Ghosted

by Rosie Walsh

  In the hope of having another Google route to Eddie, I had tried many times to remember the name of his football team. Beyond the word “Old,” though, nothing had materialized. My train began to accelerate and I closed my eyes, concentrating hard on the memory of Eddie’s football trophies. Old Robsonians? Is that what they’d said?

  I remembered Eddie’s finger, sliding a snake of dust off the top of one of them. Yes! Old Robsonians, The Elms, Battersea Monday. I was certain of it!

  I looked back out the window, even though the station had long since fallen away. Behind an old gasworks, the skeleton of a huge construction block was being fussed over by dizzying cranes.

  That man plays in Eddie’s football team.

  Old Robinson footnalk, I typed, but Google knew what I was looking for. A website was offered. Pictures of men I didn’t know. Links to fixtures; match reports; an article about their U.S. tour. (Is that where he’d been? The States?)

  In the corner of the page, I scrolled through their Twitter feed: match results, banter, more pictures of men I didn’t know. And then, a picture of a man I did know. It was dated a week ago. Eddie, in the background of a postmatch pub photo, drinking a pint and talking to a man in a suit. Eddie.

  After staring at the photo for a long time, I selected “About Us.”

  Old Robsonians played on an AstroTurf pitch right by Battersea Park Railway Station on Monday nights. Their kickoff was at 8 P.M.

  I checked my watch. It wasn’t yet seven. Why had the other man been there so early?

  At Vauxhall, I teetered at the door of the train, unsure as to what I should do. There was no guarantee that Eddie was in London, or playing tonight. And according to the website, the football pitch was on the grounds of a school: I either marched right up to the perimeter to brazenly confront him or I didn’t go at all. It wasn’t like I could casually stroll by.

  The train doors rolled shut and I remained on board.

  At Victoria, I got off and stood, paralyzed, on the crowded concourse. People bulleted and ricocheted off me; a woman told me outright not to “stand there like a fucking idiot.” I didn’t move. I scarcely even noticed: all I could think about was the possibility that Eddie, in less than an hour, might be playing football a few minutes from where I was standing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Dear You,

  Today is July 11—your birthday! Thirty-two years since you forced your way out into the bright starkness of the world, stunned fists moving in the air like little tentacles.

  Out you came, into the warm, blurred glow of love. “She’s too small,” I cried, when they let me visit you. I could feel your hopelessly fragile ribs around your tiny beating heart. “She’s too small. How can she survive?”

  But you did, Hedgehog. I remember now as then the fantastical brimming of love for which I was so wholly unprepared. I didn’t mind Mum and Dad spending all their time with you. I wanted them to. I wanted your ribs to grow stronger, to strengthen and thicken around that tiny lamp of life in your chest. I wanted you to stay in hospital for months, not days. “She’s fine,” Mum and Dad told me, again and again. Dad made me a Banoffee pie because I was so afraid for you I cried. And yet you were fine. That heartbeat went on and on, through the day and through the night, on and on as seasons changed and you grew and grew.

  Did you know it was your birthday today, Hedgehog? Has anyone told you? Did someone make you a cake, covered in chocolate stars, just how you liked it? Did anyone sing for you?

  Well, if not, I did. Maybe you heard me. Maybe you’re with me now, while I write this letter. Giggling about how much neater your handwriting is than mine, even though you’re younger than me. Maybe you’re outside, playing in your tree house, or reading girls’ magazines in your den up on Broad Ride.

  Maybe you’re everywhere. I like that idea most. Up there in the pink-flushed clouds. Down here in the dampness of daybreak.

  Wherever I go, I look for you. And wherever I am, I see you.

  Me xxxxx

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  On my last night in London I turned up at a six-a-side football game in Battersea in the hope of finding a man I’d met once, a man who’d never called.

  What I did that night would lie way beyond the splintered edges of sanity. But as I stood on the concourse at Victoria Station earlier on, trying to reason with myself, I had realized that I wanted to see Eddie more than I cared about the consequences.

