‘You’re a weirdo,’ I told him, neutrally. He turned quickly towards me at my echo of his own phrase, with an expression of nervous interest in his eyes, but he didn’t say anything.
‘You say your words in a funny way,’ I said, ‘and you’re extremely short. Your mother also tells me that you enjoy eating scrambled eggs, and that is the sign of someone who is badly weird.’
He sat there, watching me, not knowing if I was serious. I moved right away from him, towards the other side of the bench.
‘You terrify me,’ I said, wobbling my head from side to side in a fearful judder. That tickled him, finally: he began to laugh. His face creased up and he held on to the zipper of his green anorak with one hand to steady himself. His pale brown hair stuck up at the front like a hello.
‘Maybe next week, if your mother says it’s all right, I’ll take you to the zoo,’ I said, ‘Would you like that?’
He nodded yes.
I don’t really know why I hit on the zoo: that’s where divorced fathers take their Sunday children. At least it wasn’t McDonald’s, I suppose, But Eve liked the idea of me taking him to the zoo. Anyway, she said, it would give her a bit of time to herself: she wanted to get her hair cut, and have a look round the shops without Raymond clamped to her side quietly agitating to go home.
I arrived to pick him up on Sunday morning, and he was all dressed and ready in his green anorak, with a blue scarf round his neck and a notebook in his hand: there was an air of anticipation about him. I kissed Eve goodbye, and she waved us off at the door. Anyone watching us might even have thought we were a family.
It’s daunting, taking someone else’s child out for the day. You’re worried that you might do something slightly wrong and set them off into a screaming tantrum or a sulk, and then have to hand them back to their mother, surly or weeping, with the defeated admission hanging in the air that, as things turned out, they didn’t like you very much and (although you won’t actually say this, of course) you didn’t like them at all.
Raymond wasn’t like that. He was easy company, if that is the right way to put it. It was as though there was something already old in his understanding of how life went. With circumstances being what they were, and Eve having to work, no one ever really had quite enough time for him, although Eve and her mother did their best. But instead of becoming a pain in the neck and clamouring for more attention, the way most children did (the ones you always see in the supermarket being casually smacked to the staccato tune of ‘Shu-dd-up, Luc-as’ or ‘Put-it-back, Ti-na’) he had absorbed the fact that attention was somehow rationed, and that you just made the most of it when it finally came round. The rest of the time he locked himself in a dream-world with his books or his toys. He must have decided that the trip to the zoo was a good thing, therefore he wasn’t going to wreck it. Like Eve, he seemed to know that happiness was not a right. I appreciated this, and it made me sad.
A child’s tantrum carries a kind of confidence, after all, the belief that everyone will love them no matter how badly they behave, that they’ll be calmed down and carried home without conditions. Raymond should have been too young to know that love is a breakable commodity, but he sensed it anyway and it made him careful.
It was a cold, overcast day. I had forgotten the smell of zoos, the distinctive earthy whiff of llama urine and zebra shit wafting over from the pens. I bought Raymond a shiny souvenir map from the shop and gave it to him, telling him it was his job to direct us around the animals. He took his task seriously, squinting diligently at the pathways on the map. He wanted to start with the camels, and we walked over to where they were chewing sideways and sulkily, their drooping mouths trailing strands of hay. Their coats looked mangy and their humps had slumped to one side like deflated bags.
‘They like to run in the sand,’ said Raymond. ‘That’s why they’re grumpy here.’ He knew these things from the animal encyclopaedia Eve had bought him a month ago: I had seen him looking at it with a rapt face and open mouth.
Then we went to the gorilla enclosure. The massive silverback, the daddy of the troop, rose up on his enormous haunches and ambled towards us. Raymond reached for my hand. We stared at the gorilla. The little jewelled eyes set in his great, seamed mask stared back at us, impassive and dignified. He turned round, presenting the vast expanse of his silvery behind, and walked over to a darkened corner, where he sat in profile, eating a banana. His gigantic hands worked with a clever delicacy, peeling off the yellow skin. It was like watching a very fat man dance on nimble feet.
‘He doesn’t have enough space in there,’ Raymond said. ‘He should have more trees and things to swing from.’
