The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit

by Graham Joyce

  12

  BLACKER THAN NIGHT WERE THE EYES OF FELINA

  I stepped lightly as I made my way down from the roof but my head was broiling. I was short of breath. My anxiety had given everything an intensity of color and sound and my senses seemed super-sharp. I made certain that no one was at the bottom of the stairs or hanging around by the back door before I followed the wall of the rear of the building. Of course I was expecting Colin to call me back at any moment. I kept walking and turned up the side of the building, eventually breaking free from the shadows into the sizable crowd moving into the theater. My heart hammered, though there was comfort to be had in the crowd.

  The ladybugs were even now dotting the early-evening air but their numbers had dropped massively. The task force was still sweeping the carcasses into piles, and some of the workers had incinerators with fuel tanks strapped to their backs. The insect piles crackled and sent up twists of black smoke as they burned.

  A friendly holidaymaker walking to the theater with his wife and three children stopped on the way. He looked concerned. “You all right?” he said to me.

  “Touch of migraine,” I said.

  “Coffee,” he said. “My mother used to swear by coffee. She got migraine. She always said—”

  “I’ll try it,” I said, skipping away and forcing a laugh at the same time. I hurried into the theater. I was late for my evening duty. My hands were quivering. I took a deep breath and knew I was going to have to quiet myself.

  That evening we had the talent show. The holidaymakers were the stars: They made up the evening program with singing and dancing routines and the winner walked away with a decent cash prize. Tony and all of the revue performers had an evening off while the talent show was run by my fellow Greencoats. Sammy with the wig acted as the show’s compère. I was supposed to be there ahead of the others, taking names and forming a schedule.

  The talent show always seemed to feature a tiny five-year-old performing some cute but charmingly inept dance routine that they would forget halfway through. The idea of one of them being onstage while Colin beat the crap out of me in the auditorium had me sick with anxiety. But the talent show was scheduled to start within five minutes.

  I made my way to the front of house where Nikki presided behind a desk, doing my job of listing a schedule from the queue of would-be performers. Mike, the organist with the Beatle haircut I’d met on my first day, was sitting next to her making his own running order.

  Nikki was cross. “Where have you been?” She jabbed a pen in the direction of the folk in the queue. “Find out what music they want Mike to play for them.”

  I was so relieved to see Nikki. I knew that I should tell her what was happening. But right then I did exactly as I was told. I shuffled down the line asking what compositions were wanted. Most of them didn’t know. One man was doing a song from the musical Fiddler on the Roof but he couldn’t remember what the song was called. When it was hummed for me I recognized “If I Were a Rich Man.” Another man said he wanted to do an American country song called “Rosa’s Cantina,” but when he sang a few bars for me I knew he meant “El Paso.”

  I didn’t even look up for Colin. I was running on autopilot. I could see myself from an astral point twelve feet above my head, and I could hear my own muffled voice from a short distance saying, “That’ll be fine, just tell Mike you want ‘El Paso’ and Nikki over there will give you a number, okay, good, thank you, who’s next then?” A very large elderly lady said she was going to perform “The Laughing Policeman.” Seven-year-old twins wanted to do “On the Good Ship Lollipop.”

  I somehow got to the end of the line but then I came unglued.

  “You look really pale,” Nikki said.

  I hurried to the toilets and managed to reach the porcelain in time. I rinsed my mouth from the taps and threw up again. Sweat rolled from my face in great beads and yet in the mirror my face was white like the moon. I splashed water on my cheeks and neck and rinsed my mouth a second time. I looked in the mirror and gave myself a stiff talking-to, cut short when someone else came in.

  It was another friendly holidaymaker, not one I knew. A burly man with a red face and ringlets of blond hair. “So this is where all the big knobs hang out then, is it, heh heh heh.” It was a mirthless laugh. A spoken laugh. Heh-heh-heh. That was what my life as a Greencoat had become. One weak joke after another. One forced smile beyond that. I grinned back at him, but I knew it was the smile of a skull. I felt too weak to speak.

