Ghostwritten Read online

  Truth be told, fishing bored me. I’d rather be watching the footy on the box. But Mum insisted that I went with him, so I did, and now I’m glad I went. Even today, the word ‘Wales’ brings back the taste of tuna and egg sandwiches and weak, milky tea, and the memory of my dad looking out over a murky lake walled in by cold mountains.

  Her coming was the hum of a fridge. A sound you grow accustomed to before you hear it. I didn’t know how long cupboards had been left open, air-conditioners switched on, curtains twitched open, before I became conscious of her. Living with Katy postponed it. Katy thought I was doing what she was doing, I thought Katy was doing what she was doing. She didn’t come in the dramatic way they do in the movies. Nothing was hurled across the room, no ghosts in the machine, no silly messages typed on my computer or spelt out with the fridge magnet letters. Nothing like Poltergeist or The Exorcist. More like a medical condition, that, while terminal, grows in such small increments that it is impossible to diagnose until too late. Little things: hidden objects. The honey left on top of the wardrobe. Books turning up in the dishwasher. That kind of thing. Keys. She had a penchant for keys. No, she’s never been an in-your-face house-guest. Katy and I joked about her even before we believed in her: Oh, it’s only the ghost again.

  In the end, however, I think she affected the three of us deeper than any amount of smashed vases.

  I do remember the day that hum became a noise. It was a Sunday afternoon, last autumn. I was at home for once. Katy had gone shopping at the supermarket down in the village. I was vedging out on the sofa, one eye on the newspaper and one on Die Hard 3 dubbed into Cantonese. I realised there was a little girl playing on the carpet in front of me, lying on her belly, and pretending to swim.

  I knew she was there, and I knew there was no such child.

  The conclusion was obvious.

  Fear breathed on the nape of my neck.

  Half a building blew up. ‘We’d better get some more FBI agents,’ said the stupid deputy who didn’t trust Bruce Willis.

  Reason entered, brandishing its warrant. It ordered that I behave as though nothing untoward was happening. What was I going to do? Go screaming from the apartment to – where? I’d have to come back at some point. There was Katy to think about, too. Was I to tell her that a ghost was watching us morning, noon and night? If this drawbridge was lowered, what else would come in? I forced myself to pretend to finish the article, though it could have been written in Mongolian.

  Fear was handcuffed, but it could still yell at the top of its lungs, There’s a fucking ghost in your apartment! A fucking ghost, you hear me?

  She was still there, swimming. She was on her back now.

  I had to lower the paper. Would it mean I was mad if she was there, or if she wasn’t?

  What did I know about her?

  Only that she wasn’t threatening me.

  I folded the newspaper and looked at where I had thought she was.

  Nobody, and nothing. See? said Reason, smugly.

  Neal, said Neal, you’re cracking up.

  I walked resolutely towards the kitchen.

  Behind my back I heard her giggle.

  Fuck you, said Fear to Reason.

  I heard the lock being jiggled, and Katy’s keys echoing in the hallway outside. She dropped them. I walked over to the door and opened it for her. She was bending down, so she couldn’t see my expression, which I’m glad about.

  ‘Phew!’ said Katy, smiling and straightening up.

  ‘Welcome home,’ I said. ‘I say. Is that champagne?’

  ‘Champagne, lobster and lamb, my hunter-gatherer. You’ve been asleep, haven’t you? You’re all groggy.’

  ‘Uh . . . yeah. Don’t tell me I’ve missed your birthday again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I want to feed you up, so you make lots of sperm and get frisky. I’ve decided that I want a baby. What do you think?’

  How Katy.

  I was in a ramshackle yard, walled in by falling-down fisherman’s cottages. Paths forked off and forked off some more. A black dog eyed me with its one eye, looking at what I am. I wished it were on a chain. What are the odds of that dog having rabies? Enough of their masters certainly seem to. A woman stood up from behind a cabbage the size of a small hut. She said, ‘You going to the Big Buddha yes?’

  I saw myself, blundering in her yard. A foreign devil with mud round his ankles, shoes from Pennsylvania, a silk tie made in Milan, a briefcase full of Japanese and American gadgetry worth more money than she saw in three years. What must she think?

