Helen Grant - Ghostwriter

Abigail woke early and stood outside Callum’s room talking in a loud voice. They’re good playmates and she misses him when he’s asleep. There was a knock on the door at 7.30. It took me ages to answer it because the children had hidden the keys. The postman waited patiently while I hunted in drawers, under tables and behind chairs.

When I finally opened the door, I must have looked a sight, dishevelled from lack of sleep and my hair hastily pulled back in a pony. But my grumpy mood soon lifted when I looked down and noticed the postman was wearing the most unusual shoes. They were burgundy brogues with white laces and thick white soles. Polished to perfection, they looked oddly out of sync with his postie uniform but it brightened my mood no end, and I told him so.

I did some writing this morning while the children played, then we stopped for a snack, and I wrote some more while they built a den under the dining room table, and played in the garden. Hallelujah, the rain stopped for about … ooohh …. 40 minutes, so we made a dash for air.

After lunch we walked to our friend Sophie’s house. We didn’t need to walk far because Sophie’s house is opposite ours. She has two little boys called Samuel and Laurie. The children played happily while we chatted. We ate raisins and apricots, drank coffee, and the kids watched a programme called The Blue Planet, a documentary about life under the sea.

Then we came home and I wrote some more of the book I’m working on, before thowing a load of veg, mushrooms and tomatoes in a pan, frying the lot in butter, and adding two tins of tuna and a scoop of cream cheese. Sounds gross but it was delicious. 

Today was a good day, but I’m in desperate need of sunshine now. It’s been raining for days. Splashing in puddles was a novelty for a while, but there’s only so much walking in the rain you can do before you feel washed out and start dreaming about sunshine.

When I was 21 and recovering from postnatal psychosis, I went back to work part-time as a secretary for an estate agent. One of the partners took a shine to me and the feeling was mutual - to begin with. There was a lot of flirting until one day he offered me a lift home. Our kiss was brief and unfamiliar. “Will you go out with me?” he smiled. “Yes,” I beamed.

So we went on a couple of dates, but I was still semi-away with the fairies, and his clinginess was more than I could handle. I agreed to go to his parent’s pub to meet them. I saw no harm in that, but his constant phoning and turning up unannounced at my house was wreaking havoc with my recovery. “Let’s take things slowly,” I suggested, “There’s no rush.”

“Okay,” he agreed, “Do you still want to meet my folks?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” I said cheerily, “I’m looking forward to it.” My mixed messages must have been alarming.

So we drove through open countryside (in the dark) towards his parent’s pub. Huge mistake! We were about three miles out of the city, when I relapsed - big time. I began hyperventilating, getting really scary thoughts that he was going to murder me, chop me up and fling my body parts out of the window. I was afraid to say anything in case I ‘planted the seed in his head to do just that’. Instead, I pressed my fist into my mouth to shut myself up, my heart pounding.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, frowning at my panicked face. I was breathing really fast, sweating and light headed, rocking back and forth, and holding my knees to my chest. We were approaching a small town and I was relieved to see lights in the distance. As we got closer, there were shop doorways and a few people milling about. “Thank God for that,” I mumbled, relaxing a little.

“Stop the car,” I said. “I need air.” When he turned off the ignition, I opened the door and ran, like a lunatic down the street, desperate to get away.

I called mum from a phone box. “Help me!” I screamed. “He’s going to kill me!”

“Who’s going to kill you?”

“My estate agent friend,” I hissed.

I turned around and jumped. He’d caught up with me and was peering through the phone box window, out of breath and confused. He tried to coax me out but I refused to budge, so he sat in his car and waited while I did … God knows what, counted sheep probably, or twiddled my thumbs, or fantasised about eloping with my doctor. We’re talking 13 years ago so I can’t remember every detail, but suffice to say, I wasn’t right in the head.

Not surprisingly, I returned to hospital that night. I didn’t care. I was glad to be alive. They doped me up with pills and, as far as I was concerned, that was the end of my fling with the estate agent man.

But he wouldn’t let it drop. He visited every day, wearing the most bizarre clothes (like a pin stripe suit and straw hat or football shirt and suit jacket and sandals). I began to wonder whether they’d locked up the wrong person.

“Will you be my girlfriend when you get out?” he kept asking, and I told him I didn’t want to think that far ahead. “I’ll be as patient as you need me to be,” he said, “we can take things slowly.”

When I was ‘released’ we dated for a while. God knows why. We had nothing in common, and I didn’t fancy him. I kind of felt sorry because he had no friends. He was supportive and encouraging, a genuinely nice guy. But we weren’t right for each other.

“As long as we’re together,” he said, undeterred, and I nodded. I was so poorly; I’d have agreed to marry him right there and then and been none the wiser. Living in each other’s pockets would have been okay if there was chemistry (we could shag all day to pass the time) but I fancied him about as much as a smartie dipped in arsenic. I’m not sure how he felt about me, but as he made no sexual advances, I can only assume he was in it for the companionship too.

So our brief ‘relationship’ consisted of a couple of picnics, a date to the cinema, a mad drive through the countryside, the odd snog, and a few afternoons in bed, sitting side by side in matching tee-shirts, reading to each other. It was a bizarre experience, but hey, life would be dull without the odd battle scar, and bizarre experiences make up the grand tapestry of life.

According to a recent poll, David Beckham is the guy most British men would choose as their best mate.

The survey, carried out by Maxim magazine to celebrate the launch of new game Army of TwoT from Electronic Arts, asked guys which celeb they’d most like to befriend. Beckham come top of the list with 27%, followed by DJ Johnny Vaughan at 22%, and Chris Moyles with 19%. Ant and Dec made it into the top 10 with Dec getting 9% compared with Ant’s measly 6%.

