“Now then, my dears, I’m sure that Mr. Aziel and Mr. Doddridge have got matters what they’d like to talk about. Why don’t I take you through to meet with Mrs. Doddridge and Miss Tetsy? I think Mrs. Doddridge said as she’d be making tea and cakes for everybody.”
The whole ghost-gang seemed to be inordinately cheered by this announcement, flocking round the deathmonger as she began to shepherd them out through the bright room’s further door into the passageway beyond. The mention of refreshments came as something of a shock to Michael, who until that moment had assumed that ghosts could neither eat nor drink. He realised that the last thing past his lips had been the cherry-menthol Tune his mum had given him there in their sunlit back yard down St. Andrew’s Road, at least a week ago by Michael’s reckoning. Since then he hadn’t felt the need for food, but now the memory of how good it had been to chew and swallow something nice was making him feel hungry and nostalgic at the same time, so that both sensations were mixed up together and could not be told apart. He was becoming ravenously reminiscent.
Michael and the other children followed Mrs. Gibbs into the cosy, creaking passageway, leaving the reverend and the tall, bony builder to their conversation. Mr. Doddridge and the man that Mrs. Gibbs called Mr. Aziel were settling themselves into two facing armchairs as the parlour door swung shut behind the children and the deathmonger. The corridor in which the phantom kids now found themselves was short but pleasantly arranged, with pink and yellow flowers in a vase upon the single windowsill, caught in a slanting column of fresh morning light that fell as a white puddle on the varnished floorboards. A framed panel of embroidery hung from the mint-green pinstripe of the wallpaper on Michael’s left, with the roughshod design that he had seen already in Mansoul, the ribbon of a street or road unwound beneath a crudely rendered set of scales, picked out in golden thread on plump rose silk. There was the most delicious smell of baking leaking out into the passage from the far end, sweet and fragrant even in its competition with the niff of Phyllis Painter’s decomposing rabbits.
Bustling like a black hen, Mrs. Gibbs led the delinquent spectres through the plain oak doorway at the landing’s end into the Harvest Festival glow of a cheery and old-fashioned kitchen. This, Michael determined instantly, was where the fruit-pie perfume he’d detected in the passage had originated from. Two very pretty and nice-looking ladies with their raven hair pinned up in buns were standing talking by the black iron stove, but turned delightedly to the deathmonger and her flock of phantom roughnecks as they entered.
“Mrs. Gibbs – and these must be our little heroes! Do come in and find yourselves a chair. Tetsy and I count ourselves amongst your most ardent admirers, and now here we are, right in the middle of your ‘Choking Child’ chapter, saying all the parts of dialogue that we’ve already pored over a dozen times. It really wiz the strangest feeling, and tremendously exciting. You must all sit down while I make us some tea.”
It was what Michael took to be the older of the women who had spoken. She was slightly built, having a heart-shaped face and kindly eyes, clad in a dress of white damask embroidered with silk blooms and speckled orange butterflies like those around the edge of Mrs. Gibbs’s apron. On her rather small feet she wore shoes of soft, pale ochre leather, which had stitches of black thread to look like leopard spots and heels that were perhaps two inches high. Motherliness hung everywhere around her in a warm, toast-scented blanket so that Michael wanted to attach himself to her and not let go. As the nice lady led him to one of the wooden chairs around the kitchen table, over by the beautifully-tiled fireplace, he missed his mum Doreen more than ever. Mrs. Gibbs was making introductions.
“Now then, my dears, pay attention. This wiz Mrs. Mercy Doddridge, Mr. Doddridge’s good lady wife, while this young lady standing by me wiz their eldest daughter, Miss Elizabeth. You wouldn’t think to look at her, but Miss Elizabeth wiz younger than a lot of you are. You wiz six, dear, wizn’t you, back when you turned the corner into Mansoul?”
Miss Elizabeth, a younger and more animated version of her mother, wore a frock that was the delicately-tinted primrose of the east horizon in the minutes before dawn, embellished here and there with tiny rosebuds. She had a mischievous laugh as she responded to the deathmonger’s enquiry, shaking her black curls. To judge from their expressions Reggie, John and Bill were already infatuated with the reverend’s daughter, hanging on her every word.
“Oh no. I wizn’t even five before I came to grief with lots of bother and consumption. I remember that I died the week before the party celebrating my fifth birthday, so I never got to go to it, which made me awfully cross. I think that I’m still buried under the communion table downstairs, aren’t I, Mama?”
Mrs. Doddridge gave her daughter an indulgent, fond look.
“Yes, you’re still there, Tetsy, although the communion table’s gone. Now, be a pet and take our fairy-cakes from out the oven while I make the tea. The over-water surely must be boiled by now.”
