The Ghost Factory

by Jenny McCartney

Under the strip-lighting of the shop, I tried to assemble a package for him: a chicken sandwich, satsumas, a chocolate bar, some toothpaste and a toothbrush.

  I handed him the thin plastic bag swaying with the weight of its contents. He peered into it with mild interest.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said dully, like a child with a dud Christmas stocking. His eyes slid away. He would have preferred the cash, which could have bought him some crackle and pop and forgetting, rather than all this dreary nourishment and fluoridated dental care. Fair enough.

  I walked on and waited for the bus. It wouldn’t be so hard at all, I thought, just to slide down to where he was. It was so easy that the thought of it frightened me, like tiptoeing to the edge of a cliff and peering over, and feeling – just for a split second – your head starting to spin and your knees giving way beneath you.

  They used to get all the daily papers at Delauncey’s and stick them in a rack at the café section of the restaurant, in the pretence that it was some kind of Left Bank joint where customers could sit thoughtfully and ponder the day’s political events. At the end of the day, when I remembered, I would take them home in my bag. Nobody else wanted them. Francis had probably never sat down and read an entire newspaper in his life, although he was always blathering about mind-blowing books he had read while often, I had noticed, getting the titles slightly wrong. He was prone to wittering about Jack Kerouac’s The Karma Bums. I savoured his little errors: they gave me a brief sensation of superiority.

  But I felt at home with it, this feast of tiny print. It reminded me of my childhood in the newsagent’s, tying up the remaindered copies with Big Jacky, absorbing the electricity of events from all over the world, plugging into the stronger voltage of those near home.

  Something happens to you when you grow up in the midst of bombings and shootings, with the possibility of someone’s agony always in the air like the coming of rain. It’s a secret that nobody really talks about: you get hardwired to the news.

  The question of ‘will it happen to me?’ and ‘will it happen to anyone I love?’ and ‘will it happen to anyone I know?’ slowly becomes a reflex, almost a professional interest. You look at photographs of the aftermath of an explosion, say, in Iraq or Sarajevo, and you feel that sickened, sneaky tug of familiarity, the little quickening of recognition. They have it so much worse, you think, but still it’s something you already know, the intimacy of chaos.

  In London, I still kept track of stuff at home. Delauncey’s didn’t get the Belfast Telegraph, so I sometimes read the Irish Times. In between its own stories of soaring house prices and political scandals it reported Northern news like a form letter tersely mentioning the latest doings of a regrettably delinquent cousin.

  The day of Phyllis’s scheduled departure from Julie’s house was creeping nearer, and the Whartons had seemed okay with the notion of her visiting in exchange for a dollop more rent. As I boarded the packed bus home I decided to go to the travel agent’s in my break the following day and book her ticket. I found a cramped seat on the top deck, where the air smelled of damp woollen coats, and inched open my copy of the Irish Times. Two stories in, my eye fell on this:

  KILLING CONNECTED TO INTERNAL LOYALIST FEUD, POLICE SAY

  A man shot dead in the Sandy Row area of Belfast had close connections to loyalist paramilitaries, an RUC statement said yesterday. Witnesses said that Ronald ‘Rocky’ McGee, 28, was sitting in a parked car when he was approached on foot by two masked gunmen, one of whom fired several shots through the window of the driver’s seat, killing Mr McGee instantly. The men made their getaway in a nearby car which was later found burned out in a nearby estate. It is thought that the shooting is linked to an ongoing internal feud which has claimed several lives, beginning with the car bomb attack which killed Kenneth Bates, a father of two, in Bangor last January.

  McGee was unmarried and lived alone in the Village area of South Belfast: he had a seven-year-old son by a previous relationship who lives with his former partner.

  The victim’s Alsatian dog, which was in the back seat of the car, was unharmed after the attack.

  I read it twice. I was shocked, I admit. It was such a stark form of resolution, the fact of his death.

  I couldn’t deny the deluge of relief. If a desire for revenge had been warming in him regarding me or Phyllis it would never now get the chance to boil over. Just like that, a flick of fate from out of the blue, a wee tap from God’s finger, and I was rid of him.

