A little further down the alleyway, young Bill had evidently made some smart remark that had upset Drowned Marjorie. A pushing match had then ensued, and Phyllis was alarmed to note that Marjorie, who’d set her mouth in a determined line, had taken off her spectacles and handed them to Reggie Bowler for safekeeping. This was never a good sign with Marjorie, and Phyllis thought someone had better intervene before affairs got out of hand.
“John, go and see to them. Tell Marjorie to put ’er specs back on and tell ayr Bill that if he dun’t behave I’ll smack his arse so ’ard ’e’ll end up in another cemetery.”
John smiled and nodded, ambling ahead of Phyllis and the toddler on his long legs with the grey socks pulled up smartly. Reaching Bill and Marjorie he draped a friendly arm around each of their shoulders, walking in between them so that neither one could take a wild swing at the other, steering them along the cobbled jitty as he steered their conversation into calmer waters. Handsome John could always be relied upon to sort things out so that nobody was left feeling in the wrong, Phyllis observed with a faint glow of second-hand pride, just from being in the same gang as what he was. He was such a natural peacemaker that Phyllis found she couldn’t picture him at war, for all she knew how fearless he could be.
Walking beside her, Michael Warren pointed suddenly towards the recessed entrance of a staircase, dark behind an iron gate set in the alley wall upon their right.
“That’s where I thought you’d gone to when I lost you, up them stairs. The steps wiz dark and there wiz crunchy things on them I thought wiz earwigs, but they turned out to be wrappers off of Tunes. There was a horridor up at the top that had a radigator what played ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, then after that the devil caught me.”
Phyllis nodded as they passed the gated alcove. As the leader of the Dead Dead Gang she knew all of the secret passages and the hereafter shortcuts.
“Yes. It leads up into someone’s dream of Spring Lane School, if I remember right. Spring Lane’s a lovely school if yer still down in the Twenty-five Thousand Nights, but if yer find yerself there in yer dreams it’s a bit frightening, and frightening things can ’appen. Specially at night, but even in the day it’s never very bright inside. I’m not surprised that bogey found you there.”
They were just scuffling past the beautiful imaginary gas-lamp standard that in Phyllis’s opinion was the nicest thing about the jitty. What, down in the solid world, was only a plain cylinder and stem had been transformed, up here, to sculpted bronze. An oriental-looking dragon that had tarnished to a pale sea-green with glinting golden flecks of metal showing through from underneath wound down the tall post to coil sleepily in low relief about the base, where a nostalgia for grass thrust up in tufts out of the summer grit and puddle gravy. Up atop the serpent-circled shaft, the lamp itself had stained-glass panes in its four tapering windows. Of these only three were visible, the panel at the rear being continually out of sight, and since the lamp was not alight at present even these three weren’t that easy to make out.
The leftmost one, as looked at from the front, was decorated by the portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman who had a blunt and thuggish face yet wore a pastor’s wig and robes and collar. Over on the right-side pane was the translucent image of a coloured chap with white hair, sat astride a bicycle contraption that had rope, not rubber, fastened round its wheel-rims. Phyllis knew that this was meant to be Black Charley, who had lived in Scarletwell Street while he was alive and who you sometimes saw still, pedalling around Upstairs. The central pane between these two was without colour and had only black lead lines on its clear glass. It showed a poorly-rendered symbol rather than a p
roper picture: the loose ribbon of a road or pathway and above it a crude balance, little more than two triangles joined by two straight lines. This, Phyllis knew, was the town crest of Mansoul and you saw it everywhere, although she wasn’t sure what it was meant to represent.
Beside her, Michael Warren wasn’t taking any notice of her favourite lamppost, but from his expression was engaged in brewing up another silly question.
“What’s that what you said, Twenty-five Thousand Nights? It sounds like stories about skying carpets or a turban genie-bottle.”
Phyllis looked at the dishwater sky above the alleyway and pushed her lips out while she thought about it for a moment.
“Well, I s’pose it wiz a lot of stories abayt wondrous things that ’appened once and then never again, but it’s ayr stories that folk mean when they say that, Twenty-five Thousand Nights. It’s just the number of nights, roughly speaking, that most people get, seventy years or so. Of course, there’s some get more, and then there’s some … especially raynd ’ere … who got a good sight less. Poor Reggie Bowler froze to death when ’e wiz sleeping rough on the old burial ground by Doddridge Church, that wiz some way back in the eighteen-sixties or the seventies, and ’e wiz no more than thirteen. Four thousand nights, give or take a few ’undred. Or there’s Marjorie, who went into the river dayn at Paddy’s Meadow when she wiz nine, trying to get ’er dog ayt, silly little sod. ’E got ayt right as rain, but Marjorie didn’t. She washed up where it gets shallow under Spencer Bridge. They didn’t find ’er till next day. Three thousand nights or thereabouts, that’s all she ’ad. When they say twenty-five, that’s just the average.”
