The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  I was hardly ever bored behind the bar, apart from very early in the evening or late at night when you got stuck with the tedious pub raconteur in the Aran sweater who had bolted his corduroyed arse to the bar stool. I liked it best at the height of the evening, when the place was packed with people and noise, and everyone was laughing and shouting for more drink, and you started to work with a feverish rhythm that drove everything else out of your head. I liked having a bit of money, too. Murdie paid me a decent chunk of cash in hand at the end of every week.

  It was Phyllis’s birthday halfway through the month and I asked Murdie for the night off. I’d been feeling guilty lately about how grumpy I’d been with her since she moved in. She had been dropping wee hints about her birthday, and how Mary and Sam would be away on holiday together and sorry to miss it but she had thought this time she would just stay in Belfast for it. ‘Is that so,’ I had said, distantly, as though my radio wasn’t even picking up on her faltering signal.

  I knew she thought I’d forgotten all about it. On the morning of her birthday, I got up half an hour early – well before her throat-clearing operation – and put a bunch of pink roses outside her bedroom door. I’d bought them the day before, and kept them in a jug of water in my wardrobe so she wouldn’t see.

  I got back into bed. Half an hour later, I heard the floorboards creak. Then a crash, a stumble, and a yelp of surprise. Phyllis had kicked over the roses by accident and they were all strewn about the floor, but I could see she was pleased. She kept saying ‘Oh my goodness’ as she collected them up in her nightie.

  I took her out for dinner later on, to a French restaurant in town. She put on her best blouse, with a fussy wee frill at the neck, and her pearl earrings, and a daub of blue eyeshadow to set off the rose-tinted lipstick. When I saw her appear like that at the bottom of the stairs, all done up to go out, I felt an awkward pang of love for her.

  In the restaurant, she had a couple of glasses of white wine with her dinner, and got a bit tipsy. The conversation got on to Mary and Sam’s holiday: they had gone to Tenerife.

  ‘It’s good for them to go somewhere on their own without me,’ she said. ‘I sometimes felt as though I was a bit of a spare part.’

  I said nothing, sawing away at my steak. I could sense the faint electricity of something meaningful approaching.

  ‘I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted Mary along all the time when I was going out with my boyfriend,’ she said. There was a second’s hesitation before the word ‘boyfriend’, as though she had doubts about whether to mention it, but had ploughed ahead anyway.

  I had never heard Phyllis talk about a boyfriend before. I couldn’t imagine Phyllis with a boyfriend. Mary had always said that Phyllis was too delicate to get married. I carried on cutting my steak without showing surprise, so as not to scare the revelation away.

  ‘When were you going out with him, Phyllis?’ I asked.

  ‘When I was nineteen,’ she said, ‘He was a medical student. We used to go out to dances together. Mary didn’t like him. She said he was sly but he wasn’t, he was just shy of her because she tried to bully him with too many questions.’

  She smiled suddenly. ‘He used to call her the Iron Lung, because she was always hunting after me, shouting my name.’

  ‘How long did you go out together?’

  ‘Two years. Your mother liked him. The pair of us used to give Mary the slip sometimes and go out to the dances together.’

  I couldn’t leave it now. I had to get to the bottom of it before the wine wore off and Phyllis clammed up about the only really important thing that had ever happened to her, and went straight back to talking ceaselessly about hairstyles and pork chops.

  ‘So why did you stop going out?’

  ‘He was killed in an accident,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I wasn’t with him because I wasn’t feeling well that night. He went out to a dance with his brother, and his brother was driving him home along a country road late that night when a van hit their car. The van’s driver was drunk.’

  ‘Did the brother survive?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He only had a broken arm. He got married the year after. But after my boyfriend I never felt like going with anyone else.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Phyllis,’ I said. Then we both started looking, quickly, at the list of puddings. After some deliberation over the pavlova and its possible disappointments in texture, Phyllis played it safe and plumped for the chocolate mousse.

