The Ghost Factory

‘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.

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

The next day, I was back in the Whistle. It was a soft night, and the city was quiet. Blond Jimmy was on the door. Murdie was behind the bar with me, complaining about Mrs Murdie’s younger English cousin Gavin, who had come to stay with them for a few days and was still there three weeks later, sleeping in the spare room and expecting a full Ulster fry on weekends when he roused himself from his bed at midday. He was between jobs, which is a dangerous place for a house guest to be.

The cousin had elected to go on an extended ‘Troubles Tour’ of Belfast in a black taxi, in which the taxi driver took him round a miniature history of the Troubles, complete with a running commentary. They had gone up along the Peace Wall, that separates the Protestant Shankill Road and the Catholic Falls Road, and up to the shop on the Shankill where an IRA bomb killed nine Protestants queueing to buy fish, and all around the murals that use the gable walls like storybooks to tell the highly coloured version of events from each side.

The worst of it was that the cousin was very interested in the roots and origins of it all now, and when Murdie got home exhausted at night the cousin was waiting for him there at the kitchen table, with a drink already poured out for Murdie from Murdie’s own whiskey bottle, and a million questions about the Troubles along with his own answers to the problems.

Things had finally come to a head the night before, said Murdie, when he came back in at midnight and there was the cousin, sitting up with a glass of Murdie’s whiskey and a copy of the Belfast Telegraph, raring to go. Why, asked the cousin, did the Protestants who lived in a county with a majority of Catholics not move house to live in a county with a majority of Protestants, and the Catholics do vice versa, and then the counties that were then a hundred per cent Catholic could go over to the South if they wanted, and there could be a much smaller Northern Ireland just for all the Protestants who wanted to stay British?

Could we talk about it tomorrow, said Murdie, because I haven’t really much energy left after a day in the bar.

Of course, said the cousin, but did Murdie not see that if things were sorted out that way, then it would be much easier for everyone who wished to remain in the new, smaller version of Northern Ireland, and the state that was left would demand far fewer resources from the ordinary British taxpayer? Would Murdie not agree on that?

And then Murdie snapped and said I’m sick of effing politics, you’ve done nothing but talk politics since the day you got here and I wish you’d give my head peace. People don’t move house because they don’t want to move and that’s it. I’ve come home tired from a long day at work and the last thing I want to talk about is your effing blueprint for the redesigning of Northern Ireland, because I’ve had blueprints for a new Northern Ireland every single day of my life for the last effing twenty-five years.

There was an awful silence. And then the cousin finally got his breath back and said, with deep affront, Well I can see exactly why you’ve had the Troubles for so long if you’ve got an attitude like that. If you lot are not even prepared to discuss your problems rationally round a table with other people, it’s no wonder your whole place is in such a mess. And the worst of it is, you all expect English taxpayers like me to foot the bill for it.

That did it. Foot the bill? said Murdie, maddened with anger, Foot the bill? This city was blasted to smithereens in the Blitz for standing up to Hitler alongside England, would you like the fucking bill for that? And in any case you haven’t stuck your hand in your pocket for so much as a pound of sausages since you arrived.

There was no recovery from that, Murdie said, because it was the truth. And now there was a poisonous atmosphere in the house, and Mrs Murdie was livid, and the cousin had got up ostentatiously early this morning and appeared grim-faced at breakfast with his hair all combed over to one side, and would only accept a cup of tea with a lightly buttered piece of toast before going out for the day.

I told Murdie he shouldn’t worry: ‘Maybe he’ll take his leave altogether now, and you’ll get a bit of quiet.’

Murdie was racked with guilt: ‘No, it’s not right, son. I shouldn’t have spoken like that to him, he was a guest in my house. And now he’ll go back to England and tell everybody there that Mrs Murdie is married to a madman.’

Then he said, ‘The joke of it is Mrs Murdie can’t stick him for long either. But she says I shouldn’t have insulted him: it’s the principle of the thing.’

He started laughing: ‘But it was true what I said about the sausages. That fella’s tighter than a fly’s arse.’

Consoled, he went back to checking the beer barrels, whistling a tricky little twirling melody.

Murdie told me about his wife’s cousin in the afternoon. It was the last afternoon I spent working in the Whistle.

I had set up everything ready for the evening rush, but it was a Wednesday night and we had no band booked to perform, so the customers were just trickling in. I was playing a few tapes of Big Jacky’s, soul music from the sixties, and was half listening to them and half thinking about other things.

And then, at about half past nine, a dark-haired girl came in who I remembered from school. She was good-looking enough, in tight jeans with teased hair and all the jewellery on, but there was something I never liked about her face, something almost birdy. She had a hard, thin mouth, and I remembered her always hanging around the corridors with three or four girls in her gang, shouting out raucous stuff to torment the quiet ones or embarrass the plain ones. But I couldn’t remember her name.