Ghostwritten (35 page)

I can cook, and Katy’s kitchen was well stocked. My hangovers never affect my appetite. In fact I like to bury my hangovers alive, in food. I poured some olive oil into a big frying pan, chopped up some garlic, mushrooms, and chili peppers, and sprinkled some basil. I folded in a dash of cream with the eggs, and mashed up a couple of anchovies that were stinking the fridge out. Onto this Vesuvius of cholesterol I grated a light snowfall of Wensleydale, and perched a few stuffed olives around the crater. There was granary bread, so I lightly browned some toast. Real butter in a Wedgwood butter dish. I helped myself to a few sprigs of parsley from a shrub on the windowsill. Some fresh beef tomatoes on the side, with chopped celery, sultanas, and a dollop of potato salad. The coffee percolator was the same model as my own, so no problem there. I slurped down a mugful of the magic brew and felt my hangover being shooed away.

“Gosh,” said Katy, coming through with her hair wrapped in a towel. Her gray track-suit trousers and buttoned-up cardigan did not promise any frisky post-breakfast foreplay. “You’re no writer,” she said, “you’re a food sculptor.”

“We aim,” I hummed, “to please.”

She picked up
The Sunday Telegraph
from the doormat, sat down with it, and dug in. She made straight for the Living section of the supplement, which I never read, even when I’m busy moving house and can be distracted by share prices in Singapore.

I joined Katy at the table. This was a nice room. There was an overgrown little garden out back. In the front was a raised pavement. I watched human legs and canine legs and pushchair wheels go by. On the pine dresser was a collection of mainstream CDs. All very Princess Diana: Elton John, Pavarotti, the Four Seasons. A Chinese rug hung on the wall, on the mantelpiece was a zoo of ethnicky sculpted animals. Terracotta tiles and Japanese lampshades. It was a room from the Living section of
The Sunday Telegraph
. “The lack of morning-after recriminations is refreshing.” I only meant it as a pleasantry.

She looked over the paper. “Why should there be any recriminations? We were both consenting adults.” She slid in another forkful of egg. “Albeit bloody drunk consenting adults.”

“True.” I bit on a bit of chili and had to swish my mouth out with water. “Would you like to be a drunk consenting adult with me again sometime?”

Katy thought about it for a full three seconds. “I don’t think so, Marco, no.”

“Oh. Fair enough.”

I poured us some more coffee.

“Katy, I hope this isn’t an impertinent question, but I saw the photo in the toilet and I wondered if I wasn’t treading on anyone’s turf here?”

“Nobody’s turf but mine. He was my husband. We separated, then he went and died.”

I just kept the lid on a mysterious giggle. “Oh … I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

“He was a bloody clot. He always insisted on having the last word. It happened four months ago. Around Wimbledon time. Undiagnosed diabetes in Hong Kong.”

I let a respectable silence elapse. “More toast?”

“Thank you.”

The doorbell rang. Katy went over to the door. “Who is it?”

“Registered delivery for a Mrs. Forbes!” yelled a man’s voice.

“Ms. Forbes!” Katy said in a disciplining-the-dog-for-the-hundredth-time voice, peered through the peephole, and undid the bolts.
“Ms! Ms!”

A lad in blue overalls and shiny hair and ears as big as a chimpanzee’s heaved a packing case into the hallway. He saw me and his face said, “Nice one Cyril.”

“Sign here please,
Miss
Forbes.”

She signed and he was gone.

We looked at the packing case for a moment. “Nice big present,” I commented. “Is your birthday coming up?”

“It’s not a present,” she said. “It’s already mine. Come and give me a hand, would you? In the cupboard under the sink there’s a hammer and a cold chisel, in a box with some fuses.…”

We prised open the lid, and the four sides fell away.

A Queen Anne chair.

Katy’s thoughts wandered a long way away. “Marco,” she said, “thank you for making breakfast. It was really … But I think I’d like you to go now.” There was a tremor in her voice. “You’re not a bad man.”

“Okay,” I said. “Could I just hop into your shower?”

“I’d like you to go now.”

The avenue was littered with autumn. The air was smoky with it. Not yet ten
A.M.
, it was crisp and sunny and foggy all at once. I’d try to get to Alfred’s by late lunchtime, Tim Cavendish’s by late afternoon, and back to my place by early evening in time to meet Gibreel. It wasn’t really worth going back to my flat now. I’d just have to smell of sex all day.

