The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

  Back at the hotel, as I went to get the key to my room, Marie was waiting for me on reception, alert as a terrier, ears cocked, fresh up from the rabbit hole.

  ‘Big night last night?’ she said. ‘Was the wedding good? I noticed you didn’t come back.’

  Her face wore a roguish expression I didn’t care to engage with. My scarf was looped to hide my sore neck and even to look at her mouth moving around as she talked made me weary.

  ‘Aye,’ I said hoarsely. ‘What a wedding.’

  ‘Did the bride look nice?’

  ‘Beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘And the bridesmaids?

  More banter. I thought of McGee, trussed up with the mad smear of red lipstick on.

  ‘Quite something,’ I said.

  ‘I bet you’re not feeling too chatty today,’ she said, knowingly.

  I widened my eyes in humorous assent. Speech was, increasingly, beyond me.

  I had a sleep and called Phyllis later from the hotel room, to ask about Titch’s funeral. She thought I was phoning from London. For once she didn’t give me too many details, except to say that Titch’s mum was so deep in grief that she had seemed not to be fully there.

  His mum had brought along Titch’s brand new puffa jacket which they had bought together in the city centre the week before he died. She stood at the graveside clutching it tight as he was buried. Phyllis said it almost looked as if Titch’s mother was holding the warm jacket for him because she thought he might need it again later on the way back to the house, but of course no one mentioned that, they just tried to make sure she got through it. The da turned up half-cut with an enormous floral wreath that said SON and made an exhibition of himself caterwauling and crying my poor boy, my poor son, again and again until everyone wished he would give over and go home.

  23

  It felt like a relief to be back in London. The air was dirtier, but the life was cleaner and easier. Work was a pleasure in its simplicity: you did this thing, washing glasses and mixing drinks, and people gave you money and left you alone. I somehow felt as if, just by having made it out of the cellar without killing McGee, I had been handed a new lease of life. The day I came back there was a sympathy card on the bar, signed by my fellow workers – including Francis, in his loopy, flamboyant hand – to say they were sorry for the loss of my mother. I felt briefly guilty, but then I told myself it had just arrived post-dated by decades.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said to them quietly, still a wee bit bruised and downcast.

  Mrs Wharton, who knew nothing of this lie, nonetheless met me with tear-filled eyes. She broke the news to me that Rollo had been ‘put to sleep’ while I was away. He’d been irritable and walking strangely, and then he’d finally gone berserk one night and buried his teeth in Mr Wharton’s left leg. Tests had discovered a large growth pressing on the dog’s brain. ‘It was the kindest thing,’ Mrs Wharton kept repeating of the euthanasia, as though she wasn’t at all sure that it was. The house felt calmer without him but different. Even a small, malign presence punches a hole in the air when it leaves.

  There were times, though, when I woke up in the dead of night and couldn’t get back to sleep, when my anxieties sprouted claws and destroyed any possibility of rest. The loss of Titch, the heartbreak of his mother, and that weird circus with McGee in the basement all wheeled around my head in some nightmarish mix.

  One other thing worried me, too: what if that photograph threat simply slid off McGee, and he went after Phyllis anyway? Fears have a way of shrinking over time while resentments sprout muscles. Phyllis was well liked locally, and if McGee’s lot harmed her openly it might go down badly, but I knew things didn’t have to be so clear-cut. He only had to wait until a feverish patch of the year when for some reason there’s a bit of mayhem on the streets and then one young hothead among many happens to chuck a petrol bomb through a ground-floor window in the wee small hours and whoosh a middle-aged woman sleeping upstairs is burned or asphyxiated.

  Then the talk will start. Isn’t it awful, what happened? Och it is indeed a dreadful tragedy, just a nice lady alone in her own home, not an enemy in the world, clearly he got the wrong house, what on earth is this country coming to, even the leadership is furious apparently and they issue a stern disciplinary warning against these young bucks who get over-excited, there’s to be no more of this carry-on, but in a place like this with our difficult history sure tempers run out of control now and again, it seems the fire spread unusually fast, must have been the foam in the soft furnishings, but it isn’t an official breach of anyone’s ceasefire thank goodness for that, as even everyone in the government agrees so there’s some consolation at least.

  Far away in another city, however, one person will understand very clearly the precise nature of what sailed through that ground-floor window, exactly as he is meant to. A message in a bottle, addressed to me. Was any of this likely? It was hard to tell any more.

  I fell into the habit of ringing Phyllis at home every couple of days to gauge the temperature around her. She was delighted with the calls, of course: it seemed to her as if I was finally behaving almost like a son. I’d kick it all off with ‘How are things?’ and then she’d be straight out of the starting blocks, telling me that prices had rocketed at the local butcher’s now they’d smartened the place up, and how the doctors had cut a tumour the size of an orange out of her friend Julie’s husband just in the nick of time before the thing seeded itself all the way through him.

