“It’s a bad place, titch. Spots like this, Soul of the Hole wiz what we call ’em, and they won’t do you or anybody else no favours. Never ’ave done, never will do. So, if we were to do something a bit naughty, then we’d not be hurting anybody who didn’t deserve it.”
This last bit had been an abject lie. The person who’d be most hurt by the “naughtiness” that Bill proposed would be Michael himself, given an acid facial and then knocked out by an iron bar, and Michael certainly did not deserve to undergo such tribulations. On the other hand, of course, his personal misfortune would be in the service of a greater good, or at least theoretically, but Bill had the uneasy feeling that they’d probably said that to all the whippets they’d had smoking eighty fags a day at the laboratories.
By this time Marjorie and Reggie had alighted too, looking self-conscious as they’d let go of each other’s hands, and had wanted to know what this wild jaunt to the arse-end of nowhere was in aid of. He’d explained as best he could, with Michael being present.
“Look, you know that stuff that Fiery Phil wiz telling us at Doddridge Church, when he said that us lot had got a challenge on our plates, but that the powers that be were confident as we could ’andle it? Well, ’e wiz talkin’ about Willie Winkie ’ere. Apparently, when ’e’s brought back to life, we ’ave to make sure ’e remembers at least some of this what’s happened to him, even though that’s s’posed to be impossible. Now, I think I’ve worked out a way it can be done, but I can’t go into the ins and outs of it in present company. Little pitchers, if you catch me drift.”
Here Bill had been staring at Marjorie and Reggie, who’d both nodded almost imperceptibly to signal that they’d understood and were prepared to go along with Bill, despite the fact he couldn’t really explain anything with Michael present. As for the toddler himself, he’d nodded wisely too, while obviously having no idea what Bill was on about. Encountering no objections, Bill had pressed on with his scheme.
He had originally been intending to have a poke round in the surrounding days and nights, to make sure that they’d got the right date and the right occasion, but he’d changed his mind. It had been what Phil Doddridge said to them, about how they should feel free to take Michael where they pleased and rest assured that anything that happened would be what was meant to happen. This predestination and free will lark cut both ways, as far as Bill had been able to see. If he’d brought Michael and the others
to the yard on this precise night, that was divine destiny at work and it would have been almost rude to double-check. Bill had begun to realise that accepting the idea of Fate could actually remove some of the burden of responsibility. You could delegate upwards.
Having thus decided that they were indeed in the right place at the right time, Bill had next led the foursome on a wander round the reconditioning yard, inspecting stock and searching out likely material for what he’d had in mind.
It really had been a depressing place, that yard. Bill had remembered stories that his mum had told him, about when she’d been a little girl and would come round to Martin’s Fields, as this place had then been, when she was out ‘May Garling’. This had been something her and her mates did on the first of May. They’d go round door to door displaying a small basket full of wild flowers with a kiddie’s doll sat in their midst, and for a halfpenny a turn they’d sing their little Mayday song that they’d all learned: “On First of May, my dear, I say, before your door I stand. It’s nothing but a sprout, but it’s well budded out by the work of Our Lord’s hand.” Looking around him at the heaps of dented cylinders, Bill had reflected that the yard, or fields, had sounded a much nicer and more picturesque location in his mother’s day.
From Bill’s own lifetime, his most striking anecdote about the place had been one that he didn’t even feature in himself. It had been there in Martin’s Yard, as he recalled, that the police had placed surveillance officers when they were keeping an eye on the land along the far end of St. Andrew’s Road belonging to Paul Baker, a notorious villain Bill had known back in the day. The coppers had thought Baker might be hiding loot from some bank job or other on the property, and had their suspicions raised when they’d spotted two shady types who’d appeared to be tunnelling into the fifty-year-old piles of ashes and composted waste that hulked from Baker’s territory.
In actuality, these two supposed accomplices had been Bill’s old mates Roman Thompson and Ted Tripp. Ted had been an accomplished and discerning burglar who only burgled stately homes, while Rome had been a fearless union fighter and a celebrated all-round nut job. They’d been on Paul Baker’s patch of ground with his permission, digging in the mounds of compressed mud and cinders dumped there decades earlier as waste from the Destructor up in Bath Street. Ted and Roman had been on a hunt for old Victorian stone bottles, the kind with the little marble for a stopper, for which they could likely get a few bob up at the antique shops. Rome, who’d always taken reckless courage to the point of death-wish, had been tunnelling into the heap’s side, tempted further in and further still by an enticing partial glimpse of the words ‘ginger beer’ upon a curving surface. In the end, there’d only been his ankles sticking out, which had been when the entire hillock had decided to collapse on top of Roman Thompson.
