The Vanishing Point (9 page)

10

A
ghost is a professional hypocrite. We’re constantly editing the person we’ve discovered into the person they want the world to see. We are the cosmetic surgeons of the image. We become experts in what should be left out. I generally ask clients if they would be comfortable with their mother or their child reading particular episodes that I consider to be prurient or predatory. And when I’m writing about sexual abuse, for example, I’m always conscious that there are creeps out there who look for this sort of memoir only because it turns them on. So I’m careful not to include any explicit descriptions or much detail about the process of grooming children for sexual exploitation. I’m not in the business of writing a primer for paedophiles.

Even with all the practice I’d had at creating a central fiction to form the spine of my ‘autobiographies’,
Fishing for Gold
turned out to be one of my more challenging enterprises. I think the issue was that Scarlett had given me a problem I’d never faced before. Usually, what I’m editing out is the material that paints the subject in a less than flattering light. For example, when I was ghosting a champion snooker player who had successfully battled cancer, the heart of the book was the strength he’d found in his loving marriage. It didn’t need any intervention from me for the player and his agent to be clear that they did not want the public to read about the prostitutes and the drugs that had been the reality of his backstage life.

I’ve become an adept at treading the narrow line between providing just enough revelation to justify newspaper serialisation but not so much that the client becomes a pariah in their own life. And while it was true that what I was hiding about Scarlett would make her life uncomfortable, it wasn’t because the secrets were dirty and damaging. Apart from Joshu, who was her one blind spot, the truth about Scarlett was that she was smarter, shrewder and much more sensitive than any TV viewer or tabloid reader would have thought possible. I’d found it hard to believe myself at first, but I’d gradually had to accept the creeping suspicion that the Scarlett the world had been privy to was mostly as artificial a creation as Michael Jackson’s face.

I couldn’t believe she’d got away with it for so long. It was on the seventh or eighth day of our interviews that I broached the subject. ‘You’re a lot smarter than you let on,’ I said.

We were lounging on the leather sofas in the late afternoon. We’d been talking about the ill-fated second series, and Scarlett had clearly been bored by my insistence that we had to talk about the horrible thing she’d said to Danny Williams. ‘Look, it happened,’ she said, struggling upright and glaring at me. ‘You don’t need me to go through it all again. It’s there on YouTube for ever.’

‘YouTube doesn’t tell me what was going through your mind.’

She looked away. ‘What do you want me to say? It was like I lost my mind? Like I totally didn’t know what I was saying?’ She pushed herself upright, impatient. ‘Look, I said something that I don’t even believe. I’d been out of sorts for days. All kinds of crap just came bubbling up. I know now it was because I was pregnant and my hormones were all over the place, but at the time, nobody was more gobsmacked than me at what came out of my mouth.’ She sniffed. ‘Will that do?’

And that was when I broke all the rules and stepped across the line of tacit agreement between ghost and client. I’m not an investigative journalist. It’s not my job to challenge what my client tells me. Unless what they’re saying is completely at odds with all the known facts in the public domain, I’m supposed to swallow it whole. Sometimes I feel like a python confronted with a double-decker bus, but you’d be amazed what the punters will accept as gospel. On the rare occasions when I’ve had to point out very gently that my client’s version of events does not quite tally with what the rest of the world remembers, I’ve felt like I was skating on thin ice. The ghostwriting equivalent of ripping a hole in the space-time continuum. Because once you confront them with one lie, it’s hard to stop the whole thing unravelling.

But with Scarlett, I couldn’t help myself. I’d grown to like her a lot over the three weeks we’d been talking. I generally manage to stay on good terms with the people I write about, but this time I suspected we might actually form a genuine friendship. If that was going to happen, we both needed to stop pretending. I’d never write the truth, obviously. I just needed to know it.

So, ‘You’re a lot smarter than you let on,’ I said. ‘There was nothing spontaneous or hormonal about any of that, was there?’

Scarlett’s slow smile said it all. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, pointing to my little digital recorder.

But I knew what she meant. I don’t like going off the record. It can put you into all sorts of awkward places. I remember the middle-aged man who had survived a childhood of hideous abuse at the hands of the Christian Brothers who asked me to turn off the tape, whereupon he confessed that his marriage was an empty shell and he was having a sexual relationship with their parish priest. The same parish priest who was leading a campaign to name and shame the members of his church who had sexually abused children. That was one of those times when I wished I had a time machine that would take me back to the place where I didn’t know that.

So it was a big step of trust for me to turn off the machine. But sooner or later I was going to have to step outside the box if I was going to attempt to make proper friends with Scarlett.

I turned it off.

