The Ghost Factory Read online

  ‘Took a couple of Crunchie bars once from Hackett’s, when Mrs Hackett was away in the back getting newspapers. And a Walnut Whip, a few times.’

  I thought of poor old Mrs Hackett, carefully exploring the familiar confines of her shop like some ponderous old turtle in a crumbling tank. It was almost impossible to imagine her young. She looked as if she had been born with a granny perm. I pictured the doctor saying to Mrs Hackett’s mother, ‘Congratulations. You have a lovely baby girl,’ and both of them looking down fondly at Mrs Hackett’s tiny wizened face, framed with the hollow sausages of grey-beige hair.

  God help her, anyway, when even eleven-year-olds saw her for a soft touch. And God help Titch, when even an eleven-year-old knew to take things from Hackett’s, and not McGee’s.

  ‘You shouldn’t steal from Mrs Hackett,’ I said. ‘She has trouble with her arthritis, and she’s always nice to the customers, even wee headcases like you.’

  ‘Aye she is,’ he conceded. ‘She gave me an ice lolly once when I told her it was my birthday.’

  ‘See?’ Something struck me: ‘Was it your birthday?’

  ‘No.’

  He dug his paw in for some more chips.

  A pause.

  ‘The thing about telling lies to people,’ I said, slowly, ‘Is that one day they find out you’ve been lying. And when they do, they don’t like you as much as they did before.’

  ‘Mrs Hackett never liked me that much anyway,’ he said. ‘Think she knew about the Walnut Whips.’

  There wasn’t really much I could say to that: it had the probable advantage of being true. I got down off the wall, and passed the rest of my chips over to him: ‘You finish them. I don’t want any more.’ He sat watching me as I walked back up the street. As I turned the corner I saw him squinting into the greasy paper, diligently hunting out the best bits, the crunchy pieces of fried potato that lurk around the sodden corners of the bag.

  When Big Jacky died, Aunt Mary and Aunt Phyllis made a pilgrimage to Belfast to sort out the funeral. They took charge of all the phone calls to friends and family, such as there were. I could hear every word they said as I lay in my room, looking at the shadows the lamp cast on the ceiling. (Yes. An awful shock. Quite sudden. Just passed away right there on the street. Still, at least he didn’t suffer for too long. Thank you. You know how much we appreciate it. Him? Oh, taking it very hard, you know, can’t get too much out of him as usual.)

  They put the death notice in the Belfast Telegraph. Aunt Mary wanted a poem, but Aunt Phyllis thought not. I thought not, too. God knows what doggerel the pair of them would have come up with.

  They held lengthy, respectful consultations on coffins and services with Mr Gascoigne, the undertaker. They mulled over flowers. Fine choices were sifted and weighed. The Porchester (handsome oak, satin-lined) or the Wellington (slightly more accommodating, less costly wood)? They could have mummified him in newspaper, tied him up with brown string and lowered him into the Lagan, for all I cared. All I knew was that he was gone for good. I didn’t say that, of course. I dug up an empty opinion. On balance, the Porchester, I said.

  The aunts annexed the kitchen with the speed of two peacetime generals suddenly placed in charge of a military campaign. Odd, I thought, that it took a death to bring them fully to life. They churned out doilied plates of tray-bakes and delicate, pan-loaf ham sandwiches carved into tiny triangles. They went shopping for teabags, milk, sherry, whiskey, beer: the full equipment for the perfect funeral. I should have been grateful. God knows I couldn’t have done it by myself. And yet I wasn’t, particularly. I thought I could smell a faint triumph buried somewhere in their help, the way a dog can sniff out a bone deep in a dustbin.

  Sam dug himself out of his sofa, prised his hand off the remote, came up for the day to commiserate, and motored sedately back to Carrickfergus that night. The aunts stayed over. It was like a terrible dream played out in slow motion, and this time there was no waking up. I didn’t want to stand there after the burial in my Sunday suit as the kind, creased faces came up one by one and said: ‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Jacky. He was a great man.’ I wanted to haul myself off into waste ground and howl like a wolf, dash my head against the wall until my forehead poured with blood. Anything to distract me from the pain coming from the void deep in my chest, the small hollow the size of the universe where Big Jacky had been.

