The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (10 page)

It had been my plan to wander into Skegness that evening to get away from the resort, but I still felt sluggish and decided it was too late. I needed to eat. I trailed over to the fish-and-chips bar but even that failed to shake me from my stupor.

Several drinking venues were available on the site. There was a licensed ballroom where older couples did the fox-trot
and the cha-cha, but following my afternoon with the National Front I didn’t feel up for either. There was another watering hole known as the Tap Room featuring a stout and rather warty lady called Bertha who slapped the piano stride-style for a traditional sing-along. “Down at the Old Bull and Bush” and all that. Then there was the strip-lit giant aircraft hangar of the Slowboat. If you didn’t like any of these, the last recourse was a tiny bar situated in a corner of the theater foyer, a hideaway favored by the professional acts if they wanted a drink after a performance, and that’s where I decided to go. But of course there was no variety show on a Saturday evening, so the Review Bar, as it was titled, was closed. I settled instead for the Slowboat.

The resident three-piece band bashed away onstage at the far end of the hangar: drums, organ, and bass artlessly covering standards and classics. Dozens of circular table-and-chairs sets filled the space between the band and the bar, populated with new holidaymakers relaxed and drinking at a hearty pace that would last all week and quicken on Friday. I made for the bar and was surprised to see Luca Valletti sitting near the band and in his civvies. He was smoking a cigarette and had a glass of wine in front of him. I wanted to go over but he seemed deep in conversation with a woman I knew to be the girlfriend of one of the band members. Anyway I was immediately distracted when I was rounded on by a coven of kitchen girls.

“Hey it’s him from the college of knowledge! Show us your IQ!”

I was learning how to racquet back the banter but I still couldn’t stop myself from blushing. I said my IQ was too big
for any of them. It got a big cheer that made a lot of people turn round to look at us. The girls took everything as a double entendre, even if there wasn’t one. They wanted everything to be a double entendre. You could say “I once knew a man who kept an aardvark in his garden shed,” and they would treat it a sexual remark. They were always excitable and always thirsty for lager.

“Come and drink with us, college boy!”

There was no way out.

“He fancies you, Rachel,” said Pauline, a girl with luscious lips and thick eyeliner. “You could teach him how to fuck.”

This sort of thing could go on for hours. They bought me a drink. It was all teasing, all talk. At least I suspect it was. I had no idea what would happen if you tried to take one of them up on all this. Not that I was interested, and neither would I have had the courage. I bought a round of drinks back, for Pauline and Rachel and two other girls. It was while I was waiting for my change at the bar that I felt someone’s eyes on me.

Terri stood alone at the far end of the bar. When people say “my heart missed a beat,” I don’t believe that phrase exactly describes the experience. I felt a sudden suffocation, a noose tightening around my throat, an instant of time freezing when all sound was sucked out of that giant hangar of a bar. I had the uncanny, stupid notion that she had been able to do that to me just by looking, like a moment of witchcraft. And then just as quickly everything was normal again.

I turned away with the drinks I’d bought for the girls. Did my hand tremble? When I looked at her again she was still gazing at me. She almost huddled into the corner of the
bar, as if she was trying to make herself small. Her arms were folded and she was shrunk into herself. She wore a simple black dress, cut somewhat low and reaching halfway down her thighs. The reason I was so struck by her dress was that this was the first time I’d seen either her bare arms or her bare legs. The lustrous dark hair that she always wore tied back now fell forward in a loose wave across one side of her face.

I went over to her, as if pulled by a magic thread. As I approached she dropped her eye contact and looked away, squeezing herself with her folded arms. “I thought you’d been banned,” I said.

“No.”

“Or that you were suspended?”

“Not me.” She averted her face, as if she’d found new interest in the band. Anyone looking at our body language would assume that she was bored but trapped by my conversation. She wore large gold earrings and a gold bangle that reminded me of something Luca had said about women.

“I saw Colin today. At a meeting.”

That surprised her. She flickered a glance at me and then looked away again.

“Not that I’m one of them,” I said.

“So why were you there?”

“It was a mistake.”

“You went to a p’litical meeting by mistake? Not very bright, are you?”

“Did I claim to be bright?”

At last she looked at me. Her eyes had a feline flame, but with a dissolving quality, an intelligence behind them as if she
processed and documented every detail that came before her. She wore eyeliner and a little lipstick, again something I’d never seen on her before. Some instinct told me I should back away. Instead I said, “Can I buy you a drink?”

She looked away again. “No, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because everyone will see you buy me a drink.”

“Do you want me to go away?”

“Of course not. Why do you think I’m here?”

The remark left me openmouthed. “So … I can’t buy you a drink. I can’t talk with you because you won’t look at me. What am I to do?”

“You figure out a solution. You’re the one who is supposed to be clever.”

Not
that
clever, is what I wanted to say. I asked her where Colin was and she said that after the meeting he had gone back to London. He would be staying down in the capital while his suspension was in force. When I asked why she hadn’t gone with him, she said that they simply couldn’t afford for her not to be working. I flashed on what Colin had said in the pub that afternoon, and it occurred to me that this, at least, might give me permission to be seen talking to her. I would also be keeping any predators away.

But even that was of no use if she couldn’t look me in the eye. I felt emboldened and said, “It will be dark in an hour. We could go for a walk on the beach.”

“Up to the dunes? Bit obvious, ain’cha?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

It really wasn’t. For one thing, the idea of the dunes at
night didn’t appeal; for another, you would be in serious danger of tripping over any number of fornicating couples in the dark.

She unfolded her arms. In her glass of gin and tonic was a pink plastic straw. She took a sip through the straw and set the glass back on the bar. Still without looking at me, she said, “Do you know where the wreck is?”

