Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  You could get lost in these northeast London streets. I was halflost myself. They curve around themselves in cul-de-sacs and crescents and groves. A few months ago I spent the night bonking the Welsh Ladies Kickboxing Champion in a caravan somewhere beyond Hammersmith. She’d said that the whole of London seemed like one vast rat’s maze to her. I’d said yes, but what if the rats happened to like being in the maze?

  The leaves are covering up the cracks in the pavement. When I was a kid I could lose myself for hours kicking through fallen leaves, while avoiding dog turds and cracks. I used to be superstitious, but I’m not anymore. I used to be a Christian, but I’m not one of those anymore either. Then I was a Marxist. I used to wait with my cadre leader outside Queensway tube station and ask people what they thought about the Bosnian Question. Of course, most people shrug you off. “I see, sir, no comment, is it?” I cringe to think of it now.

  I guess I’m not anything much these days, apart from older. A part-time Buddhist, maybe.

  I remembered to worry about Poppy’s period. A condom had burst on us, when was it? Ten days ago. Her period is due sometime at the end of next week.… Give it another week, due to stress incurred by waiting for it.… That’s two weeks before panic starts knocking, and three weeks before I let it in. Oh well. India would love a little brother to play with. And when, in twenty years’ time, a professor of philosophy asks him, “Why do you exist?” he can toy with his nose-ring and answer, “Rugged lust and ruptured rubber.” Weird. If I’d bought the pack behind on the condom shelf he wouldn’t be/won’t be sitting there. Unmix that conditional and smoke it.

  Of course, I might be sterile. Now that really would be annoying. All that money wasted on unnecessary condoms. Well, there’s been AIDS to worry about, I suppose. Highbury playing fields. I’ve almost escaped. I like the Victorian skyline, and I like the pigeons flying through the tunnels of trees. Teenagers smoking on the swings. Last time I was here was bonfire night, with Poppy and India. It was the first time India had seen fireworks. She took in the spectacle with royal dignity, but kept talking about them for days. She’s a very cool kid, like her mother.

  It’ll be bonfire night again, soon. You can see your breath. When I was a kid I used to pretend I was a locomotive. What kid doesn’t? Old men are walking their labradors across the muddy turf. There are young fathers on the pathways, teaching their kids how to ride their bikes without stabilizers. Some of these fathers are younger than me. I bet those are their BMWs. Me, I walk everywhere. That’s Tony Blair’s old house. A postman emptying a postbox. Walking past these old terraced houses is like browsing down a shelf of books. A student’s pad, a graphic designer’s studio, a family with their kitchen done out in primary colors and pictures from school fridge-magneted onto the fridge. An antiquarian’s study. A basement full of toys—a helicopter going round and round and round. A huntin’, shootin’, buggerin’ living room with paintings and fittings that clear their throats and say “burgle this house!” to all the people trudging past to the Arsenal and Finsbury Park unemployment centers. Offices of obscure support groups, watchdog headquarters, and impotent trade unions. Three men in black suits stride past, turning down Calabria Road, one speaking into a cell phone, another carrying a briefcase. What are they doing here on a Saturday? Must be estate agents. How come they end up with that life, and I end up with this one? I could have been a lawyer, or an accountant, or a whatever you have to be to afford a house around Highbury playing fields, too, if I had wanted to. I was adopted by middle-class parents in Surrey, I went to a good school. I got a job in a city firm. I was twenty-two and I was taking Prozac for breakfast. I had my very own shrink. I wince to think of the money I paid him to tell me what the matter was. When I told him I’d been adopted his eyes lit up! He’d done his Ph.D. in adopted kids. But I discovered the answer myself in the end. I had stopped taking plunges. I don’t mean risks: I mean plunges, the uprooting and throwing of oneself into something entirely new.

  Now I live like this, losing the battle against a battery of deadlines—especially financial ones—but at least they are deadlines of my own choosing, there because I’ve plunged myself into something again. It’s not always an easy way to live. Independence and insecurity hobble along together in my three-legged race. Jim—my adoptive dad—tells me this is a choice I made, and that I shouldn’t ask for sympathy. And that’s true. But why did I make that choice? That’s what I wonder about. Because I am me, is the answer. But that just postpones the question. Why am I me?

