There is something of the parasite about all writers, but ghostwriters particularly. I have always been more comfortable being a spectator at life’s feast rather than a participant, allowing other people to have the adventures and face the dangers and horrors that I then write about from the safety of my own home.
It was always thus. At school I did everything I could to avoid team sports, as horrified by the socialising that surrounded them as I was by the pointlessness of the sports themselves. How can you think freely, daydream and ask questions in the middle of a game of rugby when you are in imminent danger of being brought painfully to the ground? Once, while batting in a school cricket game, I was actually hit on the head by the oncoming ball because my mind had wandered in the few seconds it had taken the bowler to run up to the wicket and launch his missile in my direction.
Upon arriving in London at 17 I wanted to see and hear everything that was going on in the adult world which seemed to be changing so fast, poke my nose into as many corners of life as possible, while at the same time always being nervous about actually participating. Luckily I had a school friend who shared my curiosity but not my reticence. Born with no apparent ability to assess risks of any sort, he was willing to try everything and happy for me to tag along and observe. With all the merry amorality of a male teenager he would steal brazenly from the shops where he found employment, went begging on the London railway stations when short of cash and cheerfully sold his services in fetid little amusement arcades around Piccadilly Circus, despite having developed rabidly heterosexual preferences. I fear I may have egged this real-life Artful Dodger on in all his interesting endeavours simply to collect more information and experiences that I would later be able to draw upon for writing.
In the end he took one risk too many and died dramatically before even out of his teens, falling from the window of my fourth floor flat while apparently under the drug-induced impression that he could fly, while I lived on. It was my first brush with the sobering finality of death.
But isn’t ‘living on’ one of the features of a parasite? My dictionary defines the word as: ‘any organism that grows, feeds and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host’. That seems about right.