Ghosting Read online

  “If he just thinks about it,” I said, “if it stays in his head, then it will be more convincing. People have all sorts of strange fantasies. The imagination is a weird place. I think we can make it work at that level.”

  “But who are we going to convince if it's all in his head? It will only convince him! And what's the good in that? He has to do it! It has to happen! For people to believe it, it has to happen! Isn't it? What's the matter with you? What is this nonsense?”

  His heart was clearly set on it. The book would be a travesty without it—Hamlet without the Prince. Much of his eagerness, I believed, could be put down to his identification with the protagonist. As had happened first time round, he was projecting himself into the principal role. What was surprising, indeed alarming, was that quite early on it had also become clear that the two women towards whom Tiger would be the conquering hero, at least within the covers of the book, were in fact real live women. One was an attractive, intelligent former employee based in London, and the other was her cousin living in New York—both, as it happened, born on the same day.

  Each day after I had finished in the studio Tiger would ask for a progress report. “Have we reached the orgamsiyet?” he would enquire with dispiriting regularity, although it is only fair to say that the question never seemed salacious or even coarse. It was more like a child asking that familiar question from the back seat of the car: “Are we nearly there?” If I even hinted at possible difficulties, he became downcast for a moment or two before firing questions in rapid succession, all of them beginning with “but”—his way of seeking reassurance.

  —But they're not serious, these difficulties?—

  —But we can solve them, no?—

  —But we don't have to abandon the plan?—

  —But we will finish soon, isn't it?—

  It seemed a mercy simply to agree. The orgamsi, as he called it, was enthused about and relished at every opportunity. He took obvious pleasure in imagining how beautifully it might be done, delighting in what he supposed would be the reaction of readers. Anticipation was the sweetest pleasure for him. “Just you wait,” he would say, a smile playing on his lips, “just you wait till they read that bit.” As if it might happen all by itself if only I waited. I couldn't help thinking that the particular readers he had in mind were the two women on whom his flight of fancy was based. He even wanted to use their real names in the title of the novel—a completely mad idea, I said. In the end the actual names were abandoned and replaced by aliases with a similar ring to them.

  I had tried several different ways of trying to effect the—what shall I call it?—the reverie. The original idea was to have the two principal women (one the mother of the vanished child) as the close cousins, and I just crossed my fingers that a suitable character could be created to fill the stud role. It was not something I enjoyed thinking about. I also sweated over how the sexual congress might best be arranged, flirting briefly with a number of options:

  passion and conflagration leading to ecstasy all round

  copulation brutal and loveless but with unexpected benefits for the women concerned

  variations on the above

  But I would journey only so far down a chosen route before encountering some grim problem that had me scurrying back up again. For example, would this “outreach” climax be some sort of unintended consequence? Perhaps. Or would it be delivered with intent and joyfully received? Probably not. All things considered, it would presumably just happen to the third party, willy-nilly—or, in Tiger's phrase, nilly-willy—in which case it would surely happen at a time not of her choosing. And if it was unsolicited it could easily be inopportune, particularly if it had to travel across different time zones. It hardly bore thinking about. Yet I thought about it constantly. Psychologists have written learned papers on the impossibility of refraining from thinking about a pink elephant, or anything else, for any length of time. The intention to refrain from thinking about something evidently activates the very thought you are trying to avoid. This pink elephant phase lasted for several weeks.

  Of course, illusions have to be rendered, but how do you stop yourself from pricking them? Here was another quibble. Tiger was obviously keen to break new ground, in the sense that our hero, and he alone, would be capable of producing this amazing synchronous effect on two women in different parts of the globe. But as I understood it, the joint cousinly climax had to be contingent upon the exceptional closeness of the women in question, so unless they were both virgins, not to mention unlucky in their experience of lovemaking, they must surely have climaxed concurrently before. With someone else. Someone other than our hero. And if not, why not? Thus the armature of contrivance kept breaking through, and I was continually hampered, not by a failure of nerve exactly, rather by humility before ordinary reality. An inbuilt crap detector is an awkward piece of equipment for any woman trying to carry out this kind of mandate for a man. Yet it had to be done, so I pressed on. The hero in John Banville's Shroud says: “I cannot believe a word out of my own mouth,” and I suppose I had arrived at a similar position.

