The Ghost Factory
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Mr Murdie had observed enough alcoholic bonhomie to grow mistrustful of bonhomie altogether. It was, as he knew, a slippery and deceitful customer. He had watched it sway into gross sentimentality and lurch into frightening belligerence. That is why when Mr Murdie’s regulars sometimes slumped over the counter at the end of the evening and told him – amid slurred, urgent confidences – that they actually loved him, loved him as a best, best friend, Mr Murdie answered with an economical wee smile, and the words, ‘Aye well if you really love me, boys, you’ll clear off to your beds now and let me wipe the counter.’
Mr Murdie knew that Mrs Murdie really loved him. She wasn’t much of a drinker, though, and so she hardly ever said it.
When I walked into the Whistle Bar, where Murdie was the manager, and enquired of him whether they needed any barmen, I had reason to believe that he would help me out. Big Jacky and he had played together in a showband called the Janglemen when they were in their late teens. Mr Murdie had played the guitar and Big Jacky had been on the drums. I had seen a picture of them in their stage suits, with both of them managing somehow to look eighteen and forty-five at the same time. But there was an expression of subtle pride on Murdie’s saturnine face beneath a glossy Brylcreemed quiff, suggesting that a secret craving for flamboyance had been momentarily satisfied.
Murdie remained a friend of Big Jacky’s, and he would call round to our house on some nights to play cards and eat bacon sandwiches. When I was small he had a habit of greeting me with the words: ‘What happened – did your school burn down?’ This threw me into a pleasurable confusion. I hadn’t the least idea what Mr Murdie meant. Why on earth would my school burn down? And yet the thought that it might burn down some day was unsettling but exciting. If I woke up one morning, and Big Jacky just said, ‘No school today, son. It’s burned down, I’m afraid,’ would that be the business of school over for good, would I ever have to go again?
When I got a bit older, I used to reverse the charges and ask Murdie: ‘What happened – did your bar burn down?’ This was less of a joke than it seemed. Two of the bars that Murdie had worked in really had burned down. One was razed at a time when sectarian furies were running conveniently high in Belfast, and the owner torched it himself for the insurance money. The other was intended to act as a city-wide warning to those who chose to ignore the final reminders on their protection money. Murdie kept silent as a Sphinx throughout, observed all that happened, found himself fresh employment and carried on pouring customers’ whiskey.
He was polishing the beer glasses when I walked into the Whistle, and he seemed pleased to see me. It was a quiet enough afternoon. There were two drinkers slouched over the bar, but they were too engrossed in the horse racing on television to slide me more than a desultory glance. Murdie had been at Big Jacky’s funeral along with Mrs Murdie. I hadn’t talked to him since.
‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Here’s the man himself.’
He poured me a pint of lager, and then – with a quick look towards the pub door – lit up a cigarette. ‘So, wee Jacky, what are you up to?’
‘You won’t believe it,’ I said. ‘My school burned down.’
Murdie’s face cracked into a broken smile: ‘Who did it?’
‘I did. I decided I was getting too old for detention.’
He laughed, and then waited, smoking. There is an amateur and a professional style of smoking. The amateur style is floatily indulgent, expansive in the movement of the smoking arm, casually squandering the cigarette’s little life. The professional style extracts the maximum value from every puff, the smoking arm moving quickly and in a straight line, in the knowledge that the pleasure of the cigarette might soon be cut short by some external demand. Murdie smoked in the professional style.
‘Aunt Phyllis is living with me now. She’s sort of taken over the running of the newsagent’s.’
‘Is the business going well?’
‘Aye, I think it’s going all right. It seems to have plenty of customers. Most of them come in to talk to Phyllis. She’s certainly got the gift of the gab.’
Enough said. Murdie nodded, and looked at me with the unspoken understanding that there are times when you would like to put the people with the gift of the gab in a large room along with everyone who has kissed the Blarney Stone, lock the door and let them all jaw each other to death.
‘The thing is, though, there’s not really enough for me to do there. Phyllis has it pretty much all under control. I was wondering if you might need a barman here, or know anyone else who does.’
