Meggie wasn’t always a ghost. I first knew her as a frequenter of my local coffee shop and I often saw her chatting away to her girlfriends, of whom she seemed to have an endless supply, all of them just like her – in their early twenties, fashionably dressed and pretty in that unsurprising way that so many pseudo-blondes are. Frankly, I found them hard to tell apart.

At first, Meggie was as far from being a ghost as you could imagine. She was no faded wallflower, no shy anonymity, living in a lonely city. Her voice, in particular, was of that irritatingly piercing kind that was impossible to ignore and inevitably made you an unwilling eavesdropper on her conversations. Even if she was left on her own – if only for a few minutes – she would immediately phone a friend, so she could start talking again.

She was never silent for a minute, it seemed, and so it was that I learned of her dislike of both tofu and tight clothes, of the scandal of her cousin’s pregnancy and of all the gossip from the office where she worked as a receptionist. It was like listening to a rather tedious and pointless soap opera. I learned that her boyfriend’s name was Dave – I had no interest in any of this – and, one wet, late December afternoon, I learned of their engagement.

They were sitting on the one comfy sofa that the coffee shop possessed, with an older woman, whom they ignored as Meggie chatted on her phone to someone named “Amanda, darling” about bridesmaid’s dresses and flowers and how six months wasn’t very far away. In what I thought of as typical Meggie, she managed to reduce her wedding to a collection of clichés and it all sounded dull to me.

Dave seemed happy just to listen in – it was hard to get a word in with Meggie – while the other woman – an unnaturally frosted blonde with heavy make-up and a pinched mouth – drank her coffee in what seemed a very self-conscious manner, holding the cup in two hands, eyes downcast, and sipping very deliberately, as though it were a performance.

“Tell her about the vicar,” Dave prompted his fiancee. By this time, the rest of the coffee shop was in silence, defeated by Meggie’s piercing voice regaling us with all the details.

“Oh Amanda, darling,’ she told her phone. “You wouldn’t believe the vicar! He says we’ve got to come to church every Sunday for the next six months if we want to get married in his church.”

“Well, and quite right too,” said the older woman, speaking for the first time, though not looking up. “The church isn’t there for just anyone to get married in, who fancies it. He wouldn’t have agreed to it at all, if it wasn’t for me.”

“Oh Mother,” said Meggie. “Oh Amanda, you should hear what Mother is saying, she’s completely on the vicar’s side and we’re going to have to do it, you’ll see, go out to Hurley every Sunday…”

‘… Just so long as you don’t expect me to be cooking Sunday lunch for you,” her mother said, sourly.

I left then, having finished my coffee and having no interest in Meggie’s wedding, nor the fact, as she was no telling Amanda, darling, that he dress was going to cost over two grand.

I didn’t see Meggie again until a few weeks later, in the same coffee shop. It took me a while to notice her; for the first time ever, she was sitting quietly. She was dressed in the tight jeans and knee boots that it seemed almost every woman aged between 15 and 50 were wearing that winter. Though she was on her phone, she wasn’t talking, instead she was texting with an expert use of both thumbs.

Dave was in the chair next to her, turned slightly away, talking into his phone. His voice was quieter than hers, but I was at the table next to theirs and could hear him clearly.

“Laryngitis,” he was saying. “I know, can you believe it? Poor Meggie, she’s lost her voice completely. She doesn’t know what to do with herself.”

Meggie had finished texting and was drinking her coffee – in the same deliberate manner as her mother, with both hands and downcast eyes. Every few seconds she would pause to check on her phone, but clearly no one had yet texted her back.

“Saturday night?” Dave asked. “Oh I expect it will be all right, won’t it Meggie?”

He turned to face her and she looked stricken, started to shake her head, but he’d already turned away.

“Yup, no problem. Where shall we meet?”

They left soon after that and I paid them no more attention, except to be amused that while Meggie probably hated losing her voice, for everyone else it was a welcome relief.

When I saw her again, a few days later, Meggie had already started to fade. She was sitting on the sofa with Dave and one of her friends – in fact, it was the infamous “Amanda, darling”. Previously I’d always found it hard to tell Meggie apart from her friends, but on that day Amanda was easily the prettier of the two, despite their matching pink tops that said “Princess”. Amanda was animated and glowing, whereas Meggie seemed washed out by an inner sadness. She had turned from someone whom no one could ignore – even if they wanted to – into a mouse of a girl, easily overlooked.

