Ghostwritten (11 page)

Everything is in order, that’s the second bell, Neal. That gives you sixty seconds.

“Neal? Why aren’t you getting on this ferry?”

That feeling when vomiting is a certainty, and you wonder what you’ve eaten.

I don’t have enough inside me to vomit.

What’s the matter? Is she making me stay? Tugging my arm?

No. It’s nothing to do with her. I know when she’s here, and she’s not here now. And she can’t make me do anything. I choose. I’m the master. That’s one of the rules.

There was something more remarkable than her altogether.

Last night, Avril and I were preparing a briefing for Mr. Wae the shipping magnate. The computer was fucking up my eyes, I hadn’t eaten since a BLT at lunch, I’d gone through hunger and numbness several times as my stomach downsized. Around midnight I started feeling dizzy. I came down to this coffee bar just across the street from Cavendish Tower, and ordered the biggest fuckoff triple shitburger they did, two of them, and put ten sugar cubes into my coffee. I drank it through my tongue, and my blood sang like the Archangel Gabriel as the sugar flooded in. That can’t be natural, Neal. Fuck Natural.

I watched the cars, people, and stories trundle up and down the street. In the distance a giant bicycle pump was cranking itself up and hissing itself down. I watched the neon signs intone their messages, over and over. There was a song playing, that Lionel Richie hit from years ago, about the blind girl. A real weepie. I’d lost my virginity to that song under a mountain of coats at a friend’s party in Telford. Fuck knows what I was doing in Telford. Fuck knows what anybody is doing in Telford.

This kid and his girl came in. He ordered a burger and cola. She had a vanilla shake. He picked up the tray, looked around for a seat which wasn’t there, and caught me watching him. He came over, and in nervous English asked me if they could share my table. It wasn’t Chinese English. Chinks would normally die rather than sit with one of us. Either that or they’ll just pile in without acknowledging that you’re even there. So I nodded, tapping the ash from my cigarette. He thanked me gravely, in English. “Sankyou very mochi,” he said.

She was Chinese, I could tell that, but they spoke in Japanese. He had a saxophone case, and a small backpack with airline tags still attached. They could barely have been out of high school. He needed a good long sleep. They didn’t hug or cloy over each other like a lot of Chinese kids do these days. They just held hands over the table. Of course, I didn’t understand a word, but I
guessed they were discussing possibilities. They were so happy. Sex twitched in the air between them, which made me think that they hadn’t done it yet. None of that lazy proprietorship which settles in after the first few times.

Right at that moment, if Mephistopheles had genied his way from the greasy ketchup bottle and said, “Neal, if I let you be that kid, would you pledge your soul to the Lord of Hell for all eternity?” I’d have answered, “Like a fucking shot I will.” Nipkid or no Nipkid.

I looked at my Rolex: a quarter past midnight. What life is this?

I was wrong about the sky. It’s not dreary white.… When you look you see ivory. You can see a glow, there, above the mountain where the sun polishes it pearly and wafer thin.

And the sea isn’t blank; there are islands out there, right at the edge.

Soft brush strokes on a fresh scroll hanging in Mrs. Feng’s room, four floors above us.

Ahem. May I remind you, Neal, that you have credit card bills that would make Bill Gates twitch? That your divorce settlement will gouge out most of the money you thought was yours? That lawyers with fingers in the kinds of pies yours are in simply do not miss appointments with Mr. Wae. These Taiwanese shipping magnates eat breakfast with politicians powerful enough to make skyscrapers appear and disappear.

Ten seconds before the third bell and the barriers come down! Worry about your existentialist dilemmas during your lunch hour—right, when did I last have a lunch hour?—whenever, but get on that
fucking
boat right now! I am not telling you again.

A man gallops down the walkway from the shops. Andy Somebody, I know his face slightly from my Lantau polo club period. Not that you can find a single fucking pony on the whole fucking island. His Ralph Lauren tie is flapping like a live snake, his shoelaces are undone, my, Andy Somebody needs to be careful. He might fall and break his crown, and ill Jill’ll hill crumbling after.

“Stop that boat! Wait!” My, my, Andy Somebody is Lawrence of Olivier.

