The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (25 page)

I was aware that he was waiting for me to make my play. I bowled and got pretty damn close to the jack. The old boy puffed on his pipe, content with me. Then when I bowled my second, I’d lost it again.

Apropos of nothing at all he said, “Did you know there was a lion in town?”

“Yes, I’ve seen it.”

He took his pipe out of his mouth again. “What? Tha saw it?”

“Yes. You can see it every Saturday.”

“What’s tha talking about?”

“The lion. They take it for a walk every Saturday.”

“They won’t take it for a walk now,” he said. “They shot it.”

“What? Who shot it?”

“The police. It killed a dog and attacked a little girl. They shot it.”

“When was this?”

“This morning. It had got loose and was causing mayhem in the town.”

I realized we had been talking at cross-purposes. “Was it a lion from the circus?”

“Well, I daresay it hadn’t come from the town hall.”

“That’s a tragedy,” I said.

“Tha can’t have a killer lion on the loose. Imagine that poor little girl!”

“What little girl?”

“The one it attacked.”

“No,” I said. “I mean you’re right.” I picked up a wood, weighing the polished resin in my hand.

“Now then,” he said. “Head down, eyes still. And always follow through.”

19

A BIT OF STREET FIGHTING IS IN ORDER AND WOULD HELP

I fell in love with Nikki, plain and simple. It may seem unfeeling to say so, but I thought less and less about Terri. I’d not heard from nor seen Colin since the night we’d driven up to the mine shaft at Black Bank. I could only speculate, and since I didn’t like what I speculated, I even stopped doing that.

In some ways I found it easy to blame Terri for what had happened. It was convenient to convince myself that I had been the one seduced. The truth was that with Nikki it was utterly different. I was allowed to display my happiness at being with her instead of creeping around in secrecy, hiding every smile and disguising every remark.

But I wasn’t allowed to forget Terri completely. Early one evening I was making my way toward the theater with a couple of boxes of rock candy in my arms when four men stepped out of the narrow alley between the theater and the
offices. One of the men was Terri’s brother. Williams and Hanson, the two knaves from the kitchen who had been at the National Front meeting, were also there. The fourth was a burly figure I’d never seen before. He was kitted out in the orthodox skinhead uniform of Sta-Prest trousers, Doc Martens, and braces over a neat, short-sleeved Ben Johnson shirt.

“A word, if you don’t mind,” said Terri’s brother.

None of them were smiling. “I’ll just get rid of these boxes.”

The unknown skinhead stepped behind me.

“We’ll just be a minute,” said Talbot. He motioned that I should lead the way down the alley.

I tried to look over my shoulder but the skinhead crowded me. “What’s it about?”

“That’s why I want a word.”

The burly skinhead was still breathing on my neck, and I was flanked by Williams and Hanson. Williams had his usual goofy smirk on offer but Hanson, the one to whom I’d given a carton of cigarettes, didn’t seem to want to make eye contact. My options were limited. I thought I could either walk down the alley under my own steam or get dragged down there. I opted for the former.

When we got behind the buildings I stood with my back to the wall, still holding the two cartons of rock candy. The meaty skinhead folded his arms, pushing his fists behind his biceps as if to make them look bigger.

“What’s in the boxes?” said Williams.

“So what’s this about?”

Williams reached across and took the lid off the top carton,
exposing the cellophane-wrapped gaily striped sticks of rock candy.

Terri’s brother stepped in between us. “You’re a Leavisite.”

I squinted at him but said nothing. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. The only Leavisites I’d ever heard of were followers of the flowery literary critic F. R. Leavis, and I knew in my bones that Terri’s brother hadn’t got me up against the wall to discuss literature.

“You’re Colin’s man, aren’t you?”

“In what sense?”

“Don’t deny it.”

Hanson piped up for the first time. “He’s sound, I’ve told you.” He glanced at me and then he looked away. He was embarrassed by all of this; I was grateful I’d bought him with a carton of cigarettes.

Terri’s brother held up a large putty-colored finger to silence Hanson. “If I get a scrap of proof of what’s gone on: you, Tony, Colin … all the lot of you. It won’t be a little chat next time. Do you understand me?”

I was about to tell him he may just as well have been speaking in Urdu for all the sense I made of it, but given his affiliations I thought better of it. But I couldn’t say “No, I don’t understand you,” anymore than I could implicate myself in all of this by saying “Yes, I understand you,” so I remained silent.

After a moment Williams swatted the cartons out of my hands. The cheerful sticks of rock candy spilled across the concrete path, many of them breaking in the process. Williams bared his teeth at me, but the burly skinhead closed his eyes. Hanson, too, turned away in shame.

“Pick the fucking things up and put them back in the boxes,” Terri’s brother said to Williams, with barely repressed fury.

I looked hard at Williams. Imagine, I thought, being a person of such low instincts that you are an embarrassment to your fascist friends. Williams slammed the broken candy back into the cartons. Terri’s brother led them away up the alley in single file.

I WAS STILL shaking when I dumped the broken rock candy and went hunting for Tony. He had a show that evening with the rest of the troupe, and I was pretty sure I’d find him in his dressing room, preparing. I tapped lightly on his door. With Tony you never knew with which voice he would answer. He used to have a ventriloquist act—he was a former “vent” in stage jargon—with dummies. You might get one of his vent voices. There was a squeaky schoolboy and a crusty old drunk and other things. This evening I got squeaky schoolboy. I pushed the door open.