Dave and Amanda were having an exuberant conversation about musicals and whether or not there were any that a man could like, or whether he was always just an unwilling companion to his date. Meggie was silent, frequently glancing at her phone for incoming texts – but in vain, it seemed.

“There were two men together at the cinema when we saw Fame,” Amanda was arguing.

“Gay,” Dave declared emphatically.

“They didn’t look gay and they weren’t touching.”

“They were watching Fame together, of course they were gay.”

Meggie wrote something down in a notebook she had and then showed them the page.

“Oh yes,” Dave said, glancing at it. “But the other thing, Amanda…”

And he and she were off again. Meggie wrote something else down in her notebook, but they didn’t notice. I felt sorry for her then, for the first time.

I saw her again, several times over the next few days, always on her own. She seemed to become more faded each time I saw her, like sun-worn fabric. Though she was always well dressed in fashionable clothes, she grew pale and thin and no longer seemed pretty at all. Previously, if she’d been on her own, she’d have been constantly on her phone, chatting away. Now she was silent, constantly checking her phone for incoming texts that never seemed to come. She had a note, written on an index card, for the barista: “Small non-fat latte please.” Clearly, her voice was still lost.

One lunchtime I passed Dave in a nearby restaurant, sitting with Amanda in the window. I went to the coffee shop, only to find Meggie there, sitting with her mother. Meggie was wearing a red t-shirt that said, “I’m not invisible” on the front. It looked like she’d written it there herself, in felt tip.

She and her mother weren’t talking to each other, but instead drank their lattes in the deliberate manner that they shared. Her mother finished her drink first and she gathered up her shopping bags and left without saying goodbye. Meggie watched her going, with despair in her eyes.

The last time I saw her, she was in front of me at the counter of the coffee shop, waiting to order.

“Next please,” the girl serving there said.

Meggie showed her the index card that asked for a latte.

“Next please,” the girl said more emphatically, ignoring the card and staring at me.

“You’re next,” the man behind me said pointedly.

“Oh, right. Um, dopio espresso,” I said. Meggie was tapping her card on the counter, but no one was paying her any attention.

“And a small, non-fat latte,” I added. I gave Meggie the latte, when it came, and invited her to sit with me.

“Thank you,” she wrote in her notebook.

“Laryngitis no better?” I asked.

She shook her head. The man who’d been behind me in the queue, and who was now sitting nearby, looked at me strangely.

“How’re the wedding plans?” I asked Meggie.

“Cancelled,” she wrote. “He’s forgotten all about me and gone off with Amanda.”

“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t think of what else to say.

“It’s funny, I think I’ve always been afraid this would happen,” she wrote. “I’ve always been a chatterbox and I think I always knew that if I ever stopped talking…”

She stopped writing and shook her head.

“Well, hopefully, you’ll get your voice back soon and then it’ll be all right,” I said, awkwardly.

“Extraordinary thing,” the man sitting near us confided into his phone. “There’s a woman here talking to herself. Even bought her invisible friend a coffee!”

I turned and glared at him and he blushed and looked away, muttering into his phone with his hand shielding his mouth.

When I turned back to the table, Meggie was gone. She’d left her latte and her notebook behind.

“It’s too late,” she’d written on the last page.

The next time I went to the coffee shop, I thought I saw her with her fiancé, both laughing. Oh good, I thought. She’s got her voice back. Then I realised that it was her friend Amanda, not Meggie at all.

I’m good at seeing ghosts to whom others are oblivious and, looking back, I realise that that was what Meggie had become, that last time I saw her – already invisible to all but me. Since then, this being London, I’ve seen hundreds of young blondes, fashionably dressed and interchangeably pretty, any one of whom could have been Meggie – but none of them are. And though I see many ghosts, faded and insubstantial to the world around them, I’ve never again seen her.

I think that, being such an incessant talker, when she lost her voice, there wasn’t much left of her – she lost herself, you could say.

About the Author

Essie Gilbey

Essie Gilbey is an ex-pat Brit, currently living in Cambridge Massachusetts. She has had her flash fiction published on Thrillers, Killers n Chillers and at Static Movement Online. She blogs at http://essygie.blogspot.com/