The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  ‘He’d only moved in a couple of weeks before, and I’d helped him carry in his stuff. Then he goes and burns my flat down. My first thought when I heard was “Where is the old git? I’ll kill him,” and then I heard he’d died in the fire and I felt bad, like.’

  ‘Poor old bloke,’ said Mrs Wharton.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Harry.

  He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and turned to me: ‘And what’s our Jacky going to do, eh? Got yourself a job yet?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m still looking about for one.’

  ‘What did you do in Belfast?’

  ‘I was a barman.’

  Harry absorbed the information silently. I wasn’t sure how much the Whartons had told him about my reasons for coming to London, but there was a kind of crude grace to Harry. He didn’t scratch around for too many difficult answers. I could see he was mulling over my predicament.

  ‘A mate of mine is a chef at a flash place in the West End. He said they’re always needing barmen, and they coin it in tips. Do you want me to ask him for you?’

  ‘That would be very kind,’ I said. I meant it. Rollo and I were really beginning to get on each other’s nerves. It was becoming clear that if we stayed in the house together any longer, things would come to a head – and although he was smaller than me he had a nastier temper and sharper teeth. I had even stopped baiting him, because I could sense that he was slowly building up to biting me properly, and I had enough scars as it was.

  Delauncey’s restaurant belonged to a wealthy, grizzled Australian man and a grizzled, wealthy British woman. They were a pair of ruthless old hippies who had married each other long ago on a beach in Bali, and probably regretted giving in to the dictates of bourgeois society ever since. They wore platinum love-beads, leathery tans and hand-stitched clothes that cost them hundreds of pounds from Notting Hill boutiques and then fell apart at the seams after two outings. His name was Delaney, but her maiden name was Price, so I never worked out where the Delauncey’s came from. Pricey’s would have been more appropriate.

  It was the sort of restaurant that had a menu the length of your arm, and not a single thing on it that you unambiguously wanted to eat. Every simple food was mangled up with something mildly nasty or complicated. If you fancied chicken, it would arrive steeped in a mango-and-chive sauce. If you asked for a bowl of soup, you would find that the soup of the day was blood-orange-and-watercress. You couldn’t have got a bacon sandwich in Delauncey’s, but if you had, it would have been free-range bacon wrapped in warm ciabatta bread with a drizzle of chicken livers and a shredding of coriander. The customers were delirious with happiness. They would gladly have eaten their own spleens if it came served in a basil mousse with an ugli fruit twist.

  Our customers were finger-snapping men from the City in charcoal suits and pinstriped shirts, who – to show that time was money – always made a point of ordering from the Express Menu, which took expressly seven minutes longer than the ordinary menu. We had tipsy, highlighted women, fresh from their body maintenance classes, pushing endive-and-squid salads through the automated gates of their bright white smiles into gym-hard stomachs. We had ladies who lunched, and PR girls who launched, and market investors, and business assessors. And I worked behind the bar.

  My introduction to Delauncey’s was Harry Smiley’s friend, Francis the chef, a six-foot-four Molotov cocktail of bonhomie and menace. Long nights of excess had left a dull patina on his native robustness: he looked like a thinner, rain-damaged Luciano Pavarotti. Francis moved in a fug of flashing, yellowing teeth, baroquely foul curses and swishing knives. When the restaurant was full, and things were heating up in the kitchen, a vein on Francis’s forehead would begin to bulge and pulse in a kind of samba rhythm as his huge hands flew efficiently and ominously in fifteen different directions.

  The freedom which Francis afforded his hands had got him into trouble in the past. He had slapped the most junior of the kitchen staff, a pale-faced French boy who was too slow at chopping the parsley, and sent him reeling into a pan of bubbling water. The boy was only lightly scalded, but the rest of the kitchen staff had squeezed their shreds of courage up into a communal ball and made a formal complaint to Mrs Delaney. Francis was made to say sorry to the quivering boy, wearing a forced, ingratiating grin that was somehow more frightening than his expression of rage. He looked like a hyena about to savage a baby gazelle.

  ‘I ap-ol-ogise for slapping you. It was very wrong of me,’ he said.

  ‘That is all right,’ said the French boy, nervously.

