Ghosted: A Novel

Six Weeks Later

Autumn is here. I can smell it in the air, rough and unprocessed and—I’ve always thought—oddly apologetic. As if it feels slightly embarrassed, dismantling the heady dreams of summer to make way for another cruel slog.

Although personally, I’ve never minded winter. There’s something exquisitely unworldly about this valley when frost spikes the ground and the trees fling long shadows across the bare earth. I love the sight of smoke twisting out of a lone chimney, the fairy-tale pinch of light in a remote window. I love how my friends brazenly invite themselves over so they can sit in front of my fire and eat the hearty stews they seem to think I cook all the time just because I live in a rural barn.

Strangely, Mum always seems a little happier in the winter, too. I think that’s because it’s more acceptable to stay indoors once the temperatures drop. Summer is fraught with the expectation of increased socializing and outdoor activity, whereas in the winter her small existence needs little explanation or defense.

But today it’s only September and I’m still in shorts as I march up the composty hillside of Siccaridge Wood. Shorts and a jumper I still can’t bring myself to wash and debobble, because the last person to wear it was Sarah.

I walk a little bit faster. A mild burn spreads through my calf muscles as I stump on up the hill, too fast to let my feet sink into the layered mulch. I start singing Merry Clayton’s part from “Gimme Shelter.” The only people who can hear me singing about rape and murder being just a shot away are the birds, who probably thought I was mad already.

My voice reaches the final section of the song, where Clayton is basically screaming, and I start laughing. Life is not feeling all that tranquil right now, but refusing to think about—well, about unhelpful things—definitely gives me a breather.

The problem is, Jeanne Burrows is not really on board with my plan to block all thoughts of Sarah from my mind. My sessions with her make me feel so much better, so much less alone, and yet she is breaking my balls every week. I didn’t imagine you could break someone’s balls in a deeply kind, gentle, respectful way, but Jeanne seems to be doing just that.

Today’s session, however, was unprecedented.

Just as I reached the end of Rodborough Avenue, where Jeanne lives, I saw none other than Hannah Harrington reversing out of Jeanne’s parking spot. She was concentrating on not hitting a neighbor’s car, so she didn’t notice me, but I got a good look at her. She looked not dissimilar to the last time I saw her: tearstained, tired, lost.

Of course, I wondered immediately why Hannah was seeing Jeanne, and before I knew it the old fear engine had fired up again. What if it was one of Sarah’s parents who died? Sarah would be distraught. She told me in those letters how guilty she’d felt, all these years, insisting on living thousands of miles away. I decided it was my duty to help her.

“I want to call Sarah Harrington,” I announced to Jeanne on arrival. “Can I do that here, with you?”

“Come and sit down,” she said calmly. Oh brilliant, I imagined her thinking. Here we go.

Within a few minutes I had calmed down and accepted that I had no business calling Sarah Harrington, but it did inevitably lead to a conversation about her. Jeanne asked again if I felt that blocking all thoughts of Sarah was helping me let her go.

“Yes,” I said stubbornly. Then: “Maybe.” Then: “No.”

We talked about the process of letting go. I told her I was fed up with being so bad at it, but that I didn’t know what else to do. “I just want to be happy,” I muttered. “I want to be free.”

Jeanne laughed when I complained that there was not a manual for stopping loving someone. I admitted that that was actually Alan’s joke, and then she threw me a neutral look and said, “While we’re talking about setting ourselves free, Eddie, I wonder how you feel about that in relation to your mother? How do you feel when you imagine freedom from your duties to her?”

I was so shocked I had to ask her to repeat herself.

“How does the idea of lessening some of that burden feel?” Her tone was friendly. “That’s how you described it last week. Let me see . . .” She peered at her notes. “A ‘nightmarish burden,’ you said.”

My face blew warm. I pulled at a loose thread on her sofa, unable to look her in the eye. How dare she bring that up?

“Eddie, I want to remind you that there is no shame—none at all—in finding it hard. Family carers might feel great love and loyalty toward their relative, but they also experience resentment, despair, loneliness, and a whole range of other emotions about which they would not want the patient to know. Sometimes they reach a point where they need to take a break. Or even completely rethink the care arrangement.”

