The Ghost Factory Read online

  Copyright

  4th Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.4thEstate.co.uk

  This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

  Copyright © Jenny McCartney 2019

  Cover design by Jack Smythe

  Jenny McCartney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ‘634–5789’ (recorded by Otis Redding), by Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd (1967).

  W. H. Auden: ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ (1938), in Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 (Faber and Faber, London, 1966).

  ‘Walkin’ after Midnight’ (sung by Patsy Cline), by Alan Block and Don Hecht (1954).

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008295493

  Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008295523

  Version: 2019-02-11

  Dedication

  For my parents

  Epigraph

  One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—

  One need not be a House—

  The Brain has Corridors—surpassing

  Material Place—

  Emily Dickinson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Part Two

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Part Three

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  1

  Belfast, 1995

  I grew up in a rainy city, walled in by dark hills, where people were divided by size. We came in one of two sizes: big or wee, with no real words for those who fitted somewhere in between.

  Mostly the reason for a fella’s nickname – Big Paul, say, or Wee Sammy – was staring you in the face, or the chest. But sometimes strangers were puzzled when they heard some great lump, with arms on him like two concrete bollards, being spoken of as Wee Jimmy.

  The explanation was simple: he was obviously the son of a Big Jimmy, and had contracted the term ‘wee’ early, from the pressing need to distinguish the child from the father. Although he had long burst out of his wee name it clung to him as he surged through life, a stubborn barnacle on the side of the Titanic.

  I was once Wee Jacky. But when Big Jacky, my father, collapsed on the street one day, his hand flapping towards the astonishing pain in his heart, the need for my title ebbed away on the pavement. I became just Jacky, because I was now the only Jacky.

  Then there was my friend Titch. His name belonged to the third and rarest category: he was so enormous, but so unthreatening, that his bulk could safely be referred to in ironic terms. So he was dubbed Titch, a miniature word synonymous with a small perspective on life.

  The clash between Titch’s name and his appearance made strangers laugh. From the moment of introduction, he was a walking contradiction, an ambulatory joke. But he turned out to be no joke for me. That big soft eejit, and what he stumbled into, was the trigger for the whole nasty business that swallowed me up like a wet bog.

  I grew up in Belfast: my beloved city, baptised in tea and drizzle, sprinkled with vinegar-sodden chips and cigarette butts. You turned off the Lisburn Road, with its smattering of boutiques and cosy coffee shops, and just kept walking over the metal footbridge until at last you made it to our battered grid of streets with its two-up, two-down terraced houses crammed together in different shades of brick, paint or pebbledash. Every so often there was a derelict one with boarded-up windows, dismal as an eyeless face. And there I was, walking down Lucan Street towards the house where Titch lived with his mother.

  It was the best time of the day for me: the fading hour when a long summer evening tips into the night, and mothers come to their doors to reel their grumbling children back in from patchy football games on scrubby grass. One of them was sitting on the brick wall near the waste ground as I walked past, scuffing his heels on the graffiti. He yelled after me in his reedy voice: ‘Mister, lend us a quid would you?’ I would have walked on, but there was something about the pally delicacy of his lend that made me laugh, the wily pretence that I had a hope in hell of ever getting it back.

  I turned round to look at him. He was slouched up there, about eleven years old, puffing on a cigarette and screwing up his eyes like a bad imitation of James Dean. He wouldn’t have known who James Dean was, of course: he thought he had made up the squint himself. He had a ratty skinhead and one of those childish old man’s faces, the fine skin stretched over the sharp bones a bit too tightly for someone so young.

  ‘What would you do with a quid,’ I asked him. ‘Go and buy yourself some more fags?’

  ‘Sure a quid wouldn’t buy me a whole packet anyway,’ he answered, quick as a ferret.

  ‘At the corner shop, they sell them as singles,’ I said. A second’s pause. The wee dervish knew I had him on the hop.

  ‘I was gonna get a bag of chips,’ he countered, sliding his eyes away in expectation of defeat. I handed him the coin: ‘Don’t be spending it all in the one shop.’

  He grinned, a sudden flash of pure joy, and faked falling off the wall in amazement as payment. I watched him saunter down the road to the chippy, trying to flick his fag-end into the gutter like a practised smoker. In about a month’s time, he’d have it just right.

  The moment sticks in my mind: his dwindling, cocky figure in the grey light. It was the last time that things in my life seemed clean, the smiling photograph snapped minutes before the car crashes. Seconds after I walked into Titch’s house I could smell the first cracklings of trouble, like something softly burning in another room.

