Ghostwritten

London

My smirking hangover gave me a few moments to make my last requests, and to take in the fact that whoever’s bed this was it wasn’t Poppy’s. Whash! Then it laid into me, armed with a road-surface shatterer. I must have groaned pretty loudly, because the woman next to me rolled over and opened her eyes.

‘Good morning,’ she said, pulling a sheet over her breasts. ‘I’ve lost an earring.’

‘Hi.’ I grimaced as pleasantly as I could, peering through the sheets of pain. Not a face I could imagine smiling easily. I hoped this wasn’t going to turn into one of those GuiltLine wake-ups when she tells you about her boyfriend and her dead brother and her run-over-last-month dog Michael and you end up wondering how many people are in this bed. Still. Stern, rather than neurotic. A strong profile. Late thirties. Not bad, but nothing so special. Either she had aged since last night or I was getting less and less choosy. Red hair. Quite heavily built. That’s right! I’d been at the private view on Curzon Street. Oil paintings by some artist friend of Rohan’s, Mudgeon or Pigeon or Smudgeon or something. This redhead had come up to me then, and we’d done the old quantum physics equals eastern religion bollocks. Then — a taxi — a wine bar on Shaftesbury Avenue — then another taxi — that would be most of my money gone — and then another wine bar on Upper Street. Then to here, though how was anybody’s guess. What was her name? Cathy? Katrina? It was something convent schoolgirlish. I always have this problem with women’s names, once I’ve slept with them.

She found her earring and noticed the way I was looking at her. She cleared her throat. ‘Katy Forbes. The personnel manager. You’re in my flat in Islington. Delighted to meet you. Again.’

‘Hello. I’m—’ Something was gripping my windpipe. I fought free and found my Woody Woodpecker boxer shorts.

‘Marco. I know. The “writer”. We did just about get to the name-swapping stage.’

So I’d played the writer card. That was valuable information. I looked around me. A single woman’s bedroom. Lacy curtains, trees bobbing in the early autumn. A framed poster of an oil painting, with a big Delacroix written underneath it. The original was probably nice. A little nest of tissues and condoms down my side of the bed, and a bottle of red wine with almost nothing in it, but 1982 on the label. Why do the best things happen when I’m too pissed to remember them?

An Islington Saturday morning. A car alarm going off somewhere.

‘Well. This is jolly...’

She watched the end of the sentence dangling for a few moments.

‘I’m going to get up and have a shower.’ A horsey inflection to her voice. She must have seen me as a diamond in the rough, the old Lady Chatterley complex. ‘If you feel as ghastly as you look there’s some fizzy hangover medicine in the first aid box on the drinks cabinet. If you have to be sick, do try to get it all in the lavatory bowl. Help yourself to some coffee, there’s instant if you can’t figure out the percolator, but please don’t run off with the fake chandelier, it was expensive. And if you can cook I’d like some scrambled eggs on toast.’

‘Never fear,’ I said. ‘I am a casual shag to be relied upon!’ This wasn’t terribly funny but I blundered on anyway. ‘No bread knives through the shower curtain, guaranteed.’

Her face would buckle any mere bread knife. She put on her dressing gown and went through into the bathroom. I heard the pipes in the walls judder as she switched on the shower.

I got dressed, wishing I had clean clothes. I smelt hash in a burn on my shirt, between the lipstick and a stain that I tried to ignore. My bladder felt like an inflatable camping bed. I groped out of the bedroom and found the little toilet, where I wazzed the waz from outer space. Seriously, I was pissing for a whole 55 seconds. On the shelf next to the pot-pourri there was a picture of my hostess Katy Forbes and a baldish youngish chap in a punt under a weeping willow and for a moment I wondered if I shouldn’t split before hubby came home, but then I fuzzily recalled Katy saying she’d been divorced. We’d agreed that joining a pyramid savings scheme is a much more stress-free way to lose all your money and wreck your life. So. A leisurely, assault-free breakfast was in order. Odd though, the only use that divorcees normally find for photographs of their ex-husbands is for dart practice. Maybe he’s her brother. I thrust out the last few drops and mopped up the spray on the rim with a clutch of toilet paper, and pulled the toilet chain, sending the previous evening’s spermatozoa to the North Sea. Three seconds later a howl came from the shower. ‘Don’t touch the bloody water ’til I’m OUT!’

‘Sorry!’

I can cook, and Katy’s kitchen was well stocked. My hangovers never affect my appetite. In fact I like to bury my hangovers alive, in food. I poured some olive oil into a big frying pan, chopped up some garlic, mushrooms and chilli peppers, and sprinkled some basil. I folded in a dash of cream with the eggs, and mashed up a couple of anchovies that were stinking the fridge out. Onto this Vesuvius of cholesterol I grated a light snowfall of Wensleydale, and perched a few stuffed olives around the crater. There was granary bread, so I lightly browned some toast. Real butter in a Wedgwood butter dish. I helped myself to a few sprigs of parsley from a shrub on the window-sill. Some fresh beef tomatoes on the side, with chopped celery, sultanas and a dollop of potato salad. The coffee percolator was the same model as my own, so no problem there. I slurped down a mugful of the magic brew and felt my hangover being shooed away.

‘Gosh,’ said Katy, coming through with her hair wrapped in a towel. Her grey tracksuit trousers and buttoned-up cardigan did not promise any frisky post-breakfast foreplay. ‘You’re no writer,’ she said, ‘you’re a food sculptor.’

‘We aim,’ I hummed, ‘to please.’

She picked up the Daily Telegraph from the doormat, sat down with it and dug in. She made straight for the Weekend section of the supplement, which I never read, even when I’m busy moving house and can be distracted by share prices in Singapore.

I joined Katy at the table. This was a nice room. There was an overgrown little garden out back. In the front was a raised pavement. I watched human legs and canine legs and pushchair wheels go by. On the pine dresser was a collection of mainstream CDs. All very Princess Diana: Elton John, Pavarotti, the Four Seasons. A Chinese rug hung on the wall, on the mantelpiece was a zoo of ethnicky sculpted animals. Terracotta tiles and Japanese lampshades. It was a room from the Weekend section of the Daily Telegraph. ‘The lack of morning-after recriminations is refreshing.’ I only meant it as a pleasantry.

She looked over the paper. ‘Why should there be any recriminations? We were both consenting adults.’ She slid in another forkful of egg. ‘Albeit bloody drunk consenting adults.’

‘True.’ I bit on a bit of chilli and had to swish my mouth out with water. ‘Would you like to be a drunk consenting adult with me again sometime?’

Katy thought about it for a full three seconds. ‘I don’t think so, Marco, no.’

Hey, she remembered my name. ‘Oh. Fair enough.’

I poured us some more coffee.

‘Katy, I hope this isn’t an impertinent question, but I saw the photo in the toilet and I wondered if I wasn’t treading on anyone’s turf here?’

‘Nobody’s turf but mine. He was my husband. We separated, then he went and died.’

I just kept the lid on a mysterious giggle. ‘Oh... I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what to say.’

‘He was a bloody clot. He always insisted on having the last word. It happened four months ago. Around Wimbledon time. Undiagnosed diabetes in Hong Kong.’

I let a respectable silence elapse. ‘More toast?’

‘Thank you.’

The doorbell rang. Katy went over to the door. ‘Who is it?’

‘Registered delivery for a Mrs Forbes!’ yelled a man’s voice.

‘Ms Forbes!’ Katy said in a disciplining-the-dog-for-the-hundredth-time voice, peered through the peephole, and undid the bolts. ‘Ms! Ms!’

A lad in blue overalls and shiny hair and ears as big as a chimpanzee’s heaved a packing case into the hallway. He saw me and his face said, ‘Nice one Cyril.’ ‘Sign here please, Miss Forbes.’

She signed and he was gone.

We looked at the packing case for a moment. ‘Nice big present,’ I commented. ‘Is your birthday coming up?’

‘It’s not a present,’ she said. ‘It’s already mine. Come and give me a hand, would you? In the cupboard under the sink there’s a hammer and a cold chisel, in a box with some fuses...’

We prised open the lid, and the four sides fell away.

A Queen Anne chair.

Katy’s thoughts wandered a long way away. ‘Marco,’ she said, ‘thank you for making breakfast. It was really... But I think I’d like you to go now.’ There was a tremor in her voice. ‘You’re not a bad man.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Could I just hop into your shower?’

‘I’d like you to go now.’

The avenue was littered with autumn. The air was smoky with it. Not yet 10 a.m., it was crisp and sunny and foggy all at once. I’d try to get to Alfred’s by late lunchtime, Tim Cavendish’s by late afternoon, and back to my place by early evening in time to meet Gibreel. It wasn’t really worth going back to my flat now. I’d just have to smell of sex all day.

Katy Forbes wasn’t the stablest of campers but at least she hadn’t been a head-case like that vamp of Camden Town who’d tied me up to her bedstead with a leather belt and videoed herself releasing her pet tarantula on my torso. ‘Stop screaming,’ she’d screamed. ‘Baggins has had his sacs removed...’ It hadn’t been Baggins’s sacs that were at the forefront of my mind. Katy’s intellect must have impressed me enough to go for the writer identity, rather than the drummer. Even so. The Morning After Me was not overly impressed with the Night Before Me. I pass through many Mes in the course of the day, each one selfish with his time. The Lying in Bed Me, and the Enjoying the Hot Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them.

I really am a drummer. My band’s called The Music of Chance. I named it after a novel by that New York bloke. I describe us as a ‘loose musical cooperative’ — there are about ten members, and whoever’s around performs on whatever’s happening. Plus, most of us are pretty loose. We play our own material mostly, though if I’m strapped for cash we’ll play whatever will put bums on seats. We’ve been offered a recording contract, by the biggest record company in southern Belgium, but we thought we should hold out for something more EMI or Geffen-sized. The Music of Chance is pretty big in the Slovak Republic, too. We played a few gigs there last summer that went down very well.