Ted, a sturdy chap considering his size, had taken hold of Roman’s feet and hauled him from the suffocating dirt and clinker in a great surge of adrenaline. It was at this point that some two or three cars full of coppers, who’d been watching the whole episode from up St. Martin’s Yard, had roared onto Paul Baker’s premises and had come screeching to a halt beside the thoroughly disoriented pair. Bill hadn’t known what the police were hoping to achieve by their manoeuvre, but he’d bet they weren’t expecting the appalling sight of Roman Thompson, covered head to toe in black filth, hair and beard plastered to muddy spikes and his crazed, furious eyes blazing amidst the soot and mire. It had occurred to Bill, as he’d thought back upon the incident from there in Martin’s Yard, nosing around with Reggie, Marjorie and Michael, that if not for Ted Tripp’s timely actions, the Destructor would have killed Rome Thompson even after it had been demolished for the better part of forty years. If Bill had been the superstitious type, the sort who readily believed in demons, ghosts and thousand-yard-long river monsters, he might even have concluded that this had been the Destructor’s murderous intent.
As they’d continued wandering around the reconditioning yard – Bill hadn’t known what time it was, except that it was clearly outside working hours – they’d come at last upon about a dozen drums that had been set apart from all the rest, perhaps to begin work upon first thing the morning following. One of the battered metal cylinders, which stood a yard or two away from its companions, had a strip of tape dangling from it; its fierce warning-notice trailing into grit and oily puddles where it had become detached at one end.
Destiny. Fate. Kismet. Bingo.
Bill, delighted that for once in his precarious existence things seemed to be working out as planned, had organised the other three ghost-children as if for a game of trains. Since Reggie was the tallest, Bill had let him be the locomotive at the front of their impromptu conga line, with Michael, Marjorie and Bill himself playing the coal tender and coaches. With Reg Bowler trying hard to make appropriate train-whistle sounds and puffing noises, they’d set off in a restricted circle round the isolated drum, chugging around their miniature loop of imaginary track as if they were pretending to be a toy train rather than a full-sized one.
Even in the sluggish atmospherics of the ghost-seam they had quickly gathered speed, as Bill had learned would happen if there were enough of you all pushing. Circling faster and still faster, their pursuing after-images had fused into what must have looked from outside like a grey and spinning giant doughnut made of blur: a torus, as Bill had heard this apparently important shape described by Mansoul’s brainier inhabitants. About the bottom of the drum, the dust and fag-ends had begun to get caught up in the rotating currents of the mini-whirlwind that the phantom kids had been creating. Glittering metallic toffee-wrappers and spent matches spiralled up into the night, and Bill had shouted above Reggie Bowler’s dopey sound effects for the Victorian urchin to run faster. The detached end of the warning tape had started lifting itself from the pool of water, oil, and indeterminate hazardous chemicals that it was draped in, flapping dolefully, with toxic droplets flung out from its snapping, fluttering extremities. Bill had called out to Reg again, to tell him he was running like a girl, which had resulted in the anger-fuelled acceleration Bill had hoped for. Soon the drum had been wrapped tight in a tornado of revolving lolly-sticks and spinning grit, the length of tape standing straight up into the darkness over the container, rattling against the cyclone like a tethered kite.
Eventually the other end had come unstuck as well, at which point Bill had yelled for Reg to stop and they’d all run into each other, falling over in a breathless, laughing heap. The roughneck spectres had sat in St. Martin’s Yard and watched while the soiled streamer sailed away, bowling across the property’s enclosing fence and off into the sodium-lamp sparkle of the night. Mission accomplished, even if nobody except Bill had known precisely what the mission was.
They hadn’t hung about long after that. They’d bounced and swum and doggy-paddled up into the windswept firmament as they’d returned to the unfolded earthworks, back the way they’d come, treading the moonlight over Spencer Bridge and the whore-magnet of the overnight long-distance lorry park. This was tucked in the corner where the bridge met with Crane Hill and the St. Andrew’s Road, the transport café that had previously been a public lavatory and, prior to that, a slipper-baths. This had become a major point of trade that had supplied the customers who drew the girls, who brought the pimps, who dealt the drugs, which bred the guns that shot the kids who lived in the house that crack built. Even though Bill had lived a fair way into that current century, the twenty-first – much longer than he’d been expecting to, at any rate – he’d found that visiting the period made him just as uncomfortable as it made Reggie Bowler or, to judge from her expression, Marjorie.
It had been something in the way the streets and factories and houses looked from up above, something that made you think of all the sacrifices and the struggles, the ambitions and the childbirths and the deaths and disappointments that those doll-sized little homes had seen across the years, all of it leading up to what, exactly? Bill had been unable to suppress the melancholy feelings that things had been meant to turn out a lot better than the way they had. The world that everybody had been given hadn’t been the one that they’d been promised, that they’d been expecting, that they’d been supposed to get. Although when Bill had thought about the state Mansoul was in during these early reaches of the new millennium, the damage done by the Destructor and its widening arc of influence, he couldn’t say he was surprised. The modern streets of heaven were in terrible condition, right here at the divinely appointed centre of the country’s fabric. Was it any wonder, Bill had mused, that present-day English society should start to fall to bits, start to unravel, as the burn-hole in the middle of its painstakingly-woven fibres had begun to spread, to gradually unpick the whole of the material?