  In the circumstances it was not an easy matter to deliver quality orgasms to those taking part in the story. And so, a compromise was reached, though it had all the drawbacks of a trade-off and no obvious benefits, at least not for Tiger, whose high hopes were cruelly thwarted. The idea of the two families remained, but I simply could not effect the needful with grown-up, sexually mature, sane adults. So instead, and in a spirit of greater realism, the cousins— together with their fanciful frolics—were switched to the younger generation. This is how the ground was prepared:

  It was as if their closeness had been preordained. By some extraordinary coincidence they had been born on the same day in late August, Tara greeting the world as a strong healthy screaming baby, her cousin slipping out vulnerably six weeks ahead of schedule and scarcely bigger than a bag of sugar… As the years went by, they became closer and closer. They shared secrets, made every conceivable kind of pact, took vows of confidentiality, became blood sisters in a solemn ceremony and crossed their hearts and hoped to die. They played language games and devised exclusive ways of communicating.

  Establishing the bond early on allowed it to be infinitely strengthened by the disappearance of the young boy—the brother of one of the cousins. Ordinary life is suspended after the tragedy and the days seem to merge one into another. The adults are so busy coping with their own grief that the girls—by now fifteen years of age—are left to get on with life and their own feelings largely by themselves. They befriend the boy next door, only son of the vicar who is helping the bereaved parents, and gradually they retreat together into their own world, all three bound by a common neglect. They have a secret meeting place in the grounds of a disused farmhouse and it is here that their sexual awakening takes place.

  … And so united by a common hurt, the young people had begun to experiment. It was something that had developed gradually, as a natural offshoot of their pain, which became diffused and softened in the thrill of the new. The line between innocence and knowledge is scarcely a line at all; it is much more a meandering stream, flowing sometimes this way, sometimes that, occasionally turning back on itself before finding the way forward once more, reduced to a trickle in places, at other points surging ahead. It is not something fixed or predetermined, but something that finds its own level and makes its own way. This is not how they thought of it at the time, but it is a truthful description of how things happened.

  It is clear from these lines that the writer is struggling a bit. It is not only the river that is meandering and turning back on itself. The reader is being asked not so much to suspend disbelief as to indulge the author. Moving from the adult world to the realm of adolescent desire was definitely a bit of a cop-out. But I felt that Tiger's dreams, albeit in a modified form, might be fulfilled there. I thought that writing about the freshness of first love would perhaps be less awkward and would have fewer pitfalls. It might also allow for
strange elaborations. That, at least, was the theory. Here was the practice:

  James lay now between the girls, propped up on his elbows, looking from one to the other with complete adoration. The sun and fresh air washed deliciously over their bodies. He longed to possess them, to merge his body with theirs. Gently, as he had done many times now, he ran his fingers over Tara's coppery sheen of tightly curled hairs, springy to his touch. She guided his hand between her legs, where his practised movements brought a sudden slick wetness. He pushed his fingers inside her. As he worked his hand in the rhythmic movements he knew Tara loved, he felt skilled and powerful. He traced the outline of her hard nipples with his tongue and drew them, first one, then the other into his mouth. He exulted in the pleasure he was giving; and also in the pleasure he was taking, for Claire all the while was rubbing her breasts against his back. Her arms were round his waist and she held his erection in one hand, stroking the tip of his penis with the other.