I really am a writer, too. A ghostwriter. My first published project was the autobiography of a pace bowler called Dennis Mackeson who played for England a few times in the mid-eighties, when it rained a lot. The Twistlethwaite Tornado got great reviews in the Yorkshire Post — ‘Not in a million years would I have guessed it that Mr Mackeson could bowl ’em out with his nib as well as his yorkers! “Owzat!”’ On the strength of the first book I’m currently writing the life story of this old guy Alfred, who lives on the edge of Hampstead Heath with his younger — though not by much — boyfriend, Roy. I go, he reminisces about his younger days, I tape it, jot notes, and by next week I write it up into a narrative. Roy’s the son of some Canadian steel tycoon, and he pays me a weekly retainer fee. It helps pay the rent and the wine bars.

You could get lost in these north-east London streets. I was half-lost 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 any more. I used to be a Christian, but I’m not one of those any more 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 stabilisers. 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 post-box. 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 colours 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 Centres. 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 PhD 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 foster 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 grey 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 Noddy 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.

‘Well,’ said the leggy woman, ‘how frightfully bizarre!’

I picked myself up and walked away from the little cluster of passers-by 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 realise 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—’

‘WewannaAweewordAboo’ 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 dame 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 dame 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 Paddington, 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 neighbour, with its Prince Regent, West India Quay and its Gallions Reach and its Royal Albert. Stentorian Piccadilly wouldn’t approve of such artyfartyness, and nor 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 colour 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 anti-heroes 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 defences 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 any more.

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 defence 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 pair of cottagers 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 womanisers are victims.

‘Victims of what?’

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

I was oddly narked. ‘So the womaniser 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 centre 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.

The sky was clouding over, groily clouds the dunnish white of dug-up porcelain. I sighed quite involuntarily, the whole world was about to cry. I’d had a sexy little umbrella last night, but I’d left it at Katy’s or the gallery or somewhere. Oh well, I’d found it lying forgotten somewhere myself. The wind was picking up, and big leaves were flying over the chimneys like items of washing on the run. All these Edwardian streets I’d probably never go down.

The first raindrops were dappling the tarmac and scenting the gardens by the time I got to Alfred’s.

Alfred’s house is one of those bookend houses, tall, with a tower on the corner where you can imagine literary evenings being conducted. In fact, they used to be. The young Derek Jarman paid tribute here, and Francis Bacon, and Joe Orton before he made it big, along with a stream of minor philosophers and once-famous literati. Visitors to Alfred’s place are like the bands that play the university circuit: only the will-be-famous and the once-were-famous perform. Has-beens and Might-bes. Alfred tried to start a humanist movement here in the sixties. Its idealism doomed it. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament bishops and that Colin Wilson bloke still drop by. Heard of him? See what I mean...

It usually takes a long time before anyone answers the door. Roy is too otherworldly to notice things like doorbells, especially while he’s composing. Alfred is too deaf. I ring a polite five times, watching the weeds coming up through the cracks in the steps, before I start banging.

Roy’s face materialises in the gloom. He sees it’s me, smiles, and readjusts his hair-piece. He shoves open the door and almost shears off the tip of my nose. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘hi! Come in... uh...’ I realise he has the same problem with names as me. ‘Marco!’

‘Hello, Roy. How are you this week?’

Roy has one of those Andy Warhol accents. He speaks as though receiving words from far beyond Andromeda. ‘Jeez, Marco... You’re sounding like a doctor. You’re not a doctor... are you?’

I laugh.

Roy insists on helping me off with my coat, and slings it over the pineapple-shaped knob of the bannister. I must look up the correct word for that knob. ‘How’s The Music of Chance? All you young things, playing together and inspiring one another... We just love it.’

‘We laid down a couple of tracks two weeks ago, but now we’re back to rehearsing in Gloria’s uncle’s warehouse.’ Due to a chronic lack of anything to pay with. ‘Our bassist’s new girlfriend plays the handbells, so we’re trying to expand our repertoire a little... How’s your composing?’

‘Not so good, everything I do ends up turning into “A Well-Temper’d Clavier”.’

‘What’s wrong with Bach?’

‘Nothing, except it always makes me dream about a team of synchronised tail-chasing Escher-cats. Now what do you think of this? It’s from a wicked young friend of mine named Clem.’ He hands me a postcard of Earth. On the back I turn it over and read the message: ‘Wish you were here. Clem.’

Roy never makes himself laugh, only others. But he smiles timidly. ‘Now. You’re good with your hands. Can you work out how our percolator works? It’s through in the kitchen here. I’ve just been having no luck at all with it. It’s German. They make North American-proof percolators in Germany. Do you think they’ve forgiven us for the war yet?’

‘What seems to be the problem with it?’

‘Jeez, now you’re really sounding like Dr Marco. It just keeps overflowing. The drippy nozzle thing totally refuses to drip.’

The first time I saw Roy’s and Alfred’s kitchen, it looked like the set of an earthquake movie. It still does, but now I’m used to it. I found the percolator under a large head made of chickenwire. ‘We thought it would give a dead machine a little character,’ explained Roy. ‘It also makes it impossible to lose the percolator. Volk constructed it one spring weekend for Alfred.’

Volk was a truly beautiful Serbian teenager with a dubious-sounding visa who sometimes lived at Alfred’s when he had nowhere else to go but Serbia. He always wore leather trousers, and Alfred called him ‘our young wolf ’. I didn’t ask any more questions.

‘Well, I think the main problem is that you’ve put tea leaves into the filter instead of coffee.’

‘Oh, you jest! Lemme see. Oh, Jeez, you’re right... Now, where’s the coffee? Do you know where the coffee is, Marco?’

‘Last week it was in the tennis-ball shooter.’

‘No, Volk moved it from there... Let me see...’ Roy surveyed the kitchen like God looking down on a mess of a world it was too late to uncreate. ‘Bread basket! Say, go on up to Alfred in his study whydon’tcha? I left him reading last week’s instalment of his life. We both thought it was marvellous. I’ll bring up the coffee when it’s done dripping.’

There’s a sad story about Roy. He used to have his compositions published. He still finds old copies of them, occasionally, leafing through very specialist shops, and he shows them to me with glee. A few times they were performed and recorded for the radio. The American Public Radio Network broadcast his First Symphony, and Lyndon Johnson wrote Roy a letter to say how much he and his wife had enjoyed it. That success attracted negative criticism, too, though, and some bitchiness from the music world filtered down to Roy. It upset him so much that he’s never published anything since. He just composes, wodge after wodge of manuscript, with nobody to hear it but himself and Alfred, and occasionally a young wolf from Serbia, and me. He’s on his thirteenth symphony.

He should hear some of the things that people have said about The Music of Chance. Enough to make your bile freeze up. The Evening News reviewer wrote that he thought the world would be improved if we all fell into the giant food blender that our music resembled. I was chuffed pink.

As I reached the top floor I found that my mind was chewing over a conversation I had the first time I met Poppy. Everyone else at the party was unconscious, and a drizzly morning was watering down the night.

‘Do you ever think of the effect you have on your conquests?’

‘I don’t see where you’re coming from, Poppy.’

‘I’m not coming from anywhere. But I suddenly noticed that you love talking about cause. You never talk about effect.’

I knocked on the door of Alfred’s study, and entered. A room inhabited by photographs of friends, none of them new. Alfred was staring out of the window the way old men do. Curtains of rain were blowing pell-mell off Hampstead Heath.

‘Winter will soon be with us, our gustviter friend.’

‘Afternoon, Alfred.’

‘Another winter. We must hurry. We are still on chapter, chapter...’

‘Chapter six, Alfred.’

‘And how is your family?’

Is he confusing me with someone else? ‘They’re fine, last time I looked.’

‘We are only on chapter six, you see. We must hurry. My body is degenerating quickly. Last week’s work was satisfactory. That is good. You are a writer, my young friend. We can make more progress today. I indicated with a green pen the parts I wish you to revise. Now, let us begin. You have your notebook with you?’

I waved it. Alfred indicated the seat nearest him. ‘Before you sit down, please put the recording of Vaughan Williams’s Third Symphony onto the gramophone player. It is filed under “V”. The Pastoral.’

I love Alfred’s record collection. Real, wide, black, plastic records. Thick. My hands love handling them, it’s like meeting an old friend. CDs were hoisted onto us with scandalous aplomb and nobody rumbled their game until it was too late. Like instant coffee compared to the real stuff. I didn’t know this Williams’s music, but it had a good start. I’d like to mix in a distorted bass, and maybe a snare drum.

‘Then let us begin, shall we?’

‘Whenever you’re ready, Alfred.’

I start the cassette rolling, and open my notebook at a new page. Everything on it is still perfect.

‘It is 1946. I am living in Berlin, working for British Intelligence. Now there’s an oxymoron for you. We are on the trail of Mausling, the rocket scientist wanted by the Americans for his—’

‘I think we’re back in London, now, Alfred.’

‘Ah, yes... We’ve handed Mausling over... 1946...

‘Then I’m back at the civil service. Ah, yes, 1947. My first quiet year for a decade. There were rumblings from India, and Egypt. Bad rumours from Eastern Europe. People finding pits full of bodies in Armenia, Soviets and Nuremberg Nazis blaming each other. Churchill and Stalin had done dividing up Europe on a napkin, and the consequences of their levity were becoming horribly apparent. You can imagine, I was a bit of an embarrassment in Whitehall. A Hungarian-Jew back from Berlin amongst the pencil sharpeners freshly down from Oxford. The crown owed me, they knew, but they no longer really wanted me. So, I was given an office job on Great Portland Street working with a division cracking down on black marketeers. I never got to see any action, though. I was just doing what computers and young ladies in shoulder pads do nowadays. Rationing was still in place, you see, but it was beginning to crumble round the edges. The wartime spirit was seeping away through the bomb craters, and people were reverting to their usual small-minded selves. Roy was still tangled up with his father and lawyers in Toronto. Imagine one of the more tedious Graham Greene novels, remove the good bits towards the end, and just have it going on and on and on for hundreds of pages. The only enjoyable part was the cricket, which I followed with the passion of an émigré. That, and Sundays at Speaker’s Corner, where I could discuss Nietzsche and Kant and Goethe and Stalin in whichever language I wanted to, and get a decent game of chess if the weather was good. London was full of Alfreds in 1947.’