Consideration. He stubbed out the cigarette as punctuation to his thoughts. His mental machinery was doing some speedy calculations: I could almost hear it clicking and revolving.
‘Davy’s leaving next week, to go and work on a cruise liner,’ he said. ‘You could fill in for him for a while. But you’d need to come on a few afternoons, when there’s just me here, to get the hang of the place. Come in on Tuesday.’
I was delighted. I finished up my pint. Murdie walked me to the door, and, as I left, he hit me a stern, playful whack with the rolled-up copy of the Belfast News Letter he had been using earlier on to kill flies.
I went to see Titch to tell him about the job. Ever since the beating, it had been a gala performance to get him to come downstairs at all. In the past he used to get a bit of spare cash for helping out at the chippy but there was no prospect of that now. His mother was at her wits’ end. There was mostly silence from him in the daytime, when he often slept, and then a rumpus during the night. His mother said that she could hear him getting up at two and three in the morning and struggling to shift the furniture around in his bedroom with his one good arm.
He had said to me, one afternoon, ‘I’m going to get them back for what they done, I swear it.’ It made me sad even to hear him say this. It wasn’t going to happen. The sentence started out with defiance in it, but it tailed off halfway through from a lack of conviction.
‘Och Titch,’ I said, ‘Leave it now. Don’t make things worse for yourself. Soon they’ll all land themselves in jail anyway.’
Titch had a counsellor. The Victim Support people had got in touch after the beating, and now a woman in a paisley-patterned duvet jacket came round regularly to ask him, in a professionally hushed voice, how he was feeling. Titch confirmed regularly, in monosyllabic form, that he was feeling bad. As the awkward silences lengthened, the counsellor was forced to stare with false, fixed interest at the family photographs displayed on the mantelpiece. Titch’s hand moved with increasing frequency towards the open packet of Viennese whirls by his side. He wouldn’t even look at a Jaffa Cake now.
Titch’s mother said that once she had read, upside down in the counsellor’s notes, the single phrase: ‘uses food, mainly sweet things, as a comfort blanket’. Titch’s mother remarked to the counsellor that she had obviously never had the chance to observe Titch at work among savouries, in the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Shaftesbury Square. The counsellor stared blankly at her for a moment, with her biro quivering above Titch’s case notes, and then said without smiling, ‘Ah. Joke.’
The whole aim, said the counsellor, was to allow Titch to ‘achieve full closure’ with his experience at the hands of the paramilitaries. It would be useful if Titch could first learn to forgive himself for behaving as a victim, and then somehow – and she recognised this might take a while – forgive his attackers for perpetrating the assault. Titch’s mother said that she had a First World War bayonet, a family heirloom, and that she would first like to ‘achieve full closure’ with the backsides of his assailants. The counsellor looked at her oddly again, she said, and then made some quite extensive notes which she casually shielded from view with her arm.
When I called round Titch was up in his room. He was lying on his bed, reading his mother’s Bella magazine. He had it pulled open at the recipe section. When he saw me come in, he let it slide to the ground: a full-colour picture of Thai fishcakes with a tiger prawn garnish winked garishly up at us both.
I skated over the pervasive air of hopelessness. ‘I’ve got a job, Titch. I’m going to start as a barman at the Whistle on Tuesday. If you come into town to see me, I’ll treat you to a pint of lager, cider or orange squash for free, as an introductory offer. We need new customers.’
I knew there was no way he would come into town yet, but I wanted to ruffle him out of this awful torpor. I wanted to goad him into being cheeky to me again.
‘I’m not going out of the house,’ said Titch, sulkily. ‘I don’t want them fellas to get hold of me and do what they done last time.’
‘Titch, they’re not going to do you all over again just for the heck of it. They’ve already done you once.’
‘They’re not in jail, are they? There’s nothing to stop them, if they want to.’
I couldn’t argue with that. He had the relentless, correct logic of a child sometimes. The hopelessness came back to fill the small room, washing over me, touching the useless frills on the beige nylon curtains and the pointless, grinning Toby jug on the windowsill that his uncle had brought him back from Yorkshire. In my desire to shove it away, to jolt Titch out of his own grim reasoning, I threw in something even worse.