  Except that it wasn’t out of the blue. His end just came flying in from another direction, one I hadn’t considered. I wasn’t the only player in his drama. He had been planning something, that night with Marty. Perhaps his intended targets had got to him first.

  I felt dizzy, as though the news had rushed too fast into my system. When I got off at the bus stop the glittering lights and sounds of the city seemed to swim and reel around me. I stumbled from the kerb to cross the road and a black cab gave a long, furious blast of its horn.

  I put my hand down deep into the pocket of my overcoat. McGee’s spare keys were still there, tucked into my wallet. I wondered had he ever noticed they were missing. Part of me was reluctant to let them go. It felt risky still to have them on me, though, so I pulled them out and dropped them down a nearby drain.

  That night, I woke up in bed in the dark and thought about what McGee had left behind. His legacy, if you want to call it that. A trail of misery, certainly. I was sure, without knowing the names of the victims, that he had been involved in murders. He left behind the grief of sundry relatives of the dead, the pain and death of Titch, the nagging ache in my bones, the braille of scars on my arms.

  There were only these stains to remember him by, and then slowly history would close back over him like the surface of a river over a drowned man.

  After his funeral he’d fade perhaps to a name on a gable wall, an incidental footnote in a history of the Troubles, an occasional nostalgic late-night mention from those fellow paramilitaries who still held him in their dubious esteem. The rain would fall down as it always did on the grey street where he had died and soon almost no one would think of him at all.

  He had believed in his violent vision of order, until somebody else’s version of it required him to be destroyed.

  He left behind him a small, empty, tidy house, with bills on the doormat and cans of lager still cooling in the fridge.

  He left behind him an Alsatian dog, to whom he had perhaps been sporadically kind. I was glad the dog was still alive.

  He left behind him a father, hard and mean of spirit, who had brought up his son in his own image and seen him crumble to dust.

  He left behind him a son, about whom I had not known, and a woman who maybe once felt something strong for him until the feeling grew complicated and sour.

  He left behind him me, damaged but not dead. I had managed to survive him now, and I supposed I would remember him.

  The second time I woke up, near to dawn, I thought about him at the age of seven when his mother went missing, and how he must have hunted for her every day like a hungry and abandoned pet, until finally he accepted she was never coming back.

  And then I thought about his own seven-year-old son, being told of his death, the child’s mouth falling open in surprise and his face turning pale as the telephone kept on and on ringing and the funeral preparations gathered force around him.

  The minute I had proved unable to kill McGee, he had begun to despise me all over again. He couldn’t comprehend the language of mercy or conscience, or even ordinary squeamishness. He only spoke the local dialect of power. I wondered what emotion he had felt in his car, in the few seconds between seeing the gunman and the emphatic arrival of the bullet. Had he perhaps thought, in that instant, that I was the gunman? The notion brought me an unexpected flicker of pleasure, followed by a jolt of shame.

  The next evening, about an hour after I got back from work, I heard the thin whine of the doorbell. From my room at the top of the house
I could hear Mrs Wharton answering it, and a muffled conversation before she called up the stairs for me: ‘Jacky, visitors!’ in a voice slightly breathless with excitement. No one ever visited me there. I came downstairs warily. I suppose I half thought, against all logic, that it might be something or someone linked to the business of McGee’s death.

  There Eve stood on the chilly doorstep, her pallor framed by the darkness, looking at me steadily but with some kind of suppressed nervous pleasure in her decision to come. I knew she was serious because she had Raymond with her, his hand linked tightly in hers, his greenish eyes also fixed expectantly on me.

  I stared at them both for a minute, frozen by the weight of joy that had descended on me, and then I opened my arms.

  Part Three

  24

  I flew back to Belfast for Murdie’s funeral, under grey skies baggy with the threat of rain. They had just renamed the City airport after George Best, and I couldn’t be sure whether it was because he was such a brilliant footballer or such a hopeless alcoholic, or both. In Belfast we have a weak spot for glittering wrecks. Steady, reliable success isn’t memorable enough for us.

