How to Seduce a Ghost

by Hope McIntyre

  And then just as we were wrapping up the first draft and I was rolling up my sleeves to hammer out the revisions before handing it over to Genevieve, Tommy announced that Noreen’s helper was moving to Australia with her husband. But, he added, this had prompted him to come up with a wonderful idea.

  Why didn’t I move in with him and be the one to take care of Noreen while he was at work?

  CHAPTER 23

  WHAT WITH ONE THING OR ANOTHER, I HADN’T SEEN much of Tommy since I’d moved into Selma’s house. On the odd occasion when he’d come down to visit me, I could see he felt uncomfortable there. Tommy didn’t do grand and that was one of the things I had always liked about him. There were times when I could have done with him having a bit more aspiration in life but his blatant dislike of the ostentatious trappings of wealth made sense to me.

  Somehow I had got immersed in writing the book with Selma and although I made the odd visit to Bewdly Street, it was more to see Noreen and sit with her a while than anything else. There was nothing acrimonious going on between Tommy and me, we talked on the phone regularly but the weird thing was that I had begun to really miss him.

  In a way, I enjoyed it. I savored missing him because it was a new experience. In the past I’d thought about Tommy when he wasn’t with me and I’d needed him intermittently and summoned him to satisfy that need, either in my bed or as a stalwart against the marauding world on the other side of my front door. But while it was awful to have to confess such a thing after eight years of being someone’s significant other, apart from the four months when we split up, this was the first time I really did miss him. It was a combination of the way I’d felt when we were first going out, that kind of visceral craving you get for someone that doesn’t really even require them to speak. In that way I missed the reassuring sight of his sheer bulk slumped at the kitchen table or spread-eagled flat on his back across the mattress. I missed the smell of him. His pheromones. He might be a slob around the house but Tommy was meticulous about having clean shirts and linen.

  It was an unexpected turn-on but then the other thing I missed was his constant ability to surprise me. On a visit to Noreen while he’d been at work I’d found evidence—books and language tapes—that he was learning Russian. At first I worried that he might be contemplating ordering a mail-order bride on the Internet as the on dit was that the Russians were the best value in the looks department. But it turned out that the new owner of Chelsea FC was a Russian who couldn’t speak much English and Tommy was entertaining aspirations to become his translator. It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded because within a matter of weeks, Tommy appeared to be fluent. When he gabbled away to me in Russian he was probably talking utter gibberish for all I knew but he sounded authentic. He had a natural gift for languages, with or without Marie-Chantal. Who would have thought?

  I called him back and said I’d come up to Bewdly Street that night and we’d talk about it.

  But Tommy had a crisis at work and didn’t get back until ten o’clock by which time I’d fed Noreen and settled her down for the night and was more or less ready for bed myself.

  We went upstairs to his bedroom—where I almost changed my mind and went home. He claimed to have tidied up for me but of course Tommy’s version of tidying up a room was nothing like anyone else’s. All he had done was to pick up his dirty clothes that were usually strewn all over the floor like an extra carpet. Now they were arranged in neat little piles—but they were still on the floor. I closed my eyes and said nothing.

  We got into bed and lay there side by side in silence for a while.

  “Tommy,” I said tentatively when I noticed his eyes were closed and I wondered if he had fallen asleep. “I’ve thought about your idea.”

  “Give me your paw,” he said, opening his eyes and snuggling up against me, taking my hand in his. “Okay. Fire ahead. I’m listening.”

  “I was thinking maybe I could give you a hand with Noreen.”

  “Stoked if you would.” He began inching my nightie up my leg with his toe. “Stoked” was his new word. It had replaced “cool” and “crazy” but seemed to mean the same thing.

  “And I might as well move in with you.”

  The toe stopped halfway up my calf.

  “Did I hear you correctly?” The sheet was pulled up to his nose and his eyes peered over the rim at me, very wide.

  “But, now, listen, I want to set some ground rules,” I said, “literally. I want us to have separate rooms. You’ll be here and I want you to let me have your mother’s room all to myself—for work—and to sleep. At least until your mother moves back upstairs.”

  We both knew this wouldn’t be for quite a while, if ever.

  “You mean we wouldn’t share a bedroom?”

  “Well, of course we would. We’d share two. You’d invite me to yours and I’d invite you to mine.”

  “If I was a good boy?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But I’m not a good boy,” he said, moving my nightdress up my body with his hands now.

  It was the perfect plan, I reflected in the afterglow of what Tommy insisted on calling Soviet sex. This involved a lot of nibbling and mumbling of sweet nothings in my ear in Russian, spoken softly and with great tenderness. It would be cramped with the three of us living at Bewdly Street as I’d requested but I knew I had to have my space. It would be good for me to move on. Blenheim Crescent had always been my mother’s house and now that the insurance was going to cough up for the extensive repairs she planned, she could reclaim it.

  But there was something missing. If I was going to take this huge step and move in with him didn’t we need to make it official? Marie-Chantal might be safely back in France but Tommy’s dalliance with her had shaken me out of my complacency. Living with him would be bearable, providing I had my own room to retreat to and being on-site I could control the chaos throughout the rest of the house. I didn’t really want control of Tommy. I would prefer to encourage him to control himself. But now that I had finally realized how much I loved him, I wanted to hang on to him.

