Ghosting Read online

  “You are so highbrow,” Tiger said, spitting his contempt. This was a most terrible charge: being highbrow belonged on the same spectrum of iniquity as coughing or menstruating.

  “And she's so dim,” I spat back.

  “Actually”—he elongated the actually, as if he'd just unearthed the vital clue, the incriminating evidence—“you're completely wrong. This girl is the smartest around. You could learn a thing or two from her.”

  And so the interviews took place and the book was started. It was a bizarre project with multiple layers of identity issues: I was impersonating Tiger who in turn was impersonating the society girl whose intimate first-person story he had contracted to tell and under whose name it would appear as an autobiography. It felt more than a little mad.

  Most of the time my approach to the situation, and how to change it, was not in the least rational or methodical. I just became used to a feeling of mild desperation, which sometimes got better, sometimes worse, and I simply kept going, trying not to think about it too much or talk about it at home. Home was increasingly in London—far away from the fresh sea breezes of St. Andrews and my little sanctuary in the garden. I was spinning in Tiger's orbit, navigated this way or that by the latest enthusiasm, each one laid aside after a while to make way for the next. Sometimes it seemed as if I scarcely lived in the world at all, except maybe at one or more removes. Leaving the Soho building one night after work I turned onto Regent Street where there was a man wearing a sandwich board that exhorted sinners to abandon sex and turn to God. He was walking ahead of me, though with difficulty, for the board was long and he himself quite short. The bottom edge clipped his heels with every step—a pitiful sight that brought tears to my eyes. Was he just doing a job, I wondered, or did he actually believe in what he was doing?

  The ghost-writer is aptly named. Real ghosts, if we accept such a thing, are constrained to live in a world they no longer properly belong to. They are suspended in limbo, unable to move on. There is something disquieting about them: they are the spectres at the feast, they never seem to sleep, their presence disturbs. Writer ghosts are much the same. They upset those who are in the world, reminding them of things they would rather ignore. They spoil the party, they can appear at inconvenient moments, and their energy lingers for a long time.

  When I was in St. Andrews, hundreds of miles from London, I was an absent presence in Tiger's life, a ghostly creature he could summon at will. Did I even exist at all? Most people would have doubted it—just as with a “real” ghost. After all, much of the evidence was purely anecdotal and therefore prone to construction and interpretation. In the early days, at a launch party for one of Tiger's books, I got talking to a magazine editor, a commanding force on London's literary gossip circuit, who said he had heard that Tiger was helped by “some woman up in Scotland;” adding, surreally, that since no one had ever met her she probably didn't exist. The strangeness of this encounter appealed to me, and in any case I was still at the stage of finding it restful to hide behind someone else. It seemed to be a natural continuation of the translation work, and in fact I felt this for many years. Concealing your identity can actually be a strange sort of liberation; it can even be self-affirming, since eventually you work out who you really are by living who you are not.

  In later years, when I was spending more and more time working in the London palace, I still remained a shadowy spirit. Famous people regularly turned up to lunch or to be interviewed. I would have loved to meet some of them—particularly those whose books I had read or whose biographies I had researched— but as soon as the doorbell rang I knew it was time for me to disappear. “Make yourself rare!” Tiger would say.

  For a while Tiger continued to perform breathtaking juggling acts with money, all the while firing off more scatter-shot letters. Surely one would hit the target? But time went on, and no outside investor came forward. The bank, keen to protect its own interests, applied more pressure. It was a gloomy time.

