Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  Alexander cupped his hand around the newel post, as though it were Megan’s face that he was touching. ‘What’s the book?’ he asked. She showed him the title, but it made no sense to him. ‘Are you OK, Megan?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll cope. Don’t worry about us.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Sure. Don’t worry.’

  ‘How’s university?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ was all she said, but he could tell that it was better than she would admit to him. ‘How’s the army?’

  ‘Awful,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ she asked, and she seemed concerned for him.

  ‘Not cut out for it,’ said Alexander. ‘Give me a quiet life any day.’

  Megan stood up and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Poor soldier boy,’ she said, and she rubbed the cropped hair on the back of his head. ‘Let’s meet before you go back. Not here, though. I’ll try to come over to your house.’

  But the last day of his visit came, and he had heard nothing more from her. In the afternoon he saw Room at the Top at a cinema up in town, and walked back all the way, from Waterloo to Borough, on through Bermondsey and down Jamaica Road, then up the hill to the Heath. He considered calling at Megan’s house, and the thought was still in his mind when he found himself at Sidney Dixon’s shop. A stirrup-shaped brass knocker had been attached to the side door that led to Sidney’s flat. Alexander rapped on the door and above his head a window rattled. ‘Who’s that?’ Alexander heard, and he stood back from the door and looked up. ‘My boy!’ Sidney shouted. ‘One minute!’

  In Sidney’s front room they shared two bottles of beer and talked about the shop and Alexander’s training until the chorus of chimes under their feet announced seven o’clock. ‘I’ll have to get home,’ said Alexander.

  ‘The hero’s send-off, eh?’ Sidney jested. Alexander would always remember that he was looking out of the window when Sidney said this, and that the crack in the windowpane was so wide that he was looking through clear air at the wall above the shoe shop opposite. A train was going up to the city. ‘Any idea what you’ll do after?’ Sidney asked.

  ‘Haven’t really thought.’

  ‘You know you can have your old job back any time you want,’ said Sidney. ‘The new boy, he’s all right. He’ll do for now. But he’s not like you. You’re like family,’ Sidney assured him. ‘Remember what I said,’ he added as he closed the door to the street. ‘If you want it, it’s yours.’

  Alexander crossed the road, then crossed back to look into the shop. The glass shone like the surface of a dark pool. Inside, the Chesterfield gleamed like a weed-clad rock and the clock faces caught the light like sea-worn pebbles. As though peering into the water in the hope of seeing something move across the sandy bed, he stared into the space where he used to sit.

  17. Welcome back, Private MacIndoe

  Morosely, as if they were a gang of work-shy assistants, Sidney inspected the rolled-up rugs that leaned against the wall. ‘We’ve got to get this stuff shifted, Alex,’ he complained. ‘Look at it. Nothing’s moved for days. Nothing. Not a single damned thing.’ His galoshes squelched on the waterlogged carpet as he crept behind the wall of wardrobes and tallboys.

  ‘Don’t worry, Sidney,’ said Alexander, dredging a handful of cigarette cards and sweet wrappers and pencil shavings from the back of the desk’s upper drawer. ‘Things will improve.’

  A door clicked open and clicked shut. ‘You could grow potatoes in the muck back here.’ Sidney reappeared, displaying a smudge of filth on the end of an index finger that was as pink as an as an earthworm.

  ‘We’ll sort things out, don’t worry,’ Alexander assured him.

  ‘It’s meant to be a shop, for Christ’s sake, not a bloody museum,’ Sidney grumbled, idly dandling the label that hung from a print of the Battle of the Nile. He looked at what his finger was doing. ‘What the hell?’ he exclaimed. ‘Two quid? Two quid? Would have stayed here till the crack of doom at that price. Bloody idiot! And God knows how many times I told him: guineas, not pounds. Always guineas. Not hard to remember, is it?’ Once he had checked the price of every picture, Sidney began on the crockery and silverware. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ he moaned at the label on a teapot that was made in the form of a thatched cottage. He lifted the lid by its chimney and waved it like a porter’s bell. ‘Here’s another one. See the price on this? See that? I paid more than that for it. Running a bloody charity or something.’ He lowered himself onto the chaise longue, and gave its tag a disgruntled glance.

  ‘I’ll fix them all before the end of the day,’ Alexander volunteered, turning the pages of the ledger.

