Ghosted

by Jenn Ashworth

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

A deeply affecting and unconventional love story, shot through with anger, black humour and grief.

One ordinary morning, Laurie's husband Mark vanishes, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks, she tells no one, carrying on her job as a cleaner at the local university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her tower-block flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports Mark as missing, the police are suspicious. Why did she take so long? Wasn't she worried?

It turns out there are many more mysteries in Laurie's account of events, though not just because she glosses over the facts. At the time, she couldn't explain much of her behaviour herself. But as she looks back on the ensuing wreckage - the friendships broken, the wild accusations she made, the one-night stand - she can see more clearly what lay behind it. And if it's not too late, she can see how she might repair the damage and, most of all, forgive herself.

(P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: June 10, 2021

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1

That last morning the May sunshine had spilled into the room through a gap at the top of the curtains and woken me before the alarm. One of the curtain hooks had slipped its ring and left the top edge sagging. I had asked him – my husband, that is – more than once to sort it out. I turned over in bed, away from the window and the job still undone, and towards the sleeping shape of him: a mountain under the duvet, radiating heat. I put my hand in his hair. When we were first together I used to tell him he had hair like a bear. I made a fist and held the thick, dark ruff of it in my hand, then let go. I’ll admit I was pissed off with him, however unreasonable that was.

‘Are you awake?’

We were an odd couple. Me, short and slight – wispy somehow. Pale, like a ghost. Him, like a brick shithouse. I never found his size and solidity alarming. There was pleasure in it, still, even after fifteen years, twelve of them as man and wife. The feel of him. His weight. Ironic, really. I’d always put myself down as the insubstantial one.

I huffed, pulling at the duvet, and he opened his eyes. He lifted his hand from where he had it tucked between his legs, like a little boy, and put it on the back of my neck.

‘You didn’t fix the curtain,’ I said.

‘What?’ He blinked, baffled.

‘You said you’d fix it. I asked you. It’s too high for me. You said you’d get one of the kitchen stools and sort it out.’

He has always been slow to come online in the morning. I took advantage of this sometimes and used the moments he remained not quite with-it, wondering who this angry dream-wife was, to say things I wouldn’t usually say. I knew he wouldn’t remember, you see.

‘I don’t know what you were doing all day,’ I said. ‘Lying around surfing the internet while I’m up to my eyeballs. Me at work, you at home, doing God knows what. Nothing. You don’t do anything.’ I turned away from him. ‘You’re a lazy get.’

He squeezed my neck. Used his other hand to pull me towards him. It is instinct for him, in the morning, to want sex. We sleep naked. He nudged my thighs apart with his knee, pulled me in tighter and pushed himself, with some difficulty, inside. I was still quite dry.

‘Did you sleep all right?’ he said, properly awake now.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You were snoring.’ That was often the case, but he had slept peacefully that night, as far as I’d been aware.

‘Sorry,’ he said, automatically. He thrust into me. It was more of a burrowing really – a persistent pressure until he was all the way inside. He held me very tight. We lay perfectly still.

‘Nice?’

‘Hmm.’

It was better that we did it like that in the morning, his belly against the small of my back. We often had bad breath when we woke up.

‘What time are you in work today? Early?’

I nodded and he bit my neck gently. I made a little high-pitched growl – something like the noise a cat would make if you stood on its tail, but under my breath. Not a purr. The noise – halfway between a quiet yowl and a suppressed groan – had over the years become a kind of private joke between us. Or the remnant of a joke, the way the fossil trace of an ammonite pressed into a rock is not an ammonite, but only a reminder of one. The original joke was something to do with pussy, I think, and the doggy position. We used to be crude in the way we spoke to each other in bed and I suppose the cat noise was a way of reviving the atmosphere of those days. I wriggled my backside against him but his cock had gone soft already. I did what I usually did in those situations and pretended not to notice. We lay still for a few more minutes, not talking, until my alarm went off.

‘I’d better get up.’

He withdrew. Little sad mouse sliding out of its hole. He rolled out of bed and turned off the alarm on my mobile. He retrieved my glasses from the top of the headboard, where I always stashed them just before I went to sleep, gently opened them, then passed them to me, ready to wear.

‘I’ll make your tea,’ he said, just as he always did. I was extremely hung-over, just as I always was.

 

It’s hard to know how other couples live their lives, but all of this had become utterly ordinary for us. I told the police as much, later. I left for work while he was still in the shower. I don’t know what he was wearing that day. No, he hadn’t seemed unusual in any way that morning.

