While he was pondering this unlikely similarity he noticed that his favourite frond, the green one, had a rippling and attractive ruff along one side up near the top, resembling a stripe of fanning mushroom gills. At the point where the complicated cable of translucent jade bent to the left, which was the point where it was also nearest him, he had the opportunity to view these gills side-on and realised with a jolt that he was looking at an endless row of duplicated human ears. Only when Michael saw that every one was wearing an identical facsimile of his mum Doreen’s favourite clip-on button earrings did he understand at last what he’d been gawping at.
The jelly-flooded chamber, weird as any undiscovered planet, was in fact their dear, familiar living room but somehow swollen up to a terrific size. The luminous, contorted crystal shafts laced through it were the bodies of his family, but with their shapes repeated and projected through the chandelier-like treacle of their atmosphere, the way that Michael’s arms and legs had looked when he himself was floundering in the viscous emptiness. The difference was that these extended figures were immobile, and the images that they were made from didn’t promptly fade out of existence in the way that his spare limbs had done. It was as though while people were still living they were really frozen motionless, immersed in the congealed blancmange of time, and simply thought that they were moving, when in truth it was just their awareness fluttering along the pre-existing tunnel of their lifetime as a ball of coloured light. Apparently, only when people died, as Michael seemed to have just done, were they released from the containing amber and allowed to rise up spluttering and splashing through the aspic of the hours.
The biggest, greenest structure, that he’d already expressed a preference for, was Michael’s mum, passing at great speed through the living room, from kitchen door to passageway. He dimly calculated that in normal circumstances this would only take his mother a few instants, which suggested that the slice of time on permanent display in this capacious tank was, at the most, ten seconds thick. Even so, you could tell from the tortuous interweaving of the sunken lumps that quite a lot was going on.
The curling reef of bottle-glass that was his mother – he could now discern her lime-lit features shuffled through the ridge’s uppermost protrusion like a stack of see-through masks – appeared to have a bright fault all along the greater part of its extraordinary length. Where it grew into the enclosure on its far side, through the towering gap beneath the waterline that was in actuality their now-enormous kitchen door, the green mass had a smaller form enclosed within, a roughly star-shaped splotch of radiant primrose running through its centre like the lettering in a stick of rock. This inner glow remained inside the gooseberry-toned configuration from the point at which it surged in via the chasm of the doorway, following it as it briefly veered to Michael’s right and then resumed its path towards him, a manoeuvre undertaken to avoid the obstacle of a drowned mesa that he reasoned must be their living-room table. It was here, however, right between the table and the yawning cavern of the fireplace, that the yellow brilliance seemed to leak out from the moulded olive vessel that contained it. A diffused gold plume rose smokily through the engulfing negative-space gelatine, a cloudy and unravelling woollen strand of lemonade that trailed up to the gumdrop pane of the vat’s surface quite near Michael’s plaid-clad feet as he stood on the framing wood s
urround. It looked like clean bath water somebody had done a wee in. The soft star-shape with its five blunt points was still inside the greater rolling bulk as this swerved to one side and went out by the presently colossal passage door on his far left, but now it was a colourless and empty hole amidst the warm, enfolding green. The summer light had all drained out of it.
After a while it came to Michael that this had been him, this frail five-petal marigold of brightness which at first glance seemed to be inside the larger crystalline arrangement that was Michael’s mum. She had been carrying him with both arms in front of her, so that her wider contours seemed to swallow his as she rushed forward in her stream of repetitions. And the point in her trajectory between the table and the fireplace where his smaller light switched off, that was where he had died, where life had cracked and his awareness had seeped into the enveloping consommé of coagulated time. The yellow traces straggling upwards in the prism-syrup were the ones that his pyjama-swaddled consciousness had left behind when he’d dog-paddled up and through the ceiling.
He gazed down into the grotto at the submarine contortions of the other two illuminated ferns, a spiky russet hedge of what looked like refrigerated orange pop and which he took to be his gran, and then a pale mauve tube much closer to the floor that had a violet torch-beam flare dancing inside it. He assumed this was his sister, flickering with all her purple thoughts. With its delicious paint-box tints and its aquatic layers of transparency, Michael could see why the unnerving girl who’d hoisted him aloft had spoken of it as “the jewellery”. It was delicate and beautiful, but he thought there was something sad about it, too. Despite its shifting, coruscating sparks the ornamental diorama had the look of a forgotten snarl of river-bottom junk, so that it seemed a common and neglected thing.
The girl’s voice issued over Michael’s shoulder from behind him, thus reminding him abruptly that she was still there.
“It’s an old can of beans, but every bubble that you ever blew wiz still inside.”
Oddly, he knew just what she meant. It was a rusty and discarded old container he was looking at, but all his hopes and wishes had been in it, had been born from it. It was a treasure chest that turned into a coal scuttle once you could see it from outside, yet still he couldn’t help but miss the slack that he’d mistaken in his inexperience for finery. He mooned down for a moment at the royal carpet river of malachite filigree that was his mother’s hair, then looked round at the girl. She sat, kicking her ankles, on the shabby cream steps banked around the sunken living room. Michael was starting to accept that in some way this framing woodwork was in fact the moulding up around their ceiling, but turned inside-down or upside-out and blown up larger. She was looking at him quizzically, so that he felt he ought to say something.
“Wiz this play seven?”
His enunciation was still bungling his tongue, but Michael thought it might be slowly getting easier to communicate. The trick appeared to lie in meaning every word you said in a precise, pure way that left no room for ambiguity. This seemed to be a place where language would erupt in connotations and conundrums without provocation, given half a chance. You had to keep your eye on it. At least this time his new posthumous playmate wasn’t sniggering at his speech-defect as she answered him.
