Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Son,’ said Arnold, holding out his hand in exactly the way Sam did, with the palm almost flat, as if to receive a small object.

  ‘Nicely done, didn’t you think?’ said Sam’s mother. ‘Weren’t so sure, were we, Arnold? It not being a religious do.’

  ‘We weren’t,’ her husband responded, surveying the tables nervously.

  ‘But it was very nice. Very tasteful,’ said Mrs Saunders. Again she looked at him frankly, as if there were something in his face that she had forgotten to verify. ‘Sam said you was a nice-looking boy,’ she commented. ‘You’re a very nice-looking boy,’ she told him, conclusively. ‘Isn’t he, Arnold? A nice-looking boy?’

  Her husband was looking in the direction of Mrs Gatting, who was adjusting a slide in her hair while standing underneath a pink wall-lamp which made her hair resemble a hive of candy-floss. At the top table, Sam was kissing Liz for a relative’s photograph.

  ‘Giving you trouble, was she?’ asked Sam’s mother, folding her arms in a gossip’s pose. ‘Mother of the bride. I saw her giving you an earful.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Alexander assured her. ‘She was just saying hello.’

  ‘If that was just saying hello, I’m Vivien Leigh,’ she laughed.

  ‘Well,’ conceded Alexander. ‘She’s bound to have mixed feelings.’

  ‘Oh, bound to,’ Sam’s mother agreed sarcastically.

  ‘Giving her daughter away. It must be hard.’

  ‘Oh, very hard.’ Mrs Saunders swatted her husband’s arm. ‘Arnold, stop staring at the poor woman,’ she ordered. ‘You’re making things worse for her.’ She presented to Alexander a face suffused with compassion, briefly, and then her smile returned. ‘I’m sorry, love. You must think I’m wicked, but I don’t like her and she don’t like me, and that’s the way it is.’

  ‘Doesn’t like our Sam,’ her husband reminded her.

  ‘She’s the same as us, for all her airs and graces. Her dad was a docker.’

  ‘He was,’ said Mr Saunders.

  ‘Mind you, if you want to know what I think, Alex, I think it’s her reputation she’s bothered about most. It’s what people will say about her. As a mother.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said her husband.

  ‘Her girl could have been marrying Lord Muck, and she’d still have that face on her. It’s the circumstances that’s really put her nose out of joint. The gossiping.’

  ‘The circumstances?’ replied Alexander.

  The small, dark eyes of Mrs Saunders started, then looked at him quizzically. ‘You hadn’t noticed?’ she asked.

  ‘Noticed what?’

  ‘Look at her, Alex.’ Sam’s mother stood aside so that Alexander could see Liz clearly, and at that moment Liz looked up at him and waved him towards her table. ‘She’s in the family way, love. Four months. And a bloody good thing too, if you ask me.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Alexander emptily.

  ‘Otherwise they’d have never got round to it, would they, Arnold? Three years it’s taken them.’

  ‘Three years?’ asked Alexander, though there was nothing to be gained from any answer.

  ‘Thereabouts, love. How long they been courting?’ Sam’s mother asked her husband. ‘Three years, isn’t it?’

  Mr Saunders turned his eyes to the floor, as if to keep from his vision anything that might interfere with the consulting of his memory. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Off and on. Something like that.’

  ‘What was that record he kept playing?’

  Her husband searched the floor around his feet. ‘That thing about the rocket.’

  ‘“Telstar”?’ Alexander suggested.

  ‘Yes, that was it,’ Mr Saunders replied.

  ‘That’s the one,’ said his wife with satisfaction. ‘She bought it for him. Whenever that was.’

  Alexander looked across the room at Liz’s mother, who was straightening the zip of her skirt, while her husband held a glass of sherry in each hand, as if weighing one against the other. He heard the warble of ‘Telstar’ and found a day that matched it. He was walking past Lenehan’s the electrical shop, and the tune was coming out of it. And then he saw Liz walking under the trees, towards the gate of Greenwich park, on what he knew was a later day.

  ‘You with anyone then, Alexander?’ asked Sam’s mother.

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘You’ve caused a bit of a stir, I can tell you.’

  ‘You have,’ said Mr Saunders.

  Sam’s mother pointed to a girl in an aquamarine dress that flared out from her hips like a tutu. ‘That’s Carol,’ she said. ‘A lovely girl.’ Liz was standing, waving him over eagerly.