  8

  The next day, I was back in the Whistle. It was a soft night, and the city was quiet. Blond Jimmy was on the door. Murdie was behind the bar with me, complaining about Mrs Murdie’s younger English cousin Gavin, who had come to stay with them for a few days and was still there three weeks later, sleeping in the spare room and expecting a full Ulster fry on weekends when he roused himself from his bed at midday. He was between jobs, which is a dangerous place for a house guest to be.

  The cousin had elected to go on an extended ‘Troubles Tour’ of Belfast in a black taxi, in which the taxi driver took him round a miniature history of the Troubles, complete with a running commentary. They had gone up along the Peace Wall, that separates the Protestant Shankill Road and the Catholic Falls Road, and up to the shop on the Shankill where an IRA bomb killed nine Protestants queueing to buy fish, and all around the murals that use the gable walls like storybooks to tell the highly coloured version of events from each side.

  The worst of it was that the cousin was very interested in the roots and origins of it all now, and when Murdie got home exhausted at night the cousin was waiting for him there at the kitchen table, with a drink already poured out for Murdie from Murdie’s own whiskey bottle, and a million questions about the Troubles along with his own answers to the problems.

  Things had finally come to a head the night before, said Murdie, when he came back in at midnight and there was the cousin, sitting up with a glass of Murdie’s whiskey and a copy of the Belfast Telegraph, raring to go. Why, asked the cousin, did the Protestants who lived in a county with a majority of Catholics not move house to live in a county with a majority of Protestants, and the Catholics do vice versa, and then the counties that were then a hundred per cent Catholic could go over to the South if they wanted, and there could be a much smaller Northern Ireland just for all the Protestants who wanted to stay British?

  Could we talk about it tomorrow, said Murdie, because I haven’t really much energy left after a day in the bar.

  Of course, said the cousin, but did Murdie not see that if things were sorted out that way, then it would be much easier for everyone who wished to remain in the new, smaller version of Northern Ireland, and the state that was left would demand far fewer resources from the ordinary British taxpayer? Would Murdie not agree on that?

  And then Murdie snapped and said I’m sick of effing politics, you’ve done nothing but talk politics since the day you got here and I wish you’d give my head peace. People don’t move house because they don’t want to move and that’s it. I’ve come home tired from a long day at work and the last thing I want to talk about is your effing blueprint for the redesigning of Northern Ireland, because I’ve had blueprints for a new Northern Ireland every single day of my life for the last effing twenty-five years.

  There was an awful silence. And then the cousin finally got his breath back and said, with deep affront, Well I can see exactly why you’ve had the Troubles for so long if you’ve got an attitude like that. If you lot are not even prepared to discuss your problems rationally round a table with other people, it’s no wonder your whole place is in such a mess. And the worst of it is, you all expect English taxpayers like me to foot the bill for it.

  That did it. Foot the bill? said Murdie, maddened with anger, Foot the bill? This city was blasted to smithereens in the Blitz for standing up to Hitler alongside England, would you like the fucking bill for that? And in any case you haven’t stuck your hand in your pocket for so much as a pound of sausages since you arrived
.

  There was no recovery from that, Murdie said, because it was the truth. And now there was a poisonous atmosphere in the house, and Mrs Murdie was livid, and the cousin had got up ostentatiously early this morning and appeared grim-faced at breakfast with his hair all combed over to one side, and would only accept a cup of tea with a lightly buttered piece of toast before going out for the day.

  I told Murdie he shouldn’t worry: ‘Maybe he’ll take his leave altogether now, and you’ll get a bit of quiet.’

  Murdie was racked with guilt: ‘No, it’s not right, son. I shouldn’t have spoken like that to him, he was a guest in my house. And now he’ll go back to England and tell everybody there that Mrs Murdie is married to a madman.’

  Then he said, ‘The joke of it is Mrs Murdie can’t stick him for long either. But she says I shouldn’t have insulted him: it’s the principle of the thing.’

