The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (13 page)

Nikki jumped up, almost as if to greet them. “Beautiful!” she said.

The dapper little man stopped and the lion stopped pulling. It blinked patiently. “Good morning, my darling,” the man said to Nikki. His companion smiled. She looked about her as if expecting more people.

“Is that a lion?” I said, quite stupidly.

“None other,” said the man.

“We met before,” Nikki said.

“We did indeed,” said the man. “Though I’m very poor at names.”

“I’m Nikki. This is David.”

The man turned to me. “Lion of the Serengeti. Born in captivity. Live ten to fourteen years in the wild though up to twenty in captivity. They prey mostly on large ungulates and can run the length of a football pitch in six seconds. This is Hector and Hector is eating twelve pounds of chunk meat fed five days per week.” I had the feeling that this man regularly said the same thing through a microphone. He blinked at me.

He seemed about to say more but Nikki spoke up. “You let me stroke him last time.”

“As I said to you before, it’s at your own risk.” He held a finger up to me and said, very pointedly, “Please witness that I said so.”

I nodded.

Nikki stepped forward and gently stroked the lion’s incipient mane on the top of its head. It reacted like any cat, narrowing its eyes in pleasure. Nikki was mesmerized. She ran her elegant fingers through its fur and stroked along its flank. Then she turned to me. “You going to have a go?”

The man made an extravagant gesture of checking his wristwatch. “Go ahead, young man. But I do repeat the warning.” His companion cocked her head at me and smiled.

I stepped forward and gently brushed the lion’s mane. It opened its eyes wide and looked at me hard. I know it’s ridiculous but I felt like the beast had calibrated my soul. Then it closed its eyes again. I thought maybe his fur would be like a cat’s, but it wasn’t. It was much more brittle and coarse but
it had extraordinary movement in it, and my playing with it seemed to trigger a smell of musk and dung.

“He likes it,” said the woman.

“I do,” I said.

She giggled. “I meant Hector likes it.”

The man checked his watch again. “We really must be on our way. Good morning to both of you!”

We watched them amble down Castleton Boulevard, the man with his lion and the woman swinging her buttocks and fixing her hat in place as she went.

“How did you know he’d be here?” I asked Nikki.

“He has a route he walks every Saturday morning at the same time. Everyone around here knows him. He’s the man with the lion. It’s free advertising for his circus. The police wanted to stop him in case it’s dangerous, but apparently there’s no bylaw against walking your lion.”

“You know what I think?”

“What do you think?” she said.

“I think you are a lioness.”

She made a lovely cackle. “I’ll take that.”

I think I smiled but the smile must have vanished on my lips because I suddenly thought about Terri. I wondered where she was. I wondered
how
she was. Nikki had succeeded in doing exactly what I’d wanted her to do, which was to take my mind away from Terri and Colin. But now that it had happened, I felt guilty. I don’t know why. Nothing had happened between us, but I was dogged by the feeling that I’d already made Terri some kind of promise.

It was insane. She was married to a violent attack dog and here I was feeling responsible for her. Whereas I was spending
my time in the company of a stunning, beautiful dancer with no complications. One gave me lions, the other, snakes.

Nikki linked her arm in mine. “Come on. I’ve got other things to show you. What’s an ungulate.”

“Dunno.”

“Mr. Clever-clogs college boy doesn’t know what an ungulate is.”

“No, he doesn’t. Happy with that?”

“Very happy with that. Shows you don’t know everything.”

“Did I say I did?”

“Not in so many words.”

We had a wonderful day together. Nikki was fun company and made me laugh. She wanted to show me what she called the secrets of the town. After encountering the lion we went to the old esplanade with its formal gardens. After that she took me to an Art Deco theater. It had been closed and turned into a hideous penny arcade with a nasty plastic hoarding covering half the front of the building, but you could go inside and see some of the hidden glory of the old theater. The same thing had happened to a cinema. She told me it was going to be washed away, all of it, and she didn’t feel sad.

“It’s just had its day. The holiday resort is living on borrowed time, too. People don’t want all this anymore.”

