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“There. See ’im? That’s the Lord Protector, that wiz.
“That’s Oliver Cromwell.”
SLEEPLESS SWORDS
That blowing-up bloke on the balcony had rattled John. He liked to think that generally he kept an even keel but the two-legged fireball had upset him, there was no denying
.
For a kick-off, John had never seen before what an exploding person looked like, not in all that frozen detail and not from outside. When John himself had copped his lot over in France he hadn’t even realised it had happened for a good few minutes. He’d just taken it for a near miss and had gone running up the road with all the other lads. He’d noticed that the shell-fire was now muffled and that he was seeing everything in black and white, but just assumed the bang had made his eyes and ears go funny. Only when he’d realised he was leaving pictures in his wake, unlike his strangely unresponsive squadron-mates, had John begun to take in what had happened.
Once he’d understood his circumstances he’d been overcome by horror, which was only normal: it had been a gruesome way to perish. So to see that fellow on the landings at the Works, inside his lethal halo with that forced smile and the tears turning to steam upon his cheek, remaining in that awful second for eternity because that was the way that he remembered himself best … John couldn’t make it out. When Bill had told them that these human bombs were doing it as part of their religion, waging holy war as you might say, that had just made John even more bewildered.
John had been a Christian while he was alive. Never a good one, mind you, nowhere near as serious about religion as his eldest brother had been, but more serious than his sister, mam, or either of his other brothers were. He’d gone to church up College Street most Sundays, where he’d been a member of the Boy’s Brigade. That was where John had prayed, sung hymns, been taught to march, and learned to see this combination as entirely natural. Onward Christian soldiers and all that.
There had been no religious books to speak of in the family home where he’d grown up except the Bible, which John was ashamed to say he’d found as dry as dust, and an old copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which he’d fared a little better with. He’d not had much idea, back then, what Bunyan’s allegorically-named characters were meant to represent, but found that he enjoyed the tales and fancied that he’d caught their basic moral gist. He’d even got halfway through Bunyan’s Holy War, the first place that he’d come across the name “Mansoul”, before he’d given up in bafflement and boredom. All of this had only underlined the notion that had been instilled in him by Boy’s Brigade – ten minutes’ prayer after an hour’s drill practice in the upper church hall, blue-black military caps on bowed young heads – the sense that Christianity and marching were bound up together inextricably. He was no stranger, then, to the association between warfare and religion, but that, surely, was a thing for proper wars, with soldiers who had proper uniforms. The fellow on the landing, a civilian blowing himself up and taking others with him in the name of God, that was a different matter. That was neither warfare nor religion as John comprehended them.
Also, whatever Boroughs-of-tomorrow the perpetually exploding man had wandered back to 1959 from, that was not a future that John comprehended either. How could his scuffed, peaceful neighbourhood produce something like that in only sixty years or so? Though John had been on various sorties into the twenty-first century with the Dead Dead Gang since first hooking up with them, he realised that he’d no more than the barest understanding of how people felt and thought and lived during those future decades, anymore than he could claim to know much about France simply because he’d died there. All he knew was that the sight of that half-man, half-Roman candle made him fearful for the Boroughs, and the England, and the whole world that was yet to come. Throughout the fight between the builders and the drama in the billiard hall, John had found that he couldn’t take his mind off that illuminated and fragmenting figure, shuffling on the wooden walkways of a Heaven that it couldn’t have conceived of or anticipated, wrapped forever in the flames of its own savage martyrdom.
Indeed, not until John had realised where Phyll Painter meant to take the gang after escaping from the snooker parlour had he started to pay much attention to their present undertaking, unable to banish the compelling vision of the man-explosion from his thoughts. The English Civil War, though, was John’s hobby in the afterlife, much in the same way Reggie Bowler had a craze for cars or Marjorie liked books. If anything could stop the image of the walking detonation from preoccupying him, it was the thought of tunnelling into the evening of June 13th, 1645, here in Marefair at Hazelrigg House, or, as locals called it, Cromwell House.
