Ghostbusting

I've been ghosted. Spooked x3.

I’ve been ghosted once a decade over my adult life.

That’s three times being spooked. Not bad going I suppose if you count up the friendships over that time, the coffees and cocktails and dancing and talking about nothing and everything into the night. It’s the risk you take when you open your heart to someone, and I still say, it’s worth it. Not everyone is going to be who they said they were on the tin. And maybe you’ve been labelled incorrectly yourself. But whether I’ve been equipped with a ghostbusting proton pack, or simply with the laser power of therapy, being ghosted leaves me wondering if I imagined all the good times. Like-did I make US up? Adult relationships are tricky enough-juggling jobs, families, finances, not having time for spontaneous phone calls and long weekends together, but when someone disappears without explanation, or worse still, much like a resident poltergeist, sticks around offering breadcrumbs of friendship, as has happened to me over the last year of illness, it can make you question why on earth you turned up with a homemade birthday cake, travelled miles for their hen, listened to them as they navigated grief and breakups, and wonder if you really know how to be a human, let alone a friend. It doesn’t matter how many other dear pals you have, it’s the spook who can shout boo into your 3am thoughts. It’s me, not you. Maybe that’s actually true, when you’re not dumping a teenage boyfriend. Maybe it IS indeed me. But is it you, not me? You see how these ghosts leave me? Upside down and confused. Not sure if up is down and down is up.

The first person to ghost me was my father. I was 22, having a cheapie package hol blast of a time in Lanzarote, when my mum called me. She couldn’t find Dad. She’d just arrived home from a trip to see her family in Pakistan, and was calling me from the house landline, suitcase beside her, still wearing the shalwar kameez she’d been gifted.

He hadn’t met her at the airport. They’d agreed to meet by the M&S, as they did every year, with my dad having already bought her a prawn sandwich and grapefruit juice for the journey home. She was phoning me, out of breath, worried - had she been burgled? Had they taken her husband? Dad’s paintings had been removed from the hallway walls, leaving discoloured squares (which my mum, in her shock, couldn’t stop mentioning, “It looks awful!”) The cafetière had disappeared, alongside his Euthymol toothpaste. His toothbrush was still in the bathroom, and his clothes all hung in their wardrobes, in their usual colour-coded, fastidious order.

I said he must have been spring-cleaning. Or maybe he’d drunk too much and was passed out in the shed. I’d found him there many times, often before school, closing the door softly, and leaving him to sleep it off. My mum started to call her friends, trying to piece it together. And then, she found him. He was staying with an old family friend. He was fine, and he’d sent Dave, a local taxi guy to pick her up, so she would have to pay him, and it was her fault for not seeing her name on the sign. And one more thing. He was leaving her. He explained he couldn’t bear to be married to her for “One more Christmas”, and so he thought he had better do it now, in July. He said he’d fallen head over in heels for P, the family friend, and so might Mum forward the post. He’d be in touch shortly to arrange the removals van. And that, after thirty years of marriage, he hoped she would be respectful about the divorce proceedings.

I called and called him. Trying to find out what he was doing. I left increasingly angry messages on the answerphone, until eventually P picked up, saying coolly “Your father just wants to be left alone. Give him some peace.” He didn’t talk to me or my little sister for the next year - disappearing into the shadows at a time in my life when God, I really wanted more than a spectre of a father. I was in the beginnings of grownup-dom, where sometimes I think we need our parents more than ever, as we try out those early adult versions of ourselves.

The second person to ghost me was a friend.

She was my sister. That’s what she would tell people anyway. I think about it now, and wonder why on earth I didn’t shout RED FLAG! and run as fast as I could as she came into view. But I was flattered back then, and to be frank, I couldn’t believe somebody found me so completely enthralling.

“Nobody really gets me like you do”.

“They’re idiots, the lot of them.”

“It’s you and me.”

“I love you”.

Female friendship can be as seductive as a sun-soaked holiday romance. And can also be as ill-suited as Bernie from Benidorm (I realised about him in the passport queue). Some potential BFFs are particularly alluring when you’re emerging from the swamp of small kids. This one, F, let’s call her, well, she was just that. I now think of it as a seduction. F was for funny and fearless and free. She said out loud all the things I was secretly thinking and made me laugh in delighted shock. She decorated me with compliments, at a time in my life where I was spinning in the free fall of early motherhood, when any attention on the self is scant. The summer I met F, an old friend asked me how I was, and I replied, telling her in detail about my children and husband. “But what about YOU?” My friend has asked in bewilderment. “Where are you?’

F was my person. Looking back there were the warning signs. If I was upset with someone, she’d text SHE’S DEAD TO ME, rather than telling me to cool down, or suggest another point of view. If she saw me having coffee with another friend, I’d get a ping mid flat white, always couched in mock outrage or an outrageous putdown about who on earth was I spending my time with, if not her? I would laugh off other friends’ opinions, saying “She’s just joking”. I was flattered that someone loved me so. I was swept along with glamour, red lipstick, and hip hop blaring from her open topped car at the school gates. It was pure escapism from soft play, fishfingers, and swings. I remember a neighbour once saying, “You two always look like you’re having a party” and thinking how I felt so lucky and loved.

And it was just that, until it wasn’t.

Even now, years later, I don’t understand how it ended. I still don’t trust my recollections. One moment, we were inseparable, and then - we weren’t. At first, I could explain it away. It had been Covid. We were all recalibrating. We were all out of sorts. But then it became clear. Painfully so. I would see her around the neighbourhood, and she would pretend not to see me. Her ghosting of me informed the dynamics of our larger friendship group - I still don’t know how - and I found myself maligned. It got to the point where I would hide in my car at pick up, until a dear friend knocked on the window and said: “Show up for yourself.”

I felt doolally. I began to think that I’d somehow conjured up a friendship from nothing. I would look through old texts and photos, vainly trying to prove it had been the friendship I’d believed. It sent me right back to the primary school playground. I felt about 7, when the kids at my village school decided my name was very much like Saddam. But then I’d gotten away with it in my teenage years, being lucky enough to have a close knit group of friends that carried me through the awkward, blemish kissed years, and until F, I’d never really understood how somebody, other than an addict’s kid, could experience ghosting. I thought of my dad as a one off. An addict who was so self immersed that he preferred no contact with his daughters until he needed us again. (spoiler alert-as soon as he was chucked out of his girlfriend’s house) But people disappear for reasons we may never understand, maybe you’re too much for them, you’ve upset them and they think there’s no point in telling you, or they don’t like the version of yourself that you’ve become. Who knows? And as I’ve learnt in the last year of illness, it’s much like looking for split ends. There’s always more. You’ll go round and round in circles trimming little weakened tresses until the next time and so on and so on, so leave it alone.

As you’ve guessed, the third ghosting happened during cancer.