I stared at the floor. Back right off! I wanted to shout. This is my mother you’re talking about! Only nothing came out of my mouth.

“What are you thinking?” Jeanne asked.

I don’t get angry very often—I’ve had to learn not to, for Mum’s sake—but suddenly I was furious. Far too angry to appreciate what she was trying to do for me. To be grateful that she had waited weeks before bringing it up. I wanted to pick up the vase of peachy snapdragons on her mantelpiece and throw it at the wall.

“You have no idea,” I said, to a counselor of thirty-seven years’ experience.

If Jeanne was shocked, she didn’t let it show.

“How dare you?” I went on, voice rising. “How dare you suggest I just run off and abandon her? My mother tried to kill herself four times! Her kitchen looks like a fucking hospital dispensary! She’s the most vulnerable person I know, Jeanne, and she’s my mother. Do you have a mother? Do you care about her?”

It took nearly half an hour for me to apologize and calm down. Jeanne asked kind and respectful questions, and I responded with curt monosyllables, but she kept going. Nudging me, with those clever bloody questions, closer and closer toward an acknowledgment that I was dangerously near to breaking point with Mum. With life. Nudging me toward a grudging acceptance that it might be my own grief that had stopped me admitting this.

Jeanne seemed convinced that Derek could help find a solution. “It’s his job,” she kept saying. “He’s a community psychiatric nurse, Eddie, he’s there for both of you.”

And I kept replying that there was no way I could hand my mother over to Derek. However wonderful he was. “I’m the only person she wants to call when she needs help,” I said. “There’s nobody else she’d trust.”

“You don’t know that for certain.”

“But I do! If I told her she couldn’t call me—even if I said she couldn’t call me as often—she’d either take no notice and carry on as before, or she’d become dangerously ill. You know her history. You know I’m not just being pessimistic.”

By the time our hour was up, we had made no real progress, but I had promised I’d continue next week without any tantrums.

Jeanne laughed. She said I was doing really well.

•   •   •

I reach the top of the hill, finally, arriving underneath the beech tree I’ve come to check. (It’s meters from the mystery welly.) Back in June, when I was tramping the countryside, thinking angry and confused thoughts about Sarah, I noticed it was suffering dieback—only it’s looking much worse now. I’m guessing some sort of beetle, as there’s no obvious pathogen in the bark, but it’s definitely a goner. I rest a hand on the trunk, saddened to imagine this magnificent beast felled by a snarling chain saw.

“Sorry,” I tell it, because it feels wrong to say nothing. “And thank you. For the oxygen. And everything.”

I check the surrounding trees (the welly is still there) and then walk back down the hill, hands in pockets. My brain keeps trying to slide me back in the direction of Sarah, and her sister’s visit to a grief counselor, but I resist. I make myself think about the tree instead. The tree is a problem I know how to solve. I’ll call Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust tomorrow, see if they’d like some help bringing it down.

By the time I get back to my barn, I’m feeling quite normal again.

Then I step inside and find my mother standing by my drawer of purple letters. My secret drawer of purple letters, which nobody on earth other than Jeanne knows about. And I realize that Mum is reading—she is reading quite calmly—one of my letters to Alex. She holds it in one hand, an ugly expression on her face.

I have to take a moment to be certain this is really happening. To be certain that my mother—my dear mother—is committing a breach of privacy on this level. But at that moment Mum turns the letter over, so she can read the back of the page, and I know there’s no doubt.

Disbelief melds slowly into fury.

“Mum?” I say. My hand is clamped to the doorframe like a bench vice.

In one movement she slides the letter behind her and turns to me.

I reread in my head the text message I sent her before going out: I’m going for a walk. Just to warn you, I’ll be leaving my phone, for a bit of peace. But I’ll be back in a couple of hours.

I always deliberately overestimate the time it’ll take me to do something. She panics otherwise.

“Hi, darling!” It’s that voice again, the one she does when she’s pushed me too far. Only today it’s even higher. “You were very quick.”

“What are you doing?”

“I . . .”