  By the time I returned to the front of house everyone had gone into the theater. I heard the muffled report of Sammy, in his bad toupee, patting the stage microphone, not to see if it was working but to advertise his authority over the event.

  “Grab one of the punters,” Nikki said, “ ’coz we need a third judge.”

  I patrolled the front row looking for a likely suspect to agree to do it and finally found a heavily made-up lady who was delighted to be steered into the limelight. The houselights came down, the stage lights went up, and at last the show got under way. Sammy made a lot of himself. He told a couple of weak jokes that just made me want to shit. With his spittle darting in the limelight he introduced the first turn, which was “If I Were a Rich Man.”

  At this point I was visited by a curious calm. I wish I could say that it was the performance of the singer, but it wasn’t. In fact the singer was hopeless. The pop-eyed, rotund figure onstage swaying slightly in a minor concession to the theatrical demands of the song did, for just a moment, make everything seem all right. He was up there faking it. He must have known he was a poor singer. The audience certainly knew he was a poor singer but they were all generously prepared to forgive. The only thing they didn’t know was the drama that had taken place backstage and up on the roof a short while ago. I knew those details only too well, but I could almost fool myself into believing it had all been a piece of theater. Inept and ill-managed, yes, but still theater. It was all right. It was all going to be all right. Colin and Terri would have a furious row, but strong girl that she was, she wouldn’t identify me.

  It was all going to be all right.

  I don’t know where my thoughts had been but when I looked up onstage the next turn was already in progress. It was seven-year-old twins shouting out “On the Good Ship Lollipop” and Mike on the organ was whipping up a nice noisy storm in support. Mike went early for the big finish on the organ and the audience showed wild appreciation for the children. Sammy took the microphone and advised the audience that they should keep an eye on those two young ladies because they were destined to go far.

  My mind wandered again because the next time I blinked up at the stage an elderly gentleman was playing Ave Maria on the musical saw, eerie and unaccompanied. I knew I was losing small sequences of time. My mind was like a bingo card, with only certain numbers belonging to the full set. I would come back to consciousness to find another act in progress. After a few bars of ethereal saw music, Mike started to come in with his organ.

  After the musical saw came the gentleman who wanted to sing “El Paso.” He’d chosen to appear onstage wearing a massive straw Mexican sombrero. The song was a ridiculous, warbling gunfighter ballad, but at least the singer had a reasonable voice. Something about a challenge for the love of a maiden and a handsome young stranger lying dead on the floor.

  Life, in a sombrero, was mocking me. The elderly woman I’d pulled from the audience to be a judge put her hand on my knee. “Looks like we have a winner,” she said.

  AFTER THE TALENT SHOW was over I had to work the bingo in the Slowboat. Nobby did the calling and all I had to do was check the winning tickets. I scanned the rows of tables of people with their heads down, ostensibly scrutinizing the players but really I was hunting for any sign of Colin or Terri. There were two doors into the Slowboat and I planted my back against the wall so that I could survey both entrances.

  Up there on the microphone Nobby was an enthusiastic proponent of bingo lingo. “Five and nine the Brighton lin
e.” I had no idea what some of these things even meant, though I started to ascribe my own meanings. Nobby’s microphone had a bad echo to it and everything he said sounded sinister, like he was in on a joke. “Was she worth it, fifty-six.” My paranoia made me “see” Colin come into the Slowboat a couple of times, but it was just someone with the same stocky frame.

  I didn’t know what he would do to me. I didn’t know whether his style was to make a public fist-and-toecaps full-frontal assault, or whether he was more likely to wait for me in the dark, with a blade at the ready. Either way I was no street fighter and I hadn’t much idea of how I might defend myself if and when the attack came. My mouth was dry, I was in an advanced state of fear, but I was super-alert.

