The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  There was something slightly strange about his manner, something I couldn’t place. He seemed almost sullen, his narrow eyes not quite meeting mine.

  ‘Why are you out at this time of night? Is your ma not looking for you?’

  ‘She’s sitting up with Vicky and Jeanette, watching a film. The back door’s open, so I can go in whenever I want,’ he said.

  ‘All the same, you don’t want to be hanging around out here half the night.’

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ he said.

  ‘Just staying with a friend.’

  ‘There was some fellas round here looking for you,’ he said.

  I could feel my heart starting to sprint.

  ‘Is that so. What were they saying?’

  ‘They were just saying where were you and had I seen you because they wanted a word.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Last Thursday and Friday.’

  That wasn’t so bad. Maybe they thought I’d left Belfast by now.

  ‘Were they giving Phyllis any bother?’

  ‘I don’t think so. They just asked me had I seen you.’

  I started to think.

  ‘Marty, if anybody asks you again, you didn’t see me tonight, all right? Remember that.’

  He just stared back at me, with that strange look on his face.

  ‘I’ve got to go inside now. You should be off to your bed.’

  I took a few quid out of my pocket, and slipped it into his chilled hand. ‘Here. Buy yourself some chips tomorrow. And an ice lolly, for your dessert.’

  He didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t lift his hand to take the money.

  I moved to unlock my front door. He was standing on the grass verge now, not moving.

  ‘Goodnight, Marty,’ I said. He was beginning to infuriate me. God knows I didn’t want to be hanging around outside the house for too long. I might as well do a tap dance there on the pavement with a ‘Here I Am, Boys’ sign round my neck.

  But he seemed reluctant to leave, dragging his shoes along the grass in circles.

  ‘Are you going away?’ he said. He had lost all his cockiness: he seemed like a very young child again.

  ‘Yes, sunshine. Pretty well as soon as you’ll let me get into my house,’ I said.

  ‘Go soon, you shouldn’t stay in there long,’ he said animatedly, almost desperately. ‘Please.’

  I couldn’t quite understand his urgency. I definitely understood mine, though.

  ‘I promise. You look after yourself,’ I said. I opened the door, and he turned suddenly and bolted up the street as though Spring-Heeled Jack was after him, without once looking back.

  Phyllis was still up. She jumped a mile when I came in. She had the television turned up so loud that she hadn’t heard me outside. Her face looked subtly appalled, as though I had casually walked back in with half my head missing and said, ‘Now how about a nice cup of tea?’

  I told her that I was going to London, and then I told her roughly why. She couldn’t take it all in. At one point she said, ‘Why don’t you call the police?’

  I said, ‘Come off it, Phyllis. Do you think they’re going to give me a round-the-clock police guard and a medal because I performed a public service and hit some Loyalist in a bar?’

  She looked down at her slippers silently, a chastened child.

  ‘You’ll be able to run the newsagent’s,’ I said. ‘And then if things calm down maybe I’ll be able to come back. I’ll phone to let you know how I’m doing, and write you letters.’

  Her powdered parchment face crumpled slightly. Tears were welling in the downturned corners of her eyes.

  I said again, uselessly, ‘I’ll phone you all the time, to see how you’re doing.’

  I had the minicab booked to pick me up at six in the morning. I didn’t plan to go to bed. Phyllis wouldn’t go to bed either, although I sort of wished she would. She said she’d keep me company while I was packing.

  She got some of my things down from the wee loft cupboard, where she had put them. I didn’t have that many clothes: I bundled them all into one suitcase. Phyllis took them out again and folded them up into rectangles, meticulously laying them flat.

  Then I started hauling out my books, choosing which ones to leave, which to take. I had to leave Strange Stories and Amazing Facts behind, on the grounds of its weight. Pity. I didn’t feel unhappy during the packing. I felt as though all the messy foliage of my life was being pruned into a clear, clean shape, the tidy form of two medium-sized suitcases.

  At three in the morning, Phyllis went off to bed. She set her alarm and said she’d get up in two and a half hours, to make me tea before I went off.

