“Take no notice of her, titch. She’s just relieved we’ve found you and that you’re all right. You should have heard her a few minutes back when she thought that you’d been done in by the rough sleepers and your remnants flung in the Destructor. She wiz getting so upset, her lip was wobbling.”
Phyllis turned and scowled at John. She tried to stamp hard on the tall, good-looking ghost’s toes, but he laughed and whipped his foot back just in time. Phyllis attempted to sustain her indignation in the face of John’s hilarity as it began to spread amongst the other spectral children. Even Reggie sniggered at how vexed she looked, but turned it to a cough in case she heard him.
“I wiz not! I wiz just worried that ’e’d ’ave an accident or get grabbed by another devil, and then we should be in trouble! As if I give tuppence if ’e falls base over apex dayn the scarlet well, or gets et up by Malone’s terriers so all we find is dogshit with ’is blonde curls stickin’ out of it!”
Disastrously for her composure, this last bit even made Phyllis giggle. They all stood there laughing on the night lawns, and soon everyone was pals again.
While Michael Warren and the others made up and swapped tales of their adventures since they’d split up at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street earlier, Reggie and Bill amused themselves by playing idly in the shadows on the cropped grass. Bill suggested they play knuckles, but when both of them inspected their own hands they found the finger-joints still weakly pulsed with dull grey bruise-lights from their previous session, and decided to do something else instead. At last they settled down to running in tight circles round a piece of chip-wrap that was crumpled on the turf, to see if they could make it flutter. Sometimes you could do that, if there were enough of you. You just ran round and round an object like a toy train circling a little track, fast as you could, and if you could get up enough speed it would wear a temporary groove into what Reggie had heard others call the time-space or the space-time of the mortal plane. Eddies of wind would funnel down to fill these small depressions, and if you ran quick enough for long enough you could start miniature tornados in the little car park between Silver Street and Bearward Street down in the 1960s, or make tiny whirlwinds blossom from the straw and orange-peelings at the corners of the market square. On this occasion though, with only him and Bill contributing to the effect, they couldn’t do much more than make the litter shift a half inch. When Phyll told them to stop playing silly buggers and get ready to move on, they gave the dizzying pastime up with quiet sighs of concealed relief, grateful for the excuse to quit their unproductive efforts.
The six ghostly children and their mob of trailing look-alikes made their way up the gentle grassy incline bordering the tower blocks and parallel with Bath Street, heading for the row of homes that ran along the lawn’s top edge beside a path that Reggie thought was possibly called Simons Way. It looked like Phyllis had decided they should cut behind the hulking NEWLIF
E flats to Tower Street, which was what the former top end of Scarletwell had been renamed. Most likely she was making for the Works, though Reggie hoped she didn’t plan on visiting it here in nothing-five or nothing-six, or wherever the ruddy heck they were.
Although Reggie judged it to be in the morning’s early hours, one or two living people were about their business, unencumbered by the strings of replicas that Reggie and his posthumous ensemble dragged behind them. A small-eyed and porky fellow with a smooth-shaved head emerged from a front door in Simons Walk to leave a pair of filmy milk-bottles on his front step before retiring back inside again. Although the children all slapped their grey, insubstantial hands through his bald cranium as he stooped to put the bottles down, he didn’t show the least awareness of their presence, which was as it should be. This was not the case with the nocturnal stroller that they next encountered as they turned right into Tower Street, with the looming concrete monuments now at their back.
It was a tall skinny feller with black curly hair, who looked to be somewhere around his forties or his fifties, and who’d obviously had more than a few too many. He was veering slowly down the length of Tower Street towards the phantom kids, having presumably descended to this level via one of the flights of steps at its top end. He was reciting something in a slurred voice to himself that sounded like a poem, something about people being “strange, nay, rather stranger than the rest”. Reggie and Bill both had a laugh at that, and were starting to take the mickey out of the half-cut chap when he stopped dead in his tracks and looked straight at them.
“I can see yer! Ah ha ha ha! I know where you’re hiding, round the bend and up the flue. Ah ha ha ha! I see yer, all right. I’m a published poet.”
The dead kids stood rooted to the spot, gaping in disbelief. There was always a chance, of course, that someone living might occasionally glimpse you, but they’d almost always look away, concluding that they hadn’t really seen what they had thought they’d seen. For them to try and speak with you was practically unheard of, and as for a living soul who greeted your appearance with amusement, well, it never happened. Even Phyllis and big John were looking at the sozzled bloke gone out, as if they’d no idea what to do next.
