Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  The girls in pink had now joined his friends. Full glasses filled the tabletop. ‘What bollocks, eh?’ said Billy to Alexander.

  ‘Must be dynamite in the sack,’ remarked Mick. ‘Only reason a girl like that is going to be with a berk like him.’

  ‘A big noise in his own trousers,’ Gareth commented.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked one of the girls.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Gareth contentedly. ‘Catchy line, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nice girl,’ said Mick.

  ‘Very,’ said Billy, with what was meant to be a lustful grin.

  ‘I remember her, I think,’ said Mick.

  ‘I do,’ said Gareth. ‘Definitely. She did your reputation a lot of harm, Al.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Hanging around with a girl when you could have been playing football. Not natural when you’re eight, mate. Sissy MacIndoe, that’s what you were.’

  ‘On our block, all of the guys call him sissy MacIndoe,’ Dave sang, to the tune of ‘Pretty Flamingo’.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ objected the blonde girl, flicking ash at Dave.

  ‘Yeah, leave him alone,’ said Gareth, in a schoolboy’s whine.

  ‘My name’s Lily,’ the blonde girl told Alexander.

  25. Gone but forgotten

  The pleasure of being in the group was like the pleasure of appearing in a play on an irregular tour, in a succession of darkened and unfamiliar rooms. They had created roles for themselves, it seemed to Alexander, with ways of behaving that were so secure it was as if they had been written. He said as much once, to Gareth, as they walked back to Greenwich along the Woolwich Road, having played in a club that was run by a friend of Billy Barton. ‘And we shouldn’t be called The Park Rangers,’ Gareth agreed. ‘Should be The Misfit Labourers. That’s what we look like.’ Mick was Brickie Berserk, smacking the drums like he was throwing lumps of mortar all about the place. Dave Gordon was The Frustrated Craftsman, obliged to demean himself with a bunch of horny-handed artisans. Billy was The Genial Hodcarrier, happy enough to make a few quid on the side, while Gareth himself was The Clumsy Carpenter, fussing over his guitar as if trying to get his angles to come right. ‘And that leaves you. You’re not one of the labourers, of course. You’re the front man, the focus of all our efforts. You’re The Statue.’

  ‘The Statue?’

  ‘Yes. It’s like you’re a statue and we’re building this room around you, to show you off.’

  A couple of weeks later, Gareth gave him a T-shirt with the head of Michelangelo’s David printed on the chest, which Alexander wore whenever they played. At the first bar of the opening number he would close one hand on the stand and the other on the microphone, then plant his feet wide apart and lock his legs and tilt his shoulders, adopting the posture of a hero of Soviet industry, from which he would barely move, no matter how loud the band or how boisterous the audience. He would train his gaze for as long as he could at a point to the side of the spotlight, so that when he looked away everything in front of him was blurred, like sandy seawater. Often he would close his eyes to inhale the air of the room, which changed from place to place as little as the parts they played. It was an air compounded of smoke and beer and perfumed skin and the smell of hot dust and glass and metal that came off the lights, and Alexander inhaled it like a diver’s oxygen. When he sang he thought of nothing; his voice seemed to be impelled not by his will but by the music that rushed into him. His head would ring in the noise they made, as if he were immersed in a breaking wave, and when the last song was over, and the lights in the room went up, a feeling of being stranded would overwhelm him for a moment, as if he had been washed ashore and unfamiliar faces were looking at him.

  With the other four he would sit around a table and drink for a while, and talk about how the set had gone. There was rarely anything else for Alexander to talk about, not even with Gareth, whose boyhood friendship with Alexander was like an invisible and tedious companion who would not leave. Once or twice a month for almost two years, the band played in the pubs and clubs of south London. Almost forty times they played together, but those plentiful evenings would decay into meagre memories of half a dozen rooms, and a brawl one night in November, when a firework was thrown behind the bar, and parts of the evening on which Megan and Mitchell turned up, and Billy Barton arriving drunk because his girlfriend had left him and then tripping on a cable in the middle of a song and gashing his arm. Some faces and names he remembered, and a kiss by a grass-green door in the light of a bare fluorescent bulb, and sitting alone in a cold kitchen, with his hands on a clammy red oilcloth, looking out at a street he would never see again. And of all the nights on which he and Gareth walked or drove back together after playing, he would be able to recall substantially only the last one.

