The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit

by Graham Joyce

  “What’s in the boxes?” said Williams.

  “So what’s this about?”

  Williams reached across and took the lid off the top carton, exposing the cellophane-wrapped gaily striped sticks of rock candy.

  Terri’s brother stepped in between us. “You’re a Leavisite.”

  I squinted at him but said nothing. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. The only Leavisites I’d ever heard of were followers of the flowery literary critic F. R. Leavis, and I knew in my bones that Terri’s brother hadn’t got me up against the wall to discuss literature.

  “You’re Colin’s man, aren’t you?”

  “In what sense?”

  “Don’t deny it.”

  Hanson piped up for the first time. “He’s sound, I’ve told you.” He glanced at me and then he looked away. He was embarrassed by all of this; I was grateful I’d bought him with a carton of cigarettes.

  Terri’s brother held up a large putty-colored finger to silence Hanson. “If I get a scrap of proof of what’s gone on: you, Tony, Colin … all the lot of you. It won’t be a little chat next time. Do you understand me?”

  I was about to tell him he may just as well have been speaking in Urdu for all the sense I made of it, but given his affiliations I thought better of it. But I couldn’t say “No, I don’t understand you,” anymore than I could implicate myself in all of this by saying “Yes, I understand you,” so I remained silent.

  After a moment Williams swatted the cartons out of my hands. The cheerful sticks of rock candy spilled across the concrete path, many of them breaking in the process. Williams bared his teeth at me, but the burly skinhead closed his eyes. Hanson, too, turned away in shame.

  “Pick the fucking things up and put them back in the boxes,” Terri’s brother said to Williams, with barely repressed fury.

  I looked hard at Williams. Imagine, I thought, being a person of such low instincts that you are an embarrassment to your fascist friends. Williams slammed the broken candy back into the cartons. Terri’s brother led them away up the alley in single file.

  I WAS STILL shaking when I dumped the broken rock candy and went hunting for Tony. He had a show that evening with the rest of the troupe, and I was pretty sure I’d find him in his dressing room, preparing. I tapped lightly on his door. With Tony you never knew with which voice he would answer. He used to have a ventriloquist act—he was a former “vent” in stage jargon—with dummies. You might get one of his vent voices. There was a squeaky schoolboy and a crusty old drunk and other things. This evening I got squeaky schoolboy. I pushed the door open.

  Tony was at his mirror and was blacking up. There was part of the show where he and another singer painted their faces and wore straw boaters and sang Al Jolson songs.

  “Come in,” he said, still in his squeaky schoolboy voice, “sit down if you can find a seat.”

  There was a stool. I had to move his boater and hang it on a hook before sitting down. “What’s a Leavisite?”

  Tony widened his eyes and leaned toward the mirror, gently stroking black over his right eyelid. Then he did the other eyelid. Finally he said, “Who have you been talking to, then?” “I’ve been reading.”

  “Reading what?”

  “Pamphlets.”

  Tony sighed and stared at his black self in the mirror. “Leavis wants to take the party in one direction. Others don’t.”

  “Is there any need to go into such fine detail?”

  Tony turned on his rotating stool. “That’s one thing this place has taught you: withering sarcasm. Good. All right then. Leavis wants a more popular front. Recruit the shire Tories who are our natural friends; pull in a few MPs, members of the Monday Club who want supported repatriation; bring in more of the working classes, because they’re the ones who are going to get rained on over the next few years. Who speaks for them? The fucking Labour Party led by privately educated baby faces fresh out of Oxford and Cambridge? You’re a working-class lad, are you happy with that?

  “It’s wide open. But to do that we have to distance the party from the Paki-bashers and the idiots who still think Adolf Hitler was a jolly good chap. We’ll fight the elections. Exploit the media and go with the democratic process.”

  “And you agree with that way forward?”

  “Broadly.”

  “You’re a Leavisite?”

