Ghostwritten Read online

  ‘What seems to be the problem with it?’

  ‘Jeez, now you’re really sounding like Dr Marco. It just keeps overflowing. The drippy nozzle thing totally refuses to drip.’

  The first time I saw Roy’s and Alfred’s kitchen, it looked like the set of an earthquake movie. It still does, but now I’m used to it. I found the percolator under a large head made of chickenwire. ‘We thought it would give a dead machine a little character,’ explained Roy. ‘It also makes it impossible to lose the percolator. Volk constructed it one spring weekend for Alfred.’

  Volk was a truly beautiful Serbian teenager with a dubious-sounding visa who sometimes lived at Alfred’s when he had nowhere else to go but Serbia. He always wore leather trousers, and Alfred called him ‘our young wolf ’. I didn’t ask any more questions.

  ‘Well, I think the main problem is that you’ve put tea leaves into the filter instead of coffee.’

  ‘Oh, you jest! Lemme see. Oh, Jeez, you’re right . . . Now, where’s the coffee? Do you know where the coffee is, Marco?’

  ‘Last week it was in the tennis-ball shooter.’

  ‘No, Volk moved it from there . . . Let me see . . .’ Roy surveyed the kitchen like God looking down on a mess of a world it was too late to uncreate. ‘Bread basket! Say, go on up to Alfred in his study whydon’tcha? I left him reading last week’s instalment of his life. We both thought it was marvellous. I’ll bring up the coffee when it’s done dripping.’

  There’s a sad story about Roy. He used to have his compositions published. He still finds old copies of them, occasionally, leafing through very specialist shops, and he shows them to me with glee. A few times they were performed and recorded for the radio. The American Public Radio Network broadcast his First Symphony, and Lyndon Johnson wrote Roy a letter to say how much he and his wife had enjoyed it. That success attracted negative criticism, too, though, and some bitchiness from the music world filtered down to Roy. It upset him so much that he’s never published anything since. He just composes, wodge after wodge of manuscript, with nobody to hear it but himself and Alfred, and occasionally a young wolf from Serbia, and me. He’s on his thirteenth symphony.

  He should hear some of the things that people have said about The Music of Chance. Enough to make your bile freeze up. The Evening News reviewer wrote that he thought the world would be improved if we all fell into the giant food blender that our music resembled. I was chuffed pink.

  As I reached the top floor I found that my mind was chewing over a conversation I had the first time I met Poppy. Everyone else at the party was unconscious, and a drizzly morning was watering down the night.

  ‘Do you ever think of the effect you have on your conquests?’

  ‘I don’t see where you’re coming from, Poppy.’

  ‘I’m not coming from anywhere. But I suddenly noticed that you love talking about cause. You never talk about effect.’

  I knocked on the door of Alfred’s study, and entered. A room inhabited by photographs of friends, none of them new. Alfred was staring out of the window the way old men do. Curtains of rain were blowing pell-mell off Hampstead Heath.

  ‘Winter will soon be with us, our gustviter friend.’

  ‘Afternoon, Alfred.’

  ‘Another winter. We must hurry. We are still on chapter, chapter . . .’

  ‘Chapter six, Alfred.’

  ‘And how is your family?’

  Is he confusing me with someone else? ‘They’re fine, last time I looked.’

  ‘We are only on chapter six, you see. We must hurry. My body is degenerating quickly. Last week’s work was satisfactory. That is good. You are a writer, my young friend. We can make more progress today. I indicated with a green pen the parts I wish you to revise. Now, let us begin. You have your notebook with you?’

  I waved it. Alfred indicated the seat nearest him. ‘Before you sit down, please put the recording of Vaughan Williams’s Third Symphony onto the gramophone player. It is filed under “V”. The Pastoral.’

  I love Alfred’s record collection. Real, wide, black, plastic records. Thick. My hands love handling them, it’s like meeting an old friend. CDs were hoisted onto us with scandalous aplomb and nobody rumbled their game until it was too late. Like instant coffee compared to the real stuff. I didn’t know this Williams’s music, but it had a good start. I’d like to mix in a distorted bass, and maybe a snare drum.

  ‘Then let us begin, shall we?’

  ‘Whenever you’re ready, Alfred.’

  I start the cassette rolling, and open my notebook at a new page. Everything on it is still perfect.

