Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  They went down to the waterfront, where every restaurant was busy, and returned to the square along a narrow street that was choked with tables, all of them occupied. They walked past the church and the bus station, and reached the train station before turning back and following the road that flanked the cathedral. ‘I’m ravenous,’ laughed Megan, as though something had been troubling her for some time and she had only now realised what it was. The lights of the ship appeared at the end of a side street. They walked towards the quay, and at the first junction they looked to one side and saw two tables on the pavement outside what seemed to be an ordinary house. A middle-aged man, stocky as a wrestler, stepped through the beaded curtain that hung in the doorway and, seeing Megan and Alexander peering into the twilight of his alley, hoisted a pair of wooden chairs above his head. He pushed an arm through the curtain and extracted it almost instantly, holding a water carafe and a bottle of ouzo. ‘That’s the one,’ said Megan, and before they reached the table it had been set with dishes of aubergine and olives and tomatoes, and two young tourists were approaching from the opposite end of the alley, lured by another brandished pair of chairs.

  Standing behind Megan and Alexander, the couple scanned the front of the house. ‘It is a restaurant?’ the woman asked.

  ‘It would seem so,’ Alexander told her.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the woman to Megan, and hesitantly she took a seat at the other table, on which four or five dishes, carried into the street on a forearm, were spread as quickly as a hand of cards. Her companion had taken a phrasebook from his pocket and was flicking its pages anxiously. She raked his hair with her fingernails and huddled against him to read the page.

  In the course of the next hour or more a dozen dishes were placed on each table with scarcely a word. The young Germans smiled at each course, and at the man who had brought it, and occasionally at Alexander and Megan, but they spoke only to each other until the meal was finished. They could not stop touching each other. While the young man read aloud a passage from their guidebook, his girlfriend ran a finger up and down his arm. When she edged closer to him to look at the page he stroked her hair, her face, her legs. Whenever they took a sip from their glasses they kissed straight afterwards, savouring the taste on the other’s lips.

  Noticing that Megan was watching them over his shoulder, Alexander tapped her plate with his knife. ‘HQ to Agent Beckwith. Do you read me? Over.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Megan, returning her attention to her plate.

  ‘You envious?’ he enquired.

  ‘Of what?’ she asked. ‘Their tans?’

  ‘The first careless rapture.’

  She glanced over his shoulder, pressing her lips together in disapproval. ‘You’re kidding,’ she said.

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘Why should I be envious?’ she replied.

  ‘You know,’ he shrugged. ‘We’ve never been like that. We skipped a stage.’

  Megan looked at him for a moment, as if considering an idea that had never occurred to her before. ‘And perhaps they’ll never be like this, Eck,’ she said. She leaned across the table to kiss him, and the other couple smiled at each other, thinking, it seemed, that Megan was following their example. ‘But I do envy the tans,’ she told him, pressing his hand to her sun-reddened brow.

  When recalling their first holiday, Alexander would remember this conversation before anything else, except for the day that was as hot at eight o’clock in the morning as the previous days had been at noon, and they hired a scooter because even the beach at the end of the rough track was crowded. They went to Epidavros, where the heat was so intense that when he sat on the uppermost tier of the amphitheatre and looked across the ruins at the dark green mountain, it was as though he was looking through a slow flow of clear liquid that was continuously warping the line of the horizon and making the trees rise and fall in low waves. His sweat, dripping onto stone, became a dry stain within seconds. Birds circled high above the hills, never descending, like particles of iron stirred in thick transparent oil. Megan advanced across the hot earth, treading the ground as if there were only one path that would take her across it safely. In front of her, a man in chequered shorts and a singlet the colour of lemon sorbet wiggled his forefingers at his temples and kicked up the dust with long scrapes of his sandals; his wife giggled, waving him away. Two boys tussled over the circle of white stone in the centre; their teacher called them back to their group, and Megan stepped onto the circle. A party of students walked in single file around the tier two rows below the one on which Alexander sat, their sketchbooks held above their heads as parasols. In the gaps between them, Alexander saw Megan far below, hitching his white cotton shirt onto her shoulders. She looked at the ground; her hair glistened as if it were wet; he saw her mouth moving. ‘Hello, Eck,’ she whispered. ‘Hello, Eck,’ she repeated softly, and her voice was so close it seemed that her lips were almost touching his ear. Passing behind her, a woman paused to look at Megan, and then scrutinised the stone terraces, but her gaze did not find Alexander. Megan whispered at the ground, and her voice floated through the rasping of the feet of the people around her. ‘Hello, Eck. Hello, love,’ she said. Again the woman gazed up at the terraces.