  I had developed the art of listening on one level while letting my mind roam freely on another. Along the way at intervals I had learned to throw in ‘Aye’ and the odd incredulous echo – ‘an orange? Jesus’ – and the technique served me well. The trick was to keep an ear out for key words and interrogatives, and respond to them like a sharp tug on a harness, otherwise you could come badly unstuck. This particular evening Phyllis was talking on again, and meanwhile I was thinking with a mixture of remembered pleasure and encroaching sadness about the time when Eve and Raymond and I had walked through Chalk Farm and bought ice-cream cones even though it was bitterly cold outside because this one shop had flavours we had never tried before. Pastel-coloured, sharp-sweet sorbets that chilled the flesh inside our cheeks. And then Phyllis suddenly said down the line: ‘Well, is there anyone in London you’ve got your eye on?’

  The question brought me up short. What had prompted this? Maybe I’d mentioned Eve in passing and she’d somehow picked up on it. My love life was new territory for Phyllis, as something self-consciously bold in her tone suggested, and I didn’t want her to make herself comfortable there.

  ‘My eye on?’

  ‘Yes, your eye on.’ She was unusually persistent.

  As my situation stood with Eve, it was poor timing for romantic confessions, like admitting to someone you had sat an important exam just as the news came in that you’d failed. It was best to be evasive.

  ‘Och well, you never know.’

  She correctly interpreted my equivocation as assent.

  ‘Well if there is and she’s important,’ she said, ‘don’t let her get away.’

  When she said that I briefly recalled the image of a snarled car on a damp country road, and what Phyllis knew about someone getting away.

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ I said more gently. ‘Thanks for thinking of me.’

  After that she went back to talking about her difficulties with the business bank account for the shop, and I returned to thoughts of the ice-cream parlour. I couldn’t remember which flavour Eve had chosen that night, although she had talked about how good it was. It seemed terrible that in such a short time already I couldn’t remember this little thing, and I realised that many more details about Eve – all the tiny facts that, massed together, made up her full reality – were destined to slip away from me now, one by one, with no chances to replace them. And then another sentence drifted over from Phyllis that ended with the words ‘burned down the photo-shop’.

  A small electric shock,
transmitted through the ear.

  ‘What did you say, Phyllis? It’s a very crackly line here.’

  ‘I was just saying that somebody burned down the photo-shop nearest us where we used to get our films developed. You know the one. Speedy Snaps, it’s called.’

  ‘Who would do a thing like that?’

  ‘No one knows. I forgot to tell you earlier. It said on the news they think it was started at night with petrol-soaked rags pushed through the letterbox and then whoever it was threw in a match after it and up it went. I bumped into David who manages the place, poor fella, he was all through the wreckage of it the next day trying to salvage anything that was left. The police don’t know who did it, he says, in fact they’re looking into former employees.

  ‘David’s a lovely fella, he says what torments him is the thought of all those customers who trusted them with the films, their baby pictures and wedding pictures and whatnot, all those precious moments up in flames. He and his wife have only just had a new baby themselves so they know how it must feel. I said to him, “David you must remember that it’s not your fault, nobody will blame you. Sure it’s awful if photos get burnt but thank God at least it wasn’t people.”’

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘At least it wasn’t people.’

  ‘And here’s a funny thing because David never mentioned it at the time, but a couple of days later I got a nice wee letter in the post from Speedy Snaps just saying “we’re deeply sorry that your photographs were destroyed in a fire at our premises, we know that some images are irreplaceable”. It was addressed “to the Occupier” but I don’t remember putting any pictures in there lately – did you before you went?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I did.’

  ‘Maybe I did have something in there that slipped my mind, I’ll have to double-check. But it gave a number that you can call if you want to be compensated and they’ll send someone to the house to drop off a complimentary package—’

  Oh God. A complimentary package with wires and nails in it, maybe.

  ‘Don’t ring that number, Phyllis. That letter’s not from Speedy Snaps.’

  ‘Well who else would it be from?’

  ‘It sounds like a scam. Trust me. I’ve heard about this kind of thing before. The fraudsters hear about an incident in the news and then they send out letters on the back of it to steal your details. Are you on your own at home tonight?’

  ‘No, I’ve just been telling you all about it, Jacky, Julie’s coming to pick me up at seven and I’m going to stay with her for ten days to help her out while her husband recovers from the operation. They have a lovely spare room.’

  Ten days. I made her promise again she wouldn’t ring that number. I had ten days when at least she wouldn’t be sleeping in our house. And after that I’d have to get her over to London where I could explain things to her in person and put together some kind of plan. What then? I hadn’t a clue. If she left the house she couldn’t return to live with Mary and Sam, not after how much she had come to enjoy her life in Belfast. It would be like shoving her back into a living tomb. Maybe she would have to come and stay with me in London.

  I had a sudden, horrifying vision of Phyllis and me twenty years hence, living together as the odd couple – Eve having long since vanished – with me as one of those middle-aged men, neutered by duty, who wears his clothes too neatly pressed and can never ask a woman back to his tiny flat because his elderly aunt is always pottering about, watering house plants and snuffing out erotic possibility. It’s strange how saving someone from a living tomb so often seems to involve climbing into one yourself.

