The Ghost (3 page)

Cook studied him, uncertain about the idea of a protector – it felt like taking on a debt he knew he couldn't repay.

And then, a louder, deeper voice.

“Will you two get inside? The whistle went five minutes ago!”

This was the headmaster, Mr Austin – monolithic and walrus-faced – on the top step outside the school's back entrance. He tapped at the face of his watch.

“Coming, sir!” said Mountford.

Austin shifted to one side. Mountford scaled the steps and squeezed through the deliberately ungenerous space. Cook followed.

*

Cook was first out of the classroom door as the hometime bell rang. He took down his coat, ran across to the class opposite (Mrs Mellor's) and waited as the door opened and the children lined up to be released, alphabetically, according to surname. Lisa Goldstraw was the fifth to leave. She smiled as she saw Cook.

“Hiya, Dorian! Are you going home?”

“Uh, yeah…” said Cook.

To avoid the end-of-day crush around the pegs, Mrs Mellor insisted that her class retrieve their coats at afternoon break, and so Lisa was already wearing her dark blue quilted overcoat with detachable hood. Cook was annoyed at this – he had recognised the coat earlier and planned to bring it to the door himself.

“Y'alright?” said Lisa, as they passed through the huddle of parents at the main gate.

“Yeah. Got hit by a ball at playtime.”

Lisa giggled. “That's daft.”

“Couldn't get out of the way!”

She looked at him, doubtfully. “Shoulda been quicker, then!”

“I
am
quick!”

Lisa laughed and flicked up her hood.

At the crossing, the lollipop lady chatted to Lisa about a borrowed cooking dish she wanted her to pass on to her mother. Cook maintained a respectful distance throughout the exchange, hovering close enough to confirm himself as Lisa's companion.

They headed down past the oil-works and turned off onto the road that led to Lisa's street.

“Coming with me?” she said, as if only just noticing.

Cook was about to answer when she suddenly lurched forward, shouting, “Leave him alone!”

Half-way down a sloping side alley, almost out of sight of the main road, a group of four boys were standing in a semicircle. They faced a smaller figure who was squatting down with his back against a high wall, as two of the bigger boys aimed kicks at his legs and body.

“What's he ever done to you?” shouted Lisa.

One of the boys looked up briefly and then got back to business. Their target was foetal, hands covering his face. As Cook caught up with Lisa at the entrance to the alley, he saw a whip of white hair and realised it was John Ray.

“They're all so horrible to him!” shouted Lisa, dashing past the alley. Cook was not so phoney-brave as to plan an intervention, but he was shocked to hear Ray droning out piteous little wails of pain and protest, each punctuated by a pause as he inhaled enough breath to deliver the next. One of his assailants imitated the noise as he kicked, while the others sneered and sniggered. After each impact, Ray fell briefly silent and then resumed wailing, until the next blow interrupted him again.

And then, Cook felt himself stop and turn and run, carried by a surge of misplaced outrage. He pelted around the corner into the alley and saw that Ray had now coiled into a tight ball at the boys' feet.

“We could roll him down the hill like that!”

Cook was still running. In a few seconds, he would be within striking distance of the boys, although there was no question of making any kind of contact. So, what exactly was the plan? If he was supposed to be a bull – head down, horns cocked, hoof grinding – then his enemies entirely failed to cower before his uncastrated menace. They laughed – loud and cruel – as he slowed and shouted.

“Stop hitting him!”

The group turned away from Ray and faced Cook. A heavy-looking lad with greasy hair stepped forward.

“Why?”

Not, ‘who says?' or, ‘make us!' or, ‘what are you gonna do about it?' Just, ‘why?'

Cook had no answer. He stood there, in the glare of his audience, paralysed by intrigue and indecision – more watchful kitten than wild beast.

“Dorian!” Lisa was calling from the road junction at the alley entrance. “Come on! I'll get my dad.”

The greasy-haired boy sniggered. “Is that your girlfriend, Doreen?”

