Ghostwriting (5 page)

We were inseparable, after that.

I worked on the script in the mornings, then returned to the hotel for afternoons of delirious sex with Li. In the evenings she hurried to the Café Bar to dispense her Oriental magic, and returned to me in the early hours, re-energised, and ready for another bout of passion.

At one point I held her in my lap, her slim legs clamped tight about my waist, and stared into her wide, child-like eyes. “What’s happening, Li? Why us?”

“Because is meant,” she said. “Sometime, two people, they come together, and it is right. The gods, they say ‘Yes.’ And the two never part. Ah...”

I held her to me, as if attempting to pull her into me, become one with her. What the gods decree as right, let no man put asunder.

~

Tak Buri was a town not much larger than Khon Khai, occupying the banks of the same river. The bus drew to a halt in the busy main street at sunset, after six hours on the road. I unwound myself from my seat and, feeling as if I might faint at any second, climbed out and stood stretching amid a crowd of curious locals.

I made for the nearest bar, ordered a Singha, and then a second. I asked the proprietor if he knew where I might find a young woman by the name of Li Ketsuwan. I expected a long evening of fruitless enquiry before I was successful.

But the bar-tender gave a gold-toothed grin and said, “Li? Sure I know Li! She has big place in bend of river. One kay out of town, to the north. Can’t miss it, okay?”

I celebrated with another beer, then turned and watched – as clear as day, no word of a lie – Karen walk past the bar. I hurried out, but of course by the time I emerged from the bar she had vanished.

I returned to my beer. I told myself that I should have been unsurprised by these spectral visitations, but the fact was that the reminders of my past never failed to fill me with fear.

~

I had dated Karen one week after the disaster with Sonia. She was a young, bubbly blonde who worked in the marketing department of a big London publishing house. She was the baby sister of a friend, and until then I had always considered her off-limits. Perhaps what made her fair game now had something to do with my failure with Sonia the week before, the need to boost my flagging ego.

I manufactured a chance meeting at a coffee shop I knew she frequented, and invited her to a swank party I planned to attend that night.

The rest was like stealing candy from a baby.

Back at my apartment, on the settee, I pulled her towards me, kissed her, slipped a hand beneath her cashmere sweater, feeling the soft puppy fat of her flank.

She screamed, and pulled away as if scalded.

“Jesus!” she cried. “What did you...?” She was staring, incredulous, at my right hand.

“You burned me, for fuck’s sake! You
burned
me!”

And she lifted her sweater to show an area of rib-cage pulsing with an angry red weal in the shape of my hand.

Exeunt Karen, in high dudgeon.

After that came Gina, a sultry Italian beauty of twenty-three, who fainted when I so much as laid a finger upon her person.

And then Samantha, an ex-porn star hoping to make it big in legit films and willing – she whispered to me after a half bottle of Krug – willing to do
anything
to get there.

My touch sent her into a paroxysm of hysterical laughter, wave after wave of unforced hilarity, so that it was impossible to undress her and ease her into bed. Frightened by my effect on her, she managed to escape before she laughed herself to death.

And then Lilly, who bled when I caressed her; and Liz, who cried; and... well there were others, many others, before word got round and my friends shunned me, assuming that I was physically hurting, with intent, the women I dated.

Disconsolate and increasingly lonely, I took to drinking by myself at my local public house, hardly daring to look women in the eye lest my mere gaze provoke some ghastly reaction. Life became hell over the course of the next year. I, who had been accustomed to the attention of countless beautiful and eager women, now found myself with no one. I knew true loneliness: I was a pariah in the city where once I had thought myself a prince.

Then one night, ten pints to the good and staggering homeward, I spied a slim child’s figure watching me from across the street, its shoulders moving in such a way as to suggest that she was crying.

I hurried across the street, and all at once realised two things: one, the girl was not crying, but laughing, and two: it was Li.

Then she stepped back into the shadow of the building, and, when I moved forward, she was gone.

The following day I booked a flight back to Thailand.

~

I took a taxi north as far as the bend in the river, and when the big villa came into sight, a hundred meters away, paid the driver and climbed out. The night rasped with a chorus of crickets. The air was heavy with the cloying scent of some over-sweet nightbloom.

I moved towards the villa, hesitant, perhaps even a little fearful, now that the time had come to confront my tormentor.

Perhaps villa was too grand a word to describe the house where Li now lived: it was a long, low weatherboard construct, painted white. Wind-chimes tinkled in the faint breeze. I heard the melancholy song of caged birds.

I climbed the steps to the fly-screen door; the main door was open, and within I made out the amber glow of a paraffin lamp.