  He started laughing: ‘But it was true what I said about the sausages. That fella’s tighter than a fly’s arse.’

  Consoled, he went back to checking the beer barrels, whistling a tricky little twirling melody.

  Murdie told me about his wife’s cousin in the afternoon. It was the last afternoon I spent working in the Whistle.

  I had set up everything ready for the evening rush, but it was a Wednesday night and we had no band booked to perform, so the customers were just trickling in. I was playing a few tapes of Big Jacky’s, soul music from the sixties, and was half listening to them and half thinking about other things.

  And then, at about half past nine, a dark-haired girl came in who I remembered from school. She was good-looking enough, in tight jeans with teased hair and all the jewellery on, but there was something I never liked about her face, something almost birdy. She had a hard, thin mouth, and I remembered her always hanging around the corridors with three or four girls in her gang, shouting out raucous stuff to torment the quiet ones or embarrass the plain ones. But I couldn’t remember her name.

  She remembered mine, though. It was all hair-tossing, and ‘Hiya Jacky, I haven’t seen you in ages’, and she perched herself up at the bar with her boyfriend on a bar stool beside her. He wasn’t best pleased by the whole scenario. He looked vaguely familiar, too, although I knew he hadn’t been at school with me: he was wiry, muscled but not overly tall, with a tattoo of a rose with a face in the middle of it bulging on his left arm. It didn’t look much like her face, but then maybe the tattoo artist’s hand was shaking when he did it.

  The boyfriend was edgy drunk and she was over-the-top drunk, an explosive combination, and anyone who came near them was likely to get whipped up by the corner of their personal typhoon.

  She wanted a double vodka and tonic. He wanted a pint. I was civil enough to her, but I was keeping my distance. There was a hum of trouble off the pair of them. I served them both their drinks, and kept myself busy with the other customers. There was plenty going on elsewhere to keep me well away from them without it looking deliberate, or so I thought.

  A few vodkas later, she started up again. Her eyes had locked on to me with the peculiar, fixated stare of the slightly belligerent drunk.

  ‘You’re not very friendly, Jacky,’ she said, mushing the words a little. ‘I bet you can’t even remember my name.’

  I couldn’t, as it happened. I had been racking my brains for it all night. I’d gone out with one of her lesser friends briefly at school, and I had the dim memory of it ending in some kind of minor dispute with the potential for wider hysteria from which I had quickly retreated. But the worst thing would be to take a stab in the dark at the name and get it wrong. That could reasonably, or very unreasonably, be interpreted as an insult.

  ‘Of course I can,’ I lied.

  ‘What is it then?’ she said.

  ‘If you don’t know it yourself, I’m not going to tell you,’ I said. ‘It’s a state secret. Do you think I’d go giving out your name to just anyone?’

  My lame little joke enjoyed far too spectacular a success. She went off into stagey peals of laughter. I bet by the time she had finished she had forgotten what I had said in the first place. I winced inside, and then I looked over at him. He had obviously interpreted my remark as an unwelcome attempt at flirtation. His face was a thundercloud waiting to burst. I didn’t want to be standing there when the rain came.

  I busied myself up at the other end of the bar. When I came back, to pour two pints of Guinness, the pair of them were having a spat. I caught the tail end of his words, ‘that wee smart-arse’. I concluded from the direction of his stare, and without wishing to be immodest, that I was the wee smart-arse in question.

  When I came back, five minutes later, they had obviously made it up again. They were all over each other now: he was kissing her, aggressively, with her head bent back at an awkward angle like a rag doll’s. She looked as if she was going to fall off her seat any moment, and her hand was flailing around for some steady port of call. On the way down, the blind fingers struck a vodka glass. It fell and shattered on the floor, the malign shards skittering across the tiles. They both surfaced from the beery whirlpool of their kiss, blinking.

