It made her ghostly substance shiver, even to pronounce the words. The fever cart, to Phyllis, had since she was small seemed to be from the night-side of the Boroughs. Rattling down the huddled byways it had been one of those sinister phenomena, like deathmongers or phantom monks, which she’d believed to be peculiar to the area. Such things spoke of the neighbourhood’s relationship with death, a tiger-trodden foreign land to little girls enjoying a relationship with liquorice-whip and dandelion-clock life.
The baby in his night-things, trotting there beside her, just stared at her blankly.
“What’s a fever cart?”
She sighed theatrically and rolled the memory of her childhood eyes. She’d obviously been right in her assumption that this nipper had been brought up soft. Phyllis supposed that most of those born in the ’Fifties had things cushy, what with all the science and medicine they had by then, at least compared with how things were when she was young.
“Yer don’t know nothing, do yer? What the fever cart wiz, it wiz a big wagon what they put the kids in when they ’ad the smallpox and diphtheria and that. It took ’em to a camp near the stone cross what’s ayt near ’Ardingstone, that’s there to mark the spot where Queen Eleanor’s body wiz put down when she wiz being taken back to London. In the fever camp, ayt in the open air with all the other children what were ill, they’d either die or they’d get better. Usually they’d die.”
The child was gazing at her now with a new look in his blue, long-lashed eyes. Above them, the remembered Boroughs sky graded from Easter yellow into watery rose.
“Wiz there a lot of things what made you poorly, when you wiz down here? Wiz that what made you dead?”
Shaking her head, she put him straight.
“No. There wiz a lot of bad diseases, right enough, but none of ’em put paid to me.”
She rolled one pink sleeve of her jumper up, wearing a gruff and businesslike expression as though Phyllis were a pint-sized stevedore. Thrusting her bony arm out under Michael Warren’s nose she showed him two blanched areas the size and shape of sixpences, close to each other on her pale, soft bicep.
“I remember I wiz playing raynd the Boroughs with ayr sister. Eight, I must have been, so this wiz still back in the ’Twenties. We saw this big queue of people leading ayt the door of Spring Lane Mission over there, where we’d go for ayr Sunday School.”
She gestured to the far side of the lane that they were climbing, where the tan stones of the mission’s plain façade wore their humility and lowliness with a pride that was almost luminous.
“Seeing the queue I thought as they wiz giving something ayt, so I got on the end of it and made ayr sister do the same. I thought it might be toys or something good to eat, ’cause back in them days sometimes yer’d get parcels give by better-off folk, what they’d distribute around the Boroughs. Anyway, it turned out it wiz vaccinations they wiz lining up for, against smallpox and diphtheria, so we got given ’em as well.”
She rolled her jumper sleeve back down again, concealing once more the inoculation scars. Her young companion glanced behind him at the yard that they’d just passed, and then returned his gaze to Phyllis.
“Did the other places in Northamstrung all have their own fever carts as well?”
On this occasion Phyllis didn’t snort or role her eyes at his naivety, but merely looked a little sad. It wasn’t that the boy was stupid, she decided. Just that he was innocent.
“No, me old duck. Only the Boroughs ’ad a fever cart. Only the Boroughs needed one.”
They went on up the hill in silence. On their left across the lane they passed the mouth of Compton Street, which ran off north towards a recollected Grafton Street with hazy Semilong beyond. The burnished lustre of Mansoul hung over everything, lovely and slightly wrong, as with hand-tinted postcard photographs: the doors that stretched away to each side of the street looked like they’d just been painted, apple red or powder blue, and faced each other in two ranks like guardsmen with their chests puffed out, stood waiting for inspection. Doorknobs seemed more gold than brass, and in the dusty fawn meniscus of the summer roadway flecks of mica winked the promise of a jewel mine. We are the Compton girls, We are the Compton girls …
Phyllis remembered every one of them. Cath Hughes. Doll Newbrook. Elsie Griffin. The two sisters, Evelyn and Betty Hennel, and Doll Towel. Phyllis could see their faces sharp as anything, recalled them far more clearly than the people that she’d sat with in church congregations and school classrooms while she was alive. That was the thing with gang allegiances. You made them when your soul was pure and so they counted for much more than your religion, or the party what you voted for when you wiz old enough, or if you joined the Freemasons or something. She suppressed the urge to run off up the ghost of Compton Street to number 12 and call on Elsie Griffin, and instead turned her attentions back to Michael Warren. He was, after all, the job she had in hand.
The other four, ahead of them, had by now reached the summit where the north-south line of Crispin Street and Lower Harding Street ran straight across the top end of Spring Lane. Reggie and Bill were halfway round the factory corner on the top left, disappearing into Lower Harding Street, with Marjorie and Handsome John some way behind them. Phyllis knew that John was hanging back to keep the drowned girl company, since she’d got shorter legs than him and couldn’t climb the slope as fast as he could. Phyllis thought that Handsome John was wonderful.
A little further up the hill and on their right the sacred slab of Phyllis’s own bottom doorstep jutted out an inch or two into the street. When they drew level with it, Phyllis put her hand on Michael’s tartan-covered arm and stopped him so that they could look at it. She couldn’t pass the place unless she paused to offer her homage, silent or otherwise. It was a habit with her, or a warmly-harboured superstition.
“This wiz where I used to live, back when I used to live.”