“Yiss, if you like. Or ’ell. It’s just Upstairs, that’s all. It’s up the wooden ’ill, the Second Borough, what they call Mansoul. We’re in amongst the angles, and it wunt be long afore yer’ve got the ’ang of it. You’re lucky that I wizzle passing, what with you not ’aving family ’ere to welcome yer aboard.”
Michael considered this last, casual observation. Now he thought about it, all this being dead and going up to Heaven business did seem rather poorly organised. It wasn’t like he’d had a lot of expectations about angels, trumpets, pearly gates or anything like that, but he would not have thought it would be too much trouble to arrange a passed-on relative or two, just as a welcoming committee to this funny, slipshod afterlife. Although, to be fair, all of his dead relatives had died before Michael was born so that they wouldn’t really know him, not to talk to. As for all the members of his family that he was closer to, he’d messed that up by dying out of order. He’d assumed that in the normal run of things, people would die according to how old they were, which meant that his nan May would be the first to go, then his gran Clara, then his dad, his mum, his older sister, him himself and finally their budgie, Joey. If he hadn’t died before it was his turn, then all of them except the budgie would be here to lift him up out of his life, to clap him on the back and introduce him to Eternity. It wouldn’t have been left to just some girl, some perfect stranger who just happened to be strolling by.
As it was now, though, he’d be here all on his own arranging the reception for his terrifying nan. And what if it were years until somebody else died, years with just the two of them waltzing around together on these eerie, creaking boards? With his eyes desperate and darting at the very notion, he attempted to convey some of his musings to the little girl. Wasn’t it Phyllis something that she’d said her name was? He spoke carefully and slowly, making sure of the intention of each word before it passed his lips, so that it wouldn’t suddenly betray him by exploding into puns and homonyms.
“I’ve died while I’m still little. That’s why no one elf wiz here to meet me yet.”
He was improving, definitely. That sentence had been going fine until the bit where he had inadvertently referred to his young, bowl-cut benefactor as a “no one elf.” Upon reflection, though, this didn’t seem entirely inappropriate, and she herself didn’t appear as if she’d taken it amiss. She sat there on the ancient paintwork, straightening the navy linen of her skirt over her grit and gravel-studded kneecaps, idly picking at the brittle, yellowed edges of the flaking gloss. She looked up at him almost pityingly, and shook her head.
“That’s not the way it works. Everyone’s ’ere already. Everymum’s always been here already. It’s just dayn there where yer get yer times and chimes mixed up.’
She nodded to the glistening cavity of Michael’s former living room, behind him.
“Only when we’re reading through the pages wizzle there be any order to ’um. When the book’s shut, all its leaves are pressed together into paper inches that don’t really goo one way or t’other. They’re just there.”
He’d absolutely no idea what she was on about. Quite frankly, Michael was still entering a mounting state of panic at the idea of him turning out to be May Warren’s escort in this peeling paradise. In fact, the horror-stricken and appalled reaction to this whole state of affairs that he’d been putting off seemed to be creeping up on Michael in a thoroughly upsetting manner. As the awful fact of his demise continued to sink in, just when he thought that he’d accepted all there was of it, he found his hands were shaking. When he tried to speak he found his voice was, too.
“I don’t wilt to be dead. This wizzn’t right. If all this wizzle right, there’d be somebody that I knew here waiting four me.”
Wizzn’t? Wizzle? Michael realised he was using words the little girl had used as if he’d always understood them perfectly. For instance, he knew “wizzle” was a term that had “was”, “is” and “will be” folded up inside it, as though to divide things up to present, past and future was thought an unnecessary complication in these parts. This insight only served to make him feel even more lost and worried than he was already. He knew that even if he was here until the end of time, he’d never understand the first thing that was going on. He had an overpowering urge to run away from all of this, and all that kept his feet still was the knowledge that there wasn’t really anywhere safe in the world that Michael could still run to.
Sitting on the low steps, toying with her rotten rabbit wrap, the girl was now regarding him with a more wary and uncertain look, as if he’d said something that she mistrusted, or as if some new fact had occurred to her. She squinched her eyes, Malteser brown, to twin slits of interrogation, with the freckled bridge of
her snub nose suddenly corrugated as a consequence.
“This wiz a bit of a pecuriosity, now that I come to think. Even the ’Itlers ’ave their granddads waitin’ for ’um, and I shouldn’t think yer’d ’ave ’ad time to be as bad as that. What wiz you, six or seven?”
For the first time since he’d landed here, he looked down at his body. He was satisfied to find that in this new light, even his old night-clothes were as mesmerising in their tucks and textures as the clothing of the little girl appeared to be. The tartan of his dressing gown, in reds so deep they verged on the maroon, was bursting with the dried-blood histories of proud and tragic clans. His deckchair-striped pyjamas, alternating bands of ice cream cloud and July sky, made sleep seem like a seaside holiday. Michael was pleased to note, as well, that he was bigger than he’d been: still skinny, but a good foot taller. It was more the body of a smallish eight-year-old than that of the mere toddler he had been just moments earlier. He tried to answer the girl’s question honestly, even if that meant that she’d think he was a baby.
“I think that I wizzle three, but now that I’m glowed up I’m more like seven.”
The girl nodded in agreement.
“That makes sense. I ’spect yer’d always wanted to be seven, ay? That’s ’ow we are ’ere, looking as we best think of ayrselves. Most people monger themselves younger, or they’re ’appy ’ow they are already, but infantoms like yerself are bound to be an age such as they wizzle looking forward to.”