He was right, of course, but I didn’t want Raymond walking from enclosure to enclosure feeling sad for the animals cooped up inside. I could sense the dust of gloom settling on our outing. So I steered him instead towards the creatures that have the gift of appearing content anywhere, even Regent’s Park on a grey November day: the frantic parakeets and the capering spider monkeys; the lazy, ornamented iguanas and the big-eyed lemurs that darted and scuttled through underground cages in an artificial half-light. He liked all that, and he started to laugh and chatter about the way they looked and point things out about their strange hands or curious toes.
The sun came out as we were leaving, cool autumn sun. It fell on the stout, piebald body of the South American tapir that was standing in an oasis of green grass, peacefully rooting in the soft ground with a head that tapered to a long, elegantly questing snout. I couldn’t get over the strangeness of him. He was a joke and a miracle rolled into one, a patchwork pig stitched to an anteater. The more I looked at him, the more I started to laugh: not in mockery, but in a kind of amazement. I looked at Raymond, and he was laughing too. ‘Look at him,’ I said. ‘Isn’t he mad?’
‘Yes,’ said Raymond, his face contorted with happiness. I was happy too.
The moment you start loving someone, it frightens you: it’s not just what they might do to you, but what you might do to them. I loved Eve, and now I was starting to love Raymond. But what was I? A barman, on not much of a wage, with a body full of scars and twinges and lies and a home I couldn’t go back to. I could sense my own precariousness, and I was getting vertigo. They were two innocents who had invested their faith in me, and I was a con artist. I had walked towards both of them masquerading as a solution, but I was lugging a suitcase full of problems.
I had come to London by accident, only to escape. It had just been a stop-off on a flight to somewhere else; I didn’t know whether I really wanted to stay there. What was there in London for me, but a room in a bedsit and a lifetime mixing gin-and-tonics for pink-faced businessmen? I saw my future stretching out, the marathon evenings of the oldest barman in the big city. The thought of moving on filled me with exhilaration and sorrow.
Raymond asked Eve questions about me now, wanting to know when I would be coming round to their flat. That pleased me as much as it worried me. I feared disappointing him. More than anything, I feared becoming an echo of his idiot father, the boyfriend who had run off to Canada when Raymond was one.
The thought of that boyfriend bothered me. He was there, constantly knocking on a door I struggled to keep closed, leading to thoughts I didn’t want to entertain. I couldn’t understand how he could have left her, when I thought she was so perfect. Had he just been a fool, or was there something lurking in Eve that had slowly driven him away, something I hadn’t yet seen? This was a cheap way for me to think, I could see that. They had been very young when Raymond was born, after all, and people left each other for all sorts of reasons.
But if he was such a fool, then why had Eve loved him, if she really had loved him – was her judgement really so bad when it came to men, as her mother was fond of saying? There was that feeling of disconnection about her that once reminded me of a woman floating on the sea. Did she just allow herself to be loved by anyone who drifted along and threw her a lifebelt? That’s the problem with love: the thing t
hat pulls you towards someone in the first place is the thing that slowly spoils them for you ever afterwards.
So maybe it was only chance that she loved me, maybe I just happened to be hanging around at the right time. If I had stayed in Belfast, who might Eve be with now: one of the slavering customers who kept coming into the restaurant to chat her up, or someone like twitchy Francis, with her hanging off his arm like a gangster’s moll laughing at his jokes as he pushed her from bar to bar?
Perhaps if I went away for even a month I would come back to find Eve with someone else, looking at me as though she only dimly recognised my face and didn’t care much anyway. It wasn’t true, I knew that, but maybe it was true. And then I would look at her sleeping face on the pillow beside me, her mouth gaping half-open like a gormless child’s, and feel a wave of pointless tenderness. Sometimes I would rearrange the duvet over her to keep her warm. Then I would shut my eyes and try to sink back into sleep.
Now and then I thought that, Jesus Christ, it had been much easier when I was on my own. With nothing to lose, there’s much less to go wrong. You can hang on to the bare fact of nothing and feel a kind of security. Once you have something, you’re always in bloody freefall.