I finished the last part and flexed my fingers. I followed Alfred’s gaze, to the dripping camphor tree across the road from the study. The corner of Hampstead Heath, I could see a pond in a hollow beyond. When Alfred was thinking he looked at it, past his signed photo of Bertrand Russell.

‘I’ve never seen a ghost, Marco. I don’t believe in an afterlife. At best, I consider the idea of God to be a childish prank, and at worst a sick joke, probably pulled by the devil, and oh yes you can have one without the other. I know you offer allegiance to Buddha and your woolly Hesse, but I shall remain a devout atheist until the end. Yet one extraordinary thing occurred one summer evening in 1947. I want you to include it in my autobiography. When you write it, don’t write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don’t try to give an explanation. Just say that I don’t know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind. The ghost comes in the first paragraph.’

I’m really interested now. ‘What happened?’

‘I’d finished work. I’d just had dinner with Prof Baker at a restaurant in South Ken. I was still sitting there gazing at the busy street. A waterfall mesmerises in the same way, don’t you think? Anyway. That was when I saw myself.’

Alfred’s eyes were all pupil, monitoring reactions and effects.

‘You saw yourself?’

Alfred nodded. ‘I saw myself. Not a reflection, not a lookalike, not a twin brother, not a spiritual awakening, not a waxwork. This is no cheap riddle. I saw myself, Alfred Kopf, large as life.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Pelting past the window! I’d have missed him, if a sudden gust of wind hadn’t blown his hat off. There was no other hat like it in the whole of London. He bent down to pick it up, just as I would have done. That hat belonged to my father, it was one of the few things he gave me before the Nazis took him off to their melting pots. He bent down, and looked up, like he was searching for someone. He put his hat on. Then he ran off again, but I had seen his face, and I’d recognised me.’

Ghostwriters, like psychiatrists, have to know when to shut up.

‘I hope for your sake, Marco, that you never see yourself. It doesn’t feature in the ordinary repertoire of a sane human’s experience. It’s not unique, however. I’ve met three others who have experienced the same phenomenon. Imagine which emotion possesses you first.’

I tried to. ‘Disbelief ?’

‘Wrong. We all felt the most indignant outrage. We wanted to jump up and chase after the interloper and stamp him into the ground. Which is what I did. I grabbed my father’s hat — my father’s hat — and chased after him. Down Brompton Road towards Knightsbridge. I was a very fit young man. I could see him — my beige raincoat flapping behind him. It was raining slightly. The pavement was skiddy with drizzle. Why was he running? Oh, he knew that I was after him all right. It was a different London, of omnibuses, policemen on horses and women in headscarves. You could walk across the road without being knocked off a windscreen clean over Hades. My shadow was still there in front of me, running at the same pace as me. At Hyde Park Corner my lungs were clapping like bellows, so I had to slow down to a walking pace. And so did my shadow, as though he were baiting me. We walked down Grosvenor Place, down the long wall that closets off the gardens behind Buckingham Palace from the plebians. That takes you to Victoria. It was just a little place in those days. Then he turned up past the Royal Mews, along Birdcage Walk. The south edge of St James’s Park. By now my anger was beginning to dissipate. It all had the air of a shaggy-dog story. A Poe reject. I’d got a bit of breath back, so I tried suddenly sprinting at him. He was off again! Down to Westminster: when I had to slow down, so did my shadow. We walked along the Embankment. Commuters were streaming over the bridge. Sometimes I thought I’d lost him, but then I’d see the hat again, bobbing up and down about fifty yards ahead. My haircut, the back of my head. I tried to work out a rational explanation. An actor? Some temporal mirage? Insanity? Past Temple. We were heading east. I was getting a bit worried, it was a rough area in those days. I remember there was one of those Oriental sunsets of soupy jade and marmalade that London can pull out of the hat. Past Mansion House, down Cannon Street, and down to The Tower. Then I saw my shadow getting into a taxi! So I raced to the next one in the rank, and jumped in. “Look,” I said, “I know this sounds ridiculous, but please follow that taxi.” Maybe taxi drivers get asked that a lot, because the driver just said, “Right you are, squire.” Up to Aldgate. Through cobbled backstreets to Liverpool Street. Moorgate. Where the Barbican is now. Thanks to the Blitz, the place was one big building site back then. As was Farringdon, in fact Farringdon still is. When we were slowed up by the traffic, I considered hopping out of the taxi and running to my shadow’s, but every time I resolved to do so the lane of cars started moving again. Up to King’s Cross, stopping and starting, stopping and starting. Down to Euston Square, and on to Great Portland Street. I could still see his hat in the back of the taxi. Did my shadow have nothing better to do with his time? Didn’t I? After Baker Street the leafier parts began again, past Edgware Road and Paddington. Past Bayswater. I saw him get out of the taxi at Notting Hill Gate and stride off across Kensington Gardens. I paid the taxi driver, and sprang out after him. I recall the air after the rain, sweet and full of evening. “Oy!” I yelled, and some genteel ladies walking dogs harrumphed. “Alfred Kopf !” I yelled, and a man dropped out of a tree with a turfy thump. My shadow didn’t even turn round. Why was he running? Literary precedents suggested that at least we should be able to have a stimulating conversation about the nature of good and evil. Across Kensington Road, down past the museums, past this restaurant where I’d arranged to meet Prof Baker later that evening. A sudden gust of wind blew my hat off. I bent down to pick it up. And when I looked up, I saw my shadow disappearing.’

I had forgotten I was still here. ‘Just into thin air?’

‘No! Onto a Number 36 bus. Off he went.’

‘But I thought that you’d already met Prof—’

Something flew into the window and thwacked. It fell before I saw what it was. A pigeon? Roy came running in trembling, with tears in his eyes. ‘Oh, Jeez, Alfred. I just had a phone call from Morris.’

Was I in a tragedy or a farce?

‘Calm down, Roy, Calm down. I’ve just been telling Marco about my double.’ Alfred lit his pipe. ‘Now, is this Morris Major or Morris Minor?’

‘Morris Major, from Cambridge. Jerome’s been killed!’

Alfred’s fingers forgot his pipe. His voice fell to a croak. ‘Jerome? But he’d been granted immunity.’

‘Morris says the ministry are blaming Petersburg gangsters. They said Jerome had got mixed up in some sort of art theft.’

‘Impossible!’ Alfred banged on the table hard enough to stave elderly fingers. ‘It’s a cover-up. They’re picking us off, one by one. They never know when to stop, those ministries. Damn those vermin to hellfire!’ Alfred unleashed what I’m guessing was the direst oath in the Hungarian canon. The curse of Nosferatu.

I looked at Roy. ‘Bad news?’

Roy looked back, not needing to nod. ‘And there’s coffee all over the kitchen floor. I think I put two filters in.’

A long silence unspun. Alfred pulled out a handkerchief and a coin was flung out. It went round and around in ever-decreasing circles on the wooden floor, before vanishing under a chest where it would probably stay for years, or until Volk next visited.

‘Marco,’ Alfred said, his eyes focusing on the far distance, ‘thank you for coming. But I think I’d like you to go now.’ There was a tremor in his voice. ‘We shall continue next week.’

As I walked from Alfred’s the clouds slid away towards Essex and a warm afternoon opened up, golden and clear. Whatever worries Alfred and Roy had were their business. Me, I nibbled the truffley bits off my strawberry ice cream. Midges hung over the puddles in columns, and the trees dripped dry. They’d be winter trees again soon. An ice cream van was playing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ a few streets away. A couple of kids sat on walls trying to master their yo-yos. Good to see kids still playing with yo-yos. Fi, my natural mother, calls this time of year ‘Saint Luke’s Summer’. Isn’t that beautiful? I felt good. I had a bit of money from Roy, slipped to me wrapped around this strawberry ice. He also insisted that I took a hideous green leather jacket with me. I put up a fight, but he had already put it on me somehow and while he was zipping it up, he remembered to tell me that Tim Cavendish had been on the phone earlier and had asked me to drop in that afternoon if I could. He whispered an apology for not giving me any more money, but he’d had to take someone to the House of Lords that week for running off to Zimbabwe with a suitcase of his money, and the legal fees had come to £92,000. ‘It was a lot, Marco,’ whispered Roy, ‘but I had to do it for the principle.’ The someone was still in Zimbabwe, and so was the suitcase.

Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

While we were having sex, when the condom broke, Poppy was coming, and she gasped out, ‘Marco, this is better than sex.’ I just remembered.

I headed down to Primrose Hill. I’ll walk to Tim Cavendish’s via Regent’s Park and Oxford Street. I love walking past London Zoo, and peering in. My childhood’s in there. My foster parents used to take me on my birthday. Today even the sound of the aviary makes me taste clammy fish-paste sandwiches.

I’m pretty sure that being a single kid single mother is enough for Poppy. But I’ve known women who’ve believed one thing about abortion, only for those beliefs to swing around when the crunch came. If Poppy’s pregnant, what will I want? Would I want? For her to accept me as a father, I’d have to swear monogamy, and mean it. Many of my friends have got married and done the baby thing, and I can see how completely it changes your life. Taking plunges is no fun when the well-being of two other people depends on how you land. Weird. When I was younger, I thought that kids were an inevitable part of getting old. I thought you’d wake up one morning and there they’d be, nappies bulging. But no, you actually have to make up your mind to do them, like making up your mind to buy a house, cut a CD or stage a coup d’etat. What if I never make my mind up? What if ?

