Ghosted: A Novel

Dear Alan,

Please forgive this message from out of the blue.

You replied to my post on Eddie David’s Facebook wall earlier today. I’m a bit worried, and wanted to share what limited information I have.

Prior to your holiday with Eddie, I spent a week with him in Sapperton. I left on Thursday, June 9, so that he could pack, and he said he’d call me from the airport.

I never heard from him again. After trying several times to contact him, I gave up, assuming that he had changed his mind. I never fully believed it, however, and when I saw your reply to my post I knew I hadn’t been deceiving myself. Below is my phone number. I would really appreciate you sharing any thoughts or info that you might have. I am not a stalker! I just want to know he’s okay.

Best wishes,

Sarah Mackey

Eleven P.M. leached silently into midnight. My phone buzzed and I hurled myself at it, but it was just Jo saying she’d got home safely. No reply from Alan. I lay back in bed and felt my heart straining in my chest. It hurt. It actually hurt. Why did nobody tell you that a broken heart wasn’t just a metaphor?

Midnight turned into one, then two, then three. I imagined Tommy and Zoe in their giant bed along the hallway, and wondered if they held each other while they slept. I remembered Eddie’s body, wrapped around mine, and felt a longing so fierce it seemed to bore through my skin. Then I spent a while intensely disliking myself, because in Istanbul there were bodies in bags, whereas Eddie was—quite probably—a man who simply hadn’t called.

At four, having caught myself in the act of searching online for death notices in Eddie’s area, I let myself quietly out of Tommy’s flat. Dawn was pressing gray smudges into the sky, and a lone street sweeper was already at work, shuffling slowly past Zoe’s smart Georgian terrace. It would be another couple of hours until the city reached full throttle, but I couldn’t take another moment of the suffocating silence and the buzz of dark theories, each more terrible than the last.

At Holland Park Avenue, I started running. For a short while I sailed effortlessly past bus stops sheltering tired-looking migrants on their way to work, cafés with grilles still down, an inebriated man stumbling back from Notting Hill. I tuned out the whine of night buses and taxis, allowing only the slap of my trainers and the warble of the dawn chorus.

My effortless sailing didn’t last long. As the road began to climb toward Notting Hill, my lungs started to burst, as they always did, and my legs gave up. I walked up to the Portobello turnoff.

There’s nothing crazy about what I’m doing, I thought, when I could force myself to run again. London is awake already. A workers’ café was packed out with tradesmen in hi-vis vests; a man was opening a coffee cart on Westbourne Grove. London was on the move. Why shouldn’t I be? This was fine.

•   •   •

Only, of course, it was not, because my body felt tired and miserable, and I was the only runner I saw for the duration. And because it was still only 4:45 A.M. by the time I got back to Tommy’s.

I showered and slid into bed. I tried for five minutes not to check my phone.

One missed call, the screen advised, when I gave in. I sat up. It was a withheld number, at 4:19 A.M. A message had been left.

The message comprised two seconds of silence, followed by the sound of a human pressing the wrong button. After a brief scrabble, the caller managed successfully to hang up.

Briefly, I wondered if it was Eddie’s friend Alan, but according to Facebook he had not yet read my message.

Then who?

Eddie?

No! Eddie’s not that person! He’s a talker! Not some shady crackpot who calls at 4 A.M.!

•   •   •

By the time I woke at lunchtime, Alan had read my message. He had not replied.

I stared at my phone dementedly, refreshing it again and again. He couldn’t just ignore it. Nobody would do that!

But he had read it, and he had ignored it. The day passed; I heard nothing. And I felt frightened. Less, as each day passed, for Eddie, and more, as each day passed, for myself.