Ghostwritten Read online

  Until, that is, some fucker’s cordless phone drills through my ear-drum. That is so annoying! Answer it. Answer it! Deaf-o, answer your fucking telephone! What are you all looking at me like that for?

  Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realise they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.

  I answer it, allowing the electrons of irrelevance to finish their journey along wires, into space and back into my ear.

  ‘Yeah? Brose speaking.’

  So, now every last jackass on this bus knows my name is Brose.

  ‘Neal, this is Avril.’

  ‘Avril.’ Who else? She had probably slept over in the office. She was still hard at work on the Taiwan Portfolio when I left last night stroke this morning stroke whenever it was. Jardine-Pearl had a posse of lawyers working on this one. Cavendish had me, Avril and Ming, who couldn’t manage the lease on our – I mean my – apartment without fucking it up and getting me right royally rogered on the deposit. The Chinese are bad enough, estate agents are even worse, but Chinese Estate Agents are Satan’s Secret Servicemen. They should be lawyers, but they probably make more cash doing what they do. Fuck, the Taiwan Portfolio! On top of everything else I had to worry about, I had this maze of details, small print, traps. It was probably good Avril was on this case, but fuck, she got on my tits sometimes. London had sent her in January, and she was so piously keen. Me, three years ago.

  ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘No.’

  Avril probably wanted me to apologise for leaving early last night. This morning. One a.m. Early, right. She could fucking forget it.

  ‘I’m phoning about the Mickey Kwan File.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I can’t find it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So where is it? You had it last night. Before you went home.’

  Fuck you, Avril. ‘I had it yesterday evening. Six hours before I went home.’

  ‘It’s not on your desk now. And it’s nowhere in Guilan’s office. So it must be in your office somewhere, because I haven’t touched it since yesterday afternoon. Might you – might it have been misfiled? Could it have been put under something, again? In a drawer somewhere?’

  ‘I am on a bus on Lantau Island, Avril. I can’t quite see my office from here.’

  I thought I heard somebody sniggering behind the wall of suits, ties, and faces pretending not to listen. Sniggering like a loooooooooony. Maybe it was just a sneeze.

  Avril was a walking experiment in humourlessness. I should nickname her ‘Spock’. ‘I don’t understand you sometimes. Yes, I know you can’t see your office from there, Neal. I know that very well. But in case you’ve forgotten – again – Horace Cheung and Theo want a progress report on the Wae Folio in 52 – no, 51 – minutes. You are not here, because you are still on a bus on Lantau Island. You will not get here for another 38 minutes, 41 minutes if you haven’t had breakfast and have to stop for doughnuts. Mr Cheung is always 10 minutes early. This means I have to complete said progress report by the time you waltz in through that door. As I need the Mickey Kwan File to do this, I need it now.’

  I sighed, and tried to think of a withering response, but I was all out of wither. I must be going down with this ’flu that’s doing the rounds. ‘What you say is all true, Avril. But I honestly, really, truly, madly, deeply don’t know where the file has got to.’

  The bus lurched to and fro. I caught a glimpse of tennis courts, the international school, the curve of a bay and a fishing junk in the tepid Asian white.

  ‘You have a copy on hard disc, don’t you?’

  I was suddenly very awake. ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘I’ll download the file off your hard disc, and whip off a copy on my printer. It’s only about twenty pages, yeah? So just tell me your password.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Avril.’

  A pause while Avril thought. ‘I’m afraid you can, Neal.’

  I remembered watching a rabbit being skinned, where, or when I couldn’t remember. The knife seemed to unzip it. One moment a dozing Mr Bunny, the next a long rip of blood, from buck teeth to rabbity penis.

  ‘But—’

  ‘If you’ve downloaded any Swedish dominatrix hard porn pix from the internet, I promise your secret is safe with me.’

  No matter how quietly I tried to speak, ten people would hear me. ‘I can’t tell you my password like this. It’s a security breach.’

  ‘Neal, you probably haven’t noticed, in fact I know you haven’t, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone home last night, but we are on the verge of losing this account. The Dae Folio is worth $82 million. Dutch Barings and Citibank are both singing under their balcony every night, and they sing more sweetly than we do. If we don’t have the Mickey Kwan gains to offset the upsets in Bangkok and Tokyo, we’re history. And D.C. is going to know exactly why – I’m not going to take the rap for this. You might be happy spending the rest of your life managing a McDonald’s in Birmingham, but I want a little more out of life. Now tell me your password! You can change it when you get to work. Your “security breach” is going to last 49 minutes. Come on! If you can’t trust me, who can you trust?’

