The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  Then he gave it a second’s more consideration: ‘Make loads of money.’

  ‘They don’t put you on a big salary for joyriding, do they?’

  ‘They do for racing driving,’ he said. ‘Look at Eddie Irvine. Loads of money, gorgeous women hanging off his arm, international rally-races. I do exactly the same thing in Belfast and I get my leg wrecked by the Provies.’

  ‘That’s because you’re driving someone else’s car,’ I said.

  ‘So’s Eddy fucking Irvine.’

  He was quick enough, was Gerard.

  ‘Such an innocent wee face, and such a foul mouth,’ I baited him.

  ‘You should swear more, then, it might make your big fat mug look better,’ he said.

  Then he stuck his earphones back on. I settled my painful pumpkin head gently back into the piecrust of pillows.

  I sort of liked it in hospital. It was like resting in the centre of a soft cloud. I felt that no one could get at me there. I was taken care of, and the nurses were kind to me in a brisk way. I didn’t have to run around explaining things and trying to make ends meet. One night when neither Gerard nor I could get to sleep we made a pact to tell each other the name of the person who had directed the attack on us, names that each of us would keep close and remember on behalf of the other.

  It wouldn’t make any difference to anything, we both knew that, but there was some satisfaction just in banking the cold truth with another young human being. We had this idea that if anything worse happened to either of us, at least someone outside our family would know who was responsible. McGee’s name meant nothing to Gerard, and I had never heard the name he told me before, but I promised to remember it, and I did: Frankie Dunne. One other thing stuck with me. Gerard said that Dunne had suddenly pulled out a gun before the beating got started in earnest, and whispered softly in his ear: ‘I could just flip my wrist and plant one in your brain.’

  There was an old man up at the end of the ward who kept calling for his wife in the night. I don’t know if he was asleep or awake, but he would say, ‘Mary, are you in there?’ in a sorrowful voice, again and again. Gerard said that when he got out he was going to turn the phrase into a techno record, and make a fortune playing it in the dance clubs for all the Belfast ravers: ‘M-m-m-mary, are you in there? Are you in there, Mary?’

  The old man didn’t get many visitors, although his middle-aged daughter came sometimes, and sat there with an air of permanently distracted affection. The nurse told me that his wife had died last year, that was why he kept calling for her. He had a gentle old patched face, full of seams and lines, and fine white hair sprouting in clouds from either side of his head like some absent-minded professor. One day when he was having his afternoon cup of tea, I sent the nurse over with a bar of the chocolate Roisin had brought for me. I watched the nurse telling him who it was from. He looked over, and then his wandering, bleary eyes found the bed she had indicated, and me in the middle of it. He slowly raised one gnarled hand in a majestic gesture of acknowledgement. Thereafter, on his way to the bathroom in his striped dressing gown, he made a sort of little joking half-bow at the foot of my bed. A delicate gent.

  Hospitals are peculiar places, and the dressing gown is a great equaliser. They ought to make it a compulsory uniform on the outside. Mostly everyone’s nice to each other, exchanging shy comradely smiles, a bit abashed that fate has knocked them off their feet and into their bedclothes. You become a benign connoisseur of other people’s troubles, musing to yourself as the new arrivals stumble in, ‘I wonder what happened to him?’ and ‘What’s she got?’ It’s not a bad idea to be put in hospital along with other sick people; it keeps misfortune in perspective. It’s when you get back out among the well that your vision really starts to blur.

  I was dozing at visiting time one day when the nurse said, ‘There’s someone to see you.’ I opened my eyes and there were Titch and his mother, carrying grapes and newspapers. ‘It’s the first time he’s been out,’ his mother whispered to me as they sat down.

  Titch was staring at me, with his mouth half-open. There was still a vulnerable, exposed quality to his bulk, a sense that he had recently emerged, blinking, into an over-bright and hostile world. I suppose I must have looked terrible to him.

  ‘Don’t worry, Titch,’ I said. ‘They say I’ll have my old face back in a few weeks, but with a couple of extra lines on it.’ He had to work hard to decipher what I was saying.

