The Ghost Page A

Stone had only caught it by accident, beercan in hand, kebab balanced on knees.) But now, he hung his hungover head and slotted the door’s internal latch into place – always quietly, as there was shame in the self-indulgence of wilful withdrawal.
    A short stagger, a nudge of the mouse and, with the standard groan of middle-aged angst masquerading as joint pain, down hard onto the lumpy chair.
    Cook glared at a scattering of uninvestigated bills, flinched a little at a sagging shelf over-burdened with the unopened (sterile film theory books), the unexplored (stalled script treatments) and the unloved (a DVD series on iconic directors which featured his depressingly young self wearing the same shirt in different locations). After a brief wander round a couple of news websites, he logged in to
Mogul
, a movie-studio simulator he had found oddly compulsive during a flight from Los Angeles to London a few weeks earlier. Cook usually preferred the abstract strategy of chess or backgammon, but the game’s varied challenges – setting release schedules, taming greedy producers, green-lighting, budget-balancing – had locked his attention and torn a chunk out of the flight-time.
    An hour or so later, as he adjusted the virtual admission price for an underpopulated public tour of his virtual studio, Cook was bothered by the sense that he was avoiding something. On cue, his email alert sounded and he cautiously accessed the inbox. To his relief, it was an informal commission from the Features Editor of the broadsheet currently sitting (unopened) on a side table by the computer desk.
    Hi, Dor. We’re working on a special issue themed around the current state of play in social media – all the new channels and how they compare to the early start-ups, etc.
    Thought you might be interested in a personal piece from the perspective of a media type who opts out. Nothing too furious – just a bit of balance. Maybe sign up to the sites, take a look at what they offer and structure it as a critique? Nice and personal. 800 words.
    Let me know if you’d be up for it and I’ll send over something more formal.
    Hope all’s well, chap.
    Best,
    Tim.
    Christ, thought Cook. Working on a Sunday – for something so banal. He was a militant opponent to all forms of online social ‘sharing’, and his first thoughts of easy money were quickly replaced by a vision of the amount of work involved – trawling the sites, registering phantom profiles, dredging the lakes of self-regarding shit for occasional shimmers of substance. It was a job that would require him to engage with a culture he both despised and feared. He retained a pathological grip on his privacy, despite having little in his life that would be of interest to snoopers or strangers. His career path had meandered to its current position via a series of seemingly arbitrary waypoints – local newspapers (wedding photo captions as an intern, unsustainable clashes with section chiefs as a dispensable contractor), church magazines (a brief dalliance with Catholic conversion in his mid twenties), writing and subbing (and, to the amusement of colleagues, subbing his own writing) at a pipsqueak movie monthly called, naturally,
Popcorn
. Then, a rush of freelance pontificating for in-house arthouse mags, and sideline script-work at an over-ambitious film-quiz radio show, before wriggling his way up through the ranks on-staff at
Widescreen
.
    In the early years of their marriage, after Gina had cautiously educated him on the pleasures of mid-priced wine, Cook had considered moving into food criticism, attracted to the job’s absurd, alias-based culture of secrecy. But he was ironically surnamed, with a palate eroded by years of low-grade meat. He mocked the pretension of oysters, openly retched at offal, and generally avoided any food which required skill or practice to consume. The thirtysomething Cook had once stormed out of a Chinese