Ghosted, p.9
Ghosted, page 9
It sounded crap (and contained lies), but, from what I’d read in Abby’s profile, she might go for that kind of thing. Mums probably loved friendly girls who’d play with their kids and had Disney names. I would print it at school tomorrow, just one copy, and then I’d find their address and put it through their letterbox.
On Saturday morning I woke late and scrolled further and further back through Abby’s Insta until I found that, back when Mum was still alive, she had posted a photograph with the caption: I’ll never take this view for granted .
The picture looked as if it had been taken from an upstairs window. There was a distant sea horizon, a leafy tree in the garden, and between the two, I was almost sure, was the park with the cricket pitch. The whole thing was framed by pink curtains.
I was looking at the view from Gus and Abby’s window.
Game on. If they still lived in that house I was coming for them. My visit to Joe was a fluster of plans and possibilities, and I promised to report straight back on Sunday.
Early on Sunday morning I crept out of the house, leaving a note to say I’d gone for a walk to clear my head. I narrowed it down to five houses by walking along the road next to the cricket pitch twice. Then I sat on a bench across the field, wrapped in my warmest coat and scarf, and pretended to play on my phone until I saw actual Gus coming out of number five and setting off for a run.
I tried to get my head round the fact that this man was two years older than Joe, who was a year younger than me, but that at the same time he was approximately twenty-one years older than I was. He was middle-aged. He had lived without his brother for twenty years, which was five years longer than he’d lived with him. I was older now than Joe had ever been, would ever be, and I was moving away from him every second.
Joe should have been thirty-five. The reality hit me properly for the first time. The boy I liked, the boy who was in Year Ten, was thirty-five. That was all kinds of icky.
I rearranged my hair and made a pouty face, while holding up my phone and taking a photo of Gus. It wasn’t a good picture, but it was recognizable.
As soon as he was out of sight I pulled together all my brave atoms and walked up the garden path to number five. I saw one of those red-and-yellow plastic cars that little kids play in, on its side in the gravelly front garden. It looked old. Maybe it had once been Joe’s.
I looked up and saw pink curtains at the upstairs window.
I pushed the flyer through the blue door and walked away fast, trembling. I went home via the supermarket, bought lots of fresh vegetables and cooked a huge soup for Sasha and the baby and me.
Then I realized that I couldn’t meet Joe today, even though I’d promised I would. It was Sunday, and the mall closed at four. I hated knowing that I couldn’t chat to him. I missed him. I hated, most of all, the fact that he would be waiting for me, that the only person he could really talk to wasn’t going to show up.
I sent him silent apologies, and hoped he wouldn’t think I’d abandoned him forever.
16
I wake up in the usual way. I write down everything while I’m still half in the dream, and stare at the words.
I’m dead. It is 2019. Every day is this day. Ariel from the future in cupboard at B/view. Meet after school.
YOU ARE NOT SCARED OF THE FRENCH EXCHANGE.
YOU ARE SCARED BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO DIE TODAY.
The French exchange! That’s why I’m scared. My heart is pounding so hard I feel like it’s going to knock the house down around me, and somehow I don’t think it would matter if it did. I really, really don’t want to go to France. Why, though? And why did I write that note saying I’m not scared of it when I am?
Why did I say I’m going to die? I shudder. Stupid dreams.
I check myself out in the mirror. I seem normal. I think I do. My hair is tangled, sticking up all over the place. But it’s me, for sure. Joe Simpson, reporting for duty.
‘Pull yourself together,’ I say out loud, then see Gus in the doorway looking at me pityingly.
In the middle of morning registration I look round at everyone and realize that I’m never going to go on the French exchange, but I don’t know why I think that. It must be an echo of my dream: if I was dead then I couldn’t go to France. I shake my head, try to send those thoughts away. I take the piss out of Lucas, which makes me feel a bit better for a moment, and hang out with Troy, who’s a bit annoyed with me because he thinks I stole his trophy, but I pretend I didn’t.
