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“Out through that door I think there’s a passageway to an extension that pokes into Peter’s Churchyard. I remember it from The Return to Snow Town, just after The Dead Dead Gang Versus the Nene Hag and before The Incident of the Reverse Train.”
Marjorie was turning into quite the little chatterbox. John was impressed, though, by her cataloguing of the gang’s adventures in such careful order, even if they were more kid’s games than heroic exploits, truth be told. The six ghost-children filed out through the door of the deserted doctor’s surgery or kitchen that they’d tunnelled into, leaving the time-hole uncovered in anticipation of their exit back to the seventeenth century.
Beyond the door, as Marjorie had already predicted, was a corridor. This had an area that seemed to be a children’s playroom running off one side, in which perhaps a dozen infants of various nationalities were making an ungodly mess with powder paints under the supervision of a patient-looking bald man in his middle fifties. Even though the light within the room was poor, John thought that this was due more to the weather than the time of day, which he supposed to be mid afternoon. A calendar that John had noticed in the surgery-cum-kitchen – one that had a stout Salvation Army lady posing on it, John remembered suddenly, naked except her bonnet and trombone – had said that this was July 2025, although it looked too cold and wet outside to be mid summer.
An entrance at the passage’s far eastern end gave access to a couple of prefabricated dormitories, each subdivided into half a dozen modest cubicles by curtains hung on mobile railings. The first such enclosure that they came to seemed to have been set aside for females only, with a few women of different ages sitting watching an enormous television on which nude young men sat in some species of communal bath or paddling pool and told each other they were “out of order”. The bored-looking women who were viewing this unedifying spectacle ventured disdainful comments on the program in what might have been a Norfolk accent. John presumed that a male dormitory must lie beyond the closed doors at the room’s far end, and went to stand with Michael Warren who was jumping up and down as he tried to see out of the rear window.
This looked south towards the area behind St. Peter’s Church and over whatever was le
ft by this date of the green that John had played upon with Michael Warren’s dad when they were boys. John helpfully picked up the hopping infant so that he could see, not that a lot was visible through the incessant rain.
“Not much to look at, wiz there? How d’you fancy jumping through the wall and going for a poke-about outside? We won’t get wet because the rain passes right through us.”
Michael frowned up dubiously at John.
“Will it feel horrible when it falls through my tummy like that bird-poo did?”
Grinning, John shook his noble, chiselled head so that it double-exposed into an array of film star eight-by-tens.
“No. Rain feels clean when it goes through you. Come on. Phyllis and the others wizzle be mooching around here for a good while yet, so we’ve got lots of time. Remember what I said about how all of this wiz flashing past like lightning in the living world, and take the opportunity to go exploring while you can.”
Michael considered this for a few moments and then nodded in consent. Still holding the tartan-wrapped toddler in his arms, John stepped out through the shell of glass and plasterboard into a shower of silver, falling with the rain and his attendant after-pictures to the churchyard’s beaded turf a floor below. Once they had landed John set Michael down upon the sodden ground beside him and then, hand in hand, the two of them drifted around the west face of the church towards its rear. John was agreeably surprised to note that all the funny or horrific Saxon carvings high on the stone wall were still intact, although when he and Michael were behind the church and looking between its back railings at the derelict green his surprise was less agreeable.
Green Street was gone. Elephant Lane, Narrow-Toe Lane, both gone. Freeschool Street was transformed into bland forts comprised of offices or flats that looked suspiciously unused. Across the altered landscape in a curving scalpel-swipe was the disfiguring surgical scar of a broad two-lane motorway that ran from Black Lion Hill, away south through grey veils of inundation towards Beckett’s Park and Delapre, a distant skyline where the break between tall concrete and descending storm clouds could no longer be discerned. The green itself, neglected and unkempt, had lost its edges and its definition, its identity. It was purposeless grass now, melting in the rain as it awaited the surveyors, the developers. Standing there next to John with his lip trembling, Michael Warren made a disappointed, whining sound.
“The street that wiz down at the bottom of the green wiz gone, just like my street on Andrew’s Road. My nan used to live there!”
Keeping up his pretence, John didn’t look at Michael as he answered.
