The Ghost

Andrew Lowe

Copyright © 2015 Andrew Lowe

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the

publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with

the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries

concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador
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ISBN 978 1784629 250

This is a work of fiction.

Any resemblance it bears to reality is entirely coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador
^®
is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Converted to eBook by
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for tom and josh

Andrew Lowe was brought to you by the North of England, the colour orange and the flavour coconut. He has written for
The Guardian
and
Sunday Times
, and contributed to numerous books and magazines on films, music, TV, videogames, sex and shin splints.

He lives in London, where he writes, makes music, coaches youth football and shepherds his two young sons down the path of righteousness.

This is his first novel.

@andylowe99

andrewlowewriter.com

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And Lot's wife was told not to look back, where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse Five

SOMETHING WAS COMING
UP
the stairs.

It always did.

As usual, he was hiding in the corner closet, huddled between the musty pillars of comic annuals
(Topper, Whoopee!, Whizzer and Chips)
. He was crouched and braced, armoured only by sweat-crumpled
Superman
pyjamas.

Thunk.

Whatever was coming up the stairs didn't seem too concerned about stealth. The first few times he had added mystery – he had given the Something guile and motive. But over time, the nightmare had refined and resculpted itself, chipping away every fragment of agency. Now, it was bold and cold as gleaming marble – inexorable, inevitable.

Thunk.

This was the part where he waited – the part where, although he had no sight of the Something, he knew what it was and what it would do. He knew that it would soon enter the bedroom. He knew there would be no cinematic pause outside the door, no theatrical rattle of the handle. The Something would just come right on in, without air or grace or face (as yet).

In the early days, he had woken before the reveal. He had read about ‘lucid' dreaming – how it was possible to collude with sleep, to blend the surreal with the real and redirect the flow of fantasy. Lately, though, his night terrors could not be tamed; they swarmed and scuttled in the insomnia-parched gloom, eager to smother and deliver him into this looping suspension.

Thunk.

The room was breached. He knew he would have time for one final flex of will. Maybe, at last, he would slip the tentacles, surge to the surface and gulp down the stale spores of the marital bedroom.

The closet door jerked open. Light flared in around the shape of the Something.

This was the part where he woke up.

DORIAN COOK HAD PASSED
through the BFF Screening Rooms many times. The process was like medical triage – rhythmic and ritualised, with status as quantifiable as core temperature or pulse-rate. Most attendees were admitted casually, while emergency cases – broadsheet editors, TV pundits – demanded fast-track efficiency.

Cook typically presented in full film-critic uniform – boot-cut jeans, asexual shoes, unlaundered short-sleeved shirt. A shoulder-bag propped against his gathering paunch carried mineral water, freesheet, notebook, biro, and a recently published hardback – mostly for ballast. He would be greeted by a public-relations official employed by the studio which had produced the film being screened. The official's seniority would depend on the film's profile. (A limited-release indie might only merit a senior intern, while a major blockbuster would smoke out the Head of Publicity – a weaponised breed with an air-kiss of death and a sharkish nose for journalist blood vintage.)

Cook was mid-tier and so didn't warrant the full VIP schmooze-and-polish. But his connections earned him a personal pour of the warm white wine and an extra five minutes of shop-talk around the sandwich platter. He was Associate Editor (Film) of
Widescreen
, a national monthly that specialised in cinema but also covered selective TV. Market share was steady, but circulation was down – had it ever been up?

“Dorian!
How are you?”

Here, with guest-list clipboard, twirling a studio-logo ballpoint, was Christina Collins, a deskbound fixer temporarily elevated by maternity leave. She wore the hostess role with affected pride, like a toddler tottering in her mother's Blahniks. Cook received her small, bony hand with barely disguised indifference – it was like being invited to examine a sprig of damp lettuce. He returned an exploratory squeeze-and-shake, suppressing an urge to just swat the thing aside. Then, the cheek-to-cheek pantomime with lips pouting at nothing – a duty-bound double when neither had wanted a single.

