Confessions of a Ghostwriter

Just a single copy

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher

Introduction (#u49355ab9-e449-59aa-9004-c5d82d1826e8)

‘Ghostwriter for Hire’

I placed the small ad in TheBookseller, 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 (#u49355ab9-e449-59aa-9004-c5d82d1826e8)

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.’