The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (18 page)

It was going to be a long night.

13

THE LADYBUG PATROL: TOOLED, EQUIPPED, AND READY TO BURN

I lay awake, listening. Footsteps in the corridor, doors opening and closing. Each individual returning from the bars was going to be Colin. I heard someone outside my window and I thought Colin might be planning to break his way through the glass, but it was one of the waiters trying to get a kiss and a cuddle in the dark from a girl who kept protesting that she would but she was afraid her father would find out.

When I finally did drift off to sleep I had dreams. I was on the pier standing before the mechanized fortune-teller. The glass case had been smashed and the manikin leaned forward, her face broken. Her tongue lolled from her painted mouth. It was an absurdly long, fat, moist, lascivious tongue and she seemed to produce one of the prediction cards from her throat. In the dream I took the card but I couldn’t read what was on it because the printed letters changed before my eyes, now Greek, now Chinese. It was a matter of great torment to me that I couldn’t read what was written on the card.

I felt so anxious about not being able to read the card that I woke up. In the dark someone was sitting on the end of my bed. But I couldn’t sit up. My chest was compressed. It was like I had a claw wrapped round my lungs. I could hear myself trying to breathe. I was so frightened I tried to shout out but I couldn’t get my breath. It was the man in the blue suit. He was sitting on the end of my bed regarding me steadily.

But his eyes were pure glass. Clear glass, no pupil. They reflected the light and shadow of the room, and even though his eyes were clear glass I could see he was looking down at me. But because his eyes were clear glass I couldn’t see if he wanted to hurt me. I tried to sit up but couldn’t because of the weight on my lungs. I thought he must have a hand pressing on my chest.

With a superhuman effort I forced myself upright, and as I did I woke up. I’d had a dream within a dream. I’d woken up only to wake a second time. I got up to put the light on. The man on the edge of my bed had gone. I prowled my tiny room, lifting things and setting them down again: my clock, a newspaper, a shoe. I was scared of waking up again.

Finally I went back to bed. I left the light on. I lay awake for a long time, blinking at the ceiling.

I must have fallen asleep again because I overslept. I was already a few minutes late when I threw on my Greencoat outfit and hurried over to the theater. There was a smell of burning accelerant in the air. The ladybug patrol was up and about, fuel tanks strapped to their backs, sweeping dead ladybugs into piles and incinerating them. You would hear the spit and brief dull roar of the incinerator and a little black puff of smoke would ball in the air.

Pinky’s morning briefing was already well under way when I got to the theater. Nikki gave me a look of maternal disapproval. Nobby, slumped in a chair, winked at me as if I’d done something good. I looked for Terri performing her cleaning duties but there was no sign of her. I sat through the briefing, rubbing my eyes and trying not to yawn.

“Are you with us then, son?” It was Pinky.

I realized he had just asked me a question. “Sorry,” I said. “I had a night from hell.”

“Not letting that Nobby have a bad influence on you, are you? Not going to turn out like him?”

“That’s fucking nice, that is,” Nobby spluttered. “Charming. Fucking nice, that.”

Pinky ignored him. “Sand castles with Nikki then?”

Nikki had one eyebrow raised, waiting for an answer.

“Sure.”

“Go easy on the sticks of rock candy,” Pinky said as we got up to leave. “It has to last all season.” I looked at the stage again, expecting Terri to emerge from behind the flats, wiping her mop this way and that as on so many other occasions during our briefing. Normally the hoover and other equipment would be around as she worked. Not this morning.

“Are you all right?” Nikki asked me when we got outside.

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Nothing. I thought you looked a bit …”

“A bit what?”

“I worry about you, for some reason. God knows why. But I wondered if Nobby had been up to his tricks. Getting you involved.”

“You’re speaking in riddles, Nikki.”

Nikki brought her hand to her mouth and made a quick back-and-forth smoking gesture. “He’s a doper,” she said. Then as an afterthought she said, “And a dope.”

Gosh, I wanted to say to her, I wish it was as innocent as smoking pot. Instead I said, “No. Nothing like that. I tried it once at college but it made me throw up. I don’t even like the stuff.”

“Me, neither,” she said as we passed through the beach wall tunnel and emerged onto the sand. “I prefer fresh air and sex for entertainment.” She looked at me pointedly. “Right, let’s get cracking. You do the over-sevens and I’ll do the tiddly-pots.”

My only salvation was to fling myself into the work. It was a way of shoving aside all thoughts of either Terri or Colin, even though they were like demons barking at either ear. I got down on my knees with the children and exhorted them to dig. I helped them make models of horses and of boats, trains, and planes. One little girl even complained that in my fervor I’d snatched away her blue plastic spade. I was manic.

I’d already decided that Colin would just have to come and do his worst. I would fight him. I would go down fighting. As I worked the sand and flipped shiny plastic buckets among them, the innocence of the children almost made me want to cry. I very nearly did.

Nikki stooped beside me and whispered in my ear, “You’re putting me to shame.”

I looked at her. The sun was hot and I was sweating. I must have been wild-eyed.

“It’s okay,” she said sweetly. She lifted my hair out of my eyes and parked it behind my ear. Then she went back and lay down.

I thought some of the parents were looking at me oddly so I left the kids to their sand designs and went to sit next to Nikki. She was stretched back on the sand with her hands behind her head and her eyes closed. I tried to copy her, but as soon as I put my head back and closed my eyes I saw Colin standing over me. I sat up. There was no Colin. “I’m really sorry about that thing,” I said.