I hesitated, hand raised to knock, but called out instead, “Li?”

There was no reply. I pulled open the fly-screen door and, after a second, stepped inside.

In the low lighting of the big front room I made out a sofa, rugs and tapestries. I called her name again, and moved around the room. Incense burned, filling the villa with its sickening sweetness. I felt as if I were intruding, that at any second Li might emerge in rage and shout at me to leave.

Then I saw the photograph. It stood on a small bamboo table by the window. Beside it was a joss-stick, curling smoke. It could only have been lighted very recently. Had Li known I was on my way?

I picked up the photograph. It showed Li, beautiful in a tight red dress, standing next to a tall Westerner. The man was me.

I had taken the photograph on our very last night together, setting my camera on delay and leaving it on a boulder in the jungle, then rushing back to Li’s side.

I picked up the photograph and stared at the fool I had been.

~

My work on the screenplay was over, and I had no reason to prolong my stay in Khon Khai. The last scene was shot, and the cast and crew were packing up to leave.

On my last day in Thailand, I returned to the hotel in the afternoon to find Li still in bed. We made love, with a passion that surpassed all our previous encounters – she must have known, of course, of my intention to leave.

Then, wordlessly, she dressed, indicated that I should do the same, and led me from the room. On the way she picked up my camera. We left the hotel, took the path beside the river and into the jungle.

We climbed, and emerged fifteen minutes later looking down at the smooth curve of a waterfall as it slipped over the lip of the land and shattered far below.

Li indicated a boulder, and my camera. I set up the photo, intending to send Li a copy when it was developed.

I held her as we stared at the falling water.

“This place haunted,” she whispered. “Spirits live here. Sad spirits. People who kill themselves, they cannot leave the Earth.”

I shivered. It was as if, in the humid afternoon, I could feel the presence of the unsuccessfully departed all around me.

“Sad people, they jump from here. Some hit rocks and die, some drown. Then their spirits cannot get away.”

I kissed her.

She murmured, to my chest, “Don’t go.”

“I must. I have work to do.”

“Take me. I can live in London. I have money.”

“It wouldn’t work...” I said, and led her back to the hotel.

It was as if the unparalleled physicality of our liaison pointed up our essential personal incompatibility. Out of bed, we shared nothing, no interests, no culture: only the fact that we were man and woman had brought us together.

She watched me pack. “You can’t leave,” she said.

“Li... it wouldn’t work.”

“The gods, they say we belong together. You cannot say no to the gods.”

“Watch me,” I said, cruelly, as I strapped my case and made to go.

She stared at me. “You will come back. I tell you now, I am only woman who can love you, yes.”

I lowered my case. “Li, you don’t love me. You hardly know me.”

“No!” she cried. “I see into you. I see you bad man, but can be saved.”

It was as if she had reached into my chest and clutched my heart. I felt suddenly cold.

“You bad man!” she yelled at me. “You use women! You always did, for years and years, yes? Use women, walk away!”

I hurried to the door, and paused to look back. She was standing by the bed, slight and tiny. Her expression shocked me: I had expected anger – but she was smiling, as if privy to some secret known only to herself.

Then she said, “Anna, Zoe, Julia, Susan, Olivia, Sabine...” A litany of forgotten names which filled me with something almost like regret, and very real fear.

I almost ran from the hotel.

Later, in London, after Sonia and Karen and all the others, I had cause to recall her words. “
I tell you now, I am only woman who can love you, yes
.”

~

“Li,” I called again, and moved through the house.

An open double door led onto a veranda. I stepped through, and found her.

She was sitting in a wheelchair with her back to me, staring out across the river to the dark tangle of the jungle beyond.

I hesitated, my heart labouring.

“You come back,” she said. “I say you come back, no? Sit down.”

A rattan chair was positioned next to her wheelchair, as if in preparation for this audience. Hesitantly, I stepped onto the veranda and sat down next to Li.

She was radiant. Her face glowed with a beauty I recalled from a year ago.

She smiled. “Good to see you, Mistah Grant. I told you we belong together.”

Her words frightened me. I took refuge in a question, indicating her legs covered by a tartan blanket.

“What happened?”

“What happen? I tell you. When you go, I walk into jungle. To waterfall, you know? Then I throw myself down, into water. I want to die, but I know I won’t. You see, I see future, yes?”

“You foresaw
this
?” I said, gesturing to the wheelchair.

“The gods, they talked to me. They say they want sacrifice. I had power, but I wanted more. The gods, they say, ‘Jump, and we will give you special powers to do what you want.’”

“And you jumped.”