Sitting beside the fancy fireplace with his slippers kicking idly back and forth, Michael looked up towards the stove. A big iron saucepan steamed upon the hob, seemingly filled with the same balls of liquid filigree that he’d seen raining on Mansoul during the fight between the giant builders. This, to judge from the small intricate beads spat above the pan’s rim, must be over-water. Mrs. Doddridge crossed the spacious kitchen to a wooden counter-top on which a lustrous emerald teapot of glazed earthenware was resting. With his ghost-sight he could see a bulbous miniature of the whole room reflected in the ocean-green bulge of its sides before the reverend’s wife stepped up to the counter and obscured his view. Taking the lid from off the teapot, she reached up towards the higher reaches of the window overlooking her wood worktop, pulling down one of the oddly shaped things that were hanging from the window-frame on strings as if to dry out. Michael hadn’t noticed these before, but once he had they gave him quite a start.
They ranged in size from that of jam-jar lids to that of a man’s hand, resembling desiccated starfish or the dried-up husks of massive spiders, albeit spiders with a pleasant ice-cream colouration. This idea was in itself unsettling enough, but peering closer Michael found that the true nature of the dangling shapes was even more disturbing: each one was a cluster of dead fairies, with their little heads and bodies joined together in a ring so that they formed a radiating web that looked like an elaborate lace doily, only plumper. They reminded Michael of the strange grey growth that Bill had found when they’d been digging their way up out of the howling ghost-storm, from the back yard near the bottom end of Scarletwell Street. Those, though, had been horrid things with shrunken bodies, swollen heads and huge black eyes that seemed to stare at you, whereas these specimens were gracefully proportioned and did not seem to have any eyes at all, with only small white sockets like the chambers in an apple core when someone had dug out the pips. They hung down on four knotted lengths of cord, with two or three of the dried fairy-clusters to a string, making a hollow clatter as they knocked together like a set of wooden wind chimes.
Mrs. Doddridge yanked one of the larger blossoms free, breaking a couple of the brittle fairies’ lower legs off accidentally as she did so. Briskly and unsentimentally the reverend’s wife began to crumble the conjoined nymphs into pieces that were small enough to fit in the receptacle, whereon she hurried to the stove and lifted up the pan of bubbling super-water by its handle so that she could pour the contents out into her teapot, over the crushed fairies. A mouth-watering aroma rose from the infusion, very much like tangerines, if tangerines were somehow peaches and perhaps a bag of aniseed balls at the same time.
Meanwhile, the enchanting Miss Elizabeth was taking a black baking tray out of the oven. Laden with a dozen or more small pink cakes it smelled, if anything, more tempting than the perfumed tea. Setting it on the side to cool, the younger of the Doddridge women fetched a small plain basin from the mantelpiece of the tiled fireplace close to where Michael was s
eated. As she passed him, he could not contain his curiosity.
“Why are you called Tetsy if your name’s Elizabeth and why are you so grown up if you’re only four? What’s in that basin? My name’s Michael.”
Miss Elizabeth stooped down to beam at him.
“Oh, I know who you are, young Master Warren. You’re the Choking Child from chapter twelve, and I’m called Tetsy because that’s how I said Betsy when I wiz a little girl. The reason I’ve decided to grow up since I’ve been dead wiz that I never really got a chance to see what growing up wiz like while I wiz still alive. As for the basin, well, see for yourself.”
She held the bowl down, tilting it so he could see inside. Heaped at the bottom of it was a midget dune of powdered crystal, quite like granulated sugar except that this substance was the blue and white hue of a perfect summer sky. Elizabeth invited him to take a dab of the cerulean dust upon one fingertip and taste it, which he did. It was a bit like normal sugar though it also had a sharp and fizzy taste, like sherbet. Being taken with the novel flavour, Michael asked her what it was.
“It’s all the little blue pips that we pick out of the Bedlam Jennies. Once we’ve got enough of them we grind them down into Puck-sugar with a pestle so that we can sprinkle it upon our fairy-cakes.”
Belatedly, he realised what had happened to the missing eyes from the suspended clusters of dead fairies. Sticking out his tongue as if he didn’t want it in his mouth after its dalliance with the eyeball frosting, Michael pulled a face that made the reverend’s daughter laugh.
