The lanky angle sounded somehow mournful and apologetic as he answered with a syllable that was apparently the same in English as in his own tongue.
“No.”
After a well-timed pause as if before the punch line of a joke, he went on to pronounce another angle-word that Michael understood almost immediately.
“Dyimoust?”
What this meant was “Did you miss it?”
There was a shocked silence, and then both the reverend doctor and his guest began to laugh uproariously although Michael didn’t see what was so funny. As with the majority of grown-up jokes, he evidently didn’t get it. Like the one that ended ‘If I put a penny in the slot and press the button, will the bells ring?’ He’d had no idea what that one was to do with either, eider, duck-down drifting off into the candyfloss of his snug thoughts.
When the amusement shared by Mr. Doddridge and his visitor had died away, the doctor said his farewells to the children, as did Mrs. Gibbs, Miss Tetsy and her mother. Of these goodbyes, Mr. Doddridge’s was the most lengthy and effusive.
“Thank you, children, for your visit. I hope I shall see you all again, and not just Master Reggie when he comes to study at my afterlife academy. And as for you, young Phyllis Painter, you should know that you and your associates are being trusted with this child because such wiz the will of the Most High. All the experiences you share with him, even your truant capers and transgressions, are the lessons he must learn. That he recall those lessons shall be your conundrum to unpick, though be assured that we who serve Mansoul have every faith in you. As for the fiend we spoke of earlier, it seems apparent he shall have his way at some point, and when that time comes then my best counsel would be to remind you that even the lowest creatures are but the unfolded leaves of the Third Borough and are in the end subservient to His design. Now, be upon your way with our friend Mr. Aziel. Have faith, and do not fear.”
As if from far away, Michael heard Phyllis ask the reverend if what he’d said regarding truant capers and transgressions meant that the Dead Dead Gang could take Michael scrumping for mad apples out at the asylums, without getting into any trouble? Doddridge laughed again, and said that he supposed it did. There followed more goodbyes and Michael felt at least two small, damp kisses on his almost-sleeping cheek, most likely from the doctor’s wife and daughter.
Then there was the brief sensation of elaborate wood-grain as they passed through the door halfway up the church’s western wall. It wasn’t as if Michael suddenly felt cold, simply that he no longer felt the slightest trace of any temperature at all. The smell of Phyllis Painter’s vermin stole was shut off like a tap and he could almost hear the crinkling of the ghost-seam’s cotton wool, stuffing itself into his ears. He opened eyes gluey with ectoplasm to a world of black and white, just as John gently lowered him onto the phosphorescent planking of the Ultraduct, where time boiled up like scalding milk all round them.
Phyllis asked if anybody was still hungry.
THE TREES DON’T NEED TO KNOW
Marjorie Miranda Driscoll was amongst the well-read dead. She hadn’t been much of a reader when she’d followed her dog India into the dark Nene down at Paddy’s Meadow, but she’d caught up in the timeless time since then. She’d loitered, liminal, in libraries, skulked spectrally in sitting rooms and crept, crepuscular, through classes. The bespectacled girl’s tubby, weightless form had bobbed unseen at scholars’ shoulders like a grey, translucent pillow as she’d followed them through Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Dickens, into the linguistic hinterlands of Joyce and Eliot with quite a lot of M.R. James and Enid Blyton on the way. She’d enjoyed nearly all of it, particularly Dickens, although she’d remained entirely unimpressed by the demise of Little Nell, who Marjorie considered a theatrical young madam. If she’d written it, somebody would have chucked the whining little bugger in the Thames; see how she handled that.
Not that Marjorie could have written The Old Curiosity Shop, if the truth be told. She knew, despite the recent unexpected flattery from Mr. Aziel and the Doddridge family, that she was nowhere near as good as that. It was exciting, she’d admit, to think that somewhere further down the linger of eternity her novel was already finished, somehow published, and apparently quite well received. However, being a realistic sort, Marjorie thought her future popularity was probably more on account of The Dead Dead Gang’s novelty than any special literary merit. Hardly anybody wrote books after they were dead and even fewer saw their efforts through to ghostly publication, and so she supposed that anyone who did was bound to get a fair bit of attention.
