The white-haired and clean-shaven man was dressed in a long nightshirt, and he looked as if he’d just been in a fight. One of his eyes was closed and blackened, and some blood from a split lip had stained his otherwise completely spotless robe. His face was frighteningly angry and he gripped the wooden rail with one hand – in his other hand he held a long staff – as though he’d stepped out onto the balcony in order to calm down, although it didn’t look as though his whiskery companion standing next to him was helping much in this attempt. This second person, dressed in a great bush of dark green rags, appeared to be in fits of laughter over the first chap’s predicament. With his forked beard and with a mass of chestnut curls beneath his broad-brimmed leather hat, it looked like he was prodding the white-robed man in the ribs and clapping him upon the back, neither of which activities seemed likely to alleviate his black-eyed comrade’s filthy mood.
Just then a gust of breeze must have blown down the walkway, with the bearded man’s confusion of green pennant rags all fluttering wildly as a consequence. Michael was startled to discover that each flapping scrap was lined upon its underside with silk of brilliant crimson. As the wind disturbed the laughing figure’s tatters they flared upwards, rippling in abandon, so that the effect was like a leafy shrub that had spontaneously and suddenly burst into flame. It was a wonder, Michael thought, that the man’s leather hat had not blown off as well. Probably it was held in place with cord tied underneath his whiskered chin much like the headgear worn by Spanish priests, which it resembled.
Michael realised that he was in danger of becoming engrossed in this place’s details once again, and lowered his gaze from the crow’s-nest perches overhead back down to Phyllis Painter. She was by now quite some way in front of him and Michael felt a surge of panic as he ran to catch her up. He knew that if he lost sight of her it would be the way it was in dreams, where he could never find the people that he’d promised he would meet.
He overtook her just as she was coming to the end of the long boardwalk, with the last line of the inset vats reaching away on either side of her. A quick peep into one of these revealed another aerial view of a back garden not his own, despite some superficial similarities. Since it was right at one end of the mile-long row, he wondered if it might be the back garden of the corner house, where Andrew’s Road ran past the foot of Scarletwell Street. Michael had no time to ponder this idea, since Phyllis Painter was already marching out beyond the endless grid of apertures to where the wooden floorboards ended, somewhat startlingly, in a raised curb made of worn grey brick and then a broad strip of distressed and fractured paving slabs, just like the ones along St. Andrew’s Road.
Across these flagstones, facing Michael and the bunny-collared little girl, the lowest level of the monster arcade’s bounding wall confronted them, a lengthy terrace made from disparate brick buildings that were clearly not intended to be standing side by side with one another. Two or three of them resembled houses from his street but changed, as if they’d been remembered incorrectly, so that one had got its front door halfway up the wall on the first floor, with almost twenty stone steps rising to it rather than the normal three. Another had the nettle-fringed earth entrance of a rabbit hole where the brick hollow of the boot-scrape should have been, at pavement level down to one side of the doorsteps. In amongst these hauntingly familiar yet distorted house-fronts there were other almost-recognisable constructions, though the places they reminded Michael of did not belong in Andrew’s Road. One of them bore a strong resemblance to the school caretaker’s house up at the top end of Spring Lane, with black iron railings fencing off a downstairs window that was set perhaps a foot back from the street. Beside this was a section of the school wall which enclosed the always-locked arched entranceway that led into the juniors’ playground.
Set between this odd assortment of locations, which at least were all from the same neighbourhood, was one half-glass door with a display window next to it that Michael thought more properly belonged in the town centre. More precisely, it belonged in the real-life Emporium Arcade, that dim-lit incline rising from the fancy scrolling ironwork of its gateway on the Market Square. The shop that he was looking at, nestled incongruously amongst the displaced houses, was an almost perfect duplicate of Chasterlaine’s Joke, Novelty & Toy Shop, halfway up the right side of the arcade’s slope as you ascended. The wide window with the shop’s name in antique gold lettering above it, as he saw it now, was bigger than it should be and the words upon the sign seemed to be wriggling into different orders as he watched, but it was definitely Chasterlaine’s, or at least an approximation of the place. “Realist chanes” was what the shop appeared to be called at the moment, though when he looked back it seemed to read “Hail’s ancester”. How long had he been able to read, anyway? Regardless, Michael was so taken by surprise at this familiar store in such an unfamiliar setting that he thought he’d ask the girl about it as they walked the last few yards of floorboards to the boundary of the massive passageway.