  ‘Good lad,’ Sidney smiled, but behind the stiffened skin his eyes were like nail heads.

  ‘This appears to be well kept. Nines look like twos sometimes, but it’ll be all right,’ Alexander reported.

  ‘Good lad. Job number one, that is,’ Sidney intoned. He looked up from the floor, and slowly his eyes became rekindled. ‘Job number two: get the desk moved up there, by the window. Get that bloody helmet out the way, and slot the desk in there. I want the punters to see what a nice boy you are. No point hiding your light under a bushel, is there?’ he asked, and a smile contorted his anguished skin. ‘And job number three. Out the back you’ll find a few boxes. Lots of small things: tiepins, cuff-links, cameos, that sort of stuff. Put everything in the big case, Alex. Neatly, in straight lines, labels to the right. Neat as if they was new.’

  It took Alexander three days to set the shop in order. Diligently he traced every item in the acquisition book, calculated the mark-up, and attached new labels to every one, writing the prices in a script as careful as that of a registrar of births. He buffed each foggy mirror and clouded pane of glass, restored the gloss to greasy veneers, eradicated the tarnish on the silverware. He glued the peeling corners of the green leather rectangle that was set into the surface of the desk, and moved the desk to its new place near the window. It was there that he was sitting, on the afternoon of the third day, when he noticed a ball of paper crumpled under the door, by the hinge. Alexander peeled it apart and read ‘Welcome back, Private MacIndoe’, written in pencil, in a squat, loopy handwriting that he did not recognise. The next day, at five to nine, he pushed open the shop door to see on the mat, half covered by the morning’s post, a page that had been torn from a magazine. Part of a crossword puzzle was on one side, and on the other a photograph of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, ringed by a circle of dark pencil. A week later, he found amid the morning’s letters a sheet of paper folded precisely into quarters, with ‘Its too long till Valentines Day’ scribbled on the inside. Another note, soon after, had been left protruding onto the tiles of the doorstep, where the sleet had dissolved what seemed to be a piece of verse, so that Alexander could read only ‘to be true’ at the end of one line and ‘you’ at the end of the next.

  The illegible note was lying on the desk, and Alexander was about to close for lunch, when Liz Gatting came into the shop. She was wearing a white cotton overall and her hair was now blonde, lying in a broad wave against the nape of her neck. The collar of her blouse lay open on a necklace of pink plastic beads that matched the colour of her lipstick. Plucked into steep wiry arches, her eyebrows gave an insolent quality to her expression, which the slight backward tilt of her head was perhaps intended to strengthen.

  ‘Long time no see,’ she greeted him, dropping her handbag onto the desk. ‘How you finding Civvy Street?’ She smiled at him, revealing the gap in her teeth, and her smile amused and excited Alexander, as if a masked actress had accidentally allowed him a glimpse of her face.

  ‘So-so,’ Alexander replied, suppressing a laugh. ‘You a nurse now?’

  Appalled, Liz clutched her hands to her throat. ‘A nurse. Me? Mucky bandages? Bed pans? You’ve got the wrong girl.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Receptionist, Alec,’ she explained. ‘Like you, sort of.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The opticians, up
there.’ She aimed a pink fingernail at the street. ‘Five minutes away. You’ve walked past some mornings. In a world of your own. Can I?’ she asked, and she sat down on the chaise longue.

  Together they tallied the schoolfriends who had left or were no longer friends. ‘I reckon John Halloran’s gone,’ Alexander told her, and he recounted the conversation that he had sensed would be their last. ‘Paul Malinowski’s still around, though.’

  ‘Don’t know him.’

  ‘And Mick Radford?’

  ‘Tough guy, yes.’

  ‘He’s stuck around.’

