The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit

by Graham Joyce

  And then it was all over. I said goodbye to Pinky and he made me promise that I would come back the following year. “Your face fits,” he said.

  Tony shook my hand manfully and apologized for not being able to knock some political sense into me. He pointed at me with a big tanned, nicotine-stained index finger. “Don’t let them commie professors fill your head with nonsense, mind you. And don’t forget about us.”

  They were all wonderful with the sweet wine.

  I talked Nikki into shacking up with me in Nottingham. We scoured the classifieds in the local newspaper and found a flat near the town center. We bought paint and freshened the place up and she gave it some feminine touches. We were playing at being a couple. One day she came home with a little gift for me.

  “What is it?”

  “Open it.”

  I unwrapped some tissue paper and found a heavy glass paperweight. The glass was red with black spots and bifurcated to look like the carapace of a ladybug.

  “It’s to remind you. Of the summer.”

  I weighed it in my hand. “It’s lovely.”

  “It’s for your studies.”

  Perhaps I looked confused. I don’t know what type of student Nikki thought I was; maybe she had a notion of me at a big desk with a brass telescope and a silver engraved pen and a huge blotter, with a pile of maps and scrolls.

  “It’s a silly present, isn’t it?” she said, suddenly losing confidence.

  “No it’s not. It’s beautiful.”

  “Silly.”

  “I’ll treasure it.” I weighed it in my hand for her to see. “Really.”

  Nikki was entertained and amused at being part of the student scene. She met my friends, and we drank in the union bar. We even sneaked her into a few lectures, completely unnoticed, just so she could get a sense of what we did. She was three or four years older than my contemporaries, and though she never criticized them I could tell that their immaturity bored her. Nonetheless she became excited by the lectures; she always wanted to discuss what she’d heard; in fact she was more interested in learning than ninety percent of the student population. She hungered for learning.

  She almost fell over backward when I explained that it cost nothing to be a student at university; that the government paid all fees and awarded a grant to students so that they could live and study in reasonable comfort; that education was a right to be claimed. No one had ever told her. We found out that she could apply as a mature student on reduced qualifications, and she immediately prepared to take an extra couple of O-level examinations in order to matriculate the following year.

  ONE RAINY, MISTY Thursday evening we were on our way to the Old Angel Inn to meet up with some friends. We would always walk the short distance into town from the flat, and on the way we passed by a small theater, a place that staged both amateur theater and irregular concerts. One night you might see a rock band and another night a comedy act. Billboards outside the theater advertised these various shows and one particular billboard proclaimed that “for one night only” there would be a performance of “A Selection of Songs from My Fair Lady.”

  The billboard caught Nikki’s eye. I was still walking when she summoned me back. The billboard indicated that this was the public’s “last chance” to catch this “amazing show” before it went on an “international tour.”

  “What?”

  “Look at the photos,” she said.

  I saw it at once. His appearance hadn’t changed at all, but his name had. He was no longer called Luca Valletti. His new stage name was Dante Senatore. His duet partner was Shelly Diamante. To be precise she was billed as Shelly “The Nightingale” Diamante. I don’t think I would have recognized her from her photograph: It was a very professional and airbrushed Terri who gazed out from the billboard with tender eyes as she leaned her head against the breast of Dante Senatore’s tuxedo. Her hair had been restyled and her lips were painted with luscious red lipstick. She no longer looked like someone who mopped the floor after hours.

  I remembered Pinky’s words, about whether telling someone they have a nice voice constitutes making a pass. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

  We were way too early for the show but Nikki suggested we find out what time they finished and come back and say hello. I was reluctant, but she said it would be fun to surprise them. We went inside and asked at the box office about what time the performance ended.

  After that we went on our way to the Old Angel Inn, where we drank with friends until about ten o’clock. I was comfortable and didn’t want to go, but Nikki was determined. She persuaded me that it would be rude not to say hello. When we got to the theater people were already spilling out of the doors, turning up their collars. Knowing that Luca’s professional habit was to get out quickly, I thought we might have left it too late. Nikki dived inside and asked someone where the stage door was. It was at the side of the building.