  The Bank: gradually, these two little words came to symbolise all that was wrong with the world. They were shorthand for ruination and disaster, they fuelled resentment and a feeling of persecution, they were the reason for everything and nothing. They stopped books being published, they cancelled parties, they plagued every conversation and spoiled the fun. Phone calls with his girls, normally a wellspring of happiness, consisted of fractured, plaintive talk—“Beloved, if only I could! I would love to. But, you know, the Bank …” Letters from the Bank arrived every week, and from time to time a middle-aged man with a briefcase and a double-breasted suit would visit in person. In the days and hours before his arrival a pall of darkness was draped over the building, but the minute he had gone the light would come flooding back. “I charmed him,” Tiger always said. “I had him eating out of my hand. He loves me!” And he would grin as if the past few months had been a stupid misunderstanding or a trick of the imagination. For a day or two he went on a spree, and his spirits lifted, shored up by bright hopes and whistles in the dark. But the stay of execution soon expired, and it was back to “But, you know, the Bank.”

  The gloom pitched its tent and looked as if it might stay a while. Gloom, being the colour of sludge, sat awkwardly in the glittering palace with its bright bordello colours. And like pollen, it rubbed off on anyone who came into contact with it. Tiger stopped inviting beautiful people to lunch. “How can I entertain someone when I have the Bank?” was a recurring cri de coeur. At lunch he had to make do with the Girl Friday, his secretary, the cook and me. In spite of the lightness of our shadows, we were a grim second-rate bunch and a constant reminder of the sinking state of affairs. We didn't eat in the splendid dining-room but sat at a small table in the basement bar where, in keeping with the prevailing mood, there was no natural light. Mostly we tried to cheer him up, take his mind off things, but it didn't work. Everything was too effing terrible, too effing awful. Occasionally, just for the hell of it, we tried to outgloom him. It couldn't be done.

  During this time, just to make matters worse, the columns came to an end. The editor at the newspaper had moved on and Tiger's slot was soon swept away by the new broom. “Just imagine!” he said, banging his desk with brute force. He looked suddenly so strong and angry—any minute now he might tear up telephone directories. “Getting rid of us! It's an outrage! What fools these people are!” And he rose to his full height before gliding goose-winged round the room, fulminating against the new editor who couldn't even kiss a donkey's saddle, he said, never mind the donkey.

  Every so often, in a bid to lift his mood, he would splash out on something he didn't need. He would appear in the doorway of the library where I worked. “Come! We shall walk together for five minutes,” and we would leave the building without delay and head for Bond Street. At times of great purpose like this, he moved like a speed-walker, his hip joints rotating in their sockets, his arms bent at the elbows to aid forward propulsion. People in the street stopped to stare. When we reached the shops he would quickly buy something he didn't need—a leather jacket maybe, or a fur hat. It was all over in an instant, the item grabbed randomly and purchased speedily, as if he couldn't wait to leave the shop and get it over with. “Don't bother to wrap it,” he would say to the puzzled assistant, as he snatched the beautiful garment from careful hands preparing to tuck it into soft tissue. Such a mission had the feel of a desperate, almost furtive act, like a quick trip to a whorehouse, something to answer a need rather than fulfil a desire. Out on the street he would immediately tear up the receipt into tiny pieces before throwing them into a bin, and on the way back to the palace he would tell me that he had dozens of leather jackets. “What do I want with another one?”

  This appetite for divertissement grew stronger as the crisis deepened. It was usually something impulsive and gratifying, like oysters from Fortnum and Mason's, or a dash to the latest fashionable restaurant to eat marinated kangaroo and talk about it afterwards. But there were regular indulgences too. Every Friday morning the chauf
feur picked him up at 5:30 and drove him to Bermondsey Market in south London where he wandered from stall to stall in search of very particular artefacts: phalluses carved out of ivory. In a short time he had built up quite a collection—dozens of sculpted male figures with huge penises. “The sale of ivory is banned now,” he said merrily, “so they are worth collecting.” The day I went with him he showed me how he worked the stalls, making eye contact in the half-dark with certain sellers who would then indicate if they had something interesting to show. One man in a cloth cap and fingerless gloves gave a nod. Tiger grabbed me by the arm— “Look, he's got something for me!”—and we pushed through the crowd towards him. “Let's hope it's a good one.” Evidently it was, and Tiger was content to pay a small fortune for an ivory twosome with outsize erections in a homoerotic tangle. Back in the car he said, “I'm so happy now.” It seemed a precarious happiness, but it served the purpose of nudging the gloom sideways for a moment or two.