  Absolutely Fucking Nobody, that’s who I can trust. I pulled my jacket over my head and held the phone in my armpit. Quasimodo Brose. ‘K-A-T-Y-F-O-R-B-E-S.’ Don’t tell her not to snoop. That would make her snoop. ‘There. Happy?’

  To her credit, Avril didn’t take the piss. I’d have been happier if she had. Have I reached the stage where people feel sorry for me?

  ‘Got it. See you in Theo’s office. I won’t let anyone else touch your PC.’

  The bus pulled into Discovery Bay harbour. The turbo ferry was waiting, as always. Nobody needs to hurry – the first bell is ringing now. The second bell will ring in 1 minute. The third in 2 minutes. The boat wouldn’t leave for 3 minutes, and bus to boat took less than 60 seconds, if you have your pass ready, which we all do. That’s a wide enough safety margin to drive a Toyota Landcruiser up. The bus doors hissed open, and the troops filed off, the bus rocking as they jumped, one by one.

  Was she here, amongst us? Holding my hand? Why had I always assumed she stayed in the apartment all day? It’s more logical she roams around the place. She likes attention.

  Leave it, Neal. That’s your apartment. Your ‘home’ life. You go there because you have nowhere else to live. Don’t bring her to Hong Kong Island. She probably can’t cross water. Don’t the Chinese say something like that? They can’t jump – that’s why there are steps into the holy places – and they can’t cross water. No?

  Twenty paces to the ticket barrier. Well, I think the morning’s crisis is lowering its revolver. The really incriminating stuff is locked lower down in the bowels of my hard disc, and Avril simply doesn’t have the time to go prodding around at random. She doesn’t have the motive. And she is too stupid. As the comings and goings of Account 1390931 became ever more complex, my security arrangements became ever more intricate, my lies more incredible as one near miss lurched to another. The truth is that Denholme Cavendish’s yesmen don’t want to know the truth that even people handicapped by an Etonian education must dimly be able to smell by now. Don’t worry, Neal. Avril will be printing off her precious Mickey Kwan File. Guilan will be making a pot of coffee so thick you could fill cracks in the road with it. I’ll fob Theo off with some bollocks about over-zealous auditors, and, like most superiors he’ll be too proud to ask me the simplest questions. Theo will fob the Cavendish Compliancy Body off with some bollocks about capital tied up in double-hedging Japanese banks. They’ll fob Jim Hersch off with some bollocks about the house being told in no uncertain terms that it needs to put itself in order during the next financial quarter, and he’ll fob Llewellyn’s master off by swearing that he is totally and completely confident that Cavendish Holdings is absolutely clean in regard to these rumours smeared by – and here I have to be frank with you old boy �
�� by the Chinese, and we don’t need degrees in Police Detection to know who’s pulling the strings of the Hong Kong People’s Police these days, do we, Comrade, eh? Eh? And hey presto, we’ll all get our six-figure bonuses, five figures of which have already been spent and the rest of which will vanish into cars, property and the entertainment sector during the next eighteen months. You’ve done it again, Neal. Back from the brink. Nine lives? Nine hundred and ninety-fucking-nine more like.

  Everything is in order, that’s the second bell, Neal. That gives you 60 seconds.

  ‘Neal? Why aren’t you getting on this ferry?’

  That feeling when vomiting is a certainty, and you wonder what you’ve eaten.

  I don’t have enough inside me to vomit,

  What’s the matter? Is she making me stay? Tugging my arm?

  No. It’s nothing to do with her. I know when she’s here, and she’s not here now. And she can’t make me do anything. I choose. I’m the master. That’s one of the rules.

  There was something more remarkable than her altogether.

