The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  There’s so much to get right.

  The people who were the softest targets, usually, were those who had a routine. In most places a routine makes a life easier, but in my country it helped to finish it off. People settled into patterns, the shapes that fall naturally in a week. They opened their grocery store at the same time each day, or locked up after work, or went to church or Mass on Sunday. And then right in the middle of the irreplaceable ordinariness, instead of the next polite greeting to a customer or the anticipated lull of the afternoon tea break, instead of the short drive home, just as the leg of lamb was spitting hospitably in the oven or the kettle bubbling towards tea, what on earth oh my God what on earth should come walking purposefully towards them but Death?

  Here’s a routine: Sunday night was Phyllis’s bingo night with her friend Julie. Off she went, lipstick on, wee bag zipped and clamped to her side, bit of excitement sure, wouldn’t miss it for the world. From a distance, I watched her leave. I wore a baseball hat tugged low over my eyes, glasses, and the stick-on moustache, with cotton wool jammed in the pouches of my cheeks. I sported a little pot belly from a small cushion I had taped around my middle. I moved differently, slouchily, as though my stomach was already pushing forward in expectation of its next can of lager. I carried the rest of my kit in the backpack, along with a packet of cooked cocktail sausages I’d bought in Marks & Spencer downtown.

  I slipped into the house with my old key, looking quickly around to see if anyone was watching, and shut the door sharply behind me. For a second I stood against it and closed my eyes, breathing in the sweetish, wood-polish smell of the house. It was my house – all those years here with Big Jacky – and yet it didn’t feel like mine any more. You go away even for a short time and things shift irrevocably. I had become a burglar, nervily tiptoeing around the furniture of my own life.

  I took it all in: the flaking paint, the sideboards suddenly full of knick-knacks – she’d got them all out of the cupboard and put them on parade. She’d got rid of the sofa without even asking, the forgiving old sagger with the wooden frame where Big Jacky and I had been so happy, and replaced it with something squashy, floral and horrible from one of the sofa shops in town. I felt a surge of fury. As I turned to see what else she had done, the corner of my jacket caught one of the ornaments – a grey, glazed pigeon – and it crashed to the floor, shattering with surprising force and scattering little fragments across the room.

  I found a dustpan and brush under the sink, swept up the pieces and put them in one of the plastic bags Phyllis kept compressed in a drawer. The handle of the pan felt sticky in my hand. I was beginning to feel overheated and tense. No point looking for a bin outside now. I went up to my old bedroom, and shoved the broken pieces far back under the single bed, into a light grey snowdrift of undisturbed dust. She wouldn’t come across them there for a while.

  Under there too was a small box of my old toys, including just the item I was hoping to find: a pair of police handcuffs, complete with keys, that Big Jacky had long ago unearthed at some charity shop or other. They had once been my most prized possession. I knew precisely how they worked, because at the age of nine I had played cops and robbers all around the house for weeks on end with an extraordinarily forbearing Big Jacky, and at least fifty per cent of the time I got to be the cop.

  I carried on, encouraged now. Phyllis’s stuffed little packet of sleeping pills sat in the bathroom cabinet, exactly as I had pictured it. Best just to swipe one whole metallic sheet, I thought, and that way she would think it had fallen out somewhere. Anyway, I might need them all later. Down in the kitchen, I took a sharp knife and made a small, deep incision in the end of a cocktail sausage: I pushed a pill inside, and watched the puckered meat close back over it, like a tiny arsehole obediently receiving a suppository. Three pills into each sausage, three sausages in total, wrapped in foil and put in my pocket. Oh, and the keys for the cellar to Big Jacky’s shop. All done.

  Then I started watching the clock.

  Phyllis usually came back from bingo just before eleven, after a couple of drinks with Julie. It would be disastrous if she saw me. I would get entangled in the sticky web of her panic and never make it anywhere near McGee. I went through the house, setting it straight, carefully eradicating any clear taint of my presence, and stepped out into the cold night. There weren’t that many people about now, as the pubs hadn’t closed yet. The authorities had scaled down the British army patrols, with their jolting cargoes of jumpy young soldiers looking out warily from the back of Land Rovers, and the darkness meant that the disguise could pass with less scrutiny.

