Jerusalem

This ghost-seam though, the light from which blazed upwards through a wardrobe door-sized hole in the den’s floor, that felt a bit like trespassing. It felt like something older children might get you to do just so’s you’d get in trouble. Didn’t all the phantoms down there mind having a gang of hooligans running around and bothering them even after they were dead?

On Phyllis Painter’s orders they all climbed down through the glowing rectangle, with the good-looking older boy called John being the first one to descend. Michael supposed that this was probably because John was the tallest and could drop more easily into the black-and-white world underneath. Once John had found his feet below, he would be able to reach up and help the smaller members of the gang to clamber down beside him. The old-fashioned-looking boy with all the freckles and the bowler hat went next, and then the sober-sided little girl with glasses that they called Drowned Marjorie. The kid with ginger hair who Michael thought was more than likely Phyllis Painter’s little brother followed Marjorie, which left just him and Phyllis in the television flicker of the hideout, with the colourless light shining up out of the earth t

o make the ladies on the cover of Health & Efficiency look grey and chilly.

Michael thought he might be warming to the bossy little Dead Dead girl, especially since she’d come back and saved him from that rotten devil, and not just abandoned him like he’d expected her to do. She was all right, Michael decided, for a girl. However, although she’d gone up in his opinion over the last hour or so, and even though he’d gradually been getting used to how her scarf of rabbits smelled, he found that being in a closed-in space such as the den with her was a bit much. Because of this, he didn’t make a fuss when Phyllis told him that he was the next man down the hole. It would be a relief, quite frankly, to be out in the fresh air again, even if Michael didn’t really need to breathe it quite as urgently as he might once have done. Being inside the hideout with her was like being buried in a coffin full of weasels.

Phyllis told him to get down upon his tummy and to let her gradually lower him backwards, holding tight onto his tartan sleeves in case he slipped. When he was halfway down and had his upper half still poking up into the den he felt strong hands supporting him from underneath. He trusted them enough to let his head sink down below the level of the hideout’s floor, still clinging to the hard dirt of the hole’s rim with his sweaty palms.

It was a bit like going underwater suddenly. The light looked different and it changed the way you saw things, so that everything was sharp and crystal-clear but hadn’t got its colours in it any longer. This new level of the afterlife felt different, too, as though it were a little colder, although Michael didn’t think that was the proper explanation. It was more as if when he’d been in the world Upstairs there’d been a sticky memory of summer warmth, whereas down here there wasn’t any temperature at all. It wasn’t hot, it wasn’t cold. It just felt a bit numb. The same was true with how things smelled. The dreadful niff of Phyllis Painter’s rabbits vanished at the moment Michael’s nose dropped down below the level of the hideout floor, and he discovered that he was unable to smell anything at all. The realm that he was being dangled into had no more scent than a glass of tap-water. Even the background noises of the ghost-seam, swelling up around him, sounded just like his gran’s wind-up gramophone might do if it were being played inside a cardboard box.

The firm grip of what proved to be John’s hands moved up and around Michael’s ticklish midriff, and the next thing that he registered was being set down on the off-white grass that grew there in the country of the ghosts. Everything looked as though it had been drawn in Indian ink or charcoal, and to his surprise he found that he was once more leaving trails behind him as he moved, though these weren’t the fancy wine-red tartan plumes he’d sprouted when the devil took him on his flight. The fading pictures he was leaving in his wake now looked as soft and grey as pigeon feathers. Blinking, he peered all around at the odd place in which he found himself, trying to make his mind up if he liked it much. Colourless dandelions, he learned, looked quite upsetting, while the white wasps striped like flying humbugs left him feeling slightly queasy.

Phyllis Painter, meanwhile, made a big display of holding onto her plain navy skirt, now simply black, as John lifted her from the den down to the hilly wasteland where the rest of them were standing, with his eyes averted throughout in a gentlemanly manner. As she came down, Phyllis dragged one corner of the carpet remnant into place across the gap above her, with the wardrobe door itself being presumably too heavy for a single person. Since the carpet’s underside already had an indistinct and murky hue, the entrance to the den was neatly camouflaged against the cloudy Boroughs sky that it appeared to be suspended in, a jagged hole cut in the air a few feet up above the sparse turf and uneven ground. As John helped Phyllis find her feet, Michael continued to inspect the startling newspaper-coloured kingdom that was all around them.