  And now here I was, crammed into a hot corner of the 7:52 to London Bridge via Crystal Palace, first stop Battersea Park. Less than two minutes’ walk from the station I would find an AstroTurf pitch, and on it—my stomach flipped like a February pancake—Eddie David. In a football kit, warming up for his eight-o’clock match. Right now. Passing to a teammate. Stretching his quads.

  His body. His actual, physical body. I closed my eyes and crushed a surge of longing.

  The train was slowing down already. The squeal of brakes, a pulsing wave of commuters forcing me down the steps, and then—suddenly, shockingly—I was standing on Battersea Park Road. Behind me, the amplified bark of ticket sellers’ voices, an echoing busker’s guitar. Above me, the heave and groan of the train viaducts and thickset white clouds like beaten meringues. And ahead of me, somewhere up an unpaved lane, Eddie David.

  I stood there for some time, breathing slowly. Two further waves of passengers poured out around me. One man, wearing a red-and-white football shirt with “PAGLIERO” written in black on the back, sprinted up the lane toward the pitches, trying as he ran to send a text message and affix shin pads to his legs. His green satchel swung round and hit him in the face, but he carried on running.

  That man knows Eddie, I thought. He’s probably known him for years.

  As the pitches slid into view, everything that I’d seen online was confirmed. The pitches were surrounded on all sides by high wire fences, train viaducts, buildings. There would be nowhere to hide. And yet here I was, all five foot nine of me, striding ever closer in my smart conference blouse.

  This is the most appalling thing I will ever do.

  But my legs kept on walking.

  The players in the pitch closest to me were warming up. A referee jogged toward the center with a whistle in his mouth. Everything moved slowly, like an old VHS tape starting to jam. The air smelled of greasy rubber and exhaust fumes.

  My legs kept on walking.

  “Turn round and run,” I instructed myself in a loud whisper. “Turn round and run, and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

  My legs kept on walking.

  It was at that moment I realized that, apart from the PAGLIERO man, there were no other players in the Old Robsonians’ red-and-white strip. There was a team in blue and a team in orange on the pitch nearest me, and on the other one, black-and-white versus green.

  PAGLIERO was putting his shin pads back in his bag. After a moment he straightened up, noticing me.

  “Are you an Old Robsonian?” I asked him.

  “I am. A very late one. Are you looking for someone?”

  “Well, all of them, I guess.”

  PAGLIERO had the mischievous smile of a boy. “The game got moved to seven P.M. I forgot. They’ve already played.”

  “Oh.”

  He picked up his satchel. “But they’ll be over there now, having some postmatch beers. Would you like to join us?” He gestured over to what looked like a shipping container.

  I peered at it. It was a shipping container. How typically London. A craft ale taproom, probably, in a bloody windowless container. “Please do come and join us,” he repeated. “We like visitors.”

  PAGLIERO looked too disorganized to be a rapist or a murderer, so I fell into stride beside him, making small talk I couldn’t even hear. I wasn’t in charge of my own mind anymore, so this was all fine.

  “Here you go,” PAGLIERO said, holding open
a door carved into the side of the container.

  I was staring at the naked backside of an adult male for quite some time before I realized what was happening. Before I realized that I was staring at the naked backside of an adult male, with a towel round his neck and his back to the door, singing something with great enthusiasm and minimal musicianship. Other men, more fully clothed than this one, were sitting on benches, arguing about the match. Around them, a jungle of discarded football shirts read “SAUNDERS,” “VAUGHAN,” “WOODHOUSE,” “MORLEY-SMITH,” “ADAMS,” “HUNTER.”

  Over by the door to what I realized now must be the showers, the naked adult male pulled on some boxer shorts.

  “Oh, no,” something deep inside me said, but it didn’t make its way to my mouth. Behind me, in the direction of PAGLIERO, I heard a man laugh.

  “Pags!” someone said. “You’re an hour late.” Then: “Oh. Hello.”

  I came back to life. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, turning to leave. PAGLIERO, laughing, moved to one side to let me out.

