I’m lucky. My parents had to deal with all kinds of crazy people appearing at their door and selling them something or wanting to talk about their religion, and I don’t. Most hagglers have moved online, and getting a DM on Instagram or Facebook will never be as scary as an absolute stranger appearing right in front of your home and demanding to talk to you. A few times as a kid, I answered the door to a cold caller, and it terrified me. I was always scared that if I told them no to whatever they were asking, they would try to force their way in or come after me because they knew where I lived. They probably meant no harm, but you’re scared of what you’re scared of.

When I moved out and started living alone, I always got a little nervous whenever somebody knocked on my door. 

But a woman knocked on my door one day, and I knew she must have been a cold caller. She wasn’t a delivery woman or anybody I had asked to come round. The Cold Caller was in her 40s, maybe even in her early 50s, but she was absolutely beautiful. She had long, wavy dark hair with streaks of grey and big blue eyes, and she wore a navy blue pantsuit with shining dark heels. The Cold Caller was holding a magazine up to her chest, but when I first saw her, I couldn’t have noticed what it was. I was too focused on her.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, speaking very smoothly. “Do you have a moment to talk about lingerie?”She said it slowly, like it was three different words. Longe-a-ray. Pathetic as it was, I couldn’t really take an attractive woman talking to me about lingerie. My face flushed red, and I knew she could tell. Her eyes met mine, glittering away. 

“I won’t need to buy any lingerie,” I said quickly. 

“I’m not trying to sell it, sir” 

I looked at her magazine, and realised it wasn’t a shopping catalogue of any kind. The cover showed a woman sprawled out with her legs wide apart, dressed in a dark blue lingerie set, and gurning at the camera, her crooked teeth all on show beneath her full lips. The title at the top read “SLUT RANCH”. It was clear to me then that she was actually against lingerie. 

“You’re against lingerie, are you?” I asked. 

“Yes. I know it might seem a strange thing to crusade against, but if you would just hear me out… perhaps you could invite me inside?”

I invited her inside without really thinking about the implications. The only thing I did think was that I wished my front room was a little cleaner. I had left a few plates, wrappers and cans strewn around the floor and the table. The Cold Caller took no notice of that and sat down on my settee and laid her copy of Slut Ranch neatly down on the table, straightening the cover out with her thumbs. Her eyes turned downwards to look at the magazine, and suddenly she looked a lot older and more vulnerable. 

I had this urge to hug her, or ask her what was wrong. I wanted to comfort her in some way, but it would be more than inappropriate, if the situation wasn’t already inappropriate enough. “What’s your name?” I asked her. 

“Veronica”  she said, hardly a whisper. I knew a girl named Veronica once. It was a strange name, old-fashioned. It’s a mouthful, I had told her, don’t you go by anything shorter?

Some people call me Ronnie, she had said, but I guess it makes me sound like a boy. I used to call her Ronald, as a little joke, but never to her face. We didn’t ever joke around like that, we never laughed together. I wanted to see her laugh. Maybe I did make her laugh once. I kind of remember her laughing, but maybe it was someone else who made her laugh. Maybe it was in class. Did she ever laugh when it was just us? Did I ever call her Ronald? She wouldn’t have found it funny. 

“And what’s your name?” The woman asked me, I snapped back into reality and looked her in the eyes, wide open now. It was like she could see into my mind, the way they bore into me. Like she could see right into my mind and knew about everything that happened between Ronnie and I. 

“Corey,” I said. 

The Cold Caller flicked one magazine open. One side of the paper showed a hundred tiny pictures of women, gurning away with glossy lips besides words like ‘naughty’ and ‘horny’ and lots of short, easy to type in with one hand, phone numbers. The other side was the table of contents, they assumed little of their audience. Even that was plastered with images of women in various states of undress. Pathetic. It’s the same with porn websites, they plaster all these adverts across the webpage  and before your video. It usually turns me off and kills my train of thought. I spend so long looking for something I like, and then my eyes are assaulted with something I don’t like.

“You lose your train of thought a lot, don’t you?” The Cold Caller asked me. 

“It was because you said your name was Veronica. I knew a girl with that name, that’s all”

“It’s an unusual name” she said “Old-fashioned. Was she an older woman?”

“The same age as me” I muttered. I say that, we were born in the same year, but we aren’t really the same age now. I had this desire whenever I thought about Ronnie to go run away and drink myself stupid. That’s all I wanted to do at that moment. I knew I needed to tell this woman to leave.

“I’m sorry. I can tell it’s something you don’t want to talk about” she said it suggestively, like she wanted me to talk about it. Some people had wanted me to talk about it, my friends, they said “Hold on, isn’t that the girl you used to date?” I don’t even remember. We were just kids. I don’t ever think about her. It’s sad, but I hadn’t even seen her in years. She was no good anyway. It’s sad she died so young, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. 