  I took a taxi from the airport. Through the back-seat window I could see Samson and Goliath, the yellow Harland & Wolff gantry cranes, our two biblical giants looming over what was once the world’s biggest shipyard. The crowds massed along here in 1911 to watch the dazzling bulk of the Titanic slide on greased slipways from her building yard into the waters of Belfast Lough. Big Jacky’s granny was there as a young woman, he told me – she was always so nosey, he said, she’d turn up to the opening of a can of corned beef – and when she was old she used to tell him how it was such a scorcher for May that she got sunburned on the back of her neck, and everyone on the quayside waved hankies and hats in the air and roared with full-throated pride that Belfast had built this unforgettable ship.

  No one could have imagined on that blazing day that within the year disaster, not triumph, would hammer the ship’s name into history. But the thing is, who would talk about the Titanic today if she hadn’t sunk?

  When I arrived at the church, a little ahead of time, Phyllis was already in a pew, red-eyed and smart in her best navy coat. Mrs Murdie, never the biggest talker, hugged me for five seconds longer than she ever did before, resting her head lightly on my shoulder. Even Gavin was in evidence, stouter and less chatty, his natural windbaggery deflated by the gravity of the occasion. He greeted me with every appearance of deferentially controlled pleasure, in a long black coat with his hair neatly combed. He seemed to be making himself useful, having a prudent word with the funeral director, steering Mrs Murdie gently towards the next stage of proceedings. Not a bad oul stick, in the end.

  I did my bit: helped to shoulder the coffin from the church into the car for the crematorium, with the six of us – including Gavin and a solemn trio of Murdie’s nephews – sweating discreetly as we quietly struggled to adjust for our difference in heights without visibly buckling or letting Murdie slide. That’s the pallbearer’s job, to uphold the dignity of the occasion. It’s the last chance you ever get not to let someone down at a bad time.

  The coffin was surprisingly heavy. I wouldn’t have thought that dry wee man would carry such weight. Still, he did have weight for me: he looked out for me, always remaining alert to trouble coming my way, watching over me from a distance like a tough, chain-smoking guardian angel. Lung cancer finished him off almost as soon as the news leaked out that he had it, the final bill for all those years in bars breathing in the smoke from other people’s cigarettes and his own.

  He was the one who knew everything about my family, and when he was cremated a piece of my own history burned up along with him. It was just over ten years since he’d stood at the airport and solemnly waved me off to London. Now it was my turn to say goodbye. When I saw the curtains closing around the coffin – it happens so quickly, that final mechanical conjuring trick – I put my two hands over my face and wept.

  Soon after, I found out he had left me money in his will, a sum that he had carefully set to one side and grown over the years. The solicitor told me that Murdie had attached a note to it: ‘For Jacky, the son I never had, and in memory of his father, the best friend I ever had. To be spent on happiness and security. May your school never burn down.’

  I run a café now, partly started up with Murdie’s money. I would rather have had Murdie than the money, but I didn’t get the choice. I was managing Delauncey’s by that time, on a decent enough salary, but I knew the business well enough not to come a cropper on my own. I added Murdie’s cash to a bank loan and poured it into a coffee shop down a side street in Soho. I didn’t have any fantasies about floating about the place, graciously playing mine host. That’s where people usually come unstuck in this game: they have a certain image of themselves.

  The café’s been running for nine years, turning a good profit, enough to pay for the usual heart-stopping London mortgage on a bigger flat with high ceilings and a handkerchief of garden just off the Holloway Road. Your own place means security, everyone sagely repeated as I signed the forms, but security’s a maw that needs feeding. It turned out I had a keen instinct for business, maybe something that had passed down in the genes from Big Jacky: a knack for ordering the right stock, negotiating with suppliers, driving a hard bargain on prices but not being so stingy that they walked away or hated you. I knew how to defuse any residual tension with a joke, sensing what the customers wanted out of a place even before they could articulate it themselves.

