Ghosted: A Novel

That man. He keeps staring at me.”

I look at Mum, pressed back into her seat, her neck thrust forward like a turtle. Then I look at the man, who’s vast, poor sod, absolutely enormous, spilling over three chairs and chain-drinking Diet Coke from a two-liter bottle. Above his head, a bluebottle bats at the window, again and again, like a child telling the same joke because it made someone laugh half an hour ago.

I watch the man for a while, but he doesn’t look at Mum. He’s reading an NHS leaflet entitled “Let’s Talk.”

“He’s not staring at you,” I whisper. “But we can go and sit over there if you’d prefer.”

I point at a row of green chairs, facing away from this perfectly innocent man, but I know she won’t go for it. At the end of the row, there’s a mother with her baby asleep in a buggy, and Mum can’t cope with children these days. Last month she locked herself in the toilet at her GP practice because a toddler was handing her Duplo bricks in the waiting room.

“I think I’ll stay here,” she says eventually. “Sorry, Eddie, I don’t want to make a fuss, but will you keep an eye on him?”

I nod, closing my eyes. It’s too warm in here. Nothing to do with the sunshine outside; it’s that flabby medical-waiting-room heat, fired by anxious breath and underused bodies.

“Are you missing the beach?” Mum says. She has on that tone she uses when she’s worried she’s annoyed me. Lighter than normal, full of overinflection. “Santa Monica?”

“Ha! No, not really. Did I tell you about it?”

She nods, her eyes skittering over to the Diet Coke man before returning to my face. “It sounded lovely,” she adds, and I wonder what jet-lagged lie I told her about my day on that beach. I can’t stand lying to her. It’s hard not to take the view that life has betrayed my mother, so it feels extra sickening when I do the same. No matter that I do it for her own good.

Mum turns away and my thoughts return to the funeral procession I saw earlier, heading down past the green toward Frampton Mansell. The hearse had been full of wildflowers, bunches and sprays of them, toppling down over the sides of the wooden box as if on the banks of a stream. It was followed by three empty black cars. Must be a young person, I thought. The aged seldom had so many mourners. I wondered who they were off to collect. Which broken, desperate family was gathered in a house somewhere nearby, draining their coffees, adjusting their uncomfortable black clothes, and wondering, over and over again, How can this be happening to us?

I’d glanced sideways at Mum as the procession passed, hoping it wouldn’t throw her off-balance.

I found her with an ugly expression on her face. “Looks like they’re heading for Frampton Mansell,” she observed, sounding oddly pleased. Spiteful, even. “Let’s hope it’s that girl who’s died. Sarah.” Then she looked at me, as if expecting me to agree.

I couldn’t say anything for several minutes. I just breathed through my mouth—a sort of Eddie Emergency Response that I remember well from the weeks following Alex’s death. I felt sick. Physically sick, a banding round my chest. I tried with every resource I had to bury what she’d just said, but I couldn’t.

No wonder Sarah moved to the other side of the world, I thought weakly. How could she ever have survived here?

The bluebottle at the window falls silent for a moment, and I think, now, about how strongly Sarah would approve of wildflowers on a coffin. She brought bunches of them into my house during our week together. Filled almost every mug I own. “Is there anything more beautiful?” she asked, smiling down at them.

You, I thought. You’re the most beautiful thing that has ever come into this house.

Save for my mate Baz, who works for the Natural History Unit in Bristol, Sarah’s the first person I’ve met under sixty who knows much about wildlife. I remember her voice rising in excitement when I quizzed her on birds from that Collins Gem book. Nuthatch! Stonechat! Then her laughter, wonderfully dirty and full of life.

God, it hurts. It hurts in ways I never imagined.

I turn to look at Mum, to reinforce to myself that Sarah is the very last woman on earth with whom I could have a relationship. This is your mother, I tell myself. Your mother, a mental health services user for nearly two decades. A woman who can’t remember the textures of life, the rhythm of the world, because she’s become so isolated. She needs you.

Mum’s pretending to rest her head in her hands, as if dead tired, but she’s just watching the guy with the Diet Coke through splayed fingers.

“Mum,” I whisper. “It’s okay.”

I’m not sure she even hears me.

When I went over to Alan’s the other night, he said I should join Tinder. I said okay, because that’s what he wanted me to say, and then had to go to the loo, as if to flush away, turdlike, the horror I felt. Tinder? Nobody warns you that life continues to be complicated after you’ve Done the Right Thing. That there is no reward, beyond some intangible sense of moral fortitude. I’ve been back eleven days now, and if anything, I feel worse than I did when I left Sarah standing on the beach.

Tinder! I mean, for fuck’s sake!

“Where’s Arun?” Mum whispers. “We’ve been waiting ages.”

I check my watch. We’ve been waiting ten minutes.

“Do you think he’s off sick, Eddie?” she asks. “Do you think he’s left?” Her face clouds at the thought.

“No.” I tuck her hand into my elbow. “I think he’s just running late. Don’t worry.”