Katy Forbes wasn’t the stablest of campers but at least she hadn’t been a head-case like that vamp of Camden Town who’d tied me up to her bedstead with a leather belt and videoed herself releasing her pet tarantula on my torso. “Stop screaming,” she’d screamed. “Baggins has had his sacs removed.…” It hadn’t been Baggins’s sacs that were at the forefront of my mind. Katy’s intellect must have impressed me enough to go for the writer identity, rather than the drummer. Even so. The Morning-After Me was not overly impressed with the Night-Before Me. I pass through
many Me’s in the course of the day, each one selfish with his time. The Lying-in-Bed Me and the Enjoying-the-Hot-Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them.

I really am a drummer. My band’s called The Music of Chance. I named it after a novel by that New York bloke. I describe us as a “loose musical cooperative”—there are about ten members, and whoever’s around performs on whatever’s happening. Plus, most of us are pretty loose. We play our own material mostly, though if I’m strapped for cash we’ll play whatever will put bums on seats. We’ve been offered a recording contract, by the biggest record company in southern Belgium, but we thought we should hold out for something more EMI- or Geffensized. The Music of Chance is pretty big in the Slovak Republic, too. We played a few gigs there last summer that went down very well.

I really am a writer, too. A ghostwriter. My first published project was the autobiography of a pace bowler called Dennis Mackeson who played cricket for England a few times in the mid-eighties, when it rained a lot.
The Twistlethwaite Tornado
got great reviews in
The Yorkshire Post
—“Not in a million years would I have guessed it that Mr. Mackeson could bowl ’em out with his nib as well as his yorkers! ‘Owzat!’ ” On the strength of the first book I’m currently writing the life story of this old guy, Alfred, who lives on the edge of Hampstead Heath with his younger—though not by much—boyfriend, Roy. I go, he reminisces about his younger days, I tape it, jot notes, and by next week I write it up into a narrative. Roy’s the son of some Canadian steel tycoon, and he pays me a weekly retainer fee. It helps pay the rent and the wine bars.

You could get lost in these northeast London streets. I was halflost myself. They curve around themselves in cul-de-sacs and crescents and groves. A few months ago I spent the night bonking the Welsh Ladies Kickboxing Champion in a caravan somewhere beyond Hammersmith. She’d said that the whole of London seemed like one vast rat’s maze to her. I’d said yes, but what if the rats happened to like being in the maze?

The leaves are covering up the cracks in the pavement. When
I was a kid I could lose myself for hours kicking through fallen leaves, while avoiding dog turds and cracks. I used to be superstitious, but I’m not anymore. I used to be a Christian, but I’m not one of those anymore either. Then I was a Marxist. I used to wait with my cadre leader outside Queensway tube station and ask people what they thought about the Bosnian Question. Of course, most people shrug you off. “I see, sir, no comment, is it?” I cringe to think of it now.

I guess I’m not anything much these days, apart from older. A part-time Buddhist, maybe.

I remembered to worry about Poppy’s period. A condom had burst on us, when was it? Ten days ago. Her period is due sometime at the end of next week.… Give it another week, due to stress incurred by waiting for it.… That’s two weeks before panic starts knocking, and three weeks before I let it in. Oh well. India would love a little brother to play with. And when, in twenty years’ time, a professor of philosophy asks him, “Why do you exist?” he can toy with his nose-ring and answer, “Rugged lust and ruptured rubber.” Weird. If I’d bought the pack behind on the condom shelf he wouldn’t be/won’t be sitting there. Unmix that conditional and smoke it.

Of course, I might be sterile. Now that really would be annoying. All that money wasted on unnecessary condoms. Well, there’s been AIDS to worry about, I suppose. Highbury playing fields. I’ve almost escaped. I like the Victorian skyline, and I like the pigeons flying through the tunnels of trees. Teenagers smoking on the swings. Last time I was here was bonfire night, with Poppy and India. It was the first time India had seen fireworks. She took in the spectacle with royal dignity, but kept talking about them for days. She’s a very cool kid, like her mother.