  They shook hands.

  Mrs Delaney said, ‘Well that’s that over then,’ and left the kitchen, satisfied.

  ‘Next time use the little, sharp knife for the parsley, it will chop faster,’ said Francis, in a cold, businesslike voice. Then he went over to stir a cream capers sauce for his fillet of sea bass.

  He hated the kind of food he had to cook at Delauncey’s, and often made a point of telling me so. Francis revered meat. When he ate out himself, he went to places where they served pieces of an animal’s interior that only surgeons and abattoir workers knew existed. He would have been happiest working in one of those New British restaurants, where they give claret-faced customers every known variety of offal, cooked in styles that are increasingly obscene to vegetarians. But Delauncey’s was regular work with decent money, and Harry Smiley had slyly hinted that Francis’s recreational habits were becoming expensive: ‘The trouble with Francis is, he spends far too much time with his old mate, Charlie.’

  I had noticed the same syndrome in Francis myself, a certain subcutaneous twitchiness, although I had been slow to put a substance to it.

  14

  There was consternation at the Whartons’. Rollo had killed a grey squirrel and then dragged it into the house. It was lying on the hallway mat, with one dead bright eye staring up at the ceiling. Two front paws were raised in supplication, a plump little friar caught up in an unexpected massacre. Rollo lay dozing some distance away, a crust of squirrel blood drying in the seam of his jowl. It was the first time he had killed anything, and the Whartons looked at the sleeping dog with suspicion and respect, as though after all these years he had become a fresh mystery.

  That night I lay in bed at the top of the house, in the dark, wondering how it was that Rollo had managed to kill the squirrel. They were so fast: I had seen them shinning up trees like circus performers.

  I didn’t sleep well. The dream that kept troubling me came back, or a version of the dream. In it, I was looking out of the bedroom window in the Whartons’ house. Below me, standing in the falling rain on the wet street, was a man in a dark hood. He was calling out to me, ‘Jacky, Jacky, come down here, I have something for you,’ and holding up the curled body of a dead squirrel.

  ‘I’m not coming down,’ I called out to him from the window. ‘I can get the squirrel in the morning.’

  ‘Then I’m coming up,’ the man said. He began to climb up the drainpipe towards my window, slowly at first. I felt myself filling with fear, like a flooding ditch. I was rooted to the spot.

  The hood came waggling up the pipe until at last I could look straight into its eyeholes, but saw no eyes. In a panic, I picked up the lamp base from beside my bed and hit at the thing inside the hood over and over again. Then suddenly the hood fell off and the stunned face beneath it, with blood running down in a rivulet from the forehead, was Big Jacky’s.

  ‘Aw, why did you do that to me, son?’ he said, in a voice soaked with an immensely soft and patient sorrow.

  I couldn’t speak. My hands were trying to press his bleeding head back together and make it well, but none of it would work.

  ‘Why did you do that, son?’ he said again, sadly.

  When I woke up, my face was wet. My heart was beating at a hundred miles an hour, like a starling’s ticker, and the sheets were damp with sweat.

  How could you explain love and how it creeps up on you? How it slowly takes a grip, spreading across you like blight acr
oss an elm tree, shortening your breath, sneaking into your dreams, making your mouth suddenly foolish, ambushing your clumsy, stupid heart with stabs of jealousy and desire?

  And how can you explain the illogicality of it: how you might say there’s a girl there, who is certainly beautiful, and intelligent, and amusing, and if she were to be flattened by a bus tomorrow I would be very sorry, of course, for the loss of a life, but not that sorry? And there’s a girl there who’s not strictly anything that I can really convey, except that first I saw her laughing in a way that something in me understood, and then I thought I might love her.

  She started as a waitress in the restaurant, about two weeks after I got the job behind the bar. She didn’t talk to anyone much at first, because she was too busy trying to work everything out, with the managers shouting in one ear and Francis in the other.

  She had thick dark, wavy hair that fell jaggedly on to her neck, as though she had taken a chop at it herself with the kitchen scissors. Pale skin, as pale as paper, and dark, watchful eyes. She was small and fine-boned, as if pieced together by an intelligent hand. At the beginning, she spoke to me only in drinks orders, and her name was Eve. The significance of her name wasn’t lost on me, since I had already started to weave meanings around her. Eve, I thought, the woman at the start of everything.

