I brought the spoon towards his mouth and it duly opened and received the gloop. I noticed that my hand was trembling a little. Some of the yoghurt slipped out of the side of his mouth and I quickly rounded it all up with the spoon and scraped it back in.
Then I leaned towards him just as he swallowed and said, in a low voice but very clearly, ‘What happened to your wife?’
His gaze stayed on me, a hard, uncomprehending grey-blue stare surrounded by rheumy, reddened lids. I locked eyes with him and said it again: ‘What did you do with your wife?’
Not a flicker. Nobody home.
I delved for another spoonful, a deep, full one this time, and brought it back towards his opening mouth. The spoon landed and dropped off a significant deposit.
‘I know your game,’ I said, close up and deliberately. The belligerent assertion felt pointless and crass, hanging unacknowledged in the air.
I tried for one last time: ‘Your wife. Where did she go?’
A brief pause. Then he shot the accumulated yoghurt back out of his mouth with sudden force, spraying it all over my face and jacket. The splattering took me by surprise. I recoiled sharply and was glaring at him when the carer suddenly walked back in.
‘Och dear!’ she said, ‘I should have warned you. He does that every now and then. You can never predict.’
She extracted a wet wipe from a nearby tub and began fussing, dabbing at my jacket. I took it off her, gently: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it.’ I was still shaken. The clean-up gave me something to do.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Helping becomes a bit of a habit in here.’ She looked regretfully at the half-finished yoghurt. ‘Do you want to give it another go?’
‘Ah no,’ I said, ‘I think I’ll leave it to the professionals.’
I looked around the room. A large framed colour photograph of old McGee and his sons was on the windowsill. He was there in the centre, his heavy arms placed paternally around the shoulders of his two grown boys. They were all smiling, dressed in grey suits as if for a wedding, and Rocky’s collar was open with his wee dagger necklace on show. Someone from the family had brought this picture up to the home and stationed it there as permanent evidence of familial affection, indelible testimony to normality. At some point far in the future, perhaps, this image might harden into undisputed fact.
She saw me looking.
‘Him with his two boys,’ she said. ‘So sad. Don’t they all look handsome there. The younger one was killed a good few years ago. Terrible. Did you know him at all?’
‘Just to see around,’ I said, ‘I remember seeing him around.’
‘Such a pity.’
The silence between us on the matter widened. After a while she realised I wasn’t going to try and close it. Neither of us could think of anything more to say.
‘I think I’ll head on out now. It was good just to drop in and see him.’
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a wee cup of tea and a biscuit?’
‘Och no, I’ll let you get on with it. Thanks.’
He turned his head towards me suddenly as I left, and for a second I could have kidded myself that something in his eyes knew me. Trick of the light. The spoon was already back hovering dutifully at his mouth. I walked downstairs and into the reception area. There was a special code you had to press into a keypad to get out and it took me a wee while to get the hang of it. The weather had turned and when the door finally opened the cool drizzle on my face felt like a blessing.
Before I flew back to London I took the bus up to visit Titch’s grave in Roselawn cemetery in Belfast. Once I got off I had to walk for a while around the tidy boulevards of the dead before I found it, but in the end there it was. The black lettering on the mottled granite still looked sharp and fresh. It spelled out his too-short years and his full name, Rodney James Bell. No Titch – that was his joke name, and his ma wouldn’t let him die a joke. The grave was well tended, with a pot plant flowering in front of it. She still fusses after him, keeping him right even now.
That’s the legacy of it all, I thought, the long wound that cuts across the given and the stolen days: the noted but uncelebrated birthdays, the full past and the empty future. For those like Titch’s mum, who are left behind, the skin never knits together in quite the same way again.
I took along some yellow flowers and a tall jar and a packet of Jammie Dodgers and I sat next to the grave and tore into the biscuits just like we used to. One biscuit for me, one for him, with his set down just next to the plant.
I ate mine slowly, crumbling it dry and sweet in my mouth and listening to the scraps of birdsong that laced the air. And I thought about the years that had passed and how everything had changed.
After a while, I got up and arranged the flowers in the jar and left them there for him like a patch of tethered sunlight. I left them there for him, and all the others.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to my agent Peter Straus for his wisdom and invaluable encouragement; my editor Nicholas Pearson, a beacon of reassurance; and all those who helped to bring this book into being, in particular Lottie Fyfe, Fran Fabriczki, Beth Humphries, Jordan Mulligan, Matt Clacher, Naomi Mantin, Matthew Turner and Jack Smyth. Thanks, too, to Rosemary Davidson, Nigel Farndale, Mark Law, Tristan Kendrick, Mark Jagasia, John Thornley, Andrea Tumelty, Karen McCartney and Sara McCartney for their generosity with time and advice; the memory of Ed Victor, whose belief in my writing first got this book started; and my beloved husband and patient listener Rajeev Syal.
My enduring gratitude also goes to those individuals from all communities in Northern Ireland who – during the bleakest days of the Troubles and beyond – refused to accept cruelty as our normality.
About the Author
Jenny McCartney grew up in Northern Ireland and lives in London, where she works as a writer and reviewer for a variety of national publications. The Ghost Factory is her first novel.
About the Publisher
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