“Are we in the Euphorium Arcade, like on the market? That place there looks like the Choke & Joy Shop.”
Phyllis squinted in the vague direction that one baggy sleeve of Michael’s dressing gown was pointing.
“What, yer mean The Snail Races?”
Michael looked back at the shop in question and discovered that “The Snail Races” was indeed the name that the establishment was trading under at that instant. He and Phyllis were mounting the curb that edged the wooden Attics of the Breath,
as she’d referred to the huge hall, so that Michael was close enough to see the merchandise on show within the 40-watt-bulb-lighting of the window. What he’d taken to be Matchbox cars all standing on a podium of the red-and-yellow cardboard boxes that they came in, such as would have been displayed at the real Chasterlaine’s, were in fact life-sized painted replicas of snails. Each stood upon its little individual box, the way that the toy cars and lorries would have done, but now the packaging had got a picture label showing the specific model snail resting on top of it. The reproduction molluscs all had shells that had been customised or painted in the style of actual Matchbox cars that he had seen, so that one was in navy blue with “Pickford’s” in white lettering across it, while another had the snail itself in pillar-box red with a tiny curled-up fireman’s hose set on its back where normally the spiral shell would be. Looking back up at the sign above the window, Michael saw that it still read as “The Snail Races”, so perhaps he had been wrong about the letters changing. Probably that’s what the sign had said the whole time he’d been scrutinising it. Still, all this made no difference to his basic point, which had been that the place resembled Chasterlaine’s Aladdin’s cave of novelties, up the Emporium Arcade. Michael turned back to Phyllis Painter – they were walking over the broad ribbon of cracked pavement now – and stubbornly restated his assertion.
“Yes, The Snail Races. It looks like the shy-top in the arcade on the market. Wiz that where we are?”
Venting a heavy sigh that sounded put-upon and obligated, Phyllis halted in her tracks and gave him what her tone of voice made clear would be her final explanation.
“No. Yer know it’s not. The arcade what you mean, that’s Daynstairs. Lovely as it wiz, it’s a flat plan compared with this one.”
Phyllis gestured to the plane of floor-bound windows stretching off behind them and the high glass ceiling overhead where origami clouds unfolded mystifyingly against a field of perfect iridescent blue.
“In fact, the ’ole of Daynstairs wiz a flat plan of what’s Upstairs. Now, this arcade what we’ve got up ’ere, over the Attics of the Breath, that’s made from the same stuff as these Old Buildings what we’re coming to.”
She swung her stick-thin arm around so that her trophy-necklace swished repulsively and indicated the long, muddled terrace facing them across the fissured paving slabs.
“All this wiz made from people’s dreams what ’ave built up. All of the people what lived hereabouts Daynstairs, or all them what passed through, all ’avin’ dreams abayt the same streets, the same buildings. And all of ’um dream the places a bit different, and each dream they ’ave, it leaves a kind of residue up ’ere, a kind of scum what forms a dream-crust, all made out of ’ouses, shops and avenues what people ’ave remembered wrong. It’s like when all the dead shrimps build up into coral reefs and that. If yer see someone up ’ere who looks hypnotised, walkin’ abayt in just their underpants or night-things, it’s a safe bet that it’s someone who’s asleep and dreamin’.”
Here she paused and looked down thoughtfully at Michael, standing there in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers.
“Although I could say the same thing about you, but I just saw yer choke to death.”
Oh. That. He’d almost put that whole unpleasant business from his mind, and frankly wished that Phyllis wasn’t quite so blunt about the fact that he was recently deceased. It was a bit depressing, and the fact of it still frightened him. Ignoring his distressed wince, Phyllis Painter carried on her morbid monologue.
“I mean, if yer wiz dead, then I’d ’ave thought yer’d ’ave been in yer favourite clothes what yer remembered. Unless yer pyjamas wiz yer favourite clothes, yer lazy little bugger.”
He was shocked. Not by her implication that he was bone idle – indeed, his pyjamas were his favourite clothes – but by the fact that she had sworn in Heaven, where he’d not have thought that this would be allowed. Phyllis continued, blithely unconcerned.
