It struck him suddenly, an ominous gong sounding in his stomach, that his mum’s and gran’s distress might be connected with his current puzzling circumstances. It was Michael that they were upset about, a fact so obvious he wondered why he hadn’t hit on it immediately. He must have had a shock, so that he’d needed time to put his thoughts in order. It seemed reasonable to assume that what had shocked him was the same thing that had made his mum and gran sound scared to death …
No sooner had the word entered his mind than Michael, in a rush of helpless terror, understood exactly where he was and what had happened to him.
He had died. The thing that even grown-ups like his mum and dad lived with the fear of all their lives, that’s what this was, and Michael was alone in it just as he’d always dreaded that he would be. All alone and far too little, still, to cope with this enormous thing the way that he assumed old people could. There were no big hands that would grab him up out of this fall. No lips could ever kiss this better. He knew he was entering a place where there weren’t mums or dads or fireside rugs or Tizer, nothing comforting or cosy, only God and ghosts and witches and the devil. He’d lost everyone he’d had and everything he’d been, all in a careless moment where he’d just let his attention wander for an instant and then, bang, he’d tripped and fallen out of his whole life. He whimpered, knowing that at any moment there would be an awful pain that would just crush him to a paste, and then there’d be a nothing that was even worse because he wouldn’t be there, and he’d never see his family or his friends ever again.
He started struggling and kicking, trying to wake up and make it just a petrifying dream, but all his desperate activity served only to make everything more frightening and more peculiar. For one thing, all the empty space around him wobbled like a slow glass jelly as he thrashed about, and for another, all at once he had too many arms and legs. His limbs, which he was slightly reassured to find were still clad in his blue and white pyjamas and his dark red tartan dressing gown, left perfect copies of themselves suspended in the air behind them as they moved. With one brief, wriggling spasm he had turned himself into a lively, branching bush of stripy flannel that had pale pink finger-blossoms by the dozen sprouting from its multiplying stems. He wailed, and saw his outcry travel in a glittering trumpet ripple through the crystal glue of the surrounding air.
This only seemed to make the little blonde girl who was in or on the corner cross with him, when what with finding out that he was dead and all of that, he’d quite forgotten she was standing there. She stretched her grubby hands towards him, reaching up or down depending on which aspect of her chalk-box optical illusion he was focussing upon. She shouted at him, near enough now so that he could hear her, with her voice no longer like that of a beetle in a matchbox. Closer up, Michael could hear the Boroughs creaking in her accent, with its grimy floorboards and its padlocked gates.
“Come up! Come on up ’ere, yer’ll be all right! Gi’ me yer ’and, and pack up wi’ yer fidgetin’! Yer’ll only make it worse!”
He didn’t know what could be worse than being dead, but since at that point he could hardly see her for a forest full of tartan trees and striped-pants shrubbery he thought he’d better do as she advised. He held himself as still as he could manage and, after a moment or two, was relieved to learn that all the extra elbows, knees and slipper-covered feet would gradually fade away to nothing if you gave them enough time. Once all of his superfluous body parts had disappeared and weren’t obstructing his view of the corner-fairy anymore, he cautiously reached out towards the hand that she was holding down or up to him, moving his own arm very slowly so that all the trailing after-pictures were reduced to a bare minimum.
Her outstretched fingers wrapped around his own, and he was so surprised by how real and how physical they felt he almost let them go again. He found that, as with sight and scent, his sense of touch had suddenly been made a lot more sensitive. It was as though he’d taken off a pair of padded mittens that had been tied on his wrists soon after he’d been born. He felt her palm, hot as a new-baked cake and slippery with sweat, as if she’d held it guarding pennies in her pocket for too long. The soft pads in between her digits had a sticky glaze, like she’d been eating ripe pears with her bare hands and had not had time to wash yet, if she ever did. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been anticipating, possibly that being dead his fingertips would simply pass through everything as if it were made out of steam, but he’d not been expecting anything as clammily believable as this, these humid crab-legs scrabbling for his wrist and clamping on the baggy cuff of Michael’s dressing gown.