Cook smouldered with impotent fury. He watched as two of the boys held Ray's arms while another trained the bright light of a pocket torch into his eyes.

“Keep his head still!”

Having assessed Cook and determined a nominal threat, the bigger boy turned back and rejoined the game. He gripped Ray's head firmly and forced his eyes open with his thumbs.

“Watch! He hates this!”

Ray was half-moaning, half-growling. He had gone limp – an exhausted quarry, downed by predators, resigned to the inevitable. The boy with the torch passed the beam across his eyes. Ray reacted as if his fingers had been pushed into an electrical socket. He bayed and bucked with agony, trying to shuffle himself up to a standing position. But his tormentors held him back, until he flopped forward and was allowed a few seconds of relief, before being prepared for another pass of the torch. The second time, as the light was tracked more slowly over his open eyes, Ray retched up a bellow of anger and thrashed his legs at the boys' feet, forcing them to step back.

One of the boys yelped in mock-surprise. “Look out! The ghost is getting angry!”

Ray's blue-and-white handkerchief had been used to tie his long hair up into a vertical stack at the top of his head – a joke ponytail. Cook turned and sprinted back down to the junction. A few hundred yards down the road, he could see Lisa, outside her house. She was waving and pointing, directing a large, slow-moving man as he emerged from the garden gate.

Cook backed onto the pavement, pivoted and ran to the main road, towards home, hands over his ears, muffling the sounds of John Ray's anguish until he was far enough away to pretend they had never existed.

COOK EVICTED HIMSELF FROM
the oceanic triple bed he had shared with the same woman for fifteen years. Gina had been awake and busy for so long, she had effectively lived through a parallel morning – showering, dressing, rousing Alfie and preparing his lunch-box, bringing Cook his morning tea, crunching through her usual bowl of muesli. (Cook, unfunnily, called it ‘rabbit food' and mocked her asceticism. In turn, she sneered at his ‘cardboard' Weetabix.)

Sex had been off the morning menu for two years and counting. (Gina still counted, Cook didn't.) At some point, post-Alfie, all the grappling and wheezing had started to seem faintly silly, certainly pointless – gymnastics without judges. Cook, always body-shy, was glad to be free of it all. He still flinched at the memory of their joint unveiling – Gina was slender, feline and pedigree, while Cook could only stand there, brandishing a slight, serviceable penis which jutted from a body that had accelerated ten years into the future in all directions. He was now 45 – in years and geometry. He leaned his age. Despite moderating all vice – alcohol, tobacco, chocolate, crisps, even
bread,
for Christ's sake – the bathroom mirror broadcast a clumsy clay rendering of creases, folds and unfortunate fuzz clusters. His scalp hair still carried a passing illusion of density, assisted by above-average height and judicious avoidance of overhead glare, but male-pattern baldness had clearly entered its final, irreversible, phase. With friends, Cook had a line for it – “I try to think of it as gaining head, not losing hair.” But it sounded hollow, and he had no desire to acquaint the world with the curvature of his skull. He had spent his working life sitting in darkened rooms and dreaded exposure of any kind.

Cook showered, brushed his teeth and, almost fully swaddled in toga-like bath-towel, padded back through to the bedroom. The long-untouched Jockey briefs in his underwear drawer reminded him of Brigitte, a French unit publicist he had enjoyed a
thing
with a few years ago. (It was too erratic and uncommitted to call it an affair.) Back when baby Alfie was waking two or three times a night, Cook had staggered, sleep-starved and vodka-soaked, into Brigitte's world after a book launch party at a hotel bar. They had bonded over Bresson – Cook's favourite director – and swapped a few spurious industry anecdotes. The sex was lurid and cathartic, but it was the follow-up shutdown he mostly craved. At home, he was expected to put in a daily dawn shift, supporting Gina's uncomplaining breast-feeds with a glue-eyed bottle session. Escaping to Brigitte's for the odd weekend soon became more about rest than lust.

Downstairs, Cook tag-teamed with Gina across the breakfast bar.

“Alfie's had cereal. Could you make him some toast?”