  In a similar vein, and despite the crippling cash flow problems, he ordered on a whim the manufacture of thousands of key-rings made of solid silver. They had been specially designed in the shape of exaggerated male genitalia. “It's a brilliant idea, don't you agree?” His eyes twinkled. He loved to provoke a reaction. “The poofters will love it! I am sitting on a goldmine!” I said I couldn't possibly judge but hoped he was right. Part of his undoubted thrill was to show off his latest craze to people visiting the palace and judge them according to their reactions. Women who were exceptionally favoured might even receive one as a gift, though it became clear that the number of women to whom you might, even in a gesture of uncomplicated beneficence, give a silver phallus key-ring, is actually quite limited. I once witnessed someone failing the character test, a woman of wit and intelligence and deputy editor of a respected magazine. On being shown the key-ring and exhorted to hold it—“Go on! Touch it! Feel it! It's solid silver!”— she could not hide her distaste and, with a curl of the lip, she uttered the fateful words. “Oh dear.” Whereupon she was cast into outer darkness and never invited back. Indeed her name could never be mentioned without Tiger recollecting her reaction and cursing her anew:

  “Do you remember? What she said about my silver penis? How did she get to be deputy editor with an attitude like that?”

  Though it was hard not to admire his willingness to take risks and to back a hunch, the key-rings did not sell. Somewhere there is a silver penis mountain waiting for good homes.

  Out of the blue, a saviour materialised—a deus ex machina who would avowedly deliver Tiger from his torment. This was a saviour so perfect that had he not existed it would have been necessary to invent him.

  “Our problems are over,” said Tiger, eyes bright with relief.

  “That's wonderful news,” I said.

  It was October 1998 and we were on our way to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The deus in question turned out to be Greek, which I thought was incredibly apt, given that Greek dramatists were the first to think of dropping a god from a contraption above the stage to sort out the tragic drama beneath.

  “How did you find him?” I asked.

  “I didn't. He found me,” said Tiger. He was laughing now. Everything was going to be all right.

  “So you don't actually know him?”

  “Of course, I know him! We've known each other for thirty years!”

  I wondered why hadn't I heard of him before. I had worked for Tiger for nearly twenty years, and The Greek—as we came to call him—had never been mentioned. Closer questioning revealed that they had met, once, thirty years ago. And no, Tiger didn't actually recall the meeting, though The Greek remembered it very well. Oh God, I thought, I don't like the sound of this. But Tiger was upbeat, and during the flight to Frankfurt I swear the angels sang. Evidently The Greek had important contacts in the Saudi royal family who were looking to invest in London. This was the break Tiger had been waiting for. The Sah-oo-deez, as he called them, regarded his empire as a golden opportunity, and they were keen, in fact very keen, to sink money into it.

  “They are so excited.”

  However, there followed many miserable months of false hopes and broken promises. The Greek seemed permanently to be sorting out the final details with different banks, documents were just about to be signed, and the money was always just on the point of being paid: it was coming on Monday for sure, by the end of the week without fail, and then without a shadow of a doubt the following week. It was an endless cycle and always, at the last minute, there would be some unexpected hitch that strained credibility. Tiger was told the Sah-oo-deez had fallen out among themselves, or that they had to return home for Ramadan, or a vital signature was required from a high-ranking family member and just my luck, they cant fucking find him! There were also trustees, shadowy figures in the background, who complicated things and according to Tiger were a law unto themselves. And so it went on, a form of Chinese water torture designed to drive the prisoner mad.

