LOVE'S GHOST (a romance) (7 page)

I hadn’t had fun on a Saturday night for at least six months. Before then, I’d enjoyed going out. At the agency we’d often get invitations to soirées from photographers or people at advertising agencies. And I’d gone along to a fair few, even though some of them felt a little too much like work.

Russell had usually come along, too. But we were both just as happy snuggling up in front of the TV. I thought that when you found somebody who was as happy staying in with you as they were going out, you were set for life.
 

After Russell left, I felt less inclined to go to parties. But I was unhappy, too, sitting down in front of the television. I couldn’t find anything I wanted to watch. Romantic comedies made me cry. Cops shows made me impatient to find out the villain. Soaps made me rage.

It was the easy intimacy we’d had that I missed the most. Russell was the one person I didn’t have to try hard to impress, which was nice.

“You could always call me. You don’t have to wait for me to call you.”
 

It was Russell again. The one in my head. I was imagining him sitting in the armchair in the corner of the room. I didn’t want to imagine him, I wasn’t in the mood, so I stood up and walked into the kitchen.

What should I have for dinner?
I asked myself. Even the smallest decisions were proving difficult. I didn’t want anything too heavy. I’d had crab fishcakes for lunch. It wasn’t a lot, but I still didn’t feel like eating several hours later. There was a box of eggs on the shelf. I could scramble them and pour baked beans poured over the top. It was what I cooked when I needed something warm and comforting.

“Well, you could.” He was in the kitchen now, standing by the washing machine. I didn’t want to start up a conversation. Not now. So I pretended he wasn’t there, which he wasn’t.
 

Oh, how I missed him.

Scrambled eggs and beans on toast watching
Strictly
would do nicely I finally decided. So I set about cooking them. The simple things in life are so reliable. They are if you don’t overcook the eggs. I don’t like runny scrambled eggs, but this time I’d gone the other way — the eggs were dry. I hate scrambled eggs that are too dry. The sauce from the baked beans helped, but still they didn’t look good.

“I do miss your scrambled eggs. You make fantastic scrambled eggs.” Russell gave me a wry smile. “Most of the time.” He was back in the armchair. I couldn’t get rid of him. “Although those look a little crispy.”

I still didn’t reply to him: not in my mind, and not out loud. They were just scrambled eggs, I told myself. It didn’t matter. But these eggs seemed like the most important thing in the world.

I didn’t realise I was crying until a single tear made its way down to the corner of my mouth. I’d been trying to concentrate on the dancers on
Strictly
. A soap star was being whirled around in a waltz by a hunky pro. It was romance in motion.

It was the dance that made me cry, I told myself. I wasn’t going to fall into a slough of self-pity. But I had to put down the eggs and beans and go into the kitchen to find a tissue. After I’d blown my nose, I returned to the sofa. The eggs and beans tasted cold and nasty. I didn’t want to eat anymore. So I took the plate back into the kitchen, scraped off the remains and washed the crockery.

“Have one of those chocolate puddings you keep in the fridge for emergencies,” Russell suggested. He was behind me and I didn’t want to turn round. It was sound advice, though. I opened the fridge and took out the chocolate pudding.

Back on
Strictly
, an astrologer was being fired out of a canon, the main reason being to hide his lack of dancing talent. It was quite funny, but I just couldn’t laugh. It was going to be one of those evenings.

“Day or night, you only have to call,” said Russell. I stared at my phone lying on the coffee table. I could call him, I suppose. The evening couldn’t get much worse.
 

Could it?
 

Yes, it could. I knew that if I did call we’d have an awkward conversation and I wouldn’t say what I really wanted to say, which was to beg him to come back. And when the phone call ended, I’d be left with a feeling of emptiness so acute that it would feel like a real stomach bug.

There was another option. I could talk to Russell without calling him. I could have a conversation with the imaginary one. I could stop ignoring him and do what I’d done many times over the last few months — chat to him, my imagined version of him.

I didn’t know precisely why I did it. I’m sure a psychologist could come up with a reason, or several reasons. But it worked for me. I usually felt a little better afterwards. The only time it went wrong was when I imagined spending a romantic night with him. Bath night had been a disaster, had completely freaked me out.