Michael and the other children seemed to be in the same spot as the Dead Dead Gang’s den had been up in the dreamy, colour-drenched world of Mansoul that they’d just climbed from, but the version of the place that Michael looked out over now was very different, and not just because it was all black and white and sounded flat and hadn’t got a smell. The thing that made the most impression on him was the difference in the place’s atmosphere. It made it near enough impossible for him to keep up the pretence that he was dreaming, because this felt nothing like a dream. The landscape running off downhill before him was far too let-down and sad not to be real.

The houses that had stood there between Monk’s Pond Street and Lower Harding Street were gone; all of the fond and shining memories of homes they’d passed while they were trudging up Spring Lane and all the dwellings that were half pulled down and that they’d had to pick their way through to the derelict communal yard where the Dead Dead Gang kept their hidden den. All gone. Now there were just bleached weeds and straggling, sooty bushes rising from the heaps of rubble. Michael couldn’t even see the faintest lines to show where all the former walls and boundaries had been.

The whole of Compton Street, which had been roughly halfway down the sloping wasteland, had completely vanished. In its place was an unsurfaced track of grey and glistening mud that ran across the wilderness from left to right as he gazed down the hill. He recognised the area now, whereas the glowing streets of Mansoul had seemed unfamiliar: this was how the place had been in Michael’s lifetime. These were the demolished bombsite outskirts of the Boroughs where his older sister Alma played, and that he’d heard her call ‘the Bricks’.

He had a funny feeling, as if he were in a blurry photograph from this year, 1959, a creased old picture that was being looked at by somebody in a century from now, when he and everyone he knew would all be gone. It almost made him want to cry just thinking of it, of how quickly everything was finished and how everyone’s lives were as good as over with already, from the minute they were born. The colour-blinded landscape dropped away from him towards the west, where stands of nettles that were almost black rustled and swayed on slides of sunlit mud that flared with dazzling white. Uneasy, Michael turned back to the members of the Dead Dead Gang, who were all down on solid ground by now.

To Michael’s left stood Phyllis Painter, who looked like she thought she was Napoleon or somebody, stroking her chin as she surveyed her troops. Her small hand, raised up to her face, left grey and white shapes through the air behind it in a fan of ostrich plumes.

“Right, you lot. Back to Spring Lane and across it into Crispin Street. We’ll take ayr ’onorary member for a walk dayn Scarletwell Street to ’is ’ouse in Andrew’s Road. John, you walk up the front and keep an eye ayt for rough sleepers. Bill and Reggie, you ’ang back and do the same so that we dun’t get any mad ghosts come upon us from behind. Remember, there’s a lot of ’em what we’ve played tricks on, up and dayn the years, and they don’t like us. Most of ’em are ’armless, but if yer see Mary Jane or old Tommy Mangle-the-Cat then run like billy-oh. We’ll meet up later on the Mayorhold, where the Works wiz, if we should get separated.”

Michael thought this sounded more alarming than the pleasant stroll he’d been expecting. What, he wondered, were rough sleepers? Also, why would anyone be called “Mangle-the-Cat”? Nevertheless, he fell in with the other children as they climbed the slanting wasteland with its test-card tones, back up towards all that was left, by 1959, of Lower Harding Street. He tried to haul himself up a particularly steep bit of the slope by clutching at a clump of bindweed, but discovered that his fingers passed through the white trumpet blossoms and the thick grey veins of creeper as if he was made completely out of cigarette smoke, rather than just being the same colour as it at that moment. He supposed it made sense if the weeds were real and he was ghostly, but then what about the ground that he was clambering on? Why didn’t he and his new dead friends sink down through it to Australia or somewhere? He decided to ask Phyllis, who was struggling up the hill ahead of him.

“What makes the flaw be solid when the rest of everything is mistreous?”

He pulled a face, dismayed to find his tongue was playing up again. It seemed to happen most when he was nervous, and he thought that it was very likely all this talk of mad ghosts and cat-manglers that was upsetting him. Phyllis scowled back at Michael over one pale woollen shoulder of her jumper, which looked warm grey even though he knew that it was really milkshake pink. Smudged after-images were smoking from her back.