  That night, as on every other night of that week in Nafplio, they went back to the taverna in the alley by the harbour. After the meal, as was their habit, they strolled around the main square for a while then followed the path around the headland from the waterfront. Halfway between the town and the beach Megan looked back and, assured that they were alone, climbed down from the path onto the platform of rock where they sunbathed. At the edge of the outcrop she began to undress. ‘Come on,’ she said, holding her dress with her fingertips and letting it fall. He sat on the path and he watched her as she lowered herself from the rock. With strokes that barely moved the surface she swam towards the boat that was tethered some twenty yards from the shore, and when she reached it she put a hand on its bow to rest there. ‘Come on, Eck,’ she called. Directly across the bay, a charcoal cloud was running aground on the hills and crumpling upwards, and underneath the cloud the headlights of a car flashed at the curves of an invisible road. Against the dark purple water her skin was as pale as a snowberry. In the bushes the cicadas creaked in a regular rhythm, as if singing the seconds away.

  35. MacIndoe’s

  As soon as they had decorated the flat and Alexander had uprooted the weeds and dug out the debris and put the garden in order, they invited his parents for a meal, and this was to be the one evening on which his parents were their guests, because all subsequent invitations to his parents were discreetly turned by Alexander’s mother into an invitation from her to them. From time to time Alexander and Megan had an evening with Sam and Liz, but never at the flat, because it was difficult to get someone to look after the children for long, and whenever they spent some time with any of the five or six of Megan’s colleagues whom she regarded as friends it was nearly always at a pub or a restaurant in Greenwich or up in town. The only person who came to the flat more than once in the first year was Sid Dixon.

  It was around the time of the bank robbery in Nice, as Alexander would recall, that Megan first met Sid. She and Alexander were redecorating the Beckwiths’ house, and she came into the shop one Thursday afternoon before term started, bringing a swatch of paint samples that she had borrowed. Ten minutes later Sid arrived, to pick up a Jack Teagarden record he had promised to deliver to one of their regular customers, who had broken an ankle.

  Alexander and Megan were standing by the window, holding the fan of colours into the light, when Sid came in. He looked at Alexander, then at Megan, and then at the swatch they were holding, but before he could form a conclusion Megan smiled at him and said his name. ‘I still owe you my thanks,’ she said before he could respond.

  ‘For what?’ asked Sid, directing his bemused reply to Alexander.

  ‘For never having thanked you,’ said Megan.

  ‘For what?’ asked Sid ag
ain.

  ‘For talking to my father that time. It was very good of you.’

  ‘You’re Megan?’ said Sid, now closing the door.

  ‘I’m Megan,’ she verified. ‘Alexander told me all about it. I should have called you, instead of leaving it to him. It was remiss of me,’ she said, and she looked at Sid steadily, seeming not to see the disfigurement of his face.

  ‘I wasn’t much help,’ Sid demurred.

  ‘No, Sid, you were,’ said Alexander.

  ‘You were,’ Megan agreed.

  ‘Some light refreshment?’ Alexander suggested, sidling towards the counter.

  Sid nodded, but did not follow him. ‘All those years, and we never met,’ he said.

  ‘I was away a lot of the time,’ Megan explained.

  ‘I always wondered what you looked like,’ Sid told her. ‘And vice versa, I suppose.’

