Ghostwriting by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

scene. Witch-doctor, only we don’t call them witch-doctor. And he wouldn’t cast magic spell like you say in film, no!”
    I stared at her. “How do you know that? We haven’t even shot the scene.”
    She just shook her head, as if impatient. I wondered later if she’d heard about the script from one of the Thais working on the set.
    I questioned her, and she told me everything I needed to know. She was quick, intelligent, and very, very beautiful. When my audience was over, fifteen minutes later, I wanted to extend our time together, find some excuse to keep her talking.
    I said, “That’s great. Would you like a drink? We could—”
    “Don’t drink. Alcohol bad for me. One hundred baht, Mistah Grant.”
    I passed her a handful of soiled notes. “You’re very beautiful,” I said. I expected some positive response. In London I was never wanting for a willing woman.
    Before Thailand, that was.
    She dismissed me with a contemptuous scowl and slipped from the bar through a rear exit.
    Later, alone in my hotel room, I could not sleep. I listened to a mosquito drone in the darkness and imagined Li’s slim body pressed tight to mine.

    ~

    I turned off the main street and approached the broad, slow river. Moonlight reflected from the water in a quick shimmer of cusps and curlicues.
    The Café Bar was still there, raised on stilts beside the river. I climbed the rickety wooden steps and stepped into the familiar long room, lighted by dirty strip fluorescents and occupied by half a dozen dedicated drinkers, tired men in shorts and vests drinking brandy from chipped tumblers.
    I half-expected to see her at her usual place at the back of the bar, but the table was taken by a gaggle of argumentative locals, playing cards.
    I approached an old woman behind the makeshift bar and asked if she spoke English.
    She frowned at me, shot off a round of plosive vowels and gestured over my shoulder. When I turned, a thin, rat-faced man in his thirties was standing at my elbow and bobbing his head.
    “Ah, Mistah. I speak English. What you want?”
    I ordered two beers. “I’m looking for Li,” I told him. “Li Ketsuwan. She used to come here to...” Words failed me. What did she do? Work her magic? Cure the incurable? Foretell the future?
    He was nodding. “Ah, Li. She no longer work here. Two years ago, now, she go.”
    “Does she still live in the town?”
    “Ah, no.”
    “Do you know where I can find her?”
    He turned and fired questions at the card players. A minute later he hurried behind the bar and stared at a map of the region pinned to the timber wall. He gestured me over.
    With a long finger-nail he indicated a town about fifty kilometres north of Khon Khai.
    “Li Ketsuwan, she live here now. After accident, she go.”
    I took a long pull of my beer and regarded my informant. “What happened to Li?” I asked. “What kind of accident did she–?”
    He was shaking his head. “No one know that. Very mystery. She go in jungle one day. After that, never walk again.”
    I finished my beer, thanked him, and left the bar. In the morning I would take a bus north to the town of Tak Buri.
    I was walking back down the busy main street when I thought I saw her – not Li, but Sonia. She was standing beside the cart of a street-vendor selling banana fritters, watching me. I stopped in my tracks and stared. Sonia was six feet tall and platinum blonde, a model and a wannabe movie star. In the street crowded with diminutive Thais, she stood out like a stork among penguins.
    It was an illusion, of course – like all the others that had plagued me for the past year.
    A truck trundled between us, and by the time it had passed she was no longer there.

    ~

    I met Sonia Bellingham at the party of a fellow script-writer in Islington. The place was full of beautiful women, actresses and models, and slick young men, posing. I was alone. Since arriving back in London from Thailand a month earlier, my luck in the department of casual