There is a thick, panicked silence as she weighs up her options. Everything is still. Even the trees outside seem to have paused, as if waiting for confirmation of treachery. But she can’t do it. She can’t tell me the truth. “I could hear something,” she says, and her voice is so full of inflection she could be on children’s television. “It sounded like a mouse. Have you had trouble with mice recently, Eddie? It was near here. I’ve just been poking around . . . I’ve opened a few drawers. I hope you don’t mind . . .”

She continues in this vein until I shout— No, I actually bellow, “HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN READING MY LETTERS?”

There is a bottom-of-the-sea silence.

“I did find some letters, just a second before you arrived,” she says eventually. “I haven’t read them, though. I took a look at one and thought, Oh, this has nothing to do with me, so I was just putting it back when—”

“Don’t lie to me! How long have you been reading my letters?”

Mum’s hand flies to her face, and she starts to take off her glasses, but then changes her mind, leaving them skewed across her nose like a child’s seesaw. I look at her and I don’t see my mother. Only rage, a giant hotplate of fury.

“How long have you been reading my letters?” I ask, for the third time. I don’t think I have ever spoken to her in this tone. “And don’t lie,” I say. “Not again. Seriously, Mum, do not lie to me.”

I’m wholly unprepared for what comes next. I’m expecting weeping, my mother slumped on the floor begging forgiveness, when suddenly she turns, sweeping the letter into the air as if it were a parking ticket or some other insult to her existence. It zigzags slowly toward the floor. “Like you’ve lied to me?” she says. “Like you lied to me about wanting to go to LA for a ‘holiday’? About wanting to see your friend Nathan, do a bit of surfing? Like you lied to me about Alan having an ‘emergency’ the day you got back?”

With a deliberateness I find mesmerizing, she moves forward and plants her hand on the bench that runs down the center of this part of the workshop. “Like you lied to me about that . . . that girl?” She stares wildly at me, as if searching for her son in the face of a serial killer. “How could you? How could you have slept with her, Eddie? How could you betray your sister like that?”

She must have been reading my letters for months.

No wonder she’s been so paranoid and clingy since I got back from LA. And no wonder she tried everything in her power to stop me going over there in the first place. Usually when I tell her I’m planning a trip, she looks pleased, because it allows her to convince herself I’m still having a life. This time she behaved as if I were emigrating to Australia.

“That girl,” she adds, shuddering. She looks like she’s talking about a rapist or a pedophile, not Sarah Harrington. Although I guess that to Mum there’s no moral distinction. “I meant what I said that day. I hope it was her in that hearse.”

“Jesus Christ, Mum!” I breathe. My voice is soft with wonder. “After all you’ve been through, you wish the same pain on someone else? Are you for real?”

She makes a dismissive noise with her mouth. My mind leaps in all directions, finding clues everywhere. This is why she’s started to become ill again. She has known about Sarah for months.

“Was it you who called her?” I ask quietly. “On the phone? Was it you who sent her that threatening message? Is that why you wanted to get a new phone back in July?”

I’ve started getting those marketing calls, she’d said. They’re really stressing me out, Eddie. I need a new phone number.

“Yes. It was me who called her. And I don’t regret it.” She’s wearing a pink jumper. For some reason the pink makes this ugliness all the more shocking.

“And did you turn up at her old school that day? Did you lurk about on the canal path near her parents’ house when she came down to visit?”

“Yes.” She’s almost shouting! “Somebody had to do something. I could not have her infect you. You’re all I have left!

“Somebody had to do something,” she repeats, when I fail to reply. “And you obviously weren’t going to. Moping around like that, telling your poor sister how much you loved the woman who killed her . . .” She trails off. She’s hissing again. I stop hearing the words. All I can think is, Do you have any idea what I have gone through to keep you safe from this? How lonely I’ve been? Do you have any idea what I have sacrificed for the sake of your sanity?

It comes to me at some point that she has stopped talking. Her eyes are wide and glassy with tears.

“How did you get Sarah’s phone number?” I hear myself asking, although I know the answer. “How did you know she was at her old school that day? Have you been looking at my phone, too?”

She tells me yes. “And it’s your fault, Eddie, so don’t you get angry with me. I had to intervene, somehow. I had to try to protect Alex from . . . from this.”

A tear escapes her eye, but her voice remains firm. “It’s your fault,” she repeats. “You who loves to talk about choice! You had a choice, and you chose that woman. That girl.”