  He had read about premature ejaculation in magazines, that it was not good, that it was something to be avoided, something you had to control. But if it was undesirable, no one seemed to think so, least of all himself. It did not put an end to their lovemaking; it merely prepared the way for more. The girls seemed to love it. It made them even more excited, and afterwards they kissed and stroked him with renewed passion till their bodies were a tangle of limbs and caresses. He almost wanted to write to the magazines and tell them they were wrong. But what was the point? All that mattered was here and now. There were no rules of conduct, no one had to prove anything. They just did what felt right; out of love, and out of a kind of unspoken disdain for their parents.

  Tiger did not conceal his disappointment. It was absolute and comprehensive.

  “But they're children!” he scoffed. “Why are we writing a children's book?”

  “It's not remotely a children's book,” I said, slightly horrified. “It's an adult book with children—young adults—in it.”

  “They are children!” he insisted. “They haven't even done it before!”

  “That's the beauty of it,” I said, glimpsing a straw that might be clutched, “they're not yet set in their ways.”

  “And they're doing it all together! They are not apart at all. We agreed they would be miles apart! We've made it into an orgy!”

  So sudden, this prudery. So unexpected.

  “Well, it's hardly an orgy,” I said, trying to placate. “They are just feeling their way. It's a kind of innocence in fact. And anyway they love each other.”

  This was desperate stuff.

  Tiger was not to be appeased. He fumed and frothed. And scowled as he read the passage again. He moved his lips as he read and his breath made a susurrus, like bamboo in the breeze. Then came another objection, overlooked the first time.

  “We don't even say that the girls have orgamsi together. At the same time. Why don't we say it? How can people understand if we don't say it? We have to say it.”

  And so we said it. And this is how we said it:

  … She lay on her front on the bed, her face buried in a duck-feather pillow. James had entered her from behind, urgently and without much preparation, as he often did now, knowing how it made her wild… While James lay on top of Tara, Claire knelt at the end of the bed, straddling James's legs, moving rhythmically against his firm flesh. She clasped his buttocks and rocked him in and out of Tara. At these times she felt that she herself was making love to Tara, that James was an intermediary, a vehicle for her own passion. When she heard Tara's gasp, a long swishing sound, like skates stopping on ice, she knew absolutely that it was the moment of most intense feeling in her life so far. But then, a second or two later, at the height of her own ecstasy, that moment was replaced and transcended by another, even more intense. At these times she knew what it was to feel love, to ache with love, to want to die for love.

  This was a terrible letdown for Tiger. It was not at all what he had dreamed of. The pinnacles reached were not transatlantic, and our hero, far from being a representation of the author, was a sixteen-year-old spotty youth. This marked only one of several disappointments with the novel.

  By contrast, I felt a lot better once the tripartite orgasm, the three-piece suite, was out of the way. It had been oppressing me and I felt relieved to have dispatched it. Another reason to be glad was that the warm country air of the Dordogne valley had now been swapped for the cool salt air of St. Andrews and I felt I could breathe more deeply and freely. It was always a bit of a relief to be home. I split huge logs on the chopping block and stacked them up in the garden. For the first few days it felt strange to handle money again or make simple decisions for myself. Ordinary domestic life seemed slightly exaggerated, larger than normal, as if seen through a lens. I didn't have to eat breakfast at 7 A.M., and the man of the house did not force food on me. There was no strict timetable. I would walk around the house and garden, finding my footing again, touching familiar objects, bringing them back into my life.

  But the peace didn't last for long. There was a book to be finished. I would have liked to polish paragraphs and weigh each word, but there was no time for that. The telephone started ringing at half past eight every morning and the questions were invariably the same.

  “How are we doing? Are we nearly done yet?”

  I hated this pressure. It was such a strain trying to hold the novel together. With this frenzied haste there was a danger of everything falling apart in my head. Now and then I begged for thinking time as well as writing time, and it would then be graciously suggested that of course I must take as much time as I needed—“Bloody hell, we all have to think!” he said, every inch the man of reason. But all the while the publication date and the launch party were being arranged, and there would be more phone calls to tell me the details—“Just so you know what's happening.”