Is this how she observes me? This indifference, laced with mockery?

The Chinese barrier guard, most likely the bus driver’s brother’s half-twin stepcousin-in-law, flicks his switch and the turnstiles close. Andy Somebody’s flight through the air ends gripping the bars, and he represses the howl of a demented prisoner. “Please!”

The Chinese barrier guard makes the faintest gesture with his head at the “Boat Departures” board.

“Let me through!”

Barrier Guard swishes his head, and he goes back to his coffee booth.

Andy Somebody whinnies, fumbles for his mobile phone, and manages to drop it. He walks away speaking into it to Larry, inventing excuses, and pretending to laugh.

The turbo ferry pulls away from the jetty, and buzzes away into the distance.

I don’t understand you sometimes.

————

Katy insisted that I didn’t see her off at the airport. Her flight was in the afternoon, it was a manic Friday. My desk at work had become a canyon floor between two unstable formations of contracts. And so the day she left we had taken the bus before my usual one and drank a cup of coffee at the jetty café. That café, there. In the window seat Andy Somebody has pulled out his laptop computer and is hammering the keyboard as though he’s trying to avert a thermonuclear war. Sitting hunched like that is going to knacker his back. Nope, he doesn’t know it, but Andy’s sitting at the very table where Katy and I staged our Grand Farewell.

It was not a Noël Coward Grand Farewell. Neal Brose and Katy Forbes brought you a much unlovelier performance. Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found
we had not one dollar of time left between us. I suppose we talked about airport layouts, watering plants, what Katy was looking forward to once she got back to London. It was like we’d met the night before, fucked in a Kowloon hotel, and had just woken up. In fact, we hadn’t had sex for five months, not since finding out.

Fuck, it was horrible, horrible. She was leaving me.

It is what we didn’t say that I remember best. We didn’t mention Mrs. Feng, or her. We didn’t mention whose “fault”—fuck, haven’t thousands of years of infertility come up with a better word than “fault”—it was. Katy was always capable of mercy. We had never discussed therapy, clinics, adoption, procedures, that umbrella of “ways around it,” because neither of us had the will, and we didn’t now. I guess. If nature couldn’t be fucked to knit us together, we sure as hell weren’t going to be. We didn’t mention the word “divorce,” because it was as real and near as that mountain there. We didn’t mention the word “love.” That hurt way too much. I was waiting for her to say it first. Maybe she was waiting for me. Or maybe it was that we had left those days and nights for the starry-eyed beepy muppets born seven or eight years after us. Those kids in the coffee bar last night. They were who love was for. Not us old fucks over thirty. Forget it.

The bell for the ferry had rung. On this spot, right here, this pinkish paving slab I’m standing on right now. I know it well because I walk around it every day. Here was where I thought I should embrace her and maybe kiss her good-bye.

“You’d better get on your ferry,” she said.

Okay, if that was how she wanted it.

“Good-bye,” I said. “Nice being married to you.”

I instantly regretted those words, and I still do. It sounded like a parting shot. She turned and walked away, and I sometimes wonder, had I run back to her, could we have found ourselves pin-balled into an altogether different universe, or would I have just got my nose broken? I never found out. I obeyed the ferry bell. Ashamed, I didn’t look for her on the shore as the ferry pulled away, so I don’t know if she waved. Knowing Katy, I doubted it. It took me about forty-five seconds to forget her, anyway. On page five of
South China Business News
, ten lines of newsprint mugged
my attention. A new Sino-American-British investigative body, the Capital Transfer Inspectorate, had just raided the offices of a trading company called Silk Road Group. It was not well known to the general public, but it was very well known to me. I, personally, as per instructions received, had ordered the transfer of $115 million, the Friday before, from Account 1390931, to the Silk Road Group.

Oh … fuck.

There was nobody but me.

The road from the jetty and the harbor village led to the Polo Club. Flags hanging limp today. After the Polo Club the road became a track. The track led to the beach. At the beach the track turned into a path, winding along the shore. I’d never taken the path any further, so I had no idea where it might lead. A fisherman looked up, his gnarled fingers knotting a net, and our eyes met for a moment. I forget, outside my Village of the Short Lease Damned, people actually live out their whole lives on Lantau Island.

