A plaintive, panicky voice: ‘Will you write from Scotland?’
Firmly: ‘Goodbye for now, Phyllis.’
I went back to Murdie’s house and made a cup of tea. Then I spread myself flat out on Murdie’s sofa, and repeatedly bounced the back of my head off the firm cushions, all the while emitting a low moan of pain from deep within my chest. I had to do this for a very long time before I began to feel even a little bit better.
There wasn’t much else to do, so I spent the afternoon in the Botanic Gardens. It was a sunny day, and there was a hint of August heaviness in the air, the delinquent, late summer laziness that seeps into your bones and turns them to warm rubber.
It is a calming place, the Botanic Gardens, a green park set behind a pair of heavy Victorian wrought-iron gates. I sat down there on a wooden bench and looked at the organised pinks and reds of the flower beds, and thought of the gardeners plotting precisely this spread of colours, and ordering in all the bulbs, and carefully planting them, and then watching the flowers straggle up and grow to their full, brazen moment before they begin their gradual drooping towards death. I thought of how a gardener might take pride in that, and of how – as the hectic world outside the gates chased stupidities and bred its failures – the flower beds in the Botanic Gardens might be counted a rare thing, a modest and complete success. If you died and were forced to justify your existence before God, and you told him, ‘I made the flowers bloom every year in the Botanic Gardens in Belfast,’ it would not sound a shabby way to have spent your whole life.
The gardens were full of schoolchildren in their uniforms, temporarily released for lunchtime, waving their dripping ice lollies and bawling amiable insults. Young women, who had worked all the morning in nearby offices, unpacked first their sandwiches and then their lard-white legs beneath the sun. On the grass, university students kissed and alcoholic tramps hunted casually for cigarette ends on the path.
I used to come here with Big Jacky. First, we would go into the Ulster Museum itself and straight up to see the main attraction, the Egyptian mummy in her glass case. The mummy was a fine-boned, shrunken thing, short of stature, and her head and one hand were left unwrapped for the benefit of onlookers. The leathery little face was all cheekbones, and you could still see some of her teeth, like small, stained squares of brown pottery. There was even hair, too, a patchy custard fuzz.
Back then, I just used to look and look at the mummy, without even thinking. But today, up close again beside her transparent tomb, I thought how very strange it was that this desiccated thing was once actually a young woman who ran around and laughed in the sun, and was quiet or talkative, and who maybe fell in love and sang songs and stroked cats. If anyone had told her where her body would end up, how unbelievable it would have seemed.
Now, everything that remained of her was lying in a glass case for generations of Belfast schoolchildren to gawp at. Big Jacky had told me once about a school friend of his, a real head-the-ball, who screwdrivered open her case one time they were all knocking about up there, reached in and shook her frail dark hand. The others were excited and half scared by the act of sacrilege. But that was back in the old days, when you could do nearly any mad thing.
After the spectacular dryness of the mummy, Big Jacky and I always used to walk back to the gardens, and into the splendid damp of the hothouse, billed on a brass plaque outside as The Tropical Ravine. It was a Victorian glass dome that, once you stepped inside, was suddenly bursting with humid jungle. You could have sliced the air with a knife inside the hothouse, and it would have poured out water. Plants with fleshy stalks as thick as a child’s arm juddered near the little waterfall, and bulbous fruits drooped from thick, unidentifiable vines.
I opened the door and went in again, for the first time in years. The humidity was just the same, a tender slap on the face with a wet flannel. But the glasshouse seemed darker and smaller than I remembered. Inside, a man was taking his daughter round on the wooden pathway, holding on to her hand tightly in case her chubby, unsteady legs gave way. She must have been about three or four, an outspoken child in a short red coat. They stopped briefly to stare into the water beneath them.
‘Is there frogs in that?’ she said. She had one of those sweetly rasping childish voices like a scouring pad on silk.
He didn’t pay attention to her question: he was kneeling down to point out a giant water lily.
‘Is there frogs in that?’ she said again, louder this time.
