Ghosted

“The necessity of protecting Hannah—not just as she slept in this tent, but always—felt like molten rock in my stomach, a volcano barely contained.”

Walsh provides a visceral, sensory description of the sense of responsibility that Hannah feels for her sister, which is so strong that it produces physical discomfort. This early reference to Sarah’s drive to protect her sister foreshadows her actions in the car accident and mirrors Eddie’s impulse to take care of his mother.

“I’d combed through every glowing, lambent moment of my time with him, searching for cracks, tiny warning signs that he might not have been as certain as I was, and I’d found nothing […] I phoned and messaged him; I even sent him a pathetic little tweet. I downloaded Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and checked throughout the day to see if he’d surfaced […] Flattened by both shame and desperation, I’d even downloaded a bunch of dating apps to find out if he was registered. He wasn’t.”

Walsh explores the motif of written communication to highlight the indignity of being rejected via multiple potential communication platforms at once. Sarah’s desperate reaction to try every possible mode of communication is also related to the uncertainty that ghosting entails and The Impact of Technology on Romantic Closure.

“I had seen friends do this. I’d watched in amazement as they claimed that his phone was broken; his leg was broken; he was broken, wasting unseen in a ditch. They insisted that some careless comment they’d made must have ‘scared him off,’ hence the need to ‘clear up any misunderstandings.’ I had watched them shred their pride, break their heart, lose their mind, all over a man who would never call. Worse, a man they barely knew.”

Walsh characterizes Sarah as competent and controlled in terms of her career and life in LA; her desperate actions after being ghosted are out of character, and she feels surprised that she is affected in the same way she has seen others be. Walsh emphasizes the idea that the experience is equalizing in its psychological difficulties.

“As I gazed up at the sky, the earth warm underneath me, I caught an old ripple of memory. This, I thought lazily. The smell of warm grass, the soft patter and rustle of it, layered with buzzing insects and snatches of hummed songs. This had been me once. Before Tommy had moved to America and adolescence had exploded under my feet like a landmine, this had been enough.”

Walsh connects landscape with memory, and the vivid sensory description allows Sarah to return to the sense of who she was in her youth. The positive image of an “old ripple of memory” and the description of adolescence as a landmine suggest the powerful and unavoidable connection between memory and the place where either positive or traumatizing events occurred.

“‘It’s my contention that everyone has a choice, in everything. On some level. […] What they do, how they feel, what they say. It’s just somehow become the received wisdom that we don’t have a choice. About anything. Jobs, relationships, happiness. All behind our control.’ He shooed the tiny spider back into the grass. ‘It can be frustrating, watching everyone complaining about their problems, never wanting to discuss solutions. Believing they’re a victim of other people, of themselves, of the world.’ That tiny hairline fracture had returned to his voice.”

Walsh uses first-person narration from Sarah’s perspective to characterize both Sarah and Eddie throughout her memories of their seven days together. Eddie is characterized by his strong feelings on the idea of choice, which are later revealed to be a response to his lack of choice in the need to care for his mother. Sarah’s reactions to him also characterize their intimacy, as she begins to observe intricacies of his delivery, with the vivid corporeal and aural description of a “hairline fracture” in his voice.

“Not long before leaving the sixth form, I’d studied Mrs. Dalloway for my English A level. We’d taken turns narrating the book, exploring Woolf’s ‘unique narrative technique,’ as Mrs. Rushby called it. ‘The world has raised its whip,’ I read aloud when my turn came; ‘where will it descend?’ I had paused, surprised, and then read the sentence again. And even though my classmates were watching me, even though Mrs. Rushby was watching me, I had underlined the sentence three times before moving on, because those words had described so perfectly how I felt, most of the time, that I marveled that anyone other than me could have written them. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend? That was it! seventeen-year-old me had thought. That perpetual alertness! Watching the skies, sniffing the air, bracing for calamity. That’s me. And yet here I was now, nineteen years on, feeling exactly the same. Had anything actually changed? Had my comfortable life in California been mere fantasy?”

