Ghostwriting Read Online Free PDF Page A

the tea-tray. He had slipped down into the arm chair, his long legs, encased in baggy brown cords, stretched out towards the open fire.
    He accepted the mug without a word, took a mouthful, and topped it up with alcohol from a silver hip flask.
    I fetched an ashtray as his roving eye sought a place to deposit the foul smelling ash of his cigarette.
    “So...” I said, “it’s been a long time – ten years?”
    He ignored me. His eye had alighted on the glass-fronted bookcase in which I kept copies of my published work. “Still writing, Simon?” he asked, as if it had been a passing phase out of which I might have grown.
    I nodded. “Keeps the wolf from the door,” I said, and immediately regretted it. I recalled the disdain with which he regarded those who compromised in order to get by.
    He was rapidly thawing out before the dancing flames, and the process brought back another aspect of the man I had conveniently forgotten over the years: Beauregard had a body odour as distinctive as it was strong. I recalled debating with Dave and Sue as to the exact essence of the perfume: I think I described it at the time as something like the reek of an old jungle temple, leaf mould and guano. Now this compost odour filled the room.
      “I must say, this is a surprise,” I waffled. “What have you been up to lately?”
    It was some time before he replied. He took a mouthful of his charged tea, then a sharp inhalation of his cigarette.
    “Travelling,” he said.
    “Anywhere interesting?” I winced as I said this. What was it about Beauregard that made my every comment crass and ignorant? Wasn’t everywhere interesting, if one approached it with curiosity?
    He nodded, his liquid eyes seeing far away places. “Patna, Kathmandu, Lhasa...”
    I nodded, as if I were familiar with these cities.
    “Working?”
    He shook his head. Silly question. “Studying. Thinking. Reading.”
    He always had been a voracious reader of obscure texts. He spoke at least six languages, read six more.
    He swung his long head and stared at me. “I’ve seen things, Simon. I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe.”
    I nodded, prepared to believe him, but was aware as I did so that I did not want him to tell me of these things.
    Thankfully he seemed disinclined to go on.
    “So you’ve been away for ten years?” I asked, feeling compelled to stoke the conversation.
    He nipped the tab of his cigarette and inhaled with miserly economy, looked at me through the smoke, and nodded. “Almost ten years. Walked across Europe, through Greece, Turkey.”
    “Walked all the way?”
    “All the way, though in eastern Turkey I bought a horse. Rode through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and into India.”
    I nodded, wondering whether to believe him. He rode through Iran and Afghanistan at the height of the troubles there?
    I wanted to ask him how he paid his way – but there were some things that I had never enquired of Beauregard. I did not know his first name; nor his place of birth; I had no idea if he had brothers of sisters, or if his parents were still alive: it seemed as if the answers to these mundane questions might diminish in stature the man I regarded as something of a myth.
    “Years ago I decided never to stop,” he said. “To settle down, to establish roots – that would be death, Simon. Possessions...” He gestured dismissively at my book-crammed study. “It isn’t what my life is about. I have nothing.”
    “And you’ve been travelling ever since?”
    He nodded. “I have to, Simon. I wish I could explain – I know that if I ever stop, then that’ll be the end.”
    I nodded, at a loss for words.
    When I next looked up from my tea, Beauregard had lodged himself further into the armchair and seemed to be asleep. I experienced an immediate relief.
    I was washing the cups in the kitchen when I heard him cry out. I rushed back into the front room. He was talking to himself in his sleep, his head turning back and forth. I hovered,