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Michael looked thoughtful, narrowing his eyes as he gazed at the older boy.
“Wiz it because you knew my dad and used to play with him?”
John chuckled, reaching out with four or five left arms to scuff up Michael’s hair.
“Yes, I suppose it’s something like that. I knew all your dad’s side of family, back when I wiz alive. How’s old May getting on, your dad’s mum? Wiz she still a terror? What about your aunt Lou?”
He still wasn’t sure why he was keeping the full story back from Michael, when it wasn’t really in John’s nature to be secretive. He’d wondered, when he’d first heard Michael’s surname, if it might be the same Warren family that he knew, but there’d been no point in mentioning that at the time in case he was mistaken. Then, when it had been confirmed, he’d quite enjoyed having a piece of secret information for himself, something than even Phyllis didn’t know about – although that wasn’t the whole picture, if he was completely honest. What it was, he didn’t want to burden Michael with the truth of who he was or their relationship. He didn’t want the boy or any of his family to hear first-hand the facts about how John had died in France, how scared he’d been, how he’d been trying to work up the courage to desert when they’d come under fire upon that country road. That was the real reason he’d spent all those years haunting a disused turret after he was dead, rather than going straight up to Mansoul. He’d had a guilty conscience, just as much as Mick Malone or Mary Jane or any of the area’s rough sleepers did, because both John and God knew that John was at heart a coward. Better, surely, to let all that rest. Better to keep up his white lie, best to allow the tot who now stood pondering beside him to retain his blissful ignorance of how the world could sometimes be, even in how it treated little boys who came from decent, working families. Michael was still considering John’s questions before venturing his answers.
“Well, I like my nan, but sometimes she gets a bit frightening and I have dreams about her where she’s trying to catch me. Aunt Lou’s like a lovely owl, and when she used to pick me up she’d chortle to me and I’d feel it running through her when she held me. Nan wiz nice, though. If we go round her house she gives me and Alma each an apple and a sweetie from her jar that’s on the sideboard.”
In the moonlit reaches far above them John could make out a grey comet with a tail of fading photographs that he thought was most likely Phyllis, herding a disgraced triumvirate of similarly pluming spectres back towards the Earth. It looked as if the ghostly kids were playing join-the-dots between the stars. He smiled at Michael.
“No, she’s not a bad sort, May. I know there’s times when she can put the fear of God in you, but she’s had a hard life that’s made her that way, ever since she first popped out into the gutter down on Lambeth Walk. You shouldn’t judge her harshly.”
The four other members of the Dead Dead Gang had by this time floated down far enough to be in hailing distance. John could hear Phyllis regaling Bill as they descended.
“… and if you chase pigeons, the Third Borough knows abayt it! You’ll be lucky if ’e don’t turn you into a pigeon and then make a pigeon pie out of yer!”
Bill, doing an ostentatious butterfly stroke through the air with after-image arms like spinning wagon-wheels grown from his shoulders, clearly wasn’t taking any notice. A broad smirk kept threatening to break out and spoil the usually-ginger troublemaker’s penitent expression. Before long Phyllis had guided the three truants in to land and then had settled down upon Marefair herself, an ashen dandelion clock or man-in-the-moon as John had always called them, spilling picture-parasols up into the night sky behind her.
After Phyllis had conducted a brief show-trial for the trio of miscreants and issued what she must have felt were necessary recriminations, the gang had a vote on what route they should take back to the nineteen-hundreds. The resultant show of hands – something like fifty if you counted all the after-images – appeared to be unanimous in favouring a somewhat indirect approach commencing at the Black Lyon Inne a little further down the way. The sole abstention in the crowd was Michael Warren who, as regimental mascot, didn’t really get a ballot anyway. John sympathised with Michael in his simply wanting to go home, but it was true enough what he’d said earlier about these exploits taking up no time at all, back in the mortal world that Michael all too soon would be returned to. John had also meant what he’d said about having become quite fond of the nipper, and he didn’t want him going back to life and thus forgetting all of this just yet.
The gang moved down Marefair towards the castle, on the slopes of which the soldiers’ campfires were all now extinguished. On their left they passed by the bat-sanctuary of St. Peter’s Church, where the dog-whistle squeals pierced even the soundproofing of the ghost-seam. In the shadows of the gateway John could make out the slumped shape of the lame beggar-woman’s ghost that he’d met on his first posthumous visit to the church, but didn’t call the other kids’ attention to her. Motionless and silent she watched them pass by, her luminous eyes hanging in the dark, disinterested.