  22

  About half an hour after I threw the sausages into McGee’s yard, the dog stopped moving around. I could see it, if I jumped to look over the wall. It was lying down with its eyes closed but still breathing, giving little snorts, its side gently rising and falling.

  I climbed over the wall, jumped into the yard and squatted near the kennel, just beneath the windowsill. It stank a bit there, of dog hair and rain and old scraps of forgotten food. I had time to think of what I was getting myself into, to acknowledge the anxiety slopping around my stomach. I now wished I had a real gun, but there was no going back. I had been crouching there about fifteen minutes, with small pains starting to quiver through my ankles and knees, when I heard voices coming closer as the lights went on in the living room.

  Oh Jesus no, more than one of them, I thought. Please don’t come out into the yard. I raised my head a bit, looked in, and saw McGee. Next to him was Marty, in a wee black bomber jacket. He looked suddenly older. I ducked again and pulled on my Bill Clinton mask under my baseball cap, inhaling the smell of rubber and my own souring breath. From above my head, I could hear far too clearly what they were saying.

  ‘Sure you won’t actually be doing anything,’ McGee said. ‘You’re just the lookout. You’re lucky enough to be let into an operation at all at your age. Beer?’

  There was the crack and hiss of a can being opened. First one, then another.

  ‘Anyway, you’re too wee to go to jail. You’re underage,’ McGee said. I got the feeling that he thought this passed for reassurance.

  ‘But who is it you’re doing?’ Marty said. His voice sounded high and shaky, a little breathless, as though he had accidentally slipped into waters too deep for him to swim in confidently.

  ‘Who said we were doing anyone? Anyway you don’t need to know. Better if you don’t.’

  ‘Are they in the Provies?’

  ‘Does it fucking matter? You don’t need to know. They’re trouble, just like the Provies. But just remember, if you squeal about this to anyone, ever, I’ll have to come after you.’

  A silence.

  ‘Don’t worry, son,’ McGee carried on in a more avuncular tone, as if he had been kidding: ‘I know you’re going to be okay, and you’ll get a few quid towards that skateboard you keep going on about. Top lad. Okay?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Aye well, come back here tomorrow after school and I’ll give you the plan of where you’ve to be at what time.’

  ‘All right. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you not going to finish your beer?’ McGee called after him. But the front door closed as he was still speaking. He was slurring a little. With some relief, I realised that he was properly legless.

  I could hear the sound of humming, breaking into words. McGee was singing a country and western song to himself – ‘I go out walkin’ after midnight, out in the moonlight, ju-st like we used to do’ – and rooting about in his fridge for the makings of a snack – ‘I’m always walkin’ after midnight, searchin’ for yo-u’. Then he remembered the dog. ‘Major!’ he shouted. I tensed myself. The dog made no sound, no ragged, gratifying, anticipatory panting and scrabbling. ‘Major!’ he yelled again, stung, and opened the back door. The dog was lying there, a long slab of fur spread flat out in a haze of soft rain. McGee started walking towards it: ‘What the fu—’

  And he didn’t get any
further then because I hit him hard on the back of the skull and jumped on his back and we were into a tussle on the slippery, cold ground. I had to be quick before he recovered himself. He kept twisting and jerking his head round to see who I was, but I forced his hands behind his back while he was still reeling and snapped them into handcuffs before he could yank off my mask. The gloves made my fingers a bit stupid but I got it done anyway.

  I could confirm even from the smell of him that he’d had a load to drink. It was slowing him down.

  Still, he was sinewy and vicious, working well with what he had left, trying to knee me in the groin and headbutt me at the same time. ‘Why the fuck are you wearing that mask?’ he spat out, slurring again. I knocked him to the floor with my fist. His feet skidded on the wet ground, and he fell over awkwardly on his shoulder.