We both sat in silence for a moment, staring at the recorder. Then Scarlett cleared her throat. ‘You’re right. I planned it. I knew I was pregnant when I went back to Foutra. Plus I knew the second series was my chance to take myself to the next level. I figured I’d only get one chance to make a splash with the news about the baby, so I better go for broke.’ She gave me a sly look. ‘I think I did a pretty good job of it.’

I laughed. ‘You hooked me. And I’m the best. That’s how good a job you did. Has it all been planned, Scarlett? From the off?’

‘Right from the off.’ She fell back against the sofa in an exaggerated pose of relief. ‘Steph, it’s bloody great to share it at last. I’ve had to keep my gob shut for so long, it’s been killing me.’

And out it poured. The strange, twisted plan of a woman who had no prospects, no qualifications and no obvious escape from a dead-end life she adamantly did not want. ‘I remember when
Big Brother
started. I was way too young to get on it, but I could see how something like that might be the way out for somebody like me. Somebody with a totally shit life.’

‘And a brain,’ I said. ‘That’s what made you different, isn’t it?’

‘Well, I think so,’ she said. ‘I was never any good at school, mostly because they wrote me off before I even got my feet under the table. But I reckoned if I could get on one of those shows, I could play a good enough part to make something of myself. I studied them like it was maths or history or summat. I could have gone on
Mastermind
with reality TV shows as my specialist subject.’ She chuckled. ‘Mind, the general knowledge would have been a bit of a disaster.’

She’d auditioned three times before she finally got her slot on
Goldfish Bowl
. ‘I had to keep dumbing down.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘You would not believe how fucking dim most of the people who get on these shows are. They haven’t got a clue. No wonder the TV companies love shows like
Goldfish Bowl
. They can exploit the living daylights out of the contestants and the poor sods don’t even notice.’

‘So it was all a con job?’

‘Start to finish. Remember that night on the first series when I got drunk and danced naked on the table?’

I shuddered. It had been unforgettable, for all the wrong reasons. ‘Oh, yes.’

Scarlett rocked with laughter. ‘I know, it’s excruciating to watch. But it didn’t half grab the headlines. I wasn’t drunk at all, you know. I made it look like I was drinking a lot more than I did. And I was totally stone-cold sober. I played them all for suckers, Steph. And look at me now. I’ve got my own house and money in the bank. You’re going to make me a bestseller. And my baby’s going to have a daddy.’

‘What about Joshu? Is he part of the game?’

She looked outraged. ‘Of course not. I wouldn’t be that cruel. I wouldn’t play with somebody’s emotions like that. I love Joshu, and he loves me.’

I wasn’t entirely sure about the second half of that sentence. Especially if Joshu ever realised that the woman in his life was about seven times smarter than him. ‘As long as you’re happy, that’s what counts. But I have to congratulate you, Scarlett. You’ve done a terrific job. When I was just another punter, I had no idea that you were anything other than a nice-but-dim bimbo.’

Scarlett scooted forward to high-five me. ‘Props to you, Steph. You’re the only one who’s ever worked it out. All the hacks, the TV producers, the business people that make my brands – they think I’m thick so they patronise the arse off me then funnel everything through Georgie. And bless him, Georgie’s like most people. He made up his mind about me before he even met me. He thinks he knows my limits and he plays to them. He never actually looks at me or listens to me. He only pays attention to the surface. It’s one of the reasons why I chose him. That and his reputation for being honest. Let’s face it, if you’re supposed to be thick, you need to be bloody sure you pick an agent who’s going to take care of you and not rip you off.’

I had to admit she’d made a good job of it. ‘Don’t you get fed up, though? Always pretending?’

‘I do sometimes. Being pregnant’s done me a big favour. I was getting knackered with having to be out on the lash three or four nights a week. But now I’m supposed to set a good example and stop at home. Early nights, no smoking or drinking. Because you know there’s a whole world of media out there who would give their right arms to catch me being a shit mum-to-be. You’ve no idea what it’s like. Every time I leave the house, they’re on my tail. I go to the supermarket, they’re snapping my groceries. I go to lunch and talk to the parking attendant, they’re all over him, asking what I said. I have no fucking privacy unless I’m in here, behind these walls. They’re all waiting for me to end up on my arse outside some nightclub six months pregnant. And that’s not a headline I could come back from. So I have to pull the tragedy face for poor Joshu and tell him I can’t come and watch him doing his pumping rideouts all over town.’

‘“Pumping rideouts?”’

She snorted. ‘DJ wankspeak for a set. He takes it all seriously, bless him. He’s got a little studio out the back, he spends days in there putting stuff together in the right sequence. He’s doing really well, you know. He’s starting to get some top gigs.’