  “Welcome!” someone else said, close behind me. I staggered outside, wondering how I would ever get over this. I had just walked into a changing room full of barely clothed men.

  “Hello?” The man had followed me out. He, at least, was fully clothed.

  He put on a pair of glasses, and from inside the container I heard the stunned silence lapse into laughter that I thought would never stop.

  He shook his head in the direction of the door, as if to say, Ignore them.

  “I’m Martin. Team captain and manager. You’ve just walked into our changing room, and while it’s an unorthodox move, I sense that you might need some help.”

  “I do,” I whispered, clutching my handbag to me. This must be the Martin who’d written on Eddie’s Facebook page. “I need quite a lot of help, I think, but I’m not sure you can offer it.”

  “It could happen to anyone,” Martin said kindly.

  “It could not.”

  He thought about it. “No, I suppose you’re right. We’ve never had a woman walk into our changing room, not in twenty years. But Old Robsonians is a modern team, embracing innovation and change. Showering after every match is one of our oldest principles, but there’s no reason why we can’t build new features into the practice—guests, maybe a live band, that sort of thing.”

  From inside the container drifted great shouts of laughter and male conversation. A ribbon of shower steam uncurled slowly into the evening air. Martin the team captain was laughing at me, although he did so with kindness.

  I took a deep breath.

  “It was a terrible, terrible mistake,” I said. “I was looking for—” I stopped suddenly. In my horror, I had completely forgotten why I was there in the first place.

  Dear Christ. I had walked into a changing room in the hope of seeing Eddie David.

  I folded my arms tightly across my chest, as if trying to hold the shattered pieces of myself together. What would I have said? What would I actually have done? He could be in there, right now, toweling down after a shower, listening with the growing shock of realization as his teammates told him about the tall girl with the suntan who’d just marched into the changing room.

  Sickness moved in my stomach. Something is wrong with me, I realized. Something is actually wrong with me. People don’t do this.

  “Looking for who? Someone in Old Robsonians? Or another team?”

  “Old Robsonians, she said just now,” PAGLIERO told him, stepping outside. Then: “Sorry, by the way. That was very bad of me. Although you made the boys’ night. One of our founder members is visiting from Cincinnati—he thinks we hired you especially to welcome him back.”

  I stared at the ground. “It was a great joke,” I whispered. “No need to apologize. And I got it wrong. I wasn’t looking for anyone from Old Robsonians, I was . . .”

  “Looking for someone from Old Robsonians,” Martin said. “Who? Everyone’s married! Well, apart from Wally, but he—” He stopped and stared sharply at me, and before he even said it, I knew what was coming. “Are you Sarah?” he asked quietly.

  “Er . . . No?”

  Two other men came out. “Is it true that—” one began, and then saw me. “Oh. It is.”

  “These gentlemen are Edwards and Fung-On,” Martin said, although his eyes didn’t leave my face. “I’m deciding which of them I think should be Player of the Night.” Then: “I’ll help you get back to the road,” he said suddenly, marching me off toward the entrance lane.

  “Bye!” called PAGLIERO, and Edwards and Fung-On, one of whom would be Player of the Night, gave a salute. I could hear their laughter as they went back into the container.

  When they were gone, Martin stopped and faced me. “He’s not here tonight,” he said eventually. “He doesn’t play for us every week. He’s in the West Country most of the time.”

  “Who? Sorry, I . . .”

  Martin looked sympathetic, but I could see he knew exactly who I was. And that he knew exactly why Eddie hadn’t called.

  “Is he in Gloucestershire, then?” I blurted. Hot tears of humiliation built in my eyes.

  Martin nodded. “He—” He stopped abruptly, as if remembering his responsibility to his teammate. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t talk about Eddie.”

  “It’s okay.” I stood there, slumped with shame. I wanted to leave, but self-loathing and shock had immobilized my legs.

  “Look, it’s none of my business,” he said slowly, running a hand over his face. “But Eddie’s been a friend for years, and he . . . Stop trying to find him, okay? I’m sure you’re very nice, and if it helps, I don’t think you’re mad, and neither does he, but . . . stop.”

