The Ghost

by The Ghost (epub)

  9. Catching Up

  WILLIAM STONE DRAINED HIS glass and rose for a second round. He quickly returned from the bar with two fresh drinks, handed one to Cook and clinked cheers. Cook had barely broken the surface of his original pint, but awkwardly slurped at the foam from the new glass.

  “Look at him!” laughed Stone. “Two on the fucking go! What a lightweight!”

  Cook tilted his glass and took on more beer than was comfortable. The liquid was lukewarm and chemical. Bubbles spiralled up into his nose and he had to disguise a gag as a cough.

  “How’s the cholesterol?” A deflection.

  Stone lifted an eyebrow, wrinkling his brow. Here, in a mangy corner of the Seven Stars, under the hundred-watt scrutiny of a mock-antique lantern, Cook saw that the whites of his friend’s eyes were scored with deep red capillaries, branching and pooling into bloodshot halos around the socket edges.

  “Quack put me on some pills, printed out a little info sheet. Usual – more exercise, no smoking or decent food. I had a scare last autumn. I dunno. Gotta die of something.”

  He finished off half of his pint in what looked like a single gulp. Cook reverted to his first glass and manfully cut the content by around a third. The effort made his vision blur.

  “How’s Gina?” Stone asked, eyeing his drink lustfully, as if pondering how soon he could dive back in for the second half without appearing dependant. Stone had always given Cook the impression that he was a drinker by personality and capacity, when in fact he used alcohol as more of a tool than a toy – to dull the ache of a desolate marriage that was slouching towards divorce.

  “She’s good, yeah,” spluttered Cook, mid-drink. “I mentioned I’d seen you and she said to say hello.”

  Stone smiled, looked up from his glass and held Cook’s gaze a little, sensing – and expecting – more.

  “But… Ah, you know. We’re holding it together. Her folks would fucking disown her if she gave up, but I’m not sure how much longer that can go on for.”

  “Funny,” said Stone, sloshing his beer around, “I always had you pair down as happily-ever-after types.”

  Cook snorted. “You can never really judge someone else’s relationship from the outside.”

  This prompted a synchronised swig, noticed by both. Stone laughed, loud enough to turn a couple of heads.

  “How’s Lydia doing at school?”

  Stone’s daughter was fourteen going on eighteen, with a swelling sexuality that Cook regarded with both alarm and allure.

  “I barely see her these days. She communicates more with her bloody gadgets than she does with her voice. I suppose Alfie is too young for all that?”

  Cook winced. “He’s well aware of it – more than I am, anyway. I hate the idea of ‘social media’ – this culture of virtual vanity.”

  “It’s an American thing,” Stone confirmed. “They love bragging about their friends, talking about how successful everyone is. Brits used to find that a bit embarrassing but we’ve definitely got over it now.”

  Refreshment levels steadily increased and the conversation flowed into darker channels. Cook raised the topic of Stone’s troubles at work – he had recently been assaulted during the policing of a street protest and, unwisely, had retaliated, socking his (female) assailant on the chin with his sizeable fist, and laying her out cold. His promotion prospects had been frozen and he would soon face a disciplinary hearing.

  “Listen, Dor…”

  Cook braced. Stone’s tone and posture was now familiar – maudlin, head hung low and heavy, weighted with booze. He was breathing like a bulldog.

  “Can you do me 2K? 3K at the end of the month.”

  It was a long-running arrangement. He would hand over £2000 in cash and, at the end of the month, always on time, Stone would deposit £3000 back into his account. Cook suspected a gambling debt, but couldn’t make sense of the economics. He emptied his glass and, unkindly, left the question unanswered for a few seconds.

  “Of course, mate.”

  *

  Later, hot-faced and ravenous, Cook bought a steak pasty and settled into the corner of a quiet carriage on the last Tube train home.

  He took out his phone and opened an email which notified him of a new message on PastLives.com. He laid the paper pasty bag down on the seat beside him, logged in and opened his profile inbox.

