The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  He kept on: ‘You should have seen the last fella we done. He was a big fat slabber, but he couldn’t even make a fist when it came down to it. When we pulled him out of his house, he just kept squealing for his ma-a-a-mmy.’ He rolled his eyes stagily like Al Jolson as he delivered the punchline.

  I felt a terrible coldness coming over me, as if I was being dipped in a bath of ice. It was a single realisation, pumping into my brain in waves, each wave bigger than the last, sickening my stomach, filling the empty space behind my eyes with a red, pounding mist. I realised exactly who he was. He was McGee’s son.

  He kept on: ‘He had insulted my da.’ His voice rose to a screaming falsetto, a drunken pastiche of a terrified woman’s voice: ‘Mammy! Mammy! Ma—’

  I leaned over and hit him on the jaw as hard as I could. He tumbled off the bar stool with a crash. I heard girls screaming, and Murdie saying ‘Jacky, what the fu—’ I climbed over the bar and slammed him again twice, when he was moving back up off the floor.

  I don’t remember much about what happened next, except that Murdie pulled me off, and Jimmy and Joe moved in to surround him and bundled him outside, befuddled and jabbering with rage, before he could take a swing at me. His girlfriend was left behind, yelping and hissing at me like a vicious, scalded cat, ‘Why did you do that, you bastard?’ before someone propelled her outside as well.

  I could hear roars coming from outside the bar, and Jimmy’s voice saying firmly, ‘I’m sorry sir, you’re not getting back in. If you keep trying to get back in, I’ll have to call the police. We’re closed now.’ Then more shouts, and threats: ‘I’ll be back for you too, you fat bastard.’ And, finally, a calm that was somehow worse than the noise.

  In the centre of the silence I thought: why did you do that? But I knew why I had done it. The phrase drifted into my mind, ‘to get him back for what he did’. And then I thought: no, Jacky, you haven’t got anybody back. They’ve got you now.

  That night, Murdie told me not to come back to the Whistle. It was for my own good, he told me, and he was right. It was also for his good, I told him, and I was right too.

  He poured me a large whiskey, and one for himself, and then looked at me with shrewd, troubled eyes.

  ‘Why did you do that, Jacky?’

  ‘He gave my friend Titch a beating, along with three of his mates. You remember Titch, you met him at our house one night. He’s a bit simple. He hasn’t been out of the house again since.’

  ‘But how did you know it was that fella?’

  ‘I didn’t have a clue until I heard him boasting about it at the bar.’

  Murdie took a cigarette out of his crumpled pack, tapped it and lit it contemplatively.

  ‘He’s a guy called Ronald McGee,’ he said, ‘Nickname “Rocky”. To be honest, Jacky, of all the people you could have had a dig at tonight, he wasn’t the best one to choose.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘He’s well in with the Loyalist paramilitaries.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ I said.

  Murdie poured us both another whiskey.

  ‘If you keep working here, Jacky, they’ll come in and get you here.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And if you go home, they’ll find you there.’

  ‘Home Sweet Home,’ I said. I was almost getting the hysteria again.

  ‘You can stay at my house until you get yourself sorted out. I don’t think anyone would think to look for you there. I’ve a sofa bed in the front room, and I’ll lend you a bit of cash to tide you over.’

  He was a good man, Murdie.

  When we got back to Murdie’s house that night, Gavin the cousin had gone to bed. ‘That’s a first,’ said Murdie. Then he picked up his whiskey bottle: there was only a miserly tea-coloured dribble in the base of it. ‘That’s not,’ he said.

  Mrs Murdie had gone to bed too, leaving a note that said simply, ‘Stew on the cooker’. The premeditated brevity of the stew note, said Murdie, was a sign that she was still livid. It was actually worse than no note at all, because by continuing to consider his dietary requirements, even while furious, Mrs Murdie was taking care to retain occupation of the moral high ground. That could only mean she was gearing herself up for a long and painful campaign: ‘The Deep Freeze,’ he muttered, ‘Mrs Murdie’s Stalingrad.’