  When the car arrived to collect the bride and groom, Sam came over to Alexander’s table, bowed extravagantly to Carol, and hauled Alexander to his feet. ‘Time we were off,’ he announced. He seized Alexander by the shoulders and kissed him on his ear. ‘Thanks, Mac,’ he breathed. ‘Took care of the old folks for me. Good job. Good man.’

  As Sam was embracing his mother, Liz came up to Alexander. ‘You know, then?’ she asked.

  ‘About what?’ he replied, and Liz glanced at her belly. ‘I do,’ he said, and he kissed her on the cheek, more coldly than he intended.

  Soon after Liz and Sam had left, Alexander returned alone to Greenwich and went to the Crown and Anchor, where a couple he had never seen before had taken the table that normally was his. He sat at the bar until they went, and then he moved to the window. He rehearsed what he would say to Sam if he ever decided to tell him that he knew, and as he watched the steel grey of the sky turn to anthracite his anger weakened into disappointment, which became resignation, which became mere tiredness. Shortly before closing time Alf Davies came back in, and was given a pint, which he flicked with a thumbnail by way of acknowledging Alexander.

  23. The Park Rangers

  It was a Saturday and Alexander was about to close the shop when he saw them hurrying down the hill, with Mick Radford in the lead. As he reached for the upper bolt Mick saw him and pointed, and they all broke into a run. He went out onto the step, where they gathered in front of him.

  ‘How’s it going, Monty?’ asked Mick.

  ‘Fine,’ replied Alexander.

  ‘You got a minute? We’d like a word. Won’t detain you long. Word of honour.’ Mick spread his fingers over his heart, showing five oil-rimmed fingernails.

  They followed him into the shop, where they lined up, precisely as a firing squad, as Alexander withdrew behind the counter. ‘So?’ Alexander asked. ‘What’s up?’

  Pondering how to begin, Mick Radford stroked the flattened bridge of his nose. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing ‘Mother’ tattooed in blue ink on his left arm, on a scroll that wound around a scarlet heart, and ‘England’ on his right, above a vase-shaped thing that was intended, Alexander assumed, to be the World Cup. ‘You know Dave,’ said Mick, presenting Dave Gordon, with whom Alexander had exchanged a few words on a few occasions since the incident on the Heath, though more often they exchanged nothing more than nods whenever they happened to meet in the street or in the pub.

  ‘Yep,’ said Dave, giving Alexander a look that implied some doubt about their mission. There was always something undernourished and furtive about his appearance, and his outfit seemed to have been chosen to accentuate these qualities, with a close-fitting, high-collared white shirt, now tinged faintly blue, hanging over the waist of a pair of grey drainpipe trousers, which ended well above the tops of his winkle-picker shoes. The block in the pocket of his shirt, pinned tightly to his chest by the fabric, resembled some sort of bony extrusion rather than a pack of cigarettes.

  ‘And of course you know this lad,’ Mick continued, dropping a hand onto the shoulder of the shortest and plumpest of his three companions, who wore jeans and a secondhand pinstripe waistcoat, and glasses with red-tinted lenses shaped like letter-box slots.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ said the plump young man, scraping his damp and wayward hair. He hooked a
finger over the bridge of his glasses and observed Alexander over the lenses, wryly, waiting to be recognised.

  ‘Jesus! Gareth?’

  ‘Jesus Gareth at your service,’ Gareth Jones replied. ‘Fifteen years wiser, fifteen years wider.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked Alexander.

  ‘Only went three miles down the road. Where have you been?’

  ‘Here, all the time. I thought –’

  ‘And this is an old friend of mine, Billy. Billy Barton. We go back a very long way,’ said Mick, as though there could be no better guarantee of Billy’s good character.

  ‘Known each other since the dawn of time,’ Billy told Alexander. With his zip-up jacket, freshly pressed trousers, bristly fair hair and large white teeth, his appearance suggested to Alexander the character of an apprentice astronaut. As far as he was aware, Alexander had never seen him before.

  Cheryl, from the baker’s up the street, came to the door. ‘We’re closed, love,’ Mick called out before she could open it, and Cheryl backed away, craning her neck to see where Alexander might be. Alexander smiled at her and mimed an apology. ‘Better lock up,’ said Mick. ‘You do it, Chuck. Look lively.’ Gareth stepped out of the line.

