Ghostwritten Read online

  ‘No, it was kind of you. I’m sorry I’m too ignorant to accept your generous offer.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. No umbrage taken, I promise you . . . It was just a passing . . .’ Mr Fujimoto looked for the right word, blinking hard, and laughed when he couldn’t find it. ‘I don’t blame you in the least. You wouldn’t want to end up being like me, would you?’ He found that a lot funnier than I did.

  ‘It’s not my place to say this, but I wouldn’t mind ending up being like you at all. You’ve got a good job. Unforgettable bow ties. A great taste in the world’s finest jazz discs.’

  He stopped smiling for once and gazed out. ‘The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, it turns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits the ground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air, this way and that, for the briefest time . . . I think that only we Japanese can really understand that, don’t you?’

  A van roaring the message Vote for Shimizu, the only candidate who really has the guts to fight corruption screeched past like a drunken batmobile. Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays, Shimizu never betrays.

  Mr Fujimoto trailed his fingers through the air. ‘Why do things happen the way they do? Since the gas attack on the subway, watching those pictures on TV, watching the police investigate like a crack squad of blind tortoises, I’ve been trying to understand . . . Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply . . . seizing up?’

  I’m never sure whether Mr Fujimoto’s questions are questions. ‘Do you know?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it’s the only question, and that all other questions are tributaries that flow into it.’ He ran his hand through his thinning hair. ‘Might the answer be “love”?’

  I tried to think, but I kept seeing pictures. I imagined my father – that man who I had imagined was my father – looking out through the rear window of a car. I thought of butterfly knives, and a time once three or four years ago when I was walking out of McDonald’s and a businessman slammed down onto the pavement from a ninth floor window of the same building. He lay three metres away from where I stood. His mouth was gaping open in astonishment. A dark stain was trickling from it, over the pavement, between the bits of broken teeth and glasses.

  I thought about Tomoyo’s eyebrows, her nose, her jokes, her accent. Tomoyo on an aeroplane to Hong Kong. ‘I’d rather be too young to have that kind of wisdom.’

  Mr Fujimoto’s face turned into a smile that hid his eyes. ‘How wise of you.’ He ended up buying an old Johnny Hartman disc with a beautiful version of ‘I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart’.

  A mosquito blundered its way into my ear, suddenly there, loud as an electric blender. I pulled my head away and swatted the little bugger. Mosquito season. I was scraping its fuselage onto a bit of paper when Takeshi’s estranged wife marched in, pushing her sunglasses up into her bountiful hair. She was accompanied by a sharp-dressed man who I immediately sensed was a lawyer. They have a look about them. When Takeshi offered me this job I’d spent a whole evening over at their apartment in Chiyoda, but now apart from the curtest of nods Takeshi’s wife ignored me. The lawyer did not acknowledge my existence.

  ‘He,’ Takeshi’s wife pronounced the pronoun with the unique bitterness of the ex-wife, ‘only leases the property, but the stock is worth quite a lot. At least, he was always boasting that it is. The real money’s in the hair salons, though. This is just a hobby, really. One of his many hobbies.’

  The lawyer demurred.

  They turned to go. Takeshi’s wife looked at me as she was stepping through the door. ‘You can learn something from this, Satoru. Never make a big decision which will alter the shape of your life on the basis of a relationship! You may as well take out a mortgage on a house made of sponge cake. Remember that.’ And she was gone.

  I thought about what she had said as I put on a Chet Baker disc. A trumpet with nowhere urgent to be and all day to get there. And his voice, zennish murmurings in the soft void. My funny valentine, You don’t know what love is, I get along without you very well.

  The phone rang. A hysterical Takeshi. Drunk again.

  ‘Don’t let them in! Don’t let that mad cow in!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her! Her and her backstabbing-scumbag-bloodsucking lawyer, who should be representing me! They’re going after my testicles with a meat cleaver! Don’t let them look at the stock – don’t let them look at the accounts – it’s illegal – and hide the limited edition original Louis Armstrong. And the gold disc of ‘Maiden Voyage’. Stick it down your boxer shorts or something – and—’

  ‘Takeshi!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a bit late, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve already been. Just to look around for a few seconds, so the lawyer could see the place. They didn’t look at the accounts, they didn’t evaluate anything.’