  The years had dealt Titch’s mother a few thumping blows, and you could see their impact in the depressed sag of her shoulders. She was like a sofa that too many people had sat on, and the heaviest arse was Titch’s dad, a salesman and raconteur who drank up the housekeeping money, and then the rent money, and then buggered off to leave her precarious and alone with Titch, her hulking, simple-natured son with a penchant for stealing things from shops. Titch’s dad had since shacked up with a hairdresser from Omagh, by whom he had two more children in quick succession. He sent Titch occasional birthday cards with a fiver or tenner tucked inside, and the scrawled words ‘From Your Dad’ beneath the glaringly false inscription To The World’s Greatest Son.

  When Titch was younger he hoarded all his dad’s cards from year to year and used to pore over them sentimentally. Then one year the dad’s card arrived ten days late, bearing the gold-piped legend Happy Birthday Son, and i
n his furious disappointment Titch threw the entire carefully saved stack on the fire. Now he filleted the money wearing a bored, sulky expression, plump fingers rustling speedily inside the envelope, and threw the card into the bin without even reading the message. At least, that’s what I had seen him do, but it might have been for effect. I bet he fished it back out and had a proper look at it later.

  There was a kind of sweetness running through Titch’s mum: she wasn’t a whinger. She never hinted that God had dealt her a bad hand. She had dealt it to herself, she said, the day she first saw Titch’s dad relating a joke in a smoke-filled city centre bar, with his gleeful face shining as he approached the punchline, and the men crowding round him already in stitches at the way he was telling it. She should have seen he was a bad egg from the word go, she said, but then again that might have been why she had liked him. Maybe the whiff of sulphur had attracted her.

  I knocked twice: the front door opened, more slowly than usual.

  ‘Ah hello, Jacky,’ she said. The day’s worries had seeped into her voice.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked, hanging my jacket in the narrow hall. She ushered me into the front room and nodded towards Titch’s bedroom.

  ‘He got into bother at McGee’s shop. The old man caught him taking a packet of biscuits he hadn’t paid for and there was a bit of a row, I think.’

  She watched me warily, the hazel eyes waiting for a definitive reply.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. It was worse than she knew. I had heard that the McGees were hardmen, heavily involved. The older McGee was a nasty piece of work: rancid with an unnamed resentment, quick to anger and loath to forget any slight. He hung about in a couple of local drinking clubs with a guy called McMullen, who had a pot belly and weaselly eyes, and who was said to have killed at least three people himself. I didn’t know if he had or not, but bad rumours clung to him.

  There was no missus on the scene. People whispered that oul McGee’s wife had abandoned the family and Northern Ireland years ago, when her two boys were young, never to return. This was a maternal crime alluded to only in hushed voices, although I heard Titch’s mum say once – as though uttering a small heresy – that she was a good-looking woman and the only one in that family with a civil tongue in her head. For most people, though, the wife’s flight had given her husband a reason for the drop of arsenic in his soul.

  From what I remembered, McGee’s grown son now called round after work twice a week to take him to a drinking club where he stayed until the small hours, diligently feeding the next day’s irritable mood with copious amounts of spirits. The son lived a few streets away from me. He had an Alsatian dog tied up in his back yard that growled if it heard anyone walking past.

  As a shopkeeper, the da maintained a testy politeness with his regular customers, but he wouldn’t take kindly to some fat chancer just wandering in for a free packet of chocolate bourbons.

  ‘What exactly happened?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. You go and speak to him. I can’t get any more out of him.’

  I started walking up the stairs towards Titch’s room. Titch was lying on his long-suffering bed, ostentatiously scrutinising one of his mother’s very old Hello! magazines. He had heard me come into the house long ago, which is why any moment now he would affect a sudden surprise at my appearance.

  Titch. Physique: overweight, shambolic, implicitly threatening the trembling frame of his single bed. Eyes: pale blue, currently glued with manufactured attention to a picture of Ivana Trump. Mood today: laconic, with a strong undercurrent of surly defiance. His left hand dangled speculatively above a half-open packet of Jacob’s Custard Creams, like one of those mechanical claws you try to pick up prizes with at fairgrounds.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘Is that a tacit acknowledgement of my presence, or are you just rehearsing aloud the title of your reading matter?’ I said. I liked talking this way to Titch.

  ‘What?’ he said. You had to hand it to Titch, he was a genius of repartee. He was a lord of language, drunk on the endless permutations of the spoken word.

  ‘You’re a lord of language,’ I said.

  ‘Bugger off, Jacky,’ he said, mildly. He shifted slightly: the bed frame winced and shivered. I could see he was working up to some tremendous pronouncement. ‘How do you think that Trumpy woman gets her hair to stay like that?’

  That did it. I went over and pulled his head round to face mine. The pale blue eyes carried a look of resentful surprise.

  ‘Listen, you big eejit,’ I hissed. ‘Never mind Ivana fucking Trump’s hairdo. What did you do today in McGee’s shop?’

  The eyes widened slightly in recognition, and then floated lazily away from mine. ‘The old man caught me taking a packet of Jaffa Cakes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take them from Hackett’s? At least your ma settles up with them at the end of the week.’