Without opening her eyes she said, “What thing?”

“That meeting. They’re not my kind of people.”

“Oh, forget it.”

“I didn’t know what I was getting into. I just went along for the ride. Literally. I mean I was invited to get into a car without knowing where it was taking me. Next thing I know I’m up to my jaw in flags and regalia and
Spearheads
and all this about the commies and the unions and the Jews and the blacks and—”

“Look, we’ve been through all this. I’ve forgotten it. Why don’t you?”

“I would never have gone if I’d realized.”

“Realized what?”

“Who they were. How it would offend you. All that.”

Now she opened her eyes and sat up.

“I mean to say, what if those people ever got into power?”

“They won’t,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“They’re a hate club. Most people are decent, you know.”

“You say that. But it has happened. In history.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“Well. Organize.”

“Organize? Right! This afternoon. We’ll go after them with an iron bar and a cricket bat. You and me.” She closed her eyes again.

I vented a deep sigh. I know I sat there for a while pinching a loose bit of skin above the bridge of my nose. At least it was better than forcing small children into making overly complicated sand castles.

Eventually Nikki got to her feet. “Come on. Put on the happy face. I’ll pick the winners while you give everyone a stick of rock candy. Sod it, give them two sticks apiece.”

14

THE REWARD OF A CIGAR WHILE SATURDAY COMES

More than ever I needed to locate Terri, to reestablish terra firma, to stop my world from spinning out of control. But I couldn’t find her anywhere. A sweet-natured gray-haired woman called Elsie supervised all the cleaning staff. I tracked her down and asked where I could find Terri.

Elsie wore a pair of plastic-frame spectacles patched together with clear tape. Metal clips pinned back her hair and she was weighed down by an enormous silver ring of keys dangling from a leather belt looped round her thin waist. She seemed too frail to be carrying such a bunch of keys. “What do you want her for, duck?”

“She left some stuff in the theater. I want to take it to her.”

“Give it here. I’ll see she gets it.”

“No problem. I’ll return it to her myself.”

“Please yourself, duck. Only she hasn’t been in today.”

“Oh?”

“Happen she’ll be back tomorrow, eh?”

“Happen,” I said. I don’t know why. I never say
happen
.

I thought briefly of home. I don’t know if these are the sort of things young men discuss with their fathers or their stepfathers or not at all, but I was in serious need of someone to talk to. Though the idea of me telling all this to Ken seemed ridiculous. I’d always kept him at arm’s length as if, through no fault of his own, he wasn’t to be trusted with intimacies. As I passed by the palmist’s little white caravan I couldn’t help glancing through the door. Tony was in there, laughing and sipping tea from a china teacup, his feet crossed at the ankles. I couldn’t actually see Madame Rosa, but I could hear her talking in animated fashion.

No, I didn’t think that she could see my future or that she could see into my past. But a kind of desperation made me look toward the caravan. Not that I was ever going to give her the chance: I’d found out that Madame Rosa charged £4.50 for a reading. That seemed to me an astonishing amount of money: the equivalent of about fifteen pints of beer. I didn’t need a palmist to tell me that I was in serious danger of getting my head kicked in and that it was all of my own doing.

Nikki had a direct way of speaking. “You don’t look happy and you don’t look well,” she said.

“I’m not sleeping well.”

Nikki sighed. “This place. It can really get to you. That’s why your predecessor left. He just couldn’t stand it. Long hours of the happy face. It’s dangerous. Doing a happy face when you really want to scream. Plus he put himself between a rock and a hard place.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She looked at me with dark eyes full of intuition. “I mean, is anything else bothering you?”

I was close to telling her everything. I wasn’t in love with Terri but I felt responsible for her. I couldn’t see how I could spill the beans on any of this without seeming like I’d made it all happen. “I’m just not sleeping. That rabbit hutch doesn’t help.”

OF COLIN OR TERRI there was neither sight nor sound. A new cleaner had been drafted in to take care of the theater. I got her to switch off her noisy hoover so that I could ask her about Terri. She didn’t know anything. She said that all she knew was that she’d been taken off block B where she was happy and put on the theater where she didn’t know a soul.

In blistering heat we judged the competitions around the swimming pool. The heat and lack of sleep exhausted me. Nikki wanted me to go to the canteen with her for lunch but my need to sleep was overwhelming. Images from the previous evening’s escape were washing over me and the dreaming part of my brain was flooding my waking mind. I went back to my room and was relieved to find no sign of Nobby. I locked the door, flung myself on my cot, and instantly fell into a deep sleep.

Though it seemed like only seconds, it was maybe a couple of hours later when I was roused by a hammering on the door and a woman’s voice calling my name. It was Nikki.

I got to my feet and opened the door.

“You’re supposed to be preparing for the Farewell Show,” she said. She peered round me into my room, as if to see if I’d got anyone with me.

I felt drugged. I was like a zombie. “Need a shower,” I slurred.

“You haven’t got time. They’re all there. Only you missing.”

I ignored her and in a stupor I shuffled to the shower room, stepped out of my clothes, and ran cold water over my head. I stood under the icy water for a moment and began to revive. When I opened my eyes Nikki was there, shamelessly watching me. Her arms were folded. She was holding one of my towels. She flapped it at me. “You’ll need this.”