“Yer don’t ’alf ask some silly questions. All them things grown ayt the land, all of the ’ouses and the people and not just the plants and trees, they’re only ’ere a little while. It’s only like a month, a year, a century or what-not, and they’re gone. The linger of ’em ’ardly ’as a chance to make a real impression on the worlds what are all up above. Some places, like St. Peter’s or the ’Oly Sepulchre what ’ave been there for ages, it can be a struggle walkin’ through the walls of ’em because they’re thickened by ’ow long they’ve been there. There’s a beech tree up in Sheep Street what’s been there eight ’undred years, so yer can give yer ’ead a nasty smack on that, an’ all. Compared with that, gooin’ through factory walls or them in people’s ’ouses wiz a piece o’ cake. You just pass through ’em like yer made from steam. This slope we’re walkin’ up, though, that’s been ’ere for like a million years, so it feels solid even to a ghost. Now, keep yer trap shut ’til we’re up the ’ill.”

They climbed on for a moment or two more, and then the whole gang reassembled on the cracked stone paving slabs of Lower Harding Street. Michael was pleased to see that all the houses on the street’s far side had people living in them and were being kept in good condition, with the gentle rise of Cooper Street still running up to Belbarn and St. Andrew’s Church, although the near side of the street where he stood with the other ghost-kids had all been pulled down. Above the street, the polished silver pot-lid of the sun was blazing from a wide expanse of cool grey sky, which Michael thought might be a summer blue if it were looked at by the living. Little white clouds stood out from the background here and there, as if drops of peroxide bleach had fallen onto blotting paper.

In a trailing throng the gang of phantom children made their way down the old-fashioned crackling newsreel of a street and back towards Spring Lane, each with a row of fading look-alikes that streamed along behind them. As they?

??d been instructed, little Bill and Reggie what’s-his-name brought up the rear, while Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie walked side by side towards the middle of the line, engrossed in giggling female conversation that was punctuated by swift, furtive glances at the unsuspecting tall lad, John, who paced along in front of everybody.

Michael tried to walk with Marjorie and Phyllis so that he’d have somebody he knew to chatter with but Phyllis tossed her fringe, causing her rabbit necklace to swing back and forth, and told him that it was “a private matter” what they were discussing. Given that he wasn’t sure yet what to make of the mischievous Bill or the tough-looking Reggie, Michael hurried to catch up with John, who strode with a heroic bearing at the front of their ragtag parade. This oldest member of the Dead Dead Gang appeared to Michael to be a dependable and decent sort of lad. He glanced round and grinned amiably as the pyjama-clad child scampered from behind to trot along beside him.

“Hello, nipper. Phyllis given you your marching orders, has she? Never mind. You keep me company instead. You never know, it might be we could learn a thing or two off of each other.”

Michael did a sort of double skip in order to keep up with John’s long legs and greater stride. He liked the older boy a lot. For one thing, John was the first person that he’d met up here who seemed as though he wouldn’t get annoyed if Michael asked him things. Michael decided that he’d put it to the test.

“What wiz that Phyllis said about rough sleepers? Are there bad ghosts going to come and get us? Wiz that what you’re looking out for?”

John smiled reassuringly.

“They’re not bad ghosts, not really. They’re just people who aren’t sleeping soundly in their afterlives because of one thing or another. They don’t fancy running through their lives again, and they don’t feel right going upstairs to Mansoul. Some of ’em don’t feel like they’re good enough, and some of ’em just like it here where everything’s familiar, even if it’s all in black and white and there’s no smell or anything.”

The handsome boy’s face took on a more serious look.

“They’re harmless for the most part, that sort, but there’s one or two of them who ain’t. There’s ones who’ve been down here a long time and it’s sent them funny, either that or they were funny to begin with. Then there’s ones who’ve got too fond of ghost-booze, Puck’s Hat Punch they call it. They’re the worst to look at. They can’t hold themselves together properly, so they get shapes and faces that are mixed up like a jumble sale, and they’re forever flying into rages. Old Mangle-the-Cat, he’s one of them, and I’ll tell you for nothing, if a ghost gives you a thick ear then you’ll feel it.”

John gave Michael a soft prod in his left shoulder with one finger as a demonstration, and although it didn’t hurt, the younger boy could see it would have done if John had put more force behind it. Satisfied he’d made his point, John next untucked his phosphorescent shirt tails from the waistband of his knee-length trousers, pulling up the garment and the pullover he wore above it to reveal his belly. Just below the ribcage on John’s right-hand side there was a dull grey light that seemed to pulse at intervals beneath the skin, as if John had a tiny road-lamp flashing in his stomach.