I had to stop idealising him. A normal conversation would be fine. We could talk about things we normally talked about. I could ask him who he would be voting for in
Strictly
, not that he ever voted. He probably didn’t even watch it anymore. He’d probably pretended to enjoy it just to keep me quiet. He usually passed the time when it was on, and we were at home, on his iPad or reading a book about one of his sporting heroes.

“Why did you leave me, Russell?”

He didn’t reply. He just stared at the TV. Of course he did. He didn’t have an answer for
that
question. Or, to be more accurate,
I
didn’t have an answer.

Instead, Russell asked, “Why did you give your phone number to another man?”

“I was caught off guard.”

“Oh, come on. You wanted to give him your number the moment you saw him on the train.”

“If I thought there was the slightest chance that you would change your mind and we would get back together, I wouldn’t give my phone number to anybody.”

It had been six months since we broke up and five weeks since we’d met up for our fortnightly drink. The regular contact was Russell’s idea. But he hadn’t been in touch for those five weeks. A couple of text messages just before that, about nothing in particular, but he hadn’t mentioned meeting up for a drink again.
 

Conjuring up his image in my head was difficult. I was shocked at how difficult it was. It was only five weeks since I’d last seen him. But it was only a vague impression of him that I saw. I suppose that when you think of someone in your head they can’t be anything but vague.

“If you keep giving out your number to strange men,” he said, “then there’s no way we can get back together. You
do
want to get back together, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then you should act like you do.”

“For how long?” I asked him.

“For as long as it takes, surely?”

“And what about you?” I said. “You haven’t told me if you’ve found somebody else. To be frank, I find it odd that you haven’t suggested meeting up for a drink for five weeks. That can only mean you’ve found somebody else. Can’t it? What are you thinking right now? Are you thinking it’s less cruel if I don’t tell her that I’ve found somebody? Because it
isn’t
less cruel. If you told me at a pub, or even on the phone, at least I’d know. It would be hard. It would be devastating. But I’d know. Then I could grieve properly, instead of this sad state of affairs.”

He didn’t say anything immediately. What would he say, if he were really here? Would he flat out deny it? Even if it were true? Or would he come clean? That’s assuming that he
was
seeing somebody else and wasn’t just busy at work.

It’s funny how you can be with somebody for seven years and think you know them. But when you break up, you suddenly realise how little you did know them. I
should
know how he’d deal with this situation, I told myself, but I don’t.

I wanted him to speak. So he spoke. “I don’t
think
I’m seeing anybody.”

I scowled. “You don’t
think
you’re seeing anybody? What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t
think
I am.”

This was a stupid game I was playing with myself. It was torture. But I couldn’t stop. It was the next best thing to having the real Russell here. It was a nonsensical conversation to have with the imaginary version of my ex. But somehow, as well as torture, it was comforting. I still had a good idea of the tone of his voice in my head even if my memory of the exact shade of his hair was a little fuzzy.

I took the empty chocolate pudding container back into the kitchen and tossed it into the bin.

“We can talk anytime. Just like this,” Russell said.

“Yes, I know.”

“Anytime you want. Night or day.”

I went back to the sofa, curled up in a corner, and hugged a cushion. I stretched my arms right around it and held it close, as if it were a person, somebody special.

One of the dancing couples on
Strictly
finished their routine and received their marks. They weren’t good, a combination of threes and fours. That seemed sad, too. I started crying again.

SUNDAY MORNING AND I should have been lying in bed, listening to birds chirping at each other. But I was out on the roads, pounding the pavement, jogging.

I have to keep fit. Not just to keep the weight off. My mind gets sluggish if I don’t, and I do less. If it wasn’t for the endorphins produced by exercise there would be a real danger that pottering around the house would become a full-time occupation.

Luckily, the bank of the Thames is not far away, so I jog along there, to Kingston and back. Sometimes a little further if I’m feeling masochistic. I’ve never enjoyed jogging. I have to listen to music or a talking book. If I don’t do either of these, I listen to my breathing, which sounds like I’m dying.
 