  Murdie clattered about, pulling out the bed in the front room and getting me clean sheets. The place was very tidy. He handed me a clean towel and a glass of water. Then he dug around some more and added a toothbrush he said he kept for spare and a disposable razor for the morning.

  He said: ‘I’ll warn Mrs Murdie you’re about the place, so she doesn’t get up in the night and beat you over the head with the frying pan in mistake for me.’

  Then he leaned closer and whispered: ‘But if Gavin should come in here, I give you permission to hit him with any implement that should come to hand. You haven’t seen him before, after all, and from his demeanour you might assume that he is a violent intruder.’

  He laughed, enigmatically. I wondered had all the whiskeys gone to his head, or maybe his nerves had just been scrambled by the evening.

  I told him: ‘You seem like a good host, Murdie, and I’ve only been here ten minutes.’

  He gave a regretful little smile. Hospitality was still a sensitive point, after the incident with the cousin. ‘Sleep tight,’ he said, and went up the stairs on leather-shod tiptoe so as not to wake Mrs Murdie with the groaning floorboards.

  The yellow light of a street lamp came through the window, falling across my brown blankets. Out on the street a solitary drunk was stumbling home. I heard him singing a mournful song in a voice wet with alcohol and stirred with sadness. I could have lain awake all night, turning over the implications of what had just happened in the Whistle. But I didn’t. I just fell back on the clean pillows like a dead man, into the soft arms of a deep, black sleep.

  9

  I came round early and lay very still, trying not to wake my dread up. But it was already lying in me like stagnant water, and it began to stir when I heard the sound of Gavin clanking around in the kitchen.

  There is a poem I have always liked, by W. H. Auden, that I first came across years ago in one of the books Big Jacky bought. It is about how perfectly the Old Masters understood suffering: how, in their paintings, when one person was enduring torments, everyone else was simply carrying on as usual, ‘eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’.

  While Titch sat terrified in his airless bedroom, and I was thinking about being exiled from my own house, Mrs Murdie’s cousin Gavin had remounted the summit of his own good spirits and was digging noisily in the fridge for bacon and potato bread.

  Gavin was a tall and robust fella in his early thirties: ruddy-cheeked, with a busy, loose-lipped mouth. There was an air of greedy carelessness to him, something almost unfinished, as there is with some hectic, sizeable people. The blueprint for Gavin had been sketched with a thick charcoal pencil and in great haste.

  This cousin was always half in a hurry, although he never had anything really important to do. If there was a vase set next to Gavin’s elbow, you knew that it was destined to crash to the floor, the casualty of some sweeping gesture. If he loaded his clothes into the washing machine, you knew that he would shove them all in with reckless speed, and then twist the dial just hard enough to break it and leave you ankle deep in churning, foamy water not long after. He never did break the washing machine, to be absolutely fair, but you always felt that he was right on the verge of it. And in one way that was worse.

  He liked his food, although he was large rather than obese. In a few years, though, he would almost certainly slide into a corpulence that would be lent dignity only by his height. For now, a vast amount of fuel was needed to keep his bandwagon on the road. The Murdies’ fridge door swung back and forth like a hurricane lamp in a high gale. Much of its contents eventually poured into the same deep pit: Gavin’s perpetually masticating, chattering, questionin
g, exclaiming, capacious gob.

  After a few minutes, I wouldn’t have cared if I had never seen Gavin again for the rest of my life. After a few hours, I would have been actively and powerfully grateful not to. I observed politely to Murdie that Gavin certainly seemed to have more energy than the rest of us.

  ‘That’s because he does eff all but lollop about Belfast like an effing Labrador dog,’ said Murdie sourly. It was uncharitable, but I took Murdie’s point. A generous heart was a luxury he could no longer afford. It was costing him enough just to keep Gavin in sausages and soda bread.

  On the first day at Murdie’s, after Mrs Murdie departed for her secretarial job and Murdie went off to the Whistle, I was left alone with Gavin and a large pot of tea. Gavin had his map of Belfast out and a couple of paperback books about the Troubles, and leaflets about forthcoming events all spread across the table.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘what brings you to the Murdie Family Hotel?’

