Ghosting

She thought he was dead.

Clare saw his name on her recruitment search and she felt something plunge in her chest. Glancing around the office, she half-expected others to have stopped with the same shock, but the life of the office whirred around her. She took a breath and the slightest of hesitations before clicking on his profile.

Matthew Rummage: the photo was an aged, greyer - no whiter - version of the boy she’d known, but it was unmistakeably him.

It took a while to phrase the first email, with just the right amount of breeziness and questioning. Clare did not expect a reply.

Six months and several emails later they were both in the same city and a date had been set to meet.

***

Although she had told Simon all about Matt, the preparation for the ‘casual’ lunch felt like a betrayal. Clare used a face masque and booked a hair appointment. The outfit was carefully chosen, and time taken over her make-up. She rarely looked this polished for the man who had been there for every twist, turn and drama of her adult life. But it had been thirty years since she’d seen Matt and her vanity was sitting just above her nerves. It was the ritual of a date. She crossed herself as she picked up her things.

Clare’s strategy was to be early, to be calm and seated for when they first met. She had decided against the potential coolness of a more alluring, dramatic later entrance. From her seat, she messaged Matt to say look for the middle-aged woman in the green dress. Time had passed and he might not recognise her.

Clare watched Matt arrive. He was harried, and his suit didn’t quite fit his stooped and shrunken frame. She found him both familiar and strange, like a sun-bleached photograph. She was aware that he gave an appreciative double-take on spotting her. Clare smiled, got up and put her hands out for a hug with a slight question mark on her face. The embrace was swift and they sat down. Amidst the industrial chic of bare brick, moody lighting, tattoos and beards, Clare calculated that they were probably the oldest people there. Matt looked out of place; his clothes dated, his white hair conspicuous.

“We are going to be called ‘guys’ and there is a lot of high-fiving among the waiting staff”, she commented. Matt smiled. She noticed him relax.

“This is weird, isn’t it?” she said, attempting the breezy tone of her emails.

“A little.”

As Clare had arrived early she had already made her menu choice, so she sat back and gave him time. A joke about the glasses they now both needed. Memories came back to Clare in small needle points. That’s right. He’s left-handed. Oh yes, he rubs his jaw when he is nervous. He is very poor at eye contact but when he does look at you, it makes you feel special, noticed and a little afraid.

But there was something new. His voice was quieter and less sure. It cracked and was almost a whisper. Above the noise of metal seats scraping, she found herself leaning in to catch what he was saying. She worried she looked coquettish.

The waitress approached.

“Do you know what you want?” Clare found herself looking after him.

They ordered. She sipped her tea. Clare was looking down when she heard him say. “You look more glamorous than I remember? No ringlets, no ethnic jewellery.”

“I’m middle-aged,” she admitted. “I have to spend some time grooming these days.”

“You look good.” Matt added and Clare knew she was supposed to return the compliment.

“Thank you. I made an effort.”

They talked. She told him about her father’s death, because she knew Matt had met him and had failed to impress. They swapped stories about caring for elderly relatives. He told her about his divorce and they shared pictures of their children on their phones. She noticed him glance at her naked left hand.

She smiled, “I’m not single, just too radical for marriage.”

Although their voices occasionally broke with nerves and they swallowed words, they fell into their old patterns. They played at the edges of joking and intensity. She would gently tease. He would ask disconcerting questions. She found he got better looking as the lunch progressed. She began to find the awkward way he held his cutlery endearing.

The food was a little cumbersome for their attempted informality. Sourdough toast too tough to cut, whole grains difficult to chew and undercooked vegetables that resisted being speared by a fork. Clare wished she’d ordered wine, as Matt’s voice became more serious. She wondered how he’d done it; how he’d taken the slightly awkward chat of a reunion and produced an intense silence with his stare. She took in how he was commanding the space, but still didn’t know what to do with his too long fingers, which were now at a strange angle to the table. She remembered that as she had tired of him, this awkwardness had quickly turned from endearing to annoying, almost to the point of enragement. Why couldn’t he hold his pen like a normal person? Back in this moment, in this poorly lit café, it annoyed her that she found herself fiddling with her hair.

They were four flights up, but she could swear it felt like underground.

