4 December 10.54

Morning. Hope work is easier and you haven’t been staying late too much. Fancy a drink this week? Or if you’ve got early starts, I can come to yours and cook or you could come to mine? Whatever’s easiest for you x New message from: Nina

5 December 14.40

Get the feeling something is up. I would really appreciate chatting on the phone to you, even if it’s just for five minutes. Let me know when works.

New message from: Nina

7 December 08.11

I really hate feeling like I’m harassing you. It’s making me go a bit insane. Please can you just let me know you’re OK?

New message from: Max

7 December 09.09

Sorry if I’ve made you feel that way. I don’t feel like you’re harassing me.

New message from: Nina

7 December 09.17

Thanks for your response. I guess I’m just worried you’re not being honest with me about something. If you really are busy with work, that’s totally fine and I don’t want to be another burden/pressure on you, but I need just a bit more communication so I know that you/we are fine. It’s odd to have been seeing each other so regularly and speaking every day to have not spoken to you in three weeks. I hope you have a good day at work x New message from: Nina

12 December 12.01

Hiya. Not sure if you remember but we’re meant to be going round to my mum and dad’s tomorrow night for dinner. 1) Do you still fancy it? 2) If you do, Mum wants to know if there’s anything you don’t eat? As a warning: she nearly always does some undercooked rice stuffed in something overcooked. So if you’re not in a rice mood: let it be known now or for ever hold your peace x New message from: Nina

13 December 10.05

I assume you’re not coming for dinner tonight.

New message from: Nina

13 December 22.17

I don’t understand why you suddenly don’t want to talk to me, Max. It seems strange that the last time we saw each other you told me you loved me for the first time, then you went completely silent and lost all inclination to see me or even pick up the phone when I call. I hope you can see how confusing that is. I’d really appreciate an explanation when you’re ready.

New message from: Nina

19 December 11.10

Another week of no contact from you. I don’t really know what else I can do at this stage. I’m really, really hurt at how you’ve behaved and I hate that you’ve made me feel like I’m being intense and demanding and weird, when it’s your actions that are strange. If you don’t want us to see each other any more, that’s OK, but you have to be honest with me about it. You can’t just disappear. It’s staggeringly cruel and (unless I’ve been totally wrong about you over the last three months) I don’t think you’re a cruel man.

Missed call from: Nina

19 December 20.14

New message from: Nina

19 December 20.33

Max – please just call me back and tell me what’s happened. Then you never, ever have to speak to me again.

9

‘I dedicated my practice to you and Max in hot yoga yesterday.’

‘I don’t know what that means, Lola.’

She was lying across her sofa with her feet on my lap, eating chocolate raisins and wearing a navy polo neck that had NO PHOTOS, PLEASE emblazoned on it in cerise sequins.

‘Yoga is most effective when you focus on a cause or a person who you want to send all your energy and focus out to,’ she said. ‘So when it gets really hard, you think of that person, and you almost feel like you’re doing this work for them. So, when I was in Dancer’s Pose yesterday and I thought my back was going to break in two – I just closed my eyes and imagined Max coming to your house.’

‘Okay, well it hasn’t worked.’ I pulled the sofa throw over us. Lola’s flat always had a very specific and irritating temperature – that of a house with all the windows open and the heating on full-blast.

‘I know this isn’t a comfortable thought,’ she said, tentatively reaching up to stroke my ponytail, ‘but is there any possibility he could have died?’

‘I have wondered that.’

‘Let’s try and trace him,’ she said, sitting up. ‘We’ll need to go full Miss Marple. Oh God, I do love this bit!’

‘What “bit”?’

‘Trying to work out if a man who is ignoring you is dead or alive.’ She opened up her laptop. ‘What’s his Instagram handle?’

‘He’s not on Instagram.’

‘Okay, what’s his surname?’ She brought up Facebook.

‘Max Redmond.’

She typed his name into the search bar. Up came a teenager in Derbyshire proudly holding a mug with Chewbacca on it and an elderly, topless man in a bandana from Idaho. ‘Any of these?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t think he’s on Facebook. I don’t think he’s on any social media.’

‘Okay, how about WhatsApp? How do you message each other?’

‘Just texting.’

‘Ah-ha!’ she said, one fluorescent-orange fingernail held aloft. ‘He’ll definitely be on instant messaging service and that will tell us when he was last online.’ She typed his number into her phone and brought up two instant messaging apps. She frowned at her screen. ‘How weird. He’s not on one.’

‘He’s a sort of hippie,’ I said, loathing myself for speaking his own propaganda.

‘Yeah, but nearly everyone I know is on at least one. Even my gran and I talk on one.’

‘Have we run out of options?’

‘Give me your phone,’ she said. She went to the app store and downloaded Linx – I had deleted it about a month ago as it was doing nothing on my phone but inhabiting storage space and collecting occasional likes from plain-faced men with job titles I didn’t understand such as ‘brand behaviours’. She passed me my phone back and I logged in. ‘Scroll down to find the conversation you had with him. We can go on his profile and see when he last updated it.’ I scrolled down to the very bottom of my matches – they hung there morbidly, encased in cryonic ice – dead but perfectly preserved and ready to be desperately revived.

‘He’s not here. He’s gone. What does that mean?’

‘It means he either deleted the app and his profile …’ Lola said, fiddling with the pearly ear-cuff that sat like a miniature tiara on her cartilage.

‘Or?’

‘Or he’s unmatched you.’

I put down my phone and stared ahead at Lola’s framed print of her own face made to look like a Warhol silkscreen.

‘I think he’s done this before,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s gone out of his way to make himself as untraceable as possible. Who else is this untraceable nowadays? It’s strategic. He doesn’t want women to be able to find out where he is or what’s going on after he vanishes.’

‘That can’t be true. He knows you know where he lives and works. That’s hardly an effective vanishing act.’

‘Yes, but he also knows that I would never ever go to his flat or his office for an answer. He’s safe there. It would be too humiliating for me. He knows that I would hate to seem that mad. I’m strong-armed into silence by the fear of being called mad. So instead I just have to go actually mad with no answers.’

‘Do you want a glass of wine?’

‘How have you done this for a decade, Lola?’

‘Rioja?’

‘It’s eleven in the morning.’

‘It’s an emergency, I think.’ Lola stood up and walked to her kitchen counter to retrieve a bottle from the wine rack.

‘This is only fun for the boys,’ I said.

‘What is?’

‘Dating in your thirties. The boys are all in charge. We have no control in any of it.’

‘Don’t make this political, it’s not political.’

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘If you’re a woman in your thirties and you want a family, you’re at the behest of the impulses of flaky men. They make all the rules and we just have to obey. You’re not allowed to say what you want or what has upset you because there’s always this undetonated bomb underneath the relationship that goes off if you seem too “intense”.’

Lola poured the wine into two glass tumblers. ‘But you weren’t intense.’

‘Of course I wasn’t! He told me he wanted to marry me on our first date. Can you imagine what would have happened if a woman had said that on a first date? He would have alerted the authorities. Why does he get to say that? Why does he get to be the one in charge of saying “I love you” first, then ghost me?’

‘In my experience, that’s when ghosting is most likely to happen.’