Ghosting (9 page)

‘Feminism meant nothing to me,’ Grace says. ‘It was just something you read about in the papers or saw on TV. Germaine Greer, burning bras – all that. Never imagined it had anything to do with me, with my life.’

‘My mum was a total inspiration to me. She’s an academic and an activist. She’s kinda my role model.
My younger sisters both stayed in Leeds, got married and had the two-point-four kids, which is great for them. But it isn’t for me. I want something different. I’ve got no desire to have kids. There’s no way I could handle that level of responsibility. It’s unremitting!’

‘It certainly is,’ Grace says, starting to feel dizzy from the wine.

Linden crushes the joint in the ashtray and says, ‘Actually, Grace, there was something I wanted to ask you.’

‘What?’ she says, finding it harder and harder to focus, concentrating on staying locked in single vision.

‘Would you sit for me?’

‘I am sitting,’ Grace says, and Linden laughs.

‘I mean would you sit for a portrait? Would you let me paint you?’

Grace pictures herself with melting features, and as if reading her mind Linden says, ‘It won’t be like the two I showed you. Next, I’m going to do two portraits where the faces are photo-real but the clothing and the surroundings are melting. One will be of Luke, and you’d be perfect for the other one. You’ve got a great face.’

Feeling a strange flush of vanity and pride, Grace finds herself saying, ‘Yes. Go on, then.’

‘Great. Are you free tomorrow morning?’

‘I could probably spare an hour or two.’

‘Fantastic. I’ll pick you up around ten if that’s OK.’

At that moment, Grace’s vision begins to double. When she closes her eyes her head spins as if someone’s
turning a handle inside her skull; but with them open she can focus on nothing. All this stuff inside, clogging her mood like dirt in the mouth. Feeling a sudden surge of nausea, she leans over the side of the boat and vomits straight into the canal.

Mortified, she apologises, rummaging around in her bag for a tissue to wipe her mouth and chin, wishing she could wipe herself away like a mistake on a blackboard.

‘It’s OK. I’ll get you a glass of water,’ Linden says, putting down her drink and going inside. Dizzy and ashamed, Grace watches shadows move like serpents in the violet light around the boat, breaks in the black water giving away their location.

Linden returns and hands her a glass of water.

‘I should have eaten,’ Grace says. ‘I think I’d better get home to bed.’

‘Stay there,’ says Linden, ‘let me make you a sandwich and some tea. Keep drinking the water.’ And she disappears back inside.

Grace feels much better after eating, but she’s still too embarrassed and wretched to stay, so, insisting she is well enough to walk back on her own, she does: past the silhouetted boats like slumbering dinosaurs; or coffins laid out in a row.

Here we are, my narrowboat. For my narrow life.

She makes her way to the bed, removes her shoes and lies down fully clothed, falling into a sleep as deep as a rabbit hole.

THE FAINT SOUND
of knocking pulls her out into the conscious day. Feeling as if her eyes have been put in the wrong way, she climbs off the bed and flounders to the door. ‘Hello?’ she says without opening the door.

It’s Linden. Grace suddenly remembers the arrangement they’d made the previous evening. Not wanting her to see that she slept in her clothes, she speaks through the door.

‘I’m sorry, love, I’m not feeling too bright today; do you mind if we postpone the modelling?’

‘Fine, no problem,’ says Linden. ‘Call me when you’re feeling better.’

Grace makes her creaky way to the sink, wondering what happens to the dreams people don’t remember.
Do they return to the deep, to resurface at another time? Or do they die, disintegrate, return to nothing?

Ignoring the dishes piling up, she runs a glass of water, and swallows a Valium. Then she drops back into bed, pretending not to notice the mouldering teacups and encrusted plates she’s let pile up around her since Gordon’s departure.

If I stay in this room long enough, maybe I’ll become mouldy too.

Jungled in the duvet, she maps the sequence of light changes inside the room through her eyelids, lost in a not-quite-sleeping reverie.

DURING THOSE
weeks in Singapore without Pete, Grace allowed herself to feel happy for the first time in years: she had help with the children, the climate was a joy, and those little pills the doctor had prescribed made her mood lighter than she’d ever believed it would be again. She was giddy from the unexpected freedom. If she managed to avoid thinking about the future – which she did, for days on end, floating through the hours like a phantom – her current life presented no problems. Paul and Hannah spent their mornings at kindergarten and their afternoons at the outdoor swimming pool. In the evenings she took them down by the ocean in the setting sun, where they would splash in the warm surf, while she sat on the exposed roots of a palm tree with Jason. Grace strolled through those days like a sleepwalker, processing what was happening through the warm code of her children’s bodies. And they so clearly loved being there.

Children had a way of grounding you, she thought. Despite – or perhaps because of – their great untamed energy, they could focus you, exhaust you, leave you no time for self-reflection. They took her mind off the blind, screaming panic over what the hell she was going to do
now. While euphoria flooded her at being free of Pete, she was now a single mother wondering how she was going to manage.