Ah, worry, worry, worry.

The top of the hill. Breathe in, look at that view, and breathe out! Quite a picture, isn’t it! Old Man London, out for the day... Italians give their cities sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay. I know its overlapping towns like I know my own body. The red brick parts around Chelsea and Pimlico, Battersea Power Station like an upturned coffee table... The grimy estates down Vauxhall way. Green Park. I map the city by trigonometrical shag points. Highbury is already Katy Forbes. Putney is Poppy, and India of course, not that I shag India, she’s only five. Camden is Baggins the Tarantula. I try to pinpoint the places in Alfred’s nutty story... How am I supposed to put a story like that into a serious autobiography? I’m going to have to do something pretty drastic, or I’ll end up ghostwriting ‘Diary of a Madman’.

It’s too beautiful a day to worry about that. The light is too golden, the shadows too soft.

There’s a lot of things in London that weren’t here when Alfred went round his big loop chasing Alfred. All those aeroplanes flying into Heathrow and Gatwick. The Thames Barrier. The Millennium Dome. Centrepoint, that sixties pedestal ashtray, bloody hell I wish someone would come along and bomb that. Canada Tower over in Docklands, gleaming in the sunlight now, and I think of that art deco mirror in the corner of Shelley’s room. Shelley of Shepherd’s Bush. She moved in with, whatsisname, ah, Jesus, what was his name? The British Oxygen man. Her flatmate Natalie had become a born-again Christian and moved in with Jesus. Shelley, Natalie and I had formed a Holy Trinity one rainy afternoon under Shelley’s duvet. At the time I had filed Natalie under ‘Dangerously Vulnerable’.

A city is a sea that you lose things in. You only find things that other people have lost.

‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ I say to a man walking his red setter.

‘Fackin’ shithole innit?’

Londoners slag off London because, deep down, we know we are living in the greatest city in the world.

Oxford Street was heaving when I got off the bus. Oxford Street is one of those sold-out-past-its-best things, like Glastonbury Rock Festival or Harrison Ford. You can taste the metallic tang of pollution here. The Doctor Marten boot shops depress me. The gargantuan CD shops preclude any surprise discoveries. The department stores are full of things for people who never have to lift anything when they move house: Neroesque bath tubs with gold-plated handles and life-size porcelain collie dogs. The fast-food restaurants towards Marble Arch leave you hungrier than you were when you went in. The only good thing about Oxford Street are the Spanish girls who pay for their English lessons by handing out leaflets for cut-price language schools around Tottenham Court Road. Gibreel got his rocks off with one once, by pretending to spik no Eenglish and be just off the boat from Lebanon. I bought a T-shirt from a stall near Oxford Circus with a pig on it to cheer Poppy up, big enough for her to use as a night-shirt. Then I walked past a poster in a travel agent’s, or rather I was crushed against it by a sudden surge of bodies, and I felt small and older than my years and losing sight of the strip of sky far above, and—

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

You know the real drag about being a ghostwriter? You never get to write anything that beautiful. And even if you did, nobody would ever believe it was you.

I had to wait eight minutes to use my bank machine, and in that time I counted eleven different languages walking past. I think they were different, I get fuzzy around the middle east. I blew my nose. Gravelly London mucus showed up on my snot analysis. Mmm. Lovely. Next to the bank was a shop that only sold televisions. Wide ones, cuboid ones, spherical ones, ones that let you see what crap you were missing on thirty other channels while you were watching the crap on this one. I watched the All-Blacks score three tries against England, and formulated the Marco Chance versus Fate Videoed Sports Match Analogy. It goes like this: when the players are out there the game is a sealed arena of interbombarding chance. But when the game is on video then every tiniest action already exists. The past, present and future exist at the same time: all the tape is there, in your hand. There can be no chance, for every human decision and random fall of the ball is already fated. Therefore, does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

Now I don’t know about you, but my life is a well and I’m right down there in it. Neck deep, and I still can’t touch the bottom.

I had a strong desire to jump in a taxi, tell him to take me to Heathrow and get on a plane to somewhere empty and far away. Mongolia would suit me fine. But I can’t even afford the tube fare to Heathrow.

I inserted my bank card, and prayed to the Fickle God of Autobanking for twenty-five quid, the minimum amount necessary to get drunk with Gibreel. The bloody machine swallowed my card and told me to contact my branch. I said something like ‘Gah!’ and punched the screen. What’s the point of Yeats if you can’t buy a few rounds?

A round Indian lady behind me with a magenta dot on her forehead growled in a Brooklyn accent, ‘Real bummer, huh kid?’

Before I could answer a pigeon from the ledge above crapped on me.

‘Better go back to bed... Here’s a tissue...’

The Tim Cavendish Literary Agency is down a murky sidestreet near Haymarket. It’s on the third floor. From the outside, the building is quite swanky. There’s a revolving door, and a flagpole jutting out from above the lobby roof. It should house a wing of the Admiralty, or some other silly club that bars female members. But no, it houses Tim Cavendish.

‘Marco! Wonderful you could drop in!’

Too much enthusiasm is much more offputting than not enough. ‘Afternoon, Tim. I’ve brought you the last three chapters.’

‘Top hole.’

Glance at Tim’s desk and you’ll see everything you need to know. The desk itself was owned by Charles Dickens. Well, that’s what Tim says and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Terminally overpopulated by piles of files and manuscripts, a glass of Glenfiddich that you could mistake for a goldfish bowl of Glenfiddich, three pairs of glasses, a word processor I’ve never seen him use, an overflowing ashtray and a copy of A–Z Guide to Nineveh and Ur and the Racing Post. ‘Come in and have a glass, why don’t you? I showed the first three chapters to Lavenda Vilnius on Monday. She’s very excited. I haven’t seen Lavenda so fluttery about a work in progress since Rodney’s biography of Princess Margarine.’

I chose the least piled-up-on chair and started unloading its cargo of shiny hardbacks. They still smelt of print.

‘Dump those dratted things on the floor, Marco. In fact fly to Japan and dump them on the bastard they’re about.’

I looked at the cover. The Sacred Revelations of His Serendipity — A New Vision, A New Peace, A New Earth. Translated by Beryl Brain. There was a picture of an Oriental Jesus gazing into the centre of a buttercup with a golden-haired kid gazing up at him. ‘Didn’t know this was your usual line, Tim?’

‘It isn’t. I was handling it for an old Eton chum who runs a flaky New Age imprint on the side. Warning bells went off, Marco. Warning bells. But I didn’t listen to them. My Eton man thought the market was ripe for a bit of Oriental wisdom in the new millennium. Beryl Brain is his part-time girlfriend. “Beryl” is just about right, but “Brain” she is not. Anyway. We’d just got the first consignment back from the printers when His Serendipity decided to hurry his vision along and gas the Tokyo underground with a lethal chemical. I’m sure you saw it on the news earlier this year. ’Twas ’im.’

‘How... horrific!’

‘You’re telling me it was horrific. We only got a fraction of the costs off the bleeders before they had their assets frozen! I ask you, Marco, I ask you. We’re stuck with a print run of fifteen hundred hardbacks. We’ve sold a handful as curios to True Crime Freaks, but those apart we’re up Shit Creek without a spatula. Can you believe those cultists? As if the end of the world needs to be hurried along...’ Tim handed me the biggest glass of whisky I’d ever seen or heard of.

‘What’s the book itself like?’

‘Well, some of it’s twaddle, but mostly it’s just piffle. Cheers! Down the hatch.’

We clinked goldfish bowls.

‘So tell me, Marco, how are our friends up in Hampstead?’

‘Fine, fine...’ I returned the book to its brothers and sisters. ‘We’re up to 1947.’

‘Oh, really... What happened in 1947?’

‘Not much. Alfred saw a ghost.’

Tim Cavendish tilted back and his chair squeaked. ‘A ghost? I’m happy to hear it.’

I didn’t want to broach this topic, but. ‘Tim, I’m not sure to what degree Alfred is altogether...’

‘Altogether altogether?’

‘You could say.’

‘He’s as nutty as a vegan T-bone. And Roy has definitely been to Disneyworld once too often. What of it?’

‘Well, doesn’t it present some problems?’

‘What problems? Roy has enough dosh to personally underwrite the whole print run.’

‘No, I don’t mean that.’ Now wasn’t the time to broach the other topic of Roy and The House of Lords. ‘I mean, well, autobiographies are supposed to be factual, aren’t they?’

Tim chuckled and took off his glasses. Both pairs. He leant back on his squeaky chair and placed his fingertips together as though in prayer. ‘Are autobiographies supposed to be factual? Would you like the straight answer or the convoluted one?’

‘Straight.’

‘Then, from the publishing point of view, the answer is “God forfend.”’

‘I’ll try the convoluted answer.’

‘The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.’

Very Tim Cavendish. Profundity on the hoof. Or has he said it a hundred times before?

‘Look at it this way. Alfred is the ingredients, the book is the meal, but you, Marco, you are the cook! Squeeze out the juice! I’m glad to hear there’s still some left in the old boy. Ghosts are welcome. And for God’s sake, play up the Jarman–Bacon connection when you get to that. Encourage him to namedrop. Stroke his udders. Alfred’s not famous in his own right, at least, outside Old Compton Street he isn’t, so we’re going to have to Boswellise him. The ear of postwar-twentieth-century London. That kind of thing. He knew Edward Heath, too, didn’t he? And he was a pal of Albert Schweitzer.’

‘It doesn’t seem very honest. I’m not writing what really happened.’

‘Honest! God bless you, Marco! This is not the world of Peter Rabbit and his woodland friends. Pepys, Boswell, Johnson, Swift, all freeloading frauds to a man.’

‘At least they were their own freeloading frauds. Ghostwriters do the freeloading for other frauds.’