  ‘What happened to you?’ he said.

  ‘The same guys that did you over, took me on a trip to the waste ground,’ I said. ‘You can probably imagine the rest of it.’

  ‘Phyllis told us about it,’ his mother said.

  Titch kept on staring, as though his eyeballs had stuck to my stitches.

  ‘When are you coming home?’ he said finally.

  ‘I don’t think I will be coming home,’ I said. ‘When they let me out of here, I’m going away for a while.’

  ‘I came home.’

  ‘I know you did, but it’s different with you. I don’t think they’ll give you any more trouble. Anyway, how are things?’

  ‘He isn’t getting the counsellor any more,’ said his mother.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He spilled his orange squash on her case notes when she was in the bathroom, and accidentally ruined them,’ she said.

  I saw a prim little smirk on Titch’s face, of the sort that Queen Victoria must have worn when she first glimpsed John Brown in the nude.

  ‘Attaboy,’ I said, ‘I hope you bought the poor woman a new jotter.’

  ‘She wrote down about me liking biscuits,’ he said, with a passable stab at indignation. ‘And then she wrote that I was unhelpful. But she was supposed to help me, not the other way round.’

  He was obviously perking up.

  ‘Send her over to me. I’ll give her something to write in her notebook,’ I said.

  I would have, too. They had offered me a counsellor as well, but I had said no thanks, I’d have to get over this in my own way.

  Two days later, Phyllis visited in an even worse state. Her lipstick was put on all awry, as if it had made an escape bid for the safe territory of her right ear. The Loyalists had issued a death threat against me if I came back into the area. Posted through our front door, it was signed with the military-sounding pseudonym of Captain Grey. Phyllis had called the police, who had been very pleasant about it, she said. They had sat down and taken a cup of tea with her. Their sympathetic advice was that, since they hadn’t the means to guarantee my future safety round the clock, it might be better if I left the area for a while. ‘A cooling-off period,’ was how they described it.

  The Loyalists and the IRA were ordering people out of Northern Ireland all the time now, as if they owned the place. We were supposed to go and skulk about in other countries, dreaming about a moment when they would finally turn round and suck their teeth in lofty contemplation and maybe let us slink back in.

  Because they were all on ceasefire no one in authority would really challenge them, in case they got annoyed and started swinging the big wrecking-ball again. The government thinking was that in the meantime you had to allow them their wee patches of control. Gerard and I, unfortunately, had our postcodes in those wee patches.

  I was leaving anyway, I told Phyllis, so it didn’t make things any different.

  ‘At least I have it in writing,’ I said. ‘If I come back and they don’t shoot me, I’ll be able to sue Captain Grey for breach of contract. Hope he has money.’

  Phyllis just looked at me.

  But I wasn’t feeling half as witty as I made out. I didn’t want to leave the hospital ward. My bed was next to the window. At night I could lie motionless between the clean sheets and watch the clouds moving across the sky. There was the faint smell of detergent in the air, keeping our poisoned exhalations clean. I could hear the music still trickling out from Gerard’s earphones, although he had fallen asleep. Even the old man calling softly for Mary wa
s a kind of comfort, although he did so less often now. I feared being left absolutely alone. I feared travelling into the heartless expanse of a city I didn’t know, and that didn’t know me.

  On the day that they said I could go, Gerard was quieter than usual. His eyes were red-rimmed and he wasn’t playing his techno music. The doctors had told him that morning that he would walk with a limp for the foreseeable future, which Gerard took to mean for ever.

  I had a bath, and slowly got back into the clean clothes that Phyllis had brought. It felt like a different me inside them now, warier and more fragile. If I breathed too deeply or bent over, my ribs shot out a suffocating strand of pain. I began to understand why Titch had refused to leave the house for all those weeks. It was as if the memory of the beating had sunk into my bones. I moved around like a much older man, as though even the breeze was hiding a knife.

  I looked different, too. The scars set me apart, although the nurses had given me cream to put on them and told me they would fade with time. People see your damage and aren’t sure how you got it, whether for being a bully or a victim. Either way, it makes them a little uneasy. Their eyes climb aboard the scars and travel down the tram lines.