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She pointed with a blunt vegetable down one of the paths.

  ‘Thank you.’

  At first the path was clear, but as it went deeper into the wood it grew more ambiguous. Leaves, stems, shoots, nodules, thorns, thicket. A common dirt-coloured bird that sang in emerald and opal. Dry grass. Soil, stones, loose rocks, worms moving underground.

  I’m not thinking about it. The day was just beginning to warm up.

  I heard a helicopter, and imagined Avril and Guilan leaning out with a headset and binoculars. Avril would be speaking into a camera like a radio station’s traffic reporter. I giggled. Something jumped and thumped in the undergrowth. I froze, but heard nothing more. There’s a thought. Are there snakes on Lantau Island?

  Thirty-one days hath September,

  April, June and November.

  And fuck the rest . . .

  Insects buzzed around my head, thirsty for sweat to drink.

  It’s time to bring in the maid.

  Fair’s fair, she was Katy’s idea from the start. I never wanted one, didn’t choose her, and for the first six months – until this winter, I didn’t even see her. I never even met the maid until Katy was back in Britain. There was a circle of men at Cavendish who were into hiring maids willing to do more than fluff pillows and take the kids to school and back. Most of the men at Cavendish’s hired Filipinos, because they had no permanent residency, and so had to be more compliant. They also know that the more accommodating they were, the more likely they’d be handed on when their master left Hong Kong.

  Maybe Katy had heard these tales in the wives’ club. Maybe that was why she chose a Chinese maid. I was surprised when Katy told me she wanted one. Katy came from an upper-middle-class Cambridge family, but from a firmly lower-middle-class income bracket where you traded on your family’s name and tightened your belt to put the kids through good schools. We met at a law firm in London, for fuck’s sake, not the House of Lords.

  But here we were, out in the colonies. Well, the ex-colonies. I was disappointed that she’d been swayed by the Wives’ Club. But then, as Katy pointed out, I wasn’t the one who had to clean up my mess. I couldn’t argue when Katy pointed out that after she got pregnant, she’d have to take it easy. I suspected Katy was on a culture-bridging kick, and had chosen penetrating the Chinese psyche as a hobby.

  If that suspicion had been correct, then for Katy it badly backfired. All Katy got from her hobby was grief, which she then passed on to me, the moment I was through the door. Katy gave her presents, but she took them without saying a word. Katy said she was surly, inscrutable, and kept dropping mile-wide hints about how her starving family in the mainland needed more money. Katy suspected she was working at a hostess bar for more money at night. Katy couldn’t be sure, but she thought a pair of gold earrings had gone missing. Looking back, I wonder if that was the work of our host daughter?

  ‘If you’re not happy with her, sack her.’

  ‘But how about her starving family?’

  ‘It’s not your problem! You’re not Lady Bountiful.’

  ‘Spoken like a true lawyer.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s whinging about her morning, noon and night.’

  ‘I want you to speak to her, Neal.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘I’ve tried, but women only respect men in this culture. They respect men in this culture. Jus
t be assertive. I’ll give her this Saturday off, and ask her to come on Sunday. Make sure you’re here.’

  ‘But they’re your earrings.’

  That had been the wrong thing to say.

  When I managed to calm Katy down I asked her what I was supposed to say.

  ‘Tell her that there are certain standards we wish her to meet. Say that perhaps we weren’t clear enough when we first hired her.’

  ‘Maybe she’s just a lazy bitch. What makes you think I’ll have any effect?’

  ‘The Chinese psyche: if you let her know who the master is, they listen. She looks at me like I’m a piece of dogshit. Theo’s wife was telling me about it, she had the same problem. It doesn’t even matter if she doesn’t understand everything. They can tell from the tone of your voice.’

  And the next Sunday I met the maid. So you see, Katy brought us together.

  I had expected a cleaning lady. Maid meant maid. I guessed she was twenty-eight or twenty-nine. She was in a black and white uniform, and black tights. The material must make her skin sweat. She listened insouciantly, while I ran through my patter, avoiding eye contact for most of the time. Her hair was luscious, her skin dusky. After 30 seconds of being in the same room, I knew that she and I would end up fucking each other, and I knew that she knew it too.