  ‘Chuck? Since when’s he been Chuck?’

  ‘A year. In honour of the other Chuck Jones,’ explained Billy.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Creator of Sylvester, the hippest cat around,’ added Dave, with a caustic smirk.

  ‘So,’ said Alexander, ‘what’s this all about?’

  ‘Well,’ answered Mick, ‘what you have here, though you might not believe it, is a band.’

  ‘The premier R&B outfit in the Blackheath, Lee and Mottingham area, we’d like to believe,’ said Gareth, straining to push the bolt across.

  ‘I do drums,’ Mick went on. ‘Dave and Billy are guitars. Chuck’s on bass, and writes the songs, with Dave.’

  ‘The Park Rangers,’ said Billy. ‘We’re the Park Rangers. Because of –’

  ‘I think he can work it out,’ Dave interrupted.

  ‘But,’ said Mick, ‘we’re in a fix.’

  ‘We need a singer,’ stated Dave, seeming to imply that their problem was the fault of one of the other three.

  ‘We had a singer to begin with, but he’s out of the picture now. As of four o’clock. Man overboard.’

  ‘Thought he should be getting the biggest cut,’ said Billy.

  ‘Of the money that will come flooding in our direction when we finally get out of Mick’s garage,’ Dave explained.

  ‘No great loss,’ said Billy. ‘Pissed half the time, he was.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ said Gareth.

  ‘So we have this problem,’ Mick resumed. ‘I sound like a bus reversing, Dave’s got a voice that could stun a mule at fifty paces, and you don’t want to know what Billy sounds like. That leaves Chuck.’ He bowed and gestured at Gareth as if passing a gift on to him. ‘Chuck, if you would? “Wild Thing”, perhaps?’ Clutching his chest with parodic passion, Gareth howled the first verse, half in tune. ‘Now that,’ observed Mick, ‘is the best we can do. And, as I think you’ll agree, it’s simply not acceptable to the general public. Not acceptable to anyone, really.’

  ‘Not the best,’ Alexander agreed.

  ‘Painful, is what it is,’ said Gareth.

  ‘So,’ Mick continued, ‘you understand the situation. And this is where you come in, we hope. You can hold a tune, can’t you?’

  ‘Near enough, I suppose.’

  ‘Better than that, Monty. I’ve heard you when I’ve been in here. Singing to yourself in the back room. Quiet, like, but I can tell. When we were kids you could do it. You can do it now. What do you think? Could be a big break.’

  All four were looking at him: Mick with his arms spread wide, like a car salesman making a pitch for this week’s special offer; Dave sullenly, as if indifferent to Alexander’s decision but willing him to make it quickly; Gareth with a vague smile, perhaps elicited by something he was remembering from years ago; and Billy pulled the zip of his jacket right up, as if to make a good impression with a potential employer.

  ‘R&B, you said?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘Right,’ said Mick. ‘Spencer Davis, Yardbirds, that sort of stuff.’

  ‘You do their songs, you mean?’

  ‘And some of ours,’ Gareth interrupted. ‘Dave and me have written one or two.’

  Dave scratched his chin and looked around the shop to avoid Alexander’s gaze.

  ‘Give it a go,’ Billy urged. ‘If you can hum in the right key you’ll be better than us. I mean, you look the part.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like this,’ said Alexander.

  ‘We’re all beginners, more or less,’ Billy countered.

  ‘I should do an audition.’

  ‘If you insist,’ said Mick.

  ‘Next weekend?’

  ‘Stuff next weekend. What’s wrong with right now? Give us a quick blast, like Chuck did. Only better.’

  ‘You need music, Mick,’ Dave protested. ‘You can’t tell anything without music.’

  ‘You can tell if someone’s crap,’ Gareth pointed out.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Mick, sweeping an arm out, ‘we’ve got music. Tons of it, haven’t we?’

  ‘So we’re going to have a sing-along right here?’ Dave mocked. ‘For the benefit of the good folks of Blackheath, Monty’s going to stand here and make a screaming great tit of himself?’

  ‘No, Dave, not here,’ said Mick. Putting a hand on Alexander’s back, he looked significantly at the ceiling, and then at Alexander.