  Titch and his mother came to the house: he was in his Sunday suit, too, but it fitted even worse than mine. The too-short sleeves exposed his bluey-white, plump wrists. His mum was running around helping, but Titch stood in the corner at a loss for what to do and ate nearly two plates of sandwiches. I saw jowly Aunt Mary shooting him a glance of distilled venom as he started in on the tray-bakes: it was the only thing that made me smile all day. Before he left, he came up and said to me in a rush, ‘I’m very sorry, Jacky. I liked Big Jacky an awful lot.’ I knew he meant ‘loved’. His anxious face was pale and clammy with sweat.

  I told him: ‘He really liked you too.’

  The ambush came the day after the funeral. I was sitting in the kitchen on a hard wooden chair, drinking lukewarm tea and watching a shaft of sunlight falling through the window. I was counting the minutes, waiting for the aunts to go home. They would say: ‘Will you be all right?’ and I’d say graciously, ‘Yes. I’ll be fine. Thanks for everything. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.’ And then I’d wave them off and go upstairs and lie on Big Jacky’s bed and stare at the ceiling and think about him quietly as the light faded and darkness slowly filled the room like black ink pouring into water.

  I might go and get one of his shirts out of the cupboard, with the pipe-smoke smell of him still on it, and put it on the pillow beside my head and just lie there a while thinking about the things we did together over the years. I wanted to remember him taking me to the Botanic Gardens when I was younger, and both of us standing silently in the hothouse watching the big, leathery water lilies floating in the pond.

  But it didn’t happen like that. Suddenly the two aunts padded into the kitchen with manifest intent, a pair of soft-soled missionaries circling a recalcitrant native. Aunt Mary had her coat on, I noted. Aunt Phyllis, ominously, didn’t.

  Mary broached the subject first: ‘We were thinking it might be better if Phyllis stayed here for a little while, and helped you get back on your feet. She could help out at the newsagent’s too, until you sorted something else out.’

  The newsagent’s: I hadn’t even thought of that. It had been closed since Big Jacky died.

  Aunt Phyllis was looking at me, expectantly. I stared back at her, wild-eyed. I was appalled. Every fibre of me was screaming no, no, no, this mustn’t happen. I made a flailing effort to push their fait accompli away: ‘Oh you don’t need to do that, Aunt Phyllis. I’ll be fine here, sorting things out on my own. Please don’t put yourself to that trouble, honestly the two of you have done enough already. More than enough.’

  Mary struck a firmer tone, her cheeks puffing out with confident authority: ‘No, really, Jacky. We are certain it would be best.’

  You big bloodhound, I thought, fuck off and sniff round someone else. It was a dirty trick, to mob someone the day after their own father’s funeral. My heart was pounding with the injustice of it.

  ‘I’ll be fine, honestly,’ I said.

  I looked again at Phyllis, at the worn, expectant face, the tightly permed hair, the fussy wee cardigan with the careful bow tied at the front. It was a miserable enough life she had up there in Carrickfergus with Mary and her husband, and Mary queening it over her. I was her bid for independence, the last raft drifting past on an isolated river. She was clambering aboard me with a horrible tenacity: didn’t she realise she would sink us both? No, no. I struggled to fight off the pity. Pity makes weaklings of us all.

  Phyllis said: ‘It would only be till you got yourself set up again, Jacky.’ No, no. Mary chipped in quickly with: ‘You can’t be expected to manage here on your own like this. Phyllis can sort things out
around the house.’

  A brief stab of utter hatred, followed by a little flood of guilt. They had me now. I was sliding underwater.

  I looked at Phyllis, and said: ‘Just till I get myself sorted then. That would be kind of you.’

  Phyllis smiled. Mary remembered there were some more of Phyllis’s things in the car, and bustled out to fetch them.

  Tick-tock. Tick-tock. That night Phyllis moved herself into Big Jacky’s room, so I couldn’t very well go in there and lie down, as I had planned, unless I wanted to give her a heart attack as well. I lay in my own bed, seething.

  Tick-tock. Tick-tock. The bathroom had quickly filled up with Phyllis’s bits and pieces, her aspirin and cuticle scrapers. Towelettes and hairnets, Q-tips and denture grip. Like the Dana song: all kinds of everything remind me of you.