  Dor! I hope I don’t sound too pushy – and I hope you’re getting my messages. It’d be great if you could just give me a quick call mate! It’s really important. Think I might have got in touch with Dave but he hasn’t got back to me either!! Please mate. Just two minutes then I promise to leave you alone. Hope you’re really well!! Den

  The train jerked away from the station. Cook deleted the message, pocketed his phone and slumped forward, elbows on knees, head resting on clasped hands. The journey was around twenty minutes and he stayed in this position all the way, uneaten pasty by his side.

  10. Foreshadows

  April, 1974

  “City or United?”

  Uncle Russell raised Cook onto his shoulders, crouching slightly. As he gradually unbent his knees, Cook felt the peaks in the ceiling’s artex complexion brush against his hair.

  “United!”

  Russell drew himself almost upright, lifting Cook’s head closer to the plaster spikes. Both were laughing.

  “City or United?”

  “City! City!”

  Russell squatted down and Cook scrambled off his shoulders, brushing off-white flakes out of his hair. His uncle closed in for a follow-up armpit-tickle, but Cook saw it coming and was quickly up and running for the bottom of the stairs.

  “Nana! Tell him!”

  A knock at the front door, rather than Cook’s plea, brought Esther thudding down the stairs.

  “Leave him alone, Russell! What do you want for your tea?”

  Russell gathered himself. Then, still laughing: “Egg and chips!”

  “Can I have that too, nana?”

  Cook followed Esther and hovered as she struggled with the sticky front door.

  “No. You’re going out.”

  The door opened on the third tug, revealing Lily, frozen in a rehearsed smile.

  “Hello, Dorian, darling!”

  As ever, Cook recoiled from the hug, keeping one foot in the house and the other on the front step, torn between his egg and chips and his mother.

  *

  Cook and Lily walked slowly and silently through the Saturday dusk, up past the oil-works and down a deserted side-road lined with houses whose windows were either boarded or cautiously ajar, leaking statutory odours of over-boiled vegetables. Cook tolerated the holding of his hand but didn’t squeeze back. As they traced the high perimeter fence of honeycomb-patterned wire that bordered the Bethesda School infants’ playground, he saw that Lily had lost her smile, but regained it briefly whenever she caught him glancing up at her. After a careful crossing of the busy road that climbed up to the football stadium (City), Lily released Cook’s hand and pulled a single door-key from the fur-lined pocket of her coat. For a second, Cook thought she was about to let herself into the King’s Head – a buckled old pub on the corner, long since marked for demolition but somehow still upright. Instead, she cut into a narrow side-passage and Cook followed as she lifted the latch on the poorly hung gate at the end of a smelly back yard. The key admitted them into a narrow kitchen where they crab-stepped past toppled columns of saucepans and dinner plates which seeped over the rim of a china sink barnacled with mould and matter.

  The living room was certainly lived in. Cook cleared away a heap of damp clothes and settled into a squashy armchair which, despite its smooth PVC upholstery, had managed to retain an impressive crust of dust. A large-to-overlarge man in T-shirt and pyjama bottoms emerged from a storage room under the staircase, bumping his head on the door frame. Lily leapt to his aid, rubbing at the bump, her pink nail varnish contrasting with his inky-black hair. She turned to her boy as she soothed her man.

&nbs
p; “Dor, this is Tom. Remember – I told you about him a few weeks ago.”

  “Hiya!” said Cook, mock-cheerfully.

  “Y’alright, Dorian?” enquired Tom. He pulled away from Lily’s fussing and dumped a mound of comic-books on the floor next to Cook’s chair.

  “Ee’yar… Have a look at them, then. Spider-Man, Hulk. Think there’s a few Superman ones in there, too.”

  “What d’ya say, Dor?” said Lily.