  “Should we send a note? Say we’re here?”

  “No!” Nikki said. “It will be more fun if we don’t.”

  I really wasn’t sure about that.

  Soon enough the stage door opened to reveal a rectangle of yellow light. The figures of a man and a woman carrying large prop bags and with polythene-wrapped costumes over their arms emerged into the shadows. As they joined the illuminated main street in front of the main doors of the theater we were able to intercept them.

  “Luca!” Nikki said. “And Terri!”

  They were both paralyzed by our sudden appearance. Their eyes flared wide in the light from the streetlamp. Traces of stage makeup remained at the corners of their eyes. They looked pale, ghosts of the people I’d known at the holiday resort.

  Terri looked at me without a trace of expression.

  “Don’t you remember us?” Nikki said cheerfully.

  Terri was the one who recovered first. I could almost feel the engine of her brain turning. “Nikki and David!” she said. “Look, it’s Nikki and David! From the resort,” she added, as if she needed to prompt Luca into remembering who we were.

  Luca was still floundering. “Yes, of course! How amazing to see you! Simply amazing!”

  I intuited all the thoughts processing in Terri’s mind. She stepped forward so that she could kiss me. She stood on tiptoe to reach me, a gesture that still burned.

  “What a coincidence to see you both here!” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “a coincidence.”

  “Actually,” I said, “we passed the billboard earlier. Nikki was the one who recognized you.”

  They both looked at me, smiling, as if I were telling a truly fascinating story.

  The hiatus was awkward so I said to Luca, “But you changed your name.”

  Nikki said, “It’s just show biz, David.”

  Luca said, “Yes, I changed my name. A different show. A new start, you know?” He put his hand in his pocket and fumbled with some loose change, then he brought out a set of car keys.

  I stepped over to the billboard and examined the picture. I looked back at Terri, and then back at the picture. “It’s fantastic! I mean, we all said you should be onstage.”

  “We formed a duet,” she said unnecessarily.

  “What, after you left? You formed a duet?” I had Terri on the rack, and I wasn’t going to stop. You see, in that moment I understood with shining clarity that Luca and I had both been her lovers at the same time. I suspect Luca might have guessed, too. It meant of course that Colin’s initial suspicions were confirmed after all.

  Luca looked up the street and then back at me with the same fixed smile. He wasn’t saying much at all. He shook the car keys in his hand.

  “So is this where you are a student?” Terri asked me, swinging the spotlight in another direction. “What about you, Nikki? What are you up to these days?”

  “I’m applying to university, aren’t I, David? I’m going to be a stoooooooodunt!”

  Terri smiled the long, long smile of wonder and dismay.

  “ ‘A
utumn Leaves,’ that was my favorite,” I said to Luca. “I really used to enjoy doing all that. And of course it’s autumn now, isn’t it?”

  “I never found such a good lights man since,” he said chivalrously. His jaw, too, must have ached from smiling. “Look, lovely people, I’m very sorry but we have to slip away to a party.”

  “A party!” Nikki said.

  “Well, you could come, couldn’t they, Terri? Except that it’s a family thing, you know, and I don’t think it’s appropriate.”

  “No, that wouldn’t work, would it?” I said. “A pity.”

  “Why don’t you give us your telephone number,” Luca said. “Then we could call you. Have a coffee somewhere. Coffee and a nice cake.”

  “I don’t have a telephone number. Student, you see. Always broke. You know how it is.”

  Terri opened her handbag, struggling with the polythene-wrapped dress over her arm, and produced a pen. “Let me give you our number, then.”