  ‘We’ve had a spillage,’ he yelled. He raised his fingers above his head, snapping them and pointing to the floor. ‘There’s broken glass down here. Somebody clear it up.’ He was looking straight at me, his eyes glittering with hard, pissed malevolence.

  I wasn’t in too big a hurry to race over there like an eager scullery maid with my pan and brush, kneel down next to him, and then have my face ground into the debris. It sounded like a recipe in the French restaurant where I’d gone with Phyllis: tonight we have mashed face on a bed of broken glass, with a blood coulis, the house speciality of our resident thug. I felt a thin jet of hysteria squirt through me. It always did when I got nervous. I almost wanted to laugh out loud.

  Murdie glanced over, and absorbed the situation in a second. He had antennae for trouble. Years of working in bars had given Murdie a talent for instant invisibility, beyond price in moments such as these. He simply withdrew his personality as a snail draws in its horns. He became his pure function and nothing more. I had watched him do it before. He didn’t make eye contact, he remained scrupulously civil, but he didn’t utter a spare word. There was no dangling hook left out for a drunk to hang an argument on.

  While the fella was still staring at me, Murdie nipped out from behind the bar with the pan and brush, and swept up all the glass. It was over in an instant: as far as anyone else was concerned, the brush and pan had simply danced up and done it by themselves.

  When Murdie came back, and we were both turned towards the cash register, he whispered to me out of the side of his mouth: don’t stand effing rubbernecking around here, get you up to the other end of the bar.

  I did. Soon, I thought, they would just leave, stumble off acrimoniously into some boozy argument at home, and fall into their pit of a bed taking oafish swipes at each other and missing. And I would have a whiskey with Murdie and then walk home alone, letting the cool night air wash the alcohol, and the stale smoke, and all the fury off my back. I still wish it had happened that way.

  It didn’t. An Otis Redding song came on, the one where he keeps telling some girl that his telephone number is six-three-four-five-seven-eight-nine. I always used to wonder what happened to the people who actually had that telephone number, whether they were driven mad by hordes of drunken Otis Redding fans ringing them up in the middle of the night, or whether nobody bothered them at all.

  ‘If you need some good loving, just call on me …’ sang Otis, ‘And if you wa-a-a-nt some good kissing, call on me … Lord have mercy.’

  I had started listening to the song, letting the words drift around me as a cocoon against the pair sitting up at the bar. But the guy at the bar had started listening to the song too, and now he was bawling out his own parodic version of the lyrics: ‘If you wa-a-a-ant, a good kicking, call on me.’

  I began watching him. He was horrible all right, but he wasn’t
stupid. It took a certain amount of ingenuity to fit those new words tightly into the song, especially when you were as drunk as he was. And he was singing them in exactly the same rhythm as Otis.

  He had a flicker of charm in his face, too, something in the curve of that cheekbone that suggested good humour, sitting right next to his viciousness. But that flicker would always be enough to attract certain women to him, enough to assure him the place of popular class clown who beats up other pupils at break-time.

  I hated him. I hate people who ruin a good song, plastering stupidity all over something great. And I hated his chanting face, pumping out its thick stream of cunning idiocy.

  On and on it went. When it came to the chorus, he had another little twist up his sleeve: he began bellowing, at the top of his voice: ‘Six-three-four-five-NINE-NINE-NINE,’ the ambulance number, and banging his fist on the counter so that the pint glasses danced a rickety jig. People were moving away from him now, edgily, and Jimmy was looking over from the door to see what was going on, but the girlfriend was still screeching with laughter. I could see her distended, open mouth, the dirty pint glasses, Jimmy’s anxious face. It was like riding round and round, strapped to a fairground horse on some nightmare carousel. My head was beginning to spin.

  The song ended. I tried to steady myself. And then I heard him turn to his girlfriend and assert, with slurred deliberation, ‘Nobody fucking messes around with you or my fucking family.’

  She looked back at him hazily, with smudged eyes, trying to pacify him now, repeating, ‘Yes, yes … och sure I know that.’