Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

There were also a couple of friends who I saw precisely twice a year—once at their birthday drinks, once at mine—and there was a new-found mutual understanding that while we didn’t want to let go of the friendship altogether, we had absolutely no interest in investing time in it beyond these biannual meet-ups. I found this unsaid pact to be both sad and cheering in equal measure.

I’d noticed this was a thing that people did when they got into their thirties: they saw every personal decision you made as a direct judgement on their life.

After we broke up, I tried to catch up on all the sex I hadn’t been having in my twenties with a six-month promiscuity spree. But a “promiscuity spree” for me meant sleeping with three men, all of whom I tried to make my boyfriend.

My thirty-second birthday was the simplest birthday I ever had. Which was a perfectly lovely way to begin the strangest year of my life.

Young adulthood had quickly turned into just plain adulthood—with its daily list of choices to confirm who I was, how I voted, who my broadband provider was—and returning to the scene of my teenage life for an afternoon felt like a brief holiday back in time. When I was in Pinner, I could be seventeen again, just for a day. I could pretend that my world was myopic and my choices meaningless and the possibilities that were ahead of me were wide open and boundless.

Mum was right, he didn’t need these relics of mundanity, but I understood his inclination to hold on to them. I too had shoeboxes of cinema tickets from first dates with Joe and utility bills from flats I no longer lived in. I’d never known why they were important, but they were—they felt like proof of life lived, in case a time came when it was needed, like a driving licence or a passport.

There were the hundreds of men who feigned indifference to being on Linx—some of whom said their friends had made them do it and they had no idea why they were there, as if downloading a dating app, filling in a profile with copious personal information and uploading photos of yourself was as easy to do by accident as taking the wrong turning on a motorway.

There was the evidence, in all these profiles, where who we really are and who we’d like everyone to think we are were in such unsubtle tension. How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million clichés, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nurtured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. None of us are special. I don’t know why we fight it so much.

When he came back from the bar, we talked about Linx, which was inevitable but somehow it felt gauche to talk about the dating app that was the very reason we were on the date. It struck me that the only event where it’s appropriate to talk about the reason you’re at the event is a funeral.

He said, “But those are the best things about a person—the contradictions,” with a faraway look in his eyes. I knew that very second that if I ever had a reason to hate Max, if he ever treated me badly, I would return to this sentence as proof that he was the worst person alive. But for now, I was able to nod dreamily and agree.

The sexiest, most exciting, romantic, explosive feeling in the world is a matter of a few centimetres of skin being stroked for the first time in a public place. The first confirmation of desire. The first indication of intimacy. You only get that feeling with a person once.

He took off his denim jacket and draped it around my shoulders because I was cold. I could tell he was just as cold as I was, but I didn’t want to stop his big show of masculinity. How could I? I’d bought front-row tickets to it.

“I LOVE THAT!” he shouted back, grabbing me by the waist and pulling me into him. His T-shirt was damp with sweat and he smelt like the warm earth as the air rises after a summer storm. “FUCKING WEIRDO.” He craned his head down towards me in a smile and we kissed. I draped my arms around his neck and he pulled me closer to him, lifting me off the ground.

“I like Lucy, she’s very…creative.” “She does PR for a bubble tea company.” “Don’t be snooty.” “I’m allowed to be snooty about bubble tea.”

“I’m so stressed about the summer coming to an end,” she said, pulling out a half-empty packet of menthol cigarettes and withdrawing one with her teeth. “Why ‘stressed’?” “I’m worried I haven’t made the most of it.” “You’ve been to four music festivals.” “I’ve got to get to Burning Man next year.”

I hadn’t realized quite how much of early-days dating was pretending to be unbothered, or busy, or not that hungry, or demonstratively “low-key” about everything.

I liked being a commentator and co-conspirator with Max. I could have done it all night.

“Heterosexual women should be decorated like war heroes just for loving us,”

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said. “I think about this curve where your neck meets your shoulder. And the shape of your mouth. And the backs of your arms. That’s next-level fancying, isn’t it? Wanting to kiss the backs of someone’s arms.”

wow how creative

“The last girl whose arms I remember wanting to kiss the backs of was Gabby Lewis. She sat in front of me in chemistry. She had a ponytail that swung every time she turned from side to side. Which she did a lot. I think she did it on purpose actually, I think she knew it drove me crazy.” “You sound like an incel.”

“I think men are all so insecure that too much beauty overwhelms them. I think they probably see a profile like mine—sweet face, very unremarkable hair, sense of humour—and they feel like they’re home.” Max laughed loudly, tipping his head back into the grass. “You know what I mean though, don’t you?” “I suppose you do have a…welcoming quality, but not for the reasons you think you do.”

And on solstice last year, my friend Lola made me come here at the crack of dawn and do a ceremony.” “Is she a pagan?” “No, just neurotic,” I said.