Tim chuckled up to the ceiling. ‘We’re all ghostwriters, my boy. And it’s not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we’re in control of our own lives, but really they’re pre-ghostwritten by forces around us.’

‘So where does that leave us?’

‘How well does the thing read?’ A classic Cavendish answer in a question’s clothing. The intercom on Tim’s desk crackled. ‘It’s your brother on the line, Mr Cavendish.’ Mrs Whelan, Tim’s secretary, is the most indifferent woman in London. Her indifference is as dent-proof as fog. ‘Are you here or are you still in Bermuda?’

‘Which one, Mrs Whelan? Nipper Cavendish or Denholme Cavendish?’

‘I dare say it’s your elder brother, Mr Cavendish.’

Tim sighed. ‘Sorry, Marco. This is going to be protracted sibling stuff. Why don’t you drop in next week after I’ve had a chance to read this lot? Oh, and I know this is Herod calling Thatcher a bit insensitive but you really need to change your shirt. And there’s something white stuck in your hair. And a last word of advice, I tell this to anyone who’s trying to get a book finished, steer clear of Nabokov. Nabokov makes anyone feel like a clodhopper.’

I downed the rest of the whisky and slunk off, closing the door quietly behind me on Tim’s ‘Hello, Denny, how marvellous to hear from you, I was going to get in touch this very afternoon about your kind little loan...’

‘Goodbye, Mrs Whelan.’ To Caesar that which is Caesar’s, to God that which is God’s, and to the Secretary that which is the Secretary’s.

Mrs Whelan’s sigh would drain a fresh salad of all colour.

‘Marco!’

I’d wandered into Leicester Square, drawn by the knapsacked European poon, the lights and colours, and a vague plan to see if there were any new remainders to be found in the mazes under Henry Pordes Bookshop in Charing Cross Road. Warm, late afternoon. Leicester Square is the centre of the maze. Nothing to do but put off getting out again. Teenagers in baseball caps and knee-length shorts swerved by on skateboards. I thought of the word ‘centrifugal’, and decided it was one of my favourite words. Youths from the Far East, Europe, North America, wherever, drifting around hoping to find Cool London. Ah, that Cockney leprechaun is forever beyond the launderette on the corner. I watched the merry-go-round for a few revolutions. A sprog was smiling every time he bobbed past his gran and somehow it made my heart ache so much that I felt like crying or smashing something. I wanted Poppy and India to be here, now, right now. I’d buy us ice creams, and if India’s fell off, she could have mine. Then I heard my name and looked up. Iannos was waving a falafel at me from his Greek Snack Bar between the Swiss Centre and the Prince Charles Cinema, where you can see nine-month-old movies for £2.50, by the way. Katy’s scrambled eggs had long since vacated my stomach, and a falafel would be perfect.

‘Iannos!’

‘Marco, my son! How’s The Music of Chance?’

‘Fine, mate. Everything as it should be. Petty arguments about nothing, bitching, still porking one another’s girlfriends when we’re not porking one another. Did you buy the new Synth from Roger?’

‘Dodgy Rodgy? Yep. I play it in my uncle’s restaurant every night. Only problem is that I have to pretend I’m Turkish.’

‘Since when can you speak Turkish?’

‘That’s the problem. I have to pretend I’m an autistic, Turkish, keyboard-playing prodigy. Gets you down, man. Like being in Tommy and The King and I on the same stage. When’s The Music of Chance playing again?’

‘When is it not playing?’

‘Bollocks, man. How’s Poppy?’

‘Ah, Poppy’s fine, thanks,’

‘And her beautiful little daughter?’

‘India. India’s fine...’

Iannos looked at me thoughtfully.

‘What’s that look supposed to mean then?’

‘Ah, nothing... I can’t chat, but why don’t you come in and sit down? I think there’s a seat at the back. Cup o’tea?’

‘I’d love one. Thanks, Iannos. Thanks a lot.’

Iannos’s little snack bar was full of bodies and loud bits of sentences. The only free seat in the cramped place was opposite a woman slightly older than me. She was reading a book called The Infinite Tether — You and Out of Body Experiences, by Dwight Silverwind. I asked if I could take the seat, and she nodded without looking up. I tried not to stare but there was nothing else to look at. Her auburn hair — dyed — was in gypsy ringlets, and between her fingers, eyebrows and ear-lobes she was wearing at least a dozen rings. Her clothes were tie-dyed. Probably purchased when she’d gone trekking in Nepal. Landslid breast. She burns incense, does aromatherapy and describes herself as not exactly telepathic, but definitely empathic. She’s into pre-Raphaelite art, and works part-time in a commercial picture library. I’m not knocking these things, and I know I come over as arrogant. But I do know my Londoners.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt you,’ I sipped my tea with a cocked little finger, ‘but I couldn’t help noticing the title of your book.’ Her eyes were calm, and faintly pleased — good. ‘It looks engrossing. Is there a connection with alternative healing? That’s my field, you see.’

‘Is that a fact, now?’ Nice voice, rusky with sprinkled sugar. She was amused by my come-on and faintly flattered but not going to show it — too much. ‘Dwight Silverwind is one of the leading authorities on out-of-body experiences, or spiritwalking, as the Navaho Indians call it. Dwight’s a very special friend of mine. He’s my Life Coach. Look. This is Dwight.’ On the inside cover of the jacket was a wispy white smiling man with preposterous braces. A Yank, at fifty paces. ‘In this book, Dwight describes transcending the limits of the corporeal body.’

‘Oh. Is it easy?’ Probably easier than transcending his dress sense.

‘No. It requires a lot of mental training, to unknot and cast free the moorings that society ties us down to its own reality conceits. Also, it depends on the individual’s alpha emanations. I’m quite high alpha, you’re more gamma.’

‘Beg pardon?’ I detected large deposits of vanity. Vanity is the softest of bedrocks to sink shafts into.

‘I could tell when you sat down. Your emanations are more gamma than alpha.’

‘You tell without a urine sample?’ I almost said ‘sperm sample’, but chickened out.

She acted a laugh. This was going well. ‘I’m Nancy Yoakam. Holistic Therapist. Here’s my card.’ And here was Nancy Yoakam’s hand, lingering on my side of the table.

‘I’m Marco. I like your name, if I may say so. You should be from Nashville.’

‘I’m from Glastonbury. You know. King Arthur and the rock festival. Very pleased to meet you, Marco.’ Gaze into my eyes... You are sinking into a deeeeep sleeeeeep. Okay. But I’m a bit too old for her to be adopting that Children’s TV presenter voice. She probably thinks I’m younger, most women do. That’s not vanity, it’s having Latin American genes in the pool. ‘You see, I’m a person watcher. I like to sit and read people. To trained eyes, humans transmit their innermost secrets. I see your fingers are ringless — tell me Marco, is there no special somebody in your life?’

Direct. ‘A girlfriend, you mean?’

‘Yes, let’s suppose I do mean a girlfriend.’

‘I see several women concurrently.’

Taking me in her stride. Eyebrow theatrically arched. Nancy did not get sprung from the Lego box yesterday. ‘Oh, how nice for you. A Juan Quixote. Doesn’t that get rather complicated?’

‘Well, it would do, but I always tell a women when I first meet her that I see other women too. Like I’m telling you now. So if they don’t want to handle that, they can stop before they start. I don’t lie to people.’

Nancy Yoakam put down Dwight Silverwind, still open but face down, and thumbed her lips coquettishly. ‘If you ask me, that’s a very sophisticated way of luring women.’

‘I don’t mean it to be. Why do you say so?’

‘It sends out a challenge, “You could be the one to change me, you could be the one to make me believe in love again.” Dwight calls it the “Bird with the Broken Wing Syndrome”.’

Iannos brought me my tea, and tutted at me like a wily peasant. I thanked him and ignored him.

‘Never thought of that. Maybe you’re right, Nancy.’ Always a pleasure to discover insight in a vacuum. ‘I don’t not believe in love. I just think it follows its own rather perverse rules of conduct, which I cannot fathom. Actually, I’ve been in love twice, which I think is rather a lot. Excuse me if I devour this falafel, would you? I’m ravenous.’

‘Go ahead. Why do you think we met today, Marco? Why you, why here, why now? Would you like to hear what I think it was?’

‘Blind chance?’

‘When we say chance, we mean “emanations”. Dwight would say that your gamma was drawn to my alpha. The north magnetic pole is drawn to the south in an identical way.’

Dwight was beginning to piss me off. I sat down because my mate Iannos offered me a free falafel. I sat where I did because there was nowhere else to sit. If Nancy Yoakam had been a bloke I would have been halfway to the door already. She had an interesting mind — possibly — but all this New Age tosh was daubed over it. However, there was a free shag on my dick’s radar, so I stayed and sat through ‘How Crystal Healing Can Change Your Life’. Amethyst is good for depression. Nancy’s best friends were minerals. By the time I got her phone number I was no longer even interested in phoning her.

What’s wrong with me?

When I was a kid and every female an unexplored continent, my heart would gasp in the wind and all colours held new truths.

Now look at me. I shag women like I wash my shirts. More often, some weeks.

Marco at sixteen and Marco at thirty are as different as Tierra del Fuego and Kennington.

No good, Marco my boy, no good at all. If you think about it too much you’re lost.

Poppy and I had an argument a few weeks ago, which she ended by saying, ‘You know, Marco, you’re not stupid, but for someone so intelligent you can be pretty goddamned blind.’

I’d had no idea whatsoever how to respond, so I made some stupid joke. I forget what.

Time to head back.

I live in The New Moon. My pad is an attic conversion on the top floor of the pub. It’s easy to find — if the weather’s good go to St Katherine’s Docks and keep walking along the river, or just get any bus bound for The Isle of Dogs, and get off at the university. The pub’s almost next door to Wapping Tube Station. I wound up there quite by accident, of course. The Music of Chance had a gig there last winter. One of our occasional guest vocalists, Sally Leggs, introduced me to Ed and Sylv, who run the place. The gig went down well, Sally being a kind of local celebrity, and when we were chatting afterwards Ed mentioned they were looking for a lodger again.