‘But Titch, it makes no difference anyway whether you go out or stay in. In fact, you’d be better off going out. They came up and got you here, didn’t they? They pulled you right out of this room, didn’t they?’
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I should never have said them. He stared at me for a second as though I had just smacked him full in the face. And then his expression began to disintegrate, falling apart into shapes that would have been almost comic if they hadn’t been so terrible. He was moving violently from side to side, putting his elbows up to shield his head, and all the time making the high-pitched wailing sound of some trapped animal in distress.
I waited until the worst of it had passed and then I went over and put my hands on his heaving shoulders. I told him gently: ‘Sshh. They won’t come for you again.’ The shoulders moved gradually to a shaking halt. And then he started to whisper something all jumbled together, like a child’s babble, and so softly that I had to lean in very close to hear. It was the same sentence, over again: ‘I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t have anywhere to go.’
7
The Whistle was a great place to work. It was an old, established bar on the way in to the city centre: a bit dilapidated, but it had charm. We got a lot of students and gentle wastrels in the daytime, and a more eclectic, fired-up clientele by night.
It was never too busy in the afternoons, and in between serving customers Murdie demonstrated to me some of the little tricks of the barman’s trade: how to polish glasses to a high sheen without smearing them again when you set them down; the correct way to serve a whiskey and water; how to pull the perfect pint of Guinness; and the proper proportions of the constituent elements in a port and lemon.
When we had the basics of the bar sorted out, said Murdie, we’d move on to learning cocktails.
At a certain point in the day, if things were quiet, he would pour a single whiskey for each of us, to be drunk slowly and without ice. We would savour the peaty burning at the back of our throats while Murdie’s favourite song, Van Morrison’s ‘Tupelo Honey’, spun lazily out of the CD player. It was a surprisingly lush choice for such a self-contained man. The golden afternoon light would float in through the frosted pub windows, spilling in widening patches on the polished wood of the tables, and for that moment all the worries that clodded to me would flake away.
One day I was staring at the fat, corrugated worm lying at the bottom of a bottle of mescal. One of the regulars had brought it back from a trip to Mexico, as a present for Murdie. He had displayed it behind the bar, unopened, and the function of the worm had begun to nag at me.
‘What’s that thing for?’ I asked Murdie.
‘That’s the mescal worm,’ he said. ‘It soaks up all the lunacy in the bottle. If you eat that worm, you’ll start hallucinating. You’ll see demons.’
He could be quite poetic, Murdie, when you got him going. We both stood contemplating it floating there wickedly like a baby’s thumb.
‘If you ate that worm, Murdie,’ I said, ‘could you remember, in the moment of insanity, why you and my dad called your band a name like the Janglemen?’
‘It wasn’t us that thought of it, Jacky,’ he said: ‘it was your mother. She thought it would be funny, and it was. We got lots of bookings just because of that name.’
‘What was she like, Murdie?’
‘She was a laugh,’ he said gently, ‘a really good laugh. But kind, too, and a great dancer. And she was crazy about you.’
Then he started to empty all the ashtrays, to rinse them out before the evening crowd started coming in after work.
In the evenings, when things hotted up, the door at the Whistle was manned by Joe and Jimmy. They both wore tuxedos, the traditional doorman’s costume, and they were both built like brick shithouses, the historic doorman’s physique. Joe was dark-haired with a bristly, neat moustache. Jimmy was blond. Joe did weights at the gym to keep himself in peak condition. Jimmy probably kept fit by twirling his little brothers around like drumsticks on the Twelfth of July. I wouldn’t have liked to mess with either of them.
The year before had been a particularly bad year for Belfast doormen, security guards and taxi drivers. Doormen, whether Catholic or Protestant, were used as exclamation marks to punctuate the long-running argument between the IRA and the Loyalist paramilitaries.
The argument had long followed certain clear, established lines. The IRA would, for example, let off a bomb. The Loyalists, to emphasise how enormously they disapproved of this violence, would kill a Catholic doorman who was standing outside his workplace, musing on what to buy his son for his birthday. The IRA, to show how furious they were at this outrage, would gun down a Protestant security guard who was thinking about where to go with his girlfriend on his next night off. The Loyalists, to demonstrate their anger at this atrocity, would phone a taxi driver from a Catholic firm and shoot him point-blank in the back of the head as he politely asked them for directions. And so their discussions on morality continued.