  ‘Hackett’s was closed.’

  There you have it: Titch’s immortal logic. Hackett’s shop, his usual stomping ground, was closed. So what did he do? He took himself over to McGee’s, and straight into a row with a muscular wee psycho.

  ‘So what did he say when he caught you with the biscuits?’

  Titch sighed. He wanted me to go away now, but he could see there was no dodging the question.

  ‘Oul McGee saw me putting them inside my coat, and he came over. He said “What do you think you’re doing you thieving bastard?” I s-said I was going to pay for them. He was squeezing my arm till it hurt, Jacky, and he said ‘You were not, you big fat bastard.’ And he kept on squeezing.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘He was hurting my arm, Jacky, so I told him to f-f-fuck off and gave him a push. He skidded and went flying into his tins of tomato soup.’

  In the midst of his self-righteous distress, Titch’s shoulders began to heave with laughter at the memory.

  ‘Did he fall down? Did anyone see?’

  ‘Aye, he fell down with all the tins rattling round him. There was no one else in the shop but them two oul Maguire sisters. They were letting on they were shocked, but I saw one of them laughing into her coat collar.’

  I sat on the chair beside his bed and stared at him, hard. He looked back at me, guiltily, but still with that little smile twitching somewhere beneath his smooth, pasty skin. I knew he was secretly freeze-framing the image of old McGee toppling backwards in furious disbelief, his arms and legs waggling comically as the soup tins clattered around him. Titch was savouring that moment like a mouthful of stolen Jaffa Cakes.

  ‘It’s not as funny as you think. You know your aunt in Newry,’ I said. ‘If I were you, I’d go and stay with her for a while.’

  His mind slowly wheeled round to face this new and unwelcome proposition. The mouth made a brief ‘O’ of apprehension.

  ‘I don’t like that aunt. She’s always nagging me and she never gives me enough to eat. Why?’ he said.

  ‘Because you knocked down old McGee and made him look stupid,’ I shouted. ‘And McGee’s son is apparently well connected. So the next time you go dandering down the street, looking for new biscuits to stuff into your fat face, you’re liable to get a severe hammering. You think that it hurt when McGee squeezed your arm. It’ll be nothing compared to this: you won’t be able to walk right for a year.’

  ‘Aw Jacky, they would never do anything about that. I only gave him a wee push.’ He picked up his Hello! magazine again, stubbornly. ‘And I gave him his Jaffa Cakes back.’

  There was no talking to him. Sometimes Titch reminded me of a vast, impenetrable animal: a whale maybe, drifting through yesterday and today, in some unreachable element of his own. Warnings bounced off him. He swam around in the blue water of his mother’s love, and the harsher currents of my affection. He couldn’t understand that something entirely different, something much darker and nastier, might be waiting out there for him.

  I could warn him about getting a hammering, all right. I could also warn him
about the grave possibility of a Martian invasion in ten years’ time. It was all part of the meaningless, potential Future: all one and the same to Titch. Defeated, I took one of his custard creams. He looked up: ‘Hey Jacky don’t be eating all my biscuits. I’ve only got twelve left.’ He was trying, clumsily, to charm me out of my mysterious bad mood. I got up to leave: ‘Don’t be looking for women in those gossip mags: you’ll end up with an ex-wife who takes you to the cleaners for your Hobnobs.’

  His mother was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, an unravelling parcel of nerves. I told her: ‘He knocked old McGee over. I’d get him up to your sister’s in Newry if I were you.’

  She was on the verge of tears: ‘There’s no way he’ll agree to go.’

  In the days that followed, I pushed the business about Titch to the back of my mind like a stack of unpaid bills. Titch wouldn’t go to Newry, and I was in no position to kidnap twenty stone of struggling biscuit-snatcher and take him up there by myself. And it wasn’t just Titch, there was something else, too. No one ever really believes in something bad until it happens. Not even the one who predicts it.

  2

  At the time Titch nicked the Jaffa Cakes the armed gangs in Northern Ireland had been fighting for over twenty-five years, and they had only recently grown weary of it. They had differing aspirations for our little state of six counties and one and a half million people. The IRA wanted a united Ireland, while the Loyalist UVF and the UDA preferred us to stay part of the United Kingdom. They had formerly reached consensus on one thing, though, which was that the best way to persuade ordinary folk on the other side of the sincerity of your argument was to build a large stack of their corpses and promise more of the same until your demands were secured.

  We called our situation the Troubles, and the longer it had dragged on the more fitting that genteel euphemism became. The murdering was sporadic but fully expected, like some recurrent, rumbling agony in your unmentionables. The populace soldiered on through it, mainly keeping their heads down and quietly hoping that splashes of terror didn’t land on or near them. In between shootings and bombs there were businesses to be run and children to be raised. Things didn’t fall apart, quite. They kept on, but more painfully.