Up four stone steps the door of number 3 Spring Lane was olive green bleaching to grey, like stale sage, in the sun. The house was narrow and had clearly once been one half of a somewhat larger place along with number 5, next door and downhill on the right. Still further down in that direction were the rear wall and back gate of Spring Lane School, so that on mornings when she’d woken up too late, Phyllis could pull her trick of popping out of the back door, down to the bottom of the back yard that they shared with number 5 and climb over the wall to drop straight into the school playground. This had meant that Phyllis’s report card always had high marks for punctuality, although both Phyllis and her parents were aware that she didn’t deserve them, strictly speaking.
Phyllis knew that past the weathered door, where brittle paint peeled back from blisters to reveal imaginary continents of plain wood underneath, beyond the door there was no passageway or hall. You just stepped without preamble into the Painter family living room, which was the house’s only room downstairs. A twisting flight of stairs ran from it to the single chamber up above, her parents’ bedroom, with the attic in which Phyllis and her sisters slept directly over that. On Friday nights when it was warm they’d sit out on their window-ledge and watch the fights outside the pub across the street at chucking-out time. Shouts and shatterings would waft up to them through warm air that smelled of hops and copper, blood and beer. It was the 1920s, and they’d not had television then.
With only the one space downstairs there’d obviously been no room for a kitchen, and the nearest that they’d had was the cold water tap and old tin bucket, standing on a glistening-wet concrete block atop the flight of blue brick steps that led down to their cellar. This was shared, like the back yard, with number 5 next door and consequently it was cavernous with lots of twists and turns and alcoves that you could get lost in. Up one corner of the cellar, under number 5 and therefore technically a part of next door’s house rather than Phyllis’s, there was a stone slab in the ground what you could move if there were two of you. Lying there with your belly pressed into the chill and coal-dust of the cellar floor you could peer down a short black chimney-well, with pallid silver rings and ripples dancing on its sides, to where the spring that gave the lane its name roared downhill through the dark below. Although the secret torrent had foamed white as spit, Phyllis had always felt as if she were a doctor, gazing spellbound down an aperture into a rushing open vein, part of the Boroughs’ circulation system that would link up with the Monk’s Pond and the Scarlet Well. There was a lot of water hidden underneath the neighbourhood, and it was Phyllis’s conviction that the water was where all of the emotions and the memories collected as trace elements that gave the stream its biting, reminiscent tang; the cold, fresh spray which damped the cellar air.
Phyllis glanced down and to one side at Michael Warren, standing next to her.
“Do yer know, when I wiz alive, if I wiz very ill or very troubled for some reason, it would always be the same dream what I ’ad. I’d be stood in the street ’ere, in Spring Lane where we are now, and it would just be getting dusk. I’d be the age what I am now, a little girl, and ’stead of going in the ’ouse I’d just be stood ’ere, mooning up at ’ow the gaslight in the living room wiz made all green and pink as it fell through the coloured curtains what were drawn across the daynstairs window, ayt into the twilight. In the dream, I’d always ’ad the feeling that no matter where I’d been, no matter ’ow long or ’ow rough the journey wiz, when I wiz standing ’ere and looking at
the light shine through the roses on those curtains, I’d come ’ome at last. I always felt sure that when I wiz dead, this place would still be waiting ’ere for me, and everything would all be ’unky-dory. As it turned ayt, I wiz right, as usual. There’s not a minute of ayr lives is ever lost, and all the pulled-dayn ’ouses what we miss are ’ere forever, in Mansoul. I don’t know why I ever got so worried in the first place.”
Phyllis sniffed and took a last look at her former residence for now, then they continued up the hill. The next door on their right and to the left of number 3 was that of Wright’s, the sweetshop, with the stout bay window that displayed its wares behind small, thick panes of myopic glass just past the bell-rigged door as you went up. Because this higher landscape was accreted from the husks of dreams, the row of glinting chandelier-glass jars that the shop wore like a best necklace in its window were not filled with actual sweets, but with the dreams of sweets. There were small Scotty dogs made out of amber barley-sugar that had twisted middles, many of them fused to nine-dog lumps by the warm day, and in the jar of rainbow sherbet (which you could make kali water out of) there were extra strata of the different-coloured powders which, unlike the ordinary ones, fluoresced. There was a purplish layer that you couldn’t really see up at the top, and at the bottom of the jar a pinkish layer that was similarly difficult to look at, but which made your tongue feel cooked if you ate any of it. Only chocolate rainbow drops seemed anything like normal, or at least until she noticed two or three of them were climbing up the inside of their jar and realised they were outsized ladybirds that had shells coated with hundreds-and-thousands, pink and white and blue. Though their mobility put Phyllis off, the pretty beads of sugar on their backs meant that they still looked as though they’d be nice to eat. She didn’t blame the toddler she was escorting for the way he lingered by the sweetshop, staring longingly in through its panelled window until Phyllis tugged the cuff of his pyjama top and made him hurry up.
Before they knew it, they were at the peak and gazing back down the long street that they’d just climbed. She knew that in the living world Spring Lane was nowhere near as long, nor yet as steep, but knew that this was how small children would remember it, hanging annoyingly onto their mother’s coat-tails as they tried to trick her into towing them up the demanding slope. Phyllis and Michael, standing at the top end of Spring Lane, looked west across the bottom of the valley over memories of the coal yard on St. Andrew’s Road, striped as though by the rays of a low sun. Beyond were railway yards where spectral drifts of steam like spirits of departed trains followed the lost, dead tracks on into nettle-beds, and past these the green daybreak of Victoria Park suffused the wide sky’s far edge with a lime blush that looked drinkable. After admiring the soft radiance of the deadworld panorama for a moment, both of them turned left and followed Handsome John, Bill, Marjorie and Reggie into Lower Harding Street.