The officers – they sent two, a man and a woman who both refused a hot drink and made notes on a tablet instead of in a notebook – seemed frustrated by the fact that no matter how they phrased their questions I had nothing to add – no suspicious or out-of-the-ordinary behaviour on his part – to my account. I didn’t tell them I was pissed off with him, but I am telling you now.

But it may not have been the sagging curtain that caused me to be annoyed with him. I had been dreaming – one of my regular dreams about being accused of something very bad. The details were hazy – the dreams were more like emotions than pieces of theatre. There was some kind of courtroom or lecture hall and I was improperly dressed for the occasion. I knew I was supposed to speak and defend myself.

The stakes were always high in this type of dream. Sometimes I had been brought to stand before my accusers from a cell on death row and the courtroom was an American one – grafted into my consciousness from the televised O.J. Simpson trial. At other times there was a religious element, and the people I had to speak to were wearing the black robes of clerics. The implication was that either the stake or eternal damnation were waiting. The nature of the offence was never quite revealed to me and, under scrutiny, the inner certainty of my innocence gave way entirely and the inevitable guilt and terror flooded me with a kind of frozen clamminess. Yes, I thought, as I opened my eyes, I have done something terrible, and I must have forgotten what it was. I woke up and was teleported home to the marital bed in order to regard the cobwebs and warm morning light around the curtain rail, carrying the emotions of the dream world into this one.

I didn’t tell the police about my dream. They deal only in facts and a dream is not a fact. I didn’t tell them I was in a bad mood. A feeling is not a fact. Instead, the woman tapped the details I reported to them into her tablet while the man searched the flat. Unscrewed the bath panel and looked inside the suitcases that we stored under the bed, would you believe? Sinister, though I didn’t put it together until after they’d left. They were looking for his body in case I was reporting him missing to cover up the fact I’d actually murdered him.

Is there anywhere you can suggest that he might have gone? A friend? A family member?

I promised them I didn’t know anything that would help them. I emphasised again: his mood was unremarkable. Our interaction was commonplace: one morning in an entire series of them. I told them, truthfully, that his mother lived in Portugal and his passport was still in the kitchen drawer.

 

The police didn’t ask about the history of our relationship: it wasn’t like it is in the crime dramas, where the accused gets a good opportunity either in a police interview room, or in the dock, to explain. And it wasn’t as if I tried to tell them. It’s only now I am able to understand some of the strangeness that had been hidden inside our lives for a long time before he vanished. It had been there for months, through all our daily wakenings and couplings and comings apart. If I am trying to find a beginning, I need to go back further. Not to the day he vanished, but the day he arrived.

 

I met Mark at a wedding. I was only invited to the night do, being a colleague of the bride and not a member of the family or in her intimate circle of friends. Not that I minded. It was a relief, really, not to have to sit through a ceremony and a seated formal meal making polite conversation with people who I didn’t know, or to have to worry too much about an outfit. I borrowed a dress from my mother that I hoped would pass as vintage and turned up a little late, when the dancing was in full swing. I remember the cake: it was made of four square layers stacked between glass cubes filled with coloured water. This was fifteen years ago; things like that were fashionable then.

I avoided the dancing and made my way to the bar. The disadvantage of being a solitary evening guest is, I discovered, that the other guests have had time to strike up conversations and form themselves into groups and your task is to somehow break into those. Vodka would steady my nerves and prepare me for the task at hand. It was a cash bar, and while I was groping about in my borrowed clutch bag for the twenty-pound note I had tucked in there and giving my order to the barman – the DJ was playing ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ at an astonishing volume – I became aware of two people talking animatedly at the bar next to me.

‘She’s crying out for justice. She’s telling me everything. I don’t get a choice in when or where. It just comes to me.’

I took them for a couple at first. He was wearing a shabby suit and his tie was crooked. He was sweating heavily and kept pulling a serviette out of his pocket and dabbing at his forehead. She was a little older and was wearing a black sleeveless dress with a silver thread running through it. Her hair had obviously started the day in a chignon of some kind but had unravelled slightly. I accepted my drink from the barman and stayed at the bar, listening.

‘The murderer has some of her things. Her shoes. Her school bag. They weren’t found with the body. The police are going to find them hidden in his workplace, not at his home.’

I gathered they were talking about the case – it had been in all the local and national newspapers for weeks – of a little girl from our city who had disappeared from her own front garden two months earlier. The police had just found her body buried in a ditch beside a field near the Caton wind farm and were transferring their efforts from locating the girl to finding her killer.