  “Yes. I think if we don’t go that way, the Tories will outflank us at the next election. They’ll lurch to the right, steal our clothes, and we’ll lose momentum.”

  “And the other mob?”

  “The other mob wants to recruit more soldiers from the football terraces. Get a bit of street fighting going with the coons and the commies.”

  “Rivers of blood?”

  “Now as a scholar, David, you should know Enoch Powell never used that phrase. What he did say was ‘Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” ’ He was quoting Virgil.”

  “But it’s Blackshirts against Brownshirts, right? Who’s going to win?”

  He started to sponge his face again. “Can’t say. By which I mean I don’t know. But if we lose, the Tories win. Whose side are you on, David?”

  “Where did Colin and Terri stand in all of this?”

  “You have been talking to someone, haven’t you?”

  “I’m interested.”

  “Colin’s with us. It’s getting a bit tasty. The other day at a meeting in London, some idiot threw a punch at Leavis. Which was a very silly thing to do.”

  “Why?”

  “Leavis has a lot of loyal supporters and minders. Like Colin. And Colin threw a few punches back. So now he’s got people after him and he’s gone to ground.”

  “Was Terri with him when all this kicked off?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Is she in danger?”

  Tony threw his sponge down in irritation. “What do you think we are, son? The Mafia? We’re not uncivilized people despite what all those pot-smoking lefty university lecturers have been telling you. Though I will say that there are a few freelancers in the party who were very cross with Colin, and these types are not always easy to control. What the hell is it to you, anyway?”

  “Since I went to that meeting, I’ve been interested.”

  Tony laughed. “Don’t bullshit me, son. If you were interested you wouldn’t be getting your leg over a Paki—”

  “She’s lovely,” I said flatly. “And her mother is from Guyana, which is about as geographically distant from Pakistan as you can get.”

  “Can’t you find yourself a nice white girl?”

  At the time it didn’t seem odd to me that a man with a blacked-up face was asking me this question.

  “By the way,” Tony said. “One of your long-haired gits. Eric Clapton. You like that sort of thing, don’t you?”

  Clapton was a guitar hero of mine. He played black man’s music, rocked up for a white audience. He was the sort of figure I looked up to. “Yes.”

  “He’s one of us.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Tony reached for a newspaper, flipped a couple of pages, and folded the paper neatly before handing it to me to read. The report stated that Eric Clapton had treated his audience in Birmingham to a five-minute foul-mouthed tirade saying that “wogs” and “coons” should be thrown out of the country. I put the paper down and looked hard at the man in the makeup.

  “And that David Bowie, he said, ‘Britain is ready for a fascist leader.’ Though we wouldn’t have the fucking puff in the party.”

  I handed the newspaper back to Tony. I had no words left. Nothing. I turned to go.

  “It’s coming,” Tony said. “People are waking up. People are choosing sides, David.”

  I closed the door behind me. But through it I heard him add, in his squeaky schoolboy voice, “Whose side are you on, David?”

  20

  YET THERE IS ONE WHO SEEMS TO HAVE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

  I had another dream abo
ut the fortune-teller machine on the pier. In the dream the glass was still smashed and there was the head of a live woman instead of the manikin. But her face was badly made up: Lipstick was smeared all over her pancaked face and black mascara streamed from her eyes. It was horrific. She delivered a card from her mouth instead of the slot. I couldn’t read the card because the words had been smudged by her saliva.

  Without telling Nikki, I took a green double-decker into town and went onto the pier. I was utterly carried away with the idea that I would find the glass in the machine broken and that my dream was somehow prophetic. Of course the glass was intact when I got there. I didn’t know whether to feel disappointed or relieved as I stood for a while at the end of the pier looking out to sea. A lonely gull bobbed on the swell.

  I knew where Colin and Terri lived. They had a small apartment in a street just behind the seafront. Terri had told me the address. I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t know how Colin would react. But I had to find out what I could about Terri.

