The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (2 page)

I stepped into the light shining from above the Wurlitzer.

He took a puff on his unlit cigar. “Christ,” he said.

Pinky Pardew—real name Martin Pardew—was the entertainments manager. He governed the resort jollies: the children’s entertainment; the daily timetable of events; the variety acts in the theater; the bingo, darts, and dominoes; the sing-along in the saloon; everything occupying the holidaymakers’ time from nine thirty in the morning until two at night that didn’t involve food and alcohol. It was a busy program of enforced bonhomie. He was also the boss to an assistant stage manager, the children’s entertainer, and the team of six Greencoats—three boys and three girls. I’d arrived at the right moment to replace a Greencoat who’d quit. Good timing.

He stared at me glumly, cigar wedged deep between his fingers, eyebrows still arched high like windows in a locked village church.

“I think whoever had these before me,” I said seriously, “must have been a bit overweight.”

It got a snort from the man at the organ. He was of only a slightly more contemporary cut. He wore a black turtleneck and his hair was trimmed pudding-bowl style, like one of the Beatles when they were still shocked at their own fame.

“All right,” Pinky said. “We’ll see if we can improve on that lot. Tomorrow. Meanwhile you’re just in time for lunch at the canteen. Then at two o’clock you’ll find a bunch of lads waiting for you on the football field. Referee a game, will
you?” He rummaged around in the pocket of his checked jacket and brought out a silver object on a string. “Here’s your whistle. Try not to use it. Who are you?”

“I’m David,” I said. I shot out a hand expecting him to shake it. It was a nervous gesture I instantly regretted.

Pinky looked at my hand as if he hadn’t seen one before. To my relief he then conceded the handshake. But it was a brief gesture before he turned back to the man at the organ. The musician tapped out three quick rising notes on the keyboard. Pa-pa-pah! I took that to be theater-speak for
Thanks, right, g’bye
.

THE STAFF CANTEEN thrummed and clattered. A few faces glanced up to take in the new boy but returned to their conversations without paying me much attention. I felt clumsy and knew I looked uncomfortable in my ill-fitting “uniform.” I slid my tray along the rail and two ample but deadpan ladies from behind the counter loaded it with leek soup and a dollop of cod in white sauce.

All the tables were occupied with chattering staff and the only empty chairs would have me crash some intimate group. Except for one table where a couple in white cleaners’ overalls ate in sullen silence. The male hunched over a bowl of soup looked pretty rough, but two chairs stood empty at their table. I went for it.

“Mind if I sit down?”

They didn’t even look up at me.

My cheeks flamed. The buzz of canteen conversation
diminished. I got the strange sensation that everyone else eating there was suddenly interested in my progress. They all continued to talk but with less animation; they flickered glances in my direction but looked away just as quickly. The tension in the room had ratcheted up out of nowhere, but everyone was pretending nothing had changed.

The man bent on ignoring me had close-cropped tinsel-gray-and-black hair that reminded me of the alpha-male silverback gorilla; and though he was still hunched over his soup bowl, he had frozen. His spoon, having ladled, was arrested mid-path between dish and lip. I switched my gaze to his partner, a much younger woman maybe in her late twenties. The palm of one delicate hand flew to her face, but then she too was immobilized. Her brown eyes were opened in alarm, though her gaze was tracked not on me but on her partner.

I looked back at the man. “I didn’t want to crowd you. There aren’t any other seats.”

At last, at long last, he lifted his bony head and gazed up at me. His complexion was ruddy and weathered, all broken surface capillaries. The whites of his cold eyes were stained with spots of yellow. He blinked in frigid assessment. Finally he offered the briefest of nods, which I took as permission to sit down. I unloaded my soup and fish and leaned my empty tray precariously against the leg of my chair.

The man’s wife—I took the wide gold band on her finger to mean that they were married—relaxed a little but not completely. She glanced at me and then back at her husband. Meanwhile he put his head down and continued to eat, reaching all the way round to the far side of his dish, digging
back into his soup before raising his spoon to his mouth. His sleeves were rolled. Naval tattoos, faded and discolored on the pale skin beneath the dark hairs of his arms, flexed slightly as he ate. Between the lower finger knuckles of his fists were artlessly tattooed the words
LOVE
and
HATE
in washed-out blue ink.

I started in on my leek soup.

“First day?” I heard him say, though he appeared to growl right into his dish. His voice was a miraculous low throaty rasp. Southern.

His wife looked at me and nodded almost imperceptibly, encouraging me to respond.

“Yes,” I said brightly. “Trying to work out where everything is. Get the hang of things. You know? Got lost three times already.” I laughed. I was a bag of nerves and I knew it and he knew it. I colored again and hated myself for it.

He lifted his head at last and looked from side to side as if an enemy might be listening. It was like we were in prison. Almost without moving his lips he croaked, “Keep your head down. Be all right.”

His wife was looking at me now. Her beautiful brown eyes blazed at me. But behind them, her expression seemed to be saying something else.

He pushed his empty soup bowl aside and sucked on his teeth before reaching for his plate of fish. His wife quickly buttered a slice of bread and set it before him. She had long elegant fingers. Her extreme delicacy and prettiness were a shocking contrast to the coarseness of her husband. He took the buttered bread and between strong fingertips colored like
acorns with nicotine, he folded and squeezed it. After swallowing a mouthful of fish he leaned back in his chair and said, “Don’t give ’em nothing.”

I had no idea who he was talking about.

He shot a glance through the window and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Don’t lend ’em any money. Don’t buy ’em a beer.”

I was about to say something but his wife flared her eyes at me again. Very wide. She was warning me not to interrupt him.

