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Rearing up to treetop level out of the benighted torrent came the first thirty or forty feet of the Nene Hag, as if some hurtling underwater train had jumped the rusted tracks to fling itself into the sky. The creature’s long umbrella fingers were extended to their fullest with the grey and blotchy membrane stretched tight in between them as the towering, swaying monster raked the air in an attempt to capture its escaping prey. The nude boy’s earlier grin of self-assurance had been swapped for an expression of surprise and terror as he realised belatedly the mer-thing’s true extent and reach. Kicking his legs and doing what appeared to be a vertical front-crawl the plucked and plucky youngster shot beyond the swaying horror’s grasp, into the safety of the sequinned heavens over Paddy’s Meadow, where Marjorie and the other spectral children floated, breathless with excitement and mortality.
The Undine shrie
ked in its frustration and its rage, its disproportionately tiny forelimbs clutching uselessly at empty space for several seconds before it gave up and, with a disappointed wail that chilled its nervous audience, fell back towards the Nene like a collapsing chimneystack. There was no splash as its great insubstantial length hit the material surface of the water, only an unnerving final moan having the sound of something that had once been very close to human speech but which had turned into a strangled bellow through disuse. For one appalling instant it had sounded as though it were trying to say “Gregorius”.
And after that, once Marjorie had been formally introduced to the Dead Dead Gang, they’d all drifted light as thistledown towards the point a little further up the grassy bank where Reggie Bowler had left all his hurriedly discarded clothing underneath a squeaking, listing death-trap called a Witch’s Hat which was erected in the children’s playground there upstream. Along the way they’d passed above a bobbing parcel, turning slowly in the petrol sheen and pond-scum on its way to Spencer Bridge, which Marjorie had scrutinised for some time without realising it was her; her human envelope, its ugly glasses gone at last, its lungs all filled with water.
She had also spotted bloody, bloody, silly bloody India, who, as it turned out, could swim after all. The dog was scrabbling up onto the bank, where next it shook itself and then commenced to trot beside the water, barking as it kept pace with the drifting body. That had been that. Chapter Seven: The Dead Dead Gang versus the Nene Hag. That had been Marjorie’s short life.
She walked now on a patch of crew-cut grass, mown into stripes, which must presumably be part of the better-maintained St. Andrew’s Hospital. This was confirmed by the quite evidently better class of lunatics at large upon the broad swathe of grey-greenery, dotted about across the neatly-shorn expanse like chessmen, lost without their grid. As she progressed across the lawn in the direction of the spinney, Marjorie passed by one living inmate whom she thought she recognised, a shuffling fellow in his sixties, dressed in a loose cardigan and trousers stained by breakfast. The poor man was humming something complicated and askew beneath his breath as he made his laborious way past her, unaware that she was there, and she was almost certain that it was the old composer chap, the one who’d made his name long after Marjorie had lived and died. Sir Malcolm Arnold, that was it. Him who’d made wild, delirious music out of Robbie Burns’s Tam O’ Shanter and who’d orchestrated “Colonel Bogey” with a full arrangement of impertinent and farting brass. Bemused and balding, very likely drunk or medicated, Arnold slippered on across the fractured madhouse grounds without acknowledging her presence, crooning his refrain with only ghost-girls and the nearby trees to hear it.
Marjorie, quietly appalled, noticed that the composer had a ripe and thriving Puck’s Hat growing from his liver-spotted forehead, just above one eye. She knew that Bedlam Jennies favoured the proximity of people who were mad or steeped in alcohol or both, which she supposed was where they’d got their name from, but she’d never previously seen one with its roots apparently sunken directly into someone’s brain. His dreams must be infested, overrun by twittering and mindless pseudo-fairies to the point where Marjorie imagined that fresh compositions would be near impossible. And how could the affliction ever be removed when by the very nature of the 4D fungus, nobody alive could see it? Nobody, including the composer himself, was aware that it was there. Marjorie watched Sir Malcolm tottering away from her towards the riot of mismatched asylum buildings, with the pulchritudinous growth bobbing on his skull at every step. The blank-eyed little nymphs whose naked bodies formed the blossom’s petals even seemed to wear miniature knowing smirks upon their ring of overlapping faces.
Marjorie walked on, passing between the optical-illusion pillars of the Ultraduct as it swept overhead on its long arc between Jerusalem and Doddridge Church, its endless alabaster mass casting no shadow on the composite of institution lawns below. When the grass changed from light to dark, from short to shaggy and unkempt beneath her lace-up shoes, she knew that she’d crossed into territory belonging to either St. Crispin’s or the older madhouse in Abington Park. The thick and bristling copse was now much closer, and she could see Phyllis, John and Michael sauntering amongst its trees, collecting the few Puck’s Hats that the future-Bill and future-Reggie hadn’t plucked already. Phyllis waved to her.
“All right, Marge? I expect that them two thievin’ buggers are both gloatin’ over ’ow they’re gunna come back ’ere and pinch our Puck’s ’Ats, somewhere up the road.”
Wandering up to join the other children in the dapple of the overhanging leaves, Marjorie shook her head.
“Nar. They’re as confused about it as the rest of us. Your Bill’s filling ’is jumper up with all the Jennies they can find, to make it up to you.”
Phyllis appeared surprised by this, and stuck her lower lip out pensively as she considered.
“Hmm. Well, I suppose as I’m not bein’ fair, takin’ the ’ump with them before they’ve even done the thing what’s made me cross. Besides, we’ve found enough mad-apples just on these few trees to make the visit worth ayr while. Look – they’re all ripe and everything, but they’re just little uns.”