By “all this” I knew she meant Abdul-Shazam, Luca Valletti, and dancing girls performing jaded routines in clapped-out variety clubs. She meant the holidaying habits of the industrialized working classes. She meant a way of life that had reached the end of its commercial utility. These were the
last days of working culture, ended not through earthquake or tidal wave or volcanic eruption but through the obstinate ticking of the cash register.

We went to a pub and had chicken-and-chips in a basket. I asked Nikki about her future in dancing. I wanted to hear about her next career step, her plans, her dreams. She took off her dark glasses, folded them, and put them on the table next to her chicken in a basket. Then she took a sip of lager.

“I don’t know. This sort of work is dying out, too. I’m going to have to do something else.”

“But there must be better work.”

“And the better you have to be. If you’re really good you could work in the big London shows.”

“But you are really good.”

The skin around her eyes crinkled when she smiled. I wondered how old she was. I figured she was about twenty-five but I didn’t want to ask. “You know nowt about it.”

“I know what I see onstage.”

“So who are the good dancers? Go on! Out of me, Gail, Rebecca, and Debbie. Who is good and who isn’t?”

“Gail is pretty shit.”

“Gail is classically trained.”

“Really?”

“Really. Though in a way you’re right. She’s got no sexiness.”

Not compared to you
,
is what I thought
.

“There is work,” she said, “if you want to take your top off and show your tits to Arab oil sheiks. There are also cruise ships. I don’t really want to do that, either. But I’m never going to be a top dancer and I got used to that idea a while
ago.” There was sadness in that. She was a bird with a broken wing.

Some middle-aged men at a table nearby were eavesdropping. They were utterly fascinated by her. Why wouldn’t they be? She was stunning to look at and here she was talking about dancing topless in front of Arab millionaires. I could tell they thought she was wasted on me. I felt their envy and lust. They were like lions in a sawdust pit who had surrendered to the whip. I didn’t give a damn. They could gnaw on their own livers as far as I was concerned. I could afford to feel superior, so when she offered to buy me another drink I held up my glass in salute of the staring men before draining it. They all looked away. I wanted them to hate me.

After lunch we decided to go onto the pier, and as we came out of the pub a man nodded at me briefly and passed us by. I knew him from somewhere but I couldn’t place him.

Once on the pier we strolled past a small arcade of fizzing, pinging, gurgling slot machines. There was a glass case with an upper-body manikin of a lady fortune-teller. Zorena. It was an impressive name for a fortune-teller. Better than Rosa. Sadly Zorena looked like Punch, but with a dark veil over her head. The paint on her hands was peeling, in front of which were spread a few playing cards: aces and queens.

I felt oddly fascinated by it. I was sure I’d seen one of these before. Nikki saw me staring at the thing.

“Give me a coin,” she said, and I fumbled in my pocket.

Some tinkly music struck up and the dummy was underlit with weak yellow light. Zorena rocked and whirred and her flaking mechanical hands made a pass across the cards. There was actually a tape recording of some wise words, but it
was so distorted and muffled we couldn’t make out what was said. When it stopped, a card spat out of a slot.

Nikki grabbed it and showed it to me.
Know thy elf
. The print mechanism had lost its S. We both laughed, but the laughter was won from very different places. Nikki wanted another coin and the machine spat out a second card.
Choo e your future wi ely
.

“There you are,” Nikki said.

As if by contract we walked the boards all the way to the end of the pier, where in grander times passengers would be loaded on or off pleasure steamers. We leaned easily against the rails looking far out to sea. Nikki turned the conversation to my own future. She asked me what I would do with my life. I wanted to say to her that my immediate ambition was to avoid having my arms and legs broken. Instead I told her some cock about going into journalism or copywriting or teaching, none of which I’d seriously entertained as a career for more than a few moments.

“Journalism? Do you get to go around the world breaking big stories?”

“I guess.” That was the fantasy anyway.

“You could take me with you.”

I laughed. Not because of what she’d said but because of what a great time I was having just being with her. She looked at me strangely. Perhaps she was offended, but I was distracted because in that moment I suddenly realized who the man was outside the pub. I remembered where I’d seen him before. It was at the National Front meeting. He was the second man Colin had introduced me to, the oily-haired man called Talbot, John Talbot.