‘You can’t know those things for sure,’ Mark – he’d introduced himself to me later, in the taxi back to his flat – was saying.

‘But I do,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve written to the detective inspector in charge of the case. I’m not just some nutter,’ she laughed, and another lock of her hair fell from the chignon. ‘I’ve done work like this before.’

‘With the police?’

‘Don’t sound so surprised. Lots of police forces use mediums to help them when their investigations on the material plane come to a dead end,’ she said patiently. I edged closer, unashamedly eavesdropping.

‘Name me one case you’ve worked on,’ Mark said, a little belligerently. ‘Name me one case where your evidence has been presented in court.’

‘Blake Barrett,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘York. The police force paid for my train ticket. I sat in their incident room holding his lanyard from work – his mother had brought it in for me because it helps me make a connection if I have something material from the deceased – and it came to me – where he was, what he’d been doing. They’d been looking for him along the route he was supposed to take – down the riverbanks and under bridges, places like that. They had a map on the wall with his normal way home marked out on it in a yellow highlighter. He wasn’t a well man. Still water, that’s what he told me. Still water, over his head and all around him. I told them to change tack. To check the canal. It’s out of his way, they said. Check it anyway, I said. A diving team costs a fortune, they said. Check it anyway, I said. And that’s where they found him.’

Mark had been looking at her sceptically all this time, but smiling too – as if this was a debate he took pleasure in having with her. Not a couple after all, I thought. A husband or boyfriend wouldn’t be so scathing about his partner’s profession in a public place, not when drink had been taken. He’d know better. This was different. It was almost like flirting.

‘He wanted to be found. To be put to rest. Everything that had been troubling his mind, his worries, his illness, the wounds from his childhood, it all lifts off when you pass the veil. They tell me – my spirits – that’s what death is like. All the earthly and material things that get in the way of bliss just lift away and dissolve. He was happy. But there was this one last thing in the way of his rest. He wanted his mother to know where he was.’

Mark shook his head, then looked directly at me. I looked away – feeling that I’d been caught out doing something wrong.

‘Have you heard of this guy? Blake Barrett?’

‘No,’ I said truthfully. There was a third stool near to them and he patted it. I sat down.

‘Joyce here is just telling me about her job. She sees things. Dead things. She talks to dead people.’ He glanced at my glass, waved a hand at the barman and ordered another round – vodka for me, a pint for himself, and a large glass of white wine for Joyce. I liked it that he bought her a drink, even if he thought she was a lunatic and was talking rubbish. I liked that about him.

‘Joyce,’ he said, once the drinks had been supplied, ‘are you telling me that if I went and looked up the court records or the police archives or whatever it is – public documents, they will be – that show how the investigation was conducted, are you telling me I’d find your name in there? Find out that the evidence you provided was central to solving the case?’

Joyce laughed. She wasn’t a bit rattled or embarrassed. In her shoes, I’d have been writhing.

‘Of course you won’t,’ she said, as if it was Mark who was missing the point. ‘Police forces only call me in when they’re struggling. It’s almost an admission of failure. They’re hardly going to advertise that, are they?’

‘And that’s what the Lancashire Constabulary have done? Found Connie Fallon’s remains then phoned you up to ask for the address of her murderer?’

That was her name. The little girl who had gone missing and been found dead. There were photographs of her everywhere, and of her front garden, her pink bike lying abandoned on the patio where she had been playing with it.

‘The police haven’t commissioned me this time,’ Joyce said gently. ‘She found me herself. They do that sometimes. She doesn’t understand what’s happened to her. She wants her mum to come and get her.’

Mark shook his head and looked at me – a ‘can you believe this’ expression on his face.

‘I’m going to get in touch with her mother. Offer my services directly. I can’t ignore Connie’s voice.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

I don’t know why I did this – it wasn’t like me at all – but I put my hand on his arm. I wanted to both comfort and restrain him, I think.

‘Mrs Fallon might find it a consolation,’ I said, in as conciliatory a manner as I could manage (for I too was more on Mark’s side of things in this argument). ‘It might help her with her grieving. People go and light candles in a church, don’t they, and there’s no science to that.’

Joyce smiled. ‘Maybe. Maybe it will work like that. But my work is with Connie. She’s the one asking for my help.’

‘How much will you charge her mother?’ Mark asked.

