeted by the morning light streaming through the curtains.

  But it didn't dim my appetite. If anything, it encouraged it. The croissants were delicious, delicately flaky but not so much that they fell apart.

  “Can you take the day off?” Emily asked.

  “No. Not really. Nothing in my life is going well. It’s not just men. I’m not doing so well at the agency, either. So a day off is a no-no.”

  “Okay. But take it easy. And instead of going home afterwards, come straight here.”

  “Emily, no. You’ve done more than enough.”

  “If you don’t come round, I will come round to your place and drag you back here. Okay?”

  I nodded. She was an amazing friend. “After work, I’ll nip back to get a change of clothes. But I promise I’ll come back here straight after. Thank you, Em. Thank you so much.”

  7. In search of models

  ON MY WAY from Emily’s apartment to catch the train the following morning, there was a sense of relief, despite the headache I had. I was glad I’d told her about my inability to let go of my life with Russell.

  Even now, he was the one I wanted to
have walking by my side to the station, just to talk about how I missed him walking by my side. I wanted the man who had rejected me to be holding my hand. I wanted to talk to him, not to ask him why. We’d been through that and I was none the wiser. I just wanted him there, like he’d always been there.

  My head was still hurting, the hangover persistently knocking on my skull, when I reached the office. I kept my sunglasses on inside the building. In any other office that would have attracted comment, but not in the fashion industry. There were two other people wearing shades, and they didn’t even have hangovers.

  “Find me somebody,” Polly shouted. “Just find me somebody. There’s nothing worse in this industry than standing still. But we, as an agency, are suffering from a bad case of inertia.”

  Polly had called a staff meeting in her office. All eight bookers were squeezed into her office. There should have been plenty of room for all of us. But I’m sure she moved her desk before these meetings, so that it took up more room. We were backed into a corner like sheep cowering from a particularly snarly bullmastiff dog. Polly as a vicious dog? I think Polly might like that comparison.

  “We need fresh talent. Some people in this agency have been resting on their laurels.” She was staring at me. She was obviously taking the loss of our one and only supermodel hard and was looking to lash out.

  “This weekend, I want you to scour the capital for the face of 2014. Look everywhere. Nightclubs, restaurants, bathrooms, gutters. Hey, we’ve had heroin chic, we might start gutter glam.”

  I looked round the room. The expressions were a mix of uncaring, uninterested and complete bewilderment. Cool Chrissy examined her nails, Diffident Dougie kept his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans, dragging them further south to show more of his Calvin Kleins, and Sulky Sooz kept pouting (when did she ever do anything else?).

  Polly surveyed the faces before her, then turned up her nose. That nose didn’t look like it had much confidence in the talent scouting ability in front of it.