It was a beautiful morning, the early morning mist rising off the river. Dog walkers passed me by, and the funny little coot birds swam back and forth with twigs in their mouth, busying themselves building their nests next to the boat jetties.

I was listening to Coldplay at the time. I’d been jogging for about half an hour. I’d reached, and gone beyond, Kingston Bridge, and was level with the tennis courts.
 

That’s when my phone rang.
 

I love the modern world and hate it at the same time. I use my phone as an audio player when jogging. If the phone rings, I can push a button on my headphones to answer it. But I have to answer it without knowing who it is. I don’t like doing that. I just don’t like going into a conversation blind. It throws me. Caller ID on phones is such a blessing but I can’t read the caller ID if I’m jogging.
 

And if I stop jogging to look, I have to untuck the phone from my jogging tights. It’s a pain to extricate it, and dogs start barking when I do. Anyway, by the time I’ve hit the answer button doing it that way, it’s usually switched to voicemail. And that’s another thing I hate — missing calls.

So the choice is this: hit the button and answer the unknown caller, or let it go to voicemail and worry that I’ve missed somebody important. I know, it’s difficult being me.

But who calls on a Sunday morning? It might be my mother. But she’s more of a Saturday morning person. And Dad would be playing golf. It wouldn’t be Emily checking on me, would it?

As much as it pained me, I decided not to answer the call and left it to go to voicemail. Oh, I hate that. I missed out on a job once because of stupid voicemail.

My irritation extended to the track that was playing. I wanted to move on from Coldplay’s
UFO
to their
Princess of China.
I pressed the button on my headphones to move the track along.

“Hello?”

That wasn’t the sound of Chris Martin singing in my ear.

“Hello? Fay?”

It was Carl. Damn it, the call hadn’t been disconnected.

“Hi,” I said.

“Did I interrupt something?”

“I’m out jogging.”

“Good. Hey, listen. I was wondering if you wanted to meet up for lunch this afternoon.” Then, referring to Emily’s remark of yesterday, he joked, “Because I know you hate Sundays.”

I smiled, but realised he couldn’t see my smile on the other end of a phone line, so there would just be silence at his end. The obvious way to fill this silence was to laugh at his joke. So I did, a little. But it was so delayed that it probably sounded sarcastic.

“About one o’clock?”

“Okay. Yes. Thank you.”
 

I said it before I’d thought about it. When my thoughts finally caught up with my mouth, I regretted speaking. I didn’t want to go on a date. I know not all meetings between men and women are dates. But unless this guy had a morbid anthropological interest in the romantically distressed, this was a date.

“No,” I said. “No thanks.” Contradicting my first answer.

There was silence at the other end of the line. Then he said, “Some people say that in 1962 the world avoided nuclear annihilation because President Kennedy acted on the first communique from First Secretary Krushchev and ignored the second. I’m going to take his lead and ignore your second answer.”

I’d never had somebody use the Cuban missile crisis when asking me out before. It was a novelty. But the thought of going on a date still filled me with fear. I should be honest with him, I thought. Give him the cold shower of my current position.

“Look, Carl, it’s very kind of you, but I’m on a break with my boyfriend. So I’m not in the mood for dating.”

There was another pause at the other end of the line.

“Fay.”

“Yes?”

“What else will you do today? Be honest with me.”

I couldn’t be honest with him. If I told him the truth, the list of things would be so mundane he would scoff at his own pursuit of me. I couldn’t tell him that I would go home, make a cheese sandwich for lunch, clean the bathroom, and watch the most mindless movie in my collection.

So I said, “Oh, just stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Yes.”

“We spend a lot of time dead, Fay. I don’t know your emotional state. You might be grieving for your man, you might just be confused. All I’m offering you is lunch. The chance to meet and talk to somebody you haven’t met before — isn’t that one of the wonderful things we can do while alive? Meet new people? See this strange world through somebody else’s eyes? I won’t try and kiss you. I won’t even bring flowers. I won’t compliment you. We can talk about your boyfriend if you like. But however well we get on, or not, it’s got to be better than cleaning the house, hasn’t it?”