Tony was at his mirror and was blacking up. There was part of the show where he and another singer painted their faces and wore straw boaters and sang Al Jolson songs.

“Come in,” he said, still in his squeaky schoolboy voice, “sit down if you can find a seat.”

There was a stool. I had to move his boater and hang it on a hook before sitting down. “What’s a Leavisite?”

Tony widened his eyes and leaned toward the mirror, gently
stroking black over his right eyelid. Then he did the other eyelid. Finally he said, “Who have you been talking to, then?” “I’ve been reading.”

“Reading what?”

“Pamphlets.”

Tony sighed and stared at his black self in the mirror. “Leavis wants to take the party in one direction. Others don’t.”

“Is there any need to go into such fine detail?”

Tony turned on his rotating stool. “That’s one thing this place has taught you: withering sarcasm. Good. All right then. Leavis wants a more popular front. Recruit the shire Tories who are our natural friends; pull in a few MPs, members of the Monday Club who want supported repatriation; bring in more of the working classes, because they’re the ones who are going to get rained on over the next few years. Who speaks for them? The fucking Labour Party led by privately educated baby faces fresh out of Oxford and Cambridge? You’re a working-class lad, are you happy with that?

“It’s wide open. But to do that we have to distance the party from the Paki-bashers and the idiots who still think Adolf Hitler was a jolly good chap. We’ll fight the elections. Exploit the media and go with the democratic process.”

“And you agree with that way forward?”

“Broadly.”

“You’re a Leavisite?”

“Yes. I think if we don’t go that way, the Tories will outflank us at the next election. They’ll lurch to the right, steal our clothes, and we’ll lose momentum.”

“And the other mob?”

“The other mob wants to recruit more soldiers from the football terraces. Get a bit of street fighting going with the coons and the commies.”

“Rivers of blood?”

“Now as a scholar, David, you should know Enoch Powell never used that phrase. What he did say was ‘Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” ’ He was quoting Virgil.”

“But it’s Blackshirts against Brownshirts, right? Who’s going to win?”

He started to sponge his face again. “Can’t say. By which I mean I don’t know. But if we lose, the Tories win. Whose side are you on, David?”

“Where did Colin and Terri stand in all of this?”

“You
have
been talking to someone, haven’t you?”

“I’m interested.”

“Colin’s with us. It’s getting a bit tasty. The other day at a meeting in London, some idiot threw a punch at Leavis. Which was a very silly thing to do.”

“Why?”

“Leavis has a lot of loyal supporters and minders. Like Colin. And Colin threw a few punches back. So now he’s got people after him and he’s gone to ground.”

“Was Terri with him when all this kicked off?”

“As far as I know.”

“Is she in danger?”

Tony threw his sponge down in irritation. “What do you think we are, son? The Mafia? We’re not uncivilized people despite what all those pot-smoking lefty university lecturers
have been telling you. Though I will say that there are a few freelancers in the party who were very cross with Colin, and these types are not always easy to control. What the hell is it to you, anyway?”

“Since I went to that meeting, I’ve been interested.”

Tony laughed. “Don’t bullshit me, son. If you were interested you wouldn’t be getting your leg over a Paki—”

“She’s lovely,” I said flatly. “And her mother is from Guyana, which is about as geographically distant from Pakistan as you can get.”

“Can’t you find yourself a nice white girl?”

At the time it didn’t seem odd to me that a man with a blacked-up face was asking me this question.

“By the way,” Tony said. “One of your long-haired gits. Eric Clapton. You like that sort of thing, don’t you?”

Clapton was a guitar hero of mine. He played black man’s music, rocked up for a white audience. He was the sort of figure I looked up to. “Yes.”

“He’s one of us.”

“I don’t believe it.”

Tony reached for a newspaper, flipped a couple of pages, and folded the paper neatly before handing it to me to read. The report stated that Eric Clapton had treated his audience in Birmingham to a five-minute foul-mouthed tirade saying that “wogs” and “coons” should be thrown out of the country. I put the paper down and looked hard at the man in the makeup.

“And that David Bowie, he said, ‘Britain is ready for a fascist leader.’ Though we wouldn’t have the fucking puff in the party.”

I handed the newspaper back to Tony. I had no words left. Nothing. I turned to go.

“It’s coming,” Tony said. “People are waking up. People are choosing sides, David.”

I closed the door behind me. But through it I heard him add, in his squeaky schoolboy voice, “Whose side are you on, David?”

20

YET THERE IS ONE WHO SEEMS TO HAVE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

I had another dream about the fortune-teller machine on the pier. In the dream the glass was still smashed and there was the head of a live woman instead of the manikin. But her face was badly made up: Lipstick was smeared all over her pancaked face and black mascara streamed from her eyes. It was horrific. She delivered a card from her mouth instead of the slot. I couldn’t read the card because the words had been smudged by her saliva.

Without telling Nikki, I took a green double-decker into town and went onto the pier. I was utterly carried away with the idea that I would find the glass in the machine broken and that my dream was somehow prophetic. Of course the glass was intact when I got there. I didn’t know whether to feel disappointed or relieved as I stood for a while at the end of the pier looking out to sea. A lonely gull bobbed on the swell.

I knew where Colin and Terri lived. They had a small apartment in a street just behind the seafront. Terri had told
me the address. I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t know how Colin would react. But I had to find out what I could about Terri.