The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  18

  I didn’t see her for a month. For two days she was still working at Delauncey’s, but not on the same shifts as me. Maybe she had specially organised that in order to avoid me: the thought made me feel sick. Then she moved to Harrigan’s just as she had said. I didn’t try to get in touch. Every memory of her was a knife turning: she had such soft skin.

  ‘Are you still seeing Eve?’ Francis asked one evening while I was organising the bar before the customers came in. He was hanging up his designer cashmere coat with the falsely innocent expression of a man who had just watched you back your car into a lamp-post and then walked over to enquire if the journey had gone well. I didn’t really know what to say: a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ could cause equal amounts of mischief, in their different ways. I stared at him as if I couldn’t quite remember who he was.

  He sighed sympathetically. ‘Well, you wouldn’t be the first to come a cropper there.’

  I wanted to punch him so that the flesh on his complacent face went rippling in all directions. More than that, I wanted to know what he meant.

  ‘A cropper?’

  ‘I knew her boyfriend Steve, the one who went off to Canada. She used to do his head in with her moods. He couldn’t make her out at all. Once he put his fist through a plate-glass window, she had wound him up so much.’

  I was stung on her behalf. ‘Well, a fat lot of use he was. He was a headcase. He went off to Canada and left her in the lurch with Raymond to look after. Never writes or sends any money either.’

  Francis answered in a conciliatory voice, like someone smoothing down an over-excited child: ‘I’m not saying he was right, Jacky. Steve was a bit of a nutcase. Just saying that she wasn’t Miss Easy-Going herself.’

  ‘Yeah? Well you can fuck off,’ I said, ‘because it’s not your business.’ My arms were shaking: I went back to replacing the empty Gordon’s gin bottle and didn’t meet his eye. Francis looked exhilarated. He savoured an angry reaction like the first mouthful of one of his bloody juicy steaks.

  ‘Still smitten,’ he said, lighting up a cigarette as he walked into the kitchen, before breaking into a few bars of ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ I had to hand it to him: he was a wind-up merchant par excellence. He would have loved it if I’d really gone for him, and we’d had a big punch-up over his pristine stainless steel worktops, spilling blood on the chopping boards. That would have been his version of male bonding: sharing an Armagnac together afterwards as he gave me ice cubes for my black eye and lectured me about the best way to throw a right hook. My version of bonding would have been sticking his sagging chef’s arse to his work bench with a medium-thick layer of superglue. I made a mental note to do it on the day I left for good, with no forwarding address.

  Maybe I would go home to Belfast for a week to think things over. I could stay in a hotel in the city centre, and get Phyllis and Titch to come and meet me. I would take them presents as a surprise: a couple of comedy videos for Titch, and a jumper from Marks & Spencer for Phyllis. She loved Marks & Spencer with a quiet passion, I had noticed, always speaking of it with an unmistakable note of reverence as if it were church. The company had kept a store open in Belfast city centre right the way through the Troubles, when others shrank away, and for Phyllis it had become a touchstone of glorious normality. But I felt I didn’t belong in its enveloping cosiness, like a mourner who had accidentally strolled into a wedding.

  I thought of buying Eve some chocolates, but then I remembered that I was probably someone she would prefer to forget. I had a sudden picture of Eve’s mum energetically lecturing her about getting involved with yet another bad bet, while Eve stared at the floor. I hadn’t met Eve’s mum yet, but Eve had told her about me on the way to the agonies of a formal introduction.

  Still, there was a whole other reality out there, in which men washed the car on Sundays and talked passionately about the wisdom of upgrading their sound system. And they never seemed to question what the point of it all was – or did they, now and then when they had time to think?

  When I watched television alone, once or twice a week when the Whartons finally trundled out for a few drinks, the feeling would come to me during the advertisements that I was an alien in this society. I began ignoring the programmes, but I couldn’t stop watching the ads, flicking back and forth between them like a spy absorbing the mysterious rules of another country. I was trying to work out how the wider world thought people ought to behave: innocently greedy for ever more stuff, it seemed, eager to inspire envy, touchingly exhilarated by a successful white wash at a low temperature. When I heard the Whartons fumbling at the door, I would quickly turn over and pretend I’d been engrossed in a film.

  And what do you do if none of it applies to you: if you happen to look really odd – which I didn’t at least, apart from a few scars – or there is just never anyone in an advertisement who lives even slightly the way you live, an adult orphan renting a single room with a funny old couple who like the television on too loud?

  Books didn’t make me feel the same way television did, and I read all the time, up there in the bedroom with the rain spattering on the windowpane and the distant hum of noise from two storeys down. There were plenty of men in books who lived at least a little bit like me, and even seemed to feel the way I did some of the time – drifting and half meaningless – men like that fella in The Stranger by Camus or Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Once I had that thought, I immediately regretted it and wanted to chop it down as if it had never come sauntering into my mind, because the thing that those characters had in common of course was that they ended up murdering someone.

