The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (6 page)

Terri burst into tears. “I’m sorry, Luca. I’m so sorry!”

Luca seemed suddenly to recover his composure. “My darling, was it you? Or was it him?” He stepped over to Terri and took her hand, bent his head, and pressed his lips to her trembling fingers. Then with a sad smile he released her hand. “Yes.
Sì. Sì
. We have a show, no? We have a show.” He turned and skipped up the steps and onto the stage to disappear into the wings, followed by Tony and the dancers, all still babbling incredulity at the event.

I was left out front with Pinky. Terri switched on the hoover and moved away from us. “I saw it all,” I said.

Pinky sniffed. “Was he?”

“Was he what?”

He nodded at Terri. “Was Luca having a sniff?”

“Christ, no. Luca was just telling her what a great voice she has. That’s all it was. Unless that constitutes ‘having a sniff.’ ”

Pinky turned away from me and followed the others up the steps onto the stage. He puffed on his unlit cigar. “Sometimes it does,” he said, “sometimes it doesn’t.”

I was left with Terri as she trawled up and down the aisles with the hoover. I wanted to go but then again, I didn’t. I watched her work as if nothing had just happened, and I knew she was aware of me watching her. It was ridiculous. She was beautiful. It didn’t seem possible that she had become yoked to a man like that, someone twice her age, someone who was a beast and who could offer nothing but raw violence and meanness and a life of low instinct.

Very slowly she worked her way back toward me with the vacuum cleaner, bringing the thing close to where I was standing. I wondered if I was supposed to lift my feet like I’d seen my dad do for my mum, but when the machine was almost touching my shoe she switched it off. The new quiet pulsed in the empty auditorium. A stray lock of hair had fallen across her face and she pretended to blow it out of her eye but I knew it was a breath of relief. She gave me a deep, searching look. Then she parted her lips and mouthed one single, painful word.

She didn’t even have to say it.

4

TO FIGHT THE SAVAGE FOE, ALTHOUGH

The following morning I got to find out who I was billeted with. It turned out to be the missing Greencoat, a cheerfully psychotic Mancunian chain-smoker called Nobby. After another bad night I was actually sleeping well that morning, only to be awoken when his key hit the lock from the other side of the door.

If he was surprised to encounter a new roommate he didn’t show it. He stood over me in a Greencoat outfit of whites—or rather off-whites—and a blazer identical to mine. “Are you with us, son? It’s a brand-new day!”

I blinked up at him from my pit. He was at least ten years my senior. His hair shook in its tight perm of dark curls streaked gray at the temples. The tremor was from an endless nervous energy that would never—I was about to discover—allow him to be still.

“You the new Greencoat, then? Shake a leg and I’ll walk down with you. Though you can have this shithole to yourself
’coz I’m never here how the fuck they expect two grown men to sleep side by side in this depressed hen coop for plucked chickens I’ll never know are you up yet? Come on, son, come on.”

“I’ll get a shower,” I muttered. I grabbed a towel and walked out into the corridor.

For some reason Nobby followed me. “Shower? Shower? Throw water on your face, you’ll be fine. There’s a drought on! War rations. I mean war footing! Plus showering every day is bad for you no one ever tell you that scrubs away the natural oils so essential to your vitality, son. Not to mention the pheromones yes yes yes. Did I mention the pheromones?”

There was a communal shower at the end of the building and I walked in and switched on the faucet. “The what?”

“The what? They told me you was fuckin’ educated. Pheromones, son, pheromones. This is what it’s all about, innit? Are you getting plenty? If you are that’s ’coz of your very fine zinging pinging pheromones. If you’re not getting plenty that’s ’coz your pheromones are no good. Or rinsed out. Wash it all away and well, damp squib sort of thing.” He stood watching me shower and didn’t stop talking except to light up a cigarette. “Too much fuckin’ showering that’ll do it. Hey! Hey! Hey! You listen to Nobby. Nobby knows, you know.”

I dried off and padded back to my room. Or
our
room, as with increasing dismay I now felt I should call it.

