“… body get down! It’s Malone at ten o’clock, up over Althorp Street! Were the same grey as what the path wiz, more or less, so if we stay still he won’t see us, being right up in the sky like that.”
Although afraid to move a muscle, Michael slowly tipped his head back so that he could peer into the firmament above them.
At first, he mistook it for a smear of dirty smoke, a drifting stain of factory black above the chimneypots that rose between here and the Mayorhold, uphill to the east. It scudded over the slate rooftops like a small but viciously determined thunderhead, and Michael was just wondering why anyone would name a cloud “Malone” when he first noticed the two yapping terriers that it was carrying beneath its arms.
It was a man, a dead man judging from the smudge of picture-portraits stuttering behind him in his wake as he progressed across the off-white heavens. He wore hobnail boots, a shabby suit and long dark coat, the outfit topped off by a bowler hat like Reggie wore, though a much smarter one that looked more business-like. It was the fading plume of after-images from this drab clothing that had looked like smoke when Michael first set eyes on it, a filthy airborne blemish caused by someone burning tyres. However, as he studied it more closely with the better eyesight that he’d had since he’d been dead, more and more horrid details became readily apparent.
There was the chap’s face for one thing, a white mask suspended in the churning black steam of his head and body. Pale, with small grey wrinkles where the eyes should be, the ghostly countenance was smoothly shaven, almost rubbery, that of a well-kept sixty-year-old man with absolutely no expression. Michael thought the deadpan features looked more frightening than droll. They didn’t look like they’d react to anything, no matter how sweet, terrible or sudden it might be. The colour of the fellow’s hair was hidden underneath a stream of bowler hats, but Michael thought that it was more than likely white and oiled, like feathers from an albatross.
Not very tall yet wiry in his build, the man was upright as he moved across the sky, legs pedalling as though he sat astride an unseen bicycle, or as though he were treading air. Each sweep and swing of his long coat hung there recorded on the space behind him in a tongue of tarry vapour. Underneath his arms he clutched his pair of dogs, one black, one white, like on the label of Gran’s whiskey bottle, while up from his jacket pockets boiled the writhing heads of what the horror-stricken Michael first took to be snakes then realised were ferrets, not that this was any less distressing. He could hear their distant cheeps of threat and panic, even in amongst the startled barking of the terriers, despite the ghost-seam’s soundproofing that sucked the echo out of every note.
“What wiz he?” Michael asked John in a whisper as the two of them lay face down, side by side upon the tiles of Crispin Street. The older boy kept his poetic-looking eyes fixed watchfully upon the smouldering figure passing overhead as he replied.
“Him? That’s Malone, the Boroughs’ ratter. He’s a fearsome man, make no mistake. They say he does a party trick where he’ll catch rats and kill ’em with his teeth, although I’ve never s
een him do it. Phyllis stole his bowler once and put it on a great big rat. All you could see was this hat with a rat’s tail scuttling down the street, and old Malone grey in the face as he went running after it. Malone wiz furious. He said that he’d hang Phyllis with her rabbit-string if he caught up with her, and sounded like he meant it. From the way he’s headed, I’d say he’s just come out of the Jolly Smokers. That’s the pub they haunt, up on the Mayorhold, so he might have had a drink. At any rate, you’re best off steering clear of him, whether he’s drunk or sober. With a bit of luck he’s heading home to Little Cross Street, where he lived, and he’ll be passed by in a minute.’
As it turned out, John was right. Although he moved as slow as treacle, the dead rat-catcher progressed in a south-westerly direction through the ashen Boroughs’ sky, cutting across the corner of the school’s top lawn from Crispin Street to Scarletwell Street, floating off above the maisonettes, past Bath Street to the tangled courts and passages beyond. The whining of the hounds grew fainter as their master’s blot-like shape was shrunken to a smut, a breeze-borne speck like something in your eye, no different from the other black flakes carried from the railway station.
Cautiously, the Dead Dead Gang climbed to their feet once they were sure he wasn’t going to come dog-paddling back through the still summer air and pounce upon them. Bill and Reggie were both giggling as they reminisced about the rat-and-bowler incident that John had mentioned, although Phyllis had a faintly worried look and fiddled nervously with her long scarf of putrefying rabbit pelts. Only Drowned Marjorie seemed unconcerned by the experience, dusting her skirt down with a brisk efficiency and brushing bits of ghost-grit from her chubby knees as she stood up. Michael was starting to see the bespectacled girl as the gang’s most stoic member, taking every new experience in her stumpy stride without complaint. He thought that this might be an outlook that came naturally to someone drowned before the age of seven. Things would probably seem relatively unsurprising after that, even if they were flying rat-catchers.