“Yes, I know. That’s where your dad grew up, as well, with all his brothers and his sister. That where your great-granddad died, sitting between two mirrors with his mouth stuffed full of flowers. All of the things that happened in that little house, and now …”
John trailed off. There was nothing else that he could say without revealing matters best kept to himself. With copies of the boys trailing behind them through the graveyard like a funeral procession for the neighbourhood, Michael and John went back the way they’d come, towards the two-storey prefabrication jutting into consecrated ground out from the modified Black Lion next door. This meant that they walked past the black stone obelisk that stood some feet west of the ancient church and which John had paid no attention to when they passed by the other way just moments earlier.
Glistening wet like whale-hide in the drizzle, the dark monument appeared to be a war memorial. It hadn’t been in evidence when John had paid his one and only visit to the place just following his disembodied homecoming from France, when all the ghosts had put him off from coming back again. He paused to look at it more closely, bringing Michael similarly to a halt. He was just reading the inscriptions when the toddler yelped down at his side and pointed to the needle’s base.
“Look! That man there has got the same last name as me!”
John looked. Michael was right. Nobody spoke for a few seconds.
“So he does. Ah well, I s’pose we should be should be getting back to Phyllis and the rest, see what they’re up to. Come on, before they go back to 1645 without us.”
Hand in hand the two wraiths slid amidst the tippling precipitation, passing through the insulated layers of the pub extension’s lower walls into an office where a pretty, burly, coloured woman with a dreadful scar above one eye was talking to what looked like a stamped-on sardine tin held against her ear.
“Don’t give me that. The government awarded all this money weeks ago, when Yarmouth had the floods. I’ve got two dozen people here, and some of them are ill, and some need drugs. Don’t tell me that the payments have to go through channels when the fucking cheque is sitting there in your account and earning interest for the council.”
There was a brief pause and then the Amazon resumed her fierce tirade.
“No. No, you listen. If that cash is not wired into the St. Peter’s Annexe account by next Tuesday at the latest, I’ll be at the Guildhall for the meeting on the Friday after with a list of every dodgy deal between you lot and the Disaster Management Authority. I’ll strap one on and give your mates a public fucking so rough that they won’t be sitting down in council or anywhere else for months. Now, get it sorted.”
With a sneer that curled her luscious glistening lips to form a swimming-pool inflatable the woman snapped a lid across the sardine tin, contemptuously tossing it into the innards of a cartoon dog that sprawled there gutted on a work-surface and which John finally identified as some variety of handbag. Tipping back her office chair and flipping through a file she’d taken from a shallow wire tray on her desk, she was magnificent, quite unlike any female John had seen before. Although he didn’t hold with women swearing and although he’d never really been attracted to what he thought of as half-caste girls, this one possessed a kind of atmosphere or aura that was absolutely riveting. She had as much intensity about her as Oliver Cromwell had, a short walk down Marefair and getting on four hundred years ago, except that the force burning in her was less black and heavy than the energy that churned inside the Lord Protector.
She was also a much healthier and more attractive specimen. Her ludicrously splendid mane of catkin hair fell to her shoulders which were naked where her thick, masculine arms, those of a lady weightlifter, emerged from the chopped-off sleeves of her T-shirt. This had a man’s face printed upon it, his hairstyle almost identical to that affected by the garment’s wearer, with above it the word EXODUS and then below it the phrase MOVEMENT OF JAH PEOPLE. The girl looked to be in her late thirties, but the radiance of youth was undercut by the grown-up and very serious-looking ragged seam of flesh just over her left eyebrow. This did not deface her beauty so much as it loaned a strength and gravity to her young countenance. John was just thinking that her powerful, mannish arms and air of resolute nobility gave the impression of a Caribbean Joan of Arc when he put two and two together and remembered where he’d heard about this girl before, blurting the answer out to Michael Warren.
“It’s the saint. It’s that one that I’ve heard about who looks after the refugees here in the twenty-fives. I think that I’ve heard people call her ‘Kaff’, so I suppose that’s short for Katherine. She pioneers some treatment here that wizzle save lives right across the world, folk who are on the run from wars and floods and that. They say that in the nothing-forties people talk about her like a saint. She’s the most famous person that comes from the Boroughs in this century, and here we are getting a look at her.”
Michael regarded the oblivious woman quizzically.
“Where did she get that nasty cut that’s near her eye?”
