Ghosted, p.19
Ghosted, page 19
It’s ten fifteen. ‘Yes!’
‘Gus or Joe?’
I am so happy that I want to dance. I do a little jig just because I can.
‘I’m Joe,’ I say.
‘She talks about you two all the time. It’s adorable. Have a seat. Want a glass of water?’
I shake my head. It’s nice not having to bother with that stuff.
The world’s slowest fifteen minutes crawl by, but I surf it on a wave of Mum talks about me all the time. Until yesterday I thought she’d forgotten us. Instead she’s boring people in Reading by going on about me and Gus. I guess there’s going to be a change in mood this evening when one of the boys she keeps banging on about disappears forever.
I look at the man, hoping that he’s not bored enough to check my mum’s date of birth on some list and realize that it’s not her birthday at all. He answers the phone and tells someone that the Saturday classes are usually full, but that they could turn up early and try their luck.
‘Not at school?’ he says, turning back to me.
‘Staff training day.’
After one million hours a door opens somewhere in the building, and the man says, ‘Here we go.’
I’m shaking from head to foot.
‘Claire!’ he yells. ‘Claire! You’re a dark horse. Thought you could get away without mentioning that it’s your birthday? You’ve got a special visitor.’
I hear the most familiar, perfect voice in the world saying, ‘Dan, what the hell are you –’ Then she comes round the corner and stops. ‘Joe!’
I am on my feet, and I run right into her and hug her. I feel her arms closing round me. I am ten, seven, two, a baby, a foetus. I am just a child who really, really needs his mum.
‘Oh, Joe,’ she says. ‘Joe, what’s happened? Are Dad and Gus OK? What’s going on?’
‘They’re fine.’ I lower my voice. ‘Sorry, you have to pretend it’s your birthday.’ I thrust out the flowers and chocolates and she takes them.
‘Thank you!’ she says loudly. ‘You didn’t need to do this!’ She puts it all down on the table. ‘What’s happening?’ she says quietly.
‘Can we go somewhere and talk? Just while you’re on your break?’
She steps back and disentangles us a bit. ‘Of course. Come on. Dan? I’m just going to have to skip out of a bit of the next session, OK? Can you tell Nicki?’
Mum manages not to say anything until we’re at the nearest cafe, which is a regular greasy-spoon-type place and very un-Mum. I just keep looking at her, relieved beyond belief to have found her. I’d forgotten what she really looks like. I’d replaced her with a slightly different version, a mother who’d go off to India for twenty years without me. Real Mum has long hair that’s going grey. She’s wearing leggings and a T-shirt with her coat over the top, and no make-up. Above all, she looks incredibly worried.
‘What’s happening, Joe?’ she says as we sit down. ‘How worried do I need to be?’
‘Oh, Mum,’ I say. ‘I just really needed to see you. I’m so scared about something that’s going to happen tonight. And I needed to see you one more time before I …’ I hesitate, edit out the word die. ‘Go.’
‘Oh, Joseph.’ She puts her hand over mine. ‘Look, you don’t have to go on the French trip if it’s going to bother you this much. Honestly – it doesn’t matter in the scheme of things. Not at all. It’s not worth getting worked up about it. Does Dad know you’re not at school?’ I shake my head. I bought myself time today by making a phone call to school. ‘Then I’d better call him. Let’s get you home. My course finishes tomorrow, but I can come home with you today. I’ll skip the rest of today’s session and do a day trip back here tomorrow. I’m sure they’ll let me have the certificate anyway. I’ll finish my Sanskrit this evening.’
She stares into my eyes with such intensity that for a moment I think she knows everything. I’m warm inside. Happy. She didn’t leave us. She’s still with Dad. I know that they’ll split up later, that Dad will remarry, but right now, today, they’re happy with each other.
‘Can we go home now?’
‘Give me a few minutes to sort it out with Dan and Nicki. And then we’ll need to walk down to the hotel to get my stuff and the car.’
‘Thank you, Mum. I’m sorry. This is probably the first time you’ve been able to do something like this for years. I’m sorry for spoiling it.’
