Who will end my lady drought?

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…

Living in the same small town all my life has given me the reasonably acceptable gift of genuinely lifelong friends.

None is longer-serving than Mikey Wadburn. We met in first-year infants and still live within streets of each other: I still with my parents, while he has ventured out into a room below a flat above a tanning shop.

To be honest, he was always the one with the adventurous, wandering soul, and now lives on the nearest edge of the very centre of town, accordingly. Nothing says wanderlust like the top end of the high street.

The only thing we have in common other than our lifelong bachelor status is that Mikey is also a very short man. When we sit in the local coffee shop, I often muse that if we had been born 30 years later, we would probably have made a very good incel cell.

Still, to be honest, the amount of time online would probably put him off. He’s still on the most basic internet coverage. And, for me, the level of continuous anger the professionally celibate seem to need would prove too exhausting for my central nervous system. It is sometimes too overloaded even after a mediumpaced episode of Question Time

It was definitely in tones more of accepting sorrow than of revolutionary roar that Mikey disclosed to me, entirely out of nowhere, ‘Do you know I’m on the wrong end of an 18-year-long lady drought?’

Uncomfortable to share my own number – and slightly peeved that his was only 18, the dark horse – I nodded with big, accepting eyes. I was desperate to appear sorry for him, and not envious.

I just let the statement flop into silence, eager to let the subject disappear like the foam on my frappé.

He reflected, ‘It’s not even the sex I miss; it’s the company. My mates say it’s all right, and that marriage is a rotten game anyway, but…’ – he sighed – ‘you know what gets you most about living alone? Ghosts.’

Really? I’ve never considered ghosts as preying on the pathetically single. In literature and American supermarket newspapers, they suggest ghosts go for families, mainly on account of the vibrational energy of the newly pubescent, which attracts them.

Maybe there is a subset of ghosts who like the more off-flavour of the 50-something singleton. There are a couple of tourists from South Yorkshire who constantly frustrate my local fish-and-chip shop owners by demanding pollock each summer. When my parents take that final stroll onto God’s Avenue, the only thing I can now look forward to is some ghost with an overly fussy palate moving in.

Or should I maybe move in with Mikey? Save him from the spooks and give myself some great source material for some mega-populist piece of nonfiction – Trinity Mirror books would bash my door down for exclusive rights to our ghost stories.

I excitedly probed Mikey: ‘What’s your ghost like?’

‘A twat,’ he explained unhelpfully but utterly sincerely.

‘No, I mean physically.’ I tried to help by suggesting timidly, ‘Does it have any distinguishing features … a hat?’

‘A hat!?’ Mikey was miffed. ‘It’s a bloody haunting, not a fashion show.

‘Look, I’ve never dared look, but he makes a sinister, hissing noise like an echoey kettle, and bangs about like he’s wearing clogs and that.’

‘So it’s a male ghost? You said “he”.’

‘All ghosts are male, you idiot!’ he scoffed. ‘When did you last see a white sheet with boobs?’

I suddenly remembered that Mikey and I had been separated at junior school, as he was put in the slow class. I diplomatically nodded: ‘Oh, it’s that sort of ghost, you think?’

‘Yeah, indoors, innit. So, obviously, it will go for a sort of house-ghost look, I think…’

Suddenly uncertain in his ghostology, he got out his mobile phone and distracted me with a photo of a lady from Asia he had met online playing a word game. She now wanted to start a new life with him if he could scramble together the airfare.

Alas, I was never to meet the ghost. Weeks later, Mikey pulled his squeaky bike to a dead stop next to me, and whispered in my ear, ‘Turned out the ghost was the midnight cleaner turning on the tanning machines to have a sneaky freebie, and now I’m boffing her!’

As he cycled away again, he pulled an extravagant wheelie while whooping, ‘Eighteen years. Bonkometer now back to zero!’

I thought to myself as I turned for home, ‘Yeah, when I die, I’ll bloody haunt you, pal.’