The Black Lion, when the children reached it, still seemed to be serving even though its front door had been closed up. Passing through this, John found himself in a pub that was disturbingly familiar in its basic layout while the people and the pastimes it contained were wildly different. Bleary Roundheads sat and drank a treacly-looking beer as they attempted to forget that this might very well be their last night on Earth, while others who had women on their laps were working their scarred fingers back and forth beneath flounced layers of underskirt. The room, split level as in John’s day with three stairs connecting the two tiers, was made almost entirely out of wood. The only metal seemed to be that of the burnished oil-lamps or the heavy tankards, if you didn’t count the swords and helmets that were in the place at present, and save for the windows there was no glass to be seen. The lone quartet of bottles that presumably had spirits in, standing upon an otherwise unoccupied shelf at the bar’s rear, were all made of stone. John was surprised how much the lack of glinting highlights in a hanging blur altered the feeling of the pub, and there were other things that made an unexpected difference, too.
One of the tables had been set aside for food, a bowl of perished fruit, wedges of cheese and a half-eaten loaf, onions and mustard and a ham that had been sliced down to its stump-end, hovered over by a troupe of pearly-bellied meat-flies. Two or three dogs snuffled round the legs of chairs and the whole sound of the inn seemed subdued to John, even allowing for the way the ghost-seam muffled things. Such chatter as there was, including that between the troopers and their girlfriends, sounded hushed and reverent to modern ears. Apart from an occasional loud clump of boots across the floorboards as somebody went to use the privy in the pub yard, or a faint snort from one of the horses stabled there, then lacking the familiar chink of glass on glass there was no noise at all. It wasn’t even modern silence, having no thud of a ticking clock to underline it.
Bill and Reggie seemed intrigued by all the unselfconscious groping that was taking place up in the tavern’s darkened corners, but John didn’t like it and was pleased to see that Phyllis didn’t either. With a military briskness that concealed their mutual embarrassment they organised the gang into another human tower, this time with Reggie on the bottom and Bill standing on his shoulders, scraping with both hands in the accumulated time of the inn’s ceiling. Being upwards of three hundred years, the excavation was quite clearly going to take a while, leaving John, Michael and the two
girls with no other option than to stand there awkwardly amidst the almost-mute debauchery, trying to find something that wasn’t sexual to stare at.
As his gaze shifted uneasily around the half-lit room, John realised with surprise that he and his five comrades weren’t the only phantoms frequenting the Black Lyon Inne on that specific evening. On a long and pew-like wooden seat against one wall there sat one of the Roundhead troops, a freckled nineteen-year-old boy who had no chin to speak of, with a hard-faced woman in her thirties grunting softly as she sat astride his lap, her back against his belly. Her long skirts had been arranged in a desultory attempt to hide the obvious fact that the lad had his implement inside her as she surreptitiously moved up and down, trying to make it look like rhythmic fidgeting.
To each side of this not-so-furtive copulating couple sat a pair of middle-aged men in long robes, one chubby and one thin, whom John at first assumed to be the lovers’ friends. Granted, he’d thought the friendship seemed unusually close if it permitted their acquaintances to be spectators on such intimate occasions, but then what did he know of the actual moral climate of the sixteen-hundreds, where it was apparently acceptable to have sex in a public bar? Only when one of the two men lifted a fan of several arms to scratch his eyebrow did John realise that they were both ghosts, peeping-tom spirits that the whore and soldier didn’t know were there. Looking a little closer, John could make out that the voyeuristic duo were some type of monks, perhaps the Cluniacs who’d had their monastery a little north of here, three or four hundred years ago. Each one sat with hands folded piously and resting in his lap, not hiding the tent-poles that they were putting up under their habits as they watched the panting trooper and his wanton with wide-eyed attention. So absorbed were the two friars that they evidently hadn’t noticed there were other ghosts, children at that, just feet away across the room, John thought indignantly.
All of a sudden, though, the tableau shifted from merely unpleasant to unspeakably grotesque. One of the spectral monks – the tubby one who sat upon John’s far side of the pair – removed a plump hand from his own lap and, before John could work out what he was up to, swept it in a stream of after-images to plunge it through the apron of the mounted woman, thrusting his arm to the elbow in her labouring body, all while she remained completely unaware. From the lewd grin that bulged the friar’s ample cheeks and from the sudden increase in both gasps and agitated thrusts between the lovebirds, it appeared as if the monk had his whole fleshy hand inside the woman’s lower abdomen, grasping the soldier’s … John felt a bit sick and looked away. He’d never seen a dead man do a thing like that before, had not even imagined it. Ah, well. You died and learned.
