The Ghost Factory. Jenny McCartney

and heartbroken gamblers. I applauded them all, every one, the whole limping chorus line of flawed humanity.

      The American shows were the best by far. There, at least, they were all going to hell in flamboyant style, spurting out fierce jets of accusation. They were pouring the energy that built the American dream into wreaking the American nightmare. I admired that. Here at home, I was just fading into the soft Irish mud as the rain fell on me.

      Take Kimberley, for example, a blowsy, bleached blonde with a mouth that raced in several directions at once, most of them ill-advised. She was fighting for the affections of Charlie, her philandering boyfriend with a long, rodenty face. But Charlie was in love with the misnamed Chastity, a sixteen-year-old minx.

      Then Kimberley explained that she intended to stick by Charlie ‘because of stuff that happened in our childhoods that we’re both having a tough time getting over’. But the audience were hollering and chanting with their prissy, pleased little mouths. And then one of them stood up, a smug woman in an appliquéd top, and said triumphantly, ‘I just wonder what trailer park y’all came out of!’

      Everyone laughed and yahooed. For a split second, Kimberley’s face collapsed in genuine dismay. I fell back on the sofa and started to weep, the tears soaking my face and neck.

      It was then that I realised I really had to get out of the house.

       6

      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,