“You can lend ’em a cigarette. A cigarette is all right.
One
cigarette. Not two. One cigarette is all right.” Then he looked back at me again. “Don’t tell ’em nothing they don’t need to know. Nothing. Be all right.”

Then he bent his head over his cod in white sauce and ate the rest of his dinner. The conversation was over. His wife looked up at me briefly and this time her eyes said
There you are, then
.

FOOTBALL I COULD DO. When I got down to the bone-hard, dusty soccer pitch there were about twenty enthusiastic lads waiting to be organized, so I divided them into teams and let them have at it. I lavished them with uncritical praise, and if they fell over I picked them up. If they got roughed up, I pulled them to their feet and told them what a great thing it was they were so hardy and that good footballers needed to be tough.

When it was time to finish I noticed Pinky and another
tall, slightly stooped man watching, both with folded arms, from the side of the pitch. I gave a blast on the whistle to end the game, collected the ball, and walked over to them. Pinky introduced the man to me as Tony. I recognized him as the fez-wearing figure on the billboard in the foyer of the theater. Abdul-Shazam. Though in real life he looked no more Arabic than do I.

Tony—or Abdul-Shazam—gave me a wide professional smile and pumped my hand. “You’ll do me, son. Pick ’em up, dust ’em down. Up you get and carry on. Like that. Like it. You, son, are now officially on the team. Come on. Coffee time.”

Pinky excused himself and Tony whisked me to the coffee bar. There he charmed a couple of free frothy espressos out of the girl behind the counter. He introduced me to her and said something that made my face color. When we sat down he proceeded to brief me.

“Everything, son, you do everything. It’s all in the program. You get Saturday off every week, changeover day. Meet in the theater each morning at nine thirty sharp. Check in, cover the bases. Can you sing? Dance? Tell a funny story? Just kidding, son, just kidding. You check the bingo tickets, get everyone in the theater, give the kids a stick of rock candy every five minutes. Been to college, haven’t you? You can write, can’t you? Write down the names of the winners of the Glamorous Grandmother comp and all that. A monkey could do it, no offense. If you’re chasing skirt, make sure you share yourself round the ugly ones because it’s only fair. Smile all the way until October. That’s all you have to do. A monkey could do it.”

“What happened to the last monkey?”

“What?”

“The one I replaced.”

Tony looked up and waved wildly at a family passing by our table. His face was like soft leather and it fell easily into a wreath of smiles, like it knew the lines into which it should flow. His skin was super-smoothed by remnants of stage makeup. “Howdy, kids!”

“Shazam, Shazam!” the entire family shouted back at him. He looked pleased.

When they’d gone I reminded him of my question.

“Look, don’t worry about a thing.” I don’t know why he said that because I wasn’t worried. “Any problems see me, except when there’s a problem, see someone else.” Then he burst into song, crooner style, throwing his arms wide and turning to the holidaymakers seated at other tables.
“The answer, my friend-a, is a-blowing in the wind-a, the answer is a-blowing in the wind
.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose very loudly. Everyone laughed and I did, too, for reasons I didn’t quite understand.

He drained his cup and stood up. “You’re back on duty in one hour. Bingo in the main hall. After that, theater, front of house.”

Then he was gone.

2

AND THE WHITE KNIGHT IS TALKING BACKWARD

I was an Alice in Wonderland. It was a world I knew nothing of, hyperreal, inflated, one where the colors seemed brighter, vivid, intense. I was excited to be working there, being a part of it, but the truth is I felt anxious, too. It wasn’t just about being an outsider; it was the strangeness of it all. Many of the staff I met were odd fish. I had a crazy idea that they all had large heads and small bodies, like caricature figures on an old-style cigarette card.

Back in my tiny room on my first night I lay awake for hours. Of my roommate there was still no sign and I was wondering what I’d done in signing up to this place. I was overstimulated by the day’s events and sleep didn’t come. I lay in the darkness with my eyes wide open.

At some point I put the light on and got out of bed. The toilets and showers were at the end of the staff block. It was about three o’clock and I decided to take a shower to try to relax. When I got back to my room I dried myself.

When I’d done that, I sat down on the bed and took the
photo from my leather wallet. It was a small black-and-white photo, maybe three inches square with a thin white margin. The photo chemicals were either unfixing or the picture was overexposed. Either way the shot was of a seaside scene. The subject was slightly blurred but a muscular man, maybe in his twenties, wore dark bathing trunks and smiled back at the camera. The wind whipped his hair across his eyes so you couldn’t fully see his face. He stood with arms akimbo and behind him the sea frothed and foamed at the sand.

The man in the picture was my biological father. I turned the photo over in my hand. On the back of it someone had written one word in pencil. The pencil had faded just like the photo, but it was still easy to read what was written there:
Skegness
.

One word. It was a word I’d peered at many times, as if it were a code or a mantra or a key of some kind. My father had taken me to Skegness when I was three years old—I don’t know where my mother was at the time—and I was told he’d suffered a heart attack on the beach. I was with him at the time, though of course I had no memory of these events. Later my mother married my stepfather. This was the only photograph I had of my father. I’d stolen it. I didn’t even know whether Mum knew I had it, though she might have guessed.

I’d found the photograph when I was old enough to snoop. It was in a tin box kept at the foot of my mother’s wardrobe. In the box were various documents like birth certificates and some old costume jewelry plus a series of postcards. There were photograph albums in the house, so I knew instantly this one was rogue. I quickly figured out this was my
natural father. At some point in my teens I took and kept the photograph for myself.

It was not as if we had never discussed my biological father. Anytime I asked, I would get some basic biographical details and the same account of a tragedy that took place on a beach. The account was consistent and unvarying.

“Why on earth would you want to go there?” This was my stepfather, Ken, when I announced I was going to Skegness to look for seasonal work.