  Chance, that’s why. Because of the cocktail of genetics and upbringing fixed for me by the blind barman Chance.

  That Big Issue vendor guy there, why is he selling his magazine next to a shop where people spend £250 on a brass-knobbed antique bedstead and congratulate themselves on a bargain? Chance. Why is that guy a bus driver, and that woman a rushed-off-her-feet waitress in Pizza Hut? Chance. People say they choose, but it comes down to the same thing: why people choose what they choose is also down to chance. Why did that gray oily pigeon lose its leg, but that white and brown one didn’t? Chance. Why did that curvaceous model get to model those particular jeans? Chance. Isn’t all this obvious? That short woman in an orange anorak wandering across the road in front of that taxi, with the driver mentally stripping the leggy woman striding past with a flopsy dog—why is she about to be mown down, and not me?

  —fuck!

  The second time this morning when I didn’t know how I ended up lying next to an unknown female. This time was even more uncomfortable than the last. There was a pulsation in my left leg that hurt. There’d been a screech of brakes, and a sleeve ripping. Something flew through the air—that would be me—and the round eye of the taxi. This woman looked much more shocked than Katy Forbes had. She had a dead leaf and a lollipop stick sticking to her face.

  “Stone the crows,” she said. Irish. Middle-aged. The lollipop stick dropped off.

  The taxi driver was standing over us, a fat Cockney. Santa Claus without the beard or the love of humanity. I heard his engine, still running. He was deciding whether to be irate or compassionate. “Ruddy Bleedin’ Nora, love! Why didn’t you look where you was going?”

  “I—” Her eyes looked around like a puppet’s. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  “Any bones broken?” The question was to both of us.

  My leg was still complaining loudly, but I found I could stand and wiggle my toes. The woman picked herself up.

  “I saw everything,” said the leggy woman with the flopsy dog and a Sloaney accent. “He rugby tackled her out of the way of the taxi. And they tumbled over and over. I’m sure he saved her life, you know.” There was no one else to tell but the taxi driver who wasn’t listening to her.

  “I’m much obliged to you,” said the anorak woman, getting up and dusting herself down, as if I’d just handed her a cup of tea. Her eye socket was already reddening.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, in the same way. “You’re going to have a black eye.”

  “The least of my troubles. Is your taxi free?” the anorak woman asked the taxi driver.

  “You sure you’re all right, love? No knocks on the head now?”

  “No, no, I’m quite all right. But can you give me a ride in your cab?”

  “I give rides in my cab to anybody with the fare, love. But look ‘ere—”

  “I must look a pretty sight, but so would you if you’d … never mind. I’m sane, and solvent. Please take me to the airport.”

  He was suspicious, but she was serious. “Well, I suppose as long as you’re inside my taxi, you can’t try and kill yourself under it. Heathrow, Gatwick, or London City?”

  “Gatwick, please.”

  The taxi driver looked at me. “You all right, son?”

  I looked around for somebody to tell me the answer but there was nobody. “I guess so.”

  The taxi driver looked back at the woman. “Then climb in.”

  They got in and drove off.

&nbs
p; “Well,” said the leggy woman, “how frightfully bizarre!”

  I picked myself up and walked away from the little cluster of passersby that was threatening to gather. Weird. If that chair hadn’t arrived when it did, and Katy hadn’t flipped out and asked me to leave, then I wouldn’t have been at that precise spot to stop that woman being flattened. I’ve never saved anyone’s life before. It felt as ordinary as collecting photographs from Boots the Chemist. Slightly exciting beforehand, but basically a let-down. I walked past a phone box and thought about calling Poppy to tell her what had just happened. Nah. She might think I was boasting. I was already thinking about other things. I went over the zebra crossing outside Highbury and Islington tube station, the one by the roundabout, and was searching my coat for a fiver that I hoped I’d put there for emergencies when the same three men in black suits I’d seen earlier hustled me away from the ticket machine and around the corner, behind a newspaper kiosk. I was still shaken from my rugby tackle, so it took me a few moments to realize what was happening. People in the background were deliberately not noticing. Bloody Islington.