  ‘Oh. Great. Just great. Great. What an utter, pigging, mess. That woman is Mad Cow Disease on two legs . . . And what legs they are . . .’ He hung up.

  The sunlight hummed and was soft. Shadows of twigs and branches swayed ever so slightly against the back wall. I thought of a time many years ago when two or three of Mama-san’s girls had taken me boating on a lake. One of my earliest memories.

  Your place does keep you sane, but can also keep you lonely.

  What was I going to do? I rolled up my shirt and looked on my forearm. There was a snake which Tomoyo had drawn on with a blue pen yesterday afternoon. I asked her, why a snake? She’d laughed at me like she was in on a joke that I wasn’t in on.

  Two thoughts walked into my place.

  The first thought said that we hadn’t slept together because sex would have closed an entrance behind us and opened an exit ahead of us.

  The second thought told me quite clearly what to do.

  Maybe Takeshi’s wife was right – maybe it is unsafe to base an important decision on your feelings for a person. Takeshi says the same thing often enough. Every bonk, he says, quadruples in price by the morning after. But who are Takeshi or his wife to lecture anybody? If not love, then what?

  I looked at the time. Three o’clock. She was how many thousand kilometres and one time zone away. I could leave some money to cover the cost of the call.

  ‘Good timing,’ Tomoyo answered, like I was calling from the cigarette machine around the corner. ‘I’m unpacking.’

  ‘Missing me?’

  ‘A tiny little bit, maybe.’

  ‘Liar! You don’t sound surprised to hear me.’

  I could hear the smile in her voice. ‘I’m not. When are you coming?’

  And so we talked about what flight I could catch, where we would go, how she would level things with her father, what I could do to avoid eating into my meagre savings too much. I felt as near to Paradise as I have ever been.

  Hong Kong

  The moon, the moon, in the after . . .

  There’s a mechanism in my alarm clock connected to a switch in my head that sends a message to my arm which extends itself and commands my thumb to punch the OFF button a moment before the thing beeps me awake. Every morning, without fail, no matter how much whisky I drank the night before or what time I finally got to bed. I’ve forgotten.

  Fuck. That was a horrible, horrible dream. I can’t remember all the details, and I don’t think I want to. The office was being raided. Huw Llewellyn had stormed in, with the Chinese police and my old scoutmaster whose Volvo I once shat on, they were all on rollerblades, and in my haste to erase the suddenly numerous files relating to Account 1390931 I keep mis-typing my password. K-A-T-Y-F-R-B, no, K-T-Y, no, K-A-T-Y-F-O-R-B-W – no, and I’d have to start over. They work their way up the building, floor by floor, coffee cups were spilling in their wake, the electric fan swings its eye this way again, and unpaid telephone bills flutter through the air, bats at dusk .
. . There’s a window open, and forty days and nights up the wind is vicious. The mouse on my computer sits there frozen, refusing to double-click. Was it any of this? Was what any of this? I’ve forgotten.

  How many times have I dreamed of computers? I’d keep a dream diary, but even that might be used to help nail me one day. I imagine reporters printing the screwier ones, and prison analysts discussing the porn ones in supermarket aisles. I wonder who had the first computer dream, where and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.

  Horn-rimmed Llewellyn. I’d only met him yesterday, and here the cunt was already gatecrashing my subconscious.

  Fuck. The minute hand clicks again. The second hand glides around, reeling in my life surely as a kite string when it’s time to go home. Fuck. I’m eating into my morning time safety margin. Another morning feeling as shattered as I felt the night before. My face feels cracked and ready to fall off in Easter-egg bits. And to cap it all I’m going down with another bout of ’flu, I swear it. Hong fucking Kong and I spend half my life walking around feeling like a steamed dumpling. Easter must be around now. Come on, Neal, you can make it as far as the shower. A hot shower will do the trick. Bollocks. Some speed would do the trick, but it’s all snorted away.

  I haul myself out of bed, stepping on a cold waffle and a plate. Fuck! She’s coming today, I think, she’ll clean it up. At least there’ll be some food waiting when I get back. Something Chinese, but at least I won’t have to face another waffle.

