Jerusalem

“That’s where Mary Jane put in the boot when we’d been playing tricks on her, some while back now. A ghost-bruise like this, it’ll fade away eventually, but I dare say that if you got enough of ’em at once, your spirit might be done some damage that’d be a job to fix.”

John rolled his shirt back down and tucked it in. The action left a churning storm of ghostly hands and cuffs around his waistband that dispersed after a moment.

On the other side of Lower Harding Street a front door opened with a muted squeak and a disgruntled-looking woman in her forties came out through it, as did a brief burst of wireless-music playing from somewhere inside the house. It was a song that Michael recognised, by an American. He thought it might be called something like “What Did Della Wear”, but it was cut off as the woman shut the door behind her and then bustled down the terrace a short distance, with arms folded truculently and her dark permed hairdo bobbing like a feeding blackbird. Calling at a neighbour’s some doors down she knocked upon the door and was let in almost immediately by a tall lady whose short hair was either blonde or grey. Neither of the two women left a trail behind them as they moved, nor spared the gang of children wandering by upon the street’s far side a second glance.

“They’re still alive, so they can’t see us,” John remarked conspiratorially. “The way that you can tell wiz that they don’t have streamers following behind ’em, like what we’ve got.” Here he waved one arm so that it fanned out like a hand of cards, the extra limbs persisting for an instant before disappearing.

“If you see somebody without streamers and it looks like they can see you, chances are it’s someone who’s asleep and dreaming. You don’t get as many of ’em hanging round the ghost-seam as you do Upstairs, but every little while you’ll get a couple of ’em what have blundered down here and are having all their dreams in black and white. Most of ’em, they’ll be wearing just their vest and pants or they’ll be in the nude. If you see someone dressed who’s looking at you, and they don’t leave any pictures when they move, it’s one of them few characters what are alive but can still see things. If they’re drunk or dosed with drugs, or if they’re a bit barmy, then they’ll glimpse you sometimes. Barmy or poetic, either one will do. Most of the time they won’t be sure they’ve really seen you, and they’ll look away.”

Walking along by Michael’s side with Michael hurrying to keep up, John gazed down at the pavement reeling by beneath their feet and frowned, as if he was recalling something that he didn’t like.

“The psychics and the swamis, they’re all tosh. They’ll look straight through you while they tell your mum how happy and how comfortable you look, and how you didn’t suffer. You can stand there screaming ‘Mum, I got blew up and it wiz bloody horrible’, but she won’t hear. Nor wizzle they, the phoney buggers.

“Mind you, once I went round to a séance this old girl wiz throwing, in her parlour. She wiz faking everything and telling people that their loved ones wiz beside her when they wizn’t. It was only me, I wiz the only ghost there, so I went and stood in front of her and blow me if she couldn’t see me! She just looked at me and she burst into tears. Right there and then she called the séance off and sent the people home. She packed the table-tilting in just after that. She never held another meeting, and she wiz the only one I ever met who I’d call genuine.”

Ahead of them the top of Spring Lane was approaching and the ancient street ran off downhill upon their right, where Lower Harding Street turned into Crispin Street once it had crossed the lane. The waste-ground that they walked beside had been fenced off with criss-cross wire, beyond which they could see the early stages of some building work. A big sign stood behind the wire, propped on a steel-pipe scaffolding, with words to the effect that all the fenced-in ground belonged to somebody called Cleaver, who was putting up a factory sometime soon.

John strolled along by Michael’s side, keeping him company, thoughtfully taking shorter strides so that the youngster could keep up with him more easily. He kept on glancing down at Michael with a faint smile, as if he was privately amused by something but was for the moment keeping it all to himself. At last he spoke again.

“They tell me your name’s Michael Warren. So, whose lad are you, then? What’s your dad’s name? Is it Walter?”

Michael was confused by this, and wondered if the bigger boy were making fun of him in some way that he was too young to understand. He shook his head.

“My dad’s called Tom.”

John beamed, giving the smaller boy a disbelieving look that was at the same time admiring and delighted.

“What, you’re Tommy Warren’s son? Well, I’ll be blowed. None of us ever thought that Tom would marry, with him being a late starter like he wiz. How wiz he, Tom? He’s happy, wiz he? Settled down and that, not liv

ing with his mam round Green Street anymore?”

Michael was flabbergasted, looking at the big lad in bewilderment, as if John had produced a flock of parrots out of thin air.

“Did you know my dad?”

The older boy laughed, swinging one leg idly as if to kick a bottle-top off of the pavement, though his foot passed through it.

“Blimey, I should say so! I hung round with Tommy and his brothers on the green, when we wiz kids. He’s a good bloke, your dad. If you should get took back to life like everybody round here seems to think you wizzle, don’t you play him up too much, ay? It’s a decent family what you come from, so don’t let ’em down.”

Here John broke off and gave the fenced-off area that they were walking past a thoughtful look. Grey rain hung trembling on the grey weave of the wire.