“Oh, don’t be silly. They’re not really fairies. They’re just parts or petals of a larger and more complicated fruity-mushroom sort of thing that’s called a Puck’s Hat or a Bedlam Jenny. We once had the spirit of a Roman soldier visiting us from Jerusalem, and he called them Minerva’s Truffles. They grow in the ghost-seam or the Second Borough, rooting anywhere there’s sustenance. When they’re still small they look like rings of elves or goblins and you mustn’t eat them. You must wait until they’ve ripened into fairies. People in the living world can’t see the blossoms. They can only sometimes see the shoots that the Puck’s Hat sends down into the lower realm, where what wiz actually a single growth looks like a ring of separate, dancing fairies – or a pack of horrible grey goblins with black eyes if they’re not ripe. They’re really all we have to eat up here, although there wiz a sort of ectoplasm-butter you can get from ghost-cows. On its own it doesn’t taste of anything, but if you grind the blooms down into flour you can rub in the phantom fat to form a sweet, pink dough. That’s what we use to make our fairy cakes, and now if you’ll excuse me I believe they must be cool enough for me to spoon the Puck-dust on and serve them up.”
The younger Doddridge moved on round the kitchen table, letting all the other children have a lick of the sweet powder, even-handedly distributing the treat. Meanwhile her mother had produced an absolute flotilla of small cups and saucers from a previously unnoticed cupboard and was pouring everyone a measure of the rosy, steaming brew out of the deep green teapot that gleamed like a fat ceramic apple. Mrs. Doddridge fussed between the wooden worktop and her seated guests, dispensing tea to everyone and telling all the younger children to be careful that they didn’t spill it.
“And be careful not to scald your tongues. Blow on your tea to make it cool before you drink it down. We have a jug of ghostly milk if anyone requires it, although we find that it rather spoils the taste and gives the tea a chalky flavour.”
Meanwhile, Tetsy finished sprinkling powdered fairy-eyes onto the warm cakes, dusting each pink fancy with a twinkling frost of cobalt. Mrs. Gibbs and the six children were allowed to take one each from the large plate on which the freshly-baked confections stood, a flock of sunset clouds against a wintry china sky. Pouring refreshments for themselves, the Doddridge women pulled up wooden stools beside the table, both selecting one of the remaining treats to nibble at and joining in with the soft susurrus of teatime conversation.
Mrs. Doddridge, who had seated herself next to Mrs. Gibbs, was questioning the deathmonger regarding an old bylaw that concerned the gates of Mansoul, of which there were five, apparently. From where he sat beside the fireplace Michael couldn’t really follow the discussion, which appeared to draw comparisons between the various entrances and the five human senses. Derngate, from the sound of it, was touch, whatever that meant. Mystified, the little boy switched his attention to vivacious Tetsy, who had sat down next to Marjorie and was now eagerly interrogating the drowned schoolgirl on some subject even more unfathomable than the talk of taste buds and town gates.
“My favourite chapter wiz the one with that hateful black-shirted fellow blundering around Upstairs whilst suffering from delirium in his mortal body. It made Mama and I laugh so much that I could hardly read it to her. And the passage where the phantom bear from Bearward Street turns out to be pro-Jewish and pursues him through the ghost-seam into the V.E. Day celebrations wiz a marvel.”
Marjorie seemed very pleased to hear all this, though none of it made sense to Michael. Further round the table, John and Phyllis sat and talked together as they slurped their tea. They looked as if they liked each other, and although he was still faintly disappointed about Phyllis saying that she didn’t want to be his girlfriend, Michael thought they made a lovely couple. Seated opposite him, Bill and Reggie were still making plans to capture a ghost-mammoth, spraying violet crumbs upon each other’s faces as they both talked through unsightly mouthfuls of partly-chewed fairy-cake.
Having no one to chat with at that moment, Michael thought that he might take the opportunity to try the dainty pink-and-blue creations for himself. He lifted up the tempting morsel he’d been given, holding it beneath his nose and sniffing its warm perfume. Like the tea, the cake had a delightful yet ambiguous aroma. Michael could tell that it wasn’t aniseed, exactly, that was mixed in with the hints of peach and tangerine, but it was something as distinctive and unusual. He bit into the sapphire-sugared topside and almost immediately his mouth exploded with sensations so immense and intricate he felt his tongue had finally arrived in Heaven with the rest of him. The cake tasted as rich and complicated as, say, a cathedral looked or sounded. The elusive tang of unknown fruits from half-imaginary islands rang around his cheeks like organ music and the airy, crumbling texture was like Sunday light through stained glass. As he swallowed he could feel a tingle starting in the centre of him where his tummy used to be and spreading to his toes, his fingers and the tips of his blonde curls. Feeling as if his spirit had been dipped in the rose scent that people sometimes put on birthday cards, Michael luxuriated in an aftertaste that echoed through the toddler like a hymn. It filled him with a fresh vitality and at the same time was so satisfying that it brought a dreamy and delicious drowsiness. It was a very contradictory experience.