Reality could try as hard as it liked—it could text, email and call me—when I was with Max, it wouldn’t be able to get in touch.

stand up

Only now do I realize that the first night I spent with Max, I was looking for evidence of past lovers. I wanted him inside me so I could search for the ghosts inside him. In the absence of any context for who he was, I was gathering forensics from the inerasable fingerprints that had been left by those who had handled him. When he pressed his palm over my mouth, I could see the woman who fucked him to feel freedom in disappearance. When he held a handful of my flesh in his hands, I could tell he’d loved a body more yielding than mine. His lips running along the arches of my feet let me know he had worshipped a woman in her entirety—that he had loved the bones of her toes as much as the brackets of her hips; that he had known her blood on his skin as well as he’d known her perfume on his sheets. He held me like a hot-water bottle when he slept and I knew that night after night after night he had shared a bed with another body and together they’d constructed an oasis from just a mattress.

Men always have to keep a low flame burning for every ex. It will be flickering in there for him, even if he doesn’t know it is. Whereas women always have to extinguish it.”

“I’m not being needy, I just find it interesting that your current girlfriend gets the benefit of all the tellings-off I gave you over the years, whereas your ex-girlfriend still has to put up with the same old shit.”

“I don’t know how women like Lucy do it. Every heterosexual woman I know is emotionally paralysed in relationships by this fear of ‘scaring men off.’ Then you have your Lucys of this world, these total anomalies, who know what they want and say: ‘I’m the boss, here are the rules, do as I say.’ And so many men seem to love it. Like it’s a relief, or something.”

“All these things we thought about each other,” I said. “Doesn’t like tall people, wouldn’t join dating apps, never wanted to get married. Funny how wrong we were.” “We weren’t wrong,” he said. “We were growing up.”

I had never known a feeling as unbearable—as sour, wrenching and unshakeably sad—as pity for a parent.

I thought of the perfect moment we had found ourselves in, entwined on a kitchen counter on a weekday evening—the ephemeral period of a new relationship when everything domestic could be erotic.

“God, I love this bit,” I said. “This bit where you melt over my socks. How do we keep it in this bit? How do we freeze this in time? There must be a way of tricking all the laws of monogamy. There must be some sort of gaming hack.”

He had rung the doorbell at four a.m. because he was so drunk he couldn’t find his keys, and when Katherine answered the door and told him he had woken up Olive, he replied: “Who’s Olive?” Katherine told the story with a sort of rolly-eyed, boys-will-be-boys joviality she often employed when talking about her husband.

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.

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.

“You’ve got to read it, Max!” Joe said, making me both love and hate him in equal measure. “I will.” “If I started dating someone who’d written a memoir, I would have read it within the first month. Maybe I’m just nosy.”

oh yikes

“Let’s try and trace him,” she said, sitting up. “We’ll need to go full Miss Marple. Oh God, I do love this bit!” “What ‘bit’?” “Trying to work out if a man who is ignoring you is dead or alive.” She opened up her laptop.

“How is this still the reality of our lives?” I said, gulping the rest of my wine in one. “Waiting for men to call us and reading our own hair like it’s a book. I feel so grim to be a woman. That’s not how I’m meant to feel.”

“And if he has to be reminded of what he’s ‘missing,’ then he’s not the man for you.

“Problem is, it does work,” Lola said. “Posting a hot photo on Instagram. I’ve done it before, and it always gets their attention.” “Do you really want that from these men? Their attention?” “No,” she said. “What do you want?” “Their love.”

You always told us that literature belongs to everyone and that we should never feel intimidated by it.

“All I mean is—I think there is a lack of duty to each other now.”

“I’ll be your mummy tonight. And your daddy. And your husband. And your ex-boyfriend.” “Four kinks in one. You’re multitalented, my girl.”

All of those websites that make you obsess over ‘who you are’ and how to explain it to everyone. You don’t need to explain it to everyone all the time! In our day, ‘who you are’ was just the thing that happened when you got out of bed and got on with the day.”

I would make a strong case for the argument that every adult on this earth is sitting on a bench waiting for their parents to pick them up, whether they know it or not. I think we wait until the day we die.

“You made me beg for you to speak to me, to even acknowledge I existed. You made me feel desperate and deluded. You made me feel like you didn’t exist, like I’d made it all up.” He held his head in his hands. “And I couldn’t say anything because whenever I questioned your coldness, you made me feel like I was crazy. You tried to convince me that it was abnormal that I wanted to speak to a man who’d just told me he was in love with me. I can’t believe you made me think I was crazy, what the fuck was the matter with me.”

“All these women who end up as the collateral damage of your confusion, Max. What are you so confused about?”

“Tell me again why you stopped talking to me,” I said as we faced each other, our heads on the pillows. We spoke softly, as if trying not to wake anyone else up. “And don’t speak abstractly or philosophically. Tell me, clearly, why.” “I knew that I wanted to commit to you, but I was scared to. Committing to you meant looking at the kind of life I really want. And I wasn’t ready to. I was a coward.”

“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 woke up every morning and checked my phone hoping for a message from him, as I had done for months, and in a half-asleep state would feel disappointment. Then I’d turn to see him lying asleep next to me—a pile of sinewy limbs and golden curly hair. I had the flesh and blood version of Max, but I still felt like I was being haunted by the virtual one.

“I know that clever women aren’t meant to worry about having a family. And I know I still have time. But I’m scared that if I don’t plan for it, it will never happen.”