  I almost saw the funny side of it. “If you want to mug me and take my money, you’ve really chosen the wrong—”

  “WewannAweewordAboo’ tha’ the’ wurmansonny!”

  Was I being mugged in Kurdish? “I’m terribly sorry?”

  He jabbed my sternum with an iron forefinger. “About—that—woman—” Oh, a Scot. Which woman? Katy Forbes? Were these her boyfriends?

  The next one drawled. “That lady in the orange raincoat, boy.” A Texan? A Texan and a Scot. This was sounding like the first line of a joke. These people weren’t joking, though. They looked like they had never joked since kindergarten. Debt collectors? “The woman you just pulled from in front of that there taxi. There were witnesses.”

  “Oh. Her. Yes.”

  “We’re policemen.” Did I have anything illegal on me? No … The Scot flashed his ID for a moment. “Where did she say she was going?”

  “I, er—”

  “The lady with the legs and the dawgie said she was going to an airport. Now all we want to know from you is which airport she was heading for.”

  “Heathrow.” I still have no idea why I lied, but once the lie was out it was too dangerous to try to recapture it.

  “Ye quite sure aboot that noo, laddie?”

  “Oh yes. Quite sure.”

  They looked at me like executioners. The third one who hadn’t said anything spat. Then they turned and piled into a Jaguar with smoked glass windows that was waiting behind the flower stall. It screeched off, leaving people staring at me. I can’t blame them. I would have stared at me, too.

  ————

  As the fine denizens of London Town know, each tube line has a distinct personality and range of mood swings. The Victoria Line for example, breezy and reliable. The Jubilee Line, the young disappointment of the family, branching out to the suburbs, eternally having extensions planned, twisting round to Greenwich, and back under the river out east somewhere. The District and Circle Line, well, even Death would rather fork out for a taxi if he’s in a hurry. Crammed with commuters for King’s Cross or Padding-ton, and crammed with museum-bound tourists who don’t know the craftier short cuts, it’s as bad as how I imagine Tokyo. I had a professor once who asked us to prove that the Circle Line really does go around in a circle. Nobody could. I was dead impressed at the time. Now what impresses me is that he’d persuaded somebody to pay him to come up with that sort of tosh. Docklands Light Railway, the nouveau riche neighbor, with its Prince Regent, its West India Quay, and its Gallions Reach and its Royal Albert. Stentorian Piccadilly wouldn’t approve of such artyfartyness, and neither would his twin uncle, Bakerloo. Central, the middle-aged cousin, matter-of-fact, direct, no forking off or going the long way round. That’s about it for the main lines, except the Metropolitan, which is too boring to mention, except that it’s a nice fuchsia color and you take it to visit the dying.

  Then you have the oddball lines, like Shakespeare’s oddball plays. Pericles, Hammersmith and City, East Verona Line, Titus of Waterloo.

  The Northern Line is black on the maps. It’s the deepest. It has the most suicides, you’re most likely to get mugged on it, and its art students are most likely to be future Bond Girls. There’s something doom-laden about the Northern Line. Its station names: Morden, Brent Cross, Goodge Street, Archway, Elephant and Castle, the resurrected Mornington Crescent. It was closed for years: I remember imagining I was on a probe peering into the Titanic as the train passed through. Yep, the Northern Line is the psycho of the family. Those bare-walled stations south of the Thames that can’t attract advertisers. Not even stair-lift manufacturers will advertise in Kennington tube station. I’ve never been to Kennington but if I did I bet there’d be nothing but run-down fifties housing blocks, closed-down bingo halls, and a used-car place where tatty plastic banners fluppetty-flup in the homeless wind. The sort of place where best-forgotten films starring British rock stars as working-class antiheroes are set. There but for the grace of my credit cards go I.

  London is a language. I guess all places are.

  I catch a good rhythm in the swaying of the carriages. A blues riff on top of it … or maybe something Iranian … I note it down on the back of my hand. A pong of salt marshes and meadows … ah yes, Katy Forbes’s perfume.

