The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (19 page)

We hurried over to the theater where preparations for the Prizegiving and Farewell Show ahead of the Friday Revue were under way. Tony and the others were already onstage, setting up. As I came in he asked me to go backstage to wheel out the sword casket and bring his fez in readiness for his Abdul-Shazam routine.

It was the first time I’d been alone backstage since it had all kicked off. Before then I’d made sure there were others around, people I could talk to, just so that I didn’t have to confront the loaded silence of the place. Backstage, a theater is a memory bank for every cue missed by an actor; every gag that died; each muffed line and dance routine gone awry; each dropped catch, muddle, mix-up, and mistake: the tragic moment that turns to farce. For all of this there is a dark audience perched and waiting.

The sword casket was covered with props and stage junk. I was thinking about Nikki, who would be called upon to get
into the box. I took all the junk off the box and unlatched the lid. When I opened the lid and looked inside, I let the lid slam and I toppled backward.

There was a woman in the casket.

I sat back on the bare boards, paralyzed, staring at the glittering box and the lid that had fallen back into place. I was waiting for the lid to open.

It didn’t.

I knew it must be a trick of the light. But even in the dimly lit recess of the props chamber the image of a woman stuck in that coffin of a magic box had been vivid. Slowly, and on my hands and knees, I crawled over to the casket and lifted the lid again.

It was Terri. She was jammed in the casket, her feet drawn up beneath her and wedged into the dividers. She wore just her bra and pants. I could only see one side of her face, and that was in darkness. Her skin looked gray. Her nose and mouth were squashed up against the padded sides of the box. Her eyes were closed. A trickle of liquid had dribbled from her mouth and across her chin, leaving a snail trail. A rope was tangled around her legs.

Her eyes opened. In the light and shadow of backstage her eyes glimmered briefly in a way that made me think of the phosphorescence of the waves. She was trying to look back at me, but her head was trapped, firmly lodged, and she couldn’t move it. She stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth and licked her parched lips. “Get me out,” she said in a faint rasp. “There’s a good lad.”

I grabbed at the plastic dividers, trying to give her some room to move. One of the dividers broke in my hands but
it wasn’t enough to give Terri any relief. She was still horribly compressed. So gray were her features in the shadows, I honestly thought she was near to death. Her breathing was shallow. Still trying to break her free I grabbed another of the dividers and it cracked noisily in my fingers, cutting the side of my hand.

The sound of the plastic splitting in my hands seemed to shatter a spell. I was left with a shard of broken plastic in my hand, staring down at an empty box. There was no Terri inside it, compressed or otherwise.

The casket was empty.

I clawed at the velvet padding at the base of the box, just to see if I was the victim of some illusion. There was nothing. Just the hollow casket with its now cracked and broken dividers.

I let the lid fall and stared at the casket for some time. The hallucination had been so strong that I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I’d seen Terri in the casket. I’d smelled her yeasty sweat. I’d heard her raspy voice.

I went back out front. Tony was laughing about something with Nikki and Gail, the dancer with whom I’d run the Treasure Hunt. “Where’s the kit?” he asked me when I got to the ballroom.

I had no time to compose myself. “It’s been damaged,” I said. “You’d better come and look.”

Tony knitted his eyebrows. He spun on his heels and marched ahead of me to where I’d just come from. I’d already decided that I would be there when he opened the casket. I followed Tony backstage and into the props chamber.

“What a fucking state, this place,” he said, pulling the
casket out of its corner. He flipped open the lid and then he stepped back, just as I had done. His eyes bulged. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “What the fuck?”

I advanced up to his elbow and peered into the casket.

“Who the fuck has done that?” Tony shouted. “It’s smashed to fuck!”

He turned to me with an accusing look. I shook my head.

“It’s that fucking Nobby,” he said. “He brings women down here.”

“What?” I said. I was still reeling from what I’d seen—what I thought I’d seen—in the box.

“Fucking gets ’em playing around in the box, shows ’em how it’s done to impress ’em. I’ll swing for the little bastard.”

“How do you know it’s him?” I said reasonably.

“How do I know? How do I know anything?” He kicked the casket, as if he wanted to break it some more. “We can’t use that now. That’s fucked that for this afternoon.”

He was furious. I pressed past him and peered into the casket. I stooped down and ran my hands over the broken trammels, not for any other reason than to check for warmth, or blood, or any other evidence that the box had contained a body less than five minutes ago.

“Leave it,” Tony said. “You can’t fix it. We’ll do the plate spinning for fuck’s sake. Sort it, will you?”

He stormed away. I was left standing over the empty sword casket. There in that place of shabby conjuring tricks, it occurred to me for the first time that someone might be messing with me. It was impossible that there could be someone in the casket one moment and then not the next, but it was also impossible to get a woman to climb into a casket and
to stick swords into her only to have her pop out of the casket unharmed moments later.

MY HEART HAMMERED and my brain was running overtime, serpentine with ideas, boiling with notions. I was in a kind of fever. I needed to see Terri, to speak to her, to see that she was all right, to find out what was happening.

I practiced deep breathing and my heart rate started to come back to normal. I collected the gear for the plate-spinning routine. The set of plates spinning on poles have deep dimples under them so that they can easily be set spinning; meanwhile you invite an idiot from the audience to try his hand and give him a fragile, similar-looking plate with no dimple that of course crashes to the floor and splinters, all to the cruel merriment of the audience. It began to seem like all the conjuring was a cheap deception rather than the noble art I’d first taken it to be.

I hauled the plate-spinning gear over to the ballroom. Nikki and Gail were still there. Tony had gone.

“He’s not best pleased,” Nikki said.