  ‘Nowhere else would have him,’ said Liz. ‘But I’ll tell you something. A real shocker,’ she said eagerly, balancing on the very edge of the seat. ‘Jenny Stanthorpe. Little Miss Proper.’ Sarcastically she clasped her hands together and regarded Alexander with a demure and saintly gaze. ‘Mother opens the door one evening. Big black boy in motorbike gear standing there. Asks is Jennifer in. All polite like. Quick as a flash, Little Miss comes running out the house, jumps on the back of his bike, and they’re off into the sunset at ninety miles an hour. Right palaver there was. Her mum screaming blue murder in the road, boys in blue on the scene. Nothing they can do, though, is there? Twenty-one, can do as she likes. Not as if she was kidnapped. Two weeks later the parents get a note. Sorry it had to be like this, I thought you’d never understand. Too right they wouldn’t. Run off with a Zulu, far as they were concerned. A boxer, someone said he was.’ Liz examined her fingernails and stood up. ‘Some people get all the excitement, don’t they?’ she said, flattening the creases of the overall on her hips. ‘None for the likes of us, I tell you. Surgical supports and aspirin all day for me; busted chairs and old junk for you.’ She picked up a battered old cricket bat. ‘Must be going. See you tomorrow?’ she proposed, and as she swung the bat her ankles and stilettos made a shape that brought to Alexander’s mind his mother and Mrs Beckwith, walking arm in arm away from him towards the wet pavement outside the Dome of Discovery.

  Every day she came to the shop at one o’clock, and he would put the sign on the door and walk up the hill with her, to the café by the concert hall. They sat on tall stools at the yellow Formica table that ran along the window, by the blackboard on which the menu was written every day, though the dishes on offer never changed. She would tell him about her morning’s customers, then he would try to make a story out of his, if there had been any. Through the musty net curtains they watched the street as they ate their sandwiches. She had nicknames for the housewives they saw most often: Mrs How Much? haggled with the assistants in the grocer’s and the butcher’s; Mrs Must Be Going always seemed impatient to get away from the conversations she herself had initiated; Mrs Dog’s Best Friend had a Highland terrier that travelled in a wheeled wicker basket with her shopping; Mrs Doomed was never seen to smile. ‘Twenty years time, that’s me,’ said Liz, as Mrs Make An Effort replenished her lipstick at the bus stop, grasping her umbrella and her open compact in the same hand. ‘And where are you?’ she asked herself, and she stood on the struts of the stool to scan the hill. ‘There,’ she decided, pointing to the newspaper that hid from view the sole passenger on the upper deck of the bus that was pulling in to collect Mrs Make An Effort.

  One day, shortly before Christmas, one o’clock passed and Liz Gatting had not arrived. For a quarter of an hour Alexander kept a lookout from the doorway, but she did not appear. He kept the shop open, and set to work logging some recently bought pieces into the book, transcribing the dates and prices from Sidney’s slips of paper. Two o’clock passed. He went to the door again. From a shelf of cheaper items he picked up a battered fob watch that might have been in the shop since his first day there. The watch’s case was as dull as mortar. He took it into the back room, put a dab of polish on a cloth, and began to work the sheen back into the brass. Mrs Daniel – Mrs Must Be Going – it was who came into the shop then, leaving the door ajar. ‘Just enquiring,’ she said. ‘I’ve gone and broken a cup, and I do so want to replace it. Used to be a popular pattern, I believe. So my husband says.’ From her handbag she extracted a linen handkerchief, folded into a triangular shape. As though unwrapping a wren’s egg, she peeled back the fabric from an eye-sized fragment of china. ‘Would it be familiar to you?’ she asked, tracing with a fingernail the tendril of orange vine that was painted on the china.

  ‘Hard to say for certain. Not much to go on here, to be perfectly frank with you, Mrs Daniel.’ He put down the watch and plucked the shard from the handkerchief. His face assumed an expert’s seriousness, but he could think of nothing to say.

  ‘Should I bring a bigger piece? Might that be of assistance?’

  ‘It would be an idea, Mrs Daniel.’

  ‘Yes, it would. That’s what I’ll do, then. But in the meantime, if you do happen to see anything like it, you will let me know, won’t you?’

  ‘Indeed I shall,’ said Alexander, and he escorted Mrs Daniel to the door.

  He retrieved the watch, put a thumbnail into the notch of the casing and prised the cover open. He turned the winder and raised the watch to his ear; its escapement made a noise like the splintering of a small bone. He was watching the tiny ace of spades at the end of the minute hand move over the pillars of the roman three when his fingertip found, on the reverse of the watch, a smaller indentation by which a second lid was opened. It covered nothing but a back of smooth brass. He was about to close this purposeless lid when he noticed a mark on its inner surface. It was a name, scratched unevenly into the metal rather than engraved, and the name was Simon Ordish. Alexander repeated the words aloud, and then, in the silence of the shop, they repeated themselves to him, over and over again, as if they were imprisoned within his mind, and were seeking the meaning that would give them liberty. He bolted the front door and turned off the lights in the shop; he locked the cash box and stowed it in the safe. And then, as he closed the lid of the pianola, he recalled seeing the name Ordish written on a medicine bottle in the rubble of the Doodlebug House.

