Well Really- "The Ghostwriter" Serialised Story

---

Chapter 1 - The Curtain

I had been walking to work. Probably late. Possibly texting. The air had smelled like warm pastry.

Now the air smelled like bleach.

I woke to beige walls and the persistent beep of machines, wrapped in synthetic sheets and mounting regret. Somewhere nearby, someone was enthusiastically dying, or giving a masterclass in it. I wasn't, though. Not yet. My mouth tasted of metal and antiseptic. The too-thin sheet was tangled around my knees. My gown scratched, the sheet twisted, and somewhere under it all, my dignity made a break for it.

I was being fussed over.

I hate being fussed over.

A fall, then. God. At 48? The indignity. I’d only just started growing out the blonde. One rogue bike and now I look like a too-enthusiastic parent at Halloween.

Normally, I’d be in the staffroom, battling Mrs Dart’s laminated grammar quizzes and drinking offensively beige tea. She thinks digital native applies to anyone who’s ever used the printer without jamming it. I’m not even a full teacher — just a teaching assistant. Helpful, discreet, utterly ignorable. It’s a talent. And now, apparently, I’d taken it to the pavement.

A small, familiar anger flickered in my chest. A rebellion against being a footnote in my own life. My mind fumbled for the sequence. A rogue pigeon? A bicycle? Please not just… me. A slow-motion solo collapse would be unforgivable. And who was feeding Mrs Henderson’s cat?

I shifted. Pain bloomed down my left side. My wrist throbbed.

If I’d broken something serious, who’d I even call? My son’s on mute, metaphorically, and literally since the last WhatsApp. My ex? He’d smirk and say, What is it now? Just behind, Wow! You look great. How much weight have you lost?

They’ll think I fainted, I thought bitterly. I did not faint. Not unless fainting involves being catapulted into traffic.

Please God, don't let it be a Deliveroo cyclist that took me down.

At first, I assumed the voice was the TV. Some BBC drama with the volume too high.

“Of course they’re still teaching bloody Of Mice and Men. That book is a punishment, not an education. A narrative straitjacket.”

The voice oozed smug. He had the kind of voice that smelled like tweed and tenure. The kind of voice you hear over a tannoy in an Oxford dining hall. Male. Somewhere between world-weary and unbearably certain. Another patient, I guessed. Or someone’s dad.

I waited for him to shut up. He didn’t.

I sighed. “Excuse me,” I called, my voice still raspy. “Could you maybe not eviscerate the entire English curriculum while some of us are just trying to survive? And by the way, if you start slagging off Iris Murdoch next, this day’s going to get very disagreeable.”

“Iris Murdoch? Please. All those dreary garden parties and existential ennui. She once said, The great task in life is to find reality. But I’d rather find a plot.”

“Oh, she found reality alright,” I said. “She just preferred to dissect it with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. And your disdain for garden parties is deeply predictable.”

A pause. “I’m haunted by a Murdoch fangirl. Wonderful.”

I allowed myself a smirk. Then smothered it.

We talked... well, exchanged fire, through the curtain

He was infuriatingly articulate, the sort of man who pronounces genre like it should be apologising. But precise, too. Not just in critique, especially in the way he spoke to me.

“You’re very quiet,” he said after a while. “What are you reading? Or is it the silence of a woman who reads secretly and writes privately?”

My pulse skipped. “How would you know that?”

“Pattern recognition. And the way you corrected me.”

He kept talking, a tirade on the death of fiction, the tragic collapse of literary standards, how nobody reads anymore.

“Not that you’d have heard of me,” he added, almost offhand. “My first best-seller was called Fugue State.”

My mouth twitched. That book. I remembered that book. One line had stayed with me for years, the one I underlined twice.

“Fugue State,” I said. “I’ve… heard of it.”

Silence from the other side.

“Really?”

“That was… you?”

“Once. And you?”

“Sharon Hassan. But to the school staff, I’m just Miss, and to the Year 9s, I’m invisible.”

A pause. “Hassan. An interesting cadence. Not quite… English.”

He noticed.

Of course he did. I rolled my eyes. “No, it’s not. It’s my married name.”

Beat.

“Was. A long time ago.” I said it like a slam of a car door.

“Ah. Divorced.” His tone softened. “The quiet solitude of a new chapter, then. Is that why you’re here, in this… fluorescent purgatory?”

“Because I got divorced? No. I got flattened by a bike. Apparently.”

He laughed. “And here I thought you were struck by a revelation.”

“I was struck by handlebars. And quite possibly a smoked tofu wrap.”

A pause. Then, with surprising gentleness: “Peter Elwood.”

“What do you do, Sharon?” Peter asked, in the tone of someone about to rank your answer against Proust.

“My career?”

“Oh! You have one?” His eyebrows practically arched through the curtain.

I blinked. “Did you really just say that out loud to me, Peter Elwood?”

He coughed. “Joke. Obviously. You sound… spirited, when provoked.”

“Better spirited than a man whose greatest thrill is re-litigating Steinbeck,” I muttered.

He guffawed, not laughed, guffawed, the kind of sound that suggested he once chaired a debating society and never quite left.

“I’m a teaching assistant,” I said.

“Indeed,” he declared, with a flourish you could almost hear. “So, my instincts were correct: a noble vocation, but hardly a career.”

I laughed. In spite of myself. Or maybe because no one had tried to dismiss me so confidently in weeks.

The wall clock ticked louder than the beep of the IV. A sharp pain like electricity sparked through my head, and my vision doubled. I gasped, head slumping against the hot pillow, and pushed the small button on the IV tube. Pain-relief. Push. Push. Push.

Why was it never enough?

After the fire drained from my temple, I noticed his breathing. It hitched. A sound caught in his throat. Sharp. Wet... a ragged cough, then a wheeze like old paper folding in on itself.

“Are you alright?” I muttered.

Nothing. Just the beep of my IV.

“Peter, do you want water?” I craned for the pitcher. Empty.

Then a whisper. “I’ve b-b-been all right for—”

More choking. A deep rasp. Then… silence. “Oh, for God’s sake!” I jabbed the call button.

A nurse appeared, brisk but not unkind.

“Our friend sounds like he needs water or an exorcism,” I said. “Whichever’s quicker.”

She blinked. “There’s no one else in here, love.”

I gestured at the curtain. “Don’t be daft. He’s just behind there, ranting about Of Mice and Men.”

She frowned. Then stepped forward and — with one smooth motion — drew the curtain back.

The other bed was empty. Made. Crisp. Undisturbed.

I stared. The empty plastic cup in my hand trembled.

The nurse glanced at her chart. Then at me. Then left without a word. The room had changed temperature. Or maybe I had. I stared at the space where he’d been. A man with an ego, a name – Peter Elwood – a genuine laugh like I hadn’t heard in years. Something prickled. Not fear, not quite. This wasn't some fuzzy after-effect. This was... something else entirely.

"Well,” I whispered. “Really.”

And for a moment, I missed him. The way I might miss someone I’d known in a past life, or someone I’d once imagined loving, once.