  ‘It is 1946. I am living in Berlin, working for British Intelligence. Now there’s an oxymoron for you. We are on the trail of Mausling, the rocket scientist wanted by the Americans for his—’

  ‘I think we’re back in London, now, Alfred.’

  ‘Ah, yes . . . We’ve handed Mausling over . . . 1946 . . .

  ‘Then I’m back at the civil service. Ah, yes, 1947. My first quiet year for a decade. There were rumblings from India, and Egypt. Bad rumours from Eastern Europe. People finding pits full of bodies in Armenia, Soviets and Nuremberg Nazis blaming each other. Churchill and Stalin had done dividing up Europe on a napkin, and the consequences of their levity were becoming horribly apparent. You can imagine, I was a bit of an embarrassment in Whitehall. A Hungarian-Jew back from Berlin amongst the pencil sharpeners freshly down from Oxford. The crown owed me, they knew, but they no longer really wanted me. So, I was given an office job on Great Portland Street working with a division cracking down on black marketeers. I never got to see any action, though. I was just doing what computers and young ladies in shoulder pads do nowadays. Rationing was still in place, you see, but it was beginning to crumble round the edges. The wartime spirit was seeping away through the bomb craters, and people were reverting to their usual small-minded selves. Roy was still tangled up with his father and lawyers in Toronto. Imagine one of the more tedious Graham Greene novels, remove the good bits towards the end, and just have it going on and on and on for hundreds of pages. The only enjoyable part was the cricket, which I followed with the passion of an émigré. That, and Sundays at Speaker’s Corner, where I could discuss Nietzsche and Kant and Goethe and Stalin in whichever language I wanted to, and get a decent game of chess if the weather was good. London was full of Alfreds in 1947.’

  I finished the last part and flexed my fingers. I followed Alfred’s gaze, to the dripping camphor tree across the road from the study. The corner of Hampstead Heath, I could see a pond in a hollow beyond. When Alfred was thinking he looked at it, past his signed photo of Bertrand Russell.

  ‘I’ve never seen a ghost, Marco. I don’t believe in an afterlife. At best, I consider the idea of God to be a childish prank, and at worst a sick joke, probably pulled by the devil, and oh yes you can have one without the other. I know you offer allegiance to Buddha and your woolly Hesse, but I shall remain a devout atheist until the end. Yet one extraordinary thing occurred one summer evening in 1947. I want you to include it in my autobiography. When you write it, don’t write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don’t try to give an explanation. Just say that I don’t know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind. The ghost comes in the first paragraph.’

  I’m really interested now. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I’d finished work. I’d just had dinner with Prof Baker at a restaurant in South Ken. I was still sitting there gazing at the busy street. A waterfall mesmerises in the same way, don’t you think? Anyway. That was when I saw myself.’

  Alfred’s eyes were all pupil, monitoring reactions and effects.

  ‘You saw yourself?’

  Alfred nodded. ‘I saw myself. Not a reflection, not a lookalike, not a twin brother, not a spiritual awakening, not a waxwork. This is no cheap riddle. I saw myself, Alfred Kopf, large as life.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Pelting past the window! I
’d have missed him, if a sudden gust of wind hadn’t blown his hat off. There was no other hat like it in the whole of London. He bent down to pick it up, just as I would have done. That hat belonged to my father, it was one of the few things he gave me before the Nazis took him off to their melting pots. He bent down, and looked up, like he was searching for someone. He put his hat on. Then he ran off again, but I had seen his face, and I’d recognised me.’

  Ghostwriters, like psychiatrists, have to know when to shut up.

  ‘I hope for your sake, Marco, that you never see yourself. It doesn’t feature in the ordinary repertoire of a sane human’s experience. It’s not unique, however. I’ve met three others who have experienced the same phenomenon. Imagine which emotion possesses you first.’

  I tried to. ‘Disbelief ?’