I run into town after school, and buy a can of Tab. I walk into a man and he’s angry. I tell him to fuck off under my breath and he calls me a little tosser.
As soon as I touch the door of the secret room I know I’m going to see Ariel and then I remember all of it.
I see Ariel every day.
I go into the room and wait. I close my eyes and feel myself disappearing into the horror of my existence. The horror is that I don’t exist, yet here I am. The horror is the fact that I live the same day every day. That nothing I thought about myself today was true. I fight, as if I had any kind of power to reject it. Ariel is the only one who understands.
I wait. The walls seem to be closer together than usual, and moving inwards so slowly that you can’t see it, but you can feel it.
I wonder if it matters that I forget everything about myself from one day to the next. It’s probably better to forget than it would be to remember. I’m not sure how I’d get through a day if I knew what that day actually was.
I sigh. It’s better not to know, but I need to try to remember. I should be trying to work out what happened to me. I’m supposed to be telling Ariel every detail of my last day, but it’s already fading. It’s slightly different every time. It must be.
I could write things down. I could try to leave myself a clue, but I have no idea how to do it, beyond sleeping with a pen and paper beside the bed and scrawling it all down the moment I wake up, and I seem to be doing that already with my maths book.
I think about that detail because it’s easier than the other stuff. It’s everywhere, though. The words are on every wall of this room. They are lit up, neon. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE, they say. TODAY. RIGHT NOW. I see them everywhere I look. If I don’t die then I’ll vanish for twenty years. There seems to be some kind of life after death, but it has taken me twenty years even to notice that I’m living the same day over and over again. I think my afterlife involves me going to school every day forever, around seven thousand three hundred times so far, and if I’d lived all those days properly I’d be thirty-five, but in fact I’m still fifteen.
Maybe I’ve gone to hell. This could be my personal, specially tailored purgatory: I am sitting in a little room on my own, knowing that I’ll always be fifteen, waiting for my only friend, who should be here by now but isn’t, and for the other thing. The bad one. Meanwhile the millennium bug won’t happen, but climate change is worse than we expect, and the world’s politics have gone unthinkably weird, and I will never be a part of the world in which those things happen.
Ariel told me Gus has children. That comes back in a flash.
She had nearly found his address. She was going to go there today.
I stare at the door and feel myself spiralling out of control. I wait and wait for Ariel, but she doesn’t arrive, and after a while I realize that it’s five o’clock, and she’s not going to come.
She’s all I have. What if she’s ill? What if she has died too? Maybe she’s decided to stop coming to see me. She might have thought that she imagined me and that it was time to pull herself together for her sister’s baby.
I tremble. I stand up on the little bench and jump off. It doesn’t hurt. I throw myself down, making an effort not to put my hands out, and land face first. It still doesn’t hurt. I bite my arm. Nothing. I punch my nose until it should bleed, but no blood comes out. I headbutt the wall again and again and again. It hurts in the end. Thank God.
I imagine Gus waiting for me to come home tonight. I wonder when he’ll stop being annoyed and start to get worried. I wonder when Dad will call the police, when Mum will come back from India, whether Dad is still a nursery manager or whether your own child vanishing stops you being able to look after other people’s kids. My thoughts leap around from now (can you pinpoint the moment when you stop being annoyed someone is late home and start to worry about them?) to the future (I hope Ariel is OK).
I wonder whether Mum and Dad are even still alive.
Gus has kids. I’ll never meet them. Unless Ariel could bring them here? Perhaps they’d see me too. Perhaps Gus would.
I know I have to focus, to concentrate as hard as I possibly can, as I’m going to look at the door soon and someone (I suppose) will come in. If I can remember who it is, when I wake up tomorrow morning, that would really help.
I might be able to do that. I’m remembering more. I take a pen from my schoolbag and write it on my ghostly arm: REMEMBER EVERYTHING TODAY. It won’t be there when I wake up.
