The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (22 page)

He looked at the page of his notebook on which he had written my name and nothing else. He closed the notebook, inserted the pencil back into the spiral binding, and put it in his pocket. Then he stood up. “I think about it all the time,” he said. “Thank you for helping me.”

I watched him walk out of the ballroom lobby. I don’t know where he went or whom he spoke to after me. I stayed in my seat for a while afterward, trying to think what the heck it had to do with me. The slow fox-trot in the ballroom had given way to a rumba.

EARLY THAT EVENING I had to supervise the theater for a screening of
The Sting
, a film with Robert Redford and Paul Newman that had come out a couple of years earlier to great acclaim. But because it was repeated every week I had by now seen it a good few times and it held no surprises.

Distracted, I made my way across the car park to the theater. I should have been paying more attention to where I was
going, but as I passed in front of one of the parked vehicles someone sounded a horn loud enough to make me jump out of the way. It was just Pinky, climbing out of his car with a lot of shopping bags.

“You’re in a world of your own,” he said. He came over to me and pulled a carton of No. 6 cigarettes out of one of the bags and shoved it into my hands. “Here, have one of these. Say nothing. You okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”

“You don’t look okay.”

“No, I’m fine. Thanks for these.”

I went off to the cinema and did my usher’s job. I sat away to the side of the auditorium, gnawing my hand. The fact is that I’d been trembling since the run-in with the detective constable. My guts were in a state of riot. I was falling apart, and I still hadn’t a clue about what had happened to Terri.

I knew I needed to get some help.

After the film was over I went to the sing-along bar. It was there that you could find many of the kitchen staff drinking. I found Williams and Hanson, the two skinhead kitchen porters with whom I’d traveled to the National Front meeting. Williams, the bucktoothed one who’d called me a puff, looked up from his pint and scowled.

I spoke to the other one, Hanson. I handed him the carton of No. 6 cigarettes. “I came by these but I don’t smoke. Split ’em with your pal.”

Williams looked baffled and showed me a bit more of his teeth, but Hanson was very glad to have the ciggies. “Nice one, mate. Can I get you a pint?”

“Another time. I’ve got stuff to do.”

“No worries, mate.”

“I wondered if you’d seen Colin or his missus.”

Hanson turned to his pal. “We ain’t, have we? Ain’t seen them for a good few days.” His pal shook his head. It was clear they knew nothing. “Been a copper here asking about them.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, if you see Colin tell him I’ve got some ciggies for him, will you?” I knew perfectly well they wouldn’t see him before I would. “Or his missus. If you spot her or hear where she might be, give me a shout, will you?”

“No problem, mate.” Then as I made to leave, Hanson raised a thumb in the air. “Hey,” he said. “You’re all right, you are. Sound.” Then he turned to Williams. “He’s sound, he is.”

Williams said nothing. He lifted his pint to his lips and took a sip through his prominent teeth.

17

SHE COMPLETELY DONE ME IN

I told Pinky that I had a doctor’s appointment and I’d need a couple of hours off.

“Haven’t got the clap, have you?” Pinky said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Joke,” he said. Then he looked away. “At least I think it was a joke. We’ll cover for you. See you later.”

I put my civvies on and took a green double-decker bus into town and visited a doctor’s surgery that dealt with temporary workers from the holiday resorts. I waited about half an hour in the reception area flicking between copies of
Vogue
and
Practical Wireless
before finding a newspaper. A fourteen-year-old Sikh boy had been killed in a racially motivated attack in the Midlands and one of the senior figures in the National Front had made a statement, saying “That’s one step closer to a better country.” I was still reading the report when a rather haughty secretary told me to go through to the surgery.

A white-haired GP with half-moon specs and a white coat over a tweed jacket grunted that I should take a seat as he finished making notes in his last patient’s records. He took so long over it I was able to observe his impressive, large, troll-like ears. When he’d finished he sniffed and wheeled his chair round to face me. He said nothing, just peered across the top of his half-moon specs. He also had huge flappy jowls, like a species of bloodhound. I began to tell him that I was having trouble sleeping but he cut across me.

“Which resort are you working at?”

I started to answer and he opened my notes on the desk in front of him. He interrupted me again.

“It says here you’re a student. What
kind
of student are you?”

I thought the question sounded hostile. I began to tell him what I was studying at college and he spoke across me for the third time.

“Well,” he said, “what’s your problem?”

I suddenly felt cross with the man. “You’re the doctor,” I said. “I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”

“Can’t help you unless you tell me what’s wrong with you, now can I?”

“I started telling you and you shut me up. Three times. Is this your idea of having fun?”

“You’ve woken up,” he said. “You’ve come to life.”

I had a family GP at home. I nearly told this patronizing old bastard what a nice, sensitive, compassionate human being my family GP was. Instead I tried again, carefully explaining that I hadn’t been sleeping at all well, for some time, and that on some nights I was only getting maybe an hour or two.

“I’m not going to prescribe sleeping pills, if that’s what you’re thinking, sonny.”

“Did I say I wanted pills? Did I ask you for pills? I don’t want pills, I want some help.”

His brittle manner seemed to relax. “I get all sorts of young men coming from these resorts wanting all sorts of pills,” he said. “Do you use drugs?”

“Emphatically not.” That one occasion in the archery hut might have caused me to blink.

He blinked back at me. “Drink?”

“Moderately.”

He asked what I meant by that and I told him. He seemed satisfied. He asked if I was getting enough exercise. I described my daily routines and he concluded that wasn’t a problem, either.

“Are you anxious about anything at the moment?”

“I’m anxious all the time. For no reason.”

“For no reason?”

“I’m generally anxious. But I never used to be.”

“Roll your sleeve up. I’ll check your blood pressure.”