  “Thank you!” sing-songed Cook, ruffling through the pile. He took out an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. On the cover, the Green Goblin was in mid-fight with the costumed hero, while the pair’s alter-egos taunted each other in flashback. Tom gave Cook a small bottle of orangeade and a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps. Cook guzzled and munched and rustled, hardly noticing that Tom and Lily had disappeared upstairs. When it grew too gloomy to read, he just sat there in the dark, tracing spider-web patterns in the armchair dust, re-imagining the comic stories, projecting them onto the blackness where they played out as animations – vivid and looming and leering.

  On the way back to Esther’s, Cook happily threaded his fingers through Lily’s.

  “I like my dad!” he declared.

  Lily snatched in a breath. “That’s really good, Dor.”

  11. The Uninvited

  THERE WERE FEW REQUESTS more humbling than being summoned for a second sitting in make-up because of a producer’s concern over ‘shine’. Cook was in position, installed on a minimalist sofa, side-on to camera, when a perky young runner interrupted their chat about the new wave of British realism and, with tender diplomacy, shepherded him back to the light-bulb mirror. He was re-powdered and re-deposited at the sofa area, where a second guest – Dan Machin from Movie magazine – had taken his spot, forcing him to sit further along and concede a subtle relegation of status.

  “I think I actually prefer it to go out live,” Machin was telling Jonathan Trotman, the Talking Pictures presenter. “You can lose confidence in what you’re saying if you have to repeat it too many times.”

  “Oh! Is this live?” said Cook, sounding a little more concerned than he’d intended.

  “Yeah,” smiled Machin.

  Trotman, a wily power-ligger who had once been Cook’s section deputy, stepped in. “It’ll be pretty straightforward, Dorian. Just five minutes of general chat with hopefully a bit of debate.”

  “Don’t worry,” added Machin – to Trotman, “we’ll try not to agree on too much”.

  Cook swallowed reflexively. He was confident he knew the topic, but always felt cornered under the gaze of live television. Recording offered a fuzzy buffer of abstraction – he could do the job, walk away and get busy denying the sharp realities of the broadcast, shunting it into the fog of the future. But in a live setting, he was shoved into centre-stage to perform for a chorus of rolling eyeballs and curling lips. He felt like a fraud.

  “Can I use the bathroom?” Cook asked Trotman.

  “You’ll have to be quick. We’re on in five minutes.”

  The runner guided Cook to a shabby rest-room around the back of the sound-stage and he slipped into a cubicle, locking the door. Without sitting down, he pulled out his phone, tapped through to the email inbox and skimmed a self-sent message of Wikipedia notes on the director of the film under discussion. He was about to pocket the phone and hurry back to the studio when the ping of his New Mail alert triggered a flutter of anxiety.

  Two messages had arrived simultaneously. Cook’s trembling index finger opened the first by accident.

  From: Sample enlarge

  Subject: So hard you could break an egg!

  Message: Forget the old memories where your pals laughed at you in the locker room, grow larger today.

  He dismissed it with a sideways jab of the screen and opened the second new message – a notification from PastLives.com. He logged in and accessed the inbox.

  Dor! I’ve managed to get a message to Dave and I think he’s up for a meet. We’ve got to talk mate. I’m freaking out. I think it’s…

  There was an urgent knock at the cubicle door which made Cook jump and close the message.

  “Dorian? Are you okay? We need you back in the studio! Live in two mins!”

  “Yeah, coming now!” Cook shouted, failing to conceal a wobble at the base of his throat. He flushed the toilet and walked out – practically into the runner’s arms. She scampered off ahead and he struggled to keep pace, disrupted and queasy.

  *

  “How does this compare to Whiteley’s previous film, Low Blow?”

  The studio heat was on. Cook and Machin sat stiffly, side by side, while Trotman – animated, informed – gently interrogated.