Although the sighting of Malone had evidently rattled Phyllis, she still managed to maintain a tone of calm authority as she addressed her men.
“Come on. If we’re to find ayt all the clues an’ evidence abayt ayr regimental mascot then we better get dayn Scarletwell, before somebody else comes sailin’ past.”
Michael fell into step beside the gang as they continued along Crispin Street. In the square holes where paving-tiles had been prised up were puddles, shimmering like chips of mirror on a pantomime princess’s ball-gown. Shuffling in his slippers to keep up with John, Michael was unable to put Malone the ratter’s recent aerial stroll out of his mind.
“How wiz he flying, right up in the air like that?”
The older boy frowned quizzically at Michael, so that Michael thought he must have said his words the wrong way round again.
“What do you mean? Malone’s a ghost. Ghosts don’t have any heaviness, what they call mass, so here in the three-sided world the pull of things don’t make no difference to ’em. Not much, anyway. It’s just the same for us lot. Here, give me your hand and jump as if we’re in the long-jump.”
Michael did as he was told. To his astonishment he found that he and John were sailing through the air in a slow arc which, at its summit, took them higher than the fencing of the school yard to their right. As light as dandelion clocks they drifted back to earth again a few yards further down the street, their after-images like kite-tails settling behind. Michael was speechless with delight at this exciting new discovery but nonetheless resumed his normal walking style there next to John, who had by now let go of Michael’s hand.
“There’s lots of things like that what you can do. You can jump off a roof and fall so slowly that you don’t get hurt. Or you can fly like old Malone, although there’s lots of different ways of doing it. Most people pick their feet up off the floor until they’re sort of lying in the air, then do a breast-stroke like they’re swimming. Others do a doggie-paddle like Malone, and some just swoop about like bits of paper in the wind. You’ll find with the majority of ghosts, though, that they can’t be bothered flying everywhere. For one thing, it’s too bloody slow. The air’s as thick as marmalade. You’re faster walking, or else running in the special ways that ghosts can run: there’s skimming like you’re on a frozen slide that’s just an inch above the pavement, or there’s what we call the rabbit run, on all fours so that just your knuckles graze the ground. That’s a good laugh, if everybody’s in the mood for it, but by and large it’s safer walking. You’ve got time to spot all the rough sleepers before they spot you.”
They were now at the end of Crispin Street, where it ran over Scarletwell Street and turned into Upper Cross Street. John insisted that they wait again at this new junction for the others to catch up, so Michael practised jumping on the spot, achieving altitudes of several feet before John asked him, genially, to pack it in. From where they stood upon their corner, Scarletwell Street was unrolled down to St. Andrew’s Road upon their right, while on their left it sloped up in between the facing terraces towards the cosy oldness of the Mayorhold. Michael always thought of this familiar enclosure as a sort of town square that was meant for just the people of the Boroughs, even though he knew that the real Market Square was further off uptown.
Standing there in his drool-scorched dressing gown, there in the draughtboard-coloured copy of his neighbourhood, the little boy looked at the weathered brickwork of the houses at the top of Scarletwell and had a sense, for the first time, of how long everything had been here before he’d been born. There was what John had told him about playing on the green behind St. Peter’s Church with Michael’s dad when they’d been boys. He hadn’t really thought before about his dad having once had a childhood, although now it struck him, shockingly and suddenly, that everyone must have been little once. Even his dad’s mum, his nan, May, she’d have begun life as a tiny baby somewhere. Then there was her dad, Michael’s great-grandfather, who John had mentioned, who was mad and had the power to not have any money. Snowy, had John called him? Snowy must have been a boy of Michael’s age once, long ago, who’d had a mother and a father, and so on and so on, back to times he’d heard about “when we were living in the trees”, which he’d assumed were probably the ones down in Victoria Park. Michael stared off down Scarletwell, between the modern maisonettes or flats on one side and the playing fields of Spring Lane School upon the other, feeling as if he were peering down a real well, one that dropped away beneath him, down through all the mums and dads and grandmas and great-granddads, back through all the days and years and hundred-years into a smelly, dark place that was damp and echoey, mysterious and bottomless.
Once all the other dead kids had caught up and joined them on the corner, John and Michael carried on down Scarletwell Street. From the hill’s top, gazing down across the squeaking railway yards towards Victoria Park and Jimmy’s End, the view was much the same as it had been up in Mansoul, except that here it looked like an old silent film, silver like fish-skin, without all of the remembered warmth and colour. It was only when he thought about the way things would have been only a little while back, in his parents’ day, that it occurred to Michael how much change the district must have seen in those few years.