  “He said that? He doesn’t think I’m mad? What else did he say about me?” Tears rolled down my face and fell to the cooling concrete below. It defied belief that I was in this situation. Here, with this man. This total stranger, begging for scraps.

  “You don’t want to find him,” Martin said eventually. “Please trust me. You do not want to find Eddie David.”

  And he turned round and walked back to the container, calling over his shoulder that it was nice to have met me, and he hoped what I’d seen in there hadn’t scarred me for life.

  A train hammered along the viaduct bordering the pitches and I shivered. I had to go home.

  The problem was, I didn’t know where home was anymore. I didn’t really know anything, other than that I had to find Eddie David. No matter what this man said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I pulled running shorts over my legs. It was 3:09 A.M., precisely seven hours since I’d stumbled away from the football pitch. My room was pungent with sleeplessness.

  Sports bra, running top. My hands shook. Adrenaline was still collecting in fizzy pools around my body, dancing over the sickening exhaustion that must lie underneath. Tommy had barred the door when I’d emerged in my running gear after getting back from the football. He’d made me a hot drink and had then ordered me off to bed. “I don’t even want to think about what happened at that football pitch,” he’d told me severely, but within five minutes he’d cracked and knocked at my door, begging me to tell him what had happened at that football pitch.

  “I’m sorry,” he’d said softly, when I finished. “But well done for admitting something’s gone . . . well, a bit wrong with you. That takes courage.”

  “The letters, Tommy, all those letters I sent him via Facebook. Calling his workshop, writing to his friend Alan. What was I thinking?”

  “A silent phone brings out the very worst in us,” he said. “All of us.”

  We sat together on my bed for a long time. Neither of us said much, but his presence calmed me sufficiently to try sleeping.

  “I’m so sorry,” I’d said, before he went off to his own bed. “I’ve become a burden on you again. You shouldn’t have
to spend your life rescuing me.”

  Tommy had smiled. “I didn’t rescue you back then, and I’m not rescuing you now,” he’d said. “I’m here for you, Harrington—you know I am—but I’m also certain you can sort this out. You’re a survivor. One of life’s cockroaches.”

  I’d just about managed a smile of my own.

  Now, three hours later, I was trying again and again to knot my laces, but my hands wouldn’t coordinate. Everything was wrong.

  My airport taxi was at five. I had not slept and I wouldn’t. There was plenty of time for a run, a shower, to gift wrap the little lemon tree I’d bought for Tommy and Zoe to say thank you. And I’d only go for a short jog; just enough to help me sleep on the plane.

  I slid out of my bedroom door, grateful that Zoe was away. When Tommy went up to bed, that was where he stayed, but Zoe often got up very early to answer e-mails from Asia, wrapped in an elegant gray silk kimono. More than once she had caught me sneaking out for a run before the sun had risen.

  Although this, I knew, glancing at my watch—3:13 A.M.—was not a run. This was a problem.

  I glanced at myself in Zoe’s big mirror in the hallway, framed by wood from a tree from her late parents’ Berkshire garden. Zoe was right; I had lost weight. My arms looked stringy, and my face looked narrower, as if I’d taken out a plug and allowed some of it to drain.

  I turned away, embarrassed to look at myself. Frightened, too. I had often wondered about the degree of consciousness held by the mentally ill as they began to deteriorate. How easily could they recognize a decline? How visible was the line between fact and fiction, before it disappeared completely?

  Was I unwell?

  I stopped in the kitchen for a quick drink of water. My leg muscles twitched impatiently. Soon, I told them. Soon.

  In the kitchen doorway, I stopped dead. What? Zoe? But she was in—

  “Jesus!” shouted the woman in the kitchen.

  I froze. The woman was naked. Another naked stranger, little more than seven hours since I’d seen the last. Synthetic orange light from the streetlamp stippled her breasts and belly as she plunged about, trying to cover herself. A stream of expletives flew from her mouth.