Ghosted, p.24
Ghosted, page 24
‘Are you keeping track of what day it is?’ she asks. ‘In 2019, I mean.’
‘Yeah. Only by living my seven-day cycle. That way I always kind of know what Ariel’s doing too, somewhere out there.’
‘You do love her.’
‘I mean, she needs to meet someone with prospects.’ If I had tears, I’d be close to crying right now.
‘Oh, Joe!’
‘Pathetic, right?’
Lara hugs me, and I take a lot of comfort from the fact that we have a shared eternity. I don’t want to talk about myself any more, so I ask about Josh, and sit back and let her talk all the way to Reading.
I crash Mum’s dojo. She drives me home for emergency medical care. I take comfort from her too. I can do this. I have to. My eternity is, at least, going to be populated by the best people.
When we’re about halfway home, I say, ‘I met a girl, Mum. It’s a bit complicated, but I really love her.’
She lights up. She looks so happy that it really is as if someone switched a light on inside her body.
‘Joe! That’s wonderful. Where does she live? Does she go to your school?’
I tell her all about Ariel, escaping into a fantasy in which everything is straightforward. Yes, she goes to my school and she’s in the year above. I tell Mum where she lives. That she has an older sister who’s having a baby. That her mother died and her father left. Mum says all the right things and instructs me to invite her over for dinner as soon as I’m feeling better, and I disappear into my imaginary world in which things are this clear cut. By the time we pull up outside Beachview I’m positively glowing.
Mum sends me into the mall to wait while she parks the car. I wish I wasn’t compelled to go and buy a drink that I don’t ever want. I decide to try to talk to the angry man today, to mix it up a bit.
I buy a can of Cherry Coke. I turn and bump into him. He says, ‘Fuck’s sake!’
I say, ‘Sorry.’ He tuts and strides away, so I follow.
He’s maybe about thirty, with curly dark hair like pubes, and he looks furious. He’s wearing a blue shirt and the kind of trousers people wear to work, and there’s some kind of ID on him that I can’t read. I run a bit to catch up.
‘Sorry I walked into you,’ I say, and he throws me an angry look.
‘I should’ve expected it,’ he says, ‘coming to a place like this. No class.’
‘Fuck you,’ I say.
‘You want to watch what you’re saying.’
He stops. We stare at each other. This is a seriously unpleasant man. I hate the way his eyes bore into mine. I turn and walk away. Everything about this feels very bad. I don’t think he would kill me for walking into him, but someone’s about to do it and he seems to hate me the most.
My heart is still pounding as I sit and wait to die. Ariel hasn’t been to see me once since I told her to stop, and I regret everything so much. I told her not to see me any more because I love her. I pushed her away because I love her. Even though I know it was the right thing to do, I often wish I could go back and unsay all of it.
I work so hard to be calm, and that man has messed with it. I mustn’t fall into a spiral of despair because if I let that happen I’ll wake up in it tomorrow, and everything will go to shit.
I take a piece of paper and a pen from my schoolbag. I have to distract myself from whatever that was, in his eyes. He is most definitely the only person I’ve met on any of my todays who looks like he’d happily turn round and kill me.
Does that mean he’s the main suspect?
I push him out of my head. He can do nothing but damage in there. I start writing without planning what I’m going to put down. I kind of think I’ll expand on my thoughts about the angry man, but when I look at the page this is what I’ve written:
Why I love Ariel
Kind and beautiful.
Clever.
She’s determined: I told her not to come any more, and she hated me saying it, but she hasn’t come back once, even though she knows where to find me and I wouldn’t be able to stop her.
I trust her.
She’s sad too – we understand each other.
She’s my friend.
The person I trust.
The one.
I met the person I’d want to spend the rest of my life with, twenty years after my death, and then I dumped her.
The worst thing in my universe isn’t the fact that I’m about to be murdered.
It’s the fact that I told the love of my life, the love of my afterlife, that I never wanted to see her again and she believed me.
Way to go, Joe.
I draw squiggles and little pictures round the edge, and savour the fact that, no matter what, I managed to fall in love.
39
5 September 2019
I got up early, knowing that I was too old to be scared on my first day at big school, but feeling absolutely fucking terrified. I had packed up everything I thought I was going to need (A4 paper, folders, lots and lots of different pens) and planned an outfit in what I was trialling as my new sixth-form style (long skirt, vintage trench coat, clumpy boots). I was meeting Izzy at nine because we were due at an orientation session at ten. Yet here I was, sitting downstairs, drinking coffee, at half past six. The baby hadn’t woken me: I’d done it myself.
Starting sixth-form college was another big step away from Joe. I wasn’t at his school any more and I was nearly two years older than him now. It was that thought that had woken me up and kept me awake.
I hadn’t seen him at all for nearly five months, ever since the day he told me not to visit, but I was wondering whether, perhaps, it would be OK if I went today. We hadn’t really ended things, and my anger and confusion had faded. I really wanted to see how he was. Whether he was even still there.