Walsh represents a vivid experience of reading a particularly relatable written description. Sarah is affected by the sense of foreboding and calamity, which is mirrored in Walsh’s creation of narrative ambiguity and suspense within the narrative structure.

“We hadn’t completed many noteworthy activities since this affair had begun. We had slept a lot, made love a lot, eaten a lot, talked for hours. Not talked for hours. Read books, spotted birds, made up an extended narrative about a dog who’d nosed around Eddie’s clearing while we’d eaten a Spanish tortilla on the bench one day. In short, even though everything was happening, nothing was happening.”

Walsh highlights the paradox between ostensible nonaction and the fact that something significant—falling in love—is happening to Eddie and Sarah. The focus on seemingly banal details also highlights the idea that the excitement of finding “the one” supplants the need for action that is more typically thought of as exhilarating, highlighting the theme of The Search for a Romantic Soulmate.

“But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t talk, not even to appease Grandad. I stood there in front of him, me in my running gear, he in a dressing gown that he’d been too weak to do up properly, beneath the worn cotton of his old blue pajamas. The edges were piped in navy. My heart was broken. Granddad smelled of deep tiredness. I wept silently, my face crumpled around the flattened shape of my crying mouth. I’d lost Hannah, and now Eddie: I knew it, I couldn’t pretend any longer, and here was my poor grandfather who’d been on his own for nearly fifty years, since Granny had had a heart attack and died in her chair with a ham sandwich in front of her, and now Granddad must be taking his daily exercise, because he had a walker in front of him, and neither of us knew what to say to each other. Neither of us had a clue.”

In this passage, Walsh provides a vivid description of the experience of silence and the inability to communicate at the moment when Sarah is forced to admit that she has lost Eddie. Their inability to communicate juxtaposes with all the forms of written communication that Sarah uses with Eddie. Walsh positions Sarah and her grandfather as having a shared experience of grief, with Sarah’s being painfully recent and her grandfather’s much more longstanding.

“Our love was based on reciprocal need and strength, and it worked perfectly. For a long time that kind of love was all I thought I needed. When I promised to love and honor him forever, I meant it. But of course, I changed. As the years passed, I no longer needed him, and so our balance was fatally disrupted. We cared so much about each other, Eddie, but without that balance of need, the scales couldn’t settle. My inability to give him a baby was the final straw. After the car accident I couldn’t stand being near kids; couldn’t bear the thought of a child suffering. The very idea of bringing a child into the world—a defenseless baby like my little sister had once been—created a storm of blind panic.”

Sarah’s logical, clear description of her balanced relationship with Rueben and the reasons that it ended is in stark opposition to her out-of-control and emotional reaction to Eddie’s abrupt departure from her life. Walsh therefore emphasizes the difference between a marriage based on love, but which is also situational, and a “soulmate” relationship.

“He shrugged, but his face told me all I needed to know. He was lost. Out of his depth. For years, there had remained avenues of hope, and keeping Jenni plugged into them had been Javier’s job. It had shielded him from the lead weight of her fear, given him an active role. Now there was nothing, and his wife—whom, for all his emotional limitations, he loved with every cell in his body—was in a deep well of grief. He no longer had a role, or any hope do offer.”

This passage emphasizes the protective power of hope by characterizing its absence after Jenni and Javier’s final IVF cycle fails. Walsh equates the loss of the ability to provide hope to his wife with Javier’s loss of role and identity, thereby emphasizing the significance of hope.

“I did not make a habit of meeting the kids. I found it far too painful. But there was something about Ruth I couldn’t resist. Even when my job had ceased to involve hospital visits, I still went to see her, because I couldn’t not. Now here she was, aged fifteen and a half, wrapped in a blue fleece blanket with a moon print on it, an IV stand next to her armchair. Tiny and scrappy; her thin hair brittle. For a moment I stood still as shock curled around my throat.”