  As the chapters became ready they were faxed to London for approval. Or sometimes I delivered them in person. For the most part they got through on the nod. Occasionally, however, a complaint would be lodged and something would have to be changed. For example, towards the end of the book the vicar's wife, Diane, who has led a life of quiet desperation, finds herself in bed with Edward, father of the boy who has disappeared. This is how it is described:

  It was such a long time since Diane had used certain parts of her body that she had almost ceased to consider them at all. She occasionally felt desire in the place that her mother used to refer to as down there, but she had learned over the years to channel it into sleep. As she turned over in her mind what had occurred, trying to give an account of it to herself—in order she supposed, to confer some reality upon it—she could not readily name those areas where she had just experienced such wonderful sensations. The feelings were still intense, but the manner in which they had been arrived at was already beginning to fade.

  Tiger thought that the scene was not explicit enough and that it was difficult to work out what was happening. “And it's not poetic,” he lamented. “Sex should be poetic.” Ah, that elusive word again. But the main problem was the description of Diane's body, for it broke the sacred principle of idealised beauty. It fitted the story to say that Diane had not looked after her body and that she felt some shame in having neglected it. But Tiger could not bear the idea of sagging breasts and a rounded belly, not even if they were contextually apt. He hated anything displeasing or unpleasant—obesity, illness, unsightliness of any variety. It was a sort of corollary of Dostoevsky's belief Beauty will save the world—the idea that the world might be destroyed by ugliness. It had to be hidden away, not talked about; that way it ceased to exist.

  More importantly, he believed that he had detected something wrong with the narrative. He seemed pleased by this. “There is a mistake,” he said gleefully, and he gave a watery smile like a pale sun after rain. He then rose to his full height and started pacing up and down majestically. Now and then it struck me that there was something operatic in our dealings with one another. “Oh yes,” he
snorted, “I have spotted a big mistake. Just you wait.” He asked me to sit down while he read the offending passage to me. “Listen carefully,” he said, “and we will see if you can spot it too.” This is what he read:

  Edward was a validation of something she had wanted to believe and had forgotten was possible: that there could exist between a man and a woman something beautiful and loving, unattended by expectations, needs, grasping selfishness. Set against all those people who sat at her kitchen table—people whose lives were disfigured by disappointment, misunderstandings, cruelty, injustice—this encounter seemed to have reached beyond ordinary experience. As a result, the significant thing she had forgotten was beginning to seep back into her memory. It was not yet fully delineated, but she thought she could detect in it the beginnings of a belief. It was the belief that love, even when it had gone from a marriage, could come to dwell there again.

  He raised the volume in the last sentence, so that it was impossible not to grasp that the big mistake must be contained therein. When I looked blank, he read the last sentence again, booming out every word, adding after a pause for dramatic effect, “Don't you see? Don't you see?” When I still didn't see, he recited with studied patience the list of characters from the novel, then he proceeded to verify their marriage partners, and only when we were in complete agreement about who was who and who was married to whom did he deliver the final judgement: “Now listen! We say that she believes love could come back to the marriage, but we have put her in bed with Edward, we have not put her with her husband!” To remove any lingering doubt, he threw his hands in the air and exclaimed, “Now do you see? It doesn't make sense! How can we say love comes back to the marriage when she's fucking someone else?”

  These moments were quite depressing, because they showed how far apart we were and how impossible it would be to get better connected. Such exchanges were hard to manage, not least because I truly wanted him to be happy with my work. In that respect my happiness was contingent upon his, and each new declaration of discontent was a blow to my spirits. At the same time this was evidence, if any were needed, that we occupied different ontological spheres. He was not interested in things psychological or the winding ways of the subconscious; in fact he was rather afraid of them. He was insensible to the notion that apparently ordinary, sensible people can often have quite ridiculous private lives.