In the brief interlude between his death and his encounter with the Dead Dead Gang, a few subjective years at most, John had pursued his interest independently. He’d twice been out to Naseby, once an hour or two before the battle and once during, and he’d travelled up the Wellingborough Road to Ecton for a look at how the Royalist prisoners were treated afterwards. He’d never previously paid a visit, though, to the occasion he was currently observing: fresh from his promotion to lieutenant-general, rising Parliamentary star Oliver Williams-alias-Cromwell, bivouacked in Marefair on the night preceding the decisive battle of the English Civil War.
John could remember how alone he’d felt in those years following his death, before encountering Phyll and the gang. His journey back from France had been accomplished with surprising speed. One moment he’d been standing in the shell-pocked mud, staring appalled at his own offal, glistening as it spilled from the burst body at his feet, desperately wishing that he’d lived to see his home again. The next, he’d found himself stood in the middle of the green behind St. Peter’s Church, now grey and silvery in the colourless expanses of the ghost-seam. Spilled-milk clouds drifted at anchor in a sky of blazing summer platinum, and John had bounded down the grassy slope towards the terrace at the bottom, leaving a parade of muddy soldiers in the air behind him.
Yes, he’d seen his mam and even seen his sister who was visiting with her two little girls, but since they’d not been able to see John he’d found the whole encounter both frustrating and depressing. What had made it worse was that his mam and sister, obviously, didn’t know that he was dead yet. When his sis had started reading out a letter John had sent home to her daughter Jackie, talking about all the fun he’d have the next time he was home on leave, with all of them sat round the family dinner table, tucking into mam’s bake pudden, John had broken down. His mam, sat in her armchair up the corner, had smiled fondly as her only daughter read the letter, scrawled in pencil on the tiny pages of a jotter, clearly looking forward to bake pudden with her sons as much as John had been the night he’d written to his niece. She didn’t know that the reunion feast would never come. She didn’t know that her son’s ghost was sitting on the lumpy horsehair sofa next to her, weeping with helplessness for her and for himself and for the entire rotten business of that bloody war. Unable to take any more, John had streamed through the closed front door, away along Elephant Lane towards Black Lion Hill, commencing his short-lived career as a rough sleeper.
Not that John had been as rough as most of that sort were, by any means. He’d always kept himself presentable while he was still alive, and thus approached the afterlife with a Boy’s Weekly sense of military discipline. He’d made himself a den in the unused round tower jutting incongruously from condemned Victorian business premises upon the far side of Black Lion Hill. He’d chosen the location partly from a sense that proper ghosts should haunt somewhere that looked appropriately creepy like a turret, and partly because his previous choice, St. Peter’s Church, seemed to be overrun by ghosts already. John had met at least fifteen on his first tentative excursion to the Norman-renovated Saxon building. By the gate in Marefair there had been the spectre of a crippled beggar-woman, talking in a form of English so archaic and so thickly accented that John could barely understand a word of it. Around the church itself John had met phantom pastors and parishioners from several different eras, and encountered a geologist named Smith who claimed to have identified the limestone ridge that stretched from Bath to Lincolnshire, called the Jurassic Way. According to the affable and chatty soul, it was the way that this primordial cross-country footpath met the river Nene which had determined where Northampton would be
most conveniently situated. Smith himself, coincidentally, had died here in Marefair while passing through the town and was commemorated by a plaque fixed to the church wall, which he’d proudly pointed out to John.
After that limited exposure to the ghost-seam’s other occupants, John had decided on a policy of keeping for the most part to himself. He’d watched the wraiths coming and going from the window of his tower-room, but they’d seemed to him peculiar things, some of them monstrous, so that he’d not felt inclined to seek their company. For instance, John had one day spotted the giant wading-bird made out of stilts and rushes that he’d seen again just recently, up on the balconies outside the Works. Upon that first occasion he had watched it striding round St. Peter’s Church in a full circuit before struggling through a wall of thousand-year-old stones and out of sight. Back then he hadn’t had a clue what it might be, and was no wiser now. The wood-beaked creature that left puddles of ghost-water everywhere it set its spindly legs served only as an illustration of the half-world’s oddness, which had prompted John to take an isolated, self-sufficient path in all his dealings with the afterlife.