The piercing question made me smile. For a second I yearned for all the brackish impurities in my life to be boiled away, and myself distilled back to some clear childhood moment when the most important thing, the only really important thing, was whether there might be frogs in that.
10
Back in Murdie’s house, the local news was on the radio. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer pledged to keep inflation rates down … there has been a train crash in the Midlands, two people have been injured … speaking today, the Northern Ireland Secretary confirmed that the IRA and the Loyalist ceasefires in Northern Ireland are still in place … police confirm that a 77-year-old Catholic man last night became the oldest victim of a paramilitary attack, thought to be linked to Republicans: four masked men broke into his flat in North Belfast, and beat the old age pensioner with iron bars in his legs and ankles. The victim is said to be in a serious but stable condition in hospital. And now over to Martin Rawlins for an hour of country music from Nashville, Tennessee …’
It has always interested me, how the truly momentous happenings in life, the great solid chunks of luck or misery, must swim in the grey soupy water of something trivial.
A lonely man is walking home from work, wondering what to have for dinner: bacon, he thinks, and then he thinks no, fish. At the fish counter he gets talking to the smiling woman beside him in the queue, they fall in love, and he stays with her for the rest of his life.
A woman is walking towards the bus after shopping in the city centre, when she suddenly remembers that her niece has just given birth to a baby boy. Should she get a present for the baby tomorrow? Och no, sure she might as well get it today. She nips into a department store, and in that very instant a bomb explodes just inside the shop door and the woman is lucky, they tell her later, because the people right beside her die but she only loses her legs.
People marvel at it, how the thin tug of an impulse can yank a whole life into a fixed shape. The man thinks: ‘What if I had gone to the meat counter instead?’ and the woman thinks: ‘What if I had just carried on walking to the bus stop?’
But sometimes we know, or think we know, what the terrible result of an action might be, and yet we go ahead and do it anyway. We trust to luck. We overtake on a blind bend and hope that there is nothing hurtling in the opposite direction. We realise, on the way to an appointment, that we have left the front door unlocked but we carry on, telling ourselves that today no one will test it. What makes us do it? The desire to escape from something, I suppose, and the desperate hurry to get to somewhere else. And the fact that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we come out of it still laughing.
Murdie came back on Thursday night to tell me that someone had been in the bar looking for me – not McGee, but a hard-looking young fella with a thick neck and short fair hair.
‘He came in and said “is Jacky working tonight?” I told him that you had given in your notice. He said “Why was that?” I said “Haven’t a clue. Maybe he got sick of being stuck behind a bar.” He said “I heard he got into bother last night.” I said “Aye, there was a bit.” He said “If you see him, tell him Mr McGee would like a word with him.” I said “I doubt he’ll be back, but if I happen to bump into him, I’ll certainly pass on your message.” So I’m passing on Mr McGee’s message,’ said Murdie, falling into his armchair.
‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Murdie. Did Mr McGee’s friend mention what sort of a word Mr McGee wants with me? Perhaps he wants to invite me to a cocktail party, or some other variety of
social event.’
Murdie gave a short laugh, a bronchial seal’s bark. ‘Probably some other variety of social event, son.’
Mrs Murdie carried on diplomatically with her knitting. Gavin glowered from above his paperback book. He knew there was something alluringly fishy going on in our conversation, but he couldn’t quite work out what. He had been a bit shirty with me ever since that morning’s conversation. I felt guilty, naturally, but then a dose of standoffishness from Gavin was a drink of ice-water on a desert march.
The trouble was, I couldn’t go to bed until he went to bed. My bed was the sofa in the front room, which was where Gavin liked to park himself of an evening, with his Troubles books and the How-To Guide to Playing the Tin Whistle, or whatever else he had concealed in his backpack.
As the night wore on, I could sense his coolness to me wearing off, at exactly the time when I would have liked it to be building up. He was snouting me out as a potential companion for a long, late-night conversation, moving inexorably back towards me like flickering toothache heightening to a reliable stretch of solid pain.