Marjorie was a beginner, she knew that, with only a beginner’s sense of how to craft a narrative or shape a story. She’d worked out a few things on her own – a chapter would seem more complete unto itself if it set up some minor question in the reader’s mind right at the start, then answered it, perhaps in the concluding lines – but other than a smattering of similar devices, she felt horribly under-equipped to deal with the demands that writing a whole book had placed upon her.
What was irritating was that nobody would tell her how her novel ended or how she was meant to get it into print. She’d heard that Mr. Blake still published from a glowing workshop in the higher territories over Lambeth, but that seemed like a long hike along the Ultraduct just on behalf of the eleven sketchy and meandering chapters she’d completed thus far. Still, judging from her admirers within Mansoul’s upper echelons, the stoic little girl accepted that it was a journey she might one day find herself upon. Then she would have a green-and-gold bound copy of her memoir that she could hide in a century-old fantasy of Spring Lane School for Reggie Bowler to find in a dream, which was the thing that had inspired Marjorie’s novel in the first place. When she’d found out where the Dead Dead Gang had got their name from, she’d decided that to write the dream-book whence the name originated would be a dead clever writer’s trick. A fine conceit, as she had learned such things were called – not that she’d ever speak the phrase in earshot of her roughneck phantom colleagues, who would only take the mickey. It was fear of ridicule or even being ostracised that had made the otherwise fearless child feel disinclined to read or write much while she’d been alive. Down in the mortal Boroughs – the First Borough – all you really had was other people, all in the same leaky boat that you were in. Start talking posh or walking round with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man underneath your arm and you risked everybody thinking you were trying to get above yourself. Above them. People might just laugh and call you Brains or Lady Muck at first, but then they’d break your glasses. Even though she didn’t think that any of her current crowd would act like that, she’d still elected to pursue her literary education and commence work on her novel unannounced, so that she wouldn’t look so stupid if she failed.
Although she’d been with her ghost-gang associates for almost every moment since they’d saved her from the Nene Hag, Marjorie had found out that her secret double life as scholar and aspiring author was ridiculously easy to keep up, thanks to the ghost-seam’s solid nature. In the ghost-seam, time was something you could dig through. You could leave whatever you were doing, burrow off to somewhere different – say six months haunting a public reading room – and then dig back to half a second after you’d departed, before anyone had noticed you were gone. Marjorie had her own private existence outside the Dead Dead Gang and assumed the other members more than likely did as well. Phyllis had once said something that led Marjorie to conclude that she had another grown-up life, or lives, elsewhere within the simultaneous reaches of the afterlife, perhaps a husband in one region and a boyfriend in another. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Phyll Painter had lived to a ripe old age and it was only natural that there were different periods in that life that would be dear to her in different ways. Marjorie hadn’t even had the time to form a crush on anyone before she’d waded after India into the night chill of the river, so she didn’t have as many choices. It was the Dead Dead Gang, or the library, or nothing.
That said, Marjorie had been impressed by Tetsy Doddridge. Here was someone who’d been plucked from life at a much younger age than Marjorie, yet who had chosen to grow, posthumously, to a vibrant and attractive woman. It implied that Marjorie could have the same afterlife for herself, if that was what she wanted, and if that was what she dared. She could be taller, slimmer, prettier, without the National Health glasses that she only wore because she’d worn a pair in life. She wouldn’t even have to let her comrades know that she was gallivanting round the district’s spectral nightspots as a lovely debutante, since when she was with them she’d manifest as a four-eyed and podgy ten-year-old, the same as always. Marjorie imagined herself in the arms of some handsome young wraith or other, maybe Reggie Bowler if he grew a foot and smartened himself up a bit, both twirling round a ghostly Salon Ballroom. Wondering momentarily what sex was like, she felt herself blush a profound grey in the colourless continuum of the ghost-seam. Hoping nobody had noticed, the young author focussed herself on her current circumstances to dispel the clouds of heated speculation that had bothered her at intervals since she’d become a writer.