Luckily, no one else seemed to have noticed the repulsive spectacle, and it was just then that Bill gleefully declared his tunnel up into the twentieth century to be completed. Phyllis was the first to scramble up the ladder formed by Bill and Reggie, disappearing into the pale gap with twinkling edges dug into the plaster ceiling, in between the kippered beams. Next Michael made the climb, multiple photographs extending his short dressing gown into a tartan bridal train as he ascended. Marjorie went after Michael, followed rapidly by Bill, leaving first Reggie and then John to leap up through the time-hole from a standing jump, buoyed by the ghost-seam’s viscous atmosphere.
Only when John had rocketed up through the aperture to find himself in a synthetic habitat where everything had rounded edges, in which Phyllis was haranguing Bill with more than usual vigour, did he realise there was something wrong. This wasn’t 1959. The room that they were in looked sparse and sterile, like a kitchen in a super-modern hospital with a steel sink, some kind of sleek and complicated cooker and two or three other hefty metal boxes that had dials, the functions of which John was unfamiliar with. Next to the doorway stood a dozen plastic canisters of bleach, designed to look like bath-toy buzz-bombs with unscrewing nose-cones, held together in a cube formation by a skin of laddered polythene that seemed to have been sprayed on. In a cardboard box beneath the chamber’s solitary rain-streaked window were what looked like Toyland hypodermic needles, flimsy little items each in its own individual see-through bag. Looking more closely, John saw that there were numerous cartons packed with bottled pills stacked up haphazardly wherever there was space, along with sacks of bulk-bought oats and rice, multiply-packaged tins of baby-food and an incongruous assortment of other mass-purchased medical or culinary supplies. Posters tacked to a sheet of pasteboard on one wall bore names and slogans that were utterly incomprehensible to John: ST. PETER’S ANNEXE; NO GRAZING, NO SLIM; NOISE KILLS; BLINDER AND TASER AMNESTY; DON’T LET C-DIF BECOME C-IMP; SEX TRAUMA INDICATORS; CONFLICT TRAUMA INDICATORS; SPOT A SPARROW; TENANTS AGAINST TREACHERY … where on earth were they? John was going to ask Phyllis but before he could she turned to him with an exasperated look and answered anyway.
“ ’E’s dug us up too ’igh, the little sod. We’re in the twenty-fives, up in St. Peter’s Annexe. Look at all that bloody rain!”
John glanced out of the window onto what he thought must be Black Lion Hill, although the view was unfamiliar. Marefair was unrecognisable, paved with a parquet of pale tiling where the cobbled and then tarmac-covered road had been. Through the torrential sheets of downpour he could see a glass-walled overpass that arced above the mouth of a much-changed St. Andrew’s Road, connecting the extended sprawl of Castle Station with the raised ground near the bottom of Chalk Lane, right where John’s long-demolished turret had once been. Here there were bulging Marmite-pot constructions with designs that seemed to have resulted from a joke or dare, across the lane from older, plainer structures with which they contrasted jarringly. The self-consciously futuristic bridge, a length of transparent intestine ravelling across the scene from west to east, looked like a tawdry, worldly apprehension of the Ultraduct to John, an earthly copy of the sweeping immaterial span that reached from Doddridge Church. Beneath the bridge peculiar traffic hissed amidst the deluge, back and forth along St. Andrew’s Road, none of it venturing up into Marefair which appeared now to be only for pedestrians. Most of the flow of vehicles was made up of the brick-shaped cars that John had seen during the ghost-gang’s recent foray into nothing-five or nothing-six, but there were also a great many stranger vehicles, near-flat contrivances like armoured skate that were completely silent and a uniform jet-black in colour. Even Reggie Bowler, the gang’s car-fanatic, stood beside the window with his hat off, scratching his dark curls perplexedly. Phyllis was fuming, which, if anything, made her look prettier.
“If we were any bloody further up we’d be in bloody Snow Tayn! ’E’s done this on purpose, all because I wouldn’t let ’im gawp at all them old pros gettin’ interfered with down there in the sixteen-’undreds!”
Bill protested.
“Oh, and when you dug us up too ’igh down Scarletwell Street that wiz different, wiz it? You’re a bossy old bat, wanting everything your own way. Who’s to say we shouldn’t have a nose round while we’re up ’ere, anyway? It might be educational, which I remember you bein’ in favour of when I wiz only a daft kid.”
Phyllis sniffed haughtily.
“Yer still a daft kid, and yer still a bloody nuisance. All right, I suppose we might as well see ’oo’s abayt, now that yer’ve dragged us up ’ere. Only fer a minute or two, mind, and then we’re gooin’ straight back dayn that ’ole to Cromwell’s time, so we can take another route to Doddridge Church.”
Drowned Marjorie, standing beside a little wooden book-rack stuffed with dog-eared paperbacks and no doubt trying to extend her knowledge of twenty-first-century literature, peered at the others through her spectacles’ milk-bottle-bottom lenses.