After draining his cup of tea, Mr Murdie stood up with a histrionic stretching motion, and then said, a shade too emphatically, ‘Well, I think I’ll turn in. It’s been a long day.’ Mrs Murdie did the same. Mrs Murdie’s Stalingrad appeared to have fallen.
Was there anything either of us needed? she asked. She was assured that there was not. Well, in that case they would both see us in the morning. Gavin made no move to get up. As Murdie turned towards the door, he caught my eye in a fleeting, sardonic glance. I was too weary even to want to laugh.
The silence hung in the air for a little while. Then Gavin said, magnanimously, ‘I see what you were trying to say this morning. You’ve had enough of religion, eh?’
‘Well, maybe just not enough of the right sort,’ I conceded. I wasn’t going to be so pompous as to claim any great philosophical intent behind baiting Gavin, even to Gavin.
‘So, has Belfast changed for the better since the ceasefires?’ he said, with a fresh heartiness.
Oh no, now we were back into the whole shebang all over again. I began to see what had driven Murdie to lose his self-control.
‘There aren’t any big bombs going off, and that’s a nice change. But the IRA and the Loyalists are dragging even more people out of their houses to beat them up. The press calls them “punishment attacks”.’
I really didn’t want to get into this.
‘So you’re saying that now the IRA are attacking Catholics, and the Loyalists are attacking Protestants,’ he said, showily figuring it out.
‘Yes.’
‘But surely much of it is just stopping their own people from stepping out of line? Wrong, of course, but I’ve heard that a lot of it is about cracking down on drug dealers and car thieves, and it’s actually pretty popular with the local community. My car was stolen from outside my house in England last year, and I can tell you, if I had got my two hands on the little bastard that did it I would have—’
‘Got together with five friends to beat him with a nail-studded plank of wood, shattering his shin bones so that he could never walk right again? Is that what you would have done?’ I said. My voice was rising.
‘Well, I wouldn’t have gone quite that far, no,’ Gavin said.
‘How far would you go, then?’ I said, in a strange, strained voice that came from somewhere in the pit of my stomach. ‘How far?’
He just looked at me.
I stood up. I was really beginning to feel quite unwell. I was cold and the palms of my hands were sweating. There was too much of this stuff crowding in on me now. My eyes began to focus on a piece of white bread that was clinging to the side of Gavin’s face, hanging on to the dark bristles that sprouted vigorously, indeed with almost obscene strength, from his cheek. That was like me, I thought. Just hanging on temporarily, about to be swept away by someone else’s gesture.
‘Are you all right?’ said Gavin. He was staring at me oddly again.
‘I don’t feel very well, Gavin. Excuse me, I’m just going to the bathroom.’
I went upstairs, locked the bathroom door, and was quickly sick into the toilet bowl. Then I rinsed my mouth and splashed my face with cold water, again and again, letting it run in and out of my eyes and down my face. I did this for a long time. I dried my face slowly, patting it with a towel, and sat down on the floor until things became bearable again.
When I walked back down into the front room, Gavin had gone to bed.
Two days later. The lunchtime radio news: ‘House prices are soaring again for the first time in five years … schoolteachers are warning of possible strike action after their annual pay rise failed to keep pace with inflation … a gang of six masked men, thought to be linked to loyalists, entered a house in Ballymena in the early hours of this morning and beat a 24-year-old man in a paramilitary-style attack … the 77-year-old man assaulted in North Belfast on Wednesday has spoken in hospital about his ordeal. He said that he had pleaded with his attackers to leave him alone, but they continued. It is now believed that the paramilitary-style beating was a case of mistaken identity, and that the gang, thought to be linked to Republicans, was looking for another man in the same block of flats.’
I woke up on the fourth day and decided I couldn’t stay at the Murdies’ any longer. It was partly because I slept in their front room. No matter how early I got up, or how late I went to bed, I was condemned to be a bulky presence camping in the heart of their home, hammering my tent pegs into their domestic peace.