  Gareth had written the words for a song, which he’d given to Dave a couple of months before. ‘It’s complicated, very intricate,’ he assured Alexander, as they approached the town hall. ‘A lot of wordplay. Like Dylan Thomas, that sort of thing.’ He recited some lines. If you hadn’t read The Magus you wouldn’t understand it properly, he explained. ‘Dave doesn’t understand it, I reckon. That’s why he’s dragging his feet. Just doesn’t get it.’ It was not raining but there was water in the air, and a silvery coating had formed on the sleeves of Gareth’s velvet jacket. They passed under a streetlamp and Gareth swiped the water from his arms, as if someone had clumsily stained his clothing. ‘He’s not too subtle, if you ask me,’ he went on. ‘Can play the guitar, but he’s too straight down the line.’ He recited the last verse of his song. ‘Now that’s OK, isn’t it?’ he asked, and Alexander replied that it was. They walked in silence for a while, and then, for some reason, they stopped across the road from the pub where Eric Mullins had lived. Its name was the same as it had been, but the mane of the plaster unicorn had crumbled and its crown, once scarlet, was now whitewashed. ‘The good old days, eh?’ said Gareth, with no clear meaning.

  ‘Whatever happened to Eric?’ asked Alexander.

  ‘Christ knows,’ said Gareth. ‘Left years ago,’ he added, and then he looked at Alexander pityingly. ‘You don’t get it either, do you?’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘The song.’

  ‘No,’ said Alexander, in a tone not so much of admission as of refusal.

  ‘Thought not,’ said Gareth, and he walked off.

  One morning the following week, Mick Radford phoned Alexander at the shop and told him that Dave Gordon had quit. An hour later he phoned again, to say that he had a replacement in mind, and that they should get together that evening. In the afternoon Mick called to postpone their meeting and by the Saturday the Park Rangers had been disbanded. Alexander removed the photo from the noticeboard behind the counter. ‘The end of an era,’ he announced to the half-dozen people in the shop, dropping the picture in the bin. One of the schoolboys looked into the bin as if to see if Alexander had disposed of something valuable. The stolid young woman at the classical music section, whom he would not remember as having been there on that day, glanced over her shoulder, smiled sympathetically, and resumed her browsing. She was the only person under the age of thirty who regularly went to those racks, and since the beginning of that year she had called at the shop every month, always on a Saturday. Other than ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Thank you’ she had never yet said anything to him. Methodically she would work her way through the month’s new albums, seeming to take note of every word on the front of every sleeve; some she would take out and turn over to read the essay on the back, unselfconsciously and without haste, as though she were standing in her living room and reading a magazine. There was an air of deliberation and self-sufficiency and imperturbability about her, though she appeared to be no more than a year or two over twenty. Sometimes he would see her coming down the hill, or watch her walking away. She always walked slowly, as if enjoying an amble along a country lane, even when everyone else in the street was hurrying
out of the rain. With her wide hips and long plain skirts, her deep-set blue eyes, her pale and mole-dotted skin, and her oak-blonde hair drawn back in two stout plaits, she put Alexander in mind of an alpine villager.

  It was in October – Bob Beamon’s picture was on the back page, he would remember – that they first had a conversation of any extent. Only she and Alexander were in the shop, and he was playing the Jeff Beck album. Leaving one hand in a gap between the album covers, she looked out of the window as if considering an idea that had suddenly occurred to her. Her hand lifted a cover free of the rack. She looked at it, and then at Alexander. ‘Would you mind?’ she asked, with a fatigued smile. ‘That music. As there’s no one else here, would you mind if we did without it? For a minute or two.’ He took the album off the turntable. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and for five minutes or so the shop was like a library, as she reviewed that month’s releases while Alexander turned the pages of his newspaper. And then he read something that made him laugh aloud. ‘What’s funny?’ she asked, in a tone so plain it took Alexander aback. It was as though they were colleagues who were used to spending every day in the same room.