Dad used to take me fishing at weekends. A gloomy reservoir, lost in Snowdonia. He was an electrician. It’s honest work, real work. You install people’s switchboards for them, connect their lighting, tidy up cowboy and DIY botch jobs so they don’t burn their houses down. Dad was full of a tradesman’s aphorisms. “Give a man a fish, Neal, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for life.” We were at the reservoir when I told him I was going to do Business Studies at Polytechnic. He just nodded, said, “That could lead to a good job in a bank,” and cast off. Was that the beginning of the path I’m still on? The last time we went fishing was when I told him I’d got the job with Cavendish Hong Kong, and a salary three times that of my ex-headmaster. “That’s grand, Neal,” he said. “Your mother will be proud as punch.” I had hoped for more of a reaction from him, but he had retired by that time.

Truth be told, fishing bored me. I’d rather be watching the footy on the box. But Mum insisted that I went with him, so I did, and now I’m glad I went. Even today, the word “Wales” brings
back the taste of tuna and egg sandwiches and weak, milky tea, and the memory of my dad looking out over a murky lake walled in by cold mountains.

Her coming was the hum of a fridge. A sound you grow accustomed to before you hear it. I didn’t know how long cupboards had been left open, air conditioners switched on, curtains twitched open, before I became conscious of her. Living with Katy postponed it. Katy thought I was doing what she was doing, I thought Katy was doing what she was doing. She didn’t come in the dramatic way they do in the movies. Nothing was hurled across the room, no ghosts in the machine, no silly messages typed on my computer or spelled out with the fridge magnet letters. Nothing like
Poltergeist
or
The Exorcist
. More like a medical condition, that, while terminal, grows in such small increments that it is impossible to diagnose until too late. Little things: hidden objects. The honey left on top of the wardrobe. Books turning up in the dishwasher. That kind of thing. Keys. She had a penchant for keys. No, she’s never been an in-your-face houseguest. Katy and I joked about her even before we believed in her: Oh, it’s only the ghost again.

In the end, however, I think she affected the three of us deeper than any amount of smashed vases.

I do remember the day that hum became a noise. It was a Sunday afternoon, last autumn. I was at home for once. Katy had gone shopping at the supermarket down in the village. I was vegging out on the sofa, one eye on the newspaper and one on
Die Hard 3
dubbed into Cantonese. I realized there was a little girl playing on the carpet in front of me, lying on her belly, and pretending to swim.

I knew she was there, and I knew there was no such child.

The conclusion was obvious.

Fear breathed on the nape of my neck.

Half a building blew up. “We’d better get some more FBI agents,” said the stupid deputy who didn’t trust Bruce Willis.

Reason entered, brandishing its warrant. It ordered that I behave as though nothing untoward was happening. What was I going to do? Go screaming from the apartment to—where? I’d
have to come back at some point. There was Katy to think about, too. Was I to tell her that a ghost was watching us morning, noon, and night? If this drawbridge was lowered, what else would come in? I forced myself to pretend to finish the article, though it could have been written in Mongolian.

Fear was handcuffed, but it could still yell at the top of its lungs,
There’s a fucking ghost in your apartment! A fucking ghost, you hear me?

She was still there, swimming. She was on her back now. I had to lower the paper. Would it mean I was mad if she was there, or if she wasn’t?

What did I know about her?

Only that she wasn’t threatening me.

I folded the newspaper and looked at where I had thought she was.

Nobody, and nothing.
See?
said Reason, smugly.

Neal
, said Neal,
you’re cracking up
.

I walked resolutely towards the kitchen.

Behind my back I heard her giggle.

Fuck you
, said Fear to Reason.

I heard the lock being jiggled, and Katy’s keys echoing in the hallway outside. She dropped them. I walked over to the door and opened it for her. She was bending down, so she couldn’t see my expression, which I’m glad about.

“Phew!” said Katy, smiling and straightening up.

“Welcome home,” I said. “I say. Is that champagne?”

“Champagne, lobster, and lamb, my hunter-gatherer. You’ve been asleep, haven’t you? You’re all groggy.”

“Uh … yeah. Don’t tell me I’ve missed your birthday again?”

“No.”