As he sat down to lunch at home now with his mother and her ghost, he began to feel a little insulted that Jeremy was not flooding him with text messages and decided that he needed to move things along himself. Something simple, he decided. Nothing that might scare the mark away.
Achilles Cleverley
Hey! Really enjoyed meeting you last night. Crazy busy here! xo
Beverley had prepared one of his favourite meals, an enormous bowl of chicken Caesar salad with home-made croutons, and he put his phone aside as she filled a plate for each of them. He was still trying to decide what he made of the new employee, who so far seemed impervious to his charms. The previous ghost, the one who’d been eaten by a lion, had also been unreceptive to him, and he’d once overheard her in conversation with Elizabeth describing him as ‘cute, I guess, but kinda bratty’, and while he recognized her description as an accurate one, it had nevertheless offended his sense of dignity.
‘Your English is very good,’ he said, and she gave him the side-eye as she crunched on a piece of romaine lettuce.
‘Possibly because I was born and brought up in Oxford,’ she replied. ‘It’s the first language there.’
‘Oh. I thought Mum said something about you being Slovakian.’
‘I said she had Ukrainian blood,’ said Beverley, correcting him. ‘Her parents came to England after the war.’
‘My grandparents,’ said the ghost, correcting her.
‘And how do you see the job of a ghost?’ asked Achilles, deciding that if she was not going to have the manners to slobber all over him, then he was honour bound to take her down a peg or two. ‘It’s a strange sort of role, don’t you think? Mind you, there are some writers out there who I think would be better off if they hired one. I tried to read a novel recently that was so unintelligible that it seemed as if it had been translated from the original Serbian by someone who only spoke Croat.’
‘A ghost is a sort of interpreter of dreams,’ explained Beverley. ‘Like Freud. Or that fellow in the Bible.’
‘Daniel,’ said the ghost. ‘Although I’m not sure that Freud would approve of the analogy.’
‘Was he not religious?’
‘Men of science rarely are. The two are contradictory.’
‘It’s a little ironic, all the same, isn’t it?’ asked Achilles.
‘What is?’
‘Well, didn’t Daniel end up in the lions’ den? Or was that a different Daniel?’
The ghost thought about it. ‘No, that was the same Daniel,’ she agreed. ‘And I see what you mean.’
‘I’m not following,’ said Beverley, looking up from her food with a baffled expression on her face.
‘Daniel was accused of worshipping God over the king and was thrown into the lions’ den for his troubles,’ said Achilles. ‘But he was saved by an angel. Your previous ghost ended up on a safari being mauled to death by a lion.’
‘How do you know so much about the Bible?’ she asked, putting down her fork. ‘You’re not being radicalized, are you?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘It’s impossible to know what goes on in schools these days,’ she said, turning to the ghost. ‘They let any type of person come in to give random talks to the children and the government approves them all. In my day, we were lucky if we had a member of the Women’s Institute stop by to break up the tedium. I remember an elderly lady who gave us a talk once on “How to Satisfy Your Husband” and we all thought it was going to be some ghastly tale of lying back, closing one’s eyes and thinking of England, but instead it had something to do with the correct way to roast a chicken and dispose of the giblets afterwards.’
‘You do make a mean roast chicken,’ said Achilles.
‘Thank you, darling. But, speaking as a mother, I can’t help but feel concerned about what goes on when my children are out of the house. One reads so much in the papers about ISIS and child brides and boys running off to fight whoever they’re fighting in Syria, so you’ll understand if I worry when one of my own starts quoting the Bible. We don’t really do God in this house, you see. We never have. Sometimes, at Christmas, George lets Him in for a few minutes before we eat but I always usher Him back out on to the street afterwards. God, I mean. Not George. Anyway,’ she added, turning back to Achilles, ‘all I’m saying is, please don’t come home some day with a long beard and waving a copy of the Koran in my face. I wouldn’t have the energy for it.’
‘Can you even grow facial hair?’ asked the ghost, peering at the boy’s skin, which was so smooth that it looked as if he’d never had to buy a razor in his life. ‘Some boys can’t.’
‘Of course I can,’ he said, scowling. ‘I have gone through puberty, you know. If I really put my heart and soul into it for about three months, I can squeeze a few hairs out of my chin. Anyway, don’t change the subject. You still haven’t told me how you interpret your job.’
His phone pinged at this same moment and he picked it up and glanced at it.
Jeremy Arlo
Busy here too. I enjoyed meeting you!
He frowned. Jeremy wasn’t even hinting at getting together again. If anything, this felt like a brush-off. He wasn’t accustomed to having to do so much of the running himself, but if he was going to earn the money he needed to keep his finances on track, then it seemed that he would have to work a little harder.
Achilles Cleverley
Fancy doing it again sometime?
‘I imagine the entire arc of the novel and describe it,’ explained Beverley. ‘Then the ghost commits all my thoughts to the page.’
‘I’d love a job like that,’ said Achilles. ‘Not the ghosting part, that sounds too much like hard work, but the imagining part. It would be great to say, Oh, I’ll just be an investment banker and imagine millions of dollars moving around the globe, but someone else can do the actual slog for me while I swan around on my yacht in the Mediterranean.’
‘You don’t understand the process,’ said Beverley. ‘It’s a lot more complicated than you might think.’
‘And do you enjoy it?’ he asked.
‘It’s not a question of enjoyment,’ replied the ghost. ‘Some of us have to work to pay the rent.’
‘Ha,’ he said, stuffing into his mouth a forkful of chicken coated in a shaved Parmesan that was so sharp it sent a shiver down his back. ‘And do you plan on making a play for my brother while you’re on the job, so to speak?’ he asked, determined to annoy somebody, anybody.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, you know that Nelson and your predecessor had something going on before she died, right?’
‘What are you talking about, Achilles?’ asked Beverley.
‘Didn’t you know? He was quite taken with her. Or so he told me. They went out for drinks one evening, apparently. He was thinking of asking her to move in with him.’
‘Wouldn’t that have been a little premature?’
‘Well, you know Nelson. He got talking to her, so he figured, she’ll do. Anything to put off focussing on the obvious.’