  I would be lying if I pretended that I hadn’t thought about killing McGee. I never forgot about him for more than a few hours, and then he would come sliding back into my thoughts like an eel disturbing calm water. At least a couple of nights a week I lay in bed with my arms neatly tucked underneath the blue-striped, fraying counterpane so I couldn’t see the raised unpleasantness of the scars, and – just before I drifted off to sleep – I would think of all the different ways that I could do it. Sometimes this calmed me down, like a sleepy little lullaby of revenge, and sometimes I had to stop thinking about it because it inflamed my nerves too much.

  I thought about tricking him into drinking a pint of beer full of crushed sleeping pills and then pushing him into the Lagan so that he sank like a stone and never came up; or monkeying with the brakes on his car and watching him go skeetering across the road slap bang into a brick wall; or binding his arms and legs together very tightly before turning on the gas in his kitchen, sealing the door and then walking out to inhale the clear, crisp, sweet air. That wasn’t the way feuds were usually settled in Belfast: it was usually with a bullet or a pipe bomb, but I didn’t have a gun and I wasn’t a pipe bomb type of person. I didn’t want to meddle around with explosives and wires and end up blowing half my own arm off. I preferred something sneakier.

  There’s something unsettling about looking into another person’s dreams of revenge. It’s like taking a peek into the friendly neighbour’s living room and seeing all the rubbish from the previous year strewn across the carpet. Revenge squats there among the steaming entrails of unfinished business, a clump of the bad stuff in a corner of the human heart.

  But I won’t say sorry for it. What bothered me about those characters in The Stranger and Crime and Punishment, if I have to admit it – what made me want to button up my overcoat, check my watch and say ‘thanks fellas, I’ve enjoyed your company, but I’ve got to be somewhere else in five minutes’ – was that they killed people who didn’t fully deserve it: that Arab on the beach who hadn’t done much to Meursault yet apart from flash his knife, and that mouldy oul moneylender who was only trying to get by herself, scraping a living from one of those freezing Russian flats, not to mention her harmless half-sister.

  I was contemplating killing someone who did deserve it, though. In fact, I couldn’t really think of anyone who deserved it more than McGee. There were
times when I thought that I could never really rest until he was gone for good.

  Anyway, when I mused on killing him, I wasn’t thinking about it quite in terms of cold-blooded premeditated murder and all the other ponderous phrases that you usually find hanging out on the street corner with the word ‘defendant’. I liked to do it in the muscular, dispassionate words that I had culled from crime novels, descriptions that were abstract and humorously blunt at the same time. I thought about how I would just be rubbing him out, cancelling or erasing him, taking him down, and how – after he had gone – the world would be a better, cleaner place, like a page from which an ugly blot had just been delicately removed, painted over as if with Tipp-Ex. That could be his obituary, a headline in the Belfast Telegraph that read: McGee, One Of Nature’s Worst Mistakes, Was Yesterday Cleared Up. Of course, I wasn’t really going to do it, was I?

  19

  When people in films are having personal difficulties, they tend to throw themselves into their work. I tried to throw myself into mine, but it was too shallow: I kept accidentally surfacing. I remembered that fella who used to work in Murdie’s bar, who went off and got a job on a cruise ship, and I thought that maybe if I saved up a bit of money as a nest egg I could do the same thing. In some of the dreams I had Eve with me, but those ones I crumpled up and threw to the corner of my mind.

  Then in between cruise ship jobs I could go off travelling with just a few belongings to all those countries I had only read about in books: Mexico and India and Thailand and all the other sunny, busy, glittering places with temples and snake charmers and tricksters and carnivals, where you didn’t need a whole lot of cash to see weird and stupendous things and have a good time.

  The world was a whole lot bigger than Northern Ireland, I told myself, with its drizzle and cramped pubs and that dank little feud that has flickered for centuries like a soggy peat fire, filling the air with its damp, choking smoke. It was bigger than London too, with its traffic that never budged and its sour-faced, busy people and pocket-emptying prices and rip-off tourist pubs with indifferent roast beef dinners and watery drinks and women who pretended to like you and then didn’t care if they never saw you again.

  I began to work very hard in Delauncey’s: I even learned how to make a string of new cocktails from a book that I had bought myself, and wrote their names up with chalk on the blackboard behind my head. I was bursting with initiatives, like one of those model employees from the how-to-get-ahead books who ends up owning the company. Mrs Delaney noticed how I was always bang on time for my shift – or even a few minutes early – and polishing glasses with a perky smile. She began complimenting me on my industry, and giving me little conspiratorial glances throughout the day as though she and I were the only ones in there who really understood the meaning of good old-fashioned hard work. Like most rich hippies, she had a staunchly authoritarian heart. Sometimes she complained about the waiters and waitresses to me – their lateness, their laziness, the stains on their white shirts, their ‘simple lack of professionalism’, as she liked to put it – but I made a point of never joining in. Nobody likes a snitch, not even the boss who’s buttering the snitch up to be a snitch.