‘What happened to the last one?’ I asked. ‘Did a runner?’

‘No,’ said Sylv, ‘you may as well know now. It happened almost twelve months ago. It was in the papers and we were on the News at Ten. Terrorists were using an old forgotten air-raid shelter under our beer cellar as a bomb factory. One night there was an accident, and about five bombs blew up simultaneously. Right under where you’re sitting. Hence the refit, and the name change. Used to be The Old Moon.’

I almost giggled. But I could tell by everyone’s faces that every word was true.

‘Fuck,’ I said, feeling ashamed, ‘that’s bad luck.’

People stared inwards.

‘Still,’ I blundered on the way I do, ‘something that freaky isn’t likely to happen for another couple of centuries, is it?’

Bigmouth strikes again.

Saturday is market day in Old Moon Road, so The New Moon was packed wall to wall with noise, smoke, grumbling, bags of vegetables and antiques. Moya was playing darts with her new boyfriend, a squaddie called Ryan. Moya and I had done the wild thing one scratchy night. It hadn’t been such a good idea.

Sylv was doing her shift with Derek, the part-timer. ‘Marco, a man called Digger was on the phone asking for you earlier. I gave him your number upstairs.’

Oh, no. ‘Really? What did he want?’ As if I didn’t know.

‘Wouldn’t say. But I think it’s just as well his name isn’t Slasher.’

Sylv is not a very well woman. Her eyelids are raw pink and on her worst days they’re red and cracked. One of the regulars, Mrs Entwhistle, told me that Sylv had lost the baby she was carrying on the night of the bomb. How do people pull themselves through things like that? I go to pieces just opening my credit-card bills. But people do survive, all around us. The world runs on strangers coping. And Sylv’s been smiling a bit more recently. If that had happened to me, I’d have to sell up — if I had anything to sell up — and go and live in County Cork. But Sylv’s family owned The Old Moon for generations and so she’s staying put in The New Moon. When there’s a lot of customers I lend a hand, especially if I’m a little behind on the rent.

There are four flights of stairs between the bar and my room. It’s a stiff climb, and the stairwell can be quite spooky at night, and sometimes in the daytime, too. The building goes back centuries. From my window there’s a fine view over the Thames, as it curves around towards Greenwich and becomes an estuary. Upstream you can see Tower Bridge. It was a clear evening, and I could see streetlights coming on as far away as Denmark Hill and Dulwich.

If I did ever go to live in County Cork, I’d be on a boat back within a fortnight.

I opened the door to my room and my heart went into contractions when I saw the answerphone winking. Surely not Digger. He said I wouldn’t have to pay him back until the following Tuesday. My dole cheque comes on Monday, and I’ll be able to persuade Barry to give me £30 for this leather jacket of Roy’s. Four messages.

But first I bit the bullet and opened the letter from the credit-card company. If they type my name and address in upper case, it’s just a statement. If they use lower-case letters, I’m in trouble. This was upper case.

Even so, it hurt. Where had this money gone? A shoe shop, restaurants, music equipment, a modem. There was a nice little bit at the bottom saying that my credit limit had been extended by £300! Are these people stupid?

Nope. They’re not remotely stupid.

Next hurdle on the Marco Steeplechase: the answer machine.

‘Marco, this is Wendy. I know I promised not to call for a while, but I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry. Well, I’m fine. I got that place at St Martin’s. I thought you’d like to know. I told my boss today that I was quitting. Like you said I should, I just told him. Straight out. No beating around the bush. I told him, and that was that. I know you said we should have a cooling-off period, but if you wanted to celebrate with me, I could get a cheap bottle of champagne in and I’d cook you whatever you wanted. So if you’re interested, phone me. Okay? Wendy. Ti amo, bellissima. Ciao.’

Ah, poor kid. She’ll get over me at art college, and learn her gender endings. One down, three possible Diggers to go.

‘Ah, Marco, sorry to bother you, this is Tim Cavendish. We’re having a slight family crisis. It appears that my brother’s law firm in Hong Kong has gone down the tubes. It’s all a bit of a mess... there’s the Chinese police, asset freezing, and whatnot... Erm, why don’t you drop in middle of next week and we’ll see how this might affect my ability to run Alfred’s book... Erm, terribly sorry about this. Bye.’

Digger would have been better.

‘Marco, this is Rob. I’m leaving the band to go and shack up with Maxine in San Francisco. Bye.’

No problem, Rob leaves the band once a month. And I can stop trying to write songs that feature handbells. Last hurdle, God, please don’t let it be Digger. If he can’t contact me he can’t threaten me.

‘Dear Marco, this is Digger at Fungus Hut Recording Studios. How are you? I’m fine, thanks. This is just a friendly little message to remind you that you owe us £150 and unless you pay by 5 o’clock on Tuesday, then on Wednesday I will sell your drum kit for whatever the pawn shop in Tottenham Court Road will give me for it and spend the money on chocolate chip cookies for our cleaning staff. Best wishes, your loving uncle Digger.’

Sarcastic bastard. All this fuss for a piddling £150! I’m an artist, for Christ’s sake! I bet he isn’t such an arsehole if Mick Jagger owes him money. I’ll work something out somehow.

Some evenings I like to open the windows and meditate as the room empties into the ebbing dusk. But now I needed a crap, a shower, a joint and a nap, in that order, before I met Gibreel in the bar downstairs around 9.30.

I tried to phone Poppy but the line was engaged. Jealousy, with nowhere to put it. A pigeon fluttered onto my window ledge, and glanced around my room. Was that the same bastard bird whose dried shit I just washed out of my hair?

Pigeon paranoia.

Time for a joint with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. The last of Josh’s Moroccan Brown... Ah, the joys of being flat broke and Generation X and surrounded by women and being miserably alone.

My room is too much like a Methodist chapel. I’m more of a Church of the Feral Pagan type. What I need is a classy chair from a more elegant century, like Katy Forbes’s. Weird. I could remember her chair, her pepper-mill and the shape of her nipples, but not her face. She’d had a birthmark shaped like a comet.

I got clean, rolled my joint, and as I smoked it the ceiling lost definition. Ah! Peat fire in the hollow of the golden bough... Josh gets his hands on the very best. That Happy Gulliver-tied-down-by-Lilliputians feeling sagged my organs, and the next thing I knew the moon was framed by the window and Gibreel was standing over me. ‘Put on your zoot suit, Marco boy!’

My gummy mouth tasted of an inner sole. My clock shone 21.45. When did I last get a good night’s sleep? How did Gibreel get a key? I always lock the door when I smoke. ‘Why? Where are we going?’

‘The casino!’

I felt too mellow for my laugh to bubble up. ‘You’re taking the piss. I owe more money than the government of Burundi. I can’t afford to go to a casino.’

‘Which is exactly why we’re going to the casino, Marco! Win it back. Pay it off.’

‘Oh, just like that.’

‘I got the people, Marco. I got a system!’

This time my laughter busted down the door and ran off over the hills.

‘What’s so funny, you stoner?’

I wasn’t sure myself, I didn’t feel remotely amused by anything. It was either this or sob, I guess. I lassoed myself back and wiped the tears away. ‘Anyway, Gibreel, anyway. They don’t just let anybody into a casino. You have to be somebody. I’m definitely only an anybody.’

‘Don’t worry, Marco. My rich cousin from Beirut is over for the weekend. My rich cousin is definitely Somebody. They run out of precious metals to colour his bank cards. Tag along. You could emerge from tonight smelling of fortune.’

‘You’re a very bad influence, Gibreel.’

‘That’s why you hang out with me. King Marco, ruler of Niceland, one day decided that he needed a bit of wickedness. And behold! Yeah, verily his plea was heard by the Angel Gibreel!’ Gibreel’s eyes flashed in the semi-darkness, and the darkness moved. ‘Got any of that hash left, Captain Marcotics?’

We met Gibreel’s cousin some time later at a wine bar in Bloomsbury. I try not to make snap judgments, but I knew right away he was a prize wanker. He didn’t even bother to tell me his name. Sometimes you meet someone, and ten minutes pass before you realise that No, they really never are going to stop talking about themselves. He was too cool to ever remove his sunglasses. With him was a middle-aged Iranian called Kemal who had fled the revolution in the seventies. Kemal’s smile was radioactive. He clapped his hands together. ‘Let’s go, if I’m not mistaken Lady Luck is in the mood for some sweet loving. So, my friend,’ he looked at me, ‘you are a man of the rouge and the noir?’

‘I’ve never used rouge in my life,’ I quipped, and waited for laughter which never came. Make a note of that, Marco. No transvestite jokes with Arabs. ‘Erm, I’m going to be more of a spectator tonight. I have a cashflow problem.’

‘Creditors?’ hissed Gibreel’s cousin in a way which made me glad I wasn’t one of his. It was the first sign of interest he’d shown in me.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t have any.’

‘Excellent! You have no creditors?’

‘No. I have no cashflow.’

‘What is this? Going to a casino, destitute and penniless?’ Kemal fumbled in his shoulder bag and flung a thin stack of paper in my lap. ‘This cannot be, my friend.’ It quivered when it landed in a way that reminded me of banknotes. Jesus, it was banknotes!

‘I can’t—’

Kemal wasn’t listening. He fingered his beard and smiled at Rich Cousin. ‘Our friend Marco will do fine. Beginners are more unpredictable. But I insist on two to one.’

Gibreel’s cousin snorted. ‘Forget it. The odds are even.’

‘Marco will do fine for what?’ A cog clicked in a mechanism way bigger than me.

‘You didn’t tell him?’ Rich Cousin asked Gibreel, who also had a crooked smile.