This year, however, had been better for doormen and taxi drivers specifically, and worse generally for young Catholics who annoyed the IRA and young Prods who irritated the Loyalists. Nonetheless, Joe and Jimmy were mindful of the pitfalls in their chosen occupation.
Joe could be funny when he had time, and he had a lot of that on the door. He told me one night, stroking his lapels, ‘If they start shooting doormen again, at least I’m going to go dressed in a tuxedo. When I get up there they’ll stick me straight on the pearly gate with Saint Peter, to keep the troublemakers like you out.’
I told him: ‘You’ve been watching too many Mafia films. Knowing your luck, they’d get you when you were dandering back from the gym, in your big floppy shorts. The best you’d get then is a part-time job as a personal trainer to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’
He wouldn’t hear of it.
‘I’m going on the gate,’ he said, puffing out his chest. ‘And when I see you coming, I’ll tell you: “I’m sorry, you’re underage. You’ll have to go to hell.”’
‘Nobody’s underage for heaven,’ I said.
‘No, but you’ll still need ID before they’ll serve you a drink,’ he said. His shoulders shook with pleasure at getting the last word, and then he wheeled round and grimaced at three girls who were teetering in high heels and an atomic cloud of perfumed body spray at the door, all of them plastered in make-up and none a day over fifteen.
‘Date of Birth,’ Joe demanded flatly, with his stern official’s face on. He stared with meaning at the smallest one, a sharp-faced wee blonde who looked all of fourteen. She glared back, pursing her glossily enamelled lips as though deeply, personally affronted by the question, and then reeled off a fake date of birth that would have made her eighteen exactly two months before. Joe mimed exaggerated disbelief. They carried on this little war of nerves every couple of weeks. It was splendid to watch.
He turned towards each of the others, as though by now deeply bored and suspicious, repeating the mantra: ‘Date of birth’. They were all pretty good at it, really, apart from a plump gormless brunette who had obviously had a bit to drink already. She stumbled over the year, and then stood blinking under her heavy purple eyeshadow, trying to work out which date she needed in order to get in.
‘Sorry, you’re not getting in,’ Joe told her.
At this, the others began to squawk and flap in protest.
‘Mister, she is eighteen,’ chirruped the blonde, ‘but she’s just had her birthday. You just confused her there, the way you asked her that.’
The brunette had worked it out by now, and even caught up with the necessary, offended tone of voice. She repeated the entire date of birth again, slowly and deliberately, as though Joe had failed to understand her the first time because of his own bestial stupidity. The others fell silent in anticipation, knowing not to push things too far.
‘Happy Birthday. And congratulations. You’re the only eighteen-year-old I’ve ever met that still gets a bedtime story from her mammy,’ said Joe sarcastically.
The three of them started to snicker and preen, sensing that he was softening.
‘Get in … and next time bring your ID,’ he called after them, in pretend irritation. He turned and winked broadly at me as they stampeded towards the bar, tittering in glee and triumph, waving their crumpled fivers and asking for vodka and orange.
It’s strange at first, working behind a bar. You feel like you’ve been pushed on to a stage without knowing your lines, with the lights shining on you and a host of querulous faces looking on. And then after a while you get used to it, and the bar becomes your little square arena, your illuminated patch.
The important thing, Murdie told me, is that you’re never seen to be standing idle. If you’re not serving customers, then you should be polishing glasses, or stacking beer mats, or wiping up real and imaginary spillages with a damp cloth. But you are never performing these tasks to the exclusion of the customer’s most vital interests. All the while, you are watching out for the thirsty, expectant face in the crowd, the frantic signalling that someone is dying for a drink.
When things get busy, said Murdie, you must learn to keep in your head the chronological order in which these thirsty faces appear, and serve them accordingly. If you mix them up you must quickly apologise. You must not disregard the short man (for Murdie was short himself) or the plain woman in favour of those individuals who naturally catch the eye and thus seem to be blessed with Bar Presence. The tall, burly man and the beautiful woman have already queue-jumped in life, said Murdie, but they should not be permitted to do so at the bar. To the truly professional barman, Bar Presence should be irrelevant. Order of appearance is everything.