  ‘I knew,’ said Megan. ‘I saw you a few times, through the window. When I called to see Eck after school. I didn’t come in.’

  ‘A common reaction.’

  ‘No,’ said Megan firmly. ‘I didn’t want to get Eck into trouble.’

  ‘I see,’ Sid replied, with a sceptical half-smile that shrank away under Megan’s candid gaze. ‘A lot of people used to run away,’ Sid jested. ‘That’s why I employed your man here.’

  Alexander, waiting in the doorway of the stockroom, took a bow. ‘A decision never rued,’ he declared, waving the kettle enticingly.

  ‘Anyway, I’m pleased to meet you, after all this time,’ said Megan, and Sid, who never shook hands with anyone, let Megan take his maimed right hand in her palm, and he smiled as if entranced by the boldness of her.

  They invited Sid Dixon to the house on Boxing Day of that year, and a couple of weeks after Alexander’s parents had visited them he came to the flat, bringing as a housewarming present a blue and white china plate on which was painted a rustic schoolhouse with a procession of children filing through its door. On the next visit he brought a little onyx box, in which Megan was to keep her rings and earrings, and after that he gave her an old cut-glass perfume bottle, which she never filled because a trace of jasmine still lingered in the empty bottle. And one evening, soon after the end of the spring term, as Alexander would remember, Sid arrived with a large object wrapped in newspaper under his arm and a briefcase in his other hand. It was raining, and the saturated paper came off in strips as he unwrapped the gift hastily on the kitchen table. ‘A bit risky,’ he warned Megan, ‘but I hope you’ll like her. Found her in a jumble sale,’ he explained to Alexander. A globe of fluted glass emerged, supported on the forearms of a pewter figure with a helmet-like bob, who was naked but for a tiara, a sash knotted slackly around her waist and a bow slung over a shoulder. At her feet, a borzoi lay asleep, its muzzle nestled between its paws. With a rag of dampened paper Sid erased a mark from the base of the lamp. ‘We had a similar one in the shop once, didn’t we, Alex? Got snapped up straight away. Less than a year, anyway,’ he laughed, glancing at Alexander in such a way that Alexander then knew what Sid would be telling them later.

  They kept the lamp in the centre of the table while they ate. Megan was turning it, admiring the nymph’s sleek little thighs and small-breasted torso, when Sid, looking up at the drawing of Malham Beck that Megan had made on a recent field trip, at last said: ‘I’ve made up my mind, kids.’ They stopped eating, but he could not look at them. ‘This is the year I pack it in,’ he went on, with a determined tensing of his jaw, and then he turned to Alexander. ‘Time to pass it on to a younger man. I’m getting too long in the tooth. Walk down the street now and it’s like I’m in a foreign country. All this effing and blinding and wearing stupid clothes, I can’t be doing with it,’ he told Megan.

  ‘We had quite enough of that kind of thing in the army,’ Alexander said, fetching more beer from the fridge.

  ‘Country’s going to the dogs, I reckon. I don’t know what their problem is, these kids. Life of Riley, they’ve got.’

  ‘No future, Sid,’ said Megan. ‘Not as far as they can see.’

  ‘No sense, more like. How you going to have a future if you go round sticking two fingers up at everyone? Shoving pins through your face. It’s stupid.’

  ‘They’ll grow out of it,’ Megan assured him.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sid, fiddling with the switch of the lamp. ‘But I’m off. I’m retiring to Jersey. Half-retiring.’

  ‘Jersey?’ Alexander exclaimed. ‘What happened to the man who needed noise?’

  ‘Who needed noise?’

  ‘You did. First time I met you, that’s what you said.’

  ‘I did?’ Sid queried. ‘Well, that’s what getting old does for you. You’ll find out, in the end.’

  ‘So why Jersey?’ asked Alexander.

  ‘There’s a cousin out there. Runs a garage. I’ll help him out a bit.’ He clicked the switch rapidly, four or five times, then said to Megan: ‘I’d like Alex to take over the shop. I’d hate it to become a branch of an off-licence or something. I want it to continue as it is, and I know it’ll be in safe hands if he’s still running the show.’