  The tips started stacking up, along with the salary and the overtime money, and I wasn’t spending much. I got paid in cash and kept it all in my suitcase at the Whartons’. Week by week, I watched the small pile of notes grow like a grubby but well-fed little pet. Then sometimes I would divide it up with elastic bands and chivvy selected bundles to different hidey-holes in the room. No one was going to steal it, of course: the Whartons were honest people and unusually lacking in curiosity. They accepted me as a simple and unremarkable fact of life now, like the rain or muddy footprints in the hall. But I liked the administrative business of counting and hiding the notes. It was as if I were tied up in a secret conspiracy with myself. And I enjoyed just looking at the money, contained there in its squat packets. All sorts of possibilities were lurking in it, silently multiplying like good bacteria.

  A month after I had walked out of Eve’s flat, I bumped into her on the street on the way back from work. Something made me lift my eyes from the squashed Coke cans and sandwich wrappers strewn across the pavement and there she was, wearing a new black coat belted tightly at the waist, and a distracted expression. The shock of her quiet beauty hit me like a glass of ice-water in the face. She saw me out of the corner of her eye a second before she passed me by. We stopped and stared at each other. For a moment I forgot to be angry. What had I been angry about anyway? I couldn’t really remember. Oh yes, I had been angry because she got a new job without telling me first. Was that it? Was that all? What an eejit I was.

  It filled me with such elation to see her again that my head swam, and all the words floated away from me.

  ‘Do you want to go somewhere for a coffee?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got to be at work in twenty minutes,’ she said.

  My heart fell.

  ‘But it doesn’t matter if I’m ten minutes late,’ she said.

  In the café she ordered coffee and a slab of coffee cake from a sleepy-eyed waitress with two limp hanks of blonde hair. It arrived surprisingly quickly, and after a couple of mouthfuls she pushed the plate over to me.

  ‘You have some,’ she said, and handed me her fork.

  I took a mouthful, and then another. It was fantastic cake, bittersweet and moist, with a fudgy buttercream that slid recklessly all over the inside of my mouth. I could have eaten that cake all day, and then fallen asleep with a wedge of it jammed in my mouth.

  ‘That’s the best cake I’ve ever eaten,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘I might have eaten a better one and forgotten about it, or I might even be lying.’

  ‘I can see from the expression on your face that it’s the best one,’ she said. ‘And it’s the best one I’ve ever eaten too, so it’s probably also the best one you’ve ever eaten.’

  ‘How do I know that there isn’t an even better cake out there in some pastry shop, waiting for me to go out and find it?’ I said.

  ‘There can’t be,’ she said. ‘If this tastes like the best, now, then it just is the best.’

  ‘Have you eaten a lot of cake?’ I said.

  ‘Not that much, but enough to recognise a really good one when it comes along,’ she said.

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I mean, I don’t wake up in the night thinking about cake. I don’t dream about cake. But when I taste a top-notch cake, I hope I have the humility to recognise it for what it is.’

  She was starting to laugh. I took another forkful, then passed the plate back over to her.

  ‘I feel sorry,’ she said, eating, with sadly downcast eyes, ‘for all the little people out there in the world who will never get to taste this cake.’ Instead of crocodile tears, she wore two tiny cake-crumbs on her cheek like decorative moles.

  ‘Those little people will go to their graves never knowing what cake could really be,’ I told her.

  While I was talking, she was nodding and methodically demolishing what remained of the cake. Finally, I looked down at the plate: she had left me a tiny, carefully crafted square, as if designed for an insect’s birthday celebrations.

  ‘That’s for you,’ she said.

  ‘Is that all?’ I said.

  ‘Do you think you deserve more?’ she asked. I felt a faint cooling of the temperature. She checked her watch and suddenly drained the last of her coffee in a businesslike way.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She started shrugging her coat on.

  ‘Can I see you tomorrow after work?’ I said.

  ‘I’m working late tomorrow. I’ll see you on Friday.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Eight. In here. If you’re not here I’ll know you can’t be bothered.’

  She leaned over and gave me a brief kiss on the cheek: she smelled of lemons. I thought of all the times she had kissed me on the mouth and suddenly f
elt a sadness worse than anything I had ever felt, apart from when Big Jacky died.

  ‘I love you,’ I said quietly, staring at the ant’s cake.

  She looked at me with a funny, half-stern expression.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Maybe I love you back.’

  I watched her go out the door and turn right into the dwindling afternoon, down into a crammed street of expensive restaurants and dirty-plush hostess bars, wincing against the wind as she turned up her collar and then disappeared from sight. I speared the ant’s cake delicately, on the end of one fork’s prong so it wouldn’t break. It tasted briefly wonderful, like swallowing the best split second you ever had.

  I woke up so happy the next morning. The autumn sunshine came through the curtain and stroked my eyelids, wheedling them open. I felt full of possibilities and second chances.

  Ten minutes later, the clock-radio clicked on and a familiar voice flooded the room. It was Brian Nixon, the official spokesman for McGee’s lot. He was always on the radio and television now since the ceasefires, blathering magnanimously about ‘the two traditions’.

  The English media loved him because he made a lot of his Protestant working-class credentials. He spoke in a bass voice using too-complicated words stuck in slightly the wrong places, but they were prepared to give him points for trying. They thought they had discovered an authentic curiosity, The Talking Belfast Prod – a new thing, since most of us were reliably taciturn in the face of interrogation.