‘Marco my son,’ began Gibreel, ‘Kemal and my cousin wish to place a bet on whether you or I come out of the casino with most money. You’ve just been given your stake to play with.’

I even felt my smile going crooked. ‘I really don’t feel terribly happy about—’

‘And we get to keep any winnings, plus double the original stake. An extra three hundred.’

‘Three hundred pounds?’

‘No, three hundred Opal fruits. Of course pounds.’

‘He worries too much,’ said Rich Cousin.

‘Way too much,’ agreed Gibreel.

‘It’s just a side dish, for us,’ said Kemal, ‘my friend.’

‘And if I lose all the money?’

‘Then you lose all the money,’ said Kemal, ‘and nobody cares.’

‘And Kemal loses his bet with me,’ observed Rich Cousin.

So there we were. Me, Gibreel, and two dodgy Arabs I’d only known for ten minutes in the back of a taxi on our way to a casino. That made four dodgy Arabs in total.

It was £150, in £5 notes so new they felt squeaky. A pert little coincidence, that. Exactly enough to pay Digger and get my drums back. Unfortunately, Gibreel’s cousin and Kemal showed me to the cashier to exchange the dosh for chips before I could think of a way to vanish down the nearest tube entrance.

So I had to grin and bear it as I exchanged my drumkit for thirty little plastic discs.

‘Now,’ said Kemal, ‘let us go our separate ways. I am a man of poker. We will meet in the upstairs lobby at midnight. Gibreel and Marco, midnight. Not a minute later, or the bet is void and you turn back into pumpkins.’

Rich Cousin strutted into the bar to flash money and select a woman.

‘Gibreel,’ I hissed, as we walked into the main roulette lounge, ‘they’re using us as toys. It sucks. Why do they do it?’

‘Because they are bored, rich, little boys who need new toys. The money is nothing to them.’

‘And anyway, doesn’t the Koran forbid gambling?’

‘Muhammad doesn’t patrol London. With non-Muslims, on non-Muslim territory, it’s kosher. Let’s gamble, and may the best man win.’

I wandered around for a while before sitting down, taking it all in. The carpet, magenta plush, made me want to put on a pair of slippers and a smoking robe. Men in dinner jackets mingled with women in silk. There were some rare and exotic females here, at home under the chandeliers. Smiling characters locked away in the decompression chambers of dreams. A Hooray Henry hoorayed and an old lady cawed like a crow. The green of the baize and the gold of the wheels were stolen from the land of faeries, under the hill. The roulette wheel spun so fast that it seemed to be motionless, the ball an atom of gold. When I leave three centuries will have passed. The glum and the bored and the quietly desperate and the manic jolly and the spectators. The croupiers worked like cyborgs, avoiding eye contact. I looked up to try to spot the cameras, but the ceiling was hidden in black like that of a TV studio. There were no windows, no clocks. Walnut panelling, prints of racehorses and greyhounds. I wandered into a room where blackjack and poker were being played. Kemal was already in a game. I came back and sat down on the side where I could watch the roulette, and asked for a coffee, hoping it was free. It was ten o’clock. I’d watch for forty-five minutes, and work out how to play.

Twenty minutes passed. A man who looked like Samuel Beckett a few weeks before he died sat next to me, fumbling for cigarettes. I offered him one of mine. He nodded, took a couple, and sedately rocked.

‘You’re a beginner wondering where to begin.’

‘I’m wondering how I can win,’ I said.

‘Let’s see now,’ he lit up, sucking the cigarette as an asthmatic does his inhaler. ‘Which game?’

‘Roulette?’

He spoke around his cigarette, his lips barely moving. ‘Well, the American Table has two zeros, so the odds against you are greater. Stick to the French Table. If you bet on the numbers the odds against you are 2.7 per cent. If you bet on the colours, then the odds against you are 1.35 per cent.’

‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’

Samuel Beckett did a Gallic shrug. ‘It adds up. It depends how long you play. After a hundred coups, fifty-two per cent of gamblers will be losing. After a thousand, sixty-six per cent. After ten thousand, ninety-two per cent of gamblers will be losing.’

‘Is there a way to... erm...’

‘At blackjack, yes. You memorise a bookful of algorhithmic probability patterns, and then you keep count. Bet heavily when the odds swing for you, bet lightly when they’re against you. In principle, it’s that simple. You have to be very good, though, or you’ll be spotted and escorted to the dustbins. It’s probably easier to become a London cabbie.’

‘I only got a grade “C” at maths. Would poker—’

‘Poker? At poker, you get what you deserve.’

‘Ah. I don’t think I want what I deserve. So, is there a way of winning at roulette?’

‘I’ll swap you that secret for a road-map to Xanadu. There’s plenty of ways for the casino to cheat — microscopic needles, electromagnets... but for the punter, the only hope is to miniaturise aerospace trajectory technology, and use it to plot the course of the ball. That’s been done.’

‘Successfully?’

‘In the laboratory, yes. But in Vegas the team got their circuitry shorted. I gather it was painful.’

‘I suppose I’d better rely on chance, then.’

Samuel Beckett indicated with a twist of his face that in that case, the conversation was over. My £300 cut of Kemal’s winnings was waiting.

I sat down, afraid of being unmasked as an impostor. I put my first chip on red. I was about to lose my casino virginity. I watched the ball bounce and hurl itself around the wheel. What’s the ball like, ghostwriter? Give us a metaphor.

Very well. It’s like a genie, spending its fury until nothing is left.

The ball settled on black. The croupier raked away my money into a hole. It clicked as it fell. That’s the quickest £5 I ever spent without smiling. I put my second chip on red.

The ball landed on black. I’d have to win one soon... The laws of probability. I put my third chip on black.

The ball settled on red. Still, I’d have to win this time.

I put my fourth chip on red. I can’t lose four in a row.

I lost four in a row. Black. Twenty pounds just gone and nobody even thanked me.

Not a good start. Red, black, red, black. Stepping out of the way of an oncomer in the same direction as the oncomer. Never mind, Marco. One hundred and thirty pounds of chips still in my pocket.

I went and got a mineral water to rethink my strategy. I downed it, and hoped it would flush out the last of the hash. Kemal was at the bar. ‘How’s it going my friend? I have a lot of money riding on you tonight.’

That’s your stupid fault. ‘Up and down.’

‘Up is better, my friend. How are you betting? Don’t bet like a loser. Bet with strength. Don’t overrate chance. Winning in a casino is like winning in life: all is a matter of will.’

Yeah, and a lollipop tossed into the mouth of the Amazon can float upstream. It just has to want to badly enough.

The casino toilet was tiled in black marble, and the mirrors were copper and smoky. I imagined gangsters in pastel suits shooting each other in the kidneys. I had just unzipped my fly when Cousin came in, still wearing his sunglasses. He came and stood next to me. He didn’t say a word.

Even though my bladder was full, he unnerved me so much that my piss refused to come out. I heard his, though, a smooth torrent gurgling down the plughole. The free-flowing urine of opulent wealth. I pretended to be shaking off the last drops, washed my hands, and scuttled off to find another toilet.

I chose another table with an attractive brunette croupier with freckles and unfeasibly long legs. She looked like she could have been a he at some point. She looked lucky.

This time, I’d concentrate harder.

I was pretty soon down to £75.

I won a few, and lost a few. I hovered around the £60 for fifteen minutes before losing eight in a row and plummeting down to £20.

Gibreel appeared at my shoulder. ‘I’m up to £280 at blackjack. Roulette’s for mugs.’

‘I don’t have a good answer for that.’

‘Dear me, is that all you have left? And still only eleven o’clock.’

‘Get lost.’

This was hurting. I wanted out. I bet the last of my money on green. If it won, I’d get... 35 to 1... £700. Maybe Kemal was right. Maybe this gambling lark was a matter of will. £700! Concentrate on that!

The wheel spun, the wheel slowed, and damn me if the ball didn’t fall into the green zero!

...And fall right out again.

I sat there, stunned. I wanted my foster mum to come and make things right. Well, I wanted any mum. I wasn’t fussy.

I watched the lime fizz in my bottle of Sol. A parrot’s pancreas pickled in piss.

Idiot!

I deserved to lose. I’d just betted haphazardly. If I’d tried to feel more... The future already exists. Prophets can see what is already there. Anyone can predict effects from a given cause. That’s a definition of sentient life, from storing food to satellite weather forecasting. Suppose you could do the same, backwards... See the cause from the effect. It wouldn’t be an intellectual process. It would be...

Ah, bollocks. I’m sounding like Nancy Thing from Iannos’s café.

Three hundred pounds! Just for finishing the evening with more money than Gibreel! Plus whatever I made, on top... Could be quite a few hundred. A thousand even. When would I have an opportunity like this again? I owed more than £3000, quite a lot more, but a few hundred quid would buy me peace of mind and cut me some slack, for weeks.

Thing is, where could I get some more stake money? I couldn’t ask Kemal. My bank card had been eaten.

A little demon blew on the back of my neck. My credit card! Three hundred pounds credit-limit extension. Remember?

Getting deeper into debt, to gamble? Are you crazy?

Look, if you’re going to have to work some greasy windowless job for the next two years to pay off these debts, then it may as well be four.

Damn, no, I’d put my credit card in my suit pocket to use at that sexy little Mexican place with Bella last week sometime. God, had that ever been a stale, pricey evening.

I’m wearing my suit. Dolt.

I tapped my pocket. Plastic tapped back.

No one had said I couldn’t get more stake money...

What if this backfired? The credit card people weren’t going to be impressed. And how about Poppy? She might be carrying your kid around inside her. It’s not just your own future you’re gambling away here. It’s wrong. Just leave. Leave now. You won’t even be able to pay half the abortion cost, if that’s what she wants. And what if that isn’t what she wants?