  At four in the morning there was the sound of our front door being kicked in, and I realised I wouldn’t be going to London on the early morning flight after all.

  First fear paralyses you, and then it makes you move twice as fast. I went into Phyllis’s room and shook her awake. I said: ‘They’re here to take me. Put your dressing gown on and get back into bed. Don’t worry, they’ll leave you alone.’ She was mumbling something, waking up, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  Then I opened the window in her room: it was a long drop from there into the backyard. If I pushed myself out and dangled down off the windowsill I would be all right. I could hear one of them shouting, ‘Where are you, you wee bastard?’ as the thump of boots came up the stairs. There was no time. I was leaning out the window, getting ready to climb, when I looked down below me and saw two other men with black balaclavas waiting in our yard. I wanted to be sick.

  They were looking back up at me and encouraging me to jump. One of them had a baseball bat, and was standing tapping it off his leg. The other one shouted out, crooning, ‘Go on, Jacky boy, come into our arms.’ His balaclava was more of a hood, a black bag with eye-holes in it, like some medieval executioner’s. I was flooded then with the feeling of despair. If there had been a way to kill myself, I would have taken it. If I jumped, I jumped to them. If I ran back, I ran back to them. I could see Phyllis on the bed, her mouth slack and her face turned the grey of cold ashes and dead people’s skin.

  I left the windowsill and picked up a lamp. Two more men, both wearing masks, came in the bedroom door, and with all my strength I threw the lamp at the one nearest me. It glanced off his shoulder and shattered on the floor into jagged china clumps. He kept on coming towards me, even angrier. The lamp had been the last thing between me and them. Now I had nothing.

  My arms and legs liquefied with fear. It is an awful thing to feel yourself utterly powerless. It takes you into a place where very few people ever get to go, and it is difficult ever to come back fully from there. It is a place where nothing you can say, nothing you think, nothing you can do matters any more. Something terrible is going to happen to you, you know it is, and there is nothing you can do to change it.

  Every nightmare you ever had where evil people were chasing you, and your feet were dragging heavily as though made of lead, was a thin echo of this. And you know it is. For this isn’t a dream. This is real, and they can do to you whatever they like. And they will like to do the very worst things, because they hate you.

  They took hold of my arms and started to pull me down the stairs. The banisters were shuddering as I banged against them. I heard Phyllis’s tremulous voice saying ‘Don’t hurt him’ sounding very far away now, a muffled, twittering plea from a distant universe. And one of them answered matter-of-factly, as though this reply had become as routine as the acts they were about to commit, ‘Shut your face you stupid oul bitch.’

  At the bottom of the stairs, one of them held my arms down while the other made me open my mouth and then tied a gag round it. It was a thick bit of white cotton, and it smelled faintly of paint. We went out the front door, and the other two were waiting. Three of them picked up their baseball bats from where they had set them beside the door. One of the bats, I saw, had nails in it. They were silent and businesslike, intent on their common purpose, l
ike men setting out together on some fine morning for a fishing trip.

  You don’t really think when four people are walking you towards waste ground. But there are almost-thoughts, embryo thoughts that are conceived and just as quickly miscarry. How had they known that I was in there? Had they been watching the front door all the time? What were they going to do: would I get just the baseball bats? Did they have guns?

  There was a big moon out that night, sailing lazily across the sky. As we moved down the street, we passed Titch’s house. All the lights were off. There I had been, warning Titch. I thought he had been stupid not to get out. He wasn’t half as bloody stupid as me.

  I turned my head to look over at the house where Marty lived. I hadn’t expected it, but there he was, watching from his bedroom window. For a second, I saw his face pressed up against the glass looking straight back at me, the gagged hostage walking in the centre of the four hoods. His pale, triangular face seared itself on my memory, a red-hot iron on a thin cloth. It bore a strange expression, one I had never seen on him before: fearful, transfixed, but with something else in it, too. Something like complicity. And it struck me then like a hammer blow straight to the back of the head: He had known. He had known they were coming for me.

