The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  McGee was asleep now, snoring, full of stewed booze and rotten convictions. His mouth hung half open, a skinny line of congealed blood snaking towards it from his right nostril. A slim gold chain with a miniature dagger on it dangled from his neck. I thought of him carefully picking it out in the shop and handing over the money.

  I sat and looked at him. If I were going to smother him, now would be the moment. That pillow would do, held down with sufficient force. There would be a brief, gurgling struggle and then it would be over. What was left of Titch would be lowered into the ground tomorrow, to the sound of his mother’s sobbing. McGee deserved this. It had a finality about it. I got out the thick roll of masking tape and wound it round his legs several times, tying them tight together. Then I did a few more loops to fix him to the chair.

  I picked up the pillow and stood beside him, staring down at him.

  And then what? How to dispose of him? I hadn’t quite thought that bit through. I couldn’t just leave him here afterwards for Phyllis to find, stiffening among the coupon stacks. If I could keep him here for a day it might be possible to come back in the night with a wheelie bin, cram him in and wheel him far away.

  I began to feel very tired. You might think that killing someone you hate will free you, but unless you plan to make a habit of it and rack up so many you can’t count, it just bonds you to them for ever. Looked at that way, murder is a stronger glue than sex. I don’t suppose you ever forget someone you kill, unless you’re in the thick of war and can’t even tell who it was. This stuff soils you, becomes difficult to scrub off. With each ebbing breath, they will etch themselves on your memory.

  I was lousy at covering my tracks. I could end up doing time for McGee, mouldering in jail for the main chunk of my life, watching as paramilitaries got early release while I – classed as what the police used to call an ‘ordinary decent criminal’ – was held in for the full stretch, enjoying the blocked toilet in the tiny cell and the boiling sugar water thrown in my face by McGee’s resentful fellow-Loyalists.

  I had thought that the destruction of McGee would make me feel exultant, but now I could actually touch the possibility it just felt squalid, the mental equivalent of getting dog shit on your shoe. I wanted him out of the cellar. Even in his stupor his presence was leaking potential harm. I knew with sudden certainty that I didn’t want to kill him. But if I didn’t kill him now, how was I going to stop him killing me?

  By the time he finally came round, he would be beginning to puzzle everything out about the place he was in, about ways of punishing me by threatening people I loved. So far this whole exercise had been the equivalent of flapping a cloth at a killer hornet. If I was going to let him live I had to disable his capacity for revenge.

  A few hours passed. I was in a fix. I had to go with anything I’d got.

  Suddenly I had a thought: I went over to Phyllis’s wee cosmetic bag and dug out her lipstick, a surprisingly lurid shade of poppy-red. There was an eyeshadow in there too, and blusher. The lipstick went smoothly on to McGee’s half-open mouth. I kept it very neat around the edges, as though he had applied it himself with furtive pride. I didn’t want him to look like he was dressing up for a hearty masculine laugh, like a rugby player on tour. It had to look sincere.

  After that I smeared a bit of blusher on to his cheeks, and gently scissored off the blindfold before dusting blue eyeshadow all over his eyelids with a wee brush. I took the blanket off him, slowly so as not to wake him up. Then, with a few decisive snips of the big scissors Phyllis kept for cutting newspaper twine, I sliced down the middle of his T-shirt and carefully set Phyllis’s cream lacy bra across his chest, over the pallid skin with the bulldog tattoo, the pimply forest of chest hair.

  I braced myself and pulled his jeans and underpants down so that the tops of them hovered on his thighs. What was exposed was unedifying. A line had been crossed. Several lines.

  He started to stir a bit, so I stepped back, waiting. He moved some more and then let out a long, wounded roar, like an animal pinched awake in pain from its den. His eyes opened and stared ahead of him into space, with a dawning consciousness that was slowly filling up with rage. He tried to move his arms, but they were still tied behind him, so he began to shake from side to side, roaring again in purest frustration. In the midst of this frenzy, his gaze came to rest on me. I was no longer wearing the Clinton mask or the other layers of my disguise. Immediately he became still, as though absorbing the full implications of my presence. There was a pause.