He’d found that he liked his own company, liked planning expeditions such as those he’d made to Naseby, even though his second visit halfway through the actual battle had been horrible and made him glad that he’d been done in by a shell and not a pike. In general, he’d felt lively and adventurous during those early months of being dead, and it had been around then John had realised that he was no longer wearing his army uniform. He’d just looked down one day and found that he was in black knee-length shorts, a jumper that his mam had knitted and the shoes and socks he’d worn when he’d been twelve. He realised now, of course, that his ghost-body had been slowly gravitating to the form that it had been the happiest with in life, but at the time he’d simply been delighted to discover that he was a lad again, and didn’t care to speculate how this had come about.
He’d thrown himself into his solitary escapades with renewed vigour, always choosing the most daring situations to investigate, fancying himself as a dead Douglas Fairbanks Junior. When that British bomber had crashed at the top of Gold Street, John had watched it passing overhead from his tower’s window at the foot of Marefair and had straight away gone racing through the sparkling dark along the east-west avenue, chased by a scrum of after-image schoolboys as he’d rushed to see if anyone was dead, if there were any new ghosts stumbling about confused, needing advice.
As it had turned out, nobody was killed by the huge aeroplane’s astonishing descent, the crew and pilot having already bailed out and the sole casualty being a late-night Gold Street cyclist who’d sustained a broken arm. The only ghost other than John upon the scene that evening was that of the plane itself. Amazingly, although its substance had been almost totally destroyed on impact, the ethereal framework of the aircraft had been driven down into the misty topsoil of the ghost-seam, so that underneath the surface of the street a phantom bomber was at rest and perfectly intact. It had been while John sat there in its cockpit, shouting out commands to his imaginary crewmen and pretending he was on a bombing-mission that, embarrassingly, he had found himself surrounded by four snickering ghost-children who had introduced themselves as the Dead Dead Gang.
Standing now in Hazelrigg House, watching Cromwell writing in his journal as the long, last rays of the day’s sun were spent outside, John smiled as he recalled that first adventure with the other ghost-kids, or “The Subterranean Aeroplane Affair” as Phyllis had insisted that they afterwards refer to it. Larking about there at the controls of the immaterial craft, the spectral urchins had discovered that they could make it move slowly forward by merely pretending they were flying it, provided they pretended hard enough. Although they couldn’t get up enough speed to break the surface tension of the streets and take the plane back up into the air, they found that they could glide round underground at a serene and stately pace, and even execute a dive into the geologic strata underneath the town by leaning on the joystick. Travelling through clay and rock, though, hadn’t been much fun, and so they’d mostly kept to a flight corridor that was a few feet down beneath the surface. Here they’d droned through tunnels, crypts and cellars and endured a comically disgusting episode while taxiing along a vintage iron sewer-bore. At last, laughing at their own ingenuity, they’d steered their phantom aircraft carefully into the space presented by a subterranean speakeasy, on the corner of George Row and Wood Hill, which, bizarrely, had been built to replicate the fuselage and seating of a passenger plane and so made a perfect parking-place for their ghost-vessel.
John had given up his independent ways upon the spot, throwing his lot in with these hooligans who’d managed to make death into their funfair. He’d not been back to his lonely turret-room since that hilarious night, preferring the nomadic life of the ghost-children as they capered through the decades and dimensions, moving between purgatory and paradise, from hidden den to hidden den. He liked the crew he’d fallen in with a great deal, even if Reggie Bowler sometimes seemed to squint resentfully from underneath his hat-brim and you seldom heard more than a word or two out of Drowned Marjorie.
He got on best with Phyllis Painter. In a funny sort of way he thought that they might even be in love. He saw the admiration in her bright eyes every time she looked at him and hoped that she could see the same in his, although he knew that what there was between the pair of them could go no further, not without the whole thing being ruined. As John saw it, what he had with Phyllis was perhaps the very best of love in that it was a child’s game of love, an infants’ school idea of what it meant to be somebody’s boy or girlfriend. It was heartfelt and unsullied by the smallest cloud of practical experience. Before he’d died aged barely twenty, John had several girlfriends and had even had it off with one of them. Likewise, although he’d never asked her outright, he got the impression that Phyll Painter had lived to a ripe old age and had at one point even possibly been married. So to some extent they’d both been through the grown-up part of love, the animal delight of sex, the troughs and torments of a passion off the boil.
