I stare at it for a few more moments, until I understand it.
It’s ghosting.
I ghosted her.
She painted it.
And that’s what got her her break.
There’s a photograph of her, underneath the insert. I lean closer to it and squint.
Her short hair is decorated with a green, jewel-toned scarf, tied in a bow at her crown. She’s wrinkling her nose as she grins widely at the camera, a glass of something in her hand. Her arms are almost completely covered with tattoos. She looks like an artist, but still Laura.
Next to her there’s a selection of photos from the launch, arranged around a press cutting. They’re recent, the glass frame they’ve been placed into shiny and new-looking.
There’s Jonty, looking just the same, in braces and a trilby hat, looking twenty-one as he grins at the camera. There’s Jonty’s sister – God, what was her name again? Laura always said she was stuffy, conservative. Emma, maybe?
And there, in amongst the crowd, is a face I didn’t expect to see: Reuben’s.
He’s there, in a shot of the room, but right next to Laura. My first response is flattered: that I meant so much to him that he maintained my friendships after I left him. The second is suspicion. Not of anything romantic, but imagining that the two of them might’ve met up, tried to figure out what really went wrong with me, presuming Ed didn’t tell them. They’d hypothesize in our local pub, together, just the two of them.
I swallow. My throat feels heavy and full, like somebody has rolled a tennis ball down it.
I look again at the transparent woman. It’s done in acrylics, I think, and so cleverly. The paint is there, but not there, all at the same time. I look at her transparent body, her half-there clothes. Her form that doesn’t leave a dent on the bed, nor cast a shadow. The details. She’s not me, and yet she represents me, see-through with guilt, all at once.
This was my price, I think. Reuben. Laura. Wilf. The accident. I’ve lost things. That is my atonement, I think naively. That was my prison sentence. I think of Ayesha and I think of Imran, dying alone, friendless, in that puddle.
Take them, I tell the universe. Have them, and make me pay.
It is a fair price.
It is a just price.
But it is not enough.
As the evening falls, I catch the DLR to the City. I am not ready to see the man I most want to. Not yet. The man who could always make me laugh with a mere shake of his head as I arrived home from Hobbycraft with an entire Make Your Own Wicker Furniture kit.
But for now I want to connect with Wilf. To see him. To see what he’s up to.
I arrive in the City and go to his work first. It’s a Friday night, but he’s far more likely to be there than anywhere else. He works on the ninth floor, he once told me, and I’ve remembered. I stare up at it. I’m tired from all the walking. It’s the most exercise I’ve done in years. My hand aches. It’s dusk, still warm, and the street lights are popping on. The sky is fading to a blue so pale it almost stays white. The building’s dark against the stark sky, except for one window. On the ninth floor. I stare up at it. Second from the left. Fourth from the right. Lit up, like a lighthouse in the spring sky. I stare and stare, hoping for a glimpse of him, wondering what we might do together if he looked down and saw me here, for the first time in two years.
‘We lost our way a bit. Me and Wilf,’ I told Reuben on the stairs at that party where we met, when I made him talk, when the words began flowing out of us like gently spooling yarn.
‘Why?’ Reuben had asked.
‘There’s no reason,’ I said.
I think Reuben understood. Nothing serious happened with Wilf, and that made it worse. We were just too different for the flower bed we sprang from to bind us together.
What would we do if things had been different? If, maybe, I hadn’t failed at university, or if we had, somehow, found our way back to one another? I could have turned up in his office, spun round on the chair, ordered takeaway for him, helped him with whatever it was he was doing. Or, maybe, we’d walk. Towards the river. In between two tower blocks, navigating their ground-floor car parks, lit up in the gloom, and down to the docks where it almost feels like the seaside, where it smells of fish and the river laps gently. We wouldn’t be able to talk about the things we used to talk about. What if there was a Narnia entrance at the back of our huge airing cupboard? What if we could fly, and it was just that no human had yet found the magic combination of moves? But we could talk about our parents and the things they used to say to us. The way Dad had told me he expected eleven A-stars from me, seriously, over Christmas dinner, and Wilf had guffawed. ‘I got one A, and I coped,’ he had told me. I could have asked him if he felt it, too: the weight of their disappointment. Their neglect, even though we went to Cape Town for the summer, even though we went for walks in meadows and for meals by candlelight at castles in the winter. I could ask him if he felt it, too: the neglect that sat behind it all, like a disturbing backdrop. Or if it was just me.
We could do something, here in London, while we have that conversation as adults. Something as brother and sister. Something as allies. Something as free adults who can do whatever they like in the world – go and eat overpriced candyfloss by the river or go on the London Eye or do absolutely anything at all.
At my eighteenth birthday, it was Wilf who ensured I had a good time. Not with drink or friends, but taking me into the garden just after midnight on the anniversary of the day I was born, and releasing a pink balloon into the sky with me. I remember that more than anything, too. What changed between us? I’ll never know. And so, because I’ve stopped avoiding things, started facing up to things, I sigh, then get out my mobile and call him. His phone rings, then, after four, goes straight to voicemail. It’s not a natural cut-off. He’s pressed the red button. I can tell. He must still have my number. It’s been over two years since we last spoke, but he must still have it.
I try him again. For old time’s sake. To give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, I think hopefully as it rings out, we could just do nothing. Nothing at all. Go to his. Go to a bar. Eat chips by the river for the last time. Or share two beers, like we did the night before he went to university, in the old barn, sitting on the hay bales in the rafters.
The light in the window doesn’t change. I stand, staring up at it for a few more minutes. I no longer avoid things, but I can’t force them, either. I can’t make him answer.
Never mind, I think to myself. The last time Wilf and I said anything meaningful to each other was when we were eighteen and twenty. It wasn’t meant to be.
My eyes are damp from staring up at the window and I tell myself it’s because of the hot breeze, because I am staring at the bright light shining in the darkness.
His phone cuts to voicemail again and I hang up. I walk away, looking backwards, once, twice, at the light still hanging, suspended, in a glass box in the dark. It stays on. I never see him emerge. And he doesn’t call me back.
40
Reveal
‘Well, you seem very together,’ the trainer says to me.
He’s called Simon, and he’s of that benign posh look; curls on the top of his forehead like a toddler’s, rosy cheeks. I am sure he likes fine wines and the races and doesn’t worry too much.
‘Really,’ I say. ‘I’m … I’m having a hard time adjusting after I’m out.’