‘Which might have something to do with being your boyfriend.’

Scarlett gave me a dark look. ‘That might have raised his profile, but he is actually good, you know.’

‘Even when he’s off his face?’ A small test of our incipient friendship.

‘What do you mean?’ Now the old belligerent Scarlett came leaping out of the cave.

‘About half of the times I’ve seen Joshu, he’s been high. You’ve spent too much time round people who abuse drink and drugs not to see that for yourself.’

‘So he uses. That doesn’t make him a junkie. He likes to have fun. That doesn’t mean he’s hooked.’

This wasn’t the time or the place to point out to Scarlett that I wouldn’t have Joshu anywhere near any child of mine, with his drugs and fake guns. But I had made my point. If we were going to be mates, it was as well that I’d got my reservations out in the open sooner rather than later. At least Scarlett knew now that she could rely on me to be honest with her, even when she didn’t like what I had to say.

We turned a corner that day. I only wish I’d had a clearer view of the road ahead.

11

O
nce I’ve finished the interviews, I generally don’t see anything of my clients until I’ve completed the first draft. When I have queries, I email or phone them. It was different with Scarlett. Five days after we were done talking, she texted me to say she was in town, could she come round to mine?

I never let clients into my life. They don’t know my address, they don’t come to my home. They are professional acquaintances and they stay in my professional sphere. But Scarlett had blown a hole in her barriers to let me in. The least I could do was to return the favour. So I texted the address back and put a bottle of mineral water in the freezer to chill.

She turned up in the red Mazda sports car. My house is the end one of a grimy yellow-brick terrace in what barely scrapes by as Hackney. The car stuck out like a pickled onion on a cream cake, but Scarlett had the good sense to stuff her hair in a snood and cover her eyes with a pair of tinted glasses. Not big, outrageous ‘look at me’ sunglasses but understated specs that made her face look different. She made it up the path without dragging anyone’s attention away from the car.

Once inside, she made no secret of the fact that she was curious. While I made tea, she poked around downstairs, checking out the CD collection, the books and the pictures on the walls. ‘Nice,’ she offered in final judgement as she wandered back to the scrubbed pine table that occupies the dining-room end of the open-plan space I live in, trailing a miasma of Scarlett Smile, the sweet floral signature fragrance the perfumiers had created for her.

‘A bit different from yours.’ I poured boiling water into the mugs and stirred the bags around.

‘Tell you the truth, I didn’t have a bloody clue when I moved into mine. Half the décor I inherited from the bankrupt geezer I bought it off. The other half, Georgie organised.’ She gave a half-laugh. ‘Nobody I knew ever had “interior décor”.’ She used her fingers to signal quotation marks in the air. ‘You just slapped a bit of paint on the walls. Or picked up some wallpaper off the market. So I’m learning as I go along. This here—’ She gestured at my lemon walls, stripped boards with their blue-and-white striped jute rugs and pale wooden cupboards and shelves. ‘I like this. I could live with something like this. I like coming into people’s houses and seeing what they’ve chosen. I’m learning all the time, Steph. I’m getting the hang of stuff that people like you take for granted.’

I’d never really stopped and considered how much people in Scarlett’s shoes missed out on. It’s not that I’m posh. My dad works for an insurance company, my mum’s a primary school secretary. But Scarlett was one of Thatcher’s illegitimate kids, the workless underclass. The rest of us, we’re too busy taking the piss or patronising or judging to stop and wonder why people suddenly thrust into the spotlight have such crap taste. When you did bother asking, the answer was uncomfortable.

Scarlett broke the seriousness of the mood. ‘Got any biscuits? I’m starving.’

I found the remains of a packet of chocolate digestives that Pete had been working his way through the previous evening. ‘You’re in luck. I don’t usually keep biscuits in the house. It’s too tempting when I’m working at home.’

‘Where do you work, then?’ She looked around vaguely, as if she’d missed something.

‘I had the loft converted about five years ago. I’ve got an office up there.’

Scarlett took the offered cup of tea and sat down, stretching out her legs under the table as if she belonged. ‘You live here all by yourself, then?’

‘Pretty much. My bloke often stays over but we don’t live together.’

‘Why not?’ She stirred sugar into her tea and smiled to soften the question.

I sighed. ‘I’m not sure, to be honest.’ I thought about it. ‘I like my own space too much, I think. I’ve lived on my own for a long time and I don’t want to give that up.’

‘Sounds like you don’t love him,’ Scarlett said.