  One day, I tried a joke.

  ‘Two small glasses of house white, a gin and tonic with ice and lemon, and a margarita,’ she said.

  ‘And a thimble of lemonade for the pixie on table twelve,’ I whispered to her. She gave me a sceptical look, but I saw her glance over to table twelve, where a tiny man with a Florida tan and a permanently astounded expression, as though his eyebrows had been surgically tweaked upwards, was leaning forward into the monstrous bosom of his formidable blonde companion. A smirk crept up the side of her face before she could catch and kill it. I carried on quietly with my business, mixing drinks in the cocktail shaker, as though I had noticed nothing.

  She had a six-year-old son, Francis said.

  ‘Any husband?’

  ‘Husband,’ he said, mocking me for being old-fashioned. ‘I don’t think so. Why, do you want to marry her?’

  ‘I’m not the marrying kind,’ I said.

  Phyllis sent me letters from Belfast. They fell on to the Whartons’ doormat every couple of weeks or so: a page or two of blue ink, written in her painstaking, cramped hand.

  There was one lying there this morning. I pictured her in the evenings in our front room, drawing the curtains and mulling over her account of events.

  Dear Jacky, it said, Hope all is well with you. The weather has been terrible here, clouds and drizzle so no surprises there. Mary and Sam came up to visit at the weekend, Mary looking very smart in a green suit she bought in Lisburn. Sam hadn’t much to say for himself because the football was on so we gave him the remote and left him to it.

  Two men I didn’t recognise came to the house looking for you last Friday. I said you weren’t here, you had gone to live in Scotland and they should leave us alone now. The next day there were dirty words sprayed on our wall but I spoke to Mr Murdie and between us we have managed to get it off with the paint remover. Hopefully that will be an end to it, as I can’t be doing with any more trouble.

  I was round at Titch’s house on Sunday for his mother’s birthday. We had a lovely evening with a Chinese takeaway and white wine, and a coffee cake with candles in it. Titch is on much better form and is now going out of the house by himself a couple of times a week, although not in the evenings. He asks after you all the time. I am enclosing some snaps of us on the night, taken by his Uncle Joe. Titch got them developed in Speedy Snaps. Take care and give my regards to the Whartons, love Phyllis.

  There were three photographs with the letter, of Titch, Phyllis and Titch’s mother sitting round the kitchen table on the big night. Uncle Joe must have been on his tenth can of lager, because they were all slightly askew, as though the kitchen floor had suddenly sunk in just before his finger pressed the shutter. Phyllis was in camera mode: teeth graciously bared, eyes staring straight into the lens, hand lifting a wine glass in a determined, recordable gesture of celebration. She was wearing a blouse I hadn’t seen before. Titch’s mother was laughing with her eyes closed, a paper party hat slipping off the back of her hair. And Titch was smiling too, but there was the ghost of something fearful in his eyes.

  I turned to the last picture. Titch had arranged his arm so that his fingers were making rabbit ears out of the back of Phyllis’s unwitting, permed head. Good sport of Phyllis to have included it. She loved photographs. It made me laugh out loud. I slipped it into my wallet and went to work.

  15

  She was a good waitress, and I liked to watch her working. It pleased my eyes to follow her round the room, stopping only when she happened to look over in my direction. She could stack and carry heavy china plates like they were made of paper, and she could keep many different things in her mind at once: the menu for table twelve, the bread for table ten, the bill for table three, and the wine list for the man with the face like an aggrieved muskrat who was signalling at the table by the window.

  She was friendly to customers almost all the time, but I saw her behave otherwise once with a man, a City type who had had too much to drink. He was with three friends at a table close to the bar, and all night they had been ordering successive bottles of a very expensive white wine. They had loosened their ties, and their voices became slightly slurred as they grew a little too loud. A jagged haze of noise surrounded them, the kind of noise that always set my teeth on edge.

  As the wine flowed, they thought they would have a bit of fun with the waitress. Every time Eve brought them something they would quickly demand something else, ‘Oh, and more bread!’ or ‘Another bottle of mineral water!’ – stagily, like loud, capricious children with a powerless nanny.