  There was a wonderful moment when we thought we hadn’t got a scrap of paper among the four of us on which to write. Then Terri went back into her handbag and found a bus ticket. We had a laugh about that—writing on a bus ticket. How funny. On the reverse of the ticket she very carefully wrote out a phone number, and she handed it to Nikki rather than to me.

  After that, Luca held out a hand that wanted shaking. “Goodbye for now,” he said, and we shook hands. Terri stepped forward to kiss me again, and Luca kissed Nikki.

  We watched them go. They passed before the yellow lights of the small theater and I watched them, Terri with her quick, almost angry little steps and Luca striding to keep up with her.

  “That was hard work for some reason,” Nikki said, as we walked away in a different direction.

  “It was.”

  “I don’t think they were all that pleased to see us.”

  “No. I don’t think they were.”

  Nikki turned her collar up to the damp air and linked her arm in mine. In the mist of Nottingham town, she was so beautiful.

  NIKKI GOT THE pantomime job in Coventry. I helped her with her O levels in the meantime. We were ecstatically happy. Over the Christmas holidays we stayed with Mum and Ken. They treated Nikki to the best china and silverware, and Ken told stories that even I hadn’t heard. I think Ken had fallen for her.

  College life restored equilibrium to our days. There was the routine of lectures, seminars, coffee bars, and the union bar. Nikki got bits of work here and there, but she loved being a student even if we were broke a lot of the time. She changed the way she dressed and wore a duffle coat and a long, winding college scarf. We joined the Anti-Nazi League and sent Tony a badge. We never heard back from him.

  The National Front meanwhile turned inward on itself, dissolving in bitter factions and violence as they disagreed on ways to make the country great again. There were court cases, scandals, violence. Some of those leading figures are still around. There were no rivers of blood in the following years, and of course certain people were rather disappointed about that.

  In the spring we got a letter from Pinky asking if we wanted to work for him again the following summer.

  One night in April I was roused from sleep in the small hours by a tapping on the window. For a split second I thought it was going to be Colin, or perhaps the boy on the beach, all over again, because the boy never completely goes away. But it was only a friend, a fellow student who had locked himself out of his student lodge and wanted to sleep on our floor.

  Whether it’s Madame Rosa, or her sister Dot in the steam laundry, or the mechanical fortune-teller on the pier, the advice comes down to the same thing: The future will be what we choose it to be, just so long as we carefully engineer the present. As for the past, it moves like sand under your feet. These things happened a long time ago yet remain luminous in my mind. As I write this I have resting on a pile of papers on my desk a glass paperweight. Scarlet with black spots, it is designed to look like a beautiful ladybug.

  Acknowledgments

  The wonderful American writer Jeffrey Ford deserves a special mention for encouraging me to write this novel after I’d explained to him over a beer the colorful and almost incomprehensible institution of the British holiday center.

  Thanks and praise to my wife, Sue, who is my first reader and an indomitable critic, always rising far above my knitted brow and infernal mutterings.

  Doug Stewart and Madeleine Clark are pillars of true strength for me at my agency, Sterling Lord Literistic. Likewise my editor, Jason Kaufman, gives me thrilling support for my (some would have it) delirious books. I’d also like to thank Robert Bloom and copy editor Karla Eoff for enormous help with the manuscript.

  I worked at different holiday centers all those years ago, and I must say that my fellow workers were generally much kinder than some of the characters in this novel. I hope that in the unlikely event any of them read this book they don’t feel betrayed by what is mostly fictional. Meanwhile, the 1976 heat wave and the swarm of ladybugs are exactly as I remember them, and the political mood of the time was volatile. I’m very glad that the dire predictions of some political commentators of the time did not come to pass.

  About the Author

  Graham Joyce, a winner of the O. Henry Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award, lives in Leicester, England, with his family. His books include Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2013 British Fantasy Awards Best Fantasy Novel), The Silent Land, Smoking Poppy, Indigo (a New York Times Notable Book of 2000), The Tooth Fairy, and Requiem, among others. His website is www.grahamjoyce.co.uk.