I was hardly ever bored behind the bar, apart from very early in the evening or late at night when you got stuck with the tedious pub raconteur in the Aran sweater who had bolted his corduroyed arse to the bar stool. I liked it best at the height of the evening, when the place was packed with people and noise, and everyone was laughing and shouting for more drink, and you started to work with a feverish rhythm that drove everything else out of your head. I liked having a bit of money, too. Murdie paid me a decent chunk of cash in hand at the end of every week.
It was Phyllis’s birthday halfway through the month and I asked Murdie for the night off. I’d been feeling guilty lately about how grumpy I’d been with her since she moved in. She had been dropping wee hints about her birthday, and how Mary and Sam would be away on holiday together and sorry to miss it but she had thought this time she would just stay in Belfast for it. ‘Is that so,’ I had said, distantly, as though my radio wasn’t even picking up on her faltering signal.
I knew she thought I’d forgotten all about it. On the morning of her birthday, I got up half an hour early – well before her throat-clearing operation – and put a bunch of pink roses outside her bedroom door. I’d bought them the day before, and kept them in a jug of water in my wardrobe so she wouldn’t see.
I got back into bed. Half an hour later, I heard the floorboards creak. Then a crash, a stumble, and a yelp of surprise. Phyllis had kicked over the roses by accident and they were all strewn about the floor, but I could see she was pleased. She kept saying ‘Oh my goodness’ as she collected them up in her nightie.
I took her out for dinner later on, to a French restaurant in town. She put on her best blouse, with a fussy wee frill at the neck, and her pearl earrings, and a daub of blue eyeshadow to set off the rose-tinted lipstick. When I saw her appear like that at the bottom of the stairs, all done up to go out, I felt an awkward pang of love for her.
In the restaurant, she had a couple of glasses of white wine with her dinner, and got a bit tipsy. The conversation got on to Mary and Sam’s holiday: they had gone to Tenerife.
‘It’s good for them to go somewhere on their own without me,’ she said. ‘I sometimes felt as though I was a bit of a spare part.’
I said nothing, sawing away at my steak. I could sense the faint electricity of something meaningful approaching.
‘I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted Mary along all the time when I was going out with my boyfriend,’ she said. There was a second’s hesitation before the word ‘boyfriend’, as though she had doubts about whether to mention it, but had ploughed ahead anyway.
I had never heard Phyllis talk about a boyfriend before. I couldn’t imagine Phyllis with a boyfriend. Mary had always said that Phyllis was too delicate to get married. I carried on cutting my steak without showing surprise, so as not to scare the revelation away.
‘When were you going out with him, Phyllis?’ I asked.
‘When I was nineteen,’ she said, ‘He was a medical student. We used to go out to dances together. Mary didn’t like him. She said he was sly but he wasn’t, he was just shy of her because she tried to bully him with too many questions.’
She smiled suddenly. ‘He used to call her the Iron Lung, because she was always hunting after me, shouting my name.’
‘How long did you go out together?’
‘Two years. Your mother liked him. The pair of us used to give Mary the slip sometimes and go out to the dances together.’
I couldn’t leave it now. I had to get to the bottom of it before the wine wore off and Phyllis clammed up about the only really important thing that had ever happened to her, and went straight back to talking ceaselessly about hairstyles and pork chops.
‘So why did you stop going out?’
‘He was killed in an accident,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I wasn’t with him because I wasn’t feeling well that night. He went out to a dance with his brother, and his brother was driving him home along a country road late that night when a van hit their car. The van’s driver was drunk.’
‘Did the brother survive?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He only had a broken arm. He got married the year after. But after my boyfriend I never felt like going with anyone else.’
‘I’m so sorry, Phyllis,’ I said. Then we both started looking, quickly, at the list of puddings. After some deliberation over the pavlova and its possible disappointments in texture, Phyllis played it safe and plumped for the chocolate mousse.