Marjorie was standing on the brilliant boardwalk of the Ultraduct with the Dead Dead Gang and the builder, Mr. Aziel. Looking out across its alabaster rail, they watched as all the idle moments of the Boroughs piled themselves up into decades: centuries of cobblers and crusaders, with the castle blooming like a huge and heavy granite rose only to wither with its petal bulwarks picked or fallen, one by one. Time steamed, and in its vapour-curls fugitive images and instants flared and melted as the past and future churned together, simultaneously and forever. One of the recycled flickering vignettes in particular caught Marjorie’s attention, blazing into being to go through its motions before vanishing, with this cycle repeating every few subjective minutes: on a low stone wall that had sprung up around the southerly front side of Doddridge Church down to her left, she saw a pair of oldish-looking men sitting there side by side, bent over double and convulsed with laughter. One of the two blokes, the tallest one, looked like he might be queer, dressed in a fluffy, girlish sweater with his messy hair down to his shoulders and what looked like make-up on his face. The other one, weeping with mirth beside his freakish friend, was really quite good-looking, even though he’d gone a bit bald at the front. Marjorie had the fuzzy and uncertain sense that she might know this second man from somewhere; that she might have run into him once but had forgotten it. She was just puzzling over this when lanky John distracted her by calling out from where he stood beside the rail, two dead kids and a builder to her right.
“Well, blow me. Come and look what I’ve found, nipper. Phyllis, hold him up so he can see what’s carved onto this railing.”
John was talking to the new boy, Michael Warren. Evidently, the tall lad had found something of note inscribed on the translucent balustrade that edged the Ultraduct. As Phyllis Painter followed John’s instructions, lifting up the dressing gown-clad toddler so that he could see, Marjorie and the other phantom children crowded round them as did Mr. Aziel, anxious for a peek at the discovery. Marjorie, at the group’s rear and herself not that much taller than the Warren kid, had to make do with second-hand descriptions, being unable to look at the graffiti for herself. She made sure she remembered all the details, though, convinced that she would need them when she wrote up her next chapter, or “The Riddle of the Choking Child” as she’d been recently informed that she was going to call it. John was pointing out somet
hing scratched on the handrail to the infant.
“See? There, dug into the marble-work or whatever it wiz, right where I’m pointing. ‘Snowy Vernall springs eternal’. That’s your granddad, that wiz. No, hang on. It’s your great-granddad. He must have been up here on the Ultraduct at some point, although Lord knows what he used to carve his name in the stone rail like that … unless he’d pinched one of the angles’ chisels.”
It was at this point that Mr. Aziel interjected, the lugubrious artisan sounding somehow annoyed, sad and reluctantly amused at the same time as he pronounced his brief burst of cascading gibberish.
“Hevdrin fawgs mobz cluptyx.”
This unfolded, in a part of Marjorie’s mind that seemingly existed only for the purpose of deciphering builder-talk, into a rolling and fluorescent speech that would have taken a good twenty minutes to read out, and then condensed again into the normal English of the chubby little girl’s own summary:
“He did indeed, and it wiz my own chisel that he stole. With his grandchild, beautiful little May astride his shoulders, he has gone exploring to the furthest reaches of the Ultraduct, walking and clambering unto the ends of Time itself. I have myself been up as far as twenty centuries hence and found this same inscription waiting for me, though I have as yet not found my chisel.”
After this had sunken in, John vented a low and admiring whistle.
“So that’s why I’ve not seen him or little May since I’ve been up here. It’s like when he used to make his long walks, back and forth from here to Lambeth.”