Читать книгу The Ghost Factory - Jenny McCartney - Страница 13

Mr Murdie was a short man, with sharp eyes that had totted up a million bar bills and a stainless steel brain that never failed – ping! – to calculate exactly the right change. If a cannibal had killed and eaten Mr Murdie, he would probably have detected an unusual flavour permeating the leathery meat, for as Mr Murdie had spent his entire working life steeped in the nicotine fug of Belfast bars, his flesh had almost certainly been deeply and satisfactorily smoked, like a mackerel hung above a wood fire.

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.’