She laughs, then reaches over and ruffles my hair. ‘Don’t be silly. If you were messing around I’d have sent you home. But a mother knows, and I know that this is serious. You can tell when you have to prioritize your kid’s well-being above all else, and this is one of those times. Maybe we can talk properly in the car? That’s often a good way of doing it.’
I nod. ‘It’s going to sound mental,’ I warn her.
‘I can do mental,’ she says. ‘I, of all people, know how to do that.’
She looks at the road and drives and listens, and I find myself telling her every single bit of it. I tell her I’ve been living the same day for more than twenty years. I tell her about meeting Ariel. I tell her about all the future things, and about Lara, and about Gus and Abby and the girls. I tell her that in 2019 she lives mainly in India, just coming back to visit her granddaughters, and that Dad’s married to my French teacher. I tell her that no one has any idea what happened to me.
She listens without saying anything except, ‘Mmm,’ and other sounds along those lines. She looks straight ahead at the road, apart from the odd quick glance when she imagines I’m not looking. I know she thinks I’m having a breakdown, but I don’t care. It’s just lovely to say it all, from beginning to end, to someone who’s in a position where she has to sit and listen. She doesn’t try to shut me off, or stop me. She just hears me out.
When I’ve said every bit of it, I wait for a reply. I know what it’s going to be, and I’m right. She gently tells me that I shouldn’t go to France, and that they’re going to get me help. ‘We’ll start off by getting an emergency doctor’s appointment, and take it from there.’
I don’t care. I knew I was going to end up at Beachview, but this time I get to go almost all the way to Ariel with my mum.
31
Joe was happier than I’d seen him for ages. He’d found his mum. I could tell that he didn’t really want to talk about it. He just said that he’d tracked her down and got her to bring him back to Devon. He’d said goodbye to her forever just outside Beachview, and he was plainly still in shock, mostly at the fact that for years and years he’d assumed that she’d walked away because she didn’t love him enough, but that he’d been completely wrong about all of it.
‘You sit down,’ I said, ‘and just let me talk at you. You can sit there and ignore me if you want. I wish I could give you a hug.’
‘Me too,’ he said.
‘So.’ I took the pieces of paper out of my bag and spread them out on the floor. ‘Can you see these?’
‘No. Yes. I think I can only see them when you’re touching them.’
‘Oh, that’s weird!’
We experimented and discovered that yes, he could only see them when I was touching them.
I put my hand on the first one. ‘So. This one is the timeline.’ I put a finger on the other. ‘This one’s my typed-up list of everyone interesting, with my research filled in. I’ve taken off the people who I was sure weren’t relevant and focused on these ones.’
I held it out.
LUCAS INGLEBY: Lives in London. Works in accounts. Found his home address on the open register for the electoral roll. His mum Maria Ingleby works at Greentrees Primary School (not Z & C’s school).
Gus said someone was hiding something and I think he was talking about Lucas. Joe was pretty dismissive and mean to him. Does that make him the prime suspect? He’s the best we’ve got. GO AND FIND HIM IN LONDON ON SATURDAY.
MARCO MANCINI: Lives between London, LA and Rome, works in film. Could track him down at his office possibly if he’s in London. No home address, social media all private, but cover photos suggest a husband. Added him on FB and Insta, but he hasn’t responded.
TROY HENRY: Nothing on the internet after 2010, but posted about moving to France before that. His parents Sheila and Piet still live here.
JEMIMA SAUNDERS: Still lives here, has three kids, sells baby clothes on Etsy, looks happy and lovely. Easiest to track down: I’ve ordered something from her Etsy store.
GUS & FAMILY: Still here. Contact firmly made.
JASPER SIMPSON/MRS DUPONT (FLORENCE DUKE): Here. Contact unexpectedly established.
CLAIRE SIMPSON: All we know is that she lives in India and comes back a couple of times a year to see the girls. Can’t find her at all online as her name is too common, no matter what search terms I try. She probably lives deliberately offline.
ANGRY GUY AT BEACHVIEW: No idea who he is – Joe to take a photo?