  We got to the patch of waste ground. It was dark. They walked me deeper into the darkness, further and further away from the street lights. Then one of them said to me flatly, ‘Lie down, you wee fucker. If you try to move about it’ll be worse.’

  I lay down quietly on the ground. ‘Prisoners Out’ was scrawled on the wall in front of me, just visible in white paint. The ground was cold and hard, with tiny bits of gravel on it that scourged my cheek. But the beating didn’t come. I lay there, waiting.

  I still waited. Then somebody, I think it must have been McGee, said, ‘What do you think, Jacky? Do you think we should stiff you?’

  I turned my head on the ground and looked up towards the black hood where the voice was coming from. The hard glint of something metal caught what little light there was. Christ, he meant it. He was holding a gun.

  I said nothing. The voice said again, ‘Should we shoot you?’

  ‘Please don’t,’ I said, through the gag. It came out as a strangulated gargle.

  ‘Why not? Say pretty please, and then I might do it anyway.’

  ‘Pretty please.’

  Oh fuck, why were they forcing me through these hoops?

  I felt the cold metal pressed against my cheek. At the same time, a warm patch of urine started to spread across my trousers. I hoped they wouldn’t notice.

  ‘He’s pissed himself,’ said one of the voices. They all laughed.

  ‘Bang bang. You’re not the hard man now,’ said McGee. ‘Not like the other night in the Whistle.’

  He was kneeling down close to my head now: I could smell the tang of stale beer.

  ‘That was a mistake,’ I said absurdly.

  ‘You hit me by mistake?’

  ‘Thought you were someone else.’

  ‘No you didn’t, you lying wee fuck. You were pissed off because we did your big fat friend, the one who was squealing for his mammy. Well now you’re going to be squealing for yours.’

  ‘Mine’s dead.’

  Why did I tell them about her? Did I think I could invoke her protection, like a hovering saint?

  ‘I’m not surprised, when she saw what a toe-rag she had for a son.’

  He jumped up. The others sniggered again.

  ‘Give him the treatment,’ he said.

  The crack of a baseball bat came down on my arm and everything spasmed in the white heat of pain. And another, and another. I heard the blows whistle through the air as they came towards me. I was yelping like a dog now and snivelling for them to stop. I tried to curl up, but the blows kept on coming. A fist hit my jaw, with a sickening smack. The copper taste of blood filled my mouth, and – oh look, there was a loose tooth swimming in it. My stomach started to heave. I fought for air through the blood-soaked gag.

  I don’t know how long it went on for. I can’t remember. Maybe I passed out, and then came round again. One of the last things I remember is another kick in the side and the hissed words, ‘You’d better get the fuck out now. I wouldn’t waste a bullet on you.’ Hands untied my gag. Then the sound of feet moving away, and someone whistling.

  I lay there. I couldn’t move. Blood was still leaking from my open mouth. Blood was clogging my nose, but the smell of my own urine and the garbage from the bins was filtering through it. An empty Tayto crisp packet fluttered near my eyes. I thought pointlessly ‘Here’s me.’ That’s what wee kids say, happily announcing themselves to a room full of smiling adults. But here’s me, a broken thing now, choking on loose bits of myself, trapped face-down in the gritty dirt. If I tried to stand up, I didn’t know which pieces would come with me, and which would stay behind. I didn’t even want to find out. Here’s me.

  12

  At first, I was mildly elated just to have survived. Elated and heavily sedated. I had lost quite a bit of blood, they told me, before the ambulance came. I still don’t know who called it. They gave me a lot of painkillers in the hospital, and I spent much of the time only half asleep, and the rest only half awake. The nurses brought me cups of tea, and I could listen to the radio. I jumbled up the voices on the radio with ones in my sleep. Together they made a soothing babble, a flowing river of sound.

  They were going to keep me in for a while, they said. Stitches and a brain scan and a few broken ribs and a dislocated jaw, they said. Black eyes. Antibiotics to fight infection. Tetanus shots. All fine, I nodded, load me up with everything you’ve got, test me to destruction. They said I’d got off lightly, all told, compared to many other cases they’d seen. Maybe out there on the waste ground I’d inherited a slim line of credit from Big Jacky after all.