“Hello, Christina!” he beamed, slipping into character. “Good, thanks. Very busy. You?”

The question was palpably rhetorical – on message with the general exchange. Collins answered it, anyway.

“Tell me about it! Pretty crazy. Not easy being a man – well, woman – down. We've had Pacino in for
Scarface 2
. That's been… interesting.”

Cook laughed – at the absurdity of the film's existence, but Collins read it as empathy. Earlier that year, at a Miami junket, Collins had chaperoned Cook around an inert section of the
Scarface 2
set. The schedule – including a twenty-minute one-on-one interview with the lead – had been revised out of existence by Robin Leonard, Pacino's cartoonishly gay publicist. Cook had planned to doorstep Leonard at the final-day drinks party and charm him into offering top-up access closer to release. But Collins kept Cook muzzled with cocktails, squashing him into a corner with another journalist and over-sharing her thoughts on how she ‘hated' kids but had
so
much respect for women who chose to have them.

“My mother was told she couldn't have children,” she squawked over the DJ's
Scarface
-riffing playlist of retrofitted ‘80s synth-pop, “but we're a stubborn family. She proved everyone wrong and had me!”

“Pity…” muttered the other journalist, as Collins answered a cellphone call. Cook snorted in solidarity.

Later, when all chance of approaching Leonard had passed, Cook was clenching through a story about a ‘brilliant' travel writer Collins had met during her gap year, when he tilted back his head and released a gaping, slow-motion yawn. Collins, drunk, raised both eyebrows.

“Oh! Sorry. Am I
boring
you?”

“Yes,” said Cook, locking eye contact until Collins turned and elbowed her way to the bathroom.

*

Cook knew that Collins would have long since dismissed the moment as a pout – a swipe of petulance too feeble to unsettle her meticulous diorama. Even so, as he accepted her offer of a pre-sliced Pret A Manger baguette, he had the feeling he was being fattened up for market – or slaughter.

To Cook's irritation, the spread was already sparse and well rummaged. He was hungry, and had taken care to arrive with time to spare, knowing that a traditional last-minute dash carried the risk of hospitality turning into hospitalisation. Journalists, like pigeons, would never decline free food, and all those mobile breakfasts and deskbound lunches required a relaxed attitude to hygiene. He imagined a flurry of sneeze-streaked knuckles and earwax-tacky fingertips, prodding through the huddle of triangles, exhuming the fillings.

Collins' assistant handed Cook a copy of the film's production notes.

He sighed. As an episode of a TV sitcom was perfectly formed at around thirty minutes, a feature film, he felt, should last no longer than ninety. This made it possible to mentally split the action into two sections of roughly forty-five minutes each. After the first forty-five, if he wasn't engaged, then he could console himself with the knowledge that there was less than an hour to go. A two-hour film was tougher, but could be moulded to a similar principle – after the first sixty minutes, Cook would at least have an idea of how gruelling the second sixty would be, and he could brace for a manageable single-hour run-in, perhaps bolstered by one or two carefully timed text messages (screen brightness reduced to minimum).

But anything with a running time of over two hours was potentially unbearable. An hour could pass with little to no connection. What then? The same amount of time could be spent trying to stay sharp and locked in to a weightless narrative, as it floated up and away.

Collins saw Cook flinch at the running time. “I know,” she smirked, “but honestly, it doesn't feel that long. I didn't even notice!”

Cook was certain that Collins hadn't seen the film – and that she would know that he knew, but not care.

“Can I get you a drink?” she asked, already moving beyond the mock-personal pleasantries in favour of playing the emotionally removed attendant.

“Nah, I'll leave it. Bit hungover.”

Lately, Cook found that drinking at screenings lulled him into the limbo of half-sleep – too tired to stay awake, but too attuned to the embarrassment of falling asleep to fall asleep. He scooped a few rubbery crisps onto the paper plate next to his baguette, took out his water bottle and found a seat with a decent eyeline on the hallway TV.

