Ghosting (24 page)
Authors: Jennie Erdal
When you come to write, things creep out of the back of your mind as well as the front. I suppose we carry our history around with us. The characters in the new novel were beginning to ride my hobby-horses and, though they struck out on their own from time to time, they had a curious way of returning to the familiar pathways of my own preoccupations: Russian literature, the puzzle of memory, the absence of God, the nature of truth. Show your workings, the teacher at school would tell us as we grappled with multiplication and long division. And now I was showing the workings of this novel, with the result that a gap was opening up between the thing begun and the unfolding story. Here is an example of what I mean. It occurs in the passage where the grief-stricken mother wanders through Oxford with no clear sense of purpose:
She felt it was important to be near people, to observe the details of ordinary living. In time she thought they
would make her well again. Sometimes she found herself gazing at people, observing their pleasure secondhand, and feeling detached from it at the same time, like tapping into someone else's memory. Her daughter had asked her once if it was possible to have someone else's memories. No, she said, memory is an individual, subjective thing. Afterwards she had worried about her answer. She knew from her studies that memory can be distorted in various ways, not least by our knowledge and expectation of the world. We can also inherit memories and build our own out of the rubble of other people's.
Since the summer she had thought a lot about memory, and how much she had underestimated its importance. It was possible that a person's very existence could be measured in terms of the extent to which he entered the memory of others. It was her memory of Oliver, for example,
and nothing else,
which made him part of the present and gave him a place in the future. In
Doctor Zhivago
there is a passage where Yury tries to give comfort to Anna, who believes she is dying. He tells her that throughout her years on earth her identity has been firmly established in the minds and hearts of others:
You in others are yourself, your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life—your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others.
And what does it matter to you if later on it is called your memory? It will still be you.
*
As a student Kate had read these lines again and again, thinking them the most beautiful version of immortality she had come across, although no one close to her had yet died. Or disappeared.
There is a lot of cross-border trading going on here, between the details of the fiction and the story of a life—the life of the ghost in this case. The passage about memory, for example, can be taken at face value within the fictional context of a mother thinking about her missing child; at another level it was a veiled way of alluding to one of the bizarre aspects of my job—that of inventing episodes in Tiger's life and thereby “giving” him memories that he couldn't possibly have. This was something that troubled me from time to time and applied particularly to his childhood, which I sometimes wrote about in newspaper articles, embellishing and enriching it in ways that pleased (and sometimes moved) him but had only a tenuous connection with biographical truth. Occasionally his childhood was impossibly, even ludicrously, romanticised—water being drawn from the well where the Virgin Mary had drunk, soil being tilled, and a wise old grandmother at whose feet the young boy heard tales of derring-do about the Ottoman empire. Once I had to check an atlas to establish if it really was possible to see the hills of Galilee, as I had described, from the spot of some invented childhood scene. At times it felt deceitful, but
that didn't stop me. I'm no longer sure why I did this, although it seemed to be what was wanted at the time, and I think the absurdity of it all appealed to me. I also remember feeling a sense of power and being strangely excited by it.
And now the same sort ofthing, only in reverse, was happening with the ghosting process. I was raiding my own knowledge and experience of the world rather than the author's. Although the novel is set in and around Oxford, for example, I deliberately used local place names from the East Neuk of Fife where I lived—Lower Kenly, Upper Kenly, Kenly Green. For some reason this was exhilarating. And in creating the character of the academic, I poked fun at my ex-husband who had something of a reputation among his colleagues for self-importance and a sense of his own suffering in the world. This felt even more exhilarating.
Julian loved himself every bit as much as his self-adulation required. He considered himself the most moral of men, not in any prudishly upright way, but in the manner of a man who has examined his position carefully and separated right from wrong. Like the anti-hero in Dostoevsky's
Notes from the Underground,
he believed there were two sets of people: normal people and those like himself of enhanced awareness. This conviction came about through extensive reading and thinking about literature, which he believed contained all the truth of the world. The penalty for his enhanced sensitivity was increased suffering. In his own mind Julian suffered more than most men, far more than Edward, for example. He loved his brother dearly, but… he felt a certain remoteness from him. Those who do
not grapple with art, he thought, cannot hope to make sense of life. Nor can they appreciate—except in the most superficial way—the struggle between good and evil, duty and desire, honour and pleasure. They may be spared some of the agony of existence, but they will never truly understand the world.
Julian's pain was not always obvious to others since so much of it took place beneath the surface. Those who were less finely turned than himself often failed to appreciate it. But he did not mind, for the rewards were commensurate with the suffering itself. These included deeper insights, a profound moral sense, and an understanding of the nature of love. It was in this last area, love, that Julian felt his heightened sensibilities had exposed him to the greatest pain.
And so on. And so on. Of course I did not tell Tiger that this Julian character was a caricature of my ex. How could I? But also, how could I
not
? I persuaded myself that what he didn't know couldn't hurt him, but that has ever been a woeful cop-out. In truth I think I had begun to sign away my soul.
One of the more pressing difficulties with the book was that I did not feel confident about being able to fulfil Tiger's orgasmic stipulation, so to speak. I had hinted to him that there might be complications in the literary execution, but he continued to regard it as a
sine qua non
of the action. I had been proceeding on the assumption
that Tiger's idea was a male sexual fantasy. Men love the idea of having a third person in on the act—or so women think. A little elementary research, however, led me to believe that it was not an absolutely standard male fantasy, yet I still thought it would be best to treat it as fantasy in the novel. I broached this line of reasoning as delicately as possible, but Tiger was having none of it.
“What nonsense!” he barked.
“But surely, it's the only way,” I said. “Otherwise it won't be plausible.”
“How can it be plausible if he doesn't
do
it? It can only be plausible if he
does
do it. Why don't you see that? We have to make him
do
it.”
There was a lot at stake here. I had to hold my ground.
“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.