  Phyllis came to see me. She said her nerves had gone to pieces since what happened, and the doctor had given her sleeping pills. I said not to worry, it would all be fine. I wasn’t worried about anything much now. The worst thing was over.

  Murdie came to see me too. He looked sad, and said that he had told me not to stay at home that night. I know you did, I said. It was a bit like a dream, with all the faces from the past appearing one by one at the side of the bed, looking mournful and wagging their heads and waving.

  In the bed next to me there was a boy called Gerard. He had short hair that he had bleached blond, with the mousy roots sprouting through, and a silver ring through his left eyebrow. He was sixteen. They were keeping him in for some operations because his IRA punishment beating had gone wrong.

  His right leg was held together with steel pins, and the doctors were pleased they had been able to save it, he said. His ordeal was more formal than mine: he had been required by the IRA to turn up for his beating by appointment, under threat of suffering something unimaginably worse if he didn’t. I thought about what it must have been like for him, watching the hands on the clock creep towards the agreed hour.

  A year or so earlier he would certainly have been shot in the legs, he said, but out of respect for the fact that there was a ceasefire on it had been decided to do him over with baseball bats instead.

  ‘It was the Provies,’ he said. ‘They told me to keep very still and take it. But I moved when they were doing it and it shattered the bone. Then they said it was my own fault.’

  ‘Why did they do it?’ I asked him. The sludgy words came dropping out carefully. It hurt to talk.

  ‘Joyriding,’ he said. ‘People were complaining about me. Me and my mates gave some cheek to the Provies. Sick of them fellas standing on the corners and bossing us about.’

  Gerard played techno music on his Sony Walkman all day. I could hear its tinny pounding leaking from his headphones, as his skinny torso twitched to the music. It kept him distracted. He was probably escaping into some endless fantasy about scooting round his housing estate at full pelt in a stolen car.

  ‘I’ve got to stay in here for weeks,�
�� he said. ‘I’m bored out of my nut.’

  His mother came sometimes and pleaded with him to keep out of trouble when he left hospital. When she went home, Gerard would look over at me and sag his upper half in dramatic mock relief at the end of the lecture. Sometimes his girlfriend Roisin came, tottering in her high heels and caked in black eye make-up. She looked about fifteen.

  Gerard looked forward keenly to her visits, counting the hours, and then was slightly offhand with her when she finally arrived. He would deign now and then to let her pull the plastic curtain round his bed and kiss him, though.

  Roisin was kind-hearted. She always brought chocolate for me as well as Gerard, because she felt sorry for me. I just posted the milky squares into the slot of my mouth and let them melt on my tongue, leaking out sweetness. Anything else involved too much unpleasant working of the facial muscles. I appeared more badly beaten than Gerard, although he was actually far worse off than me. I had needed rows of stitches in my head and cheek and some more on my arms and legs. My face looked like an old piece of fruit, dappled with rot, the kind you might make jam out of if you were feeling very thrifty. Otherwise you would chuck it away.

  Gerard’s bother was all in the legs department, and his baby face was unmarked. He said: ‘There’s a bad apple in every barrel, my ma used to say, and in this ward it’s you.’ We got on well, him and I. He was refreshingly short on self-pity.

  My tongue kept probing the empty space in the back of the top row of teeth. I doubted if you would be able to see the gap when I smiled, but it hurt too much now to find out. I was vain enough to care about how I looked at the end of all this. I was no pin-up, but there was something about my face that women liked – some suggestion of romantic complication – and I didn’t want to lose that small advantage. God knows, I didn’t have many others.

  When I got bored I would mumble a comment at Gerard, just to get him going.

  ‘What do you want to be when you grow up, Gerard?’ I said to him one day.

  He answered exactly as I knew he would, ‘I am fucking grown up,’ furiously moving the top half of his body to some imaginary techno beat, apropos of nothing.