Confessions of a Ghostwriter. Andrew Crofts

Family secrets

       One for the bank vaults

       On behalf of my client

       A movie star and her entourage

       A hit-man comes to lunch

       Writers as parasites

       Ordinary people who do extraordinary things

       Leaving London

       Soft times

       A pain in Baguio

       Whoring myself again

       The suppression of the ego

       The Pope’s secret mistress

       A writer’s pit

       Who moved my nuts?

       ‘Everyone says it would make a great movie’

       The strange delusions of world leaders

       Authors regain a little self-control

       Standing on the past

       The creation of Steffi McBride

       A gathering of ghosts

       Meeting the daughter of God

       My father’s departure by tractor

       And still I know nothing

       Acknowledgements

       Confessions Series

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      ‘Ghostwriter for Hire’

      I placed the small ad in The Bookseller, a publishing trade magazine, simply adding my phone number, and over the following years those three words took me all over the globe.

      They allowed me to meet people I would otherwise never have known existed and who would reveal to me the secrets of their worlds. I travelled from palaces to brothels, lush jungles to mean city streets and got behind the closed doors of both corporate boardrooms and the homes of dysfunctional families.

      Hiding behind the title of ghostwriter I could converse with kings and billionaires as easily as whores and the homeless; go backstage with rock stars and actors and descend into the bowels of the earth with miners and engineers. I could stick my nose into everyone else’s business and ask all the impertinent questions I wanted to. At the same time I could also live the pleasant life of a writer, my days unencumbered by hours of crowded commuting or unnecessary meetings in bleakly lit offices with people who were of no interest.

      I had accidentally stumbled upon a path that was paved with a constant stream of adventures and the following are some of my confessions from along that path.

       An eight-foot transsexual hooker in the living room

      I was having a well-earned afternoon powernap at the end of a hard working week when my wife came into the bedroom with disturbing news.

      ‘There’s an eight-foot transsexual hooker in the living room,’ she said without even bothering to check if I was still sleeping. ‘I think you should come down.’

      ‘In the living room?’ I wasn’t entirely sure if I was awake or still dreaming. ‘How did she get there?’

      ‘She arrived in a taxi. Didn’t you hear it?’

      ‘I think I was asleep.’ I hauled myself up into a sitting position as my wife attempted to flatten my bed-hair. ‘Is it Geraldine?’

      ‘Obviously.’

      ‘What’s she doing down here?’

      ‘At the moment she’s playing Barbies with the girls, but I think it’s you she’s come to see.’

      ‘Did you talk to her?’

      ‘Of course I talked to her. You weren’t there and the girls had an attack of shyness. She’s very big and she’s wearing a full-length fur coat. They thought she was Cruella de Vil.’

      ‘She’s fun, isn’t she?’ I stood up, my head clearing. ‘I told you.’

      My wife was exaggerating. Geraldine wasn’t anything close to eight feet tall. Without her heels I doubt that she was much more than six feet two or three. But then she did always tend to wear boots with stacked heels and liked to pile her wigs high. By the time I got downstairs the girls had spread their entire collection of Barbies out for inspection across the carpet in front of her shiny white boots and she had shrugged the fur coat down off her shoulders like she was Ava Gardner at a press conference in Cannes. I noticed there was an overnight bag beside her chair.

      ‘Did you get my message?’ she asked.

      ‘Message?’

      ‘I left a telephone message to say I had to see you. We need to do some serious rewrites.’

      ‘Rewrites?’ This was the first I’d heard of this. ‘But the publisher has signed off on the manuscript. They’re happy with everything.’

      ‘But it’s not right. I need to change things. It’s not printed is it?’

      ‘I have no idea, but I doubt they will want to make any more changes now.’

      That was the moment when Geraldine started to cry and my wife managed to tear the wide-eyed, open-mouthed girls away from the show and into the kitchen to make tea. I felt a bit like crying myself. One of the best moments in the book-writing business is the one when the editor accepts the final version of the typescript and agrees to send it off to the printers. The weight of months of work and uncertainty lifts from your shoulders and there is a brief period of elation (not to mention a cheque in the post) before you have to start worrying about whether the shops are going to display the book, the papers are going to review it and the public are going to buy it. Geraldine’s panic was crushing my moment.

      I had got to know her well enough over the months to be aware that if she had decided on a course of action she would not be easily diverted; going on the game and changing your gender are both decisions that require uncommon degrees of grit and character. It seemed best to go with the flow for the moment, at least until she had calmed down a bit.

      ‘Are you wanting to work on it over the weekend?’ I asked, casting a quizzical look at the overnight bag.

      ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we have to. I’ll need to find a bed-and-breakfast or something so we can work during the day.’

      ‘Don’t be silly,’ my wife interrupted from the door, the girls peering round her skirts, ‘you can stay here. We’ve got a spare room.’

      Maybe it’s something to do with female instincts, but as usual she was ahead of me in reading the situation. Geraldine did not want to rewrite the book any more than I did. There had to be some other reason for her arrival out of the blue at the other end of the country from the streets and kerbs where she plied her trade, and we just had to wait for it to emerge. As she relaxed into the evening, with the help of a bottle of wine, she opened up with a new story about a murderous pimp who she had thought was the love of her life but who was actually making her life a misery. He had arranged for her to be evicted from her flat and was now pursuing her with a gun.

      ‘Sounds like you’ve got a sequel to your book,’ my wife suggested as we washed up after sending an exhausted Geraldine up to bed, which was a relief since we’d signed a two-book deal with the publisher and finding