  ‘You wee fucker,’ McGee said, quietly, as though confirming something he had always known.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Why am I here?’ he yelled, jerking the top half of his body off the chair. The suddenness of his movement made me step backwards.

  I let his question hang in the air for a second or two. It was almost too big to answer.

  ‘Why do you think?’ I said.

  I felt sick but exhilarated, to have him on the spot.

  ‘I don’t fucking know.’

  McGee was still groggy, but I thought he could do better than that.

  ‘Have a think,’ I said.

  ‘Because I beat up your mate and you?’

  ‘That’s a start,’ I said. ‘Beat up? That’s a nice way of putting it.’

  ‘What are you going to do now, then?’ he said.

  ‘I was going to bump you off,’ I said.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ he asked.

  Then he answered his own question: ‘You haven’t the bollocks.’

  ‘Bollocks have nothing to do with it. I still might if I feel like it,’ I said. I let out a stray hoot of laughter at seeing his mouth working foully through the clown’s lipstick.

  I fancied a smoke so I lit one up and sat down further away on a wooden box, watching him.

  ‘What the fuck’s so funny?’ he said.

  ‘Look at the state of you.’

  He squirrelled his chin down on to his chest to try and see himself and caught a glimpse of the bra and the misplaced jeans. At that he started howling and struggling all over again.

  ‘You fucking pervert,’ he said. ‘What have you done to me?’

  A pause for thought.

  ‘Did you touch my dick?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said, and took another draw on my cigarette.

  The inhalation made a gentle burning hiss, fraying the fine paper. I loved that sound, the controlled fizz of the little flame. I felt tired and peaceful. A big cloud of blue-grey tobacco smoke came floating out of my mouth.

  ‘Nice make-up,’ I said.

  He glared at me. He looked like a cross between Mata Hari and Desperate Dan. He started trying to crunch his mouth up so he could see it if he looked down. He must have seen a smear of something red, because he started to struggle again.

  ‘Why are you keeping me here?’ he shouted.

  ‘Because I want to talk to you.’

  ‘About what?’

  I stuck the blanket back over him. His cabaret weirdness was too overwhelming otherwise and I couldn’t concentrate.

  ‘Why you kill people. Why you beat Titch. Why you hammered me.’

  ‘You hammered me first.’

  ‘I hit you in a bar. You hammered me with three mates and a bat with rusty nails in it. And before that you beat Titch into the hospital for a packet of Jaffa Cakes.’

  ‘It wasn’t about the Jaffa Cakes.’

  ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Respect. Order. Somebody has to keep order. Without it the entire place would fall apart.’

  ‘Look around you. What order? Why did it have to be you?’

  ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do? Let him nick from us every day? Let him shove my da over while people laugh? He’s lucky I didn’t stiff him.’

  ‘You did stiff him. He killed himself last week, because of what you did. Didn’t you know?’

  There was a second when he looked surprised. Then he just stared blankly back at me, the bloodshot eyes glazed with dri
nk.

  ‘You killed him,’ I said, flatly.

  I wasn’t going to let it rest there: ‘Just like you killed all those other people who didn’t deserve it.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  I felt a flash of anger at him even asking.

  ‘You know damn well. Your outfit. Going around shooting wee Catholic lads walking home at night. Going into pubs and shooting oul fellas when they’re drinking a pint and watching the World Cup. Is that what you’re proud of? Is that the “war”?

  ‘Nobody asked you to do it. When the IRA murdered Prods, the families came on TV and begged you not to do it to anyone else. You didn’t give a shit. You just went on doing it.’

  It was true, what I had said. I remembered the time they had shot a young Catholic workman while he was in his car eating his lunchtime sandwiches. His mother was on the television news, propped up by relatives. She had a dazed bleakness in her eyes that was hard to forget.

  McGee remembered something he had heard from the people who made theories to hang around the corpses. His voice took on an air of self-importance, like a child at a recital.