  Gerard was lying in bed, staring into the plastic curtain. I went over to him and said, ‘Forget that racing driver crap, Gerard, they all burn out eventually. Get into the DJ-ing. You’ll make a packet at it, and all the women will go mad for you.’

  He smiled and shook my hand. I waved to the old man down the ward: he raised his hand in reply. I said goodbye and thank-you to the nurses, backing away like a retreating vaudeville entertainer. Then I got into the big, clanking lift, specially designed for wheelchairs and trolleys, and pressed the button to descend into the rest of my life.

  Phyllis and Murdie were waiting to pick me up. They had got a bit more money together for me and bought me a new plane ticket. Phyllis had packed my cases all over again. Murdie gave me a lift to the airport straight from the hospital. He even had an address for me to go to in London, a cousin who he said would put me up for as long as I needed (‘A decent fella. My side of the family,’ he stressed. Gavin, he said, had finally departed after Mrs Murdie told him bluntly that a sick friend was moving in and required the room in two days’ time.)

  The fields looked very green as we drove up to Aldergrove airport, a deep bright green. It seemed calm here outside Belfast. I wondered if one day I could maybe just live somewhere round here, in a secluded house away from the road.

  The rain clouds were pewter, but the sunlight was coming down between them, falling on to the quiet fields. The light was oddly intense, like a pale yellow stone set in dark granite. I used to think that this kind of light could be found everywhere. It was only when I went away that I realised it can’t.

  Part Two

  13

  London

  I moved from a place where I mattered, but in the wrong style, to a place where I didn’t matter at all. Whether this was better I found hard to say at first. But I knew then that people don’t come to an unfamiliar city just to get away from their old homes, but also to escape their old selves.

  Everything about London was strange: the hustling crowds that seethed out from the mouths of Tube stations; the double-decker buses that reeled drunkenly around the crammed streets; the truncated way that people spoke, their words chopped in mid-air by some invisible knife that cut ‘a’s down to a sliver, and whittled off their ‘r’s and ‘t’s altogether.

  I was rich in nothing but vowel sounds, and even they were a bloody hindrance. Hardly anyone here seemed able to understand me. I could see their faces ruffling with confusion when I spoke, like the sea beneath an angry wind.

  Murdie’s cousin, Mr Norman Wharton, owned a tall house in Hackney. This he shared with his wife, Mrs Nellie Wharton. Their two sons had long since gone: one to join the navy, and the other to run an import–export business in Southampton. The Whartons had bought a boxer dog to fill the space in their affections left by their departed children. It was a wheezing, slobbering, bow-legged lump called Rollo, now advanced in years.

  Whatever core of independent character Rollo once possessed had long decayed beneath the weight of the Whartons’ indulgence. He slavered by the dinner table, where he lingered in hope of falling bits of meat, growling if his greasy manna was too slow in descending.

  In the evenings he staggered in and prostrated himself before the electric fire, sometimes letting loose a rogue fart or a dreaming squeak. Rollo had hated me from the very beginning. The day I arrived, dragging my suitcases through the front door, he stood snarling at the bottom of the stairs, his jowly little mask contorted with rage.

  Ever since, he had conducted himself with cussed obedience when the Whartons were there, but the moment he and I were alone in the house his behaviour changed. When he was awake he stationed himself at doors, nipping at my trouser leg when I tried to pass by.

  I had, in revenge, invented a game called ‘Baiting Rollo’ which I played on the rare occasions when the Whartons went out and left me to have dinner alone. The kitchen, where the Whartons usually ate, was separated from the hall by a glass-panelled door. Sometimes I was able to make it into the kitchen before Rollo noticed.

  Once the dog and I were safely on separate sides of the door, I would unpack the meat which I had bought to cook for dinner – a pork chop, perhaps, or a piece of calf’s liver – and wave it back and forth while the hungry Rollo watched me through the glass door, yapping with frustration. When I finally cooked and then ate it, sitting behind the glass, the bad-tempered beads of Rollo’s eyes followed each movement of my fork. Then I would dole a tin of Matey dog food into his dish, as I had promised the Whartons. When the door opened he would rush in, wheezing and growling, uncertain whether to bite me or bury his muzzle in the Matey first – but the lure of the Matey always won, and the monotony of chewing gradually sedated him.