“Yeah” I said bluntly. I’d learnt that was a good cue to tell someone you don’t want to talk about something. “Why don’t you just tell me about… what were you going to tell me?”

“Lingerie,” she said. There was something hypnotic about the way she said it, again, so slowly. Longe-a-rayyy. I said it in my head. My focus was on it now “What does it mean to you? Do you like your partner to wear it? When you’re intimate?” 

“No.” I said. In fact, I hated it. There’d been another girl, Dani. Dani was lovely, but I don’t like to have sex. I thought since Dani was more of the shy and nerdy type, she would never bring it up, or was maybe even asexual. I really thought it could work between us, we had dated for about 5 months without even bringing up sex. But I guess she had an itch and she told me so.

“Just so you know, Corey” Dani had said “I’m prepared for, you know, everything. I want to please you” And at the time we were watching a TV show we were actually enjoying, so she’d ruined it for me. I drank more of my beer, whatever, maybe if I got myself drunk enough I could cobble something together. Dani reached out to try and touch me. I wasn’t hard. She knew she’d made a miscalculation and went quiet. 

The next time she made an attempt was a whole other story. She bought lingerie and moved in on me wearing an obscene, bright pink thong and a see-through cami. Dani looked beautiful, I mean truly, she looked like a goddess and I’d always thought she was a bit homely. That’s what lingerie does, I guess. It transforms one figure into another one. Anything could look beautiful in lingerie.  The way she moved wasn’t of this world when she approached. I knew that I couldn’t. All those horrible memories came flooding right back. 

“Why not?” she asked me. “Doesn’t everyone like to see their partner in lingerie?”

“Do you?” I spat. 

“I don’t have a partner, Corey. What don’t you like about it?”

I couldn’t have told her the truth “I think, it screams insecurity. So you don’t think your body is attractive enough to have sex with in itself, you just have to go and dress it up. I think if a girl just came to me naked or just in… just in regular clothes. I’d like it more” 

“Do you ever think of yourself in lingerie, though?”

“Sometimes, but I don’t know if anyone would like to see me in it”

“Why not? You have a fine body. I suspect just because you’re a man, you think it’s wrong” 

“I guess. Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be against lingerie?” 

“I’m not sure you would understand why”

“Try me”

She flicked through pages of the magazine. I didn’t look, and instead gulped hard as I focused on something in the corner of the room. “I think it makes you lose your sense of judgement. It’s like when you wear it, you’re somebody else altogether. Someone filthy and desperate. Look at these women…”

I moved closer and looked at the pages at her demand. All I could see were dead eyes, twisted expressions and crooked teeth. She had a point; they all wore lingerie. It did twist someone into somebody they never would be just plain naked or in clothes. A desperate creature between dignified and completely degraded. It's the difference between the corpse of somebody who just died and a skeleton, the body that’s halfway through the process. 

I started to cry. I couldn’t believe it, it had been years since I had cried in front of another person, much less a stranger. She looked up at me, and her eyes seemed so comforting. They were so big and so blue, similar to my own mother’s eyes. I wondered if she would help me, but she seemed to just stare. I put my fists up to my eyes and tried to block it all out. 

“Listen” The Cold Caller said softly, rising to her feet. Her hand touched my shoulder, and a chill ran through me “You trust me, don’t you? I think you need to go to sleep” 

I’d only just met her, but I trusted her inherently. She took my hand and led me upstairs, into my bedroom. I only remember her hand over mine, and then finding myself falling into bed. The Cold Caller came to my side and pulled the blankets up around me. My eyelids went heavy, and I fell asleep. 

I woke up sweaty and disoriented, unsure if I was still awake or in a dream. I tried to get my head together. It was already dark outside, so I must have slept a while. I wondered if The Cold Caller was still downstairs. When I wondered about her, I felt a drop in my stomach. She was a complete stranger, not only had I let her into my home, I had let her tuck me into bed. I had trusted her, but why? What could she possibly want with me? 

I went downstairs. The lights were off, and there was a dull hum all across the house. As I walked downstairs, I felt something under my foot. Something lacy, something tangled. I took a deep breath and picked it up. It was a lacy black thong, and I held it close. I ran my fingers up and down and saw my own flesh under the material. I imagined building a person around them as I held them in my hands, I only saw a pelvis buried in the dirt with this perfect lacey thing wrapped around it. When they take that pelvis and burn it into ashes, the perfect lacey thing will still be a perfect lacey thing. If the whole body beneath a thong and a bra and stockings goes away, they fall to the ground and constantly retain the shape. Your other clothes just crumble into a rag when you drop them. Lingerie stays. 

I needed to question why the thong was there, but I didn’t. I took it with me when I went to confront her. I held it into a crumpled ball in my fist, knowing soon enough I would unfold it and hold it in front of me for hours, thinking of the body beneath it until I would vomit. 