He was drunk and bolshy and this gave me a misleading impression of him, because Mark is not usually a brisk or argumentative man, even when he’s had a few. Even so, that night I admired his stridency and his outspokenness in defence of Connie’s mother. He was obviously imagining her as a woman made credulous and imbecilic by grief, about to open her heart and wallet to a charlatan. His protectiveness was attractive. I found Joyce’s calmness and unshakable faith in the reality of what she was saying appealing too. I had never been sure of anything at all, and I caught myself wanting her to put her hands on my head and tell me what was in there and what was going to happen to me next while Mark stood guard over both of us. I would have paid her for that, if I’d had any money.

‘I never charge for this sort of work,’ Joyce said. ‘None of us do. Not the proper ones.’

Mark shook his head again and I could see he had given up. I still had my hand on his arm and he placed his palm on top of mine, just briefly. He wasn’t brushing me away; he was acknowledging me.

Joyce clocked it – a little movement that Mark seemed unaware of himself – and smiled.

‘You two,’ she said, ‘you have a real connection. I don’t see it very often. Where did you meet?’

She had mistaken us for a couple. Mark leaned back and put his arm around me. My dress – which in comparison to Joyce’s was certainly not passing muster as vintage and could well be described as dowdy – rustled a little around my shoulders. It was that type of material – stiff and shiny, smelling like loft spaces and charity shop back rooms do. I became self-conscious about it.

‘Us two? We’ve been knocking about together for donkey’s years,’ he said. He leaned over and kissed my cheek gently. He smelled of beer and aftershave. I fluttered a bit. It had been a good while since I had been kissed and these things do have their normal physiological effects.

‘You look good together,’ Joyce said. ‘You’ve got complementary energies. Earth meets water. Soil and rain.’

Mark pulled me in tighter. I knew what he was doing but because I liked the feel of his arm around me I let him do it anyway, tucking myself in under his shoulder. Later, I’d see that the makeup I’d put on my face had applied itself to the lapel of his suit: a little pale impression of my cheek and nose impressed on the material, like the Turin Shroud.

‘I’m lucky to have her,’ he said. It was only pretend, but even pretend compliments are something.

‘There’s a special link between you two. No, there is. Soil and rain. It makes the flowers grow.’ Joyce lifted her glass and slid off her stool. ‘Now I have to go and congratulate Sharon. But I think there’s another happy couple in the room tonight. I’ve not seen anything as strong as this,’ she waved her hand at us hazily, as if to indicate an aura of some kind that only she could see, ‘in a very long time.’ She paused, put her head on one side and beamed at us. ‘You two really do love each other, don’t you?’

I ducked my head against his shoulder again. I was blushing – blushing incandescently – and although Mark was laughing at me, I could see that he was feeling a little coy too.

Now I wonder who the victor was in that little skirmish. Maybe Joyce knew what she was doing all along, and just wanted to knock Mark off his perch of certainty and discomfit him a little. She drifted away to the dance floor, holding her glass up high as she weaved her way through the crowd and vanished from our sight, leaving Mark and me at the bar to get to know each other. He took me back to his flat that night and from then on, up until he disappeared, we were very rarely apart.

 

In the aftermath of that first visit from the police, I thought about the early days of my and Mark’s relationship often. I kept trying to work out when the pretence started and ended and which one of us ended up being the butt of the joke. Was it auspicious that we met at a wedding? I wondered about contacting Sharon, the colleague who was getting married that day. People make contact with old friends all the time. We could reminisce a little about Dorry and his strange habits. I could even find a way to ask about her friend, the medium who claimed to have good results working occasionally with the police.

‘Joyce?’ she’d have said, brutally, frankly, directly. She was that type. ‘What do you want Joyce for? Are you planning a séance?’

I talked myself out of calling Sharon in the end. We lost touch a long time ago. I no longer worked at the garden centre and I suspected she might be living an entirely different kind of life to the one she was living when we conducted our superficial acquaintance in the staffroom of Dorry’s Home and Garden Supplies. Her marriage would have lasted. She, no doubt, had several children and a house with a garden and a drive on which to park a respectable-looking car. I do not recognise that wedding guest in the borrowed dress, game enough to involve herself in a conversation that had nothing to do with her and to go home with a stranger. Today I live only in the present because the consequences of things going wrong are easier to see and more frightening to imagine than they were back then.

 

The police also wanted to know why I was back from work later than usual that afternoon. I thought it might have looked suspicious to them. I went to see my father. He’s unwell. I was afraid I was going to get into trouble. So I veered between clipped, short answers – name, rank and serial number only – or I babbled, uselessly.