  It didn’t matter, I told myself. I could deal with that later. Just the business of now mattered. Something about the erratic, panicky way I had begun to weigh up risks and decisions told me that I might not easily get through another tragedy in which my inaction played a part. I needed to buy some thinking time. Before the week was out I’d sort out someone to mind the shop and then send Phyllis a ticket to London for a surprise holiday when her stint at Julie’s was up. The idea would thrill her, a picturesque treat, a story to tell her friends.

  In the meantime I rang the head office of Speedy Snaps in Northern Ireland to check whether they had indeed written to their customers to offer compensation. They had no idea what I was talking about. Regarding the fire in the Belfast branch, they said, they were still in the very early stages of working out what had been destroyed. They hadn’t yet tried to contact any customers at all.

  McGee had known I’d hear about the incident and the letter. He was clever that way. I don’t think he thought that my photos of him really were in Speedy Snaps waiting to be developed, if he even believed in their existence. He’d just torched the place as a signal that he was ready to do anything. The letter was to remind me that he knew where Phyllis lived.

  I thought about Eve all the time, too: what she was doing, if she was thinking about me, whether Raymond missed me, whether he played Monopoly with anyone else now or if the board just lay untouched in the corner.

  I knew that after I’d left her alone that night in the café, if she saw me now she would just walk away before I could say anything. She had that ability, once someone finally crossed a line.

  One day I sat down at the battered little wooden desk in my room back at the Whartons’, the legacy from one of their long-departed sons, and wrote her a letter. I explained it all: the death of Big Jacky, how I had got my scars, Titch’s death, and even – in abbreviated, codified form – my run-in with McGee. I felt better for it, whatever happened. The secrets between us had begun to corrode our affection, rusting it with patches of mistrust.

  When I had finished describing what had happened, I wrote plainly at the end: ‘I’m sorry. I love you and Raymond and I want to be with you and stay with you. I hope you will let me. There will be no more messing around.’

  I meant it. I never liked those adults who were in and out of children’s lives, schmoozing them and then disappearing, returning with great fanfare like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny rolled into one and then buggering off again, stopping only to explain with stumbling, mealy-mouthed phrases that things were ‘complicated’. I had been that person to Raymond, and I didn’t want to be like that again. Big Jacky had never mucked me about. He loved me steadily and without question, in his own way.

  I posted the letter and tried not to hope too much. Eve might have met someone new, and who could blame her?

  The following days merged into one another, mined with different varieties of unease. At night I took consolation from picturing Phyllis in the warm company of Julie, who thankfully lived in another part of town. I kept the thought of Eve and Raymond at bay. It was too highly charged to hope for or even think of, like a package just outside a pub that might explode if you touched it. I thought sometimes about how to construct a life around their absence, one that didn’t have them in it but somehow ticked on successfully anyway, and I couldn’t quite make it work.

  Everywhere I looked in London, I could see people who had fallen out of a life that almost worked into one that leaked malfunction from every small action. They fell so far that their shadow-lives became invisible to everyone else, even in the full glare of daylight. They laid out beds in stone corners of the city, using doorsteps for mattresses and straining plastic bags full of grubby possessions as pillows. They pestered passers-by for cash with stories as crumpled as the back of their shoes, and I wondered what had brought them here.

  Different things, I supposed, the small mysteries of failure. The thousand ways you can descend. The bonds of love that glued people in place – the mother, the father, the brother, the sister, the lover, the friends – had melted away from them, or maybe they had dissolved those ties themselves: soaked them in drink, or drugs or disappointments until finally there wasn’t even a thread left to hang on to. And then life becomes painful but simpler. You have nothing, you need everything, you have to work all day for the little something that will vanish again overnig
ht.

  Your feet hurt, you’re cold and your crumbling teeth are aching, and you have to think about that. You can sometimes blot it out, and the deeper stuff too, with a portable anaesthetic of your choice. There is more and less to manage at the same time, and all your negotiations are with strangers, which at some blurred point in the past became less wounding than the ones with friends.

  Every day I walked past the same man on the way to the bus that took me home from work, and – with a tiny jab of nameless guilt, which I usually ignored – shrugged off his hopeless muttered lie of ‘spare some change, mate, for a cup of tea’. Funny how they always named the need for tea, as though it was the one confident English right no passer-by could decently deny.

  But today I stopped and briefly took him in as he stood in the dingy doorway: the watery, expectant, pale blue eyes, the matted hair, the stubble and the loosely belted trousers. The grime-seamed, panhandling palm. He must only have been about thirty. I didn’t want to give him cash. It would hasten his wreckage. I nodded towards the fluorescent light of the convenience store.

  ‘Can I get you something from in there?’

  ‘I’d rather just have the money, mate.’

  ‘No, but I’ll get you something to eat from in there.’

  He looked at me with a lurking truculence. Something was better than nothing.

  ‘Sandwich then, mate.’