Ghosted

by Rosie Walsh

  Tommy’s family lived on a residential street called South Bedford Drive that was as wide as the M4. Tommy’s house was a strange taupe-colored affair that looked as if a Spanish bungalow had mated with a Georgian mansion. I stood in front of it on my first day, sick and dizzy with heat and jet lag, and wondered if I’d landed on the moon.

  In fact, it turned out that I’d landed in Beverly Hills.

  “They can’t afford to live here,” Tommy said grimly, when he showed me round. There was a pool! A swimming pool! With a deck with chairs and tables and vines and roses and tropical flowers hanging in pink clouds.

  “The rent is crazy. I can’t imagine how they’ll keep it up, but Mum loves telling people back home that Saks is her corner shop.”

  Even though Tommy’s mother had become barely recognizable, and even more preoccupied with things like clothes and treatments and lunches where she surely couldn’t be eating anything, she was kind enough to see that I needed a break. She told me I could stay as long as I wanted, and told me where to get the exotic-sounding frozen yogurt Tommy had written about in his letters. “But don’t eat too much,” she said. “I can’t have you get fat.”

  Beyond neatly mowed squares of their high-fenced garden stretched a city that stunned me. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a road lined with palm trees reaching up into the sky; giant street names hanging off traffic lights; mile upon mile of squat little buildings, checkered with flowers, engineered for earthquakes. The never-ending whine of planes, the nail bars and rugged mountains and valet parking and clothes shops full of stunningly expensive and beautiful clothes. It amazed me. I spent weeks just staring. At the people, the festoons of fairy lights, the huge expanse of pale gold sand, and the Pacific, crashing away at Santa Monica every day. It was a miracle. It was Mars. And for that reason it was perfect.

  I realized soon after arriving that Tommy’s invitation for me to stay hadn’t been purely philanthropic. He was lonely. True, he’d escaped the relentless savagery of his classmates, but nothing about his family, his relationship with himself, or his trust in humanity appeared to have changed for the better. Those early signs of body consciousness he’d had when he left England seemed now to have blossomed into something a lot darker. He ate nothing or everything, he exercised sometimes two or three times a day, and his bedroom was full of clothes from which he’d not even removed the labels. He looked embarrassed when I went in there, as if a part of him remembered who he’d been before all of this.

  I asked him outright one day if he was actually gay. We were at the Farmers Market, queuing for tacos, and Tommy was already beginning to mumble some falsehood about not being hungry. I remember standing there, fanning my face with our parking lot ticket, and the question just kind of tumbling out of me.

  Neither of us was expecting it. He stared at me for a few seconds, and then said, “No, Harrington. I am not gay. And what the hell does that have to do with tacos?”

  From behind us there was a quiet eruption of laughter. Tommy cringed deeply into himself; I turned round to see a girl, maybe a couple of years older than me, laughing quite openly. “Sorry,” she said, in a London accent. “But I couldn’t help overhearing. You, mate”—she pointed at me, still laughing—“you need to work on your bedside manner.”

  Tommy agreed.

  So did I.

  An hour at a rickety table eating tacos led to a lifelong friendship. The girl, Jo, was working as a mobile beauty therapist and living in a crummy apartment share nearby. Over the next few months, before she ran out of money and was forced to go back to England, she bullied us back to a semblance of happiness and functionality with which we could move forward. She made us talk—something we were failing at quite miserably—and she forced us relentlessly out to parties, to the beach, to free concerts. She’s as spiky as a porcupine, Jo Monk, but she’s a woman of infinite kindness and courage. I miss her terribly when I’m not in England.

  September came, and I had to go back to England to finish my A levels. Only I couldn’t go. Whenever I phoned my parents and they talked about my return, I’d start crying. Mum would fall silent and eventually Dad would have to pick up the extension outside the downstairs loo and crack jokes. Mum did her best to seem resilient—cheerful, even—but it slipped out one day, as if she had turned her back on her voice just for a moment: “I miss you so much it hurts,” she whispered. “I want my family back.” Self-loathing blocked my throat and I couldn’t even manage a reply.