  When Liz arrived he was still holding the watch. ‘Miss me?’ she asked. She unbuttoned her red coat and held it open. ‘You like? My mum’s, but she got too fat for it. Stylish, no?’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ he said.

  ‘So why the face?’

  ‘This is very peculiar,’ he told her, putting the watch on the desk.

  She sat on the edge of the desk and held the watch up, like a nurse taking a reading from a thermometer. ‘It’s stopped,’ she said. ‘Nothing strange about that. It’s a crappy old broken watch.’

  ‘No, but I know the house it came from. I used to play in it when I was a kid,’ he said, and he told her about the Doodlebug House.

  ‘And here it is in a junk shop,’ said Liz, shrugging her shoulders.

  ‘But it’s strange it’s turned up here, don’t you think?’

  ‘Got to end up somewhere, Alec. You’ve got a lump of junk from every house between here and Luton. If there wasn’t something from that place, that’d be really amazing.’

  ‘I think it’s peculiar it’s ended up back with me.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Liz, looking at him as if he were an entertainingly dogged child. ‘You shutting up shop now?’

  ‘In a bit,’ he replied, having consulted the clocks.

  ‘Waiting for the last-minute rush, eh?’ she teased. ‘Go on, be a devil. Lock up half an hour early and you can walk me home.’

  Alexander opened the cash book and unscrewed the ink bottle to refill his pen. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he told her. She eased herself down from the desk.

  At that moment the doorbell rang and a man wearing tweeds and a deerstalker hat came in. He had bulging blue eyes and his face was covered in claret capillaries, like minuscule rivulets streaming from his cheeks. ‘Interested in something I saw in your window last week,’ he said. ‘Decanter. Crystal. Silver collar,’ he explained. ‘Seems to have gone.’

  ‘It has, sir. Sold it last week, I’m afraid. We do have others, how
ever.’ He indicated a group of decanters, arrayed on the bottom tier of a cake stand, close to where Liz was standing.

  The man looked at Liz, then at the decanters, then mistrustfully at Alexander. ‘Sold, you say?’

  ‘Sir. Last week. But do take a look.’ Alexander preceded his customer to the stand, and bent down to admire the bottles.

  Liz wandered down the aisle of carpets, humming ‘He’ll Have To Go’ as though it were a cheerful song. ‘Still got that kettle out the back, Alec?’ she called to him.

  ‘I think this one is most similar,’ said Alexander, raising the decanter in his palm. Above the sound of the running water, he heard Liz complaining quietly: ‘The decenter’s gorn, it hes.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the customer. ‘Not at all similar. No substitute at all.’ He looked at the pictures on the wall, at the row of clocks, at Alexander’s desk, and seemed to see evidence of poor character in everything he saw. ‘Good day to you, young man,’ he said. He closed the door with significant firmness.

  Liz strode purposefully into the shop and stopped in front of Alexander. In a pompous, matronly voice she said: ‘I am interested in something I saw in the window of your establishment, young man.’

  ‘And what might that be, madam?’ Alexander enquired.

  She reached into her coat and produced a sprig of mistletoe, and pressed her open mouth to his. ‘No more dealings with the public today, that’s what I say. Go and lock up. Kettle’s boiling,’ she said, and shoved him towards the door.

  When Alexander returned to the back room her blouse was hanging on the chair by the radiator and she was sitting on the threadbare settee with her arms crossed over her chest. ‘Locked and bolted?’ she asked.

  ‘Locked and bolted.’

  ‘The light?’ she said. ‘Don’t want to make a spectacle of ourselves.’ Alexander’s fingertips skimmed the wall and pinched the steel bud of the light switch. It snapped like a mousetrap. ‘Come on,’ she said, and she raised her arms to him. She closed her eyes and kissed him, delicately, as if she had become the one who was being seduced. Her hand touched his chest and he felt the skin of his entire body become tight, and a sound like the shriek of a flock of starlings raced into and out of his hearing. Her lips touched his ear and she said his name, as though each of its four syllables were a new sound to her. ‘You are lovely,’ she whispered, and she guided his hand to her back. ‘A lovely boy,’ she sighed.