  “I don’t think anything could have prepared us for the progression,” offered Cook. “It’s the difference between, say, Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown. Low Blow is the work of a promising talent, but it’s solipsistic – there’s too much of Whiteley’s own prejudice in there. Shifting Sand is a much more mature work. It’s hard to believe that both films are from the same director.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with that,” said Machin. “It’s clear that Whiteley is an enormously exciting filmmaker, but he seems to have fallen into the trap of believing his own press a bit too much.”

  “Early reviews gone to his head?” offered Trotman.

  Machin nodded. “Exactly.”

  Cook released a strange noise – somewhere between a sneer and a scoff. Machin glanced at him, but kept focus on his point.

  “Any artist who wants his work to engage with a mass audience must engage with them himself to some degree, and Whiteley has committed the schoolboy error of thinking that he only needs to engage with his critics – with the acclaim – and can safely ignore the dissenting voices, because they’re mostly coming from less esteemed circles – the people who still pay to see films.”

  Cook was subtlely shaking his head. Trotman spotted it, but stayed locked on to Machin.

  “So, where does this story fall down for you?”

  “I think he’s sacrificed plausibility for stylistic indulgence. He obviously wants the film to be seen as some kind of Midnight Express update, but the cinematography is all exotic travelogue. He’s infatuated by his filming location and has lost sight of how the character would actually behave in that predicament. Midnight Express has its problems, but it tells a similar story in a more accessible – and plausible – way.”

  Cook was now shaking his head so vigorously, the camera was picking up tiny jiggling movements around the edges of the Machin shot. Trotman turned, gearing up a segue from critic to critic, but Cook was quicker on the beat.

  “I’m sorry, Dan. That’s crazy talk. We have the most exciting British filmmaker since Lindsay Anderson, and he’s made an absolute masterpiece – for his second film. How many other home-grown directors have produced something indelible for their second effort?”

  Machin swivelled slightly to face Cook.

  “Welles did it with his first.”

  “It’s hardly like for like.”

  Machin caught Trotman’s eye. There was reassurance in the gesture – confirming he wasn’t about to let the dissent lapse into discord.

  “I thought we were discussing the film’s place within the director’s slim body of work, rather than making comparisons with other more established directors.”

  “No, but if you’re going to compare this film to racist drivel like Midnight Express, then we can pick and mix other irrelevant references from across cinema history.”

  The comment carried an impressive economy of insult – it managed to dismiss Machin’s taste, implicitly accuse him of xenophobic leanings and discredit the whole tack of his contribution. Machin greeted it with a stunned laugh.

  “So, Dorian. Uh…” Trotman faltered. The director hissed into his earpiece: “Focus on the film!”

  “…what do you think makes Shifting Sand so, as you say, indelible?”

  “He’s taken a
n incredibly difficult subject and presented it from so many different angles – political, social, sexual. And all framed inside this gorgeous photography – like something from Roger Deakins. What’s most amazing is how he doesn’t shy…”

  “Hitchcock!” Machin interrupted.

  “Hitchcock?”

  “Yeah. His second Hollywood feature – Foreign Correspondent. Incredibly mature.”

  “It’s a glorified B-movie!”

  Cook could feel his lips gumming together. The pitiless lighting had him surrounded, flaring down from multiple angles, searing through his thinning hair, baking his brain, boiling his blood.

  “Well, that’s the conventional wisdom,” said Machin, smugly. “Watch it again, though. It’s actually improved with age. For a film that’s over seventy years…”

  “Hitchcock wasn’t British, anyway!”

  This was an ominous incision from Cook – calm and measured, but clearly intended to wound. He carried on.

  “And if filmmaking is all about plausibility, Dan, then you’re dismissing several genres right there. Or maybe you can only stand to watch documentaries?”

  “Did you just say that Hitchcock wasn’t British?” Machin’s smile was bright and broad.

  “Well… I meant he’s not perceived as British.”

  “He was born in Leytonstone, Dorian!”

  Now, Cook was diverted by Machin’s nicotine-yellow front teeth, his coarse little goatee (grown to distract from a double-chin), his overwashed check shirt. And, yes, he was actually wearing cords!