  “Tommy,” I whispered to the outline of his head in the glow of the television, “will you marry me?”

  I was rewarded with a resounding snore. Given that it was Tommy I took that for a yes.

  Later that night I sat up in bed beside him in the darkness and tried on Mrs. Kennedy of Bewdley Street, Islington, for size. Nathalie Kennedy. Lee Kennedy. I’d keep Lee Bartholomew as my writing name, of course. Oddly enough the Mrs. Kennedy part didn’t bother me at all. Now I’d made up my mind that was what I wanted, I liked the idea of being a wife. I looked down at Tommy lying flat on his back with his arms resting by his sides on the covers as if he were trying out his coffin. I studied his huge paws and wondered if I ought to buy him a ring. I was the one who had proposed after all.

  But as the night wore on and I couldn’t get to sleep, I started to dwell on the notion of living full time in Islington instead of just visiting. And that’s when I began to get very nervous indeed. What had I been thinking? There was no way I could live anywhere other than Notting Hill Gate. Now that I had finally come to terms with the knowledge that there were shootings and stabbings and crack-cocaine dealing on a mass scale just the other side of my front door—not to mention possible juvenile prostitution; now that I had survived two fires; now that I had finally found a way to get the repairs carried out throughout the house without actually having to be there to oversee it; now that I had finally grown up enough to entertain the thought of no longer living alone; now that I had finally come to terms with survival in the heart of twenty-first-century Notting Hill, why was I even thinking of going to live elsewhere? Tommy would have to be the one to move.

  I passed out for a few hours through sheer exhaustion and then I got up and dressed, leaving Tommy a note. The Victoria Line was deserted on the journey down to Oxford Circus and even the Central Line, normally jam-packed, was relatively empty. I walked up Portobello Road from Notting Hill t
ube station and once I reached the top end, I had to start dodging the market merchants on their way to set up their stalls as they trundled their loads of vegetables and fruit along the street.

  This was something I could never leave, the dawn stillness followed by the early-morning madness as the market came to life. On one of the stalls a boombox was blasting “By the Rivers of Babylon” for all it was worth and a woman shrieked out of a second-floor window for it to be turned off.

  At Mr. Christian’s in Elgin Crescent I nipped in for one of their chocolate brownies. It tasted so good, I bought another and hurried across the road, stuffing it into my mouth as I went. I didn’t want Selma, whose doll-like frame was testament to the strict organic diet to which she adhered, to witness my early-morning sugar freak-out.

  And then, as I turned into Westbourne Park Road, I realized I couldn’t just expect Tommy to pack up and move to Notting Hill just like that. What about Noreen? I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and woke him up.

  “Where are you?” he said. “I’m looking all around and you’re not here. Are you under the bed in a sulk or something?”

  “I’ve left you a note,” I told him. “Go downstairs and read it and then call me back on my cell.”

  “You’ve left me already,” he said wearily. “I thought it was too good to be true.”

  He called back almost immediately.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Well what?”

  “Moving to Notting Hill, what do you think?”

  “Fine, no problem, but hadn’t we better wait until your house has had a few repairs done to it?”

  “You mean you don’t mind? I mean I know I said I’d move in with you in Islington but—”

  “You seriously think I believed you for half a second?” He sounded incredulous. “You could never survive long term in Islington. I knew you’d be going back to Notting Hill sooner or later.”

  “You did?” Now it was my turn to sound incredulous.

  “There’s just one problem about me moving in with you,” he said and my heart sank.

  “Your mother?”

  “No,” he said, “your mother. She’s planning on living there, isn’t she? In fact it’s two problems. I’m not living in a house with you and your mother. And you’re right—I think I do need to bring Noreen with me.”

  “Tommy,” I said, “I’ve thought of something. Now that the damp in the basement has been fixed—”

  He interrupted me. “Do we have to do this now? We’re going to take care of our mothers one way or another and we’re going to do it together. That’s just about all that needs to be said right this minute, isn’t it? I’ve got to get to work.”

  “One more thing—” I heard a sigh on the other end of the phone but my anxiety was nearing fever pitch. “Just before you fell asleep I asked you a question.”

  “Maybe I fell asleep and never heard it,” he said.

  “Maybe you did,” I replied.

  “So if you manage to make it back to my bed one night and you stay there for long enough, I’ll give you my answer.”

  “I’m not quite sure how to take that.” By now I was extremely nervous.

  “I should take it with a glass of champagne,” he said and I smiled with relief.

  “I love you, Tommy,” I said and then screamed as a pair of jeans came flying out of the doorway to the launderette on the corner and knocked the cell phone out of my hand. If Tommy replied I didn’t hear it. I retrieved my phone, picked up the jeans, and took them inside, depositing them on the pile for which they were intended. There were more piles of dirty clothes in front of each of the machines and without even thinking about what I was doing, I set to work, sorting the whites from the coloreds and weeding out the delicates altogether.

  When I reached one of the giant dryers banked along the far wall, I was just in time to rescue various items of clothing whose care labels I knew would bear the explicit instruction “Do not tumble dry.” I waited patiently until their owner’s head emerged from the drum of the adjacent dryer.

  “Well, good morning,” said Max Austin as he straightened up and his face betrayed his delight in seeing me. “I think we’ve met before.”