Of course I went along with all of this. He told me that my blood pressure was perfectly fine. He looked in my ear with his otoscope and found no signs of anxiety there. He also actually got a hammer and tapped my knee to test my reflexes—something I thought happened only in comedy films. He listened to my breathing with his stethoscope.

“There’s nothing obviously amiss,” he said. “What happens when you try to go to sleep?”

“Nothing. I lie awake for long periods. Then if I fall asleep for a few minutes I get terrible nightmares.”

“Oh? What are the nightmares?”

I heard myself say, “Things to do with children. And a man in a blue suit. Sometimes I wake up paralyzed. It doesn’t make much sense. I feel like I’m seeing ghosts. Obviously there’s no such things as ghosts and obviously I know that, but they keep coming. Plus I’m having dreams that are much more vivid than ordinary dreams, though I expect that has something to do with the fact that I’m not getting enough REM sleep.”

“REM sleep?”

“Yes, REM sleep. Rapid eye movement sleep. If you don’t get REM sleep, it sends you crazy and I’m not sleeping so I’m not getting REM sleep and it’s vital for survival to the extent that prolonged REM-sleep deprivation leads to death in experimental animals. I don’t know if they’ve studied humans, I mean they probably have but I don’t know of the conclusions. Of any studies. You probably know all this—you’re a doctor.”

The doctor stroked his chin and regarded me steadily. “Have you done anything you feel guilty about?”

“No.”

“What about your parents?”

“What about them?”

“Do you feel bad about leaving them? About having left them behind?”

“What’s it got to do with them?”

“You’d be surprised. Look, it’s not my area. I can refer you to a mental health practitioner.”

“Right. You’re shuffling me along.”

Now it was his turn to sound cross. “Look, I’ll prescribe
some mild sleeping pills. But it’s not going to become a habit, so don’t think it is. I’ll give you four.”

“Four? Four pills?”

He looked over the top of his spectacles at me then scribbled on his pad at superspeed before tearing off the top copy. “Cut out the drink altogether. No coffee, either. Take one an hour before bedtime and then go for a walk before turning in. That’s what I do when I have trouble sleeping.”

I thanked him and got up to go. As I was leaving I heard him say, maybe to me, maybe to the closing door, “We’re all anxious. What is there not to be anxious about?”

I GOT BACK in time for lunch at the canteen. Before I went in to eat, one of the holidaymakers tugged at my sleeve. He wanted me to line up with his family for a photograph. The man held up his Instamatic and I quickly slapped on my happy face for them.

It was one of the features of being a Greencoat. The holidaymakers always wanted you to be photographed with them. I might as well have been dressed up in a cuddly bear suit for all they knew of me. Would my smiling face define the holiday for them? Would I help to fill in a hole in their memories? Even people whom I’d never spoken with pulled me into their snapshots. I often wondered what they would think when they reviewed these photographs, maybe years later. Would they only see the bright smile? Or would they recognize a troubled young man behind it all. But the photograph was a detail in a holiday story, where I was a theater prop, a bit of
scaffolding on the stage. I crossed from my story briefly into theirs and back again.

I joined Nikki and Gail in the canteen queue and we all filed past the hatch to get our steak-and-kidney pie.

“You all right then?” Nikki said when we sat down. “Pinky said you had to go to the doctor.”

“No secrets there, then?”

“Have you got the clap?” Gail said.

“What?”

Gail covered her mouth with her fingertips. “It’s what everyone says around here. Whenever you say you’re going to the doctor, I mean.”

“You haven’t, have you?” Nikki said.

“No, I bloody haven’t.”

“So why the doctor?” said Nikki.

“I can’t sleep,” I said. “It’s getting me down.”

When Gail rose from the table to get her dessert at the serving hatch, Nikki waited for her to move out of earshot, touched the back of my hand with a long fingernail, and said, “I could make you sleep.”

I didn’t know what to say. I think I colored.

“You sure you’re all right?” Nikki said.

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

THAT AFTERNOON I used the public telephone in the kiosk outside the theater to phone long-distance. I don’t know, maybe it was something the doctor had said about feeling
guilty about my parents. I had a pile of coins in my hand ready to force them into the spring-loaded slot whenever the rapid-pip signal demanded to be fed.

“You haven’t forgotten us, then,” said my mother.

“Who are you?” I joked feebly.

I answered the usual questions: where did I shop, how was I managing with my laundry, did I know that Tesco had a giant-size box of washing powder on offer at half price. I squirted another coin into the trap and then she passed me on to Ken. I asked him how business was and he told me that he’d had to lay off a couple of men who had been with him a long time. I was sympathetic. I knew the men. When a country moves into recession, construction is one of the first things to be hit. I expressed the hope that they would find other work and my dad said that they hadn’t much chance of that what with all the wogs taking up the jobs.

I admit I overreacted. I heard myself calling him some names—interrupted when I had to shove another coin in the box to complete the list I had in store for him—and to his credit he just took it. Somehow we salvaged the conversation and turned it to safe things: football, the drought. He asked me if I needed any money. I told him I was fine.

“Ken, can you put my mum back on the line?”

When she came back on, I immediately said, “Mum, why did my dad come here?”

There was a long silence at the other end. Then she said, “What is it you think you are doing there, David? What do you think you’re doing in that awful place?”

“I’m working,” I said. “I just want to know why he was here. I have the photograph. I know he was here.”

I heard a muffled conversation at the other end, then Ken spoke again. “You’ve upset her, David.”

“Then we’re all upset,” I said callously.

“David,” I heard him say, “David.” But his voice was overridden by rapid pips in my ear. I had some more coins in my hand, but in the few seconds I had before cutoff I said, “I’m out of change, Ken. Tell Mum I love her.”