  Look at her! Look at that woman. Febrile. Corvine. Black velvet clothes, not an ounce of sluttiness about her. Intelligent and alert, what’s that book she’s reading? And her skin—that perfect West African black, so black it has a bluish tinge. Those gorgeous, proud lips. What’s she reading? Tilt it this way a bit, love.… Nabokov! I knew it. She has a brain! But if I break that rule and talk to her, even if I break the middle-way seating rule and sit one seat nearer to her than I need to, she’ll think I’m threatening her and the defenses will slam down. None of these problems would exist if we had just met by chance at a party. Same her, same me. But chance brings us together here, where we cannot meet.

  Still, it’s a fine morning, up on the surface of the world. I saved somebody’s life forty minutes ago. The universe owes me one. I stand up and walk towards her before I think about it anymore.

  I’m about to say “Excuse me” when the door from the next compartment opens and a homeless guy walks in. His eyes have seen things that I hope mine never do. He has a big gash where half of his eyebrow should be. There’s a lot of frauds around, but this guy isn’t one. Even so. There are so many thousands of genuine homeless people, if you give even a little to each you’ll end up on the street yourself. When you’re a Marco your last defense against destitution is selfishness.

  “Excuse me.” His voice has a hollow fatigue that cannot be faked. “I’m very sorry to bother everyone, I know it’s embarrassing for us all. But I have nowhere to sleep tonight, and it’s going to be another freezing one. There’s a bed in the Summerford Hostel, but I need to get £12.50 by tonight to be allowed in. If you can help, please do. I know you all just want to go about your business, and I’m very sorry. I just don’t know what else to say to people.…”

  People stare at the floor. Even to look at a homeless person is to sign a contract with them. I dabbled with joining the Samaritans once. The supervisor had been homeless for three years. I remember him saying that the worst thing was the invisibility. That and not being able to go anywhere where nobody else could go. Imagine that, owning nothing with a lock, except a toilet cubicle in King’s Cross Station, with a junkie on one side and a pimp on the other.

  Sod it. Roy will give me some money later.

  I give the man a couple of quid I was going to get a cappuccino with, but coffee’s bad for you anyway, and I was still buzzing from Katy’s percolator.

  “Thank you very much,” he says. I nod, our eyes meeting just for a moment. He’s in a bad way. He shuffles into the next carriage. “Excuse me everyone, I’m very sorry to bother you.…”

  The girl in black velvet gets off
at the next station. Now I’ll never get to taste oysters sliding down the chute of my tongue with her.

  I couldn’t hack the Samaritans, by the way. I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards, worrying about the possible endings of the stories that had been started. Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter. The endings have nothing to do with me.

  There’s one decent place on the Northern Line. That’s where I’m heading now: Hampstead. The elevator lugs you back up to street level in less than a minute. Don’t try taking the spiral stairs to save time. Take it from me. It’s quicker to dig your way up.

  The obligatory silence of elevators. Could be a Music of Chance song title.

  It’s a chance to have a think. Even Gibreel shuts up in elevators.

  Poppy once said to me that womanizers are victims.

  “Victims of what?”

  “An inability to communicate with women in any other way.” She added that womanizers either never knew their mother, or never had a good relationship with their mother.

  I was oddly annoyed. “So the womanizer wants every woman he sleeps with to be his surrogate mother?”

  “No,” said Poppy, reasoning when she should be defending. “I don’t quite know what you want from us. But it’s something to do with approval.”

  The elevator doors open and you’re suddenly out into a leafy street where even McDonald’s had to tone down their red and yellow for black and gold, to help it blend in with the bookshops. Old money lives in Hampstead. The last of the empire money. They take their grandchildren on birthday trips to the British Museum, and poison one another’s spouses in elegant ways. When I worked as a delivery boy for a garden center I had a woman here, once, called Samantha or Anthea or Panthea. She lived in a house opposite her mother, and not only loved her pony more than me, which I can understand, but she even loved repairing wicker-seated chairs more than me. My, my, Marco, that was a long time ago.