Her grip, not only startlingly real, was also much, much stronger than he would have thought to look at her. Yanking him by the arm she hauled him up, no, down towards her, much like someone trying to land a frantic, flapping fish. He suffered an unpleasant moment during this when both his eyes and stomach had to flip from thinking he was being pulled down to a table corner that poked out, and instead see it as a backroom corner that tucked in, with the girl straddling it and reaching down as if helping him up out of a swimming pool, while she stood safely in the dry astride the junction where its edges met. The room lurched outside-in again as he was dragged up through a sort of hinge, where everything you thought was going one way turned out to be actually going in the other, and next thing he knew Michael was standing wobbly-kneed on the same painted wooden ledge as the small girl.
This narrow platform ran around the rim of what appeared to be a big square vat some thirty feet or more across, with their precarious perch being the lowest level of a tiered amphitheatre that sloped up for several steps on all four sides, like a giant picture-frame enclosing the wide fish-tank void he’d just been rescued from. The ten-yard sweeps of stair that led up from the edges of the pool-like area were, even in his confused condition, obviously impractical and ludicrous. The treads were far too deep, being some feet across from front to rear, while at the same time all the risers were too shallow, no more than three inches high, harder to sit on than a roadside curb. The gently-stepped surround seemed to be made of tiered white-painted pine with its sharp corners rounded into curves, covered all over with a thick and flaking coat of paint, a yellowing cream gloss that looked as though it had been last touched up before the war. To be quite frank, the more he peered at them the more the steps resembled the old beaded moulding that ran round the ceiling of their living room in Andrew’s Road, except much bigger and turned upside down. As he stood with his back towards the rectangular pit he’d been pulled out of, he could even see a patch of bare wood where the paint had peeled away leaving a shape a bit like Britain lying on its back, identical to one he’d noticed once up on the decorative trim above their fireplace. That one, though, had been no larger than a penny postage stamp, whereas this was an unjumpable puddle, even though he felt sure that the wriggling contour lines would prove a perfect match on close inspection.
After blinking at the woodwork in astonishment for a few seconds, Michael shuffled round in his plaid slippers until he was fa
ce to face with the tough little girl who stood beside him on the pine boards with her collar made of rancid rabbits. She was just a fraction taller than he was himself, which, taken in conjunction with the fact that she was wearing proper clothes while he was still dressed in his night-things, made him feel as if she had him at a disadvantage. Realising that they were still holding hands, he let go hurriedly.
He meant to say something along the lines of “Who are you,” or “What’s been done to me,” but what came out instead was “You who,” followed almost instantly by “Worlds bent under me.” Alarmed, he raised his fingers to his lips and felt around to make sure that his mouth was working properly. Lifting his arm to do so, Michael noticed that he was no longer leaving picture-copies every time he moved. Perhaps that only happened in the floaty place he’d just that moment been fished out of, but right then Michael was more concerned about the rubbish he was coming out with when he tried to talk.
The girl stood looking at him in amusement with her head cocked on one side, her wide lips pressed together in a thin line so that she could keep from laughing. Michael made a fresh attempt to ask her where they were and what had happened to him.
“Ware whee are, wore ’way? And throttles happy tune me?”
Though the stream of nonsense was no less upsetting, Michael was astonished to discover that he almost understood himself. He’d asked her where they were as he’d intended to, but all the words had come out changed and twisted round, with different meaning tucked into their crevices. He thought that what he’d said translated roughly to “Where are we, in this place where I feel so aware, that makes we want to shout whee, but which makes me wary, looking all run-down and worn away, the way it does? And what has happened to me? I was happy where I was, but fear I may have throttled on a Tune that has choked off my joyous song.” It sounded a bit posh and weedy put like that, but he supposed that it contained the feelings he was trying to convey.