Since Sarah generally keeps her distance from the children whom her charity helps, the inclusion of specific physical details of the scene—the moon print on the blanket, and Ruth’s thin, brittle hair—produces a strong emotional reaction for Sarah and evokes pathos in the reader. Again, Walsh provides a vivid physical description to convey Sarah’s emotional experience.

“There was a man out there, somewhere, a nameless man I’d been thinking about for nineteen years. I didn’t know his face or his voice, had nothing to go on beyond a surname, but I’d always known I’d recognize him when he found me. I would look him in the eye and I’d just know. Which was why Eddie David couldn’t be that man, I told myself. Despite the fact that his surname was wrong, I’d have sensed who he was the moment I met him. I’d have known.”

The use of vague pronouns and descriptions in this passage creates distance between the “nameless man” whom Sarah has always pictured and the reality of Eddie. Walsh emphasizes the jarring nature of a reality in opposition to a long-held mental image.

“The fire is coming at us fast. I tried to stop the words worming their way to my mouth but hadn’t the strength. ‘I want to go home,’ I said. The meeting room hummed quietly. ‘Stop it,’ I whispered. Hot tears prickled. ‘Stop it. This is your home.’ No it’s not. This was never more than a hiding place. But I love this city! I love it! That doesn’t make it home.”

As Sarah experiences symptoms of a mental health crisis, Walsh employs repetition of the threatening phrase “fire is coming at us fast” and the instruction, directed at her thought process, to “stop it.” The repetition and syntactical choices of brief, staccato statements accelerate the pace of the passage and reflect Sarah’s mental state.

“‘I walk along there every year on June second,’ I told him. I wanted to fold myself around him, absorb his pain somehow. ‘I go there, rather than up to the main road, because Broad Ride was their kingdom that afternoon. They had nail varnish and magazines and not a care in the world. That’s the bit I fly back to remember.’”

Walsh addresses two impulses toward a sense of intimacy in this passage. First, Sarah imagines the physical intimacy that she wishes she could share with Eddie to remove his pain. Further, the details of “nail varnish and magazines” represent the figurative intimacy with Hannah and Alex through learning about the details of their experience on the day that Alex died.

“I imagined cells multiplying, all those weeks ago. Sarah cells, Eddie cells. Sarah-and-Eddie cells, splitting into more Sarah-and-Eddie cells. The Internet said it would be the size of a strawberry by now. There was a computer-generated picture on the page, and it looked like a tiny child. I’d stared at that picture for what seemed like hours, and felt things I had never felt before, things to which I couldn’t even put a name.”

Unable to name or comprehend her feelings about her pregnancy, Sarah’s description of the cells reflects her attempt to understand something that feels incomprehensible to her. The repetition of “cells” in the passage reflects the imagery of their multiplication.

“I ran my fingertips along the tiny indentations that Eddie’s pen had left where he’d written my name. I knew what this letter would be. It would be the final punctuation mark to a relationship that had ended nineteen years before it had even begun, but I wanted a few more minutes before I saw that final full stop. A few more minutes of precious, poisonous denial.”

The metaphor of the end of the relationship as a punctuation mark aligns with Walsh’s representation of written correspondence as a symbol for what is unsaid in relational communication. The alliteration of precious and poison emphasizes the paradoxical nature of the self-deception that the adjectives describe.

“I cross over to the drawers under my workbench. I open the one marked chisels. Inside, there’s a soft sea of purple paper. A sad treasure chest; my dark secret. The drawer’s filling up again: some of the letters at the back are in danger of falling into the drawer below, where I really do keep chisels. Carefully, I slide them toward the front. It’s stupid, really, but I hate the thought of any of them getting lost. Or bent, or crushed, or hurt in any way.”

Eddie anthropomorphizes his letters to Alex by worrying that they could be injured. Walsh thereby emphasizes the importance that writing to Alex has held for him over the years and that the artefacts of the letters are significant, even though they haven’t been read by their intended recipient.