Another memory threaded through her thoughts. It was all supposed to be fun. They were at university, first time away from home, independent and carefree. They were poor, but they could afford the reduced rates for film club matinees. Her choices were showings of MGM movies and forties melodramas. He preferred European cinema with plodding plots and subtitles. They rarely attended contemporary films, especially after Angel Heart. The 1950s setting and the jazz sound track was supposed to be common ground but fuelled by cheap beer they had their first catastrophic argument. For Clare, the reinstated sex scene was exploitative, the violence gratuitous. For Matt, she was afraid of real passion. He’d read enough books and now wanted to live a little. He said her arguments were straight from a school debating team. His eyes flashed, and his cheeks coloured.

There was no colour in the present. With the intense stare and silence, she found herself stuck between his aggression and eagerness; the confidence in her intelligence undermined. Why, Clare wondered, against the backdrop of the calmness of her life, had she invited this back in? She was annoyed by the adolescence of it. She sighed and leant back in her chair and waited for his question.

“In your emails, you said you wanted to apologise,” he said, “Go on, then.”

Clare paused, cleared her throat, determined not to mumble. “I thought you were dead,” she said, “and I’m sorry I never visited you in hospital.”

It was thirty years ago and the details were scratchy. She had rarely thought of it in recent years, almost forgotten about it, until she saw his name and then his face on her screen. But for years it had haunted. She said what she could.

Clare had heard about the accident from a mutual friend. Liam had sought her out at her holiday bar job to let her know that the car Matt had been driving had skidded into a tree and that he had head and spinal injuries. It was impressed upon her that it was serious. Liam had told her the hospital, the ward number and visiting times. It was the beginning of Clare’s evening shift. She thought she would remember the details, but by the end of an evening of pouring drinks and avoiding harassment, she had forgotten. Phoning the hospital had been the most grown up thing she had done by that point of her life. It proved fruitless. They wouldn’t give her details. She wasn’t family. She hadn’t yet learned how to be assertive and had hung up.

“I’m sorry. I was just 19,” she was almost pleading.

“Is that it?” he asked.

Clare nodded.

“I thought you were going to apologise for the way you finished it.”

A pause while he held the scene.

“Or for the fact that you wouldn’t let me say ‘I love you’.”

Another pause.

“Or that you didn’t respond to my letters.”

Clare’s shoulders shuddered, and she felt adrenaline pour down her arms.

“Or that you thought it was o.k. to contact me thirty years later to let me know you are happy and successful.”

Before he could add to the list, she put up her hand.

“Matt, why did the car crash?”

He smirked.

“I crashed my car, not by chance, and not out of love.”

He was quoting lyrics at her. Another haunting memory, listening to Lloyd Cole on a tinny stereo radio-cassette player, huddled on the floor under a duvet in his room in halls. One of their shared jokes was that all they ever shared was a taste in music. Was this his attempt to remind her of that? An attempt at levity or an accusation? While Clare could name the song, she struggled to name the sensation running down her spine – was it fury or fear? She remembered how after Matt, she refused the advances of anyone who could play the guitar, or wrote lyrics, or displayed any form of intensity. It wasn’t love. It was control.

Clare let Matt continue his rant about how he had loved her and that it was his choice when to tell her this.

He was so pale. Did he ever see daylight?

Her therapist called it disassociation. She hadn’t needed that trick since Matt crashed his car and stopped stalking her. She closed her eyes. She let the chatter of the bar and Matt’s hypnotic voice take over and imagined his evaporation. She melted the hair first. The pale eyes next, they fizzled and disappeared. She kept going until all that was left were those long fingers tapping out the problems one by one of everything that was wrong with her. She let them tap one more time before they too dissolved.

The waitress interrupted.

“Finished?” she asked about the half-eaten food.

Clare looked up. She was alone. The trick still worked. He was never really there.

“Yes,” said Clare

“Anything else?”

“Just the bill,” she replied.

After paying, she stepped outside and took a gasp of air.

***

Clare arrived home and gave Simon a huge embrace. She was pressed into him, when she felt her phone beep. She had no desire to look at it. Instead, she put her phone on charge, whilst finding out about Simon’s day and together they put her daughter to bed. She was snuggled on the sofa before she checked it again.

A text message from Matt.

That was fun – let’s do it again sometime, now we’ve got the awkwardness out of the way.

Blocked, deleted and contact removed.