“But then, if yer wiz dead, why wiz nobody there to pull yer up and dust yer dayn except for me? No, yer a funny little fourpenny funeral, you are. There’s summat about yer what’s not right. Come on. We better get yer to the Works and let the builders ’ave a look at yer. Keep up and don’t get lorst in all the dreamery-scenery.”
Lorst. The same way Michael’s mum pronounced the letter ‘o’ in lost or frost or cost or any word remotely similar. “Don’t get lorst.” “We’ve ’ad some frorst.” “ ’Ow much is all that gunner corst?” Not only was his escort definitely from the Boroughs, she was almost certainly from down the bottom end of it, near Andrew’s Road. He’d never heard of any Painters round where he lived, unless Phyllis had lived long before his time, of course. Michael was not allowed a breather to consider this, however. True to her word, Phyllis Painter was already skipping off across the moss-seamed paving stones without a backward glance to see if he was following. He shuffled dutifully in her wake, not able to run properly without the danger of his slippers coming off.
As he slapped awkwardly across the slabs he saw that there were openings let into the terrace on the far side of the bounding pavement, passages that he presumed led deeper into the heaped-up confusion of dream architecture. His companion, with her hydra-headed rabbit stole flailing about her, was about to disappear into one such dark chink, an alleyway that ran off from the house-fronts right between the place with its front door positioned halfway up its wall and the façade of the refigured Joke Shop. Picking up his pace Michael trailed after her, her pink-and-navy banner fluttering ahead, leading him on.
The alley, when he reached it, was exactly like the narrow jitty that ran from Spring Lane to Scarletwell Street, all along the back of Michael’s house-row. It was cobbled just the same and edged with weeds, and he could even see the grey roof of the stable with its missing slates in next door’s yard, the place that Doug McGeary kept his lorry, but viewed from the back. The major difference was that on his right, where there should be the wire fence and hedgerow at the bottom of Spring Lane School’s playing fields, there was now a whole row of houses with their latch-gates and their back-yard walls with the rear windows of the red brick dwellings looming up beyond. “Scarletwell Terrace” came into his mind, but was as quickly gone again. Already Phyllis Painter was some distance down the transformed alleyway and showed no sign of slackening her pace or caring much if he got left behind. He padded after her over the cobbles of the shadowed crevice that in real life or in dreams had always made him apprehensive.
On each side a corridor of back walls hemmed him in, the ones on Michael’s right completely unfamiliar to him and even the ones upon his left much altered from their counterparts along the rear of Andrew’s Road. He ventured a glance upward at the sky above the alley and discovered that this was no longer the unearthly picture-postcard blue that he’d admired through the glass roof of the arcade, nor were there clouds of rarefied geometry uncrinkling as they slid across it. This, instead, was a grey slice of Boroughs firmament that made the spirits sink, fulfilling as it did the usual pessimistic forecast. Michael was alarmed at just how suddenly this colour-change had altered the whole mood of his experience. Instead of being someone on a dazzling adventure, he felt orphaned and bereft, felt pitiful and lonely like a lost child out in his pyjamas past his bed time, trudging down a miserable back entry and expecting drizzle. Except he was worse than lost. He was already dead.
Anxiously, Michael cast his eyes back down from the bleak heavens visible between the rainspouts and the chimneypots and found that, to his horror, he’d been dawdling. The little girl was now much further off from him along the alley than she’d been before, shrunken by distance to the size she was when he’d thought of her as a corner-fairy, which now seemed like hours ago. He reassured himself that if he just ran faster and could manage not to take his eyes off her again, then he’d inevitably catch up with her.
Running with his gaze fixed straight ahead, however, meant that Michael wasn’t looking properly where he was going. He caught the plaid toe of his slipper in a sudden hole from which a cobblestone had been prised loose and pitched abruptly forwards on his hands and knees. Although the rounded stones felt hard and solid through the thin material of his pyjamas, Michael was agreeably surprised to find that his fall hadn’t really hurt him. It had scared him and upset him slightly, but he felt no pain, nor were there any injuries that he could see. One knee of his striped trousers had got rather wet and dirty, but the fabric wasn’t torn and, all in all, he thought he’d got off lightly.