“And with that I feel a rupture in my skin—those layers, so thin and strained, so many years, just five way and it all hemorrhages out. The resentment, anger, loneliness, anxiety, fear, whatever—you name it, it’s all storming out like a burst water main. I know in that moment that I cannot carry on like this. I’m done.”

Walsh portrays Eddie’s experience of the shift in his relationship with his mother as an abrupt flow of liquid: first blood, then water. Through this vivid imagery, Walsh highlights the sense that the pressure has built over a long period of time before Eddie has finally reached a point to let go of it.

“I stand in Mum’s kitchen feeling hollow and uneasy, wondering again who died last August. At the end of her garden, under the plum tree, there’s a little pool of gold where celandines jut bravely through patchy grass. I remember those wildflowers on the coffin and have to have very stern words with myself about the direction these thoughts are taking.”

Walsh connects beauty and death, as the image of the wildflowers is connected with that of the coffin. Like the letters to Alex, Eddie anthropomorphizes the flowers as brave because he associates them with Sarah.

“I try not to think about Mum, home alone, wrestling with what must feel like a nightmare. But then I think, Three months, she’s known. Three bloody months! She told me in the end, I remind myself, because I have to. Hating Sarah has prevented Mum from feeling the deepest pain—the most unbearable pain—for a very, very long time. It’s been her best medication. That nod toward the phone, that reluctant blessing, is a gesture I must not underestimate.”

Walsh’s use of metaphor to describe Carole’s hatred of Sarah as medicine characterizes the depth of her grief for Alex and the pain of parental loss. The specificity with which Walsh represents her gesture of blessing—the nod toward the phone—suggests how significant it feels to Eddie.

“And I know, finally, how Sarah felt the day she set off in pursuit of her boyfriend and her little sister. I know the terror that gripped her, the instinct that sent her spinning off the road to prevent a car crash Hannah would never have survived. I know she didn’t swerve because she didn’t care about Alex. It was love and fear that made her wrench that steering wheel. The same love and fear that, right now, I am feeling for her. I would do anything to keep her safe. I’d block a hospital car park. I’d break the speed limit. And I, too, in that same situation Sarah found herself in, in 1997, would have swerved left, if it meant saving the person I loved most.”

Walsh’s syntax in this passage parallels the progression of Eddie’s thoughts; it emphasizes the empathy and commonality that Eddie has begun to feel for Sarah and how long it has taken to reach understanding. The use of short parentheticals set off by commas—"finally,” “right now,” “in 1997,” and “too”—slows the rhythm of the passage and allows the reader to experience the gradual but complete shift in Eddie’s perspective alongside him.

“A lone car enters the car park, makes slowly for a disabled space opposite me. Life goes on. The world is waking. The world contains my son. This is all his. This air, this dawn, this crying man whom he might one day call Dad. Then my pocket buzzes and I see Sarah’s name, and the word ‘Message,’ and I’m off again, crying uncontrollably, before I’ve even read the thing.”

Walsh represents the significant difference in how Eddie views the world after becoming a father in this passage through the use of simple, declarative sentences and references to broad natural concepts of air and dawn. Eddie’s emotional reaction to the word “message” aligns with the symbolic significance of written correspondence throughout the text and is a fitting reconciliation for a rift that involved the absence of technological communication.

“I understand, too, that something even bigger than his mother’s illness has happened to Eddie, and that’s parenthood. Parenthood, and all the indescribable instincts and emotions over which it reigns. Alex arrived into Eddie’s life, tiny, warm, looking like he was solving the mysteries of the world, and without saying so much as a word to his father—without so much as lifting a finger—he changed the landscape of Eddie’s responsibilities forever.”

Walsh’s diction, describing parenthood as “reigning” over instincts and emotions, suggests the strong and inevitable sense of loyalty to one’s child. The inclusion of details of what Alex did not need to do to achieve this—saying a word or lifting a finger—gestures toward the idea of Eddie’s relationship with Alex in the future, when his son is old enough to do those things.