“Flip-flops! Get yourself some flip-flops. ’Coz o’ the slops they’re dirty lazy bastards in here and you’ll get athlete’s foot off this shower floor and verrucas and viruses and what else trench foot I don’t know warts corns blisters ingrown toenails
instep fungus hammertoe, hey hey! That floor is like a smorgasbord of infection, hey!”

I made the mistake of trying to listen to this barrage but it was impossible. I found my brain starting to tune him out. I’d known him maybe three minutes and already he exhausted me. As I got dressed I said, “I thought you’d quit.”

“Why? Why’s that then? Why?” He went over to the open window and flung his cigarette butt outside. Then he sat on my bed, took out a fresh ciggie, and did that trick of flipping it in the air and catching it in his mouth.

“Well, you’d been missing for a few days.”

“Missing? I haven’t been missing. I’ve been on my other job.”

“Other job?”

“Look at the state of your whites! Bit of how’s your father round the waist I’d say. That the best they could do? That’s a joke that. A joke. Go and see Dot and don’t take any shit. Better still I’ve got some as will fit you better.” Then he slapped his thigh and fell sideways on the bed, laughing, a cancerous cackle. “A joke.” When he’d recovered from the hilarity of laughing at my ill-fitting whites, he recovered to light up his cigarette. “Yes, I’ve got another job up the road.”

“Aren’t you full-time?”

He did a double take and then looked over his shoulder as if the management team might be hiding in the tiny wardrobe. “ ’Course I’m full-time. Full-time up the road, too. You ready? You look like shite! Hey! Let’s go.”

We walked together to the theater for the morning briefing. I was keen to ask him some questions, but it was almost impossible to break into his constant stream of chatter.

“Everyone’s doing two jobs, son, everyone, and if they’re not in the category of everyone they’re on the skim, they’ve all got their skim. Welcome to skim city. Hey! If you find a way to live on these wages you let me know about it.”

“Well, we do get food and lodgings,” I suggested.

Mistake.

He leaped in front of me, stopped dead, brought his feet together, and leaned forward at a forty-five degree angle. “Food and lodgings! You call that mouse cage that squirrel farm a lodging?” We started moving again. “It’s a matchwood tent! A shantytown! A papier-mâché ghetto! That famous east-coast wind better not blow too hard or it will all come down. Huff and puff, Mr. Wolf. What’s that? Pigs. Dunno. It’s not even a barn. Better not get caught with a woman in your room or they’ll have you off the site. And you can’t even keep your own alcohol in your own room, have they told you that? As for food, hey!” He suddenly lowered his voice. “Eyes right! Eyes right!” I thought he was asserting himself, saying
I is right
, but then he said “Three o’clock!” and I realized that he wanted me to look to my right.

A very pretty girl in a tiny bikini was strolling away from us.

“You like school dinner? I f’kin don’t. Okay if you want spotted dick and jam roly-poly every Wednesday and pummeled spuds and choked carrots and strangled sprouts and canteen cuisine … Eyes left! Eyes left!”—to the left two good-looking full-figured mothers led their toddlers over to the play sand—“and strangled sprouts and canteen catering well let me tell you I had better grub in the fuckin’ army and if that’s your idea of a good … Eyes right, eyes right, four o’clock.”

I glanced to the right and a very old lady with dowager’s hump came creeping toward us. Nobby howled with laughter. “Got you there, son, didn’t I? Walked into that one, you did! Shake hands! Hey! Hey!”

I admitted he’d “got me” there. Nobby refused to move on until I shook his outstretched hand. Then he started up again with his unbroken patter. I was glad when we reached the theater. I looked at my watch. It was nine fifteen. I hadn’t even got to the day’s briefing and I was dog tired.

NOBBY’S EXCITABLE ENERGY wasn’t the only reason why I was so shattered. I’d had my worst night so far. I couldn’t sleep. I’d had the window wide open but the air was stifling. Every time I thought I might drift off to sleep, I had an image of Terri mouthing that single word at me.