  Last night, Avril and I were preparing a briefing for Mr Wae the shipping magnate. The computer was fucking up my eyes, I hadn’t eaten since a BLT at lunch, I’d gone through hunger and numbness several times as my stomach downsized. Around midnight I started feeling dizzy. I came down to this coffee bar just across the street from Cavendish Tower, and ordered the biggest fuckoff triple shitburger they did, two of them, and put ten sugar cubes into my coffee. I drank it through my tongue, and my blood sang like the Archangel Gabriel as the sugar flooded in. That can’t be natural, Neal. Fuck Natural.

  I watched the cars, people, and stories trundle up and down the street. In the distance a giant bicycle pump was cranking itself up and hissing itself down. I watched the neon signs intone their messages, over and over. There was a song playing, that Lionel Richie hit from years ago, about the blind girl. A real weepie. I’d lost my virginity to that song under a mountain of coats at a friend’s party in Telford. Fuck knows what I was doing in Telford. Fuck knows what anybody is doing in Telford.

  This kid and his girl came in. He ordered a burger and cola. She had a vanilla shake. He picked up the tray, looked around for a seat which wasn’t there, and caught me watching him. He came over, and in nervous English asked me if they could share my table. It wasn’t Chinese English. Chinks would normally die rather than sit with one of us. Either that or they’ll just pile in without acknowledging that you’re even there. So I nodded, tapping the ash from my cigarette. He thanked me gravely, in English. ‘Sankyou very mochi,’ he said.

  She was Chinese, I could tell that, but they spoke in Japanese. He had a saxophone case, and a small backpack with airline tags still attached. They could barely have been out of high school. He needed a good long sleep. They didn’t hug or cloy over each other like a lot of Chinese kids do these days. They just held hands over the table. Of course, I didn’t understand a word, but I guessed they were discussing possibilities. They were so happy. Sex twitched in the air between them, which made me think that they hadn’t done it yet. None of that lazy proprietorship which settles in after the first few times.

  Right at that moment, if Mephistopheles had genied his way from the greasy ketchup bottle and said, ‘Neal, if I let you be that kid, would you pledge your soul to the Lord of Hell for all eternity?’ I’d have answered, ‘Like a fucking shot I will.’ Nipkid or no Nipkid.

  I looked at my Rolex: a quarter past midnight. What life is this?

  I was wrong about the sky. It’s not dreary white . . . when you look you see ivory. You can see a glow, there, above the mountain where the sun polishes it pearly and wafer thin.

  And the sea isn’t blank, there are islands out there, right at the edge.

  Soft brush strokes on a fresh scroll hanging in Mrs Feng’s room, four floors above us.

  Ahem. May I remind you, Neal, that you have credit card bills that would make Bill Gates twitch? That your divorce settlement will gouge out most of the money you thought was yours? That lawyers with fingers in the kinds of pies yours are in simply do not miss appointments with Mr Wae. These Taiwanese shipping magnates eat breakfast with politicians powerful enough to make skyscrapers appear and disappear.

  Ten seconds before the third bell and the barriers come down! Worry about your existentialist dilemmas during your lunch hour – right, when did I last have a lunch hour? – whenever – but get on that fucking boat right now! I am not telling you again.

  A man gallops down the walkway from the shops. Andy Somebody, I know his face slightly from my Lantau polo club period. Not that you can find a single fucking pony on the whole fucking island. His Ralph Lauren tie is flapping like a live snake, his shoelaces are undone, my, Andy Somebody needs to be careful. He might fall and break his crown, and ill Jill’ll hill crumbling after.

  ‘Stop that boat! Wait!’ My, my, Andy Somebody is Lawrence of Olivier.

  Is this how she observes me? This indifference, laced with mockery?

  The Chinese barrier guard, most likely the bus driver’s brother’s half-twin stepcousin-in-law flicks his switch and the turnstiles close. Andy Somebody’s flight through the air ends gripping the bars, and he represses the howl of a demented prisoner. ‘Please!’

  The Chinese barrier guard makes the faintest gesture with his head at the ‘Boat Departures’ board.

  ‘Let me through!’

  Barrier Guard swishes his head, and he goes back to his coffee booth.

  Andy Somebody whinnies, fumbles for his mobile phone, and manages to drop it. He walks away speaking into it to Larry, inventing excuses, and pretending to laugh.

  The turbo ferry pulls away from the jetty, and buzzes away into the distance.

  I don’t understand you sometimes.