“You know, your granddad … no. No, it’s your father’s granddad, your great-granddad. He wiz an old terror they called Snowy. He turned down an offer from the man whose company wiz putting up this building here. This feller said that he’d make Snowy a half-partner in the business, on condition Snowy kept out of the pub for the next fortnight. ’Course, he got told where to stick his co-directorship and that wiz that. He wiz a mad old bugger, Snowy Vernall, but he’d got the power in him, right enough. However poor he wiz, he’d got the power to throw away a fortune just like that.”

From Michael’s point of view this didn’t seem much of a power, not when compared to flying, say, or turning to a giant. He’d have asked John to explain, but by that point they’d reached the corner of Spring Lane, unreeling down from where they stood towards the coal-yard and the west, where John suggested that they wait until the others had caught up a bit. Michael gazed off and down the hillside as he whiled away the time.

Even without its dusty, faded colours, this was the Spring Lane that Michael recognised, Spring Lane as it was in the summer months of 1959 and not as it had been in the bright-tinted memories of Phyllis Painter or the other people who had lived here long ago. For one thing, nearly all the houses on the lane’s far side had been pulled down. The homes that had been near the upper end were gone, including Phyllis Painter’s and the sweetshop that had stood next door, demolished to make room for a long patch of grass that ran along the top Crispin Street edge of Spring Lane School, just a few stone steps up from the school’s concrete playground. This was silent and deserted on account of the school holidays.

The houses lower down the hill, the ones that had been standing in between Scarletwell Terrace at the bottom of the slope and Spring Lane Terrace halfway up, these had all disappeared, as had the terraces themselves. The lower playing field of Spring Lane School now reached from the old factory where the fever cart had once been kept, down to the jitty-way that ran along behind the houses on St. Andrew’s Road. Although the view was cosy and familiar, Michael found that he was looking at it in a different way, as somebody who knew what had been there before and knew how much was gone. The gaps between the buildings didn’t look as if they had been planned, the way they’d looked to him before, but seemed more like reminders of some great disaster.

Michael understood for the first time that he’d been living in a country that had not had time yet to get over being in a war, although he didn’t think that many German bombs had fallen on Northampton while all that was going on. It just looked like they had, or as if something every bit as bad had happened. It was funny. If he hadn’t seen Mansoul and seen how Spring Lane looked in people’s hearts, then all of this would seem normal to him, instead of being bare and broken-looking. It would look like it had always been this way, with all its holes and empty bits.

The other children had by then caught up to him and John, with Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie still smirking slyly as they whispered to each other. The boy Reggie, in his dented bowler hat, had once more started up the game of knuckles he’d been playing earlier with Phyllis’s young brother Bill, as they lagged back behind the rest of the Dead Dead Gang. Ginger Bill was blonde like Michael in the ghost-seam, which was colourless as a new Magic Painting book before you’d brushed the water on. As Bill and Reggie’s clenched hands hurtled down to smack each other on the knuckles, the two boys were blossoming with fists like angry monsters or like funny gods that people from another country might believe in. Michael wondered briefly if this was the reason why so many things in legends had got extra heads or arms, but just then his attention was seized by a passing bright grey ladybird, so that the idea trailed off uncompleted.

Once they had regrouped, the ghostly urchins crossed Spring Lane and carried on down Crispin Street, beside the woven wire boundary that fenced off the grubby white fur of the school’s top lawn. It wasn’t until Bill and Reggie plunged straight through the fence to rough-and-tumble there upon the pale and poorly-looking grass that Michael was reminded how he now had the ability to pass through walls and things. He wondered why he and the others kept so strictly upon one side of the wire partition. He supposed that it was habit, and decided not to test it out by joining Bill and Reggie. If he wasn’t walking through things all the time then it was easier to pretend that everything was normal, if you didn’t count the lack of colour or the burst of twenty hands he now apparently required to quietly pick his nose.

As they got nearer to the scuffed and silvery metal hurdle of the crossing-barrier that stood outside the school’s top gate, Michael gazed over Crispin Street to Herbert Street; there it ran off uphill between two patches of tall grass and rubble where it looked like there had once been houses. In his ordinary life, wheeled past it in his pushchair by his mum Doreen, Michael had thought that Herbert Street looked like a run-down sort of street where run-down people lived, although it might have been the name that gave him that impression. Herbert Street, he half-believed, was where the Herberts started out, including not only the Scruffy Herberts and the Lazy Herberts that his dad had often mentioned, but also their more successful-sounding relatives, the Crafty Herberts. This was an idea which more than likely had been passed on to him, like an eyeless teddy bear, by his big sister.

Thinking idly about families and where they started out, including all the things that John had said about his dad and his great-granddad, he was startled when the big boy grabbed him by the collar of his dressing gown and pushed him face down on the grass-seamed paving stones. John did this with such force that for a second Michael’s face was shoved below the surface of the street, which was alarming until he discovered that it wasn’t really a great inconvenience, although there wasn’t much to look at except worms. Bobbing his head back up he caught the tail-end of what John was shouting, with the bigger boy himself down on the ground now, next to Michael.