The little boy appeared to think about this for a while, perhaps attempting to work out how many nights he’d personally had. As Phyllis calculated it, it was a bit more than a single thousand, which was in itself no reason he should feel hard done by. There were those who’d died when they were tiny babies and had only a few dozen or few hundred days … and, unlike Michael Warren, they would not be coming back to life again to notch up who knew how many more thousand nights before they finally and permanently passed away. He didn’t know just how well off he was. The ghost-kids these days, Phyllis thought not for the first time, they don’t know they’re died.
Over against the jitty’s left-hand wall ahead of her and Michael, Phyllis noticed Mrs. Gibbs’s brazier, that she’d got John and Reggie to dispose of. It was already beginning to break down into the dream-mulch that collected at the curbs and corners of Mansoul, starting to lose its form and function as the rusting fire-basket curled back in corroded petals from the spent coals resting at the blackened centre. Its three tripod legs were buckling together, fusing to a single stalk so that the whole thing looked like it was turning to a metal sunflower, charred from having grown too near the sun. It didn’t pay to sit still for too long here in the Second Borough, where things slid and shifted and you never knew what you’d end up as.
Stumbling along beside her, Michael Warren gave her what was probably as close as he could get to an appraising look.
“How old wiz you, then, befour yew wiz dread? Did you get many nights?”
Phyllis gave him a look that could have fried an egg.
“Don’t be so cheeky. Yer should never ask a lady when it wiz she died. Old as me tongue and a bit older than me teeth, I wiz, and that’s as much as yer’ll get ayt of me.”
The child looked mortified and slightly scared. Phyllis decided that she’d let him off the hook.
“Now, if yer’d asked when I wiz born, that’d be different. I wiz born in 1920.”
Obviously relieved to find he hadn’t irrecoverably overstepped the mark, the little boy moved onto safer ground as he resumed his questioning.
“Wiz that round here, down in the Boroughs?”
Phyllis gave a little hum of affirmation.
“I wiz born in Spring Lane, up the top. When I wiz late for school I could climb over ayr back wall into the playground. Dayn ayr cellar, yer could pull a board away and look dayn in the dark upon the spring itself, what Spring Lane wiz named after. There wiz never any money, but my childhood up there wiz the happiest time I ever ’ad. That’s why I’m like I am now. This is me ’ow I remember me when I wiz at me best.”
Ahead of them, the other four had reached the alleyway’s far end, where it emerged into Spring Lane. Her Bill and Reggie Bowler were already out of sight, having apparently turned right and started trudging up the hill, but Handsome John and Marjorie were hanging back to make sure Phyllis and her small companion knew where they were going. John waved to her from the jitty’s mouth and pointed up Spring Lane to indicate that was where him and Marjorie were heading next and Phyllis grinned, raising one thin arm in reply. The infant shuffling beside her in his slippers was still seemingly preoccupied by her last statement, about how she looked now being what she thought of as her best.
“Well, if this wiz your best, why wiz them niffy raggit-thins all round your neck?”
If she’d have wanted, Phyllis could have took offence at having the rank odour of her garland raised in conversation, when to her it was a smell she hardly noticed anymore. However, she was starting to find Michael Warren at least tolerable company and didn’t want to bust things up when they were going well. She kept the faint affront out of her voice as she replied to him.
“There’s lots of reasons. Rabbits are the ’oly magic animal raynd ’ere, along with pigeons. There are some who say that’s why they call this place the Boroughs, that it should be ‘Burrows’ ’cause of ’ow the streets are tangled in a maze and ’ow folk dayn there breed like rabbits. That’s not really why it’s called the Boroughs, naturally, but it just shows yer ’ow some people think. One of the reasons why I wear them is because, up ’ere, the rabbit stands for girls just like the pigeon stands for boys. Abington Street up town wiz what they used to call the Bunny Run because of all the factory girls went up and dayn it and yer’d have the chaps stood at the edges, whistling and winking. I wiz told that Bunny wiz an old Boroughs expression for a girl, by reason of another name for rabbit being coney, what wiz also called a cunny, and … well, it involves bad language what I shouldn’t say, so yer’ll just ’ave to take my word for it. And then, of course, they say that Chinamen can see a lady in the moon where we can see a man, and that she’s got a rabbit with ’er, so there’s one more reason rabbits are to do with girls.