I’d nailed my doubts down a pit, but I could hear them hammering at the floorboards. I went back to the original table with £300. The croupier had changed. A young chap whose name was probably something like Nigel. Maybe he was from Kennington. Eleven-thirty. I’d better play for £25 per spin.

Playing for colours may give Samuel Beckett better odds, but it had wiped me out just now. This time I was playing for numbers.

How should you choose numbers? Okay, first, my age. Twenty-nine. Odds.

The ball landed on 20. Evens. Another bad start. Down to £275. Still, next number. Numbers from today. How many eggs in Katy Forbes’s omelette?

Four. Evens.

The ball landed on 20, again. Evens! This is better. This is the way to do it. Think of a question with a numerical answer, answer it, and bet. Back up to £300.

How many people had I spoken to today? A quick count. Eighteen, including myself. Even. Listen, God, I know I haven’t been a very loyal member of the fan club, but I swear, get me out of this and I’ll even start going to church again. Whenever I can.

The ball landed on 19. God, the deal’s off, you hear? Down to £275.

How many messages on my answerphone? Three. Odds.

The ball landed on 34. Down to £250. Another question. This time my stake would be £50. Time was running out. Had I pissed off a gypsy recently?

How many teeth do I have? Twenty-eight. Evens.

The ball landed on 1. Fate, what have I done to deserve this? Would you like me to stop believing in chance? I will if you want. Just let me win now. Fate. I am yours. I am fated to win. Two hundred pounds.

Oh shit, this was next week’s food money. Gambling was horrible. People actually did this for pleasure?

How many women have I slept with in my life? Forget it, no time.

‘If I were you,’ said Samuel Beckett, ‘I would do something dramatic.’

Odds.

The ball landed on 4. Fate, fuck you. Chance all the way. One hundred and fifty pounds. Ten to midnight.

How many letters in my name, Marco. Five. Odds.

24. Evens. Down to a hundred pounds.

Jesus, this is tomorrow’s rent. I’m going to have to get a job in Burger King at Victoria Station.

‘Did you know,’ said Samuel Beckett, ‘that you can bet on four numbers at once? It’s called a Carré. Place your chip on the intersection where they meet. Payment is 8 to 1.’

Where? ‘Will you choose it for me?’

‘No.’

I put my second-to-last chip on 23/24/26/27.

The ball landed in 28.

‘Tough,’ said Samuel Beckett. ‘Still. One last number to go.’

‘Please,’ I said, ‘give me an intersection.’

‘Oh, if you insist: 32/33/35/36.’

I placed the chip. This was my last chance. I realised that I couldn’t watch. As there was no sofa to run behind, I hid my eyes as darkness engulfed me.

Nearing the speed of light, time buckled. Sound thickened to the consistency of hair gel. Poverty walked towards me through the crowd, a bed at Summerford Hostel would set me back £12.50. A large pile of chips was being raked at me. And left there. I looked up. The croupier was already looking away. An elderly black gent with hair coming out of his ears was looking at my chips covetously. Two girls in matching shiny dresses were laughing right at me.

Samuel Beckett had gone.

There was £400 worth in chips in front of me. I could keep my credit card.

‘My friend,’ Kemal appeared over my shoulder, ‘it is time. I’m glad to see you have not been wiped out. Let us go to the upstairs lobby. Did you enjoy yourself?’

I swallowed hard. ‘It’s so important to play only for the pleasure of it.’

I knew I hadn’t beaten Gibreel, but I had £400, over the £300 I had borrowed. I discounted the £150 stake, since that had never really been mine. So. A modest profit of £100. The leather jacket, £30. Probably enough to pacify Digger, if I promise to manicure his mastiffs for a week. My drums were back. Then there was The Music of Chance gig at Brixton Academy next weekend, which should tide me over until the end of the month. We always got cash on the nail there because I’d shagged the Student’s Union events organiser a few times last year.

Gibreel was looking sheepish in the upstairs lobby. ‘Sorry,’ he said to Cousin. ‘The dealer must have known how to neutralise my system.’

‘My friend!’ Kemal rotated two or three times for joy. I kept a blank face, but inwardly somersaulted. Yes! £100 plus £300 equals £400 profit for me and now we are talking!

Cousin reluctantly produced a beige envelope, which Kemal snatched. ‘Thank you my friend.’

Gibreel frowned and pointed at me. ‘Not so fast! Marco cheated! He got some more money out!’ My ex-friend looked at me. ‘Deny it!’

Weird stuff, money. ‘You didn’t say I couldn’t.’

Cousin and Gibreel advanced towards Kemal, and tried to take the envelope back. Kemal swung back, Cousin grabbed the envelope, Kemal grabbed Cousin and they both fell onto a plant-stand, felling a massive umbrella plant and upsetting a gong which gonged down the stairs, one gong per step. Gibreel picked up the envelope, Kemal writhed out from under the umbrella plant with surprising alacrity and headbutted Gibreel, who staggered back, spitting out a tooth. Cousin rugby tackled Kemal from behind, and I heard a zipping rip of material. This all seemed choreographed. Kemal tumbled, reached into his jacket as he fell and suddenly a grin-shaped knife was flashing through the air. I guess they weren’t such good friends after all.

Trouble was shouting around the corner. The only possible way out for me would be for this peculiar triangular door to be open, and for me to crawl into it before the bouncers arrived, and for these three to not notice me, and for nobody to think of looking in here. What kind of odds were these? It was an ostrich-brained escape plan, but sometimes the ostrich strategy is your last, indeed only, line of defence. I turned the doorknob.

And bugger me if it wasn’t open! I cramped myself in, and pulled the door to behind me. I bumped my head, stuck my foot in a bucket and smelt detergent. My priest hole was a cleaning cupboard.

I heard the bouncers come, a whole load of shouting and protesting. I felt oddly calm. As usual, my fate was in the hands of chance. If I was caught, I was caught. I waited for the door to be tugged open.

The noises were escorted away.

What a day. Am I really hiding in a casino’s cleaning cupboard? Yes, I really am. How in heaven and hell did I get here? A humming switched itself off, and I was left alone in the silence that I hadn’t noticed hadn’t been there.

There is Truth, and then there is Being Truthful.

Being Truthful is just one more human activity, along with chatting up women, ghostwriting, selling drugs, running a country, designing radiotelescopes, parenting, drumming, and shoplifting. All are susceptible to adverbs. You can be truthful well or badly, frankly or slyly, and you can choose to do it or not to do it.

Truth holds no truck with any of this. A comet doesn’t care if humans notice its millennial lap, and Truth doesn’t care less what humans are writing about it this week. Truth’s indifference is immutable. More Mercurial than Jovian. Sometimes you turn your head and you see it: in a fountain, in the parabola of a flung frisbee, or the darkness of a cleaning cupboard. Causes and effects politely stand up and identify themselves. At such times I understand the futility of worrying. I shut up and I see the bumbling goodness behind the bitching and insecurity. Tying my future to Poppy’s and India’s — if they would have me — would be the greatest, never-ending, Richter-busting plunge I could ever take.

And then Truth is suddenly gone, and you’re back to anxiety about bills.

I yawned so wide that my jaw clicked. The adrenalin from the fight and the coffee from the lounge were wearing off. Truth is tiring stuff. It was time to crawl out of my cleaning cupboard.

I cashed in my chips, praying to get the money in my sticky hand before being recognised. Were all cashiers this slow?

At long last I was free. I went and reclaimed my jacket. Still nobody recognised me.

There was a telephone in the corner of the reception hall. As I was fishing for change Samuel Beckett came strolling over. ‘Your friends were persuaded to continue their frank exchange of views elsewhere. Minus the knives.’

‘Who?’

The telephone was one of the old dial types. All these circles and wheels spinning separately together. I rolled in my coin.

‘Poppy! This is me.’

‘Well. Look what the cat didn’t drag back last night.’ Wry. Tired?

‘I told you about the private view. A kid in a sweetshop. How’s the little trilobite?’

‘She fell asleep in a sulk because she wanted her bedtime story from you.’

‘It’s been a long day.’

‘Oh, poor Marco.’

‘I’ve been having paradigm shifts. Poppy...’

‘Do you have to do your paradigm shifts in the middle of the night?’

‘Sorry, this can’t wait... look, financially, you know I’m not John Paul Getty here, but... look, seriously, I’ve been wondering if you’d like to merge our estates, both in a financial, and maybe existential sense too, of course that would just be the tip of the, erm, commitment iceberg, and if you’d like to do the same, then maybe—’

‘Marco. What on earth are you talking about?’

Say it. ‘Would you like to get married?’ Oh, lordy lord.

‘With whom?’

She wasn’t going to make this easy. ‘With me.’

‘Well. This is out of the blue. Let me think about it.’

‘How long do you need?’

‘A couple of decades?’

‘You hussy! I bought you a T-shirt with a pig on it...’

‘You’re hoping to win my hand in holy matrimony, and in return you’re offering a pig. Is this east Putney or east Bangladesh?’

‘Poppy, I’m serious. I want to be your, your, I want you to be my...’ Husband. Wife. Jesus wept. ‘I can’t quite say it yet. But I will. I’m not drunk, I’m not stoned, I’m serious.’

The few moments that passed had more mass than ordinary time, because a possible lifetime was compressed into them. I started to say something at the same time as Poppy. Poppy carried on. ‘Look. If you use the word “serious” just once more I’ll start believing you. Then if I find out you’re not serious, our friendship stroke relationship stroke whatever is destroyed. This is your point of no return. Are you serious?’

‘I’m serious.’

Poppy whistled softly. ‘Marco. I’m taken aback that you can still take me aback.’

‘I’m coming over now. Is that okay?’

The longest wait of all.

‘Yes, under the circumstances, I guess that’s okay.’

I hung up, and collected my coat. The tube closed hours ago. I had the money for a taxi to Putney, but £15 would feed India for — how long? Anyway, I had some thinking to do. I’d walk it.

Even if it took all night.