When exams finished, I found myself reintegrated with old and new friends. I spent the days with Izzy (who had broken up with Tally solely because she wanted to try dating), but also with Alice, Priya, Jack – who had settled into being a solid friend – and a whole group of new people, friends of friends, people from other schools, or who I’d just never spoken to before. I spent a lot of time just hanging around, sitting on the beach, drinking cider, savouring the feeling that I was kind of normal again. I’d even met a boy called Finn, a friend of friends. Nothing had happened between us, but I thought there was potential, if I wanted it. Finn wasn’t Joe, but he was real. He had curly hair and a surfy kind of aesthetic, and I liked him.
It had been almost impossible to make myself turn away from Joe and towards this real boy. That was why I hadn’t visited Joe all summer, not even when I’d been in Beachview with Zara and Coco. Not even to tell him about the baby. It was too hard to move on from him and I knew that if I saw him I’d be right back where I started.
I felt a constant low-level guilt, but it was tempered by the fact that this was his plan too. He’d been right all along: my life had come back into focus in the real world and I needed to live it. I was never going to solve the mystery of his disappearance after all this time, when even the police had failed. The last thing that had happened, in that respect, was that email from Lucas with the message from Troy, and I’d just sent a short reply thanking him for trying, and left it at that.
In July the most magical thing of all had happened: twelve days later than planned, on July the fourteenth, Rafael Joseph had burst into our lives, and now nothing was ever going be the same.
Sasha hadn’t been sure about the middle name at first because she knew I’d been interested in Joe Simpson and thought the name might bring bad luck. But I persuaded her, in the end, that it was silly to be superstitious, and since I’d been part-time looking after Zara and Coco all summer, and they’d spent many afternoons hanging out at our house, talking about the baby, she came round quickly. Raffy Joe was the best thing that had ever happened to us. I’d considered taking him to meet my Joe, but I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t gone to visit two weeks ago when I got my exam results either.
I knew that if I went back I’d never leave.
I put two pieces of bread into the toaster and checked the peanut-butter jar. There was just enough, and I went to the list stuck on the fridge and wrote PB on it. I’d been doing most of the shopping and general admin while Sasha was busy with Raffy, and that had been fine. Now that I had college I was going to have to be a bit more organized about it all, but it was definitely easier than being the one in charge of the baby.
I heard footsteps on the stairs, and turned to see Sasha in the kitchen doorway looking sleepy. I rushed over and took Raffy from her arms.
‘Hello, Raff,’ I said, and he looked at me with his serious face. Raffy had been born perfectly himself. He had thick black hair and huge dark-brown eyes, and when he smiled (a recent development) it was a wide cartoony smile that took up his whole face. It was Mum’s smile. He carried her inside him.
He stared at me for a few seconds, then bestowed his huge grin upon me.
‘Thanks,’ said Sasha, stumbling towards the kettle, yawning.
‘How was he last night?’
‘Shit. One day he’ll be a teenager and he’ll be sleeping all morning and I won’t be able to get him out of bed. Imagine.’
‘You will,’ I said to Raffy. ‘You’ll sleep all morning and Mum will be saying, “You treat this place like a hotel,” and all those things.’
‘Oh Christ, Arry!’ said Sasha, looking at my bag. ‘It’s your first day! Good luck. Have you got everything you need?’
‘Everything. And lots of things I don’t. And loads of time before I have to go.’
‘You show them. I mean, I know you will. You showed the world what Ariel Brown can do with your exam results, so of course you’ll show them now.’ She paused. ‘I’m not sure who they are, but anyway. The whole of the world outside this house, I guess.’
‘I’ll do my best to show them,’ I said. Sasha was right: although I hadn’t quite got all nines as I’d hoped, my results were close enough, and I was extremely proud of them. It had all come together at the last minute solely thanks to Joe knowing what was good for me better than I knew myself.
Maybe I would go and visit him later.
Raffy went purple in the face and started huffing dramatically. I laughed at him.
‘Are you doing a poo?’ I said as an unmistakable smell filled the room. ‘Don’t worry, Sash. I’ll change him.’
‘You are an angel. Coffee?’
‘Got one, thanks.’
‘Can I have a piece of your toast?’
‘Have both. Just put another one on for me, yeah?’
‘Sure.’
We still hadn’t heard from Dad. We’d made no effort to tell him about the baby, so he probably didn’t know that he was a grandfather, though he could have worked it out easily enough from the dates. When I occasionally thought about him, I pictured him in a new relationship up in Scotland, probably with a younger woman who’d put up with his moods.
I hated him, but he had no hold over me any more. He was a stranger and I sincerely expected never to see him again. I had tried once, when I sent him that email in March, but he’d never even replied.
I took Raffy into the bathroom and changed his nappy, expert at this now. I changed his onesie too as he definitely needed a fresh one. I put him into a bright green outfit that Ms D, or Florence as I was now supposed to call her, had given him.
‘There you go,’ I said. ‘All fragrant again. Fragrant and gorgeous and really quite neon.’
Sasha had made me some toast, and put another coffee next to my plate.
‘There you go,’ she said. ‘I got you a coffee because I couldn’t remember if you wanted one or not.
‘Thanks,’ I said. I’d drink it anyway.