  Into the living room. There was a message for me on the answer machine. Luckily I’d remembered to switch on the Sleepeasy mode before I’d gone to bed, otherwise I’d have got even less sleep than I did. I swiped all the crap on the sofa onto the floor, jabbed the ‘Play’ button, and lay on the sofa . . .

  ‘Rise and shine, Neal! This is Avril. Thanks for disappearing last night. Remember you’ve got the meeting with Mr Wae’s lawyers at 9.30, and Theo wants a full briefing beforehand, so you’d better get here by 8.45 sharp. Get the coffee perkin’. See you soon.’

  Avril. Nice name, silly slag.

  Don’t get too comfortable there, Neal. One, two, three, up! I said ‘up!’ Into the kitchen, chuck the old filter into the overflowing bin, fuck, it’s gone everywhere, ho-hum sorry, maid, fresh filter, fresh coffee, more than the recommended dosage thank you very much, click ‘on’. Trickle your thickest juice there for your Uncle Neal my baby, that’s the way. I’ve forgotten. Open the fridge. Half a lemon, three bottles of gin, a pint of milk that expired over a month ago, dried kidney beans, and . . . waffles. God is still in heaven, I still have some waffles left. Waffle in toaster. Back to bedroom, Neal. There’ll be a white shirt hanging in the closet, where she hung them up every Sunday, every one the skin of a gwai lo, shagged and fleeced. I’ll be so fucking angry if she’s yanked them off the hangers again . . . She’ll do anything for attention.

  No, it’s okay. Hanging in a neat row. Boxer shorts, trousers, slung over the chair where you left them last night. The cheap, tubular, chair. I miss the Queen Anne one. It was the one thing in this apartment older than me. One more bit of Katy gone. Grab a vest, a shirt, your jacket, something’s missing – belt. Where’s my belt?

  ‘Okay. Very fucking funny. Where’s my belt?’

  The air conditioner droned from the living room.

  ‘I’m going into the living room right now. Unless I find my belt on the arm of the sofa, I am going to go fucking ballistic.’

  I went into the living room. I found my belt on the arm of the sofa.

  ‘Just as fucking well.’

  I remembered that I had got dressed without my shower. I stunk, and there was a meeting with what’s-his-face from the Taiwan Consortium this morning.

  ‘You plonker, Neal,’ and nobody disagreed. When you call yourself a plonker nobody ever disagrees with you. The shower would cost me the rest of my safety margin. Unless the morning routine – ‘routine’ – went like clockwork, I would miss that crucial ferry, and have to start fabulating some impressive excuses.

  I clicked off the air-conditioner. ‘It’s only fucking May. You want to freeze me to death? Who would you have to drive round the bend then, hey?’

  In the bathroom I found she’d been up to her usual tricks with the soap bottle. Katy always bought those pump-action containers of liquid soap, and so did the maid, which was all well and good until she discovered what fun it was to hammer the pump up and down. It was all over the walls, in the toilet bowl, on the floor of the shower cubicle, probably – yes – under where I’d just lain my shirt. Smeared trails everywhere like jerked-off semen.

  ‘Very fucking amusing. Are you going to clean up this mess?’

  Funny, she never touched any of the toiletries that Katy had left behind. It was only ever my stuff. Why didn’t I just chuck that woman-stuff out? I still had a box of tampons in the cabinet. Two boxes. Heavy flow, light flow. The maid never touched the tampons – I couldn’t understand why. Maybe it’s a Chinese thing, like the babies not wearing nappies, and just crapping through that bum-flap wherever and whenever. The maid suffered no qualms about working through the talcum powder, skin moisturisers and bath pearls, though. Why should she feel any qualms, if she didn’t about anything else?

  The shower deluged my head. Soak, shampoo, rub, rinse, conditioner, finger up a smearage of the pumped-out body soap, lather, rinse. I gave myself a full two minutes. Bathe now, pay later.

  Towelling myself dry, I suck in my gut, but it doesn’t make much difference these days. Neal, when did that thing start growing on you? Stress is supposed to make you lose weight. Doubtless it does, but a dietary credit of ninety per cent waffles, fruit pastilles, cigarettes and whisky must outweigh the stress debit. You look pregnant. ‘Ow!’ I flinch. If Katy had got pregnant . . . would anything be different? Would you have got out while you could, or would you have more to worry about? Is it possible to worry more than I do and not . . . not just die from it? I don’t know.

