My Ghost

Another package arrived this morning. This one hadn’t been returned by the post office. It came from the district court.

One hundred and twenty pages of it.

Inside was a version of my life that I recognised immediately. Bank statements. WhatsApp conversations. Facebook messages. LinkedIn exchanges. Money transfers. Arrangements to meet. Love talk. Clandestine encounters. The slightly sordid archaeology of someone slowly making a mess of his life.

I had spent the last six months writing a book.

It never occurred to me that my Ghost Writer had been writing one too.

Mine was made of memories, dreams, conversations, psychoanalysis and ghosts.

Hers consisted of screenshots, timestamps, invoices, photographs, transfers and legal exhibits.

If I wrote in metaphors, she used evidence.

For a few moments I forgot it was a divorce file and simply admired the work.

It was meticulous. Every source checked. Every claim documented. Every quotation preserved.

As investigative reporting, it was outstanding.

She had written investigative journalism, followed the money, traced not what I felt but what I did.

Every journalist dreams of producing the definitive investigation. I had accidentally become rhe subject of one.

Where my book asks why, her book asks: can you prove it?

The answer, page after page, appeared to be yes.

My private life had become paperwork.

Love looked rather less romantic reduced to photocopies. It is a strangely unsettling experience to discover that your inner life has acquired page numbers.

We narrate our lives, inventing ourselves through language. We edit. We omit. We rearrange. We explain. I had imagined myself doing exactly that.

What I hadn’t appreciated was that my shadow had been doing it too.

Reading her dossier, I slowly realised that I had acquired an unfortunate habit over the last few years. I recruited people into whatever story I happened to be living. Friends became witnesses. Therapists became interpreters. Women became symbols. Everyone acquired a role in my internal drama before they had much chance to become themselves.

Her manuscript refused all of that.

It wasn’t interested in my symbolism. It simply asked where I was, who I wrote to, what I spent, when I lied and who got hurt.

There was something almost refreshing about its complete lack of interest in my inner world.

Its audience made that inevitable.

I wrote for readers.

She wrote for a judge.

For a few minutes I wondered whether I should contest it, challenge it, explain myself, produce footnotes to the footnotes. Then I realised I had spent the better part of the last year doing exactly that, mostly to myself. Every sleepless night had already become another appeal against the verdict.

The prosecution rests.

The defence shall not speak.

There is no jury.

Only a judge.

So I signed.

Zgadzam się.

I agree.

Not because every conclusion is fair. But because the facts themselves exist whether I argue with them or not.

Reality, it turns out, is astonishingly ordinary.

The cat wants feeding.

The supermarket closes at ten.

You cook something simple.

You go to bed.

The real isn’t satisfying. Mostly, it just hurts.

But perhaps that is its gift.

As I sat in the kitchen with a coffee, her manuscript lying beside mine, I realised they were not rivals after all.

Mine tells the story I needed to write. Hers tells the story I needed to read.

Between them sits something neither of us quite managed to write. A marriage.

The judge, I suspect, will find her version far more useful.

So, in the end, do I.