  I got through the bingo session and was supposed to do the lights again at the Golden Wheel. I cried off sick. George agreed to cover the lights. I couldn’t face walking back from the Golden Wheel through the dark to the staff quarters. Instead I stayed with the crowds and, checking over my shoulder every yard, made my way back to my room. Even before I got there I had an idea that maybe Colin had already let himself in. I unlocked the door and checked through the crack at the hinge that Colin wasn’t standing behind it with his back to the wall. I stooped down to make sure he wasn’t under the bed. I gave the flimsy wardrobe a push to test its weight before opening it. Then I closed my door, turned the key in the lock, checked the window was bolted, and drew the curtains.

  It was going to be a long night.

  13

  THE LADYBUG PATROL: TOOLED, EQUIPPED, AND READY TO BURN

  I lay awake, listening. Footsteps in the corridor, doors opening and closing. Each individual returning from the bars was going to be Colin. I heard someone outside my window and I thought Colin might be planning to break his way through the glass, but it was one of the waiters trying to get a kiss and a cuddle in the dark from a girl who kept protesting that she would but she was afraid her father would find out.

  When I finally did drift off to sleep I had dreams. I was on the pier standing before the mechanized fortune-teller. The glass case had been smashed and the manikin leaned forward, her face broken. Her tongue lolled from her painted mouth. It was an absurdly long, fat, moist, lascivious tongue and she seemed to produce one of the prediction cards from her throat. In the dream I took the card but I couldn’t read what was on it because the printed letters changed before my eyes, now Greek, now Chinese. It was a matter of great torment to me that I couldn’t read what was written on the card.

  I felt so anxious about not being able to read the card that I woke up. In the dark someone was sitting on the end of my bed. But I couldn’t sit up. My chest was compressed. It was like I had a claw wrapped round my lungs. I could hear myself trying to breathe. I was so frightened I tried to shout out but I couldn’t get my breath. It was the man in the blue suit. He was sitting on the end of my bed regarding me steadily.

  But his eyes were pure glass. Clear glass, no pupil. They reflected the light and shadow of the room, and even though his eyes were clear glass I could see he was looking down at me. But because his eyes were clear glass I couldn’t see if he wanted to hurt me. I tried to sit up but couldn’t because of the weight on my lungs. I thought he must have a hand pressing on my chest.

  With a superhuman effort I forced myself upright, and as I did I woke up. I’d had a dream within a dream. I’d woken up only to wake a second time. I got up to put the light on. The man on the edge of my bed had gone. I prowled my tiny room, lifting things and setting them down again: my clock, a newspaper, a shoe. I was scared of waking up again.

  Finally I went back to bed. I left the light on. I lay awake for a long time, blinking at the ceiling.

  I must have fallen asleep again because I overslept. I was already a few minutes late when I threw on my Greencoat outfit and hurried over to the theater. There was a smell of burning accelerant in the air. The ladybug patrol was up and about, fuel tanks strapped to their backs, sweeping dead ladybugs into piles and incinerating them. You would hear the spit and brief dull roar of the incinerator and a little black puff of smoke would ball in the air.

  Pinky’s morning briefing was already well under way when I got to the theater. Nikki gave me a look of maternal disapproval. Nobby, slumped in a chair, winked at me as if I’d done something good. I looked for Terri performing her cleaning duties but there was no sign of her. I sat through the briefing, rubbing my eyes and trying not to yawn.

  “Are you with us then, son?” It was Pinky.

  I realized he had just asked me a question. “Sorry,” I said. “I had a night from hell.”

  “Not letting that Nobby have a bad influence on you, are you? Not going to turn out like him?”

  “That’s fucking nice, that is,” Nobby spluttered. “Charming. Fucking nice, that.”

  Pinky ignored him. “Sand castles with Nikki then?”

  Nikki had one eyebrow raised, waiting for an answer.

  “Sure.”

  “Go easy on the sticks of rock candy,” Pinky said as we got up to leave. “It has to last all season.” I looked at the stage again, expecting Terri to emerge from behind the flats, wiping her mop this way and that as on so many other occasions during our briefing. Normally the hoover and other equipment would be around as she worked. Not this morning.