Fortunately, the serious predicament this could have led to was averted by the timely opening of a bedroom window on the top floor of the first house in the row, behind the ghost gang and up to their left. An ancient but incredibly resilient-looking little woman in a dressing gown leaned out and hissed down sharply at the drunk chap swaying in the lamp-lit street.
“Yer silly ’ape’orth! Are yer crackers? Come in ’ere before I clock yer, standin’ talkin’ to yerself when it’s the middle of the night!”
The clairvoyant lushington looked up towards the window with his generous eyebrows rising in surprise. He called out to the woman with the same distinctive cackle that he’d just greeted the children with.
“Mother, behave! Ah ha ha ha! I was just chatting with these … oh. They’ve gone. Ah ha ha ha!”
The man had dropped his gaze once more to Tower Street and stared directly at the ghost-kids, but he blinked and looked uncertain now, squinting his eyes as if he could no longer see them. Further admonitions from the woman, who appeared to be his mother, prompted him to stumble forward, laughing to himself and fumbling for his house-keys as he passed unheedingly through the half-dozen junior apparitions standing in his path. The dead gang turned to watch him struggling with the Yale lock on the door of the end house, all the while giggling to himself, the muttering old woman having loudly pulled her bedroom window shut by now, leaving her drunken offspring to his own devices.
Phyllis shook her head as the gang turned away from the sloshed feller trying to open his front door, resuming their ascent of Tower Street.
“Flippin’ Nora. What the devil wiz ’e, when ’e wiz at ’ome? And to think livin’ folk are frit of us!”
She made her shoulders ripple in a comically exaggerated shudder to imply that living beings were much stranger and a great deal spookier than ghosts. Reggie agreed. In his experience, dead people were a lot more down to earth.
The gang came to a halt outside some sort of modern undertaking owned by the Salvation Army that was closed up for the night. These premises were on the children’s left, while up ahead of them there loomed the ugly grey-on-grey mosaic of the wall bounding the traffic junction that the Mayorhold had become. Sneaking a glance at Michael Warren, Reggie realised that the youngster couldn’t get his bearings amongst all this unfamiliar architecture, and thus had no idea where he was. Considering what had happened to the Mayorhold, this was probably as well. Look how the kid had taken it when it was just one row of houses that had disappeared.
The raised-up intersection blazed with sodium lamps that Reggie had been informed were the yellow of stale piss when seen by mortal eyes. This was what lent the ghost-seam’s monochrome such an unhealthy tinge, the sick light spilling from the elevated motor-carousel to splash upon the streets and underpasses down below, where the Dead Dead Gang gathered in a ring about their leader. Phyllis was explaining what she thought would be the best thing to do next, mostly for Michael Warren’s benefit so that the toddler didn’t suffer any more ghastly surprises.
“Right. I’ve ’ad a think abayt all this. We know that titch ’ere is a Vernall, who are people with great works to do, what very orften they don’t know nothin’ abayt. We know ’e’s gooin’ back to life again, and that it’s all summat to do wi’ this big job the builders ’ave got on, the Porthimoth di Norhan. Now, ’e’s so important to this contract that the builders ’ave ’ad a big dust-up over ’im, back dayn in 1959. I reckon we should goo back Upstairs to Mansoul and watch the fight. We might find ayt a bit more abayt ’ow ’is nibs ’ere wiz involved in it.”
Shifting uncomfortably inside his outsized overcoat, Reggie protested.
“Don’t go Upstairs ’ere, Phyll. Not ’ere in the nothings. ’E’s already seen ’ow the Destructor looks, just ’angin’ there in Bath Street …”
Phyllis bristled.
“Do I look ’alf sharp? ’Course I’m not gunna goo Upstairs from ’ere! Fer one thing, we’d be traipsing miles along the Attics of the Breath to get to where the builders ’ad their scrap. We’re gunna dig down inter 1959 first, then we’ll make ayr way Upstairs from there.”
Bill, standing on the outskirts of their circle, kicking pointlessly at dandelions and pebbles that he could not touch, frowned in concern.
“That’ll just drop us straight back in that ghost-storm, won’t it?”
Flinging her long stole around her neck in what would have been a dramatic film-star gesture had it not been for the putrefying rabbits and their after-pictures, Phyllis fixed her younger relative with an unnerving glare.
“Oh, use yer loaf fer once, ayr Bill. Not if we dig back to an ’our or two before all that kicked orf it won’t! If we goo careful, we’ll know when we’ve reached the stripe where all the wind wiz, so it’s just a layer or two down past there. Now, anyone ’oo wants to ’elp me can, and anyone ’oo don’t can clear orf ayt the way.”