  ‘Wrong. We all felt the most indignant outrage. We wanted to jump up and chase after the interloper and stamp him into the ground. Which is what I did. I grabbed my father’s hat – my father’s hat – and chased after him. Down Brompton Road towards Knightsbridge. I was a very fit young man. I could see him – my beige raincoat flapping behind him. It was raining slightly. The pavement was skiddy with drizzle. Why was he running? Oh, he knew that I was after him all right. It was a different London, of omnibuses, policemen on horses and women in headscarves. You could walk across the road without being knocked off a windscreen clean over Hades. My shadow was still there in front of me, running at the same pace as me. At Hyde Park Corner my lungs were clapping like bellows, so I had to slow down to a walking pace. And so did my shadow, as though he were baiting me. We walked down Grosvenor Place, down the long wall that closets off the gardens behind Buckingham Palace from the plebians. That takes you to Victoria. It was just a little place in those days. Then he turned up past the Royal Mews, along Birdcage Walk. The south edge of St James’s Park. By now my anger was beginning to dissipate. It all had the air of a shaggy-dog story. A Poe reject. I’d got a bit of breath back, so I tried suddenly sprinting at him. He was off again! Down to Westminster: when I had to slow down, so did my shadow. We walked along the Embankment. Commuters were streaming over the bridge. Sometimes I thought I’d lost him, but then I’d see the hat again, bobbing up and down about fifty yards ahead. My haircut, the back of my head. I tried to work out a rational explanation. An actor? Some temporal mirage? Insanity? Past Temple. We were heading east. I was getting a bit worried, it was a rough area in those days. I remember there was one of those Oriental sunsets of soupy jade and marmalade that London can pull out of the hat. Past Mansion House, down Cannon Street, and down to The Tower. Then I saw my shadow getting into a taxi! So I raced to the next one in the rank, and jumped in. “Look,” I said, “I know this sounds ridiculous, but please follow that taxi.” Maybe taxi drivers get asked that a lot, because the driver just said, “Right you are, squire.” Up to Aldgate. Through cobbled backstreets to Liverpool Street. Moorgate. Where the Barbican is now. Thanks to the Blitz, the place was one big building site back then. As was Farringdon, in fact Farringdon still is. When we were slowed up by the traffic, I considered hopping out of the taxi and running to my shadow’s, but every time I resolved to do so the lane of cars started moving again. Up to King’s Cross, stopping and starting, stopping and starting. Down to Euston Square, and on to Great Portland Street. I could still see his hat in the back of the taxi. Did my shadow have nothing better to do with his time? Didn’t I? After Baker Street the leafier parts began again, past Edgware Road and Paddington. Past Bayswater. I saw him get out of the taxi at Notting Hill Gate and stride off across Kensington Gardens. I paid the taxi driver, and sprang out after him. I recall the air after the rain, sweet and full of evening. “Oy!” I yelled, and some genteel ladies walking dogs harrumphed. “Alfred Kopf !” I yelled, and a man dropped out of a tree with a turfy thump. My shadow didn’t even turn round. Why was he running? Literary precedents suggested that at least we should be able to have a stimulating conversation about the nature of good and evil. Across Kensington Road, down past the museums, past this restaurant where I’d arranged to meet Prof Baker later that evening. A sudden gust of wind blew my hat off. I bent down to pick it up. And when I looked up, I saw my shadow disappearing.’

  I had forgotten I was still here. ‘Just into thin air?’

  ‘No! Onto a Number 36 bus. Off he went.’

  ‘But I thought that you’d already met Prof—’

  Something flew into the window and thwacked. It fell before I saw what it was. A pigeon? Roy came running in trembling, with tears in his eyes. ‘Oh, Jeez, Alfred. I just had a phone call from Morris.’

  Was I in a tragedy or a farce?

  ‘Calm down, Roy, Calm down. I’ve just been telling Marco about my double.’ Alfred lit his pipe. ‘Now, is this Morris Major or Morris Minor?’

  ‘Morris Major, from Cambridge. Jerome’s been killed!’

  Alfred’s fingers forgot his pipe. His voice fell to a croak. ‘Jerome? But he’d been granted immunity.’

  ‘Morris says the ministry are blaming Petersburg gangsters. They said Jerome had got mixed up in some sort of art theft.’

  ‘Impossible!’ Alfred banged on the table hard enough to stave elderly fingers. ‘It’s a cover-up. They’re picking us off, one by one. They never know when to stop, those ministries. Damn those vermin to hellfire!’ Alfred unleashed what I’m guessing was the direst oath in the Hungarian canon. The curse of Nosferatu.

  I looked at Roy. ‘Bad news?’

  Roy looked back, not needing to nod. ‘And there’s coffee all over the kitchen floor. I think I put two filters in.’