  In the end they agreed I should postpone my A levels for a year to stay awhile longer. They came to visit me, and although it was a relief to see them, it was acutely painful that Hannah wasn’t there. They kept wanting to talk about her, which I found almost unendurable. I was relieved when they left.

  Then I met Reuben, and got a job, and decided it was time to become someone I could respect. I’ll tell you about that next time.

  Sarah

  P.S. I’m going home to see my parents tomorrow. Granddad is staying with them for a bit. If you’re in Gloucestershire and you’re ready to talk, call me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Sarah!” Dad, who looked exhausted, hugged me tightly. “Thank God,” he said. “Thank God you’re here. Our still, small voice of calm.”

  He offered me some wine, which I refused. After my meeting on the South Bank yesterday with Kaia and Reuben, and the text message warning me off Eddie, I’d gone to Jo’s and drunk far too much. My body had told me this morning that it would not tolerate an alcoholic drink for some time.

  “Oh, Sarah.” Mum hugged me. “I feel awful about the last few weeks. I really am so sorry.” My mother spent a lot of time apologizing for her failings, in spite of having done nothing but love and look after me from the day I was born.

  “Stop saying that. I had a lovely time. You saw me in Leicester. Was I not happy?”

  “Happy enough, I suppose.”

  I still wasn’t sure why I hadn’t told them about Eddie. Perhaps because I was supposed to be home for the anniversary of the accident, not having sex with a handsome stranger. Or perhaps because, by the time I had arrived in Leicester, I was beginning to worry.

  Or perhaps, I thought now, handing some flowers to Mum, it was because a part of me already knew it wouldn’t work out. The same part of me that had stood facing Reuben on our wedding day and thought, He’ll be taken away from me eventually. Just like Hannah.

  Mum put my flowers in one vase and then swapped it for a different one. And then a different one still. “Mind your own business,” she said, when she caught me watching her. “I’m a retiree now, Sarah. I’ve earned the right to opinions on flower arranging.”

  I smiled, quietly relieved. Last time I’d seen Mum, she had seemed diminished somehow, squashed, like a carton flattened for recycling. Which didn’t feel at all right, because, save for the odd lapse, she had seemed so splendidly robust in the years following the accident. In fact, her fortitude was the only thing that assuaged my guilt at having just cleared off and left them in all that pain and chaos.

  Today she—and Dad, for that matter—were how I’d always held them in my mind’s eye: kind, solid, assured. And mildly alcoholic, I reminded myself, as Mum poured herself some wine, even though we were soon to leave for the pub. Don’t put them on a pedestal. They’ve just dealt with things in a different way.

  I glanced up at the ceiling and lowered my voice. “How’s it been? How is he?”

  “He’s a rotten old bastard,” Mum said squarely. “And I’m allowed to say that because he’s my father and I love him and I know what a rough time he’s had. But there’s no denying it—he’s a rotten old bastard.”

  “He is,” Dad admitted. “We’ve been keeping tally of the number of complaints he’s made today. So far we’re at thirty-three, and it’s only quarter to one. Why aren’t you drinking?”

  “I’ve a hangover.”

  Mum slumped
. “Oh, I feel terrible when I’m mean about him,” she said. “He’s impossible to be with, Sarah, drives us mad. But underneath it all I feel very bad for him. He’s been on his own so long now. His quality of life is awful, cooped up in that house on his own, nobody to talk to.” My grandmother, a woman so round she had seemed almost spherical in the photographs, had died of a heart attack when she was forty-four. I had never met her.

  “Well, at least he’s got you two. I’m sure he appreciates the company, even if it might seem otherwise.”

  “He behaves as if he’s been kidnapped by terrorists,” Mum sighed. “He actually said this morning, when I gave him his pills, ‘I can’t believe you dragged me down to this godforsaken place.’ I was very close to putting an end to his suffering.”