“Yes.” Way up the beach in the other direction a very old shipwreck lay offshore. At low tide the masts and the rotting prow of the boat were exposed, festooned with lime-green seaweed.

“Meet me opposite that. There’s a break in the wall.”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She just left me and her unfinished gin and tonic without a backward glance. I was still watching her go when I felt a shadow at my side. I turned to see a row of perfectly white teeth smiling at me. It was Luca Valletti. He put his mouth very close to my ear. “Stromboli,” he whispered. “You play with a-fire.” Then with a tiny, formal bow he walked away, leaving by the same door as Terri.

I’d said one hour. I glanced at my watch. Then I rejoined the rowdy kitchen girls. If they had thought anything of my talking to Terri, they said nothing. They were gathering themselves to drift off to the Tap Room, ready for a raucous sing-along with Bertha at the ivories, so I joined them, knowing that I could easily melt away from the Tap Room without anyone noticing.

IT WAS A beautiful evening, still very warm but with the lightest of breezes streaming from the sea. I left the resort by the north gate, passing the little white caravan with the palmist’s board outside. Though I’d never actually caught sight of Madame Rosa I couldn’t seem to resist trying to steal a glance inside every time I passed by. The caravan, though, was locked up for the night.

The wreck was a fair stroll up the beach. Terri had chosen the direction that the fewest people went and a place that was poorly lit. When I got there she was loitering near the gap in the wall, her arms still folded.

“We’ll walk along the beach.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Hang on, I want to take my shoes off.”

We walked down to the water’s edge with Terri carrying her shoes. The water was midnight blue and a foamy phosphorescence emanated from the surf. It was like being in the Golden Wheel nightclub when they switch to ultraviolet light. She flicked her head in the direction she wanted to walk, away from the streetlamps. After a few yards she turned toward me and I saw the flash of her teeth and the whites of her eyes, but the rest of her was in semidarkness. She seemed to me like a species of beautiful demon in the ethereal light.

But she looked away again and we walked on in silence. She took a deep breath of the air and then she made a strange gesture at the sea, raising her palm toward the waves, as if she could conjure the water. Then she stroked the back of her white neck and shook her hair.

After a while I said, “Shall we sit on the sand?”

“Yes,” she said. “You’re not kissing me.”

“I wasn’t about to,” I said. Though the thought had crossed my mind. Of course it had.

She lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the sand and I sat beside her, but not too close. We stared out at the foaming, electric blue discharge of the phosphorescent waves. “It’s beautiful!” she said. “Beautiful!”

“I know,” I said. “It’s something to do with microscopic creatures reacting with oxygen to reflect—”

“I’m not talking about the sea!” she shouted.

“Oh?”

“The freedom! A minute’s freedom! All this! Just being here with you!” She looked at me and smiled and I realized it was the very first time that she had allowed herself to smile. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Not really.”

“You don’t know how I live!”

“How do you live?”

She looked out to sea again. She compressed her lips and narrowed her eyes. Then she flicked at her dress. “See this dress? I keep this in secret. He doesn’t know I have this dress. He decides what I wear and when I wear it. I’m not allowed to go out. I’m not allowed to go shopping. I’m not allowed any friends. I’m definitely not allowed to stroll along the beach at night.” She picked up a pebble from the sand and tossed it into the lapping water. “You see those Muslim women who wear those bloody awful allover things?”

“It’s called a chador.”

“Is it? Well. He treats me like they treat their wives. He covers me up. He hides me.”

Forgive me, I thought, but at this moment I would want to hide you, too. She was a spark of light and he wanted to keep her under a glass jar. He knew that if he let her go, the light would go out of his life. “Why don’t you just leave him?”

“Ha! Don’t you think I have? Three times. He came after me. Beat me black-and-blue. Plus I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

“That doesn’t make sense. You can go anywhere.”

“It’s all right for you to say. You have all of life in front of you. I’m stuck cleaning floors, stuck with
that
. Jesus, I’m being a boring bitch.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Change the subject.”

I took a breath and described my life at university. I told her that my life wasn’t very exciting, either, consisting of lectures in the daytime and drinking in the evening even though I wasn’t a great drinker.

“What sort of lectures?”

I didn’t know what to tell her. I started with some guff about William Faulkner, but then I trailed off. What could I say?
Sorry, you’re not allowed to go to university to know about Shakespeare and William Faulkner because you were born the wrong side of the tracks
. I supposed if she exhausted herself at night school for three years and starved herself for a further three she could do it. She really could. But it wasn’t anywhere in her own expectation of herself.

“That all sounds rubbish,” she said. I was relieved that she didn’t want to hear any more about my university life.

The conversation returned to Colin and she told me how she’d met him.

“He rescued me,” she said.

She was fourteen and living in Chingford when Colin had “rescued” her. He was twelve years older than she was. She’d been in and out of foster care and ended up with a violent uncle who was getting ready to put her on the game. Her life back then was a kind of hell that she said I didn’t want to know about. Colin was handsome enough, he was strong, and he had his own flat. He took care of her. He took her away from the life she was living. She shacked up with him and carried on going to school for another year, cooking his breakfast, making his dinner, tidying his flat. She fell pregnant but it didn’t work out.

Colin was sometimes flush with money. He knew some bad people and she had a good idea where he was getting it. But it seemed exciting. Then Colin had to do a stretch in prison. It was lonely. She got some cleaning work in a pub to make ends meet. In the pub she got a little too friendly with one of the bar staff, a young man more her own age. Colin came out of prison and first he dealt with the young man and then he dealt with her. She ran away from him. He came after her, beat her again, and brought her home.