  I keep an eye on the shifting choices people crave. There are fashions in coffees and pastries like everything else, and in London people always want a new thing to tell their friends about. I’m naturally a jumpy person, keenly aware of others and their multiple urgencies. London suits me, with her surging crowds and speeding Tube trains. I understand her song.

  A battered white statue of King Charles II stands in the middle of Soho Square, the patron saint of fun and decay. In the summer I check him out when I take a walk around there, and give him and his crumbling ruffles a wee nod. Now that I’m older, weighed down with necessary things to do, I respect fun more than ever: it’s a dwindling stock, grab it while you can. And I like this area, with its quaint seediness, the old dirt still doggedly whispering through the thick lick of new gloss.

  Behind the counter I work fast, collecting and returning cash, making the coffee quick and right. But when collective motion suddenly stalls on the shoulders of a single customer deliberating on a cake, bovine with indecision as a queue builds up all the way to the door, I can feel the tension bubbling in me. I start doing this little thing with my fingers, rubbing the tips of them back and forth very quickly. The thing is, though, you have to stay civilised here. You have to press the anger down and keep a tight lid on it.

  I’m the coffee expert at our place, the resident caffeinated snob. I grew up in tea country, the Belfast brew made hot and strong, always ready to soothe a place that lived on its nerves. You could have a coffee, sure – an instant one, usually, insipid and faintly bitter – but it wasn’t the national medicine that tea was. Coffee gave you the jitters, and we already had jitters coming out our ears. We medicated ourselves, swinging relentlessly between alcohol and tannin.

  Now, in London, I like coffee even more than tea: I seek out the jitters, packaged into strong little bursts throughout the day. Short, sharp shots. I know about the countries it comes from, the beans, the roast, the grinding process; enough, at least, to satisfy anyone who wants to have that conversation at length, and it seems quite a lot of people do. Customers want to be subtly flattered on their discernment. I buy therefore I am. From their footwear to their lunchtime sandwich, they are the sum of their choices. Who am I to sneer at that? It’s what they have left, now that for so many of them God’s a busted flush and a family is either falling apart or yet to be acquired.

  I can play that game if they need me to. From the way I talk – fluent and considered – I can
seem to care more about it than I really do. That’s not to say I don’t care at all.

  Still, something’s changing here. I can feel it in the air, even while I open the curtains and bat the thought away each morning. The beast that circles the shadow of the campfire is dragging closer. I know its smell. When I first moved to London I felt lighter, carefree. Just then, it was a place that was gradually getting clean of fear, not counting the restless electricity that haunts any city, that stirs and flashes in gang fights and criminality. But the old IRA terror, the fractious marriage of nationalism and Marxism, was fading away.

  Then this new terror began, a fresh zeal jerking into life in fits and starts, hijacking the name of Allah. It’s gradually hitting its stride now, mouthing fire and destruction on the Internet, trailing a metal stick across the railings and wakening up all the pale thugs on the other side. Yoo-hoo. We hear on the news now and then that the country is on high alert in expectation of an attack, even while our own thoughts slip quietly back to work and what’s for dinner. Sometimes when I walk down Oxford Street I wonder to myself what it would be like if someone opened fire, which object I might choose to crouch behind.

  Twenty years ago, leaving Belfast for London felt like saying goodbye to a mesmerising nutcase and going to live with someone calmer who knew how to hold down a job and keep her flat clean. London relaxed me: you could float at ease in its great mix of people, its cooling civility. Now I’m not so sure. Sanity is drawing down the blinds, mania is on the march.

  What does the new terror want from us? More than a broad green slice of land, soaked in rainwater and bitter longing. It wants everything, so much it can’t even explain. More than anything, it wants the pleasure of watching the rest of us in fear and flailing confusion, ripping up the best of ourselves.

  I have something else to worry about now besides myself: a family, the nuclear proliferation of anxieties. People talk about love in quantities. ‘How much do you love her?’ they ask, as though it is always the same product in differently sized containers. They never talk about its shapes and distillations, selfish or self-sacrificing, all the wily forms in which it can present itself.