The Ghost

Lover? How could one keep a straight face? Mistress? Do me a favor. Fiancée? Certainly not. I suppose I ought to have realized it was ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship. (Kate wasn’t her real name, by the way, but I don’t see why she should be dragged into all this. In any case, it suits her better than the name she does have: she looks like a Kate, if you know what I mean—sensible but sassy, girlish but always willing to be one of the boys. She worked in television, but let’s not hold that against her.)
    “Thanks for the concerned phone call,” I said. “I’m dead, actually, but don’t worry about it.” I kissed the top of her head, dropped the books onto the sofa, and went into the kitchen to pour myself a whiskey. “The entire tube is down. I’ve had to walk all the way from Covent Garden.”
    “Poor darling,” I heard her say. “And you’ve been shopping.”
    I topped up my glass with water from the tap, drank half, then topped it up again with whiskey. I remembered I was supposed to have reserved a restaurant. When I went back into the living room, she was removing one book after another from the carrier bag. “What’s all this?” she said, looking up at me. “You’re not interested in politics .” And then she realized what was going on, because she was smart—smarter than I was. She knew what I did for a living, she knew I was meeting an agent, and she knew all about McAra. “Don’t tell me they want you to ghost his book?” She laughed. “You cannot be serious.” She tried to make a joke of it—“You cannot be serious” in an American accent, like that tennis player a few years ago—but I could see her dismay. She hated Lang, felt personally betrayed by him. She used to be a party member. I had forgotten that, too.
    “It’ll probably come to nothing,” I said and drank some more whiskey.
    She went back to watching the news, only now with her arms tightly folded, always a warning sign. The ticker announced that the death toll was seven and likely to rise.
    “But if you’re offered it you’ll do it?” she asked, without turning to look at me.
    I was spared having to reply by the newsreader announcing that they were cutting live to New York to get the reaction of the former prime minister, and suddenly there was Adam Lang, at a podium marked “Waldorf-Astoria,” where it looked as though he had been addressing a lunch. “You will all by now have heard the tragic news from London,” he said, “where once again the forces of fanaticism and intolerance…”
    Nothing he uttered that night warrants reprinting. It was almost a parody of what a politician might say after a terrorist attack. Yet, watching him, you would have thought his own wife and children had been eviscerated in the blast. This was his genius: to refresh and elevate the clichés of politics by the sheer force of his performance. Even Kate was briefly silenced. Only when he had finished and his largely female, mostly elderly audience was rising to applaud did she mutter, “What’s he doing in New York, anyway?”
    “Lecturing?”
    “Why can’t he lecture here?”
    “I suppose because no one here would pay him a hundred thousand dollars a throw.”
    She pressed Mute.
    “There was a time,” said Kate slowly, after what felt like a very long silence, “when princes taking their countries to war were supposed to risk their lives in battle—you know, lead by example. Now they travel around in bombproof cars with armed bodyguards and make fortunes three thousand miles away, while the rest of us are stuck with the consequences of their actions. I just don’t understand you,” she went on, turning to look at me properly for the first time. “All the things I’ve said about him over the past few years—‘war criminal’ and the rest of it—and you’ve sat there nodding and agreeing. And now you’re going to write his propaganda for him, and make him richer. Did none of it ever mean anything to you at all?”
    “Hold on a minute,” I said. “You’re a fine one to talk. You’ve been trying to get an interview with him for months. What’s the difference?”
    “What’s the difference? Christ!” She clenched her hands—those slim white hands I knew so well—and raised them in frustration, half claw, half fist. The sinews stood out in her arms. “ What’s the difference? We want to hold him to account—that’s the