Some days there might be an
invitation to fly to a private island on a private jet, or to spend a night
lurking in the shadows of a back street brothel with a girl forced into sexual
slavery. Most days, however, ghostwriters are like every other sort of writer, bashing
away at our keyboards for hours on end. So, let’s pick one of the more
interesting days.
Their enquiry had stood out from the usual half dozen that
arrive on my screen each day. James emailed that he and his girlfriend, Penny,
lived in Switzerland
and were looking for a ghostwriter to tell their love story. He warned that it
would contain sexual elements that many would find shocking, but that there
would also be many lessons to be learnt from it. He told me they would be in London
the following weekend and would be staying at the Dorchester
in Park Lane .
Since I was going to be in Mayfair that Sunday anyway, interviewing an African
President whose memoir I was ghosting, I suggested I pop into the Dorchester once I was finished.
The
President, an easily distracted man of almost infinite good humour, had to break
off from our meeting to deal with a crisis and I found myself free in the
middle of the day. James invited me to join them for lunch at Zuma’s, a famous
Japanese restaurant in Knightsbridge. Even if nothing came of the book it would
be an interesting lunch and would pass the time until the President was free to
resume talking.
The
couple waiting at the restaurant were extremely good looking, reserved and
charming at the same time, intent on making me feel comfortable in their
company despite being completely wrapped up in their adoration of one another
and being about to share some amazingly personal details about their lives. One
chilled bottle of wine followed another as they shyly revealed their tale of
true love.
They
had met as teenagers and, like Romeo and Juliet, were forced apart by family
pressures. Unlike Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, however, these two had
been given a second chance, which they had turned into something magical and deeply
erotic. By the time the espressos came I was hooked and had agreed to fly out
to Switzerland
the following weekend so that I could start the process of “becoming Penny” in
print.
I
was so in thrall to their story I only realised the whole afternoon had sped by
when my phone buzzed to tell me that the President was now ready to talk again
over dinner. Grabbing a cab back to Mayfair I
set the tape recorder going once more and realigned my brain, submerging myself
inside the head of a man clinging to power in a dark and dangerous world, many
miles from the hushed luxury of the room we were going to be spending the
evening in.
.JPG)