  The top of the house, where I lodged, was a Rollo-free zone: he was too fat and idle to mount the stairs. Mine was a high-ceilinged room, vacated by the naval officer son and left with few adornments: a model ship, now permanently docked on the surface of the dresser, and a small, framed oil painting of a storm at sea.

  I liked this painting: it showed furious waves rearing up towards a swirl of dark grey skies, lit by a single streak of lightning. That was all. The fact that man was entirely absent from this struggle lent the picture a rare modesty. The artist had not felt minded to include any kernel of human interest in the form of some tiny, plucky vessel battling against the high seas. It made me think with relief of how nature ticked on without us in all the places that we can’t see. I asked Mrs Wharton who had painted it, but she just muttered something about a relative of Mr Wharton’s and carried on with her dusting.

  On windy nights my windowpane rattled in its frame, and I would lie in the dark listening to the hum of traffic from the street and thinking about home. Rollo lay in the dark too, two storeys down, snorting and dreaming of a falling rain of pork-gristle.

  Mr Wharton was a tallish, stout man, with a face the colour of a rare steak and iron-grey hair that ascended from his head in a hopeful Marcel wave towards heaven. Mrs Wharton was a birdy little cockney woman, with a pair of permanently startled eyebrows, a topiary frizz of poodle-cut blonde hair and a furious energy. In life, Mr Wharton liked a steak-and-kidney pie, a couple of pints of Guinness, Mrs Wharton and Rollo. He was well disposed towards me – not so much as an individual, it often seemed, but as a benign ambassador from his own, distant Belfast past.

  For the first month I just got accustomed to the place, and some evenings I would join the Whartons in their living room. They sat in velour-upholstered armchairs on either side of the giant, wide-screen television. They liked the television to operate at a reassuringly loud volume, spouting out jingles and soap operas like some oblong, idiotic god. If discussion became necessary, they never turned the television down: they turned their conversation up. There were times when between the jabber
ing of the television, the heckling of the Whartons, the wheezing of Rollo and the thrum of the cars outside their door, I thought my head would split.

  If an advertisement came on which featured an egg sizzling in a pan, or a couple of bacon rashers spitting under a grill, Mr Wharton would dash me a stagily conspiratorial look and shout across a roguish reference to Belfast delicacies, unavailable in London: ‘I bet you could handle that between a couple of bits of soda bread, eh? And a big bit of plum duff on the side?’

  I would push my face into an expression of pleasurably tortured yearning, and sigh: ‘Oh aye I would, Mr Wharton. I really would.’

  A visitor’s voice rang out in the Wharton’s kitchen – ‘So when I came back from a month away in Spain, I found that my flat had been burned down, along with everything in it. Video, TV, curtains, carpets, all destroyed. And six-hundred quid’s worth of clobber, that I bought before I went – all off the back of a lorry, like – jackets, shirts, trousers, you name it. All burnt to a facking crisp. All I had left was the clothes in my suitcase, and what I was standing up in.’

  Harry Smiley – balding native of London town, minicab driver and friend of Mr Wharton’s – took a contemplative slug of beer from a can and screwed up his knowing eyes in squinting recognition of the caprice of fate. Mrs Wharton leaned forward in her chair, drawing heavily on her John Player Special, and asked urgently, ‘Did you get it back off the insurance?’

  ‘No. My insurance had expired two weeks before, and I hadn’t even realised to renew it. It cost me fifteen grand.’ He paused, aware of the dramatic power of his bad luck.

  Mrs Wharton gaped for a moment. ‘How did the fire start?’ she said.

  Harry took another swig before answering: ‘It was the old geezer that lived upstairs. He came back pissed from the pub one night, got into bed, lit up a cigarette and fell asleep. Next thing the whole place was burned to a bleeding cinder, his flat and mine.