Marilyn had been a godsend, helping with the children, keeping everything together, providing regular distraction in the form of day trips. Although only two years older than Grace she seemed so much more grown up and worldly-wise; the big sister she’d always wanted. She came over nearly every day, taking them out in the car (Grace couldn’t even drive) to visit parks and gardens and markets. Grace recalls one afternoon in the Botanical Gardens: the yellow of Marilyn’s dress, the red of her lipstick, the rich greens of the tropical foliage, the vivid flowers. The crystal sunlight illuminating everything. She remembers a troupe of long-tailed monkeys gathering around them, looking vaguely threatening as they began to chatter. Despite Marilyn’s assurances that the monkeys were harmless, Paul clung to his mother’s legs, whimpering, while Hannah walked boldly up to them and started throwing peanuts from the paper cone in her hand.

‘May I hold him?’ Marilyn had said, reaching over to take Jason from Grace’s embrace. ‘Norman and I can’t have any,’ she said, placing her lips against the downy warmth of his head.

SHE GETS OUT
of bed around midday and makes her way to the bathroom; starts the shower going and watches her
reflection in the mirror ghost over with condensation. She tries weighing her grief against Marilyn’s: never to have a child, or to have one and bury her seventeen years later. She writes the word HELL on the clouded glass and pauses to look at it, before adding an O and then rubbing out the entire word with a squeak of her right hand.

Undressing and stepping under the water, she remembers the very first shower she ever took was in Singapore. Remembers sitting down in it for what seemed like hours, calmly crying, hardly able to believe Pete was dead.

Once dressed, she sets about cleaning the place. With Elvis playing she loads the washing machine, then fills the sink and tackles the banquet of dishes; gathers up half a dozen teacups from all over the boat, some of the older ones looking distinctly unsavoury.

Once everything is washed, dried and put away, she empties the ashtrays, wipes all the surfaces; scours the two-ring hob. Goes over the whole place with the vacuum cleaner. Finally she empties the Thetford toilet cassette. Taking the clean, damp bedding from the machine, she folds it and bags it and leaves for the launderette to dry it.

As she’s passing Luke and Linden’s boat she hears an almighty scream coming from inside. ‘FUCKING SHIT! FUCK! CUNT! FUCKING FUCK!’

It’s a man’s voice. Stepping aboard, she calls out a tentative, ‘Hello?’

Let it please be him.

The door opens and there he is, and time snaps like a branch against the weight of a falling body. Her falling body. Like a trick of the mind, there he is; this is him, the man who ripped her heart to shreds – more like Pete than even his own sons ever were – standing before her, wearing nothing but a pair of red shorts, holding up his left hand, which is bleeding.

‘I cut myself,’ he says in a gentle Scottish drawl, breaking the spell she’d been under. Putting down the laundry bags, she leads him back inside and to the sink and runs the cold tap over the cut to clean it; assesses the damage. Neither of them says a word. He smells, not unpleasantly, of sweat, and his body radiates incredible heat. It’s like having
him
there in front of her. Though this one is fairer, she decides; and the eyes are a lighter green, with a gaze that seems to penetrate to the sleeping places of her soul and awaken them.

‘I was opening a can of baked beans,’ he says. ‘They’re clearly bad for you.’

It is only a small cut; the blood had made it look much worse. But it is right across the knuckle of his index finger. She says, ‘Do you have any plasters?’ and he shrugs.

‘I don’t know.’

So, while he stands there with a paper towel pressed against the wound, she rummages through her handbag and unearths a box of Elastoplast, her mind and heart racing, her sense of reality displaced entirely.

As she puts the plaster on his finger, he says, in that nutbrown voice, ‘What’s your name, Florence Nightingale?’

‘I’m Grace.’

‘You’re Grace! Lovely to meet you. I’m Luke. Sorry I wasn’t here last night. I was a bit worse for wear – crashed at a mate’s.’

She wonders whether he knows how much the worse for wear
she’d
been last night. She hopes not. He asks if she’d like a cup of tea.

‘Well, I was on my way to the launderette,’ she says, hardly believing her luck, ‘but go on, I’ll have a quick cuppa.’

‘Take a seat. Sorry about the mess.’

The boat looks the way hers had that morning. He lifts an item of clothing from the nearest seat and she sits down, taking in the walls and the wooden furniture all painted with flowers and wreaths and butterflies, figures dancing against olive green; a few posters and flyers are stuck here and there. Red gingham curtains at the windows.

He says, ‘Apologies if you heard me swearing.’

‘I think you were entitled to turn the air blue, given the circumstances. I know I would’ve done.’

Round his neck is a string of small seashells. She watches the way the muscles in his arms move as he rolls a cigarette and licks the edge of the paper with the tip of his tongue.

‘Is it OK to smoke inside?’ she says.

‘Be my guest.’

‘My husband doesn’t allow it inside the boat,’ she says, removing the packet from her bag. The kettle clicks off and when he turns to make the tea she notices on his back a blue-inked Icarus, tumbling in a scatter of feathers, his wings buckling beneath him.

‘What a beautiful tattoo,’ she says.

‘Thanks. I designed it myself.’