  Colin was supposed to be lying low in London, but if I bumped into him I would say that I’d come because the police had been up at the resort asking questions. It seemed plausible, except for the fact that he’d never told me where he lived. I would lie and say I found out from someone in the wages office.

  They rented the ground floor of a house next to a secondhand car lot on Beresford Avenue. I lurked around, making out I was looking at the Ford Anglias and Toyotas until a salesman came out. Then I took a breath and walked right up to the front door of the house and pressed the bell.

  The bell was actually a buzzer and the button vibrated under my finger. I swear that a bell or a buzzer ringing in an empty flat makes a different sound. I waited but no one came. I rang again. I rang a third time but this time I held the letter flap open with my fingers and peered through, listening hard, trying to detect movement inside. Anyone inside was keeping very still.

  I went round to the back of the house. The curtains were partly drawn. The sun was so strong I had to shield the glass with my hand to see through, but inside I could see a very tidy lounge. There was a low coffee table with a clean ashtray, a pack of No. 6 cigarettes, and a plastic cigarette lighter all placed in meticulous order, almost as if someone had primed for a session of viewing the television across the room. An indoor aerial sat atop the television set.

  Perhaps I’d expected evidence of slothful or chaotic living, but it was all so neat. On the mantelpiece was a gilt-framed wedding photo of Colin and Terri. Colin looked young, handsome, and smart in his wedding suit. Terri looked deliriously happy. At the other end of the mantelpiece was one of those lacy flamenco dolls—with a mantilla shawl and fan—that people brought back from their holidays in Spain.

  I moved to the next window, making a visor of my hand so that I could peer through the glass. This was the bedroom. There was a blue camberwick cover over the bed. I could see a dressing table and its mirror hung with necklaces and bead chains. In an alcove a pole had been affixed so that clothes could be hung. I saw a black dress hanging there—the black dress Terri had worn the night she appeared in the Slowboat, the night she had set me on fire. There were four or five other pretty dresses: in gold lamé, and blue satin, and red cotton, and black-and-white polka dots. Not exactly the purdah garments she’d complained to me that Colin kept her in.

  There was nothing else to see. I don’t know what I’d expected. Signs of a struggle perhaps? There was nothing like that. I left and took a bus back to the resort.

  IT WAS AS IF I’d had an appointment with Madame Rosa from the very first day I’d arrived at the holiday resort. The little white-painted caravan with its signboard tucked away between the bowling green and the office block had left its door open to me almost every day. After my fruitless visit to Colin and Terri’s apartment, I spiraled in toward Madame Rosa like water sucked down the plughole of a bath. I took the two steps up to the caravan and held the sides of the door as if I was making a last desperate grab for the side of the bath. Then in I went.

  “I was just boiling the kettle for a cup of tea,” she said, “and I suppose you want one.”

  “Yes. Please.”

  She pointed at a sofa and I sat down as she poured water into a pot, stirred the tea with a spoon, and covered the pot with a knitted cozy. She opened an overhead cupboard and took down two bone china cups and saucers. “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.

  “How did you know?”

  Behind her was a table draped in heavy lace and in the middle of the table was a small crystal sphere. I suppose if I’d ever thought about a fortune-teller’s crystal ball I had imagined it to be about the size of a large grapefruit, but this one on the table was about half the size of a billiard ball. The glass—or crystal or whatever it was—was of a gluey gray consistency. Nothing swirled within. It was rather unimpressive.

  She saw me looking at it. “I don’t need that to know you’ve been avoiding me.”

  She was a big woman with large hips, and in her floral print skirt she took up a lot of space in the tiny caravan. She had a bandanna-type scarf tied over her hair. Her face was quite heavily made up, with an exaggerated cupid’s bow painted on her mouth in scarlet lipstick. Her eyes, scanning me now, were the color of light oak.

  “You all come to see me, eventually.”

  “Really?”