  Being at someone else's mercy was not a role that suited Tiger— he was much too used to being in absolute control. But he seemed to have run out of options: he had given his word to the Bank, he had staked everything on the money coming through, and the future depended on it. As time went on and the Bank increased the pressure, he demonstrated that the human capacity to put a positive interpretation on something is infinite. Every new difficulty was explained away as an unfortunate happening, an unforeseen difficulty, just one of those things. Thus blind belief in The Greek was prolonged without a shred of evidence that he was bona fide. In a tragedy the tragic hero cannot see himself; no more can he save himself, and we cannot save him either.

  At the outset of negotiations Tiger had purchased two state-of-the-art mobile phones: one for himself and one for The Greek, so that they could be in constant communication about the deal. He was pleased with this plan—his way of staying in control. With a dedicated mobile he would never miss a call and the line would never be engaged. “I will know exactly where he is at any given time,” he said. Soon this private mobile became the focus of an obsession as well as the central visual metaphor for the grimness of that time. It tyrannised and enslaved him, but it was also a kind of lifeline: for it held out the promise of a solution to the crisis, and in so doing seemed to protect him from the unimaginable. His day was organised around it, and his careful routine altered to accommodate the critical calls that came on it. At the end of each call from The Greek he would extract a promise of a further call, pinning his tormentor down to a precise time, agreeing to it, confirming it, then repeating it at the last one more time so that there could be no misunderstanding. During these conversations his voice was permanently raised. The time in between calls—usually no more than an hour or so—was taken up with compulsive checking of his watches and waiting for the mobile to ring. Meanwhile everything else assumed the proportions of a small catastrophe. “Where is my mango?” he would roar down the intercom to the cook in the basement. “Why is it late?” And after a swift mango delivery: “I hate it with a spoon. I need a fork!”

  This was how he kept control. There must be no seepage points. Which meant that things that really did not matter started mattering a great deal. Threatening missives had to be written to Westminster City Council on the subject of bollards outside the palace, and indignant letters were fired off to newspaper editors who had failed to review his books. The water in the humidifier by his desk had to be kept at a certain level at all times. He accused imaginary enemies of imaginary crimes. He became ever more neurotic about punctuality and hygiene. He raged at the world and the unfairness of it. And the more things declined on the large scale, the more he wasted energy on the small. Each new dawn brought a fresh panic, a new layer of agitation—a light bulb blowing, the wrong size of envelope. One day he gravely summoned me to his room and charged me to conduct an investigation: “Listen carefully, one of my girls has done a poo in the loo. Find out the culprit and report back to me.” When I protested, saying that I couldn't possibly do as
he asked, he rose in a fury and bellowed: “I will not tolerate it. The smell is appalling. How dare they behave like that!”

  As the time of the next expected call from The Greek drew near, he would start the countdown—“In ten minutes it will ring … in five minutes it will ring …” He had moved the mobile carefully to a position right in front of him on the desk, as if proximity might prompt it to action. And then he would stare at it, come on, come on, willing it to ring. “Why don't you ring?” “Why don't you ring, damn you?” he would say, gorging on the pathetic fallacy. And then a few moments later, almost insouciantly, as if regaining the upper hand: “Just wait,”—a knowing smile in my direction—“you'll see. It will ring now. I know it will.” I always had a powerful urge to withdraw at this point and often tried to excuse myself, saying I had work to do, but he wouldn't hear of it. “Wait! Wait!” he would say. “Don't go! Just stay there!” I found it a dispiriting business, an exercise in futility, as we sat around endlessly, peering at a gismo and wanting something from it, like two lost souls out of Waiting for Godot. I was full of pity for him, while knowing how much he would hate it. I imagined him at night, sitting up through the small hours, staring at this wretched gadget while the rest of London slept. Couldn't you ring him? I asked more than once. But no, he couldn't. “He's at the bank, you see,” or, “He's meeting the trustees.” Sometimes when he could endure it no longer he did try ringing The Greek, both on the mobile and at home. But it was always the answering machine, which just made matters worse. Tiger hated answering machines.