The Ghost Factory
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‘Four of them jumped on him on his way home and battered him with iron bars. He’s up there in the Royal now. Head injuries, broken leg.’
‘What was it over?’
‘Some row over a girl, his mother said. Him and another lad argued over a girl but it got out of hand and the other boy’s uncle is, you know.’
A meaningful glance from behind the thick glasses. She would never say the actual word.
The door suddenly swung open and a stout, middle-aged man I had never seen before walked in. Mrs Hackett’s voice grew abruptly louder –
‘Well enjoy the ravioli, now. I hope you have an umbrella.’
‘Don’t worry, sure I’ve got my waterproof jacket.’
The thing I had liked about living with Big Jacky was his capacity for silence. It wasn’t a brooding silence, with argumentative storm clouds waiting to burst overhead. You could relax in the expanses of Big Jacky’s silence. It was the mental equivalent of an endless highway stretching out of sight, carrying within it peace and possibility.
These were the sounds that punctuated an evening with Big Jacky: the soft rustling of the newspaper, the hiss of the kettle, his belly-chortle at some fresh piece of idiocy issuing from the gabbling television, a courteous observation about the rain, the spit of sausages frying in a pan. He didn’t ask me too many questions. I suppose that’s why I told him almost everything.
I wondered sometimes how I, with my spiky edges and tangled imaginings, could have sprung from the quiet bulk of Big Jacky. He did, too. As a child, I would sometimes catch him looking at me strangely, as I gyrated wildly in my Indian chief’s headdress or danced with frustration over a difficult puzzle. I heard him once saying in a low voice: ‘You’re like her.’ I knew who he meant: my dark-haired snapshot mother, the fine-boned, smiling face that lay in his bedside drawer with his most precious things. She was frozen there, next to an earlier model of him grinning broadly beneath a modest dirty-blond pompadour. I don’t remember her. She died of meningitis when I was two.
In deference, perhaps, for me being like her, he fed me with books: shyly, at first. He brought home the daily newspapers and historical pamphlets from his newsagent’s shop. He bought dusty, dog-eared volumes from church fêtes and charity shops: everything from Oliver Twist to paperback Westerns by authors with names like Buck Tyrone and Cliff Ryder. He filled in little forms from the back of the Reader’s Digest in his sloping, careful hand, and sent off for handsome, maroon-bound tomes with titles like Strange Stories and Amazing Facts. They came thumping on to the doorstep, bursting with the lurid, illustrated mysteries of Spring-Heeled Jack, the fiery devil that terrorised the good citizens of Victorian London, and of the wailing faces which had appeared on floor tiles in Spain, mouthing inaudible agonies because the house had been built on the site of a medieval graveyard. There was even a photograph of the wailing faces: they were all smeary and open-mouthed, as though shocked at the cheek of the energetic Spanish housewives who had tried to wipe them off the tiles with a damp cloth.
He brought home the gleaming satin memoirs of Hollywood movie stars; and the autobiographies of long-dead sportsmen; and assorted poetry anthologies, trickling out lines of Larkin and Betjeman, Hughes and Heaney. Big Jacky didn’t say much, but every week floods of new words spilled from the pockets of his brown overcoat, and I danced around with expectation. The books piled up: Aunt Mary and Aunt Phyllis, my mother’s sisters, observed developments from a distance, darkly, twitching to take over. He must have sensed the conversations bristling self-righteously over their Carrickfergus kitchen table (Something should really be done. There’s just him and the wee boy in there now, and the place is coming down with all these books he buys, and the child looks as peaky as bedamned) and stubbornly ignored them.
If Spring-Heeled Jack and his clawing cohorts sprang into my dreams, and I woke up dry-mouthed with terror, I made my way to the room where Big Jacky slept. When he felt the nervous phut-phut of my breath on his sleeping cheek, he would stir and lift a corner of the quilt. ‘Get in,’ he said and I would lie awake, comforted, next to my big, flannel-wrapped bulwark against the dark.
Every so often the aunts would pay us a visit, motoring sedately into Belfast under the patchy pretext of a birthday (mine or his) or a spurious shopping trip (for one of those fine wool cardigans, a Christmas present for Anne next door, you know, can’t get them for love nor money in Carrickfergus, not even at McGill’s, just thought we’d call in and see how you two were getting on.)
Aunt Mary, her husband Sam, and Aunt Phyllis all lived together. Phyllis had never married. ‘Phyllis was too much of a lady to get married,’ said Aunt Mary, meaningfully. It was as though the goatish attentions of a man, all beard and raw lust, might have catapulted Phyllis on to a precipice of mental distress from which she would never claw her way back.
When Sam and Mary went on holiday, Phyllis came along with them. ‘Three’s company, four’s a crowd,’ Aunt Mary would carol gamely, although sometimes – when Phyllis was off peeling potatoes, drooping over the sink in her long brown cardigan – Mary would whisper: ‘Of course, sometimes Sam and I would like a wee fortnight on our own. But it wouldn’t really be fair on Phyllis, to leave her behind in charge of the house, away from all the fun.’
Mary’s whispers had a tendency to carry. Now and again I wondered if Phyllis could hear.
Sam enjoyed his bowls and his television. He was retired from his job as a bank clerk. We saw him about once a year, when we visited them in Carrickfergus, and then he would say: ‘Long time no see, Jackies Senior and Junior,’ and excavate himself from his armchair to fetch Big Jacky a whiskey.