  A revealing choice of pleasantry, I thought. But I didn’t really fancy telling Gavin all my business, especially with him rattling around Belfast on Troubles Tours in black taxis, gabbing on heedlessly about things he shouldn’t.

  ‘I’m having a few family troubles,’ I said. ‘Mr Murdie kindly offered to put me up for a few days. He’s an old family friend.’

  He slathered crunchy peanut butter on a hunk of bread and looked back at me with undisguised curiosity. ‘What sort of family troubles?’

  ‘I’d rather not talk about them, if you don’t mind,’ I said tightly.

  What a secretive little prig I must sound, I thought. Still, as I didn’t like Gavin, I didn’t suppose it mattered much whether he liked me back. We could have a conversation without any concern for the future.

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Gavin mildly, chawing away on his bread. But he continued looking at me with an odd directness, like a screwball scientist who has seen something interesting suddenly develop on his agar plate.

  ‘Are you Protestant or Catholic?’ he asked abruptly.

  So that was it. I did a mock double-take: ‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you that it was rude to bring up a man’s religion at breakfast?’

  ‘No, but which are you?’ he kept on, doggedly.

  I was damned if I was going to tell Gavin what I was, and be slotted into some pre-prepared slot he had gleaned from the introduction to his Welcome to the Northern Ireland Troubles book.

  ‘I’m not telling you,’ I said.

  ‘Why won’t you tell me? Are you ashamed of what you are?’

  All right. I took a deep breath, and got stuck in.

  ‘Because that’s what’s at the root of all my family problems. I desperately want to incorporate some elements of Islam into my private spiritual wardrobe, but my family are dead set against it.’

  ‘Are they Protestant or Catholic?’

  He didn’t give up easily.

  ‘Neither, I’m afraid, Gavin. That’s the real difficulty. They are deeply militant atheists. They even started up a paramilitary group of their own once, in the late seventies, the Atheist Liberation Army. One of its core demands was that all citizens in Northern Ireland must publicly deny the existence of God. But unfortunately my parents were the only members of the ALA.’

  ‘What happened to their paramilitary group?’

  ‘It came under very serious, sustained attack by Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries, both of whom thought it was immoral. I remember that once my parents made themselves the target for Loyalist gunfire while attempting to hoist an atheist flag over a Free Presbyterian church.’

  ‘What was the flag like?’ asked Gavin. His interest, worryingly, was far outstripping my initial expectation.

  ‘It carried a picture of a scowling man with a long beard – the traditionalist’s representation of God – but crossed out in red, as in a no-smoking sign. Mother and Father were frankly lucky to escape with their lives on any number of occasions. The problem was, they never knew who to thank for their miraculous survival. All the other paramilitary groups had God for that, you see.’

  I kept on talking, staring bleakly into my tea as though I could barely stutter out the painful memories. Gavin was soaking it all up.

  ‘The lack of focus confused and divided my parents. My mother broke away and formed a more radical, violent splinter group: the Atheists’ Defence Force. The ADF and the ALA began feuding over conflicting views of the struggle. The house turned into a battle zone, both physical and ideological. I was stuck in the middle, the only neutral ground. I started to pray.’

  This had all gone far enough. I was enjoying myself, but I was also beginning to feel ashamed. No matter how credulous Gavin was, it wasn’t right to deceive him. And, however playfully I talked about these joke parents, I was really insulting the memory of my own mother and Big Jacky.

  He started looking them up in the index of his book, excitedly. ‘I’ve never heard of this. What was it called again, this group?’

  The fizz had gone out of me.

  ‘To be honest, Gavin, all that stuff there was just a bit of a joke,’ I said sadly.

  Gavin looked at me mistrustfully, as though I had just confessed in a wee squeaky voice: ‘I’m a Munchkin, actually.’ He seemed angry. Well, he had every right to be.

  He slowly collected up his books and leaflets and moved towards the door with a certain amount of self-possession.

  ‘I hope you have an enjoyable day,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘You too,’ I said.

  The door banged shut. I slumped over my tepid mug of sweet tea. It had all been pure nonsense. I felt horrible.

