Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  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 well because I walk around it every day. Here was where I thought I should embrace her and maybe kiss her good-bye.

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

  Okay, if that was how she wanted it.

  “Good-bye,” 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 pin-balled 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 forty-five seconds to forget her, anyway. On page five 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 harbor 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.

  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 spelled 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 houseguest. 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 vegging out on the sofa, one eye on the newspaper and one on Die Hard 3 dubbed into Cantonese. I realized 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 t
here, 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-colored 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-two 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. Just 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 dog shit. 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 thirty 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, clamoring upwards like trees in a jungle.

  My cellular 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 neighboring 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? Chiang 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 into 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.