“Broke my back. Fisherman, he found me, carried me home. I live, my magic stronger than ever.”

I was silent for a minute. “You’ve made my life hell,” I said at last.

She stared at me with massive eyes, her articulate lips amused. “No, Mistah Grant.
You
made your life hell. You used me, other women. Look.” And she pointed across the river.

I made out, on the far shore, faint figures. They stood in the jungle, staring out at me in accusation. Sonia, Gina, Karen and many more... Dozens of them, a legion.

“What can I do?” I said. “You can’t imagine how lonely I’ve been. Haunted by these... these apparitions, unable to even touch another human being.”

She was smiling at me. “Touch me,” she whispered.

“No!” I cried.

I swallowed. My heart pounded. I wanted to get up and run away, but I could not move. I sat and stared at her, as if paralysed.

“Touch me!” she shouted.

Against my will, as if my hand were not my own, I reached out and stroked the flesh of her arm. She gasped, but in pleasure, and the feel of her flesh was like electricity.

It was as if my body was controlled by another. I stood and lifted her from the wheelchair. I felt her elemental savagery, and was at once fearful and consumed.

“No...” I wept.

I looked beyond her, to the far side of the river. The legion of my accusers was no more.

I wept as I kissed her. “Li,” I begged. “Please let me go.”

She smiled and whispered, “We belong together. The gods have told me.”

Against my will, fearful of what might happen, I carried her into the house, to the bedroom. As we lay side by side and held each other in the heat of the night, I heard the sound of tinkling wind chimes, and the sad notes of a caged bird, singing.

Ghostwriting

Rhodes spent most of the afternoon setting up his PC’s voice recognition program – not helped by the fact that his right hand was in plaster. A colleague had suggested he try dictating his novel after he’d broken his wrist. “Chesterton dictated, you know? And look at the quality of his prose.”

Rhodes had been reluctant at first. Speaking one’s prose into a Dictaphone – or even one of these state-of-the-art computer programs – smacked to him of something a hack without literary integrity might do. But the fact was that he couldn’t type fast enough with his left hand and the deadline for his novel, with two chapters still to write, was next month.

By three o’clock he had the program recognising his voice and reproducing on screen a fair copy of his words, though it still had the annoying habit of translating all his ‘erms’ and ‘ahems’. Still, no matter; he could edit them out on the second draft, once he was out of the damned cast.

He made himself a coffee and was settling down to dictate the opening paragraph of the penultimate chapter when he heard the phone ringing downstairs. He cursed, and decided to leave it, before remembering that Anne said she’d ring if she got back early and needed a lift from the station.

He left the program running and hurried downstairs. He’d tell Anne to get the bus to the village, explain that he was deep into the novel.

“Anne?”

“Steven. Sorry – could you collect me?”

“I’m rather—”

“I have tons of bags. I could get the bus, but...”

He smiled. “Hey-ho, I’m on my way.”

He grabbed his coat and made his way out to the car. It was a sunny day, and the countryside was riotous with summer. He’d suggest to Anne that they stop for a coffee on the way back.

So much for that pressing penultimate chapter.

He smiled to himself. It was known in the trade as a displacement activity.

~

He drove extra-carefully from the village. The cast restricted his grip on the wheel, but he found he could grip it adequately with his thumb and forefinger. The fact that his car was an automatic made driving that much easier.

It was only three miles to the Station by the main road, but Rhodes always took the back lanes, adding another mile and a half to the journey. It was a conscious decision: ever since Jane’s death, knocked from her bike on the main road by a hit-and-run motorist, he’d been unable to face driving past the place where the accident had happened.

A year ago, now. They were right about time healing all wounds, he thought; or partially right. The wound, or the pain, was still there, but scabbed over, nagging and insistent but almost bearable now. It was, he thought, a low-level ache that never really went away. Sometimes, in the dead early hours of the morning, it awoke him to futile tears as he relived the incident and his inability to do anything about it.

And relived, too, his anger.

His anger with himself, for being responsible for letting her take the main road home; and anger with the driver for irresponsibly speeding into Jane, and then driving off when it was obvious what he had done. He, or she. There had been no witnesses to the accident.

A year ago. She would have been sixteen now, studying for her exams.

He gripped the wheel and told himself to stop dwelling. He thought ahead to meeting Anne, going for a coffee at Berly’s. Tonight he’d cook a Thai curry, his speciality, and then they’d watch a film with a bottle of red wine until midnight and blessed sleep.

~

Anne stood amid an island of over-flowing carrier bags, smiling at him as he pulled up before her. He climbed out and kissed her – twenty years married and he still found her irresistible – collected the bags and stowed them in the boot.