For what feels like a few minutes, I let go. I slide down to the floor and revert so fully to babyhood that I basically have a tantrum. I kick the floor. I punch it with my fists. Nothing hurts. I’m still sobbing when the door opens. I look up, but it isn’t Ariel. It is …
Everything goes blank.
17
Monday was an OK day at school. Izzy and I laughed about stupid things, caught up on our homework, and for once I didn’t have to blink back tears at any point, which was kind of momentous. I sat with Izzy at lunchtime, overcooked jacket potatoes in front of us both.
‘I guess he’s back from France,’ she said. ‘That boy who gave you the fake number? You’re not going to see him, right?’
‘Oh, that,’ I said. I longed with every atom to tell her about Joe, to bring her into my new world. But I knew she’d think it was all in my head. I’d think that, if I was her.
I couldn’t tell her any more than I’d been able to tell Sasha.
‘I am most certainly not,’ I said with exaggerated dignity. ‘Nothing is as off-putting as a fake phone number. He ghosted me so he’s dead to me.’ I shivered. I hadn’t meant to say either of those things.
‘Bastard.’ Izzy shook her head. That ended the subject.
We made a list of potential middle names for Sasha’s baby instead. We spent the whole afternoon running a World Cup of boys’ names, canvassing opinions from whoever was nearby, eliminating some and sending others into the next round, and by three thirty the results were in: the baby’s middle name was Camembert (pronounced phonetically: Bert for short). That cheered me up immensely and I texted Sasha to inform her that her son’s middle name was Camembert.
Fuck off, she replied. Though I do quite like Bertie. Hmm, thx, I guess.
I saw the telly-ghosts around the place whether I thought about blue or not, but I wasn’t scared of them any more. I thought I was seeing parts of Joe’s last day at school, since I was in the building where it had happened, just as I overlapped with him in the Beachview room. I didn’t know if I was right, but that was what I’d decided to believe.
I looked each of them in the face, in turn, hoping to find Joe here too and wondering whether we’d be able to speak to each other if we met away from our usual space. I had no idea why I could see him. Partly, I supposed, it had to be because of Mum, but I was also starting to think that perhaps I was supposed to find out what had happened to him. Would that help him move on? It might.
In the afternoon I found myself in the loos with a cluster of ghost girls, and no one from 2019.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Excuse me. Do you know Joe Simpson?’ I waved both arms. ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’
They ignored me. They couldn’t see or hear me at all, and then a toilet flushed and a real girl I didn’t know came out of the end cubicle, smirking.
I was less freaked by the kids from 1999 now that I had an idea about who they were. This wasn’t my story: it was me helping Joe with his, and that took the pressure off. They weren’t a symptom of me losing my mind in the way I’d thought, and that made me want to hug them. They were connected to Joe (they had to be: they wore his uniform and looked like nineties kids). That meant they could be a part of him reaching out to me for help, and I tried my best to embrace their presence, though my favourite times were very much the rare days when I didn’t see them.
I often found myself wishing that Mum had had any reason at all to be at our school in 1999. If she had I might have been able to see her. But she didn’t, and so I couldn’t.
I ran to Beachview.
‘Ariel!’ he shouted, jumping up. He kind of hugged through me, and I shivered at the strange chill as his body vanished into mine. It was a bit like cold, and a bit like fizziness, a concentrated version of what happened when I walked down the corridors at school when they were filled with his people.
‘God, Joe,’ I said. ‘Yesterday, right? I’m so sorry. I just didn’t think.’
‘What happened?’ He was bouncing up and down. ‘I was so worried. I ended up … Well. Don’t laugh. I ended up lying on the floor, completely losing it. I thought something awful had happened to you. I thought you were ill, or you didn’t want to do this any more, or you’d decided it was all in your head. And then I realized that, without you, I’ll never be able to do anything except live this day over and over and over again, for all time. And it was the worst. Just the actual worst thing. The abyss, you know?’