  My mask was tugged awry. For a second I couldn’t see anything at all but white rubber, but I jerked it back into place and got the toy gun out of my jacket pocket while he was still down, quickly, so he couldn’t get a good look at it. I pressed it to the back of his neck, put my face close to his ear and whispered very deliberately, ‘Come quietly with me or I will shoot you in the head.’ I had thickened my accent, and the cotton wool in my cheeks made my voice sound sludgier.

  He stiffened slightly then, became calmer and more alert, as though I was finally talking a language he properly understood.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he said. Not so much of the swagger now.

  ‘Somewhere to talk.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Bill fucking Clinton,’ I said.

  We went inside the house, me still pressing the gun into his neck. I had to watch him like a hawk. He was fast and tougher than me and looking for a way out. Any moment, even with his hands tied, everything could turn around.

  ‘What kind of gun is it?’ he asked. I could hear him calculating.

  ‘One that kills people,’ I said. ‘Now shut the fuck up.’

  It wasn’t a good position to be in, threatening a fella like McGee with a fake gun. It was like going into a showdown during the Cold War with an Airfix model of a nuclear bomb. He could sniff out weakness. I was worried he was going to push it so far that in normal circumstances I’d have had to give him a warning shot, and all he’d get would be a soggy potato pellet.

  So long as he could only feel it and not see it, I was probably all right. If you’re a drunk hardman and a cylindrical metal object is pressing into a vulnerable spot, you tend to make the most obvious assumptions.

  ‘What the fuck did you do to my dog?’

  ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘No he isn’t. He’s still breathing.’

  ‘He looks dead. What did you do to him?’

  I didn’t like to see the dog there in the rain getting cold. I wanted to put a blanket over him but I couldn’t let go of McGee. It would be a fatal signal of soft-heartedness. The whole thing was losing momentum anyway. There was too much chat. The action was starting to sag. Any minute now we’d be sitting around in a circle crying and discussing what went wrong in our childhoods. I had to up the ante. I shoved the gun hard into his neck again, so hard it must have really hurt. I could feel a bead of sweat running down my back, a fingertip’s trace of liquid panic.

  ‘I’m going to put your coat on you with the hood up, and walk out the door with you next to me. Don’t say anything,’ I said. Then I had a brainwave.

  ‘There’s someone wants a word with you,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you. He just wants a word.’

  That eased it. A ‘word’ was something he could handle. The waiting presence of a shadowy third party made sense. It felt like business. The scenario fell into some kind of imaginary order. I was no longer his weird nemesis, just a brusque escort to a deal. This had happened to him before, in one form or another. Through the fog of his drunkenness, he could start to weave links back to that protection racket, this drugs supply, create phantom strategies, foresee a future. People always want to imagine the best.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said.

  He was chewing it over.

  ‘Is it over that deal on the building sites? I made sure everyone got their cut.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He just said to get you over. He’s got some new racket. The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll be back home. He just wants a word. Got your keys in your jacket?’

  Nice touch, I thought, the implication that he would need them again in the near future.

  ‘Aye. Why the handcuffs?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘That’s what he said. But don’t make a big song and dance or someone will call the peelers, and that won’t be good for you or me. If you start that carry-on I’ll have to shoot you and run.’

  I draped his coat across his shoulders and started hustling him out the door. On the way I quietly took his spare house keys off the peg and slipped them into my jeans pocket. I’d come back later maybe and sort out the dog.

  I pulled my hood down over my mask, and we walked together to the end of the street. It was a wet night, late now, and the pavements glistened. No one passed us. They were all in their houses with the curtains drawn, sticking the kettle on for one last cup of tea before bed. If anyone had seen us, sure we were just two tipsy messers going off to a fancy-dress party. I stopped outside Big Jacky’s shop and took out the keys I had borrowed from Phyllis.

  ‘Why are we stopping here? This is a newsagent’s,’ he said.