  And from then on, even on the nights when Katy and I had sex three times to get her pregnant, I would close my eyes and see the maid underneath me.

  The path rose sharply behind the Trappist Monastery, up into the purplish morning. Soon the tree-line was far below. I never knew there was so much sky here! I took my jacket off and slung it over my shoulder. I was still carrying my briefcase.

  I got to an outcrop and sat down. My heart was twanging like a double-bass. Should I take some of those tablets? The doctor who does the Cavendish people, a Chinese quack, just said, ‘Take three of these every day and you’ll be all right.’ I said, ‘What are you giving me?’ He said, ‘A bottle of pink ones, a bottle of green ones, and a bottle of blue ones.’ Cheers, Doc. Maybe I’ll give the medicine a miss.

  Alchemy was changing the sky. The sun was burnishing the leaden dullness to silver. In turn the silver was shrouding blue. It was going to be a nice day after all.

  A nearby furry rock lifted its head, blinking. It looked at me sorrowfully and mooed. I hadn’t been this close to a cow I wasn’t eating since . . . who knows? Wales, for all I knew. Hong Kong glistened in the distance, through the haze. Skyscrapers, construction, clamouring upwards like trees in a jungle.

  My cordless telephone rang and triggered an instant relapse.

  Fuck, what have I done! Please God let me wake up! Please!

  The cow mooed dolefully. Fuck. Fuck. Double Fuck to the power of Fuck squared. I am a lawyer living in a world where ‘thirteen’ means ‘thirteen million bucks’ and I am bunking off work like a schoolboy skipping double maths! The Taiwanese! Think! What excuse is serious enough, plausible enough, and yet too implausible for it to be a lie? Kidnapping? No, a heart attack? Avril knows I’m on medication. A seizure? Think! Serious, violent, incapacitating vomiting, then why aren’t I on the boat, I’d need to pay a doctor, I’d need a receipt, and a reliable witness—

  Answer me! Answer me!

  I clicked ‘answer’, and said, er . . .

  Neal, isn’t it about time that you decided what constitutes a crisis?

  Er . . . Nothing. I listened to Neal’s heart. It sounded like a percussion grenade in a neighbouring valley.

  ‘Neal? Neal?’ Avril, sure enough. ‘Neal, where are you?’

  A large fly landed on my knee. A gothic tricycle. My relapse was over.

  ‘Neal? Can you hear me? Chaing Yun’s here. He’s being very polite, but he’s wondering what is so important that you are late for this meeting. And so am I. And so will Jim Hersch. And if Chiang Yun isn’t important enough to warrant your valuable time, Mr Gregorski from St Petersburg has already phoned you twice, and it’s not even 9 a.m.’

  I looked at my Rolex. My, my, how time had flown. The cow frowned. I smelt its shit near by.

  ‘I know you’re there, Neal. I can hear you breathing. This had better be good. This had better be jolly good. Because nothing short of a capsized ferry is going to save you this time. Neal, you hear me Neal? Okay, look Neal, if you’re unable to speak, then tap the phone twice now, all right?’

  Aha! Doubt was creeping in to her contempt! I chuckled. Avril the ever-resourceful. Avril will go far will Avril.

  ‘Neal! This is not funny! You are royally messing up one of the biggest contracts we’ve ever seen! One of the biggest that has ever been heard of ! I’m going to have to tell D.C. You can’t seriously expect me to take the flack for this!’

  Ah, shut the fuck up. I clicked the thing off and placed it on the warm rock.

  A buzzard circled, and there was an anvil-shaped cloud.

  You never see them coming. They lurk in the overlooked and undusted places. They grow to huge proportions, and all along you don’t even dream about them, not in their true form. And then one day a chance meeting happens, a glimpse of that you didn’t know you wanted, and a latch is raised . . .

