Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

They talked about setting up their life in Pinner as if they had been looking for a hotel that was close to the airport for an early flight—convenient, anonymous, fuss-free, nothing special but it got the job done.

They lived in the suburbs because it was close to things. They had built their home and therefore entire life around convenience.

Reading Between the Wines.”

I could see the chewing gum roll around his mouth like a ball in a lottery draw machine.

I love this description

the future you decide with a person is different for every person, isn’t it? It’s not like you decide what you want, then someone else fits into that.

Being a heterosexual woman who loved men meant being a translator for their emotions, a palliative nurse for their pride and a hostage negotiator for their egos.

Something had shifted—dynamics of power always rearrange themselves when you’re not watching them.

There was a daftness that I shared with Joe, and a seriousness that I shared with Max. Both were parts of me and both were true, but both seemed so in conflict with each opposing representative present. I hadn’t anticipated that this merging of people meant this merging of selves—it made me think anxiously about myself in a way that was unfamiliar.

Nostalgia: Greek compound combining nostos (homecoming) and álgos (pain). The literal Greek translation for nostalgia is “pain from an old wound.”

“I hear you were a teacher.” “Yes.” “And what did you teach?” “Children, mainly,” he said.

Had I been treating men too much like adults and not enough like little directionless lambs?

“A lot of love is about duty, Nina.” Dad shouted from the living room, asking if I could bring him a glass of water as well as tea. Mum smiled in acknowledgement of his unwitting comic timing.

His face looked pale and fragile, like unshelled crab meat, and his eyes were beady and small, making him look even more like a crustacean.

I was regularly reminded when I spoke to Joe of how much of ourselves we had created together. In pubs, on our sofas, on long car journeys in those seven years of our relationship, we devised language that was so deeply embedded in our brains, I couldn’t trace which jokes were his and which ones were mine.

Katherine looked exquisite in high-necked pale-yellow silk that poured over her pregnancy bump like hollandaise on a perfectly poached egg.

Getting older was an increasingly perplexing thing, but these moments—understanding that potential future memories were being taken from you year on year, like road closures—were the very worst of it.

But ‘I love the gays but don’t care about the poor’ can’t be described as liberal in any sense.”

Katherine was so desperate to hide the mess of her home life from me, little did she know it was the mess that I longed for.

If only he could know how lucky he was, to exist on a blanket of untouched snow, with not one footprint yet to be found.

when thoughts of a lover are so pervasive, they find their way into every topic

What would be left of him as the knowledge, predilections and memories accumulated over a lifetime—so precise and vivid—were removed?

I thought about what Mum had said—that who you are is just what you wake up and do every day. I hoped that she was right.

“Have you really missed me? Or have you missed how I made you feel?” My body felt cold and my head felt light, the prelude to unconsciousness. I heard the lethargic murmur of his voice. “They’re the same things.”

“I once read Freud say that when two people have sex, there are at least six people in the room. The couple and both of their parents.” “What a thoroughly unenjoyable orgy.”

He shrugged. “It might not ever happen.”

“Hai voluto la bicicletta, e mo’ pedala.” “What does that translate as?” “You wanted the bicycle, now pedal it.”

I tell him it’s my thirty-third birthday. He informs me I’m the same age as Jesus was when he died and asks what I plan to do to rival his achievements.