  Dad laughed. “You’re an angel with him,” he said, and gave her a tender kiss. I looked away, mildly disgusted, very touched, and, actually, a little bit jealous. They were still so happy together, my parents. Dad had taken Mum out every day until she’d agreed to marry him; he’d telephoned her, written to her, sent her gifts. He’d taken her to concerts and let her sit at the sound desk with him. He had never left her hanging. He had never not called.

  I asked if I should go up and say hello before we left for lunch at the pub.

  “Luckily for you, he’s asleep,” Mum said. “But he’ll definitely want to see you.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Inasmuch as he ever wants to see anyone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We sat outside the Crown, even though it wasn’t really warm enough. Gusts of wind riled my mother’s hair into red flames, and Dad looked stunted, or perhaps drunk, because his side of the table was sloping down the hill. In the field rising steeply above the lane, a sheep had sunk down onto its knees to graze amid the pungent nettles. I laughed and then stopped laughing. I wondered if I would ever find sheep funny again.

  “Tell me about this cello business,” I prompted Dad. On the way up, Mum had reported that he’d been taking lessons.

  “Aha! Well, I was having a few jars with Paul Wise last autumn, and he was saying he’d just read in the newspaper about how you can keep your brain sharp in old age by playing an instrument—”

  “So he just drove to Bristol and bought a cello,” Mum interrupted. “He was awful at first, Sarah. Terrible. Paul came and listened to him—”

  “And the bastard just stood there and laughed,” Dad finished off. “So I practiced like mad, and then found a teacher in Bisley, and I’m soon to take Grade Two. Paul will eat his words.”

  I raised my glass to propose a toast to Dad, just as a woodpecker drummed its rocky beak into the side of a tree. My hand sank back down to the table. The sound reminded me so strongly of Eddie, of our time together, that I found myself unable to speak.

  The oily rolling returned to my stomach.

  * * *

  • • •

  My parents talked about Granddad while I watched another family, sitting by a blaze of delphiniums further down the garden. The parents looked like mine: just beginning their transition into old age; grayer, more crumpled, but still firmly in their lives, not looking back on them. Their daughters were how I imagined Hannah and I would look if we could sit here today. The younger daughter seemed to be holding forth with some vehemence on some topic or other and I was mesmerized, imagining my own little sister as an adult. Adult Hannah would be full of opinions, I thought. She’d love a good polemic, never shy away from fights—the sort of woman who leads committees and is secretly feared by the other parents at school.

  “Sarah?” Mum was looking at me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Then: “That family over there.”

  Mum and Dad looked. “Oh, I think the husband is one of our neighbor’s friends,” he said. “Patrick? Peter? Something with a ‘P.’”

  Mum didn’t say anything. She knew what I was thinking.

  “I just want that,” I said quietly. “To be able to sit at this table with you two and Hannah. I would give everything I had if it meant we could all sit here. Talking, eating.”

  Mum’s head dipped, and I sensed Dad had gone very still, as he always did when I talked about Hannah. “Well, we’d like that, too,” my mother said. “More than we can say. But I think we’ve learned the hard way that it’s better to focus on what we do have rather than what we don’t.”

  A plate of cloud rolled over the sun and I shivered. It was typical of me to do this. To make my parents feel uncomfortable, remind them of how things could have been.

  * * *

  • • •

  By six o’clock my heart was pounding and my thoughts had scattered like filaments from a dandelion clock. I told my parents, who were politely dismayed, that I was going for a run.

  “New exercise regime,” I smiled, hoping they would allow me this fiction.

  Sickened by myself, I went upstairs to change. I couldn’t decide what was worse: that this adrenalized state had become so familiar or that I couldn’t find a solution beyond wearing myself out and lying to those who cared about me.

  Remind me when you’re back off to LA? Tommy texted just before I left.

  Leaving for Heathrow 6:15 a.m. on Tuesday. I’ll be quiet as a mouse.

  OK. So you’re staying with us on Monday night, right?