  Tick-tock. How about if I plastered my face in Phyllis’s Pond’s cream, backcombed my hair to stand up like a fright wig, wrapped my sheet around me like a toga, and walked into Big Jacky’s room saying, ‘Phyllis, get up. It’s exactly this time every night that we slaughter the cat’? She’d leg it all the way back to Carrickfergus in her long nightie, squealing like a stuck pig.

  Tick-tock. Or, still with the face cream on, but in a voluminous nightdress to look like my mother, whispering, ‘It’s Grace, your dead sister. Leave wee Jacky alone, he’s mine, after all, not yours.’ But that would be a wicked thing to do. Big Jacky would be ashamed. I pictured him up there, looking down at me and smoking the pipe, slowly shaking his head in grave disappointment. ‘Don’t torment Phyllis,’ he would say. ‘She’s not a bad soul.’

  Tick-tock. I could just about hear her snoring. Does that mean, if she woke up, she could just about hear me crying?

  Tick-tock. The starlings singing, puffed up with the importance of the morning, balancing on the telegraph wire with their gnarled little feet. The grey dawn creeping through the fine curtain. The piglet oink and whistle of Phyllis snoring. Me wide awake.

  And all of that was just one night.

  4

  ‘Your big mate got a beating last night.’ There was a mixture of fear and excitement in Marty’s voice as he ran up next to me: fear at the darkness of what had happened, excitement at the size of his news.

  It was a lead weight casually pitched into the bowl of bad soup already swaying in my stomach.

  ‘Which mate?’ I said. I didn’t need to ask.

  ‘Your big dopey mate, Titch you said his name was.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I heard the shouting in the night. Four fellas with balaclavas on pulled him out of his house, I seen them out my window. They yanked him out over towards the waste ground, and I couldn’t see, but I seen the one left behind pushing his ma back into the house. She was screaming too. The ambulance came later.’

  How much later? I thought. They had got organised and cocky about the beatings now. I had heard that they dialled the ambulance themselves before they gave someone a doing. I wondered what they’d hit him with. I hoped to God it wasn’t the planks of wood with rusty nails in it. The last boy that got that had infections and was in the Royal for weeks.

  I could picture him there, flailing around, a clumsy bear prodded with hot pokers. It made me wince even to imagine it.

  ‘Thanks for telling me,’ I told Marty. He nodded abruptly and sauntered off down the street.

  Round the corner, the birds throatily singing, the children squabbling over the football like seagulls with a piece of bread. Everything was just the same and everything was different.

  Titch’s house had brown cardboard tacked over the frame of the living-room window, where the glass had been. The red paint was coiling back from the dents in the front door, where boots had kicked it in. This was now the bad-luck house, singled out from all the houses in the street. The plague house.

  I knocked. The door stayed shut. I knocked again. Nothing. I looked towards the window. As I stared at it, I saw the bottom edge of the cardboard peeling inwards: an eye was staring at me through the small triangle of space. Titch’s mum’s eye. My two eyes looked back into her single eye.

  ‘Let me in,’ I whispered.

  A few seconds later the front door opened. I went into the hall and looked at her face. My God, she had aged twenty years in a night. Her swollen eyelids looked as though they had been scrubbed with the pan scourer. I went into the living room and sat down. ‘What happened?’

  ‘They came at about three in the morning. I ran downstairs when I heard them kicking in the door and they said where was Titch? I said he was at his aunt’s in Newry and one of them said “You’re effing lying you oul bitch” and two of them pushed me to one side and went upstairs to find him.’

  She was crying now, pulling in the air with big, hungry gulps, her hands dipping and soaring. The words choked her as they came out.

  ‘And then they dragged him out of bed and down the stairs. He didn’t know what was happening and he kept shouting for me. Pulled him out the door and I tried to follow but one of them pushed me back and said “You stay out of it.” The same fella cut the phone and threw it out the front window, and then he said, “You effing stay in here. I’ll be in the hall and if you try to get out I’ll sort you out too and make sure he gets a worse one.”’

  ‘Where’s Titch now?’