Festooned with hollow, decomposing bunnies, the Dead Dead Gang’s leader held out her white handkerchief for Marjorie’s inspection. There at its unfolded centre rested half a dozen tiny Bedlam Jennies, with the biggest being no more than two inches in diameter. As Phyllis had affirmed, the hyper-fruits were ripe, with every fairy-petal fully formed down to the last infinitesimal detail, despite the fact that some of them measured no more than half an inch from toes to crown. Marjorie found that it took both the enhanced vision of the dead and her entirely decorative National Health spectacles to spot the smaller features, such as their near-microscopic navels. With each specimen at most providing one or two good mouthfuls, it was easy to see why this dwarf strain had been overlooked by the two scavengers from some point in the future. Phyllis, John and Michael all had pockets full of coin-sized blooms, adding transportability to the variety’s advantages. They also seemed to be abundant, growing in a virtual carpet down the rear sides of the elms and silver birches, where these faced away from the asylum grounds and turned instead to the interior of the bordering woodland. Fighting down her recent self-induced revulsion for the fungal creatures, Marjorie agreed to try a couple, then a couple more.
They really were extremely good. The taste was even sweeter than that of the larger species, and the perfume more evocative, more concentrated. Better still, once swallowed, the immediate benefits were more pronounced. The energising tingle of euphoria pervading every fibre of one’s self which Marjorie associated with the full-sized Puck’s Hats was more noticeable here and seemed to last for slightly longer. Filling her own jumper-pockets with as many of the things as they would hold, she ate them as though they were a particularly more-ish type of fruit-drop, stuffing one or two into her mouth at once while playing an impromptu game of tag with the three other ghost-kids. Giggling and shrieking they ran back and forth amongst the trees that edged the muddled institutions’ equally disjointed lawns and gardens.
Marjorie was first to recognise the living female inmate who appeared to be performing an incomprehensible routine upon the neatly-trimmed St. Andrew’s grass not far away, although it was young Michael Warren who was first to notice her.
“Look at that funny lady over there. She’s walking like that man does in the films, and doing crossed eyes like that other man.”
Marjorie looked, along with John and Phyll, and saw what the pyjama-clad child was referring to. The woman patient skipped or danced or waddled, back and forth, across an area of grass that was approximately the same size as a small repertory stage. Her movements, which seemed to include incongruous ballet-like leaps and twirls, were nonetheless, as Michael had observed, an eerily exact impersonation of the ‘little tramp’ walk first made popular by Charlie Chaplin, that man in the films. To flesh out her impression, the dark-haired and middl
e-aged asylum inmate had appropriated a long, slender tree-branch from the nearby vegetation, tucking it beneath one arm like Chaplin’s cane as she paced to and fro, continuously muttering long strings of almost-musical nonsense and gibberish to herself: “Je suis l’artiste, le auteur and I live, your plural belle, I liffey laved in Lux, in light, in flight, in fluxury and in flow-motion, gravually unriverling translucid lingo, linger franker in ma-wet streams, ma-salt dreams as I slide see-ward and I’ve not a limp-bit nor a barnacle to hinder me and it’ll come out in the strip-wash, murk my words, about my Old Man of the Holy Roaming Sea when he was on my back or I was, cat-licked and that’s how it got my tongue …”
The insane monologue ploughed on, quite independent of the twirled cane or the Chaplin walk, the twitch-nosed waggling of an imaginary moustache or the occasional surprising pirouette. Though he’d been right about the woman’s strange gait, Michael Warren had been wrong when he’d assumed her eyes were crossed in an impression of Ben Turpin or whoever he’d meant by “that other man”. Marjorie knew that this was how the woman’s eyes looked naturally. She inclined her stout body to one side so that she could speak softly into Michael Warren’s ear. She’d no idea why she was trying not to make a noise when the live mental patient couldn’t hear them anyway, but thought it might be in response to the deluded woman’s strong resemblance to a rare, easily-startled bird. She whispered to the toddler in a probably unnecessary effort not to scare the inmate off.
“You know how when you’re dead like us, and sometimes all your words get mixed up so they come out wrong? And Phyllis or somebody else will tell you that it’s taking you a while to find your Lucy-lips?”
The infant blinked and nodded, shooting sidelong glances at the madwoman who jigged this way and that upon the grassy boards of a theatre only she could see. Marjorie went on, still in the same pointlessly low murmur.
“Well, that woman there, that’s Lucy.”
Even Phyllis seemed astonished by this.
“What, that’s wossername, old Ulysses’s daughter? ’Im ’oo wrote the racy book?” The ghost-gang’s leader had announced her questions at her normal, raucous volume-level, prompting Marjorie to give up on her own subdued tones as she answered Phyllis.
“Yes. That’s Lucia Joyce. Her dad was James Joyce, and she used to dance for him when he was writing his great book, Finnegans Wake, to give him inspiration. When he took the writer Samuel Beckett on as his assistant with the work, Lucia thought that she’d been elbowed out. She also started thinking Beckett was in love with her, and began having mental problems generally. She’s up there on the Billing Road now, at St. Andrew’s, where she’s been for a few years. They say that Beckett sometimes goes to visit her there, if he’s in the area. Her family, the ones that are alive, they play down her existence in case it should cast a shadow on her father or his works. Poor woman. It’s a shame the way that she’s been treated.”
Phyllis was regarding Marjorie suspiciously.
“Well, ’ow come you know such a lot abayt it all? I never knew you wiz a reader.”
The rotund girl peered impassively up through her glasses at her rabbit-wrapped senior officer.
“I’m not. I just keep up with all the gossip.”