He was a tame man, really. Any rebellious sinews in him had long ago been replaced with a convenient machine-washable stuffing. Mary had him kitted out in pale lambswool pullovers, like Rupert Bear. His clothing was organised to match the house, an overheated cave of squashy velveteen sofas, pastel Chinese rugs, and polished tabletops sprinkled with lace doilies. You could sink back into those soft furnishings and not be seen again for a week. It was a miracle Sam was still alive. One day scientists would discover him dead there, the suburban equivalent of the leathery men they found preserved for centuries in those Danish peat bogs. He would have his eyes still wide open and his hand stiffened around the remote control. They’d dub him the Bungalow Man, and scientists would marvel at the contents of his stomach (a diet of oven chips and chicken nuggets, specifically designed by Mary to generate no kitchen mess).
China figurines of dancers sprang from the sideboards, suspended in eternal pirouettes. Brass lamps gleamed from shining coffee tables. The furnishings of the house demanded a vigorous cleaning regime. They got it with blasts of spray and polish, worked in deep with triple applications of elbow grease.
Our front room in Belfast clamoured for no such attention. It had a brown 1950s sofa with wooden legs, and a fraying green armchair. A low, rectangular coffee table provided a stationing point for mugs of tea. Big Jacky accommodated himself in the armchair while I extended myself on the sofa, where years of pressure had made convenient buttock-shaped dents. When the aunts came to our house, I could see that the sparseness of Big Jacky’s taste dismayed and unsettled them. They fluttered around, hunting for a corner on which to perch. They besieged my father with pointless knick-knacks: fringed, furiously patterned cushions, knowing china squirrels with nut-packed cheeks, Belleek pottery sweet-dishes and embroidered tablecloths, to take the edge (although they never actually said this) off his spartan, miserable life with his peaky, odd son. He thanked them politely and pressed them to take some more tea. When they had gone, he put the things away carefully in a cupboard, and brought a small selection back out only before their next visit.
One day when we had waved off Aunt Mary, amidst a rapid hail of queries and promises, Big Jacky sat down in his armchair and took out his pipe. Pressing the springy tobacco into the bowl, he sighed and said: ‘Normal service resumes.’ He lit up, and took a puff. Then he said: ‘They drove your mother mad too.’ That was it. The pipe smoke drifted my way. I drank it down with the brandy-glow of conspiracy.
After Big Jacky died, normal service never resumed again.
3
A few days after I heard what Titch had done in McGee’s shop, I was walking past his house down to the chippy. I looked in the window: Titch was beached on the floor of the front room with a pint glass of orange squash beside him, and his mum was lying on the sofa with her shoes off. They didn’t see me, because both of them were in hysterics at some crappy film on the television.
Why didn’t I go in? Normally I would have. But it’s a bore, when you’re in the middle of watching something, to have to start explaining the whole plot to the enquiring, only half interested visitor (He’s the blonde one’s husband, but he’s doing a line with the brunette who’s married to the police inspector. No, not him, the other one, with the moustache). And I suppose I didn’t want to take my claw-hammer to the fragile shell of happiness that surrounded them. I carried Titch’s trouble around with me now. The pair of them had unburdened themselves of it, and burdened me. I’d walk in there as gloomy, responsible Jacky, with a miserable long face on him like a Lurgan spade, and the talk would suddenly be all about McGee, and Titch going to Newry, and Titch refusing to go to Newry, and his mother trembling again on the edge of weeping. The funny film would be forgotten and the laughter stowed away, and who knew if anything would ever happen to the big eejit anyway?
I walked on. The midget James Dean with the skinhead was hanging around outside the chippy, with a can of Sprite in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. He acknowledged my proximity with a curt wee hardman nod.
‘Hello,’ I said.
He proffered his crumpled packet of Embassy, eyes narrowed: ‘Smoke?’
‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘I’m frightened it might stunt my growth.’
‘Very fucking funny,’ he said, mortally offended. The swear word was thrown in as proof of his maturity. He hauled all four foot seven of his dignity up on the wall and sat there, puffing away and ploughing all his energies into ignoring me.
I bought my chips, soaked them in vinegar and salt, and came back out. I had poked a hole in the warm paper to eat them while I was walking and keep them hot. He was still there, working hard not to look at me.
‘Chip?’ I asked him.
I was sorry I had made that crack earlier, after he had offered his ciggies with such ill-concealed pride. He turned his head slowly, still offended, but he couldn’t be bothered to keep it up. The hand came down and rummaged around for a chip: it salvaged two. I sat up on the wall beside him.
‘What’s your name?’ he said.
‘Jacky. What’s yours?’
‘Marty.’
A pause, bulging with contemplation.
‘I seen you walking around with that big fat fella from up the road,’ he said eventually.
‘Is that so.’
‘He’s not right in the head, that fella.’
‘Maybe not. His name’s Titch,’ I said. ‘Are you right in the head?’
He laughed, showing his pointed, irregular teeth: ‘My ma says I’m a headcase.’
‘Good, then you and Titch would get on fine. Two prime headcases together. Joint gold medallists at the Headcase Olympics.’
‘My ma says he takes things from shops.’
‘Your ma keeps her eyes peeled. Do you ever take anything from shops?’
‘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.