  Something was burning! Fuck, the iron!

  No, I hadn’t switched the iron on. That’s waffle-smoke. Fucking great. No fucking breakfast. Take your time, Neal, it’s a waffle past redemption. A Waffle Too Far. When is a waffle not a waffle? When it’s a piece of fucking charcoal, that’s when. I’d just have to heap the sugar into the coffee, I suppose. Liquid breakfast. Into the living room. A trickle of black was coming under the door, and I thought it was blood. Whose blood? Her blood? Nothing would surprise me in this apartment any more. Then I saw it was dark brown. Fucking great. I’d used two filters instead of one, and we know what happens when you do that, don’t we, Neal?

  Into the kitchen. Off with the coffee machine, off with the toaster, off with his head. Fancy a nice glass of water for breakfast, Neal? Why thank you, Neal. No clean glasses. Okay, a bowl of water. Splendid. ‘Bon appetit, Neal.’ I surveyed my culinary empire. It looked like Keith Moon had been a house-guest for a month. No it didn’t. Keith Moon would leave it cleaner than this. Sorry, Maidie. I’ll make it up to you later. ‘You’ll fucking well make sure I will, won’t you?’

  Put on your tie and get to work, Neal. Mustn’t keep the slitty-eyed moneymakers waiting any longer than you probably will. What a morning, I hadn’t even looked out of the window to see what the weather was doing. I looked on my pager: dry and cloudy. No umbrella, then. That Asian non-weather. I’ve forgotten. I already knew the view: bare hillside, dulled by mist, and the lethargic sea.

  I clicked off the air-conditioner. Again. I leave the alarm clock radio on for her, like my mum used to for the dog. From the bedroom I hear the business news in Cantonese. I don’t know if she likes it. Sometimes she switches it off, sometimes she doesn’t, sometimes she re-tunes it.

  ‘Try to behave,’ I said, squeezing into my laced-up shoes, grabbing my briefcase and picking up my clutch of keys.

  Katy always answered, ‘I hear and obey, oh hunter-gatherer.’

  She never answers.

  Going, going, gone.

  The ele
vator was on its way down. Thank God. Otherwise I’d miss the bus to the ferry. The doors opened. I squeezed into the all-male space, half-yellow, half-pinko-grey, but all the same Financial Zone Tribe. We couldn’t afford to live here if we weren’t. The space smelt of suits, aftershave, leather and hair-mousse, and something lingering. Maybe badly ducted testosterone. Nobody said a word. Nobody breathed. I turned around, so that my dick wasn’t facing another moneymaker’s dick, and saw the door to my apartment: 144.

  ‘Not good,’ Mrs Feng had said. ‘“Four” in Chinese means “Death”.’

  ‘You can’t spend all of your life avoiding Four,’ Katy had protested.

  ‘True,’ said Mrs Feng, closing her sad eyes. ‘But there is another problem.’

  ‘Which is?’ said Katy, giving me a half-smile.

  ‘The elevator,’ said Mrs Feng, opening her sharp eyes.

  ‘We’re on the fourteenth floor,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me we can’t use the elevator.’

  ‘But it’s directly opposite your own door!’

  ‘So?’ Katy was no longer smiling.

  ‘The elevator doors are jaws! They eat up good luck. In this place you shall have none.’

  I looked up, and saw myself looking down through smoked glass, from amongst the tops of my unmoving heads. Like I was spirit-walking.

  ‘You’re also on Lantau Island,’ she had added as an afterthought.

  Ping, went the bell.

  ‘What’s wrong with Lantau Island? It’s the one place in Hong Kong where you can pretend the world was once beautiful.’

  ‘We don’t like the currents. Too much north, too much east.’

  Ping, went the bell, ping, ping, ping. First floor. Ground floor. Whatever. The bus was waiting. We all ran across the road and boarded it, the James Bond music blaring in my head. I thought of little boys boarding a pretend-troop transporter in a game of war.

  Standing room only on the bus, but I don’t mind. It reminds me of being crushed on the Dear Old Circle Line back in Dear Old Blighty. The cricket season will be starting now. That’s why I like this bus. From the moment I get on it until the moment I enter the office, everything is out of my hands. I don’t have to decide anything. I can zombify.