Murdie was getting edgy, smoking more cigarettes and speaking in staccato sentences when he came back at night. The main source of his irritability was Gavin, whose mere presence now played a frantic cantata on Murdie’s nerves. An extra guest couldn’t help matters. I tried to repay them by filling up their fridge. Then it drove me twice as mad to see most of the food disappearing straight into Gavin before Murdie even made it through the door. It was a race against time. Chomp chomp. It couldn’t be long, surely, before they would just order him to leave. Or maybe he would stay there for ever – a gigantic cuckoo, squawking at the small, busy Murdies – compulsively fattening and jabbering as they grew thinner and more worn out.
I had decided to get out of Belfast. The simplicity of that decision exhilarated me. I didn’t really want to go to Scotland, in spite of what I had told Phyllis. It would be too much like here, with all the canny-eyed folk in the close wee kirk wanting to know exactly who you were, and why you left and, ‘Belfast, did you say? Which part? Och, maybe you knew the McClenahans who used to come here for their summer holidays.’ I wanted to go to some big, callous place where nobody had the inclination to squander too much inquisitive energy on a stranger. I could only breathe easily in a great fog of indifference.
I walked into the city centre, and booked a one-way flight to London for the following day. The travel agent said, ‘Are you sure you won’t be coming back in the next three months?’ and I answered, in a confident voice which pleased me, ‘No. Definitely not.’ There was something clean and precise about a one-way flight. It was a straight arrow flying into the future, the big maze of the metropolis.
I would go round to my house late that night, in a minicab, say my goodbyes to Phyllis and write a letter for her to give to Titch. Then I would pack my two suitcases and retrieve the bit of money I had stashed away for an emergency. Very early in the morning I would leave my house, once again using a minicab which would take me to the airport. I would worry about what happened in London only once I was en route. The minicab company I’d use would be from the other side of town.
The cumulative effect of these decisions was to make my heart beat faster and my head lighten, as though I was in love. And I was. I was in love with the idea of getting away.
Mrs Murdie gave me a kiss and a slightly tearful hug goodbye. Gavin gave me a handshake which managed to be both clammy and a real bonecrusher, and said ‘Bon Voyage’. I bet he was pleased I was
going. Murdie said gruffly, ‘Goodbye, son, don’t forget to write,’ and then shoved two hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes into my back pocket. I tried to give him some back, but he danced away neatly, frowning and making angry gestures of refusal.
He wanted me to pick up my stuff while the minicab waited, and come straight to his house before leaving for London, but I wouldn’t. It was late enough anyway.
‘Let’s not get it out of proportion, Murdie, McGee isn’t bloody Don Corleone,’ I said.
Murdie shook his head in despair at me. Then he said, ‘Right again, boy genius. Don Corleone is probably more forgiving.’
The truth was, I wanted to calm Phyllis down before I went, and I didn’t want to have a taxi driver tapping his fingers on the dashboard outside while I mulled over which things to take with me. It would have made me nervous.
11
It was just off midnight, and dark, when the cab pulled up outside my house. There was a light on in our front room. I paid the driver and got out.
The night was still and dry, and our street was quiet. But I had the feeling that someone was watching me. I looked around. There was a figure sitting on the wall opposite the house, wearing a jacket with a hood. The face was half turned away.
What or who was it? It could have been anyone, anything, even a slumped scarecrow or a stuffed Lundy of the kind they burn on bonfires on the Twelfth. But a single orange point was moving up and down in the shadows: whatever it was, it was smoking a cigarette. The figure looked as though it was watching our house. I started to walk quickly towards it, my blood beginning to cool. It was better to find out now.
The face snapped towards me, into focus: a familiar, sharp little triangle, lit by the street lamp, and I almost laughed with relief. It was Marty.
‘What the hell are you doing here, Marty, you gave me the creeps,’ I said.
‘Nothing, sure. Just sitting here.’
The Ghost Factory Page 8