He grunted acknowledgement, pecked her on the lips, and embraced his son, noting that Gina had already harried him into school uniform, a good half an hour before he would have bothered. As Cook made coffee and slotted bread into the toaster, Gina loaded her work-bag, flattened Alfie's hair, applied lipstick, signed a trip-slip. He cringed at this casual demonstration of the female multi-task cliche, and wondered how much longer his monthly boost to the joint account could keep him relevant here, dining out on the past provision of a healthy sperm.

Alfie was old enough to go to school by himself, but Cook walked with him, anyway – if only to stir himself to action. This morning, his son bombarded him with the baffling intricacies of an online ‘monster-trading' game, and pestered for a monthly subscription. Cook offered token resistance, but eventually submitted. It was a glimpse of the future – already gone were the blissful, unstructured hours of Lego assembly, the heatwave water-pistol skirmishes, the improvised oneupmanship over reciting
The Tiger Who Came To Tea
from memory. All those Polaroid memories – all that was precious and immeasurable – was melting and melding into bipolar finance management. Would he pay for this or that videogame, this or that mobile phone, this or that school or bike or car or wedding? He and Gina would soon become little more than chief treasurers of their son's advance into adulthood.

This, of course, was life – a progressive disease. Furtive, undodgeable, terminal. With each passing year, Cook found less time to wallow in his favourite place – the moment, the now. He was wilting under the pressure of maintaining forward momentum, of always needing to press ahead when all he really wanted was to hang back and savour the flavours. But this thirst for the present fought with the unfinished business – the trailed-off sentence – of his past. That day, that decision – always clear, always present, scowling at his shoulder. If he could only turn around quickly enough, could he catch it and bag it – and change it?

*

At the
Widescreen
office, the mood was snappy exasperation. It was the monthly magazine's time of the month. The final print deadline had loomed into view, shadowing the adult staff in temporary adolescence. This was the time when the sub-editors unsheathed their scythes. Filling the pages was, effectively, the job of the section editors, but if their work wasn't all processed and produced on time, then it was the subs who would be called on to explain the lateness – and potential late-printing fees – to the publisher.

As Associate Editor, Cook nuzzled in the limbo between accountability and superfluity. Experience had furnished him with a layered geology of skills, but he was rarely required to dig deeper than the topsoil. He could write, commission and sub-edit copy, prepare and revise an issue plan, and offer informed instinct on commercial issues. He could, at a push, manage – ideally, over juniors who still saw him as imperceptibly distant and wise. In the absence of seniors, Cook led with status, rarely by example. Since he was broadly responsible for ensuring the section editors were briefed on forthcoming issues and, as his publisher insisted, ‘big-picture editorial initiatives', press week held little fear for him. (Again, the elusiveness of the moment – his work kept him safely in the abstract future with no time to ponder the present, let alone reflect on the past.)

The lift to Cook's office floor stood at the end of a long, narrow corridor. It was possible to step inside, slip around to the right and be invisible to anyone emerging into the corridor at the far end. Here, Cook could indulge his misanthropic side. He loved to enter the lift and, on hearing someone emerge into the corridor, shift out of sight and hammer his floor button. The lift mechanism would pause, long enough to give hope to whoever was approaching. But then, the doors would silently and sweetly close, prompting footsteps to scurry for the call button – usually without success. Cook often began his ascent accompanied by a muffled ‘shit!' or ‘fuck!'. If the person did manage to lunge and force the doors to re-open, Cook's external headphones gave him an unspoken excuse. Today, to his irritation, he was delivered to his level without incident.

At his desk, he sifted through the usual deluge of email – boilerplate press releases, forwarded screening invites, templated internship requests, Nigerian friends, Estonian lovers, unsolicited newsletters, optimistic mailing lists. An update from a recently rebranded social networking site caught his attention.