  “The staff. Ninety-five percent of you. Not everyone wants it known that they come and see me. But you all come. Shall I tell you how I know you’ve been avoiding me?”

  “Go on.”

  “Every time I seen you walk past my caravan you’ve taken a little step to the side. As if you didn’t want to come too near.” She giggled. “As if you might fall in.”

  “You’re observant.”

  “Observant?” She looked out of the window at someone hurrying past. “How do you think I do what I do if I’m not observant?”

  I nodded at the crystal ball on the table. She snorted derision. “Milk and sugar?”

  “Milk with no sugar, please. Your name isn’t really Rosa, is it?”

  “It is actually. What’s on your mind?”

  “Do I pay you now or afterward?”

  “You can pay me now or you can me afterward, my darling. You can pay me whenever you like. You can pay me next week. Just so long as you pay me.”

  The caravan door was propped open. I wondered if she closed it to signify that a “reading” was in session. I pulled some notes out of my pocket and put them on the table. She fussed around with the teapot and filled the bone china cups. I helped myself to milk. I glanced at the crystal ball again.

  Something had alighted on it. It was a ladybug. Since the bug invasion had come and gone I’d only seen one or two. Now here was one of them settled on the perfect curve of the sphere and it seemed to perch not on the glass but on the arc of the light itself.

  Rosa lifted the crystal from the table and held it in front of her eyes. She seemed not to notice the ladybug. For a millionth of a second I hallucinated that the pupils of her eyes flared scarlet with black dots, but like a lot of things, I knew it was in my head. “You know who Billy Butlin is?” she said. There was a rival Butlin’s resort just a little way along the beach. “When Billy Butlin was a little boy traveling with his mother on the show circuit he threw that crystal ball at my grandmother. She picked it up off the grass and looked into it and predicted he was going to get a good spanking, which was what he got. He never did see how the two things were connected.” She put the crystal ball back down on the table. The ladybug had flown. “You’re wondering when the reading starts, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am as it happens.”

  “Already done.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve already been read.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Drink your tea. Tony says you’re a bright lad. I don’t think so.”

  “Oh?”

  “Look, if you want me to peer into that glass ball, I’ll do it. If
you want me to read the lines on your hand, I’ll do that as well. That’s all theater. But you’re not a civilian. You’re in the business.”

  “So what have I paid for?”

  “You’ve paid for the reading. And I said it’s done. I read you the moment you stepped in here.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was pulling my leg or, worse, just taking me for a fool.

  “The first one, she’s bad news. She’s already put a mark on you. The other one, the one you’ve got now, I like her much better. You can make each other happy. You’ve got a good chance. That what you wanted to know?”

  I thought for a moment. On the one hand, yes, I wanted to know about Terri, but I also wanted to know if she was safe. “I’m worried about her welfare.”

  “Who?”

  “The first one. As you called her.”

  “I can’t tell you things like that. Only things directly to do with you. If I knew everything I’d have won the pools by now, my darling.”

  I must have looked a little blank.

  “There is another thing bothering you. Something much more serious. But you’re hiding that even from yourself.”

  “Am I?”

  “Oh yes. Too dark for me to see. That’s why I’m going to send you to see someone else. She’s much better than me. She doesn’t like doing it and she’ll take no payment. But if you say I sent you, she’ll see you all right. Now drink your tea and tell me about the people you come from.”

  I WALKED AWAY from Rosa’s tiny caravan not quite sure if I’d been fleeced or whether she was one of the cleverest women on the planet. On the face of it I think I got just as much useful advice from the coin-operated machine on the pier. “Choose you future wisely.” Had that cup of tea just cost me £4.50? I was in no position to ask her any direct question. Perhaps I should have asked her if Enoch Powell was right in his “Rivers of Blood” speech. But of course the future depends on whom you ask, and what people want it to be. To the Enoch Powell question Tony would say yes. Nikki would say I love you, let’s have multiracial babies.