  If that’s OK. I’ve got a conference in Richmond on the Monday; I should get to yours by about 7:30 p.m. But if not convenient, I can easily stay on Jo’s sofa? I imagine you and Zoe have had it with me!

  No, it’s fine. Zoe’s in Manchester again. So you’re not here Sunday night?

  Negative. Why? Are you entertaining another woman?

  Er, no.

  Jolly good. See you Monday night, then, Tommy. Everything OK?

  Everything’s fine. So, Monday morning: will you go straight to the conference, or will you come here first?

  I frowned. Tommy and Zoe had been remarkably generous with their spare room on this and every visit, giving me a key and telling me to use the flat as if it were my own. And apart from the odd time we’d made dinner for each other, I didn’t think Tommy had ever asked about my comings and goings.

  I was going to come to your flat first, but can go straight to Richmond if you’d prefer? I wrote.

  No, Tommy replied. It’s fine. See you then. And don’t you dare go hunting for Eddie while you’re down there, OK? Don’t look him up, don’t go running past his front door, don’t go and sit in that pub. Do you understand?

  I understand. Have a nice weekend entertaining your secret lady. xx

  Watch it, he wrote. Then: I mean it, Harrington. Don’t even look the man up, do you hear?

  For a moment I wondered if Tommy was messaging me because he was meeting Eddie. I considered this possibility for a good few minutes before I realized how ridiculous it was.

  Would I run as far as Sapperton, in the hope of seeing Eddie? The idea had been brewing for days. Although who knew if he was down here in Gloucestershire or up in London. Or in bloody outer space. And what would I do if I actually saw him?

  But I knew that I would run to Sapperton, and I knew it would make me feel even worse, and I either couldn’t or wouldn’t stop myself.

  * * *

  • • •

  The run was how I imagined a breakdown might feel. Eddie was everywhere I looked: watching me from tree branches, sitting on the old sluice, walking in the meadow that lay between the wandering branches of the river. And before long he was joined by Hannah, wearing the same clothes she’d worn that day, that awful day.

  As I approached the tiny footbridge, I saw a woman walking toward me from the direction of Sapperton. She, at least, seemed real: a raincoat, hair tied back, walking shoes. Until she stopped suddenly and stared at me.

  For reasons I couldn’t quite
understand, I stopped jogging and stared at her, too. Something about her was familiar, only I knew I’d never seen her before. She was too far away for me to be sure about her age, but from here she looked a good deal older than me.

  Eddie’s mother? Was that possible? I peered at her, but saw no obvious resemblance. Eddie was broad, round-faced, tall, whereas this woman was extremely thin and short, with a sharp chin. (And even if it was Eddie’s mother, why would she stand in the middle of a footpath, staring at me? Eddie had said she was depressed, not mad.) Besides, she didn’t know I even existed.

  After another few seconds she turned round and started walking back in the direction she’d come. She walked fast, but her movements had the jerky irregularity of someone to whom movement does not come easily. I’d seen it enough times in children recovering from injury.

  I stood there for a long time after she’d disappeared out of sight.

  Had that been a face-off, or had the woman simply decided to finish her walk and go home? After all, there was no way of circling back from that section of the path: you either did a round trip of quite a few miles via Frampton Mansell or you turned round and went straight back to Sapperton.

  I turned for home. Several times, I felt convinced that Eddie was walking along the footpath behind me. But the footpath was empty every time. Even the birds seemed silent.

  I can’t stand this, I thought, as I arrived at my parents’ porch a few minutes later. I can’t stand it. How did I end up here again? Scrabbling around this valley after someone I’ve already lost?

  Next to the coat pegs by the front door was a framed photograph of Hannah and me in the field behind our house. I was sitting in a cardboard box, Hannah next to it, a bunch of flowers in her small fist. Trails of mud and roots from the flowers dirtied her dungarees. She was scowling at the camera, scowling with a comic intensity that made my heart hurt. I stared at her, at my precious little Hannah, and loss thickened like glue in my chest.