BooksBarbecue
Back The Ghost Factory Save as PDF
Chapters (38)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. Contents
  6. Part One
  7. 1
  8. 2
  9. 3
  10. 4
  11. 5
  12. 6
  13. 7
  14. 8
  15. 9
  16. 10
  17. 11
  18. 12
  19. Part Two
  20. 13
  21. 14
  22. 15
  23. 16
  24. 17
  25. 18
  26. 19
  27. 20
  28. 21
  29. 22
  30. 23
  31. Part Three
  32. 24
  33. 25
  34. 26
  35. 27
  36. Acknowledgements
  37. About the Author
  38. About the Publisher

Anyway, when I mused on killing him, I wasn’t thinking about it quite in terms of cold-blooded premeditated murder and all the other ponderous phrases that you usually find hanging out on the street corner with the word ‘defendant’. I liked to do it in the muscular, dispassionate words that I had culled from crime novels, descriptions that were abstract and humorously blunt at the same time. I thought about how I would just be rubbing him out, cancelling or erasing him, taking him down, and how – after he had gone – the world would be a better, cleaner place, like a page from which an ugly blot had just been delicately removed, painted over as if with Tipp-Ex. That could be his obituary, a headline in the Belfast Telegraph that read: McGee, One Of Nature’s Worst Mistakes, Was Yesterday Cleared Up. Of course, I wasn’t really going to do it, was I?

19

When people in films are having personal difficulties, they tend to throw themselves into their work. I tried to throw myself into mine, but it was too shallow: I kept accidentally surfacing. I remembered that fella who used to work in Murdie’s bar, who went off and got a job on a cruise ship, and I thought that maybe if I saved up a bit of money as a nest egg I could do the same thing. In some of the dreams I had Eve with me, but those ones I crumpled up and threw to the corner of my mind.

Then in between cruise ship jobs I could go off travelling with just a few belongings to all those countries I had only read about in books: Mexico and India and Thailand and all the other sunny, busy, glittering places with temples and snake charmers and tricksters and carnivals, where you didn’t need a whole lot of cash to see weird and stupendous things and have a good time.

The world was a whole lot bigger than Northern Ireland, I told myself, with its drizzle and cramped pubs and that dank little feud that has flickered for centuries like a soggy peat fire, filling the air with its damp, choking smoke. It was bigger than London too, with its traffic that never budged and its sour-faced, busy people and pocket-emptying prices and rip-off tourist pubs with indifferent roast beef dinners and watery drinks and women who pretended to like you and then didn’t care if they never saw you again.