  A long silence unspun. Alfred pulled out a handkerchief and a coin was flung out. It went round and around in ever-decreasing circles on the wooden floor, before vanishing under a chest where it would probably stay for years, or until Volk next visited.

  ‘Marco,’ Alfred said, his eyes focusing on the far distance, ‘thank you for coming. But I think I’d like you to go now.’ There was a tremor in his voice. ‘We shall continue next week.’

  As I walked from Alfred’s the clouds slid away towards Essex and a warm afternoon opened up, golden and clear. Whatever worries Alfred and Roy had were their business. Me, I nibbled the truffley bits off my strawberry ice cream. Midges hung over the puddles in columns, and the trees dripped dry. They’d be winter trees again soon. An ice cream van was playing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ a few streets away. A couple of kids sat on walls trying to master their yo-yos. Good to see kids still playing with yo-yos. Fi, my natural mother, calls this time of year ‘Saint Luke’s Summer’. Isn’t that beautiful? I felt good. I had a bit of money from Roy, slipped to me wrapped around this strawberry ice. He also insisted that I took a hideous green leather jacket with me. I put up a fight, but he had already put it on me somehow and while he was zipping it up, he remembered to tell me that Tim Cavendish had been on the phone earlier and had asked me to drop in that afternoon if I could. He whispered an apology for not giving me any more money, but he’d had to take someone to the House of Lords that week for running off to Zimbabwe with a suitcase of his money, and the legal fees had come to £92,000. ‘It was a lot, Marco,’ whispered Roy, ‘but I had to do it for the principle.’ The someone was still in Zimbabwe, and so was the suitcase.

  Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

  While we were having sex, when the condom broke, Poppy was coming, and she gasped out, ‘Marco, this is better than sex.’ I just remembered.

  I headed down to Primrose Hill. I’ll walk to Tim Cavendish’s via Regent’s Park and Oxford Street. I love walking past London Zoo, and peering in. My childhood’s in there. My foster parents used to take me on my birthday. Today even the sound of the aviary makes me taste clammy fish-paste sandwiches.

  I’m pretty sure that being a single kid single mother is enough for Poppy. But I’ve known women who’ve believed one thing about abortion, only
for those beliefs to swing around when the crunch came. If Poppy’s pregnant, what will I want? Would I want? For her to accept me as a father, I’d have to swear monogamy, and mean it. Many of my friends have got married and done the baby thing, and I can see how completely it changes your life. Taking plunges is no fun when the well-being of two other people depends on how you land. Weird. When I was younger, I thought that kids were an inevitable part of getting old. I thought you’d wake up one morning and there they’d be, nappies bulging. But no, you actually have to make up your mind to do them, like making up your mind to buy a house, cut a CD or stage a coup d’etat. What if I never make my mind up? What if ?

  Ah, worry, worry, worry.

  The top of the hill. Breathe in, look at that view, and breathe out! Quite a picture, isn’t it! Old Man London, out for the day . . . Italians give their cities sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay. I know its overlapping towns like I know my own body. The red brick parts around Chelsea and Pimlico, Battersea Power Station like an upturned coffee table . . . The grimy estates down Vauxhall way. Green Park. I map the city by trigonometrical shag points. Highbury is already Katy Forbes. Putney is Poppy, and India of course, not that I shag India, she’s only five. Camden is Baggins the Tarantula. I try to pinpoint the places in Alfred’s nutty story . . . How am I supposed to put a story like that into a serious autobiography? I’m going to have to do something pretty drastic, or I’ll end up ghostwriting ‘Diary of a Madman’.

  It’s too beautiful a day to worry about that. The light is too golden, the shadows too soft.

  There’s a lot of things in London that weren’t here when Alfred went round his big loop chasing Alfred. All those aeroplanes flying into Heathrow and Gatwick. The Thames Barrier. The Millennium Dome. Centrepoint, that sixties pedestal ashtray, bloody hell I wish someone would come along and bomb that. Canada Tower over in Docklands, gleaming in the sunlight now, and I think of that art deco mirror in the corner of Shelley’s room. Shelley of Shepherd’s Bush. She moved in with, whatsisname, ah, Jesus, what was his name? The British Oxygen man. Her flatmate Natalie had become a born-again Christian and moved in with Jesus. Shelley, Natalie and I had formed a Holy Trinity one rainy afternoon under Shelley’s duvet. At the time I had filed Natalie under ‘Dangerously Vulnerable’.