*

More journalists arrived, checking in with Collins and slotting into the usual cliques. Cook imagined videogame-like labels hovering over their heads – ‘Fighty Freelancers', ‘Broadsheet Stalwarts', ‘Crumple-Suited Hacks', ‘Staffers', ‘Liggers', ‘Stringers', ‘Shouty Editor-At-Large And His Interesting Hat', ‘Origin Unknown But A Fixture At Every Screening'.

Cook was known and liked and he knew and liked many in attendance, but he made no effort to socialise. Glaring up at Sky Sports' typically hysterical build-up to a Champion's League dead-rubber group game, he moped at the thought of them all – himself included – as cogs in the studio promotional machine. The age of the ‘respected' critic was over. Now that anyone with a wifi signal could declare themselves an ‘expert', it was no longer enough to have put in the hours, to have seen more
quality
films than anyone else. No-one had time for depth any more – it was all about breadth. In a grand act of self-delusion, the
Widescreen
website offered the facility for browsers to add ‘Reader Reviews' – as opposed, presumably, to the ‘real' reviews of the staff.

Not that Cook couldn't hold his own. He enjoyed a fair fight on the merits of Bergman's undisputed masterpiece (naturally,
Persona
) and he could construct a sturdy position on Haneke's ongoing thesis of audience collusion, or why Meadows was more early Scorsese than late Cassavetes. He just found it exhausting that he had to stand alongside these people who thought that a vague memory of a couple of Kurosawa films qualified them for debate. The cultural shift had led Cook to insist even more stridently on how the view of an aficionado – such as himself – was indisputable in the face of just another opinion from a punter whose formative film was probably
Reservoir Dogs
– or, worse,
Jurassic Park
. He had developed a set of irritating but effective defences – most notably, the aggressive, empirical dismissal of any insight that contradicted his own. After a recent office argument with a junior
Widescreen
writer, he had sent her an email explaining how he didn't appreciate having his opinion ‘disrespected' in earshot of the rest of the office. The subtext was clear – while they were both entitled to their views, his was the one that carried most weight.

Cook came from a world where a few people had a lot of insight into a small number of things. Now, he found himself among a lot of people with a limited insight into a lot of things. Everyone was a Jack-of-all-genres, while Cook was the crumpled king of but a few – an arcane craftsman working from an obsolete blueprint.

So, here they all were – sprawling at the blunt end, privileged by an early, ad-free viewing of the film and charged with delivering a verdict that would be picked over by Collins' office for favourable phrases to be daubed across promotional posters in high-footfall streets and stations. This would hopefully compel shoppers and commuters to spend money on seeing the film, and a small amount of that money would, technically, contribute to their salaries. Cook recalled an old episode of
Wogan
, where a young Stephen Fry had described critics as ‘parasitical'. He had always thought this a typical tortured artist's view, but now he felt its sting more keenly. He was tired of passing passive-aggressive judgement on that which had already happened. He ached to make something happen himself.

*

Cook finished his food and took a seat on the front row. He was lucky to get it – most of the prime territory had been pre-marked by the usual clutter of jackets and backpacks. Just before Collins closed the doors, Neil Hooper, a writer from rival magazine
Movie,
hustled over and hurled himself into the seat next to Cook. He pulled a notebook and pen from the pockets of the coat shaped around the seat-back.

“How's it going, Mr Cook?”

“Good! Looking forward to this. Bit long, though.”

“Fuck! Really? Wish I'd sneaked my beer in now. Strange to see Christina out in the real world. Loving her earrings. On loan from Lady fucking Gaga!”

Cook squeezed out a laugh – stifled as he noticed that Hooper's pen was the type fitted with a mini-torch that would cast a self-important glow whenever he made a review note.

The screen curtains parted and Collins dimmed the lights. Cook kept his eyes closed and drifted down through the double-darkness into amniotic oblivion.