Cook opened the link. His browser autofilled the user/password details and he continued through to his profile page. At the top-right of the screen, a large number ‘2' on a red-circle background winked white and black. He clicked it and discovered two messages at the top of his inbox – one from the administrator welcoming him to the new version of the site, the other from ‘Den'. He hovered his mouse arrow over the subject line
(‘Long time!')
and clicked.

Cook signed out of the site and returned to his email, weeding out the rest of the junk. He set up an out-of-office reply to cover holiday he was taking in a few days and moved on to his most recent message, marked
‘Urgent: BBC News Channel!'
It was sent by Henry Gray, the
Widescreen
Editor-In-Chief. Gray was supposed to oversee the magazine's overall output. In theory, he was the head chef at the pass – the final line of defence for content quality control, editorial reputation and studio relations. In reality, he hopped in and out of the office seemingly at will, being careful to wave a hand over the glamorous decisions – cover presentation, feature headlines, photo-shoots – but lying low for any political fallout or strenuous deadlines. The email was a direct appeal from Gray to Cook, asking him to appear, on behalf of ‘the brand', on a BBC News item about the forthcoming Academy Awards. Cook had just finished reading, when Gray called from the other side of the open-plan office.

“Dorian, did you get my mail about the BBC thing?”

“Yes. Just looking now.”

“I imagine you're not crazy about this, but you know the Oscars and no-one else is available.”

“I'm just shocked you didn't ask me first, instead of as a last resort!” bantered Cook.

Buried inside his levity, Cook's use of the word ‘ask' was keenly honed passive-aggression, implying that the situation was negotiable. (Technically, this was true – Gray's credibility as line-manager was hardly robust.) His reply was postponed by the arrival of the magazine's publisher Laura Porter – frantic, mid-thirties, and, for a professional talker and hawker (she preferred ‘marketeer') cursed with a blaring halitosis. As ever, she swished in with twinkly but strained fervour, like a supply teacher eager to connect with a problem class.

“Hi, guys!”

There was a surly chorus of acknowledgement. Cook barely bothered to raise his head. Most publishers, insisted the standard editorial wisdom, were overpaid accountants who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Porter simply knew nothing. As one-eyed ruler in the kingdom of the blind, she would have driven her subjects to revolt and revert to an unsighted leader. She was a jabbering ticker-tape of management cliche – ‘actioning' this, ‘escalating' that, ‘facilitating' the other. She either absorbed ideas from the magazine staff and fed them upwards to the senior directors, or adopted business-level decisions from above and dribbled them back down to the magazine team, each time passing off the work as her own making. Porter was fastidious over everyone else's process and time management, but comically relaxed about her own. The days when she would mysteriously fall out of all contact were particularly ominous, and usually led to some grand new scheme or drive – as ever, clearly funnelled from upper management.

“Daisy?” Porter addressed the Online Editor. “Can I borrow you for a second?”

It was a frequent epithet which always made Cook shudder with irritation. As Porter and Daisy moved into a meeting room, Gray shouted over.

“So, are you clear to do that telly, Dorian? Details are all at the end of the email.”

This now sounded more like delegation. Cook was clearly being advised – rather than invited – to accept. Gray pulled back slightly.

“Please? It'll be an easy gig. They just want an expert voice on the Oscar chances of the Whiteley movie. I think you'd be the best person to do it.”

“The
only
person.”

Gray absorbed the sulk without comment.

Cook had taken a media training course a couple of years ago, where he had learned how to steer a conversation towards prepared comment instead of letting an interviewer lead a discussion. “You should sit down with your own agenda,” explained the instructor, “and stick to it. Talk about what
you
want to talk about, not what they want you to talk about.” Cook was good at radio, but TV made him selfconscious and stammery. Apart from hating the unforgiving lights and the unerring stare of the cameras, he had a tendency to gum up on detail – once, embarrassingly, having to refer to a note in his pocket when asked about an actor's age. Cook's skills were solitary, not social. He was a decent writer, but a stumbling speaker.

“And there's really no-one else?”

Gray regarded him, pressuring with silence.

“OK. But what if I'm off sick?”

“Then I'll know you're faking,” said Gray.