  ‘We had to make the Catholic population turn against the IRA. It was a necessary strategy.’

  ‘How long before you decided your strategy wasn’t working? How long before you decided it was wrong?’

  Silence. I kept on.

  ‘Why don’t you just admit that killing Catholics gives you a buzz and spare us all the fucking pretence?’

  I realised I was shouting. Better tone it down. Still, that riled him.

  He sat up and hissed at me: ‘If you want to wring your hands over dead Taigs, go ahead. I won’t. The Provies killed my uncle, and he was never even into anything, just meeting his friend in a hotel when one of their bombs went off. They had to scrape him off the walls to have something to put in the coffin.

  ‘If it wasn’t for us defenders the Provies would already have murdered all of youse in your beds, like the cowardly wee shites that you are.’

  ‘Defenders? My friend is dead because of you. Why would we need the IRA to murder us, when we’ve got you?’ I yelled.

  He glared back at me and said with slow deliberation, ‘I didn’t murder you or your big fat mate. More’s the pity. Wish I’d whacked you both.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ I said. ‘But sure what chance did you ever have, growing up with your vicious oul da and that looper McMullen?’

  ‘Leave my da out of it,’ he said. ‘He brought us up the best he could. And don’t talk about McMullen.’

  ‘Where’d your ma go?’ I asked. I meant it to sound harsh, but for a moment my tone faltered into normality.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ he said.

  ‘I just want to know.’

  ‘She pissed off and left us. I was seven, brother was nine. Probably off to Scotland with some fancy man. Covered her tracks. Didn’t want to be found, Da said, but he kept trying. That’s all. Happy now?’

  ‘Did you love her?’

  ‘She was my ma. But she left us. So I don’t love her now. What are you, a therapist? Shut the fuck up and let me go.’

  ‘What are you doing with that wee fella?’ I asked.

  ‘What wee fella?’

  ‘The one in your house. I could hear you talking. You’re planning something.’

  ‘D’you know him?’

  ‘No, I’ve just seen him around. So you’re getting kids to do your dirty work for you now?’

  ‘He’s doing nothing. Just keeping an eye out for us.’

  ‘What will you do if I let you go?’ I asked.

  The silence stretched out taut, and then pinged back with a low, hoarse: ‘Kill you.’

  ‘If that’s the way, don’t you see I’ll have to finish you off now myself?’

  Nothing.

  ‘That’s one idea. Here’s another. You leave me and my family alone and in exchange I don’t make the photos of you public.’

  His eyes snapped open. ‘What photos?’

  ‘The ones I took when you were asleep, when you were wearing all the make-up and the bra like it’s your special thing. I gave the film to a friend who came to the door when you were knocked out. If anything happens to me or anyone I know, he’ll get them developed at Speedy Snaps, and send them to your da and all his mates. Then later I’ll come back and kill you anyway.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘I would. I understand they do posters too. Great big posters for the gable walls.’

  ‘I’ll burn Speedy Snaps to the fucking ground.’

  ‘Which branch?’

  He glared at me with his red, blue-shadowed eyes.

  ‘Let me out.’

  ‘I don’t take orders. That’s the deal. Do you want it?’

  A moment’s contemplation.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I’ll be leaving today. Remember what I said.’

  ‘Where’d you get the gun you had last night?’

  I didn’t like that question. With his nose for violence and its hardware, he had started to scent something not quite right about the gun.

  ‘Never you worry,’ I said. ‘Rest assured it works.’

  ‘Okay. I agree. Just let me go.’

  I looked at the clock. It was only just gone six in the morning. In an hour Phyllis would be arriving to unlock the shop. There was the whole day ahead.

  There’s a point sometimes where you take a risk, not because you actually think it’s a good or clever idea, but just because you’re so very tired. I had exhausted the possibilities of the situation. I had realised now I wasn’t going to kill him, and I suppose he had too.

