How We Disintegrate
For the past week I have been spending my evenings reading Ghosted, the new novel by Jenn Ashworth, while also making my way through the six albums that comprise the experimental music project Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker, the latter providing a soundtrack to the former. I had not consciously chosen this music to accompany my reading, they arrived through my letterbox* on the same day and I happened to begin them both that night, but it proved to be a pairing that resonated deeply.
Subtitled A Love Story, Ghosted is narrated by Laurie, a woman in her mid-thirties muddling through a marriage to Mark that appears to be a bit worn at the seams. After a mild squabble one morning, Laurie heads off to the local university where she works as a cleaner. On her way home that evening she calls in to see her dad, partly because he is suffering from dementia and she wants to check in on him, but mainly to piss off Mark by arriving home a bit late. When she does finally get back to the high-rise flat they share, Mark is not there. She assumes he has popped out for fags, or milk, but he doesn’t return that night, nor the next day, nor the day after that.
Laurie doesn’t tell anyone. Not Mark’s mum when she calls from her home in Portugal. Not Eddie, her best mate at work. Not her dad, nor the imposing Olena who has graduated from being her father’s cleaner to carer, but Laurie doesn’t trust her anyway so that’s no surprise. By the time she does decide to tell someone, it is the police she turns to, and five weeks have passed.
The police are, understandably, a little suspicious that it has taken a wife so long to report her husband missing. The reactions of her friends and family range from sympathetic to baffled to downright angry. None of this changes the fact that Laurie has no idea why Mark has left or whether he will ever return. And there we have a compelling mystery that underpins the rest of the story.
Ashworth has written a book about the tiny fractures in life and relationships, fractures that we can chose to ignore, to plaster over and allow to heal, or to prise away at until they break. At various stages, and with various of her fractures, Laurie does each of these things. She is a frustrating narrator in terms of the choices she makes and the actions she takes — she often defaults to inertia — but these are what makes her feel so urgently and viscerally real. She is also, it is important to note, often very funny indeed.
Her relationship with her father is a particularly striking element of the story. When she arrives for a visit she doesn’t know if she’ll be greeted by Doting Father, Angry Father, Mournful Father, Unfounded Accusations Father, or another of his dementia-driven incarnations. There is obvious strain there, from both sides, and as their backstory is revealed the reasons for this become clearer, although there are some threads left tantalising untied by the book’s end.
Ashworth’s handling of dementia, a peripheral strand in the novel, is never mawkish; it is presented as awkward, inconvenient and, at times, heartbreaking, but there is a certain restraint in the writing. She isn’t trying to toy with our emotions – she is just showing it like it is, trying to capture the condition and its repercussions. Our emotions can process this as they see fit.
That idea of trying to capture a sense of dementia is at the heart of Everywhere at the End of Time, a haunting and ambitious project recorded by musician Leyland Kirby, under the pseudonym of The Caretaker, and originally released between 2016 and 2019. Across six albums, comprising nearly seven hours of music, various big band and ballroom songs of the 1930s gradually deteriorate until they descend into hum, drone and fragments of white noise.
The tracks on the first couple of albums are fairly recognisable tunes with a tiny bit of looping, added fuzz and distortion — the sort of thing you’d probably hear if you put an 80-year-old record on a dusty wind-up gramophone today — but as you progress through the set the distortion becomes more pronounced, things start to fall apart, only tiny echoes of the original songs remain.
It is an unsettling experience, quite unforgettable, and, as mentioned at the beginning of this piece, one I paired with the reading of Ghosted. The fractured music echoed around my living room while I lay on the sofa entering the fractured lives of Laurie, Mark and the other characters in the novel. It took me a few days to realise how apposite this was, and once I did I found it enhanced both the listening and reading experience. It was the perfect soundtrack precisely because of its imperfection.
Both works are, in their own ways, quietly devastating masterpieces.
Ghosted: A Love Story by Jenn Ashworth is published by Sceptre.
Everywhere at the End of Time has been re-released on vinyl by History Always Favours the Winners.
*The book came through the letterbox. The vinyl was passed to me through the open door. My letterbox is not that big.