Every so often I called Phyllis at home, although I usually preferred to write rather than talk: there were fewer unreadable pauses. I gave her my work number for emergencies, but I didn’t give her the one at the Whartons’. I had unspoken concerns, although I couldn’t quite sharpen the thought, that someone might try to force it out of her.
She told me that she had bumped into Titch’s mum, who said that a wee package had been left on her front step, wrapped in sparkly paper and with Titch’s name written neatly on it. When she opened it up, inside were two boxes of Jaffa Cakes, and a floral ‘With Sympathy’ card in which was written, ‘Get Well Soon Titch. Your “friends” are thinking of you.’
Titch’s mum had put it deep in the bin without telling Titch. Phyllis said Titch’s mum couldn’t get over the fact that it had been so beautifully wrapped, all the care that had gone into the cruelty. The story worried me. It burrowed deep into my brain, coming back now and then to give me the cold sweats. Then Phyllis mentioned that the glass in the front door of the newsagent’s had been smashed in on Saturday night – probably by young hoods with nothing better to do on their way back from the pub, she said – and that gave me a bad feeling too.
‘I’ve got a new job,’ Eve said one night, when we were sitting on her sofa watching the news, her warm shoulder slotted under my arm. She was wearing a cone of newspaper on her head that Raymond had made her. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She hadn’t mentioned even looking for a new job before, and now she was looking at me expectantly, waiting for a pleased response, offering me her departure like a present tied with a big flouncy bow on top. A flash of fury went through me, but I didn’t say a word. I kept on staring at the screen. Some supermodel had just got on to the bestseller list with a cookery book. She was all bone and eyelashes. It must have been the kind of cookbook where you drool over the list of hard-to-find ingredients but never actually turn on the oven.
‘Look at her,’ I said. ‘The last thing she cooked was probably a big slice of melon, followed by three hours in the gym.’
‘Aren’t you pleased?’ Eve said. ‘It’ll pay much better money, and I can choose more of my own shifts.’
It was all I could do to sound civil. When my voice came out, it was choked and dry. ‘That’s good,’ I said, the words emerging as half-frozen drips from a small, tight tap. Christ, how stingy can you get? I was aware of how miserly I must have sounded, but I couldn’t help it.
‘Where’s the restaurant?’
She took the newspaper cone off, as though wanting to maintain her dignity in the face of an assault.
‘About three streets away from Delauncey’s,’ she said, ‘at a place called Harrigan’s. The boss is Irish, and so is the head chef. You’d probably like it, they do a modern version of traditional Irish food. Champ and wheaten bread and all, but fashionable, dressed up with Chinese vegetables and cranberry jus and stuff. It’s very expensive. You have to wear a uniform, but it’s a designer one all in black.’
It sounded rotten, soda bread and beef sausages with beansprouts on top, and fifty per cent added to the bill for the privilege of having your taste buds confused.
‘That sounds nice,’ I said, mechanically. I was dazed. So, just like that, she wouldn’t be around any more for cigarette breaks and knowing looks exchanged over the bar. ‘When did you decide to look for a new job?’
‘Only a few days ago,’ she said, ‘Francis told me about it and said that he’d have a word with the manager there for me. He said that he knew I had problems working hours that suited Raymond.’
Francis! That big meddling bastard Francis, pretending to be sympathetic, sticking his fat chef’s paws into everything. He’d never mentioned anything about the idea to me. And nor had she, for that matter. I looked forward to seeing her at work: it was the only thing that now made bartending at Delauncey’s bearable. Without her presence there, all the point drained out of my day.
‘What business is it of his where you work?’ I said, sourly.
There were pictures of a Russian cat circus on television: a grey tabby was walking across a trembling tightrope while spectators cheered it on.
‘For God’s sake, Jacky, he was just being nice!’ Eve shouted suddenly. ‘I’ve gone and got a new job. When most women get new jobs, their boyfriend takes them out somewhere to celebrate. But I don’t even expect that much. You could even just say something like “I’m glad for you” or “Well done” and I’d be happy. But you sit there, staring at the TV. You’re locked in your own little world, with your mysterious scars and your own bloody secret thoughts. You don’t care what happens to me, or if you do you don’t show it. Tell me why I should care what happens to you?’