  ‘It will.’

  ‘We can trust Alex.’

  ‘We can,’ she said.

  ‘When do you think you’ll be going?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘As soon as I can,’ said Sid. ‘In the bag I’ve got the accounts for the last ten years. Get your old man to give them a once-over. Check you’re not taking a pig in a poke.’ He turned to Megan again. ‘You’ll make sure he takes over, won’t you, love?’ he urged.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Megan.

  ‘Good. It’s right that he should have it,’ Sid told her. ‘It’s what should happen. Just like you two are together. Some things are meant to happen,’ he said, with a sentimental cadence that prompted Megan to reach across the table and put an arm around his shoulders. He glanced at Alexander and winked, but Alexander glimpsed in his eyes an inflection that raised the memory of the desolate smile with which their friendship had perhaps begun, as Alexander’s father held Sid’s coat open for him in the hallway of their house. Alexander would always remember this, and the frail jocularity of Sid’s voice when, standing at the door and glancing over Megan’s shoulder, he said that they would have to come out and see him. And he would remember that at two o’clock that night, having leafed through the accounts and found nothing unexpected, he drove to the shop and sat for an hour or more in the half-light. Hearing in the silence of the shop some of the records that he had played there, he sensed something of the portions of time that had become attached to the music. He heard Roy Orbison howling ‘It’s Over’ while two schoolboys counted their money on the doorstep, and Led Zeppelin blaring at the end of a quiet afternoon when for several seconds there was not a single person and not a single car in the street. Summoning the sound of Leonard Cohen’s voice, of Dusty Springfield, of ‘Somebody to Love’, he saw bars of shadow under a striped awning, and a girl’s white PVC coat, and a bag made from a piece of dark tapestry, from which had arisen the perfume of patchouli. He recalled the shop as it had been when Megan used to call after school, and heard again the ticking of the clocks. Gazing up the hill, he pictured the faces of the people who worked in every shop, and of the people who had worked there before them, back to the year when he became Sid Dixon’s assistant, when the girl who looked like Connie Francis was the clerk at the train station. He could not imagine himself anywhere else.

  One afternoon, three months after Dixon’s Discs had become MacIndoe’s, Alexander was in the stockroom, filing the week’s mail orders, when he heard, through the music that was playing in the shop, the catch of the door. It was one of the Bach cello suites that was playing, and Pope John Paul II had recently been elected, which he would remember because he could recall the picture of the new pope addressing the crowd in St Peter’s Square on the cover of the magazine that showed through the plastic bag that Jane was holding.

  At around the time of Mr Beckwith’s fu
neral he had spotted her Morris Minor parked outside a bank in Greenwich, and had then seen that she was getting out of it and turned back before she could notice him. Many months later, shortly after Alexander’s parents had been to the flat, he was walking past the cinema in Lewisham as the audience was leaving, and Jane, with her brother, had looked up to see him on the other side of the street, and seemed irritated by the sight of him, rather than upset, and walked on quickly, without acknowledging his wave. These were the only two occasions on which Alexander had encountered her since their last conversation on the phone, some six years ago, and now she stood in the centre of the shop, holding a bag of magazines in front of her like a breastplate, with her hands crossed over it.

  She glanced at him and observed his surprise. ‘Hello,’ he said, but she did not speak.

  Unhurriedly she surveyed the newly painted walls and the racks of records. Without shifting her feet she turned to look into the corner of the shop where she used to browse, as if to make certain that there was no one there. ‘You’ve smartened it up a bit,’ she remarked, examining the green glass panels that now covered the ceiling.

  ‘Under new management,’ he told her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I saw the sign.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Not an inspired choice of name,’ she replied, with an anaemic smile.

  ‘Well, you’d deter the older customers if you went for something trendier.’

  She looked around the shop once more, gradually, until her eyes had used up all the things there were to see. ‘How are you keeping?’ she asked, neutrally.