I laughed awkwardly. ‘That’s what he says. But it’s not true. You can love someone without wanting to spend every minute of your life with them. Like Joshu with you. He loves you, but being free to do his own thing matters to him too. I’m a bit like that, I suppose. But my bloke, Pete, he’d like us to live together and for me to give up work so I can devote myself to him. Which I definitely don’t want to do.’

Scarlett pulled a face. ‘Too right. I see what you mean, about having your own space. And I suppose if Joshu was around twenty-four seven, I’d get stir crazy. It’s going to be weird enough when the baby comes along.’

‘How are you feeling about that?’

‘Pretty cool. You know? It’s like I spent all my life watching people fuck up with their kids. I’m the greatest living expert on what not to do to your kids. I’m gonna be a good mum. I’m gonna bring this kid up proper. And nothing’s going to stop me.’ And I believed her.

She delved into her shoulder bag, pulled out a scrunched-up bundle of pages torn out of various brochures and catalogues, and spread them out on the table. ‘This is the cot I’m having,’ she said, flattening a brightly coloured photograph and pushing it towards me. As she went through her purchases, it dawned on me that she probably didn’t have anyone else she could do this with. The girls she went out on the razz with didn’t have the attention span; Joshu didn’t seem bothered about the practical details of their life as parents; and she had no matriarchal family figure to turn to. I was the nearest thing she had to an auntie or a big sister. I couldn’t help feeling that, if I was the answer, Scarlett was definitely asking the wrong question, since I’ve never felt I had a maternal bone in my body.

Still, watching her enthusiasm was infectious, and in spite of myself I began to engage with the debate over buggies and car seats. We were flicking back and forth between cot mobiles when the alarm on her phone went off. Startled, Scarlett began to gather her papers together. ‘Ah, shit,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go. I’m modelling maternity wear at some charity do up Knightsbridge. Scummy mummy meets yummy mummies.’ She shoved the papers in her bag. ‘This has been great. I’ve had a fucking fantastic time.’ She stood up, hand in the small of her back, groaning. ‘Bloody back. This doesn’t get any easier.’ She gave me a hug. ‘Can I come again?’

I returned the embrace. ‘Of course you can.’

We were halfway down the hall, nattering about when we’d see each other again, when the front door opened. Pete took a step inside then stopped dead. His face gave nothing away. That was never a good sign. Scarlett stepped back and somehow in the narrow hallway I managed the introductions. Pete grunted in response, but Scarlett either didn’t notice or didn’t care. ‘You got a good one there, mate,’ she told him as she squeezed past him to the door. ‘You want to take care of that one. See you, Steph.’ And she was gone, leaving only a whiff of Scarlett Smile in the air behind her.

It would be fair to say that Pete wasn’t best pleased by my new best friend. He seemed affronted that I would want to be pals with someone I’d come to know through ghosting them. No, that’s not quite true. If it had been a politician or someone else with status and power, he’d have been happy to include them in our circle. But all he could see was the Scarlett Harlot and all that went with that image.

‘People make judgements about us by the company we keep,’ he said patiently, as if he was explaining to a child. ‘I don’t want them misjudging you because you’re choosing to be with her. Everybody knows she’s racist and homophobic and thick as a brick—’

‘And they’re wrong. That’s not who she is. It’s who she’s chosen to portray.’

He waved a hand dismissively. ‘It doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong. What matters is how people view her. They think she’s a contemptible slapper. And that should be enough to keep you away from her. You’ve got nothing in common with her, Stephanie.’

‘I like her.’

‘I like Reginald D. Hunter, but I don’t want him in my kitchen.’

‘Who’s the racist now?’ I tried to sound light-hearted, but Pete didn’t see the funny side.

‘Don’t try to be clever,’ he said, going to the fridge and taking out a bottle of beer. ‘I’m only thinking of you.’

I knew that was a big fat lie. He was only thinking of himself. Concerned that people would judge him because of the company I kept. But I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. It would only end with bad feeling and I hated to see the hurt in his eyes when he was upset. ‘I’ll make sure your paths don’t cross in future,’ I said.

Evidently I hadn’t managed to sound conciliatory enough. ‘The easiest way to make sure our paths don’t cross is not to invite her here again,’ he grumbled, walking past me and settling down on the sofa, remote in hand. ‘What’s for dinner?’

‘I didn’t know you were coming over,’ I said. ‘I’ll make some spaghetti carbonara.’

He grunted. ‘That’ll have to do then. Come here and give me a cuddle before you get stuck in. It’s been a long and weary road, getting this mix right.’ And that was that. Looking back, I wonder whether he thought I’d agreed to dump Scarlett. It never occurred to me that he’d read me so wrong.