Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  Toweling 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 percent 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 is 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’ll just have to heap the sugar into the coffee, I suppose. Liquid breakfast. Into the living room. A trickle of black is coming under the door, and I think it is blood. Whose blood? Her blood? Nothing would surprise me in this apartment anymore. Then I see it is dark brown. Fucking great. I 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 survey my culinary empire. It looks like Keith Moon has been a houseguest for a month. No it doesn’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 haven’t even looked out of the window to see what the weather is doing. I look on my pager: dry and cloudy. No umbrella, then. That Asian non-weather. I’ve forgotten. I already know the view: bare hillside, dulled by mist, and the lethargic sea.

  I click 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 retunes it.

  “Try to behave,” I say, 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 elevator was on its way down. Thank God. Otherwise I’d miss the bus to the ferry. The doors opened. I squeezed into the allmale space, half-yellow, half-pinko-gray, 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 among the tops of the 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.

  Until, that is, some fucker’s cell phone drills through my eardrum. 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 realize 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 apologize 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 humorlessness. 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 fifty-two—no, fifty-one—minutes. You are not here, because you are still on a bus on Lantau Island. You will not get here for another thirty-eight minutes, forty-one minutes if you haven’t had breakfast and have to stop for donuts. Mr. Cheung is always ten 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, a
nd 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 disk, don’t you?”

  I was suddenly very awake. “Yes, but—”

  “I’ll download the file off your hard disk, 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 forty-nine 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 harbor. The turbo ferry was waiting, as always. Nobody needs to hurry—the first bell is ringing now. The second bell will ring in one minute. The third in two minutes. The boat wouldn’t leave for three minutes, and bus to boat took less than sixty 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, among 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 disk, 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 yes-men 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 overzealous 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 rumors 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 sixty 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 Meph
istopheles 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!”