‘It’s not much,’ I admitted.
‘I keep coming back to Lucas too,’ Joe said. He looked at the door. ‘Not that I think he’s going to crash through there and kill me. But you’re right – I was horrible to him. More than I realized. We could have got into a fight maybe, and he might have punched me in the head without meaning to kill me. And if Gus thought he was hiding something, then maybe that implies he was acting oddly? Guiltily?’
‘Maybe? But where’s your body?’
He sighed. ‘The eternal mystery. In the ocean. It has to be.’
Poor Joe. I longed with all my heart to be able to comfort him properly.
‘I love you, Joe,’ I said.
I stopped, shocked at myself. I did love him, but I hadn’t intended to say it. Did I love him romantically? Or like a brother? I knew the answer, but I tried very hard to mean it platonically. Way to go, Ariel. Fall in love with a ghost and accidentally tell him.
I wondered what it would have felt like to put my hand on his cheek. I wondered what he would have smelled like.
‘I love you too, Ariel,’ he said as if it was super straightforward. ‘Of course I do. I absolutely adore you. You’re everything.’
‘I wish …’ I stopped. None of this was going to make anything better. ‘Well, you know. I wish everything. I won’t give up on you, Joe.’
He didn’t reply. He just looked back at my piece of paper and sighed.
I took my hand off it to stop him reading it, and paced up and down, as far as the tiny room allowed. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Like it says there, I’m going to London tomorrow. Izzy’s coming with me. She doesn’t know this yet, but we’re going to start off by going to Lucas’s address. It’s Saturday. Hopefully he’ll be home. OK? That’s a concrete thing, and I’m going to do it. I wish we could get on Lara’s train because I’d like to find out whether I can see her, but we can’t go that early, and also that train doesn’t exist on a Saturday. I did think about it, though.’
Joe smiled, and I could see that it was forced.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Joe, talk to me.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s seeing your mum?’
‘It changes everything. I haven’t seen her for twenty years and now I’ve found her. Ariel, I think I’m going to go to Bodmin tomorrow, to find that guy Lara told me about. Maybe I’ll see you at the station. But after that I might just go to Reading every day. If I can make a day when I see Dad, Gus, Troy, Mum, Lara and you then I think that’s the best day I can possibly have. And I’m going to learn a language and an instrument and how to do backflips.’ He gave a sad little smile. ‘I’ve got eternity. Might as well use it.’
‘Then do that,’ I said. ‘But how do you fit Troy into that day? And actually you didn’t even see your dad and Gus today, did you?’
‘That’s true,’ he says. ‘Maybe I’ll just make two days that I live over and over, in rotation. And whenever I see Lucas I’m going to be incredibly nice to him. That might change something. You never know.’
I remembered how horrible Joe had been to Lucas, how much I’d hated it. I nodded.
‘You never know,’ I said.
I was walking home with my headphones in and Different Class playing because it was the sound of Joe’s day, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I looked round, I was surprised to see Jack Lockett. His hair was falling over his face, and he smiled shyly and tucked it behind his ear.
‘Hey,’ I said, grinning at him, taking out an earphone.
‘Can I walk with you a bit?’ He was taller than me, but shorter than Joe, and he was carrying a skateboard. I supposed I hadn’t heard him approach on it because my music was so loud.
‘Course!’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, I’m OK,’ he said. ‘What about you, though? I feel like I haven’t seen you for ages, Ariel. I just. You know.’ He looked adorably awkward. ‘I guess I hope you’re OK.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Truly, Jack, I am OK. I’m doing much better than I was before. I know I did sort of fall apart.’
‘Hey. Who wouldn’t?’
Jack was objectively gorgeous. And he was lovely, and he was into me. We had been the perfect couple for a while. I would always be incredibly fond of him.
If my heart hadn’t been entirely captured by Joe I would, I realized, be in a place to spend a bit of time with Jack again. He was thinking along the same lines, clearly, because he said, ‘Do you fancy hanging out sometime maybe?’