“Coffee?” he asked as he pulled from the station forecourt.

“Mmm, that’d be great. How’s the novel going?”

“I’m still wrestling with the blasted program.”

“But think how easier it’ll make writing.”

He thought about that, then said, “Mmm. That’s what I’m worried about. Writing shouldn’t be easy.”

She smiled indulgently. She was forever mocking him for his pose of the artist suffering for his muse.

Before Jane’s death. he had written with facility and speed. Later, when he returned to writing after six hopeless months, the old facility had gone: he’d had to sweat blood for every word. It was as if the sentiments he put on the page had to have behind them a solid bedrock of integrity, for Jane’s sake.

As he pulled up before Berly’s, Anne said, “You always suggest coffee when we come back from town.”

He smiled defensively. “I’m usually in need of a caffeine injection.”

They took their usual table by the window. Berly’s was a trendy organic place, with rough wooden tables and chairs, and local artwork adorning the walls. The coffee was the best in Yorkshire.

“Is it because,” Anne said, looking at him as she stirred her coffee, “you can’t face the main road?”

He shrugged. “It might be. Yes, probably.” He hesitated, then said, “No doubt the same impulse that made me get rid of the car.” How could he have kept it, the car which he’d been driving when he found Jane’s body in the road?

He saw the condemnatory twist of Anne’s mouth. He responded, “You’d probably feel the same, if it’d—”

“I like to think that I’d be able to face it, defeat it, move on.”

“Wish it were that easy,” he said.

She covered his hand with hers and murmured a soft apology.

~

Back home, he helped Anne put the shopping away, then checked the wall-clock.

“I’ve an hour or two before I start dinner,” he said. “I might see if I can get some work done.”

A few months ago, over dinner, he’d mentioned that he was considering writing a novel about Jane, and the aftermath of the accident. He had said it almost shame-facedly, as if seeking her sanction. Not long after Jane’s death, Anne had sought the help of a grief counsellor, and had implored Rhodes to joined her. He’d refused, saying that he would find his own way of coping. He wondered if the novel was his coping mechanism.

He made his way upstairs to his study. He stood before the window for a while, gathering his thoughts. Then he eased himself into his armchair, adjusted the microphone and touched the mouse in order to banish the screensaver – the onrushing starscape which he often stared at for an hour or two when the writing was going slowly.

The stars vanished, to be replaced with the off-white screen of the voice recognition program.

He stared at the screen. He had left it blank. Now a block of text, perhaps a hundred words long, confronted him.

He began reading, and his heart throbbed in his chest. He felt hot, then dizzy, and it was all he could do to stifle the cry that rose in his throat.

He read on, disbelieving.

I just wanted to say how much I love you both. I don’t think I ever told you that. I mean, I remember being stroppy and rude – a typical teenager. But I never said I love you. I felt it, all the time. Something stopped me from telling you. I don’t know... I didn’t want to seem soppy. But now... I’m glad I can communicate at last. I’ve been watching you, both of you. You, dad, working away on your writing, and mum in the garden... I can feel your sadness. But, please, for my sake, don’t grieve. I’m okay. I really am. I’ll be in touch again. Love, Jane.

He came to the end and read it again, then again. Then he went through it a third time, extracting every nuance of meaning and intent from the clumsy teenage sentiment.

He held his head in his hands and thought about it. The doors had been locked, back and front. As were all the windows. No one could have got into the house and done this.

He took deep breaths, attempted to compose himself.

He reached out for the microphone, brought it closer to his lips and said, tentatively, “Jane, are you there? Is it you?”

The words appeared on the screen, his question made more substantial in Verdana twelve point.

Heart hammering, he sat back and awaited her reply.

It didn’t come. Five minutes passed, then ten. He wondered if he should leave the room. He had been away when she had spoken the first time, after all.

He went downstairs, hoping that Anne would be out in the garden, and made himself a tea. He nearly dropped the packet of tea-bags twice, and the cup rattled on the saucer as he carried it back upstairs. He paused before the study door, taking a deep breath, then entered.

The only words on the screen were her original communiqué and his short question.

He sat back and wondered if he were going mad.

Then he tried to work out a rational explanation for what had happened.

~

He was unable to work the following morning. He had left the voice recognition program on overnight, but the screen was blank when he looked in before breakfast.

He had said nothing to Anne last night. He supposed she had taken his quiet abstraction as preoccupation with the novel.

Now he faced the screen bearing only the chapter heading, and knew that words would be beyond him this morning. His novel was a rational, psychological study of a man coming to terms with his loss. How could he continue with it in light of last night’s phenomenon?