Judging from how he’d heard his mum and gran describe it, the whole big oblong of ground, which stretched from Scarletwell Street to Spring Lane and from St. Andrew’s Road to Crispin Street, had been much simplified. Where once the block had been a maze of homes and yards and businesses, now there were just the classrooms of Spring Lane School sheltered in a concrete hollow at the hill’s crest and a single row of houses at the bottom on St. Andrew’s Road, the terrace that Michael had lived in when he was alive. All of the land between was now banked playing fields, with the exception of a sole surviving factory over on Spring Lane. A hundred warehouses, sheds, pubs, homes that had served for generations, alleyways for kissing couples, outdoor toilets and lamplighter’s shortcuts had been swept
away to leave grey meadows where the whitewash margins of the football pitch stood out like old scars. Although this was Scarletwell as Michael knew it, somewhere that seemed always to have been the way it was and where his own house still stood safe and sound, he had a sudden tingling sense of all the names and stories that had been rubbed out to make a place where school-kids could have sack races on sports day. All the people that were gone, and all the things they’d known.
Michael was walking beside John, still, as they sauntered down the washed-out reproduction of the hill. Not far behind them, Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie were sniggering conspiratorially again and Michael wondered if it was at him, but then he always wondered that with girls. Or boys. Following at the rear, Phyllis’s little brother Bill conferred in hushed tones with the bowler-clad boy, Reggie, telling him what Michael thought was probably a dirty joke, then having to explain the modern parts of it that the Victorian boy obviously didn’t get. Michael could hear him saying “Well, okay, the woman in the gag’s not Elsie Tanner, then. What if it’s Mrs. Beeton?” Michael didn’t know the first name, but he thought the second had something to do with either cookery or nursing, or perhaps she’d been a murderer. He strained to hear the finish of the story, which appeared to involve either Elsie Tanner or else Mrs. Beeton answering the door to a delivery boy when she was nude and straight out of the bath, but Phyllis Painter turned round to her younger brother and told him to knock it off before she clouted him. There was a tightness in her voice that Michael didn’t think had been there before they’d had their near run-in with Malone. She sounded a bit scared, and in the light of what he’d heard about the fearless pranks that Phyllis played on ghosts, this puzzled him. He thought that he’d ask John.
“So, if ghosts frighten Phyllis, why does she play tricks on them? If she wiz to leave them alone, perhaps they wizzle do the same.”
John shook his head, so that for a brief instant he had three of them. He and the younger boy were just then strolling past the south side of the school’s top lawn, towards the stone posts of its main gate, further down.
“It’s not Phyllis’s nature, to leave ghosts alone. I’ll tell you, she knows how to bear a grudge, does Phyllis, past the grave if necessary. What it wiz, when Phyllis wiz a living girl, she wizn’t scared of nothing except ghosts. Even if the ghosts wizn’t really there, they played upon her nerves so bad that she made up her mind to one day have revenge. She swore that if she ever got to be a ghost herself, then she’d give all the other ghosts what for, for scaring little children. She’d be such a terror that the ghosts would all end up afraid of kids and not the other way around. I have to say, she’s done a good job so far, even if there’s places in the Boroughs we can’t go in case they lynch her.”
John and Michael neared the entrance of the schoolyard, with its own iron crossing barrier stood there in front of it, the gates locked for the summer holidays. Across the road from this the mouth of Lower Cross Street opened, running south along the bottom of the maisonettes to cut across the slope of Bath Street, heading towards Doddridge Church in the blurred snapshot of the distance. Down this side-street, rumbling towards the junction where it met with Scarletwell, there came a baffling assortment of fused body parts and cycle-wheels that Michael couldn’t come to terms with for a moment. It appeared to be a man in a dark trilby, riding on a bicycle, but all the images that he left trailing after him had got their black and white reversed, like when you saw the negatives of photographs. This, Michael thought, was surely a notorious and perhaps dangerous rough sleeper. He tugged hard upon John’s sleeve and stammered the alarm, although the tall lad didn’t seem unduly worried by the apparition. After a few moments Michael understood the reason why, or, at least, he began to understand it.
The gruff-looking fellow in the trilby turned left at the corner and free-wheeled away down Scarletwell Street on his bicycle, a creaking old contraption that looked pony-sized to Michael. As the man rolled off downhill he left no pictures of himself behind, which meant that he was still a living person. The peculiar thing that Michael had at first mistaken for a string of after-images in negative remained, unmoving, at the end of Lower Cross Street.