But don’t cry yet Ant, because you guys were voted number 5 in the top 10 greatest double acts of all time in the same poll. Top of the list with 31% were the Two Ronnies, with Eastender’s Mitchell Brothers in second place at 22.5%. Morecambe and Wise managed to scrape in at number three with 18.6%, ahead of Beavis and Butthead who bagged 12.4%.

If you’ve ever met someone and took an instant liking to them, and wondered what their secret to popularity is, you might want to read this article. Being charasmatic is not as difficult as you might think. Aside from being polite and respectful, there are several things you must pay attention to.

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So there I was in a strange city. There were no familiar landmarks and I didn’t know a soul. But that’s how I wanted it. There is a funny kind of excitement not knowing what is going to happen next. When the road ahead is not clear, and neither are the street corners, the lamp posts, the give way signs, the restaurants and pubs, and you are as anonymous to people as they are to you. It stirs up a feeling of anticipation. Nothing is predictable in life, apart from death. Thank God because predictability is dull.

I took the bull by the horns and absconded to this new, exciting place, and within weeks a whole load of opportunities showed up. People walked past blankly for the first few days, until I became a familiar face on that route, and the blankness became a stare. From there came a smile, and a nod, and then, “hello, how are you?”. 

Friendships can begin in the most unlikely of places. We are surrounded by millions of faces all the time, and yet we can go an entire day without talking to somebody new. Wherever we are in the world, all it takes is for one person to break the ice for a new friendship to begin. It doesn’t matter where we’re from or where we’re heading. Every new person is a door to a different world.

I was in Bath and the sun was shining. Arms elbow deep in washing up suds, Ollie purring at my ankles, I looked out of the kitchen window to the garden below.

The music from the radio reminded me of happy times, candy striped stalls at the fairground and hazy nights. I pulled my hands out of the basin, wet and dripping, and dried them with a towel. The music faded to a halt and I was about to leave the room when I noticed something at the end of the garden.

A face. In my garage. Pressed against the glass window of the garage door, it’s features contorted. The face looked unmoved and stared blankly up at the kitchen window.

My heart raced. “He’s in my garage!” I yelled down the phone to a friend. She was equally as unmoved. “Ignore him and he’ll go away.”

Like a helpless sap a long way from home, I went into a calm panic, if there is such a thing. I locked the kitchen door, and every door and window in the house, and took refuge in the living room. Clutching my hands together, I tried to be logical about what to do next. Call the police, yes. Ignore him, definitely. He’d never been violent but his behaviour had been menacing for months, since I told him we were finished.

Of course, the garage episode was expected. I’d been exposed to his mind games before. The psychological abuse and manipulation, twisting everything into a game. He’d been calling dozens of times a day for weeks. Text messages every few minutes. Standing outside the house, watching. Sleeping in his car outside. Pushing scribbled messages through the door, threatening suicide.

Most mornings when I left the house to take Louise to school, my car wouldn’t start despite having a full tank of petrol. So we’d walk, with the cat limping behind, and the car would mysteriously start again at 3pm each day when it was time to collect Louise. It got to the point where I expected the car not to start in the morning so I didn’t bother trying. Then I caught him fiddling with the wires under the bonnet. He had a key, goodness knows how.

Our time in Bath was a happy time but he did his best to spoil it. “Why don’t you move back to Plymouth?” he said in a text one day. So we did just that. I’d been thinking about doing it for weeks anyway. But before we did, there was the house to pack and loose ends to tie up. In the meantime, we went to Plymouth for weekends, and it was on one of those weekends that he followed me. I was staying with a friend and her fiance and we were looking forward to a rocking night out. But same old story, he kept calling my mobile and my friend’s landline. “Turn the phone off,” I said to her, and I did the same with mine.

Anyway, friend’s fiance left the club early and went home ahead of us. When we followed an hour or so later, he looked bewildered. “Someone keeps ringing the doorbell and when I answer there’s nobody there,” he said.

“How many times?” I asked.

“At least six”. He paused and then: “Go upstairs and stay upstairs. I’m going for a walk”. He grabbed a baseball bat and headed for the door. When friend and I looked out of an upstairs window a few minutes later, she pointed out a figure running up the road, closely followed by the shadow of a man with a bat. Sorted - for the night at least.

The following morning, a Sunday, I drove to a local shop to get some papers, and when I glanced in my rear view mirror, there he was; hat down over his brows, dark sunglasses, collars up. I’d been relaxing with the windows open but they were the first to go up, quickly followed by sick rushing up my throat.

He trailed me all over Plymouth. The sound of my heart was louder than the music on the radio. “My God, he’s following me!” I hissed into my phone, my panicked brain thinking he’d hear me if I shouted. This friend was more sympathetic. “I’m on my way. Stop at the Co-op on the hill”.

I had no choice because he wasn’t going anywhere apart from where I was going. The minute I stopped, his hands were all over the windows of my car. “Get out!” he thundered, “I want to talk to you!” As if I’d do a daft thing like that. I sat stony-faced, staring straight ahead, pretending he wasn’t there. “I said get out!”. No response. Then my friend pulled up behind and ordered him to get the hell away - permanently.

“Why would I do that?” he smirked, “She loves me.”

“Em, she wants nothing to do with you - EVER - so go home,” said friend. She’d said no different to what I’d been saying for weeks, months even. But for some strange reason, her words got through more than mine. He drove away and I never heard from him again.