  Five minutes later they were filing into the living room of his flat. ‘Like a monastery,’ observed Gareth. ‘I expected a bachelor pad, Alex. Cushions and posters and all that.’

  ‘A year from now and you’ll be in a penthouse in Mayfair,’ Billy laughed, but nobody followed the joke. Billy took a seat on the settee beside Gareth. They looked like reluctant jurors, Alexander thought.

  In an upper corner of the long white wall there was a lozenge of goldfish-orange light, reflected from a window across the street. As Alexander looked at it he heard, in a lull of the traffic, the descending note of a plane flying away from the city, and the combination of the piece of radiant colour and the distant, falling sound made him acutely conscious of the absurdity of what he was about to do.

  Dave Gordon was rifling through his records, urgently as a burglar who hears footsteps on the landing. ‘The Supremes,’ he called out. ‘The Temptations, The Supremes, The Temptations. Lot of Tamla here,’ he complained. ‘John Coltrane? The Beach bloody Boys? You sure you’re on for this?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘Hang on. Here we go. Small Faces. That’s more like it.’ Like a marksman parading the target he has hit in the bull’s eye, Dave displayed Alexander’s copy of ‘Sha La La La Lee’.

  ‘We have blast-off,’ Mick confirmed, settling on the windowsill. ‘To the controls. Ready, Monty?’

  Before Alexander could reply the music was playing. He joined in behind the beat, and skipped a word to catch up. Dave altered the tone to dampen the vocals, but before a minute had passed Mick raised a hand. ‘No, no, no,’ he moaned, and Dave lifted the arm off the record. ‘We’re not going to be singing for our mums and dads. You’re being too – what’s the word?’

  ‘Wet,’ said Dave.

  ‘Yeah. A bit. Let yourself go, mate. Another try? Once more, Dave.’

  Billy cleared his throat as if he were the one being asked to perform. Gareth pressed his glasses back into place, crossed his legs and uncrossed them immediately.

  Again Alexander stepped into the music, and again Mick stopped him. Rubbing a forearm as though his tattoo were a rash, Mick grimaced at him. ‘Better. It’s louder, but you’re still too posh. This isn’t choir practice. Needs to be rougher.’

  ‘Too Rex Harrison,’ Gareth admitted. ‘Loosen up, Monty. Relax.’

  ‘Can’t be done,’ Alexander to
ld him. ‘Not with you lot watching me. Makes me feel stupid.’

  ‘Imagine we’re not here,’ said Mick. ‘Look the other way. Go on. Let’s try again.’

  Alexander stood at the end of the room, facing the door to the kitchen, but the third attempt was no improvement. ‘Not right,’ Mick pronounced, and he gazed out of the window. ‘You’re all strangulated, Monty.’

  ‘Adjourn to the pub?’ suggested Billy, but he received no response.

  A bus arrived at the stop on the opposite side of the street. Alexander looked at the skin of its roof, which quivered with the vibration of the engine. He glanced at Mick, who was staring resentfully at the bus, as though its clattering had impaired his consideration of their problem. The bus pulled away and still nobody spoke. Gradually, however, the tension in Mick’s face slackened, as if he had seen, in the vacated space across the street, the solution to their predicament. ‘Remember that bastard Owen?’ he asked. ‘The psycho?’ He scrutinised Alexander as Alexander had scrutinised the transformed Gareth Jones. ‘You had him off perfect, didn’t you? You could do him so good his own mother couldn’t hear the difference. You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking this isn’t working because you’re singing like you. What we want is for you to be singing like him on that record. I reckon you could do that. What do you think?’

  ‘You want me to copy him?’

  ‘That’s it. Don’t sing along with him. Be him. Try it, Monty.’

  ‘You want me to do impressions?’ Alexander laughed.

  ‘To get it going. Once you break the ice, we’re away. This’ll work. I know it’ll work. Believe me.’

  ‘White boys with the blues,’ added Gareth. ‘It’s all impressions, sort of.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dave. ‘Go on, Monty. Fake from the heart.’

  ‘Go through there, if we’re putting you off,’ said Mick, pointing to the kitchen door.

  ‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ Dave protested. ‘We can’t stick him in another room when we play, can we? The Park Rangers, with backstage vocals from Monty MacIndoe.’