I nodded, then shook my head and said, ‘I’m not sure, Jack. Honestly. I really like you and I’d love to hang out as friends, but …’
His face closed and he took a step back.
‘Sure. Sorry. See you then,’ he said, and set off again on his skateboard.
I went home and told Sasha that I was going to Exeter with Izzy on Saturday, and she nodded without really listening. She was texting Jai, judging by the annoyance on her face. I started chopping vegetables for a stir-fry and waited until Sasha threw the phone down (carefully, on to a sofa cushion) and said, ‘Bastard!’
‘What?’ I said as mildly as I could.
‘He wants to be in the baby’s life. But not. And then he does. And then he doesn’t. He’ll support us financially, but not if we’re already OK for cash. I’ve never asked him for anything because it’s my decision to go through with this, but if he could stop changing his fucking mind that would be just GREAT.’
‘He’s an idiot.’ I shook a load of salt into the rice pan. I was still a bit exhilarated. I had turned down Jack because I loved Joe. If you squinted and made everything so blurry that you couldn’t see the inconvenient parts, my relationship with Joe was going incredibly well.
‘He’s just so annoying,’ said Sasha. ‘I’ve been kind of assuming that when he meets an actual baby that’s half made of him he’ll want to be a dad because that’s quite a thing.’
She sighed. ‘But then again he’s nineteen. I do know we were just messing around and we didn’t plan anything. This baby is my lifeline, not his. I don’t want him to marry me! I don’t even want him to be my boyfriend. I just want him to step up the tiniest bit for the baby’s sake. But he hasn’t told his parents. Can you imagine, Mermaid? I’m nearly six months’ pregnant, my mum’s dead, my dad’s left and I live with my little sister who cooks every night because she’s an angel, and we are fucking managing. And then there’s poor little Jai, who has both parents and several siblings, and none of them know that he’s going to be a dad. Given that all the money he earns comes from a summer holiday job selling ice cream, I don’t know how he’s planning to support us if he is, and I don’t care! I just want him to be there emotionally. I hate it that I have to be the one comforting him.’
She burst into noisy tears, and I turned the gas down and hugged her. I said soothing things without knowing if they were true or not. I told her that he certainly would come round, that it was one thing to freak out at an idea. ‘But you can’t freak out at an actual human,’ I said. ‘You’re right. When he sees his son, everything will change.’
‘We’re actual humans,’ she said. ‘We were babies once. And Dad freaked out at us. At me.’
‘Jai is better than Dad,’ I said, and at last she laughed.
‘The faintest praise,’ she said. ‘But you’re right.’
‘I wonder why Mum married him. And why he stuck around all that time.’
Sasha sighed. ‘I don’t think it does us much good to dwell on it. But I reckon he depended on her so much. Maybe in his way he loved her too much to be able to manage without her. He always wanted to move away, didn’t he? But Mum wouldn’t, and he never went on his own until she was gone.’
I shuddered.
‘He was horrible to Mum. Remember how he’d punch the wall next to her? That’s a toxic way of loving someone too much. I think he’s just a wanker.’
‘Yeah. Whatever else happens, we’ve always got that. A central truth.’
We smiled at each other. Everything felt a bit better. We ate the stir-fry, which was nice enough, and then finished all the chocolate we could find.
‘An actual baby, though,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘Can we go shopping yet?’
Sasha had been superstitious about not buying anything until it was nearly time for the birth, but now that she was pretty much six months pregnant I thought we might be able to start stocking up.
‘Soon.’ She grinned. ‘I think we could start with a Moses basket, and some tiny clothes. Take it from there. I mean, tiny clothes! This is real.’
‘Pram?’
‘Maybe just a sling to start with. We don’t need a car seat or anything like that. Since we don’t have a car.’
‘What about taxis?’
‘Ariel! How often do we get a taxi? Never.’
‘How about getting him home from the hospital?’
‘I don’t know.’
We didn’t really know anything, but it didn’t matter. We would work it out.
32
Bodmin station is in the middle of some trees, with nothing but a car park anywhere near it. It’s a nice place because nothing seems to happen here apart from trains.