She stopped, a little shocked by the force with which she had spoken. I looked at her white face, still pale with anger. When she said that about the scars she had looked almost nervous for a split second, as though shocked by her own readiness to wound. For a moment I felt sorry for her, but the feeling was drowned in a fresh wave of rage. I did care what happened to her. The truth was, I cared too much. She could hurt me just with a slight inflection of her voice. I had bought her flowers only the day before: they stood in a tall blue vase across the room, with their stupid yellow heads nodding at my stupidity. The sight of them inflamed me with fury at what a fool I was to love someone so selfish, what a blundering clown to go trailing around after her with my absurd floral offerings. I might as well have worn a snap-on red nose and a greasepaint tear.
If she had been just a friend telling me about a job, I could have roared, ‘Fantastic news’, and bought drinks all round like the beery life-and-soul of the party she seemed to want. But not this sudden abandonment, from her, brandished without any warning.
‘If that’s the way you want it,’ I said stiffly. I got up and picked up my coat.
‘What are you doing now?’ she said.
‘I’m going home,’ I said. ‘Why should you care what I’m doing?’
As I turned to leave, I stumbled over a pile of newspapers. Raymond came stealthily out of his room, a watchful cat creeping from behind a row of bins.
‘Where are you going?’ he said.
‘I’m going home,’ I said quietly.
‘Why are you going? It’s early,’ he said. ‘We were going to play Monopoly.’
His reasonable voice made me feel sad and ashamed.
‘I know we were, son,’ I said. ‘But something happened. We’ll do that another day.’
Eve watched me from the sofa, her face stiff and cold, eyebrows raised. I shut the door behind me very, very gently, because I wanted to slam it so badly. No, not slam: I wanted to rip it off the hinges, smash it into tiny little pieces and set fire to the pile of broken shards that remained.
I waited at the bus st
op for long enough to tell two beggars – both a few years older than me, one fat and boozy, looking like a rotten acorn in his beanie hat, and one with the stretched, hollow look of a heroin addict – that no, I didn’t have any spare cash. Then I smoked precisely two and a half cigarettes, inhaling deeply and frequently, before the red double-decker finally trundled into view, travelling at the speed of a tricycle pedalled by a fat and lazy child. It took forever, winding through King’s Cross and the pub-ridden thick of Islington and down into Dalston, with its African hair salons and Caribbean fruit shops.
It was one of those autumn nights when everyone looks pinched and sad, defeated by the city, as if the Tube delays and the exhaust fumes have nestled into every bag and wrinkle on their faces. The only places with any warmth were the African barber shops, still lit up for business. A barber was razoring a man’s hair and telling him a joke at the same time: they were both laughing. There were a couple of half-full beer bottles sitting in front of the mirror. I thought how nice it would be to go in and get my hair cut and have a beer with them there too, but I felt too white. I looked every time I went past on the bus, but I’d never seen a white person in there yet.
Maybe no one would care about me being white, and the barber would just talk away as normal. Or maybe the clientele wouldn’t like it much. No, there would probably just be a moment of silence if I went in, and then everyone would be very polite, waiting for the stranger to get his hair cut and leave so they could relax again. The more I thought about it, the more alone I felt.
I got off the bus, stopped and bought two Fruit Grain Crunch bars and a bottle of water in the all-night grocer’s, and let myself into the Whartons’ house. The television was going full blast and they didn’t hear me come in. I walked all the way up to my room at the top of the house. It was cold here, but quiet. I took off my shoes, got into bed with my clothes on and lay there on the iron bed facing the wall, with its patches of cream paint peeling delicately like a child’s sunburn. When I pressed my cheek next to the cool of the wall, I shut my eyes. After a few minutes I opened up one of the bars and ate it, breaking off chunks and pushing them in past my teeth. It was like swallowing little clods of crumbly earth, with seeds mixed in. I saved the other one for another time. It was almost good to be here, cocooned in sadness, answerable to nobody. There’s no emotion so reliable as loneliness. It turns up bang on time and promises never to let you go. For the first time in a while, I felt safe.
The Ghost Factory Page 13