  ‘A misprint,’ he explained. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Really. It’s not funny. I’m sorry.’

  She came over to the counter, carrying a sleeve. ‘Come on. What is it?’

  He placed a finger on the notice of the second anniversary of the death of a Mr Reginald Irvine of Charlton. The heading read: ‘Gone but forgotten’.

  She bit her lip guiltily. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said.

  ‘I shouldn’t have laughed. It’s not funny.’

  ‘It’s terrible,’ she said, hiding her laugh behind the portrait of Beethoven.

  ‘We shouldn’t,’ said Alexander. ‘The poor family.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she replied, and she composed her face into an expression of earnestness.

  ‘Would you like to listen to that?’ he asked.

  ‘No thanks. It’s not necessary. I’ve already heard it.’ She placed the sleeve on the counter precisely, like a picture-framer aligning a watercolour on its backing card. ‘I’ll take it,’ she said. Alexander went into the back room to find the record. ‘My brother saw you, in your group,’ she told him when he returned. ‘He thought you were pretty good,’ she said, intending, it seemed, simply to relay her brother’s opinion rather than to please him.

  ‘But you weren’t tempted to check for yourself?’

  ‘I’m happy to take his word for it, when it comes to things like that,’ she said. ‘And I’m not much of a one for pubs, to tell you the truth.’ She put the money into Alexander’s palm.

  Two weeks later she appeared again, but she stayed for no more than ten minutes in the crowded shop, turning over the records she had seen a fortnight before, and left without talking to him. The following Saturday she returned, and after that she did not miss a week. Once, he would remember, she asked if she could listen to something, and she sat on the chair at the end of the counter, put the headphones on, and began to smile with such delight that one of the other customers – the jazz fan from the sorting office – glanced at her uneasily, as though he had found himself trapped with someone who was shouting nonsense. ‘What are you reading?’ she asked Alexander on another afternoon, after Mick Radford had called to pay the two pounds that he owed him from the last gig, and Alexander showed her the copy of Gilbert White that Mr Beckwith had given him for his birthday. She nodded, as if uncertain what conclusion should be drawn from his choice of book, but then somebody came in and the conversation ceased. That afternoon she bought an LP and wrote a cheque for it; Alexander watched her hand moving sinuously, writing the name Jane Nesbit. And then, on the last working day of the year, she arrived in the last half-hour, wearing a navy blue duffel coat and a vast navy blue pullover with a roll-neck collar and a partly unravelled cuff that protruded from a sleeve of the coat. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’ she asked him casually.

  ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘And you?’

  ‘The same,’ she said. She pulled the hood of her coat down and went to her habitual section, like a machinist clocking on for her shift. ‘Some cash from the aunts and uncles,’ she explained, slapping her coat to make the coins chink in her purse. ‘No point in delaying. Seize the day.’ She picked up an album, scanned it, and dismissively replaced it.

  ‘There’s a few newer ones at the back,’ he informed her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, but she continued with the batch she had begun. For five minutes or so she persevered, and then Alexander looked up from his book and saw her glance at her reflection in the window and notice that he had seen her glance. She took up the record on which her hand was resting and brought it to the counter. It was a recording of Bach concertos, as he would always remember.

  ‘You don’t want to listen first?’ he asked.

  ‘Time for you to close. I wouldn’t want to delay you.’

  ‘I’m in no hurry.’

  ‘No, really,’ she said. ‘I’ll chance it. I have a good feeling.’

  ‘OK,’ he replied, and he stooped to take a paper bag from the lower shelf. When he stood up again his gaze was met briefly by hers, which seemed to have remained fixed on the place where he had been standing.

  She looked down at her purse and prised it open. ‘Do you have any family, Alexander?’ she asked.

  ‘A full quota of parents,’ he replied.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and seemed embarrassed. ‘I’m glad. I’d assumed you didn’t.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘From your eyes,’ she said. ‘I thought I could tell. But obviously not.’ She took from her purse a banknote that was folded into quarters and put it in Alexander’s hand. Her gaze moved from his hand to his face, and she frowned as if trying to complete some connection of her thoughts. ‘You do have the most fabulous eyes,’ she stated, but like someone a generation older than she was. Still looking at him, she asked him directly: ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Happier than most people, I think,’ he said.