Nikki sighed.

“What?” I asked.

“You. There’s always something else going on inside your head. You’re never fully there. Or here.”

“Is that true?”

“Oh yes, it is. You’ve got a noisy inner life.”

“Have I?”

“If a woman waved at you with a barn door, what would you do?”

I didn’t know what she meant and I said so. Then she turned away and started to wander back up the pier. I was about to follow her when I was distracted by the sound of a motorboat cutting across the water.

It was a dazzling white power launch, about twenty-five foot, cruising the shallows at low throttle and turning in a wide arc as it approached the pier. Behind it trailed a frothy wake, rolling from its rudder like silvery earth from a plowshare. I couldn’t make out who was at the wheel but a man stood on the deck looking toward me. I was struck by his strange posture. He stood at a right angle to the line of the boat, looking over the gunwale at the pier. His feet were planted together and one hand seemed to grip his lapel. His chin was raised and he stared right at me.

As the boat approached the pier my heart scraped. It was the man in the blue suit I’d hallucinated when I’d almost fallen from the roof of the theater, the man I’d seen on the beach with the little boy. He wasn’t holding his lapel at all: He had a rope coiled over his shoulder. Though the light made a shadow play of his gray features there was no mistaking that
familiar jaw. Worse than that was the awful confirmation in the shadow of his face. Even though the sun shone full on him and should have lit him like a stage spotlight, his face was gray, blue-gray, smoky even. As if his face was made of smoke.

He held a rope coiled over his shoulder and he was coming for me. Another shiver of revulsion went through me. I felt cold, lonely, and very small. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I had never before known what it meant to quake. I felt my heart ice over.

The man gazed right at me with what can only be described as a menacing grin. I gripped the rails of the pier, leaning out to get a better look at him, willing the light to reveal that I was mistaken. But just as easily as the boat had cruised in, it followed the clean line of its arc and the man, still gazing at me and holding his rope, was taken away again. I watched the boat complete its turn and go deep out to sea. A man in a dark blue suit, in a boat, in the sun, in the bay of Skegness.

There was a coin-operated binoculars mounted on a stand. I swung it round to follow the boat and though I fumbled in my pockets I didn’t have the right coin. By the time the boat had diminished to a dot far out to sea, Nikki had returned to find me. “Are you okay?” she said.

“I’ve been here before,” I said.

“What? Like déjà vu?”

“Yes. No. I mean literally. I stood here. Exactly in this spot. I held his hand.”

“Who?”

I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “I was here when I was a little boy. I stood here. Right here. I’d forgotten. But now I remember it.”

The pupils of her dark brown eyes dilated as she searched my features. There was a frown line on her forehead, like an omega. If I was pale or if my hands were still trembling, she didn’t see it.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Someone just walked over my grave.”

Oddly that banal phrase made her feel reassured. Whatever it was that had just happened, those six words made it all right, made everything proportionate. Just to show her I was okay I linked arms with her and nudged her toward the other side of the arcade. The cash machines and winking lights of the games arcade made everything normal again.

An elderly couple asked if we would take their picture, which we did. Then as we made our way back down the length of the pier, Nikki drew up by another one of those absurd glass cases. Inside this one was not a fortune-teller but a manikin of a jolly jack-tar sailor, its face painted with an evil smile, like an early-period ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Do you remember these from when you were a kid?” she said. “These are great! Another coin, please.”

This time I found the right coin and she dropped it into the machine. The mechanism rumbled. The manikin’s shoulders began to shake and its arms moved. Then a recording of muffled laughter bubbled up from within the bowels of the machine. We stood and watched the manikin howl and laugh, as if we were both five-year-olds. But the laughter seemed to have a nasty edge that cut against the sea air. I don’t know how long the thing went on for.

“I suppose we’d better get back to that fucking place,” Nikki said, when the sun started to drop in the sky. The sun was a big golden-red balloon, like something you take home from the funfair. She grabbed my wrist. “Can we get some sandwiches and a drink and just go to the dunes for an hour before we go back?” She was like a child begging for an extra hour of play.