The smirking urchin could contain her mirth no longer and laughed in his face, loudly, though not unkindly. Minute beads of opal spittle, each with all the world reflected in it, hurtled from her mouth to break against his nose. Amazingly, the girl seemed to at least have caught the gist of what he’d meant to say, and when her giggles had subsided she made what he took for a sincere attempt to answer all his questions as directly as she could.
“Yoo hoo to you as well. I’m Phyllis Painter. I’m boss of the gang.”
Those weren’t the exact words she used, and there were corkscrew syllables that made him think of “gasbag” and “bass gong”, perhaps a reference to how much she talked or how deep, for a girl, her voice was, but he could make out what she was saying without difficulty. Clearly, she’d got her mouth under more control than Michael had his own. She went on and he listened, both intently and admiringly.
“What’s ’appened is the world’s bent under yer and out yer’ve fell like everybody does. Yer’ve chuckled on a sweet.” This seemed to say that he had throttled or had choked to death as he’d suspected, though with comical associations as if neither death nor choking could be taken very seriously round here. The girl continued.
“So I tugged yer ayt the jewellery and now ’ere we are Upstairs. We’re in Mansoul. Mansoul’s the Second Borough. Do yer want to join me gang or don’t yer?”
Michael comprehended almost none of this except the last part. He jumped back from her like he’d been stung. His spirited refusal of her offer was spoiled only by not being in a proper language.
“Know eye doughnut! Late me grow black square eyewash be four!”
She laughed again, less loudly and, he thought, not quite so kind.
“Ha! You ent found yer Lucy-lips yet. That’s why what yer saying clangs out wrong. Just give it linger and yer’ll soon be spooking properly. But as for where you wizzle be before, there ent no go-back. Life’s behind yer now.”
She nodded past him, and it sank in that her last remark had been intended as more than a turn of phrase. She’d meant his life was currently behind him. With his neck-hairs tingling as they lifted, Michael swivelled carefully to look at it.
He found that he’d been standing with his back turned to the very edge of the huge, square-shaped tank he’d been dragged up from, with a worrying drop beneath him at his slipper-heels. The area he was looking at, while not much bigger than the children’s boating lake he’d seen once at the park, was certainly much deeper, to the point where Michael couldn’t tell exactly how far down it went. The great flat pool was filled up to its brim with the same wobbly, half-set glass that he had lately been suspended in. The surface was still quivering slightly, no doubt from the violent jerk with which he’d been pulled out.
As Michael peered down through the shuddering substance he could make out still forms that extended through the glazed depths, motionless and twisted trunks of intricately textured gemstone that were wound around each other as they stretched across the space beneath. He thought it might look a bit like a coral garden, though he hadn’t really got a clear idea of what those words actually meant. The interwoven strands with all their branches and their surfaces seemed to be made of something you could see through, like a hard, clear wax. These frilly, tangling cables had no colour of their own, but you could look inside them to where lights of every shade swam back and forth. He could distinguish at least three of the long convoluted tubes, each with its own specific inner hue, as they snaked in amongst each other through the rubbery fathoms trembling far below, like an ice-statue of a gorgeous knot.
The thickest and most well-developed of the stems, lit from inside by a predominantly greenish glow, was the one Michael thought looked nicest, though he couldn’t have told anyone precisely why. It had a peaceful quality about it, with the sculpted emerald bough stretched right across the massive box of shivering light, from where it entered through a tall rectangle in the vat’s far wall, then coiled around the monster fish-tank prettily towards him before curving off to Michael’s left and exiting his field of vision through another looming aperture.
He thought it was an interesting coincidence that both these openings were in the same relation to each other as the doors that led out from their living room down Andrew’s Road into the kitchen and the passageway, although these entrances were vastly bigger, more like those you’d find in a cathedral or perhaps a pyramid. As he looked closer with his improved eyes he saw that there was even a black tunnel cut low down into the right-side wall halfway along, in the precise location that their fireplace would be if it were huger and if he were staring down at it from a position up above.