I put my hand through his shoulder. I had to find out what had happened to him. Even if it didn’t change anything, at least then he would know.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said again. ‘It wasn’t any of that. It’s just that it was Sunday, Joe. The mall closed at four. That was all. I didn’t think of it on Saturday, which was stupid because if I’d given it a moment’s thought I would have realized and then you wouldn’t have had to worry. I’ll never be able to see you on Sundays, but now we know that we can be prepared.’
I hesitated and then decided to carry on. ‘Joe, I missed you. It hasn’t been long, but I can’t imagine not being able to see you every day. Nearly every day. I’m kind of obsessed with working out what happened to you.’ I looked at him, slightly nervous of how exposed that made me feel, but Joe was laughing and crying at the same time, every bit as intense as me. ‘So I’ll never decide I don’t want to see you any more,’ I added, ‘because you kind of feel like my best friend.’
‘Ariel,’ he said. ‘You’re amazing, but I don’t want this to be too much pressure. Yesterday made me realize that, even though I’ve only just met you, I’m completely dependent on you. Like when someone’s sheltering someone in a war. Like Anne Frank. Or something.’
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I’m not going anywhere, right? Friends?’
We were looking at each other in a way that made me feel magical. This wasn’t really friends. Izzy was my best friend. Joe made me feel that I was opening up, transforming into someone new. It was like staring into the sun. He lit me up and scared me. He was more than a human, more than a ghost. He was all the mysteries of the universe, the unknowability of life after death, a rip in the fabric of reality. But I was going to call it friends.
‘Best friends,’ he said. We stared into each other’s eyes and then I pulled myself together. He was at the same time a rip in the fabric of reality and an extremely good-looking boy.
‘Right,’ I said, trying to be brisk. ‘Updates time. I found Gus’s house. It’s one of those nice ones by the cricket pitch, like we thought. I waited outside yesterday morning. Sitting on a bench, pretending to play with my phone. And then he came out and went for a run.’
‘You saw Gus?’ Joe was stricken. ‘Was he … was he thirty-seven?’
‘Yes. It was so bizarre. I felt like a stalker, but I did this for you. When he was quite near, I pretended I was taking a selfie, and I took a picture of him instead.’
‘You pretended you were what?’
I picked up my phone and demonstrated. ‘Taking a selfie. Like this. Everyone does it.’ I showed him my phone. ‘See, there’s a camera this way too. Teenage girls are famous for taking selfies. Everyone thinks we’re very shallow.’ I pouted and held the phone up in front of us. We were both on the screen, but when I took the photo it was just me.
‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘I’m not there. Look at that. I’m not even there.’ He turned and touched the wall behind him, which had appeared in the photo instead.
‘I bet that if you could take a photo I wouldn’t be in it.’
We stared at each other, eyes wide.
‘I can’t be in your photo because I don’t exist in your world,’ he said.
‘And I don’t exist in yours.’
‘I know it’s not the weirdest thing,’ he said, ‘but it is fucking freaky. I’ll bring a camera and we can try it. But!’ He shook himself. ‘Gus.’
‘Yes! OK. I pretended to be taking a picture of myself, but it was just so I could get a photo of Gus for you. I tried to make it look like I was using the camera that faced me, but really I was using the one that faced him. Right?’ Joe nodded. ‘Do you want to see it?’
He nodded again, and I knew that part of him really, really didn’t. I held the phone out.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Here he is, on his Sunday-morning run.’
I saw a middle-aged man in loose running shorts, huffing his way across a field. Joe saw something completely different. He gasped and tried to touch it with his finger.
‘My brother,’ he said. ‘Gus. It’s really him. But he’s …’ His voice trailed off. I carried on talking, knowing we had limited time.
‘Joe,’ I said. ‘Do you remember I told you that Gus has kids? And a partner called Abby Fielding?’ He nodded. ‘And that I thought I could try to get babysitting work with them? It probably won’t lead to anything, but I put a note through their door just in case. Did you have a red-and-yellow plastic car when you were a kid?’