  With each demand, Eve’s manner grew one degree colder: slowly she was retreating into herself, the way Murdie used to when there was trouble at the Whistle.

  She brought them another bottle of white wine, in an ice bucket. ‘Here comes the ice maiden!’ one of them shouted, a tall, sandy-haired type, his face lightly mottled with drink and excitement.

  Eve smiled, but her smile was a sliver of frozen water. She had endured enough of them over the course of the evening. Sandy Hair could see the put-down in her smile: he was quick to spot the offence, in the way that drunks are quick.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, in a bantering tone edged with aggression.

  ‘Eve,’ she said. She turned to go.

  ‘Eve!’ he said, loudly, and gave the abashed man next to him a little shove. ‘This bloke’s name is Adam. Really.’

  ‘Would you Adam-’n’-Eve it?’ chimed in a third man in a mock-cockney accent, his face shining at his own wit.

  ‘No,’ Eve said, still smiling thinly, ‘I wouldn’t.’ She turned again to go.

  ‘Will you bring Adam an apple?’ said Sandy Hair.

  ‘We don’t have apples.’

  ‘Not even an Adam’s apple? It looks like you have one.’ He peered showily at her throat, screwing up his eyes.

  Two of the men laughed. One looked a little embarrassed. Eve stood there just staring at them, as though something had disconnected inside her. Sandy Hair perused the pudding menu, ostentatiously. Something in her reaction was disturbing and annoying him. He was struggling to keep his game in the air, to re-establish his authority.

  ‘Well, could I have an Apple Strudel with Glazed Caramel then, Eve,’ he said, sharply. She went to the kitchen to get it.

  I watched her coming back with it: her body was stiff and her mouth was pinned into a tighter line. She set the strudel down in front of him.

  ‘This looks wonderful,’ said Sandy Hair. He took a spoonful quickly before she had time to leave.

  ‘It tastes so magnificent, I think my friend Adam would like one of these as well now, Eve, so hurry up,’ he said.

  The exch
ange had lost all pretence of lightness. They stared at each other with hatred, like two battling cats. Somewhere along the line, with the ‘hurry up’, this had flared into war.

  ‘I don’t think he’s going to have one after all,’ Eve said, her face utterly impassive.

  ‘Why not? I’m paying the bill here.’

  ‘Yes, and you’re going to pay the bill now,’ she said with a terrible flatness, ‘because you’re ugly, and stupid, and rude, and there’s only so much shit that I’m prepared to take.’

  The surrounding tables fell discreetly silent, the diners’ forks suspended halfway to their half-delighted, half-open mouths. But at Sandy Hair’s table the men had stopped laughing. Their round eyes were jerking over to her, and then back to him.

  ‘Get. Me. The. Manager,’ spat Sandy Hair. His face was rigid with anger. Eve turned and walked away.

  Mrs Delaney, to her credit, took Eve’s part. She brought them the bill, and when Sandy Hair kicked up too much of a fuss she just knocked off the cost of a bottle of wine, but without conceding the point. Maybe some vestige of sympathy with the workers still clung to her from her hippie years. Or maybe she just knew how hard it can be to find really good waitresses these days.

  It took me a while to work out what it was I liked about Eve, and when I did, I wasn’t sure what that said about me. It was her air of dislocation, the feeling that the current of life had suddenly picked her up and swirled her off to somewhere out of her control. Most people had harbours, and anchors, and moorings, but Eve was floating on the sea with her eyes wide open, holding tight to her son’s hand.

  She brought her son into the restaurant once, because the childminder was sick and there was nowhere else for him to go. His name was Raymond. He sat in the corner of the kitchen and played solemnly with some dough that Francis gave him. I watched him making dough-pebbles and then some funny-looking dough-men, with big unwieldy heads and stringy arms and legs. Francis put them on a baking tray and stuck them in the oven to cook for Raymond to take home, but a party of twelve people came in and we all forgot about them. We opened the oven when Francis smelled something burning, and there they were: a huddle of little burnt bodies, hapless midgets who had overnighted in Pompeii.