I shake my head, sickened. Her hatred is as livid and vital as it was in the weeks following Alex’s death, intact after all these years.

“It’s your fault,” she repeats once more. “And I will not apologize.”

And with that I feel a rupture in my skin—those layers, so thin and strained, so many years, just give way and it all hemorrhages out. The resentment, anger, loneliness, anxiety, fear, whatever—you name it, it’s all storming out like a burst water main. I know in that moment that I cannot carry on like this. I’m done.

I lean against the door, exhausted. And when my voice comes out, it’s oddly level, as if I’m reading the shipping forecast.

“No,” I say blankly. (Bay of Biscay: good.) “No, Mum, you’re not blaming me. I am not responsible for your actions. I am not responsible for how you feel, or what you think. It all comes from you. None of it is mine. You chose to read my letters. You chose to harass Sarah. You chose to turn what’s happened to me in the last few months—which, for the record, has been hell—into some sort of grand betrayal. You did that all on your own; I didn’t do a thing.”

She starts to cry in earnest, although she still looks furious.

“I am not responsible for your illness, Mum. Nor is Sarah. I have done my best for you—my very best—while you’ve invaded the only tiny bit of privacy I thought I had left.”

She shakes her head.

“Yes, I met Sarah, and yes, I fell for her. But I gave her up the moment—the second—I found out. And everything I’ve done since then has been in your best interests. Not mine, yours. And you’re still blaming me?”

I watch her consider her response. She’s starting to panic. It’s not that she’s listened to what I’ve said, or thought about it, or (God forbid) realized that I might have a point; it’s more that she’s used to me having given way by this stage, and it’s beginning to dawn on her that I won’t.

So she does what I knew she’d do, eventually: she recasts herself as victim.

“Okay,” she says, and the tears begin to stream down her face. “Okay, Eddie, it’s my fault. It’s my fault that I have this awful, miserable life, that I’m trapped in my house, taking all that horrid medication. It’s all my fault.”

She watches my face, but I don’t move a muscle. “You tell yourself whatever you like, Eddie, but really you have no idea how hard my life is.”

Given that I’ve been looking after her for nineteen years, I think this is a little unfair.

We stand like two pawns in a chessboard face-off. Mum breaks eye contact first, doubtless to make me feel like the aggressor. She looks wretchedly down at the bench, tears squeezing and dripping into the deep ruts and saw marks below.

“Don’t leave me, Eddie,” she says eventually, like I knew she would. “I’m sorry I did what I did. I’m just devastated about you and . . . her. It’s destroyed me.”

I close my eyes.

“Don’t leave me, Eddie,” she repeats.

I move round the bench and hug her. A tiny sparrow of a human being, so easily crushed. I hold her, rigid, and think of my ex-girlfriend Gemma. This was the moment she could never truly understand. The moment when, even after Mum had pushed me to the outer edge of my capabilities, it was still my job to comfort her, to tell her everything was okay. The capitulation was totally inexplicable to Gemma. But I suppose that, like most people, she’s never had the experience of being responsible for someone else’s mental well-being. She’s never lost her sister, and then, nearly, her mother.

This time, though, it’s different. I’m hugging Mum because I have to, but inside, the landscape has already changed.

•   •   •

It’s raining by the time I get her into the Land Rover and drive her home. The sky is stuffed with gray clouds, swarming quickly over each other like angry thoughts. I apologize silently to Sarah. Wherever she is. I don’t wish you dead, I tell her. I wish you only happiness.

In Mum’s house, I give the heating a boost and make her some toast before she goes to bed. I give her a sleeping pill and hold her hand until she’s asleep. I have never had the experience of watching my own child sleep, but I imagine it’s a similar feeling. She looks, somehow, both lost and peaceful as she lies there, curled against my hand like a safety blanket, twitching occasionally, her breath barely audible.

Then I step outside and call Derek, and I leave a message on his answerphone, saying, in a very matter-of-fact way, that I have hit a wall and need his help.

On returning home, I watch three episodes of some Netflix series and—exhausted but unable to sleep—spend most of the rest of the night on my garden bench, wrapped in my duvet, having a one-way conversation with Steve the squirrel.