In fact it wasn’t just while I was sleeping. After Colin’s assault on Luca Valletti I’d taken a seat at the side of the theater, watching the show without really seeing any of it. The entire variety act. Paget and Drum, the comedy duo. Shelly Breeze—I’m not making up these names—doing her diva routine. Abdul-Shazam in his fez inserting swords into a casket containing one of the dancers. Oh yes, Nikki danced at the edge of the stage. She was magnificent under stage lights. All the dancers were, and they maintained dazzling smiles that you rarely got to see offstage. But at some point in the show Nikki caught my eye, and she winked at me.

Finally Luca, consummate professional that he was, topped off the show. He had a white silk scarf wrapped tightly
around his bruised throat and you wouldn’t have known what had taken place in that theater ninety minutes earlier. He had this farewell song—something about fighting in the Foreign Legion—where he waved a white handkerchief and the ladies in the audience took handkerchiefs out of their handbags and waved back at him.

They lapped it up. But I couldn’t help thinking about what was going on in Luca’s head as he smiled and sang and leveled the blade of his hand at his breast.

So I’d spent an entire evening thinking about Terri, and I’d spent a night tossing and turning in the heat with her face appearing in the dark. Now I was about to go into the theater where I would see her cleaning the stage. I knew I was going to have to fight to avert my eyes. I thought I was transparent and that the chirpy mad Mancunian or Nikki or Tony or all of them would see through me straightaway. I was tailor-made music-hall material. I’d only been in the resort a week and had fallen for the old story about rescuing the woman with the mop and bucket.

But when I walked in I didn’t get to see Terri at all. A much older woman with a dry scowl and a giant hairpin was up onstage swinging the mop to and fro, giving the boards a good grinding. Tony sat in the front row of seats, legs spread
far apart, his well-packed midriff spilling over his belt buckle. He looked glum.

“Where’s Punch and Judy, then?” I said. I was trying to sound distant and casual.

“What?”

I jerked a thumb at the new cleaner.

“Chance they’ll be fired,” Tony said.

I was crestfallen. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” he said drily. “Turns out it’s against resort rules to disconnect the windpipe of your bill-topping Italian tenor. Who’d have thought it? What’s the world coming to?” He yawned, a little theatrically, I thought. Then his eyes fell on my roommate behind me. “Nobby, you good-for-nothing Mancunian bastard.”

“Charming, fucking charming,” said Nobby, “you get one dose of gastroenteritis for a couple of days, one miserly virus, and you stay off work to protect your mates from contagion and what abuse do you get? What abuse do you get? I’m glad you asked me that. I’ll tell you what abuse you get …”

But I wasn’t listening. I sat down. I was too busy thinking about whether something precious had been torn away from me or whether I’d had a lucky escape. I know that if Terri had asked me to walk over a cliff with her I would have followed, just for the chance of a kiss on the way down.

Nikki, in crisply laundered whites, crashed in the seat next to me. “Why the long face?” She lifted her leg so that her exquisite right ankle balanced on her tantalizing left knee. Her pleated white skirt fell away to expose her tanned thighs.

I realized she was talking to me. “Can’t sleep. Since I’ve been here.”

“You’re not drinking enough, college boy. Or too much.”

“I don’t like getting pissed. I’m a mean drunk.”

She looked at me skeptically and was about to speak when Tony jumped out of his seat and clapped his hands loudly.

“Right then, if I can interrupt you lovebirds”—he was looking at me and Nikki—“let me point out we have a big day ahead of us. Before that, please, a big round of applause for Nobby who decided to come to work today.”

Ironic applause followed. I found myself joining in.

“Fucking charming, that!” Nobby said. He started to say a lot more but Tony waved him into silence.

“Girls, Whist Drive this morning and round-the-clock. Sammy, you do the Glamorous Grandmother and don’t let those old birds grab your wig this week. Nobby, supervise the crown-green bowls if you please.”

“Fuckin ’ell,” Nobby croaked, but to himself.