It’ll be bonfire night again, soon. You can see your breath. When I was a kid I used to pretend I was a locomotive. What kid doesn’t? Old men are walking their labradors across the muddy turf. There are young fathers on the pathways, teaching their kids how to ride their bikes without stabilizers. Some of these fathers are younger than me. I bet those are their BMWs. Me, I walk
everywhere. That’s Tony Blair’s old house. A postman emptying a postbox. Walking past these old terraced houses is like browsing down a shelf of books. A student’s pad, a graphic designer’s studio, a family with their kitchen done out in primary colors and pictures from school fridge-magneted onto the fridge. An antiquarian’s study. A basement full of toys—a helicopter going round and round and round. A huntin’, shootin’, buggerin’ living room with paintings and fittings that clear their throats and say “burgle this house!” to all the people trudging past to the Arsenal and Finsbury Park unemployment centers. Offices of obscure support groups, watchdog headquarters, and impotent trade unions. Three men in black suits stride past, turning down Calabria Road, one speaking into a cell phone, another carrying a briefcase. What are they doing here on a Saturday? Must be estate agents. How come they end up with that life, and I end up with this one? I could have been a lawyer, or an accountant, or a whatever you have to be to afford a house around Highbury playing fields, too, if I had wanted to. I was adopted by middle-class parents in Surrey, I went to a good school. I got a job in a city firm. I was twenty-two and I was taking Prozac for breakfast. I had my very own shrink. I wince to think of the money I paid him to tell me what the matter was. When I told him I’d been adopted his eyes lit up! He’d done his Ph.D. in adopted kids. But I discovered the answer myself in the end. I had stopped taking plunges. I don’t mean risks: I mean plunges, the uprooting and throwing of oneself into something entirely new.

Now I live like this, losing the battle against a battery of deadlines—especially financial ones—but at least they are deadlines of my own choosing, there because I’ve plunged myself into something again. It’s not always an easy way to live. Independence and insecurity hobble along together in my three-legged race. Jim—my adoptive dad—tells me this is a choice I made, and that I shouldn’t ask for sympathy. And that’s true. But why did I make that choice? That’s what I wonder about. Because I am me, is the answer. But that just postpones the question. Why am I me?

Chance, that’s why. Because of the cocktail of genetics and upbringing fixed for me by the blind barman Chance.

That
Big Issue
vendor guy there, why is he selling his magazine next to a shop where people spend £250 on a brass-knobbed antique bedstead and congratulate themselves on a bargain? Chance. Why is that guy a bus driver, and that woman a rushed-off-her-feet waitress in Pizza Hut? Chance. People say they choose, but it comes down to the same thing: why people choose what they choose is also down to chance. Why did that gray oily pigeon lose its leg, but that white and brown one didn’t? Chance. Why did that curvaceous model get to model those particular jeans? Chance. Isn’t all this obvious? That short woman in an orange anorak wandering across the road in front of that taxi, with the driver mentally stripping the leggy woman striding past with a flopsy dog—why is she about to be mown down, and not me?

—fuck!

The second time this morning when I didn’t know how I ended up lying next to an unknown female. This time was even more uncomfortable than the last. There was a pulsation in my left leg that
hurt
. There’d been a screech of brakes, and a sleeve ripping. Something flew through the air—that would be me—and the round eye of the taxi. This woman looked much more shocked than Katy Forbes had. She had a dead leaf and a lollipop stick sticking to her face.

“Stone the crows,” she said. Irish. Middle-aged. The lollipop stick dropped off.

The taxi driver was standing over us, a fat Cockney. Santa Claus without the beard or the love of humanity. I heard his engine, still running. He was deciding whether to be irate or compassionate. “Ruddy Bleedin’ Nora, love! Why didn’t you look where you was going?”

“I—” Her eyes looked around like a puppet’s. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“Any bones broken?” The question was to both of us.

My leg was still complaining loudly, but I found I could stand and wiggle my toes. The woman picked herself up.

“I saw everything,” said the leggy woman with the flopsy dog and a Sloaney accent. “He rugby tackled her out of the way of the
taxi. And they tumbled over and over. I’m sure he saved her life, you know.” There was no one else to tell but the taxi driver who wasn’t listening to her.

“I’m much obliged to you,” said the anorak woman, getting up and dusting herself down, as if I’d just handed her a cup of tea. Her eye socket was already reddening.

“You’re welcome,” I said, in the same way. “You’re going to have a black eye.”

“The least of my troubles. Is your taxi free?” the anorak woman asked the taxi driver.