Mum’s psychiatrist, Arun, is one of only two non-family members she can talk to without reaching overwhelm. The other is Derek, her community psychiatric nurse, who handles Mum better than any of us. She does have the odd visitor from elsewhere—the local vicar, Frances, pops in when she can, because these days Mum finds it too stressful to go to church with “all those people.” And indeed Hannah Harrington, Sarah’s sister, used to visit every now and then, although Mum hasn’t mentioned her in a long time, so I wonder if those visits have dried up. But neither Hannah nor the vicar ever stayed for long. After about half an hour Mum would be up and cleaning, glancing anxiously at the clock as if she had somewhere to be.

Arun’s ability to get through to Mum is partly because he’s a really nice man, and great at his job, but partly because she has, I think, got a shy little crush on him. And of course he hasn’t left. Nor is he off sick. They’d have canceled us if he were, probably sent out the community psychiatrist. But the idea has lodged itself in her head now, just like those infuriating thoughts about Sarah have lodged themselves in mine.

What if Sarah died? Would you still think you’d done the right thing? The question continues to seep into everything, like rising damp. Where has it come from? Why won’t it go away?

Sarah is fine, I tell myself sternly. She would almost certainly be asleep now, thousands of miles away in her friend’s little bungalow. Breathing in and out. Limbs soft, face quiet.

When I realize I’m imagining lying next to her, sliding a sleepy arm around her waist, I get up. “I’ll go and check how much longer,” I tell Mum.

The lady at reception knows I’m not asking for myself. SUE, her security pass says. “You’ll be seen next,” she says extra loud, so Mum can hear. There’s a picture behind her of her family. A pleasant-looking man, two children, one wearing a lion costume. I wonder if Sue looks at families like mine and thinks, Thank God I’m not in their shoes! That’s pretty much what my last girlfriend, Gemma, said when we split up. She ended things after three months because she couldn’t handle me running off to deal with a Mum-related emergency once a week.

I felt bad about Gemma for a while—she was the third girlfriend in six years worn down by Mum’s demands—but I bumped into her in Bristol a few months ago, holding hands with a bloke who called himself Tay and told me he did street art. He had a man bun. And I’d realized, as Gemma and I exchanged bland pleasantries on the pavement, that neither of us had ever been all that mad about each other anyway.

Mad about each other—like Sarah and me—that’s how you have to feel. That’s how good it’s got to be.

When I sit back down, Mum’s checking her hair in a pocket mirror. Her hairstyle has the contours of a rugby ball today. “It’s a beehive,” she says. “I used to have one in the sixties.” She peers at it. “Do you think it’s over the top?”

“Not at all, Mum. It’s lovely.”

In truth, the beehive is (a) hollow and (b) leaning to the right like the Torre de Pisa, but I know she’s done it for Arun.

She puts her mirror away and starts doing something with her phone. After a few seconds I realize she’s pretending to message someone so she can take sneaky photos of the poor guy in the corner, presumably to be used in evidence when he has brutally murdered her. If Arun Sopori doesn’t come out soon, with his beautiful Kashmiri features and his warm smile, today is going to go very badly indeed. And I really need to get back to work.

Then: “Hello, Carole,” says Derek’s voice. He ambles in—Derek never strides—and shakes my hand, taking a seat on the other side of Mum. “How are you doing today?” He stretches his legs out in front of him and I feel her begin to relax as she tells him she’s had better days, if she’s honest.

“Storming hairstyle you’ve got there,” he tells her, when she’s finished.

“You think so?” She’s smiling already.

“I absolutely do, Carole. Storming.”

Thank God for Derek! Week in, week out he visits her. He’s like a magician, I sometimes think—he can spot things nobody else can see; he can make her talk when no one else can get through. He’s never once lost his cool, no matter how unwell she’s gotten.

“Does your mother have a specific diagnosis?” Sarah asked one day. I’d just mowed the lawn of my clearing because I was hoping to lure her back to England with the smell of cut grass. When I’d finished, we’d sat down with some cold ginger cordial, and she’d sniffed the air happily. Then she’d just turned to me and asked that about Mum—straight out, no pussyfooting around, and I’d liked her even more.

Still, I hadn’t wanted to answer, at first. I’d wanted to be the man with a Cotswold stone barn who bakes bread and makes ginger cordial and leads an extremely appealing life, not the man who has to field several phone calls a day from his mother. But it was a reasonable question, and it deserved a reasonable answer.

So I prepared myself to reel off the list of diagnoses she’d been given over the years—the chronic depression; the generalized anxiety disorder; the cluster-C personality disorder that hovered somewhere between anxious and dependent and obsessive-compulsive; the PTSD; the psychotic depression that might be bipolar—but when I opened my mouth, a great weariness washed over me. Somewhere along the line I had given up on labels. Labels gave me hope of recovery, or at least improvement, and Mum had been sick for nearly twenty years.

“She just struggles,” I’d said eventually. “If my aunt wasn’t with her this week, I imagine I’d have had to answer the phone quite a bit. Probably go and see her at some point.”

I wish, now, I’d told her more. But what would that have achieved, other than to end our time together? We’d have worked out who each other was in minutes, and then I’d never have known what it felt like to be that happy. That certain.

“Mrs. Wallace.” I look up; Mum’s hands fly to her beehive/rugby ball. Then she tucks herself into my side, suddenly shy, as Derek and I lead her over to Arun and the open door.