While Bill had been considering these notions, up there in the haunted sky above the railway yards with Michael Warren, and with Reggie and Drowned Marjorie riding the night breeze hand-in-hand beside them, he’d been struck by his second and, with hindsight, more disastrous idea. Perhaps he’d been encouraged by the seeming unanticipated success of his first scheme, or perhaps it had still been the Puck’s Hats that he’d eaten having their enlivening effect upon Bill’s consciousness, but he’d all of a sudden made a startling connection. He’d been thinking about the Destructor and the miserable twenty-first century view from there above the Boroughs when he’d made a lateral leap to Alma Warren’s paintings, most especially the huge and terrifying one that had looked down into some sort of mile-wide rubbish-grinder or incinerator.
That was the Destructor, he had realised with a jolt. That was the way it looked when seen from the perspective of a semi-devastated Mansoul at this sordid juncture of the century. Since Alma had received all of her images at second-hand from Michael, Bill had understood that at some point they must be going to take the toddler up there, even though it was a dreadf
ul place and time, most usually avoided by all but the Master Builders and those souls who were already damned. Certainly not the place that anyone in their right mind would dream of taking an easily-frightened child, though clearly they were going to have to. He would see to it. He had decided to tell Phyllis all about this latest side-trip that he’d slotted into their itinerary before they took the toddler back to 1959 and his resuscitated infant body. There was no way of avoiding Phyllis’s involvement in an expedition fraught with such dismay and danger and besides, he’d reasoned, she’d seen Alma’s all-devouring vision of apocalypse as well. She’d understand why it was necessary, what Bill was suggesting.
The four of them had alighted gently on the same deserted stretch of turf that they’d set out from, up towards the railway station end of Andrew’s Road. Unhurriedly – they’d had a whole year before they were due to rendezvous with John and Phyllis, after all – they’d wandered up what seemed to be a grassy incline leading to the modest patch of land on which the ‘castle remains’ were exhibited. At least, the slope had seemed that way, the way a living person would experience it, until they had reached its top, when they’d found themselves looking down the astral earthworks’ plunging walls into the dark collapsed lagoon, rather than staring in disinterest at a few half-hearted plaques and cheaply-recreated castle steps.
Like grubby mountain goats they’d made their way down a meandering and narrow cliff track, single file, into the lower depths of the phantasmal excavation. Here the shadows had appeared to lay around in solid slabs, propped up at eerily suggestive angles on each other, while off in the dripping blackness there were small and sudden sounds. He’d heard a tinkling splash of aural chromium as though some dream-thing, perhaps plated all in iridescent scales and without eyes, had surfaced briefly to devour another dream-thing that had the misfortune to be hovering too close to the midnight meniscus on its lacy tinsel wings. The night was lively with carnivorous imaginings.
When they’d descended to the waterside point where Bill had grabbed Reggie’s hat and sent it skimming off into adventure, Bill had started scraping the nocturnal air as he’d begun the time-hole that would take them up twelve months into the spring of 2006. Dragging the alternating black and white onionskin layers representing night and day to one side, he’d soon opened up a yard-wide aperture with a migraine-like flickering on its perimeter. Without a second thought, he’d clambered through the crackling gap and called a raucous greeting into the surrounding gloom.
“All right? It’s us. We’re back.”
The first thing Bill had seen that indicated there was something funny going on had been the string of rancid rabbit pelts just lying there discarded on a jutting granite outcrop several feet away. His ghostly night-sight, which embroidered every hidden thing with silver stitching round its edges, had leapt instantly upon the fallen carnal garland and his phantom heart had dropped. Phyllis had got so many enemies throughout the mezzanine-realm of the ghost-seam, he’d concluded grimly, that something like this had been bound to occur sooner or later.
Bill had just been in the act of summoning whatever last reserves of cunning he’d had in him to cope with this new and desperate situation when two figures had stood up from an inviting mossy hollow in the rocks nearby: a man and woman who both looked to be in their mid-twenties. The young fellow was a squaddie, hurriedly refastening the gleaming buttons on his army jacket, glaring angrily at Bill throughout with deep and dark matinee-idol eyes. The woman smoothing down her knee-length 1950s skirt as she’d stood there beside him had been a real smasher: a pale blonde with glistening lipstick and strong, finely-chiselled features that had just then been arranged in an expression of dismay, appalled and startled. There had been something so familiar about both of this strikingly handsome pair that Bill had briefly wondered if they might be famous film stars, actors that he’d previously seen in some Ealing production, a repeat shown on a Sunday afternoon during his boyhood. Certainly the grey tones of the spectral half-world, with their whiff of Brief Encounter, had done nothing to reduce the post-war cinematic quality that had perhaps created this impression.
It was then that Bill had finally realised who the couple were. More unaccountably embarrassed than he’d ever been during his earthy and robust existence, he’d ducked straight back through the time-vent into 2005, colliding with Drowned Marjorie, Reggie and Michael Warren who’d been just about to step through the hole after him. It had required some rapid thinking.
“Sorry, chaps. Don’t mean to hold you up or anything, but I’d got a nice juicy Puck’s ’At in me pocket what I’d kept for later, and it’s not there now. I reckon as I must ’ave dropped it, stepping through this bloody ’ole. Why don’t you be good eggs and help us look for it?”