  I went and got the Spud Gun and put it in my pocket, fumbling so he could see just enough of the movement but not the item itself. Then I ran a facecloth under the hot tap, wrung it out, and gently scrubbed Phyllis’s make-up off his face. He shut his eyes. I got most of it off, but his eyes still looked faintly exotic, as if stained by woad. A swollen, purpling bruise was spreading next to his nose.

  The make-up stuff and the pretend camera hadn’t been very classy, I had to admit, but they plugged into his screwed-up values that stuck pride and shame in all the wrong places. Fellas like him fear mockery more than pain. I didn’t want a reconciliation with him. I just didn’t want him squatting in a corner of my conscience for the next fifty years.

  I went behind him and unlocked his hands, and then started sawing through the masking tape on his legs. He opened his eyes, and for a second his gaze flicked across the scars on my arms as I hacked at the tape. When it finally came loose, he moved his arms and legs tentatively, wincing a bit as the feeling came back.

  He got up off the chair with difficulty like a wretched old man, tugged up the jeans and nearly fell down again because his legs were so stiff. I stood at a distance and watched him as he righted himself. The expression on his face was hard to read. I had thought that maybe he would take a run and try to belt me one, but he didn’t. I threw him an old T-shirt in place of the rag that was hanging off him, and he put it on, and then found his coat. Phyllis’s bra lay, appallingly, on the floor. The whole thing felt embarrassing, like the morning after a costume party in which everyone present was out of their nut on drugs.

  ‘So that’s it, then?’ he said.

  ‘Aye.’

  I walked beside him to the foot of the darkened stairwell. When he finally reached the stairs he groped for the rusted handrail, still disoriented, taking a moment to steady himself. As I watched him I imagined that he understood now that this incident had evened up the score, that after this we could leave each other alone.

  ‘Remember what I said,’ I murmured again, waiting for him to go.

  At that he wheeled around sharply, as though some fresh energy had suddenly surged in him, and lunged for my neck. His hands clamped tightly round my throat, pressing hard, and I began fighting to breathe. There was a shocking amount of force just in his fingers and though my own hands quickly came flailing up to pris
e them off he held his grip. As my field of vision started shrinking and blackening I thought dumbly ‘so this is it now this is how it ends’ and for a fragment of a second I was furious and then despairing at having fallen so stupidly into my own trap.

  Then he let go just as rapidly. The assault had established what he needed to know: during it, I hadn’t reached for my gun. While I was still gasping for shreds of air he brought his face closer to mine, stinking of sweat and beer, and said with a small smile I didn’t like, ‘Watch out for yourself, Jacky. Sure I’ll be keeping a good lookout for you.’

  He began walking slowly and jerkily up the stairs. On the fifth step he turned round with a sarcastic grimace of mock-terror and added ‘you, and your wee gun’ – and then carried on.

  The upstairs door clanged shut. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands in the sink. They were shaking very badly as I turned on the taps and I noticed that my legs had involuntarily followed suit, buckling and trembling like those of some blitzed accordion player. I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror above the bowl: the red, exhausted eyes, the drawn, sick face. On each side of my throat was a livid puce impression of McGee’s thumbprint. I started to wash my face, lathering up Phyllis’s pink, flowery-smelling soap.

  He hadn’t wanted to kill me here. It wasn’t a venue he had thought through himself, and maybe the crazy threat of the photographs had worked as some restraint. Still, as the warm water coursed down my aching neck it was dawning on me that from whichever angle you looked at things, he was out on the loose again and I had made yet another of my serious mistakes.

  When I finally got some balance back I started tidying up the scene, stuffing everything into a black bin liner before Phyllis got in for the early morning deliveries. It took a while, but not half as long as if I’d had to fold McGee in there as well. I tied up the bag and carried it with me as I locked up and walked out into the cool air, gulping the oxygen down like ice-water. Along the way, I shoved it all – the torn clothes, the bloodstained rag – into a public rubbish bin. As I walked away I felt a small jangling in my pocket: McGee’s spare house keys. I hesitated for a second and then hung on to them, just in case. In case of what, I didn’t know.