I found the Cold Caller in my kitchen, underneath the harsh lights above the oven. She was facing the wall, and I could see her hand was over her eye. Her body shook a little, like she was in pain. 

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Say my name.” she whispered. 

“I don’t remember it” 

“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to say it. You say it. Say it right now”“Veronica” I said, barely a whisper. 

“Ronnie” she breathed. I clenched my fist, she couldn’t taunt me like this. I wouldn’t let her get to me.

“Ronnie. I’m not scared to say that name” 

“I have something in my eye,” the Cold Caller told me, her voice shaking “It’s quite painful. Would you take a look? Once I’ve got it out, I will leave you alone.”

“Sure” I said and stepped closer to her. She turned to me, and moved her hand away from her eye. I expected to see an obvious fault, but I couldn’t. There was nothing wrong with her eyes.

“Which eye is it?” I asked. She pointed to her left eye, and I looked closer. There was a hair peeking out from under the white of her eye, hanging down below her bottom eyelid. I pulled it out, slowly, and eventually I held in my hand a long, golden blonde strand of hair.

“I think there’s more” 

“More hair?” I asked, feeling myself tremble a little. 

“I can feel it. So much hair inside me, a whole head of it, maybe a whole person is inside my eye. Can you imagine how that feels?”

“I’m sure I could imagine” I whispered weakly. “I’ll help you” 

I pulled her bottom and her top eyelid apart, seeing her sky-blue iris just lost in a sea of white. I rubbed my finger along the red underneath. She didn’t even twitch. With the tip of my fingers pressed together, I got a hold of more hair. I pulled hard and unearthed a clump of long golden hair. Once I had let this hair out, it just hung out of her eye and down her cheek. When I pulled on it again, I met resistance. It was definitely attached to something. 

I stepped back and took in the sight. The Cold Caller was a completely normal woman, she was a normal size, there was nothing remotely strange about her appearance but there appeared to genuinely be a person trapped inside of her eye. She smiled politely.

“You just got the worst of it out. Once you break that first little barrier, it doesn’t hurt to get the rest of it” 

I took a hold of the lock of hair that was hanging from her eye, and rubbed my finger across it. I had felt that hair before. I used to like running my fingers through her hair. Do you like that? was what I had whispered to Ronnie. I probably meant to sound seductive. She just looked ahead, her eyes so blank. She would say she did, did she even mean it? Would she like it more if it was anybody else? The boy she dated after me, who was he? I was incited when I saw them together, utterly furious. Why did she stop caring about me? How did he have the edge over me? And I hadn’t even lost her, oh no. She wanted to go to a hotel with me, and she’d bring her lingerie. Don’t you have a boyfriend now? Yes, but I want you. 

“You’ve broken that barrier, Corey. You don’t have to hide from it anymore. Don’t you want to see your girl again?”

“I don’t want to see her.” 

“You’d love to see her. It’s been 6 years since the last time; 3 years when you could have seen her, 3 years when she was dead. I know what you think of her, but you’d do anything to see her again”

With that, a finger poked its way out of the Cold Caller’s eye socket with ease. It poked her cheek, feeling its surroundings. The rest of the fingers followed, until an entire hand had emerged from her eye. The rest of her face hadn’t budged as a hand crawled from her eye socket. Even her eyeball hadn’t been disturbed. It seems as though there was a void between her eyeball and the eyelid where absolutely anything of any size could crawl through.

I looked at the hand that was hanging out of her eye socket. A feminine hand, with long fingers and bitten fingernails. I’d held that hand before. Maybe Ronnie only wanted me for one thing, but when I walked with her, I always made sure to hold it, even if she got fussy. What if one of my boyfriend’s friends is around here and sees us holding hands? I hoped they fucking were and I hoped they would see everything. If I knew who the bastard was I’d have told him myself and I’d have had her. Maybe she’d still be alive if I did. 

The hand wiggled its fingers, beckoning me. I took her hand, her living, perfect, warm and clammy hand and pulled until her entire arm up to the shoulder had emerged from the Caller’s eye socket. Even then, there was no effect on the Caller. Her face was unmoved, her eye and eyelid totally undamaged, although a grown woman was in the process of crawling out of it. 

Ronnie’s other hand began to emerge, gripping onto the top of the Caller’s eye. Eventually, I could see her head poking out and I helped her, pulling both arms until her entire body had slithered out of this woman’s eye and onto the floor. Ronnie lay on the kitchen tiles in a heap of clear, slightly red, fluid. It was hard to take in the sight: someone I knew now was dead, someone who I knew now was cremated, someone I knew now I could only ever see again in photos, was lying on the floor of my kitchen. 