  She looked at the wall, considering his answer. And then she raised herself onto her toes, leaned across the counter and kissed him on the lips. ‘Was that a mistake as well?’ she asked. ‘You look perplexed.’

  ‘I am perplexed.’

  Again she leaned forward, but this time she brought her face to within an inch of his and stared smilingly into his eyes for a moment, and then she kissed him as his hand touched her hair. Her lips, he would remember, seemed to be whispering as she kissed him, and the faintest perfume of lemons was on her skin.

  ‘Still perplexed,’ he said. ‘Perplexed and not at all unhappy.’

  ‘Well, you have a think, and I’ll come back,’ she said. ‘You’re with your parents for New Year?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And I’m with mine. But never mind,’ she replied, and she held her hands out flat to receive the record she had bought.

  ‘See you next year,’ said Alexander, to which she said nothing. She sauntered up the road and did not look back, or betray an awareness that he might be watching her. When she had gone he locked up the shop and went upstairs to his flat, where he sat for an hour before phoning his parents.

  26. Shipping Supplied

  On the first Saturday of January she phoned him at the shop, and at six o’clock she came to the flat. She waited downstairs, in the hallway, while he fetched his jacket. They went up to town to see a film. On the train she sat facing him, and asked him how the New Year had been with his parents. It had been the usual routine, he told her: they watched TV, had a glass of the Christmas scotch, sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at midnight. ‘My father goes all vague when he hears a bagpipe,’ he said. ‘I think it makes him pine for the glens.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Bagpipes make her ill. She prefers to be within a ten-mile radius of Oxford Street.’

  ‘A city girl.’

  ‘
Through and through. She’s OK for a week or two in the country, but she needs her magazines with her. To stay in touch with real life.’

  ‘But they get on?’ she asked. ‘Your parents?’

  ‘Oh yes. They get on. I’ve never heard them argue. Not really argue.’

  ‘How unusual,’ she commented, smiling. ‘And what is it your father does?’

  ‘Works in a bank,’ he said.

  ‘A banker with a soul?’ she queried, and she kept him talking about his parents all the way into Charing Cross, where she took his hand and they walked to Haymarket to see a film of which, when he endeavoured to reconstruct this day many years later, he would remember nothing.

  Of their Sunday morning walks he would remember reciting the description of the ancient yew tree in Selborne’s churchyard, and Jane repeating, as if the sentence were the end of a fairy tale: ‘This is a male tree, which in spring sheds clouds of dust, and fills the atmosphere around with its farina.’ There was a bench on which the name of her schoolfriend Maria could still be seen, carved on the underside of the seat. One Sunday they drove to Rochester, but a downpour started before they reached the town, and the water was dripping into their hair through a rip in the canvas roof, so they took a turn down the high street and then drove back. Somewhere in the West End, waiting for traffic lights to change, she told him that she loved her mother, with an emphasis that made it plain she did not care for her father, but then, for some reason, nothing more was said. He recalled how she would decline to come up to his flat, with a kiss that was like an affectionate reproof. ‘Not yet,’ she would sometimes say to him, and raise a forefinger to his lips. He would remember going into her flat for the first time and seeing the records she had bought from him, arranged behind the armchair; she lit a stick of incense that evening, as she always did, and when she left the room he looked at the objects on the shelf above the record-player – the tiny cross-legged brass elephant, the postcard from Iona, the bottle of minuscule glass beads, the photograph of Jane by a canal in Amsterdam, the little tree made out of cork – and anticipated the time when he would understand how these things were connected. On that first evening they sat on cushions on the floor to listen to the Bach concertos, with her back against his chest, and occasionally she would press his hands tightly, as if to transmit her contentment to him. When he left he stood under the tree on the other side of the street, to see her shadow moving in the room as she cleared away the plates. He did this many times, and often he stayed until her light went out. Once, he would remember, he saw her take the glass he had used and touch it to her lips.