Ghostwriting by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

cheroots. He stared through eyes scummed with a porridge of glaucoma.
    Last year I had thought him blind, so how did he recognise me now? After the events of the past few months, Thailand frightened me. Its people were savages, in league with elements of nature we Westerners had long since out-grown.
    “Christ, it’s...” But I had forgotten the oldster’s name.
    “Mistah P,” he said. “You need anything, Mistah Grant?”
    “I’m looking for Li,” I said. “Is she still in town?”
    He peered up, past me, with his ruined eyes. “Li? Li Ketsuwan? Mistah Grant, you not hear? Li have accident. Bad accident.”
    “What happened?” Despite myself, I felt my pulse quicken.
    “She found in jungle. Broken back. Never walk again.”
    I stared at him. “Someone attacked her?”
    “No. No attack. Accident.”
    I thanked him and hurried along the busy main street towards the Café Bar, my height, my colour, turning heads, raising smiles and humorous comments.

    ~

    In October 1999 I was called to Thailand by Kelvin Anderson III, the megalomaniac director of a dozen blockbuster movies and three that had won Oscars for Best Film. He was shooting my latest script on location in northern Thailand, but wanted to see me about certain changes he required in the final scenes. I suppose I should have been grateful that he’d consented to consult me, rather than rewrite the scenes himself – but I’d written a dozen drafts of the screenplay by then and I was thoroughly tired of the trite and hackneyed script.
    However, Anderson had money and power. He called, and I came.
    I reworked the scenes with Anderson during the day, and at night drank ice-cold Singha beer in the town’s noisiest bar with the rest of the cast and crew.
    I recall vividly how I first met Li.
    The script called for some reference to Thai myth or magic, and one of the crew, a local, told Anderson that he knew a woman who might be able to help us.
    Anderson gave me the task of questioning her.
    Duly, one evening, I was taken by the Thai to a quiet bar overlooking the river and introduced to Li Ketsuwan.
    I had expected some old crone – the Thai equivalent of Gypsy Lill, hunched over a crystal ball in some curtained booth.
    She was slim, and attractive in that dangerously slender way that only Thai woman manage to achieve, combining sensuality and an almost anorexic gamin quality.
    It was impossible to guess her age. She might have been anything from sixteen to forty.
    She listened, glancing at me with massive eyes, while my guide told her what I wanted. Then she flicked a tiny, elegant hand on a slim wrist, indicating that I should take a seat among the locals who were waiting to consult her.
    Amused by her abrupt dismissal, and admiring her for not being cowed by an obviously moneyed Westerner, I took a seat and watched her at work.
    Perhaps ten locals presented themselves over the course of the next hour.
    She sat behind her table with a fixed expression of stony neutrality as she listened to their complaints.
    Sometimes she grabbed their hands, rather roughly, and read their palms. Sometimes she looked into their eyes, pulling up their lids like a horse-doctor. One old woman talked for a long time, at the end of which Li pulled a leather pouch from the pocket of her red dress, opened it on the table, and consulted what lay there.
    Tiny bones, what looked like the eye-balls of small animals, gold symbols, so far as I could make out.
    At the end of every session she would reach out to the supplicant, span their forehead with her long fingers, and rattle off a rapid-fire burst of incomprehensible Thai.
    At last it was my turn to approach the table. It was late, almost midnight. The bar was empty. I looked around for my guide.
    Li interpreted my need.
    “Is okay, Mistah. You not need him. I speak English okay, yes?”
    I smiled. “Great. I’m with the film people.”
    She tilted her head, like a bird. “You the writer-man, no? You need see me about last