The Ghost Factory

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 (#u21117268-171d-576f-8d1a-baf98d5be952)

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.