She took the baby and sat on the sofa to breastfeed. Our house had been entirely baby orientated since the middle of July. It was hard for me to remember a time before Raffy. I sat and talked to my sister about nothing in particular, and then it was time to go to college. I laced up my boots and tried to prepare myself for this new world.
‘Good luck!’ said Sasha. ‘You look good. Studenty.’
At four o’clock I stood outside the Beachview room. I knew he was in there. I put my hand on the door, knowing it would take a second to push it open and see him.
If I saw him would I be able to leave? Would I mess up whatever equilibrium he had? Would it be a massive step back for both of us?
It was too much to risk. I walked away.
40
I wake early, leave a note and go to Bodmin. Leo isn’t there.
I walk up and down both platforms. He’s always right here. He knows which day I visit. I come once a week, every 2019 Thursday, just after calling in on Anna and Sasha, and he’s always waiting on the platform. It’s rude of him not to be here today.
I pause and force myself to get some perspective.
It’s not rude. I don’t own Leo. He’s allowed to go to the woods, or to his office at the stately home, or, of course, anywhere he wants. It’s not easy for us to keep track of the days, and for him to count up to when it’s been seven must be tricky. My novelty has worn off. I’ll just wander around, practising my Italian, until I find him.
Maybe another ghost has turned up.
That thought stops me in my tracks. A new ghost would be magical. It’s totally possible that someone from further down the line could have caught a train up here. A new person in my life would be incredible. Wild. Maybe it would be a girl.
It wouldn’t be the right girl.
I follow the path Leo takes into the woods and check each of his dens. They are all places he’s discovered over the years that were basically already there because whatever modifications he makes are gone by the morning. All the same, he spends some days building a magnificent tree house, like Lara with her knitting, knowing it’ll be gone the next day, but not caring.
I tramp through the woods, not feeling the cold, not noticing the mud. I start with his main den, the one he took me to the first time I came. He’s not up there. I go to the one in a hollow tree, the one at the top of a slope that he calls the Lookout, the one that’s almost in a hole in the ground down by the river. He’s nowhere.
I check the time. That took over an hour and I’m not sure what to do next. I visit the platform again, look in the cafe, under the seats in the ticket office.
It’s quite a long walk up to Lanhydrock House, and I take it slowly, wishing I could smell the air around me. It’s slightly warmer here than it is at home today, and I’m sure it would have that spring smell. There are things starting to unfurl all around me in these woods. Shoots are poking up through the earth. The leaves on the trees are mainly buds. I cross a little road and set off up a driveway that is so long that I can’t see the house at the end of it. The land around it is grassy and hilly. Everything is so beautiful.
I miss life. I wish I could see this spring turning into summer.
I walk round all the parts of the garden that are free to get into, but he’s not there. I pay a surprising number of pounds to get in, and ignore all the Victorian things, all the information about a family with ten children and a big fire, in my search for Leo. In the end I stop a woman wearing a National Trust uniform, and say, ‘Excuse me? I’m looking for Leo Chatterjee.’
‘Leo, you say,’ she says. She looks at me, interested. ‘He’s up in the nursery. Is he expecting you?’
Up in the nursery? What the heck? Leo never goes to work. That’s his thing. He hasn’t been for twenty years. What’s he doing in the nursery? I don’t even know if she means babies or plants.
‘Yes,’ I say. I try to remember what his job actually is. ‘I’m doing a project on conservation,’ I say, ‘and he’s going to help me.’
‘Then you’ll find him up the stairs.’ She gives me a set of instructions and I follow them, and end up in a perfect Victorian children’s nursery, with a row of little beds and a bookcase of old books, and Leo kneeling in the corner, wearing a dark blue National Trust shirt, checking something.
‘Leo!’ I say.
He looks up. ‘Hi there,’ he says. ‘Can I help?’
‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘Joe.’ He still looks confused. He is holding an old book and is clearly in the middle of packing it away. ‘I see you every week.’
His face is blank. I step closer and look at him, trying to work out if he’s messing with me, but he’s not.
Leo doesn’t know me.
‘Did you have a question about the house?’ he tries.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I have a question about why you don’t recognize me.’
‘I see,’ he says, and I can see that he’s wary. He stands up. ‘I’m sorry. I should clearly remember you but I’m afraid I don’t. Were you younger when we met? How can I help?’
I wait for the smallest flicker, but there’s nothing. I realize that he doesn’t even look the same. He’s more polished. Not only is he wearing his work uniform, but his hair is styled in a way it never normally is.
‘You really don’t know me,’ I say. I look at a doll sitting in a little chair. This place feels a bit creepy.
‘I do apologize,’ he says.
The man who has eleven different dens in the woods, who meditates on the train platform, who has filled his eternity by learning to walk on his hands and speak conversational Spanish is apologizing to me. He doesn’t know me at all.
This freaks me right out.
‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
I try to think of something else to add, but I can’t think of anything, and so I run out of the nursery, against the flow of the visitors, and outside. I have three pounds eighty left, so I buy a pot of tea in the cafe, just for the comfort of it, and wait, but nothing happens. After an hour or so I walk down to the station and catch the train back to Exeter and then home.