  ‘He’s waiting downstairs,’ I said, and I shoved him through the door and hustled him downstairs into the cramped, gloomy cellar where Big Jacky used to keep the cleaning supplies and the extra stock. I saw Phyllis had been keeping it in order, full marks to her. It was crammed with stacked boxes of Tayto crisps and Kit-Kats.

  ‘He’ll be in here in a minute,’ I said, ‘but he wants you to wear this across your eyes.’ I took out a long, clean rag from my pocket, to use as a blindfold.

  ‘I don’t fucking want to wear that,’ he said, furiously. He started shoving his shoulders around again, roaring and kicking boxes at me, trying to trip me over and knock off my mask. I knew exactly why he didn’t want to put it on. It’s the kind of thing they make people wear before they get shot.

  ‘Shut up,’ I hissed at him. ‘He’s bringing a friend from England. The fella doesn’t want you to see his face before you hear what he’s got to say.’ I threw in some more flannel for his drunken logic to tangle with: ‘He doesn’t want a witness before he’s got a deal. If you can get through this, there might be some decent money in it for you.’

  He quietened down then and let me tie it on him, knotting it tightly. I guided him to an old brown chair in the corner, a recliner with padded, threadbare cushions, and pushed him back on to it: he sank down almost gratefully. I remembered sitting on it as a child, as Big Jacky did the accounts. If you leaned right back on it a footrest zapped out, and it felt a bit like a bed. Or a boat, or an aeroplane, or whatever I wanted it to be. Today: a little prison, maybe.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ I said.

  There was a kettle and a mini-fridge at the back.

  ‘Take off this fucking blindfold,’ he said, shaking his head. Now he had it on he hated it even more.

  There was something in the arrogance of his tone that angered me. I sprang towards him and hit him very hard and quickly then with my right hand across the side of the head, enough to send his brain bouncing off the inside of his skull. The force and exhilaration of the violence surprised me; how easy it would have been to carry on. But I stopped there. Not yet. I needed time to think. His nose started to bleed, with some of the blood soaking into the edge of the blindfold, blooming like a poppy across the white material. I saw him freeze. He knew he had miscalculated.

  ‘Don’t swear at me again,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  I went to the small sink in the corner and boiled the kettle. Two small cups, a teabag in each one. I put a lot o
f milk in his so it didn’t scald his mouth, and mixed it nice and strong, mashing the bag against the side of the cup with my spoon until the tea came pulsing out in dark-brown clouds. Then I stirred in a good few of Phyllis’s little pills, with sugar to mask the taste.

  I walked back and held the tea to his lips.

  ‘Tea,’ I said, gently. ‘Have a wee drink. He’ll be here in a minute. I’m having one myself.’

  He hesitated for a minute and then started drinking. It was cold in the cellar and the tea was warm and sweet. I watched him gulping sloppily and gratefully, the skin on his jaw shaded with dark bristles, the smell of stale alcohol rising in waves from his pink mouth. A disgrace of a human being – but still, in all his little machinations, a significant piece of work. He was more bearable with the blindfold on. You could conjure him up some humanity.

  When he had finished, dribbling the last bit on to his T-shirt, I took the cup away.

  ‘He’ll be here in a minute,’ I said again.

  I sat on a hard chair next to him and drank my own tea.

  Then I picked up an old blanket from the corner of the room and put it over him. He didn’t move, except to cough now and then.

  The room was quiet, with that sour hint of damp that clings to cellars. A light bulb with a rosy, floral shade over it hung incongruously from the ceiling, as if a little girl had tried to decorate a nuclear bunker. Phyllis’s doing. As the period between his coughs lengthened, I took a walk around, checking what had changed. It was tidier, certainly. Phyllis had a fussy gift for personal organisation that Big Jacky had never demonstrated. There was a pillow in the corner. She kept a small canvas holdall down here with clean underwear, clothes and a face towel in it, and a make-up bag decorated with sprigs of flowers, in case she had go out and meet her friend straight from work. Phyllis loved all that stuff. Too much boredom in her life had led her to make a mild cult out of preparedness.