  Katy insisted that I didn’t see her off at the airport. Her flight was in the afternoon, it was a manic Friday. My desk at work had become a canyon floor between two unstable formations of contracts. And so the day she left we had taken the bus before my usual one and drank a cup of coffee at the jetty café. That café, there. In the window seat Andy Somebody has pulled out his laptop computer and is hammering the keyboard as though he’s trying to avert a thermonuclear war. Sitting hunched like that is going to knacker his back. Nope, he doesn’t know it, but Andy’s sitting at the very table where Katy and I staged our Grand Farewell.

  It was not a Noël Coward Grand Farewell. Neal Brose and Katy Forbes brought you a much unlovelier performance. Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us. I suppose we talked about airport layouts, watering plants, what Katy was looking forward to once she got back to London. It was like we’d met the night before, fucked in a Kowloon hotel, and had just woken up. In fact, we hadn’t had sex for five months, not since finding out.

  Fuck, it was horrible, horrible. She was leaving me.

  It is what we didn’t say that I remember best. We didn’t mention Mrs Feng, or her. We didn’t mention whose ‘fault’ – fuck, haven’t thousands of years of infertility come up with a better word than ‘fault’ – it was. Katy was always capable of mercy. We had never discussed therapy, clinics, adoption, procedures, that umbrella of ‘ways around it’, because neither of us had the will, and we didn’t now. I guess. If nature couldn’t be fucked to knit us together, we sure as hell weren’t going to be. We didn’t mention the word ‘divorce’, because it was as real and near as that mountain there. We didn’t mention the word ‘love’. That hurt way too much. I was waiting for her to say it first. Maybe she was waiting for me. Or maybe it was that we had left those days and nights for the starry-eyed beepy muppets born seven or eight years after us. Those kids in the coffee bar last night. They were who love was for. Not us old fucks over thirty. Forget it.

  The bell for the ferry had rung. On this spot, right here, this pinkish paving slab I’m standing on right now. I know it w
ell because I walk around it every day. Here was where I thought I should embrace her and maybe kiss her goodbye.

  ‘You’d better get on your ferry,’ she said.

  Okay, if that was how she wanted it.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘Nice being married to you.’

  I instantly regretted those words, and I still do. It sounded like a parting shot. She turned and walked away, and I sometimes wonder, had I run back to her, could we have found ourselves pinballed into an altogether different universe, or would I have just got my nose broken? I never found out. I obeyed the ferry bell. Ashamed, I didn’t look for her on the shore as the ferry pulled away, so I don’t know if she waved. Knowing Katy, I doubted it. It took me about 45 seconds to forget her, anyway. On page 5 of South China Business News, ten lines of newsprint mugged my attention. A new Sino-American-British investigative body, the Capital Transfer Inspectorate, had just raided the offices of a trading company called Silk Road Group. It was not well known to the general public, but it was very well known to me. I, personally, as per instructions received, had ordered the transfer of $115 million, the Friday before, from Account 1390931, to the Silk Road Group.

  Oh . . . fuck.

  There was nobody but me.

  The road from the jetty and the harbour village led to the Polo Club. Flags hanging limp today. After the Polo Club the road became a track. The track led to the beach. At the beach the track turned into a path, winding along the shore. I’d never taken the path any further, so I had no idea where it might lead. A fisherman looked up, his gnarled fingers knotting a net, and our eyes met for a moment. I forget, outside my Village of the Short Lease Damned, people actually live out their whole lives on Lantau Island.

  Dad used to take me fishing at weekends. A gloomy reservoir, lost in Snowdonia. He was an electrician. It’s honest work, real work. You install people’s switchboards for them, connect their lighting, tidy up cowboy and DIY botch jobs so they don’t burn their houses down. Dad was full of a tradesman’s aphorisms. ‘Give a man a fish, Neal, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for life.’ We were at the reservoir when I told him I was going to do Business Studies at Polytechnic. He just nodded, said, ‘That could lead to a good job in a bank,’ and cast off. Was that the beginning of the path I’m still on? The last time we went fishing was when I told him I’d got the job with Cavendish Hong Kong, and a salary three times that of my ex-headmaster. ‘That’s grand, Neal,’ he said. ‘Your mother will be proud as punch.’ I had hoped for more of a reaction from him, but he had retired by that time.