“Wouldn’t like to be in Nobby’s shoes,” Gail said.

“No,” I said.

Nikki took some of the plates from me. “Come on, let’s set up.”

The Prizegiving and Farewell Show passed without event. I say without event: Plates crashed to the floor but that’s what they were supposed to do. Winners were announced and prizes were given. After the show a little girl, who had a habit
of following me around, tapped me on the hand and gave me a cigar in a tube. No doubt her parents thought this a nice gesture, and I did, too, even though I don’t smoke. In fact when I looked into the sparkly innocence of the child’s eyes it almost made my own eyes water.

In the Golden Wheel nightclub I operated the lights for Luca. The show was the same and the song was the same. Amid the lyrical references to summer kisses and sunburned hands I improvised a few touches with rotating gels for “Autumn Leaves.” After his performance Luca didn’t hang round to talk. He made a little salute in my direction before leaving.

With Luca’s song playing in a nightmarish loop in my head I made a point of finding some company with whom to walk back to my quarters in the dark. I was a bag of nerves, scanning the shadows. Once again I locked the door behind me and closed the curtains. I lay down on my pallet bed and eventually fell into a bewildering sleep.

I was back on the pier again, standing before the smashed glass case of the mechanical fortune-teller. I put a coin in the box, and instead of Zorena the manikin there was the boy, screaming. His head was shaved to the skull. He covered his head with his hands as he screamed and his forearms were tattooed. The tattoos were all red-and-black ladybugs. The boy’s mouth was wide open and his ear-splitting cry faded slowly, as did the boy, leaving scraps of himself hovering in the air. Eventually I reached out a hand to where the afterimages floated. The scraps stirred, as if I’d put my hand in water to disturb them, and finally faded altogether.

In the dream a card was spat from the machine. It read,
Wait for the card
.

15

WILL NO ONE FIX THE MALFUNCTIONING STRIP LIGHT?

Some movement awoke me in the early hours. I thought I was dreaming again. I opened my eyes and in the darkness I could see Nobby sitting on his bed. There wasn’t enough light to see his face but he sat with his hands on his knees, staring at me.

“You all right, Nobby?” I said.

“ ’Tain’t Nobby. It’s me.”

The gravel voice was unmistakable and it did two things. It iced my blood and it sent me scuttling up from my bed and against the window, to the nearest point of escape.

“Calm your nerves, son. It’s Colin.”

I knew perfectly well who it was.

As I forced my back up against the window the curtain rucked to admit a thin ray of moonlight that fell on Colin’s angular face. In that light his eyes shone like the carapaces of shiny black beetles. If I tried to speak, my mouth was too dry. I was paralyzed with fright. I couldn’t move again if I wanted to.

“What the fuck are you doin’? It’s Colin,” he said again. He laughed. “Look at you!”

“How did you get in?” I managed to say.

“Are you joking? Have you seen these locks? Get dressed. I need some help.”

He stood up and moved toward the door as if to give me room. Slowly my heart rate came back to normal. My legs trembled. I felt I had no choice but to do exactly what he said. I pulled on my jeans and denim shirt and trainers. Colin flicked his head in the direction of the door and went out. I followed. I looked down at the lock to my door and it was hanging off its fittings.

“Fix that later,” he said.

A malfunctioning strip light fizzed at the end of the corridor. No one else was around. The whole unit snoozed. I wanted to bang on someone’s door and shout for help, but I couldn’t. Colin stopped under the light and turned to me. “I’m not allowed on the resort so this was the only way to get to you.”

“Right,” I said. It was all so normalized. I felt like I was being marched to the electric chair by someone whose job it was to throw the switch at the end of the walk.

We passed through the shadows between the chalets and he led me to a low wire fence behind a privet hedge. It was a way into the resort I’d never even seen before. He cocked a leg over the fence without looking back to see if I followed. A path between the resort and a caravan park led out to the road and there Colin’s Hillman Minx was parked.

Without a word he unlocked the driver’s door and got in. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that I might bolt.
Everything was telling me to run, but another voice in my head was asking me to stay calm. I thought that if Colin was going to attack me, he would have done so in my room. After a couple of seconds Colin leaned across the seat to pop the lock on the passenger door. This was my last moment to make a run for it.

I opened the passenger door and got in. Colin carefully pulled on his driving gloves, started up the engine, and eased away from the curb. The car didn’t smell good. Something was “off.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

It was after one and the roads were deserted. We drove in complete silence. After we got out of town, Colin said, “Open the glove compartment.”

I popped open the glove compartment. In it was a folded map.

“You can navigate,” he said. “There’s a torch.”

I got the torch out of the glove compartment and unfolded the map. A clumsy X had been marked on the map with black ink. It was a place just across the Lincolnshire border into Nottinghamshire, near a town or village called Barlston. “What is it?” I asked.

“We stay on the A158 for a while. Keep your eyes peeled.”

PROGRESS WAS SLOW. The road was a narrow two-lane pretty much all the way to Lincoln. More than once oncoming drivers blared their horns at Colin, angry that he hadn’t
dimmed his headlights for them. Even in the dark some of the route looked familiar to me, and just before we reached Horncastle we approached a pub that I knew. It had a thatched roof and there wasn’t a breath of wind to stir the Union Jack on its smartly painted pole. It was the Fighting Cocks.

I said nothing. I thought: This is it; he’s brought me here so that he and his National Front cronies can have some fun with me.

But the car swished by without Colin even acknowledging the place.

It was a long journey in silence and the car still smelled bad. It was a smell that seemed familiar yet I couldn’t identify it. Eventually Colin alerted me to look for a turnoff. We found Barlston easy enough. It was a Nottinghamshire mining village.