  Avril tried my beeper. Jesus, I was armed to the teeth with telecommunications devices. Like John Wayne unholstering himself after a hard day slaughtering Hispanic bandits with bad teeth, I unclipped it. I clicked open my briefcase. There was the Mickey Kwan File – whoops – and Huw Llewellyn’s calling card. I put in my beeper and cordless phone. I stood up, took a big under-arm swing, and hurled it into the void. It drew an elegant parabola, I could still hear my beeper, a costly, mewling kitten. The briefcase hit the mountainside running, and spun down the slope in terminal leaps . . . in big beautiful wheels, fast enough to kill on impact, like Mama Lion, like a tumbler, like a lemming, like Piggy from The Lord of the Flies.

  My briefcase hung for a moment in the morning sun, weightless.

  Then it plummeted like a gannet into the sea.

  It seemed Katy had forgotten to cancel the maid.

  The first week after Katy’s departure I came home one night to find my washing done, the dishes washed up and neatly stacked, the toilet and the bathroom cleaned, and the windows polished. She’d even ironed my shirts, bless her sour-plum little Chinese nipples.

  I certainly wasn’t going to cancel that. Weekdays, I had to plan in my Filofax when I was going to shit. Seriously.

  The maid didn’t take long to work out that Katy had gone.

  She came one Sunday morning. I was lying on the sofa watching Sesame Street. I heard the keys, and she entered as if she owned the place. She was not wearing her apron.

  She locked the door behind her, walked over to me as though I was inanimate, knelt on me, and started massaging my cock with one hand. Big Bird, Ernie and Bert were singing a song about the magic ‘E’ that makes the ‘A’ say its name. I tried to kiss her but she shoved my face back with her hand, and kept it there, her hand coiling me tighter and tighter. She pulled off my T-shirt, and pushed my trousers down with her foot. Athletic girl. She pinched the skin between my balls, like a ring through the nose of an ox, led me to the bedroom, and laid me down on Katy’s side of the bed. She slid out of her pants and knelt on my rib cage. I started unbuttoning her, but she made a tsu-tsuuuu noise, slapped me and dug her fingernails into my scrotum until I capitulated. Then she spoke, for the first, and almost the last, time.

  ‘Say: you want me, you don’t want Katty Bitch.’

  ‘Yeah, I do.’

  ‘Say!’

  ‘I want you, I don’t want her.’

  ‘Say. Katty Bitch is bitch trash, I am real woman.’

  I can’t say that.

  Still keeping my testicles hostage, she pulled off her top with one hand, and unclipped her bra. I heard her giggling in the other room. Her nipples rose and darkened like something in a tale.

  ‘She was a bitch. Trash. You are a real woman.’

  ‘You would give money. You would give her stuff. All of
it. A present.’

  ‘She took a lot back with her.’

  ‘She left much things. Mine now. Say it.’ Her hand slid up my shaft, tighter and tighter.

  ‘It’s yours now.’

  She put my hand onto her breast. ‘Say: You stronger than me.’

  ‘You are stronger than me.’

  Formalities, rituals and contract-signing over, she lunged down on me. For a fraction of a second I thought about contraception, but the warmth and wetness and rhythm nudged me further and further away.

  Once I tried to get on top, but she bit me and elbowed me and rolled me back over.

  Afterwards the fan droned on our bodies. Nothing left of all that fire but the smell of low tide. I felt . . . I don’t know what I felt. Maybe I felt nothing. The theme music of Sesame Street played itself out.

  She got up, and sat down at Katy’s dressing table. She opened the drawer, and took out a coral necklace, and fastened it around her neck. Slenderer than Katy’s.

  I wanted her again. This was costing me more than money, so I may as well push for maximum value and damn myself properly. I got up and fucked her from behind, on the dressing table. We broke the mirror.

  Sex with the maid became a drug. Once pricked, I was addicted. I thought about her at work. When I got back in the evening, my erection would start even as I inserted my key. If I could smell Katy’s cologne in the entrance hall, it would mean she was waiting. If not, well, if not, I’d have to make do with whisky. Hugo Hamish and Theo at the office tried to persuade me to go drinking at Mad Dogs a few times, thinking I was cut up about Katy, but the truth is, she didn’t cross my mind that often. She was living in another compartment, and I didn’t have to encounter her unless I went looking for her. The maid was different: she came looking for me.