‘Is it you?’ Katie whispers.
Nothing happens.
‘It’s you,’ she says.
He’s here, with me. With us. There can’t be any explanations. How could he tell us about his choices? He’s nothing more than a feeling, a scent, a sound.
‘Why are you here?’ she asks. ‘Tell me. Tell me.’
The sun rises just that little bit further, just enough to clarify, solidify, to a new day.
‘You can’t tell me, can you? You don’t want to.’ She sounds reconciled to her own words, as if she’s hit upon an answer of her own, somehow.
He’s gone.
Katie holds out her hand to me and I take it. We are frozen together. She thinks she’s found him, and I think I’ve lost him, and we’re good and strong in this moment for different reasons that don’t really matter.
The week passes.
Katie and I take classes, and swim, and talk to each other. We talk about her grandfather and my ghost, and the ways they were the same and they were different. We can find no answers between us.
We also talk to many women about their lives, lives that come across as strange and normal at the same time. It’s only a glimpse of what makes us all work. I find I want more.
We take half an hour after dinner every night to work on our declarations.
The last thing I write is:
I wonder what he would have said to me if he could have talked. I think it would have been something like – Min, girl, you’re concentrating on the wrong stuff. It doesn’t matter who I am. What matters is that you needed me without knowing it, and now you have to do better than that. You have to want something. What do you want?
This voice I give to him is nothing like the voice he would have had when he was alive, I’m sure.
Sometimes I think about asking Katie to tell me how her declaration ends, but I never do, and she doesn’t offer to read it to me.
Every day I wake up at dawn and every day I breathe in, and listen. I don’t move. All my concentration is on the smell and the sound of the air around me. He’s not there. He’s not there.
I miss him.
I’m ready to go home.
We stand on the dock and watch the boat coming in. It takes its time. The women talk and laugh quietly. We don’t join in but it’s good to be on the periphery, as the silent but accepted members. They don’t know much about us, but what they know is enough.
‘We don’t have to keep in touch,’ I tell her.
‘Good, because I don’t do that stuff,’ she says.
‘No, really?’ I make my shocked face.
‘I’m just reminding you.’
‘That’s very handy, because I nearly forgot your personality, there, for a second.’
‘Glad we’ve got that settled.’
‘Think of me when you dick around with people trying to purchase houses.’
‘Yeah, spare me a thought when you have conversations with boring people as part of your administrative job.’
‘You make it sound soul-destroying,’ I say.
‘It is.’
‘I don’t think so.’ I’m not certain how I feel about it. I don’t feel that my life and my job should be escaped, not right now. Not before I know what I should leave it all behind for. I have a feeling that maybe I could make a difference there. Alter the crueller behaviours of the pack by leading from the front. Is that realistic?
The boat draws closer.
‘I wonder if he’s going to stay here,’ I say. ‘On the island. Breaking the rules and smoking over the visitors. Would that suit him?’
‘Not in the least. Not unless he’s changed.’
‘Of course he’s changed!’
‘Yes, of course he’s changed,’ she echoes. ‘I didn’t ever really know him, you know.’
‘No. Me neither.’
‘Let me have your mobile number,’ she says.
‘Okay.’ I find a scrap of paper and a pen in my bag, and write it out for her.
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s fine,’ I say.
‘I don’t need it. I might want it, though. One day.’
‘I don’t even know what that means.’
‘Yeah. That’s going around,’ she says.
Is it okay to know people, just a little, and only want them when you want them? To take the parts you like and leave the rest, on your own terms?
I don’t have an answer for that.
Katie is right again, though. Not having an answer is going around.
My time on Skein Island has given me a taste for the outdoors, but I prefer it in smaller doses. I visit Jimbo’s Golf Accessories Emporium and kit myself out, then sign up for lessons at the golf course. It’s a good walk through a maintained landscape, and if I get cold I can give up and return to the clubhouse for a drink.
I’m standing at the bar, chatting about the water hazard on the ninth hole with some of my new friends, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. My first thought is for my ghost and my second thought is for Katie. But no, it’s not either of those options. It’s Dave.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know you played golf.’
‘I’ve just taken it up.’
‘I heard you went to Skein Island.’
‘I did. And no, I didn’t wear dungarees and get in touch with my inner goddess or whatever.’ I’ve heard all the jokes in these past few weeks, and none of them even begin to bother me. I’m getting tougher.
‘I wasn’t going to say that. I just wanted to say – I’m sorry. That it didn’t work out between us. It was the cigar smoke. I hate cigar smoke.’
‘The ghost’s gone,’ I tell him.
He rolls his eyes at me. ‘You’re not on about that again, are you?’
‘What?’ It takes me a moment to realise what he means. ‘You don’t believe in the ghost?’
‘If you don’t like the smoke, stop smoking. Smoking in bed is disgusting and dangerous.’
‘I don’t smoke!’
‘And stop making stuff up. This ghost guy – you created him to push me away… You realise that, don’t you? He was only there to make me jealous. I told you, you need to do something about it. I wish you the best in solving your problems. I really do.’
The things we tell ourselves to make certain we’re front and centre in our own stories. ‘Goodbye, Dave,’ I say. I turn my back on him. I hear him sigh, and then walk away.
I lie very still, early the next morning, in the first light of dawn, and I think of what my ghost would have said to me about the whole thing. Min, girl, that wasn’t the right man for you. He fooled his own memory to make you out to be the bad guy. He decided not to believe in me, even though I’m right here. Plain as the smoke drifting past your nose.
Except you’re not here any more, are you? There’s no more smoke.
I pick up my phone and take it with me under the duvet. In the warm darkness, I find there’s a text message from Katie.
All right?
I wonder what it cost her to write that, and whether she’ll hate herself for it later.
I text back, and we start a conversation. I tell her about Dave and she calls him deluded, which makes me feel much better.
Forget him. Irrelevant. Bloody people. I still hate them all.
I text back:
I hate them all too. Do you want to meet up? I was thinking about trying parasailing, or taking tango lessons.
There’s a long pause. Just at the point where I’m about to put the phone down and return to sleep, she texts:
But I’m miles away.
I’m not sure who she is and I have no clue who I am, but I know us just enough to be sure that we’ll find something that brings us together, real or imaginary. It doesn’t matter which.