  “Are you all right?” Nikki asked me when we got outside.

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing. I thought you looked a bit …”

  “A bit what?”

  “I worry about you, for some reason. God knows why. But I wondered if Nobby had been up to his tricks. Getting you involved.”

  “You’re speaking in riddles, Nikki.”

  Nikki brought her hand to her mouth and made a quick back-and-forth smoking gesture. “He’s a doper,” she said. Then as an afterthought she said, “And a dope.”

  Gosh, I wanted to say to her, I wish it was as innocent as smoking pot. Instead I said, “No. Nothing like that. I tried it once at college but it made me throw up. I don’t even like the stuff.”

  “Me, neither,” she said as we passed through the beach wall tunnel and emerged onto the sand. “I prefer fresh air and sex for entertainment.” She looked at me pointedly. “Right, let’s get cracking. You do the over-sevens and I’ll do the tiddly-pots.”

  My only salvation was to fling myself into the work. It was a way of shoving aside all thoughts of either Terri or Colin, even though they were like demons barking at either ear. I got down on my knees with the children and exhorted them to dig. I helped them make models of horses and of boats, trains, and planes. One little girl even complained that in my fervor I’d snatched away her blue plastic spade. I was manic.

  I’d already decided that Colin would just have to come and do his worst. I would fight him. I would go down fighting. As I worked the sand and flipped shiny plastic buckets among them, the innocence of the children almost made me want to cry. I very nearly did.

  Nikki stooped beside me and whispered in my ear, “You’re putting me to shame.”

  I looked at her. The sun was hot and I was sweating. I must have been wild-eyed.

  “It’s okay,” she said sweetly. She lifted my hair out of my eyes and parked it behind my ear. Then she went back and lay down.

  I thought some of the parents were looking at me oddly so I left the kids to their sand designs and went to sit next to Nikki. She was stretched back on the sand with her hands behind her head and her eyes closed. I tried to copy her, but as soon as I put my head back and closed my eyes I saw Colin standing over me. I sat up. There was no Colin. “I’m really sorry about that thing,” I said.

  Without opening her eyes she said, “What thing?”

  “That meeting. They’re not my kind of people.”

  “Oh, forget it.”

  “I didn’t know what I was getting into. I just went along for the ride. Literally. I mean I was invited to get into a car without knowing where it was taking me. Next thing I know I’m u
p to my jaw in flags and regalia and Spearheads and all this about the commies and the unions and the Jews and the blacks and—”

  “Look, we’ve been through all this. I’ve forgotten it. Why don’t you?”

  “I would never have gone if I’d realized.”

  “Realized what?”

  “Who they were. How it would offend you. All that.”

  Now she opened her eyes and sat up.

  “I mean to say, what if those people ever got into power?”

  “They won’t,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re a hate club. Most people are decent, you know.”

  “You say that. But it has happened. In history.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “Well. Organize.”

  “Organize? Right! This afternoon. We’ll go after them with an iron bar and a cricket bat. You and me.” She closed her eyes again.

  I vented a deep sigh. I know I sat there for a while pinching a loose bit of skin above the bridge of my nose. At least it was better than forcing small children into making overly complicated sand castles.

  Eventually Nikki got to her feet. “Come on. Put on the happy face. I’ll pick the winners while you give everyone a stick of rock candy. Sod it, give them two sticks apiece.”

  14

  THE REWARD OF A CIGAR WHILE SATURDAY COMES

  More than ever I needed to locate Terri, to reestablish terra firma, to stop my world from spinning out of control. But I couldn’t find her anywhere. A sweet-natured gray-haired woman called Elsie supervised all the cleaning staff. I tracked her down and asked where I could find Terri.

  Elsie wore a pair of plastic-frame spectacles patched together with clear tape. Metal clips pinned back her hair and she was weighed down by an enormous silver ring of keys dangling from a leather belt looped round her thin waist. She seemed too frail to be carrying such a bunch of keys. “What do you want her for, duck?”