  ‘Upstairs, lying in his room. He wouldn’t stay in hospital so eventually they let him home. When I brought him back from the hospital the only thing he said was “Don’t let anyone in.” He’s got a broken arm, a fracture in his leg and his face is all swollen up. The doctor said it was with baseball bats. He’s pushed his desk against the door of his room.’

  ‘I’ll leave him alone today then,’ I said. ‘Maybe call in on him tomorrow.’ I bent to give her an awkward kiss on the cheek. She wasn’t expecting it. It wasn’t our usual parting gesture. Her head was bowed and hot, the cheek damp and stiff, crusted with a layer of dried tears. I walked out on to the street.

  I took a few steps. Then something made me look back up to Titch’s bedroom window. I hadn’t expected to see anything, I don’t even know what made me turn round. But what I did see nearly stopped my heart: a swollen, malevolent thing looking back at me, standing in the space made by a tugged-aside curtain. It took me a second to realise that it was Titch. His head seemed monstrous, the eyes shrunk to sunken currants, the face a blackened, purple mass of bruises.

  Those watching eyes, I knew, had soaked up all the horror on my face. I stopped and raised a hand to him from the street. After what seemed a long time, one bandaged hand rose slowly in reply. I turned back then and kept on walking.

  As I walked, I was trying to think what he had reminded me of. Something from childhood. The lonely monster, shut up in a tower. That, but something else too. Then I got it. When I was younger, we used to play with a kit called ‘Mr Potato Head’. You took an old potato, and stuck plastic eyes and a nose and stringy hair on it, and turned it into a bit of a character. For a couple of hours you’d prop him up in fruit bowls and push him around in empty egg cartons. But then you would go on to something else and forget about it, and two weeks later you’d find oul Mr Potato Head lying somewhere behind the bin, with his head turning all purple and yellow, and accidental eyes sprouting out of him.

  So that’s what they’d done to Titch. Except he had felt and heard it all: every kick, every spike, every burning word. And he wouldn’t have understood why this evil had fallen upon him. For a packet of biscuits? Dumped by the bins to bloat and rot, my best mate, Mr Potato Head.

  I couldn’t go back home. There would be too much chat out of Phyllis. By the time I usually came in Phyllis was always hungry for my presence, even though it was invariably unsatisfactory. She yearned for gossip and confidences. I found myself unable to provide these things. She could have wolfed down a six-course banquet of discussion, and I was only capable of passing her the occasional bruised windfall.

  Sometimes I would struggle to do my best, courteously as
sembling snippets from here and there, but I couldn’t tonight. How could I hand over the happenings of the day? ‘Four men in balaclavas came round to Titch’s house last night, dragged him on to waste ground and gave him a terrible beating. Could you change over to BBC 2, I think the snooker’s on?’

  But it wouldn’t be left at that. The story would make too big an impact. You can’t drop a boulder into the centre of a still lake and not expect to create some ripples. There would be a silence – not a dead silence, but a busy one, building to a gush of who, what, why, where, when, and now what will happen? And I knew the answer to most of these things, and yet had no heart to begin explaining any of it to Phyllis or even to myself. None whatsoever. An immense weariness came over me: it would have been very good to curl up in a dark corner away from it all, and sleep for a thousand years.

  I started the walk into town, moving through the fine rain, the shining, shifting curtain of small falling needles. Nowhere does drizzle like Belfast. It’s our speciality. We should parcel it up and export it to the Saudis. They’re gasping for it, by all accounts.

  5

  Drink. The clatter of laughter, and raw shouts, and mists of smoke rising from wood-panelled cabins. Light filtered through stained glass. I was in the Crown Bar, Belfast, ornamented Victorian gin palace and liquor saloon: a doughty old coquette who had her fancy windows shattered every time the IRA attempted to blow up the Europa International Hotel opposite, which it did with a zeal undimmed by repetition.

  Just a couple of years earlier one of the IRA’s 1,000-pound car bombs had hit the jackpot, and not only blasted a large, jagged hole in the side of the Europa, but instantly reduced the wedding-cake pomp of the nearby Grand Opera House to rubble as well. The Europa’s head concierge said afterwards that if he stood at his desk in the lobby he could now see straight through to the Opera House stage. Anything really nice we had, it got wrecked. After a while you got used to it.