They’d both known adult love and yet had opted for the junior version, for the thrill of an eternal playground crush, romance that hadn’t even progressed to behind the bike-sheds yet. They had elected to taste nothing but the dew upon love’s polished skin, and leave the actual fruit unbitten. That was how John felt about it, anyway, and he suspected it was probably the same with Phyll. At any rate, whatever the success of their relationship was due to, they’d loved in their fashion for some several timeless decades, and John hoped they might keep on like that until the very doorstep of infinity.
All things considered, John’s death suited him as well or better than his life had. The wayward agendas of the ghost-gang, scampering from one absurd adventure to another, meant that John was never bored. With the grey blush of every phantom morning there was always something new. Or, in the case of Bill and Reggie’s plan to tame a spectral mammoth, something very old.
Take all of this to-do over the ghost-gang’s latest member, for example. While John felt, as Phyllis did, that being in charge of the temporarily-dead infant was a grave responsibility, he also felt that this was turning out to be their grandest episode to date. In fact, John had good reason to take Michael Warren’s plight even more seriously than Phyllis did, and to be even more concerned about the toddler’s safety. He was buggered, though, if he’d let that stop him enjoying an extraordinary outing: demon-kings like plunging Messerschmitts! Ghost-storms and deathmongers! This was the kind of dashing spree he’d fondly hoped a war might be, before he’d found out otherwise. This was more what he’d had in mind, the very picture-paper essence of adventure with no scattered entrails and no grieving mums to turn a radio-serial romp into a tragedy. This was the best bits, all the spills and spectacle without the mortal consequence. John marvelled as he thought of the colossal builders, bleeding gold and lashing at each other with their billiard cues on the unfolded acres of the Mayorhold, then broke off that train of thought on realising that it led him back to the exploding man, the stumbling phosphorescence on the balcony with his suspended nails and rivets, his soiled trousers, his evaporating tears.
To rid himself of the recurring apparition, John switched his attention to their current whereabouts, the downstairs parlour of Hazelrigg House, an ominous June evening in the mid-seventeenth century. Having emerged from underneath a gleaming rosewood table, the group stood assembled at the spacious chamber’s eastern end, all taking in the monumental presence sitting at the table’s further edge, one side of his great griffin snout lit by the sunset falling through the leaded windows from outside, his warts in shadow.
John, of course, had recognised old Ironsides from the previous occasions when the plucky youth had visited the dark days of the Civil War. He’d witnessed Cromwell, riding out with General Fairfax and his major-general of foot-soldiers, Philip Skippon, on the slopes of Naseby Ridge at first light on June 14th – or tomorrow morning from John’s current point of view. Cromwell on that occasion had seemed giddy with delight as he inspected the terrain between the ridge and Dust Hill, getting on a mile off to the north. Cantering back and forth in his black armour, he had burst out laughing intermittently, as if by looking at the land he saw the battle in advance and chuckled over the foreseen misfortunes of his enemies. John had seen Cromwell with another face as well, a semblance cast from flint, unblinking in the screaming heart of battle as his cavalry pursued the Royalist horse almost to Leicester, cutting down the hindmost by the score. Whatever mood they were expressing, he’d have known those features anywhere.
Phyllis and Bill quite clearly also knew who they were looking at, and so did Reggie Bowler, who was nodding knowingly with a wide grin across his freckled face. Although Drowned Marjorie remained impassive, staring flatly through her National Health spectacles, John had an inkling that somebody as surprisi
ngly well-read as her might well know more about the lank-haired man than all the rest of the gang put together. That left Michael Warren – Michael Warren, son of Tommy Warren, John reflected to himself with an amazed shake of the head – as the one person in the slowly darkening room without a clue regarding what was going on. John was about to venture his own explanation for the nipper’s benefit when Phyllis intervened and beat him to the punch.