“Steven,” Anne called up from the hall. “We’re going over to see James and Lillian at one, remember?”

Christ, he said to himself. It was already fifteen minutes to one. He had nothing against the Greenes – in fact they were good friends – but the last thing he wanted at the moment was a dose of James’ ebullience. Jim Greene was a financial adviser, and Rhodes was sure he compensated for a mind-numbingly boring nine-to-five office job by being the essence of excruciating bonhomie the rest of the time.

He closed the novel file, hesitated a second, then left the voice recognition program open on a blank screen.

~

They walked across the village, sunlight beating down from a cloudless summer sky.

“The novel proving difficult?”

“What? Oh, the novel... Yes, but that’s par for the course. I’d worry if it was all plain sailing.”

She hesitated, then said, “Are you okay, Steven? You can talk, you know?”

Instead of talking, and feeling guilty for the gesture, he just squeezed her hand.

The Greenes lived in a big converted barn on the edge of the village. Everything about the place, from the Porsche parked strategically in the gravelled drive, to the spotless cream shag pile in the lounge, spoke of conspicuous indulgence.

Five years ago the Greenes had moved to the village and spent half a million on converting the old Simpson barn, and Rhodes had been determined to dislike James even before they first met at a pub quiz. To his bafflement, he’d found the big, square-faced southerner more than likeable. Beneath the hale-fellow-well-met bonhomie, Rhodes detected genuine compassion.

Lillian, a bronzed, blonde woman in a sarong, met them barefoot at the door and showed them through into the back garden.

James was expertly barbecuing beefsteaks on a portable stove, fork in one hand, a bottle of chilled German wheat beer in the other. He made a performance of juggling fork and bottle, before laying them aside, wiping his hands on his apron and shaking Rhodes’s hand. He kissed Anne on the cheek.

“And how are my favourite creative types this sunny day?” he boomed. “How’s the scribbling coming along, Steven?”

Rhodes winced. James knew nothing about writing – or reading, for that matter: his idea of good literature was the latest best-seller – and he was forever exhorting Rhodes to ditch his sensitive stories of mid-life angst and take up thrillers. “Take a leaf out of Dan Brown’s book and try something racy.”

He held up his right wrist. “Slowly.”

Anna said, “Steven’s dictating into one of those new-fangled thingamajigs.”

“Ipods?” James quipped.

Anne laughed. “Tell him about it, Steven.”

“I’m sure James wouldn’t find it that interesting,” Rhodes said, earning an odd look from Anne.

They drank cold beer and ate a little later under an awning in the back garden. James was the life of the gathering, regaling them with village gossip and then imparting a sure-fire winner on the stock market. Making up for my taciturnity, Rhodes thought. James would comment on it, later.

On cue, Lillian took Anne for a turn around the garden, and James leaned close to Rhodes and said, “Anne’s worried, you know?”

Rhodes opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came. He was shocked that Anne had had the time to say anything to James since they’d arrived.

Then he cottoned on. “Oh, right. What’s she been telling Lillian?”

James wore long shorts and leather sandals, out of which his big white toes protruded obscenely as he stretched out his legs to view his feet.

James shrugged. “Just that you won’t talk to her about... what happened. That you’re bottling it all up. She thinks you should see someone, or at least talk to her.”

Rhodes nodded, staring at the label on his beer bottle.

James went on, “And I think it’d be a good idea too, speaking as a concerned friend.”

Rhodes almost said, “Speaking as someone who knows nothing at all about what I’m going through,” but managed to hold his tongue.

Instead, and to his surprise, he said, “I suppose it’s because I feel so bloody guilty.”

His friend stared at him, a mouthful of beer inflating his cheeks. He swallowed and said, softly, “You’ve no need to, old man.”

“Haven’t I?” He washed his mouth out with a swill of beer. “I suggested Jane take the main road home. We were in town. I had the car. I said the exercise would do her good. Fact was... I had some plants in the boot, presents for Anne, and I didn’t want the bike in the back in case they were damaged.”

Silently, James uncapped another beer and passed it to Rhodes.

“I had a couple of things to do in town. I set off after her ten minutes later. I must have come round the corner just after it happened. I saw her...”

“Okay, okay, Steven...” James said.

“So now you know why I feel so damned guilty.”

James nodded, then said, “Have you told Anne?”

“Of course. She doesn’t understand. Just says it’s something I have to face.” He shrugged. “That was months ago, just after it happened. I’m probably being unfair on Anne – she wasn’t as cruel as I make her sound.”