She stares out of the window, giddy and excited, lost for words. Walking over with the tea, he points to the net curtain hanging in the window beside her, and says, ‘I made that.’ She’d been looking through it, not at it, so she takes in the detail of the curtain’s pattern: a winged phallus, repeated over and over. ‘I studied lace-making when I was in Nottingham,’ he says, placing the mugs down, wincing a little from the pain of the cut. ‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s a bit rude,’ she says with a smile, and he says,

‘I’ve given it to Given,’ then, laughing at the unintentional pun, ‘That’s the guy who owns the boat.’

‘Yes, Linden told me.’

She notes, absent-mindedly, that he has less chest hair than Pete.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asks. ‘Lind said you were supposed to sit for her today but weren’t feeling too bright.’

‘I was a bit hungover. I’m not used to drinking.’

‘Me too. The hangover bit, I mean, not the not used to drinking,’ he says with a laugh. ‘I am Scottish, after all.’

‘I feel much better now,’ she replies, taking a sip of tea.

‘We’ll have to arrange another time for you to come over before we leave on Sunday,’ he says, and she is momentarily panicked. Luke and Linden are leaving. Gordon will be coming home. What will she do with the rest of her life?

‘Are you coming to the private view tomorrow?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I thought I might.’

This might not be happening. She’s scared to let it be real.

‘I’ll be performing a blood work,’ he says, ‘so I hope you’re not squeamish.’

‘I’ve had three kids – I’m not squeamish. What’s a blood work?’

‘There’ll be blood – my blood – in the performance. I don’t want to give much more away.’

‘So were you rehearsing just before I arrived?’ she says with a smile, and he gives a quick laugh which makes her heart pirouette.

She notices the ladder of delicate scars on his forearms, a pale arithmetic of lines in the skin, and thinks about the kind of person that would do a thing like that.

Blood work.

Her mobile phone begins to ring and she removes it from her bag. It’s Gordon. She puts it on silent before dropping it back into the bag. He looks so much like Pete and yet his voice is so unlike Pete’s that her senses
feel scrambled, as if everything in her life is suddenly happening all at once, past and present collapsing into a single fraction of a second, a tiny particle of time and space so explosive it could kill. She feels the sudden need to get away and put some distance between herself and this scarred young man. Standing up, all afluster, she says, ‘Anyway, I’d best get to the launderette; these sheets won’t dry themselves. Lovely to meet you. Thanks for the tea.’

‘Thanks for the medical assistance!’ he says. ‘See you Thursday.’

At the launderette, she stuffs the bedding into a machine and feeds it five 20p coins. She looks at her phone. Three missed calls from Gordon. As she sits there, with her back against the warm glass, listening to the metallic rumble of the drum and the soft, rotating fall of the fabric within, she wonders if she’ll have the courage to leave this one. She knows all too well that thinking about it is one thing; doing it, another.

Gordon rings again, and this time she answers it. ‘Checking up on the patient?’

‘I just thought I’d see how you’re doing.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘What are you up to?’

‘I’m at the launderette.’

She asks how the fishing is going but doesn’t really listen to his reply. She steps outside on to the street and starts pacing up and down. Erupting within her are words she needs to say.

Interrupting him, she says, ‘I can’t do this any more, Gordon.’

‘What do you mean? Do what?’

‘I can’t keep pretending I’m fine, when I’m not.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m terrified you’re going to have me locked up again.’

‘I didn’t have you locked up! You weren’t well.’

‘I was grieving for my daughter.’

‘You were unwell, and you got better.’

‘I didn’t get better. They just stitched me back together. You don’t recover from that kind of loss. You just can’t. Ever. Don’t you understand?’ She can feel tears welling as her voice begins to crack.

‘I lost her too, Grace,’ he says, ‘Anyway, I’m not going to lock you up. I just want you to be happy.’

‘That’s just it, though – I’m not happy. I can’t go on like this. I’m sorry.’

‘And that’s why you should see a doctor. You need help.’

The need to cry wanes before any tears can come. She says, ‘I don’t need help. I know what’s making me unhappy. Being here, with you.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘I do. I’m sorry.’

‘And what would make you happy?’ he says, an edge to his voice.

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. ‘That’s just it – I don’t know. All I know is I don’t want this. Not
any more. I’m sorry, Gordon. Please don’t be angry.’
I should never have married you
.

He says, ‘You can’t leave me, just like that.’

‘I’ve made up my mind; there’s nothing to discuss,’ she says. An idea forms in her thoughts. ‘I’m going to stay with Jason for a while. I won’t be here when you get back, but I’ll call you to discuss the practicalities.’

She sounds so calm it surprises her, wondering if she seems too insensitive and deciding it doesn’t matter. It had to be done.

‘Grace, please don’t leave!’

‘I’m sorry. I’m not trying to hurt you, and I’m not crazy; I just need something else, something different. Something that feels like me.’

‘You’re not making any sense.’

She hangs up, not quite believing she’s actually said those words. Stepping back inside the launderette, she thinks,
So now what?
She removes the dry sheets from the machine, folds them and bags them, suddenly fired up with a sense of purpose. She walks to the bench in the churchyard and calls Jason. When he doesn’t pick up she leaves a voicemail, telling him she’ll be arriving in Manchester on Friday. Here at least is a plan, somewhere to be while she thinks about what to do next.