I looked at the Cold Caller for an explanation. I couldn’t believe her. Her eyes looked exactly like they did when she had come in, not at all like eyes that had just given birth to a fully grown human. A shy smile came over her face “Thanks for getting that out. I feel very relieved. Goodbye” and with those words, she left out of the backdoor.

I hardly even cared that she left. I knelt down beside Ronnie, or perhaps something that looked like her. She was beautiful, as she always would be. When I was younger, I often fantasised about both of us finding each other again as older adults. We would talk about where our lives had gotten to, and how misguided we were in college. We always should have been together, we just didn’t realise it then. I pictured how she’d have looked when she was older, and I was sure she’d still be beautiful. I guess that was the saddest part about the news of her death. The photos they used showed her as a young woman. She died only 3 years after college ended. She would only ever be that age. She’d never get older.

Ronnie couldn’t move, it seemed. She just layed there, twitching. I winded a lock of her long hair around my finger, like I used to like to. I didn’t want to cry, but my eyes stung. “Ronnie, wake up” I whispered.

Her dull grey eyes blinked open and she looked at me blearily “Corey?”

“Yes it’s me” I whispered in response, my voice shaking with tears.“I- wow. I thought it would be my family I saw”

“It’s just me” 

She reached up and touched the side of my face with a still limp hand, only really brushing me “You feel real, Corey”

“I am” I choked out. 

“I suppose you died too.” 

I shook my head “You died years ago, Ronnie. I don’t know how you’re here”

She sniffled and moved her hand up to wipe her face. “How strange” 

“I’m sorry about the way I treated you back then” I said “I know I could be cruel”

“I was cruel to you too, Core.” I laughed, she’d only ever called me that once. The first time we met, when we were assigned to work on a project together in class. I told her nobody had ever called me that in my life. She said she thought it suited me. “I know I broke your heart. I saw your face whenever you saw me with Neil. I bet you think it didn’t get to me”

“Well, it did. Do you have any idea how it felt for me? I don’t even understand it. I’m okay to have sex with you, but I’m not good enough to be your boyfriend?”

“I just didn’t think we really had that much in common outside of sex. I thought that was all you cared about too”

“Why didn’t you ask me what I cared about?”

“I think I did, but you’d never tell me. I don’t think you know what you want. That’s the difference between you and I.”

“You wanted to die then?” 

“I always told you I did” 

“Do you regret it?”

“Not particularly. I guess I didn’t have to worry when I was dead. I hated my life.” Ronnie hesitated, her eyes scanning upwards “You know, I told you some things I didn’t ever tell anybody else. I told you things no other guy in the world would have been okay with, and you still liked me.”

“So why not just be with me?”

“That’s the problem with you. You loved me so much. You kept wanting me to be better, and I think I knew what you really wanted was somebody good. I know you said some cruel things, Corey, but really I think you were a good person. You were so sensitive. I think you really deserved a girl who was… good. I’m not good in any way whatsoever. And I want to tell you now, you probably think if we stayed together, I wouldn’t have jumped. I’d have still done it no matter who I was with and no matter what I had. There was nothing that was going to stop me” 

I cried and she reached out, batting her limp hand at my own. I squeezed it, her fingers between mine. “Ronnie, I want you to know that back then, I loved you more than anything in the world”

“I don’t want to lie to you, Corey, not now. I didn’t love you” At 18, I’d have thought hearing those words from her would have torn my heart into pieces. But now it felt like the pieces of my heart were coming back together. “My regret about you is that I wasn’t just honest with you. I kept leading you on into thinking that I loved you, that we could get together one day, but it was never like that. I just liked the attention from you. You never really meant anything to me”

With those words, I was free. No longer was Ronnie this great love of mine that I lost. She was just a misguided, pretty girl who liked getting attention from a guy who was a bit of a geek and never thought he would have her. She liked having sex with me because I acted like it was the greatest gift I ever got. I treated her like she was special. She wore that lingerie to get me flustered, to feel better about herself.  She liked me because I worshipped her. Other than that, she thought I was incredibly boring. Whenever I tried to talk to her about my writing or whatever movie I was crazy about at the time, she zoned out entirely. When I tried to ask her about anything personal, I’d get a short response or just a ‘huh?’. I used to wish I could see the laughing talkative girl she was with her friends, but I never did. It was clear as day now, she didn’t love me.

I put my arms around her and we embraced. I whispered into her ear “You know, when we were in class together all those years ago… I used to make you laugh, didn’t I?”

“You did” she said “I did think you were kind of funny”

“I wish we had only been friends. I wish we never had sex.”

“Yeah. That would have been better”

I lay in the kitchen with her all night, and in the morning she was gone again. I got my phone and looked at Ronnie’s obituary again. She wasn’t my girl, she wasn’t a great love of my life who got away. She was just an old college friend who lost her life too soon. I didn’t need to be haunted by her anymore.