  The fierce jollity I had felt in teasing Gavin evaporated, leaving behind a nasty, bitter taste. Here I was, camping in a kind friend’s already overcrowded house, jobless and homeless, cheaply taunting some gullible English cousin. What had I got to be a smart-arse about?

  I hadn’t hit the McGee fellow out of bravery, either; I couldn’t even comfort myself with that. I had no desire for dangerous thrills: the mere thought of pursuing a sport like white-water rafting or bungee jumping had always filled me with horror. Why would someone pay money to be dangled by their heels from a long piece of elastic until their retinas detached? Round here that was the sort of thing that happened to you if you were caught in bed with an IRA man’s wife.

  The only time I ever had any physical courage at all was when I was in a blind rage, and then I temporarily forgot about being afraid. More fool me. Big Jacky had always warned me: ‘That temper of yours will get you into trouble one day, son.’ Well, he had been right. But I wasn’t in a rage now, far from it. I was miserable and worried. Why hadn’t I left McGee alone last night, banked the information, and worked out some clever, subterranean way to punish him properly? As it was, I probably hadn’t even hurt him. He had fallen to the floor, unhorsed by pure surprise, but I hadn’t seen any blood on him when they were hustling him away. There would be a few bruises, maybe, but it was a poor revenge for what had happened to Titch.

  I went outside to a phone box – I didn’t want to call from Murdie’s home phone – and rang Phyllis at the newsagent’s shop. She sounded distant and reedy, as if testing out this newfangled speaking device for the first time from somewhere in the nineteenth century: ‘Hel-lo?’

  ‘Hello Phyllis, it’s Jacky.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m staying at a friend’s house. I’ll be here for a while, Phyllis. I’ve had a row with a Loyalist guy, a nasty piece of work, and I’m staying away from home for a bit. I’ll not be at the bar either.’

  ‘Oh my goodness.’ Phyllis’s voice had gone all quavery.

  ‘If anyone comes round looking for me, no matter who, you tell them that I haven’t been home since Wednesday morning. Pack up some of my clothes and stuff and put it in the attic. If they start asking you questions, tell them that I phoned you late on Wednesday night and said I wasn’t coming home, and that I was going to Scotland on money I borrowed from a friend, and not
to worry about me. Tell them I wouldn’t tell you where I was but that I’ve promised to write.’ That sounded convincing.

  The deluge of instruction was too much for Phyllis. I could hear her struggling to breathe.

  ‘Listen, Phyllis. Calm down. Don’t worry, seriously. You don’t need to tell the Iron Lung about this yet. She’ll only go berserk. I’ll ring her myself in a week or two.’

  A bemused silence. I had been trying to make her laugh, but she had probably forgotten about telling me that her boyfriend used to call Aunt Mary the Iron Lung.

  ‘But what if they come round here?’ she said, uncomprehending. She hadn’t even worked out who ‘they’ were yet. That would all happen later, in some messy tangle of reflection.

  While talking, I had become doubly conscious of the ammoniac reek of urine in the trapped air. Since phone boxes now doubled as pissoirs, a long conversation had become an exercise in endurance on several levels. I couldn’t wait to get out.

  ‘Just like I said. Tell them I phoned to say I’m going to Scotland. You don’t know exactly where, but I said I’d write.’

  ‘Are you going to Scotland?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, Phyllis. But if anyone comes round, just tell them I have.’

  ‘Where are you now? Are you in Scotland?’

  It was turning into one of those Bud Abbott and Lou Costello sketches, where the pair of them play around at frustrating confusions for a full hour, until even the audience wishes they would pack it in. I had never found those sketches very funny to watch. It was even less funny to be starring in one with Aunt Phyllis.

  ‘I’m at a friend’s house.’

  ‘Which friend?’

  ‘I’m not telling you, Phyllis, because I don’t want you to be frightened into telling anybody.’

  ‘Who would frighten me into that?’

  The more I tried to reassure Phyllis, the worse I made it.

  ‘Phyllis, I have to go now. Don’t worry about me. I love you, and I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.’