I still had a key to my father’s house, which is on a hill to the south of the city. I passed it every day as I went to and from the university where I worked, and that day, because it had been a while, or because I was still feeling the remnants of my bad mood and wanted Mark to worry about me being later than usual, I stopped off to see him on my way back home. It would have been mid-afternoon. Around 4 p.m. That’s what I told the police.

Olena and my father were in the living room, the telly on too loud. I called through to them as I took off my coat and hung it on the overloaded hooks in the hallway. In better times my father had been a keen gardener, and his fleece and heavy jacket were still hanging on the hooks, slightly mud streaked and smelling of damp. Olena had taken the house in hand since she’d been coming more regularly, but there was still more to do, and I had to edge in between crates of the second-hand books that my father liked to collect and a stack of old coffee tins, the labels removed.

‘You’re here!’ he cried, looking away from the television. It was a documentary. Something to do with wind farms, if I remember correctly.

‘How are you, Dad?’ I asked, and held my breath.

I had a great number of fathers: an embarrassment of them, you could say. There was Angry Father, Disgusting Father, Happy Father, Shoplifting Father, Mournful Father, Unfounded Accusations Father, and – my favourite father of all – Doting Father. Since he’d become unwell I had been making the effort to see him more often, but I never knew which one of his incarnations would be sitting on the brown settee waiting for me when I arrived.

‘Never mind how I am, love. How are you? Are you healthy? Are you happy?’

Doting Father! I was relieved, sat up close beside him and held his hand. Olena kept him nice. He smelled like Nivea cream and Daz washing powder.

‘I am happy, Dad,’ I said. He squeezed my hand.

‘I can tell you are. You’ve got a look about you. You’re not pregnant, are you? Has that man of yours put you in the family way? You’re not going to make me a granddad, are you?’

We’d been through this before. I smiled and stroked his arm and put my head on his shoulder – he liked to be petted when he was in this kind of mood, and I liked doing it.

‘I’m too young to have a baby,’ I said, in my little voice. ‘I’m still your baby.’

Olena, who had been ironing in front of the television, laughed. ‘Your father has been asking after you all morning, Laurie. It’s so good you could come.’

Was there a veiled criticism there? Probably.

‘Where’s your mother, petal? I’ve been waiting for her. She neglects me, you know.’

Mournful Father made his appearance. Sometimes he thought Olena was my mother, who has been dead for six years, and sometimes she played along.

‘I’m here, Dad.’ I said. ‘Tell me about your programme. What are you watching?’

He squinted at me suspiciously. I wonder if we all have lots of versions of ourselves tucked up inside our heads – a whole choir of possible understudies in there, some more trustworthy than others, but all waiting impatiently for their turn onstage. I feel them inside me sometimes, flickering in a great silver shoal, arguing between themselves, never quiet, never unanimous.

‘I’m trying to watch the television but your mother keeps disturbing me. I don’t know how to cope with her. Did I tell you what she’s been up to?’

Olena and I looked at each other. She didn’t quite roll her eyes.

‘Amazing, isn’t it, how big those turbines are? Did you hear what the woman said, Dad? About all the geese getting caught in the blades? It’s a shame, isn’t it?’

‘She’s not herself, you know. She’s been acting up again.’

‘We could get Olena to take us on a drive sometime, if you like. There’s loads of them on the way to Heysham. We could take a look.’

‘The man from the Prudential was round yesterday. He brought the paperwork to go over our policy. Your mother was sitting in that chair – right there,’ he pointed at the armchair under the window. Olena became engrossed with her ironing, smiling under her breath.

‘We could go right into the village. Get an ice cream from the café,’ I said desperately.

‘She had her going-out skirt on. Her knees aren’t what they were but all the same. No tights. She looked the poor man in the eye and uncrossed her legs. You could see everything.’ He clutched at my arm for emphasis and raised his eyebrows. ‘Everything.’

‘Dad, you know that’s not right. Stop it.’

‘Tell your mother. She was the one . . .’ he lost his thread. His eyes flicked towards the television, then back towards me. ‘You could see it. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’

‘You’re being disgusting, Dad.’

He took this personally. ‘I won’t have you speak to me like that,’ he said, his bottom lip trembling. He kept hold of my arm and shook it, as if he was trying to convince me of something.

‘Your mother . . . she . . . where is she?’

‘You’re getting yourself worked up. Mum didn’t do any of those things. That’s Basic Instinct. It was on telly the oth. . .