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“Ahahaha! Did you see that? He just stood up like he’d got piles. He’s cross because a load of little blighters just come in.” The psychic drunk had turned his head to look directly at Bill and his dead confederates here. “You can’t come in! You’re underage! What if the landlord asks to see your d
eath-certificates? Ahahaha!”
The rattled councillor glanced briefly in the same direction that the other man was looking, but appeared unable to see anything. Cockie looked back towards the chuckling boozer seated next to him, badly unnerved now.
“I don’t understand this. I don’t understand you people.”
Freddy, meanwhile, had become less furious and more puzzled at Phyll’s mention of a young woman in trouble.
“What young girl? And anyway, what’s it to me?”
The drunken, giggling bloke was turning to the councillor now, saying “I can’t hear ’em. Even when they’re right up next to you they sound faint, have you noticed? Ahaha.”
Phyllis persisted.
“I don’t know if you’ll ’ave seen ’er, just around and that, but she’s an ’alf-caste girl about nineteen, who’s got ’er ’air all done in plaits, like stripes. She wears one o’ them shiny coats, an’ it looks like she’s on the game.”
A glint of recognition came into the threadbare apparition’s sad eyes.
“I … I think I know the one you’re on about. She lives down Bath Street flats, in what used to be Patsy Clarke’s old place.”
The ghost gang’s leader nodded once, doubling the number of her heads and sending a brief tremor through her hanging rabbit pelts.
“That’s ’er. There’s some bloke got ’er in that little garage place down where Bath Passage used to be. ’E’s got ’is car parked down there an’ ’e’s doin’ you-know-what to ’er. Not as a customer, like, but against ’er will.”
From the expression on his face, it looked like an inviolable line had been crossed on Fred Allen’s private moral playing-field.
“Bath Passage. I passed by there earlier, visiting me mate. I could feel something bad wiz going to ’appen. Oh my God. I better get down there. I better see what I can do.”
With that, the ragged soul of the notorious doorstep-robber streaked straight through five or six customers, a table, and the front wall of the Bird In Hand, gushing into the night outside like angry steam. Bill didn’t know if the ghost-vagrant would be able to help that young girl or not, nor if the demon would still be in the front seat when Freddy got there, but it didn’t matter. They’d done all they could and now it was out of their hands. Perhaps it always had been.
With the hooked-nosed drunk still giggling as he pointed at the ghostly children only he could see, the dead gang followed Freddy out into the dark gullet of Sheep Street, but the disincarnate dosser had already vanished, off about his urgent business. Phyllis threw her putrid stole across her shoulder like a zombie child-star and announced that they’d head back up Broad Street to the Mayorhold, where they would return to Tower Street and next ascend up to the Works, or what was left of that sublime establishment in 2006. Then they’d take Michael back to 1959, his body, and his life.
This had of course been Bill’s idea, but in the pit of his long-vanished stomach he was dreading it, the spoiled Mansoul and the Destructor, most especially the latter. It was what it represented, the annihilating thing in everybody’s lives, regardless of what form it took. For Bill, he’d first felt its remorseless turning currents when he’d been alive, a seventeen-year-old freshly expelled from school and trying his first shot of smack in a candle-lit party room, one Friday night after the pub. They’d all been there, all of his mates, or at least a good number of them. Kevin Partridge, Big John Weston, pretty Janice Hearst, Tubbs Monday and about four others that Bill could remember. Tubbs had been the generous supplier of the goods in question, and it had been his works that the rest of them were passing round. And while it had turned out he was himself immune to the disease, Tubbs was the carrier who’d passed on Hepatitis B and C to everybody else.
Bill could remember every daft word of their unimportant chatter as they’d sat handing the spike around, even remembered the chill instant when he’d briefly thought to himself I shouldn’t be doing this, almost as if he’d known this was the action that would kill him, forty years or so along the linger of his life. That was the moment when, in retrospect, he’d felt the brush of the Destructor, felt its sobering breeze blown from the future. And yet Bill had done it anyway, as if he’d had no choice about it, as if it was destiny, which he supposed it had been. “Yeah, cheers”, Bill had said, and pushed the needle in.
He thought about the chat he’d overheard, between the friendly builder Mr. Aziel and Phil Doddridge, when Doddridge had asked the angle if mankind had ever truly had free will, to which the long-faced Mr. Aziel had responded glumly in the negative, then added “Did you miss it?”, followed by unfathomable laughter. Unfathomable at the time, at least, although Bill understood it now. He got the gag. In some ways, it was almost comforting, the notion that whatever you did or accomplished, you were in the end only an actor running through a masterfully scripted drama. You just didn’t know it at the time, and thought you were extemporising. It was sort of comical, Bill saw that now, but he still found some solace in the thought that in a predetermined world, there was no point at all in fretting over anything, nor any purpose to regret.
He was still trying to draw reassurance from that when the Dead Dead Gang arrived in Tower Street and began their climb up to the sooty wreck of Heaven.
THE DESTRUCTOR
“Michael? Ooh Gawd. Michael, can you ’ear me? Please cough. Please breathe …”
“ ’Old on, we’re nearly there. ’Old on, Doreen.”
The sight of sulphurous Sam O’Day leaning out through the window of that car, the one that had the lady being hurt inside it, that had nearly done for Michael. And the pub full of bad ghosts, with those two screaming wooden people and the man whose features floated round his face like clouds, that had almost been worse. Those things aside, though, he was starting to get used to all this haunting business.
He liked burrowing through time, and being in a gang, and having fallen secretly in love with Phyllis even though she didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Being in love was the main thing, after all, and Michael couldn’t see that it much mattered if the other person felt the same or even knew you loved them. Surely just that sad and lovely feeling was enough? That was the thing that everyone wrote songs and poems about, wasn’t it?
Michael was even growing fond of all the other Michaels that would split off from him every time he moved. It was a bit like having your own home crowd of football supporters following you everywhere, and made you feel more confident and not so lonely. Even though he knew that all his doubles were made out of nothing more than ghost-light, he was getting quite attached to them. He’d even started giving them all separate names, but as these were all variations or diminutives of Michael – Mike, Mick, Mickey, Mikey, Micko and some others that were just sounds he’d made up – it had been pointless and he’d packed it in. Besides, they melted into thin air after only a few seconds, and if you’d made friends with them and given them a name it only made it that much harder.
Actually, there were a lot of things about the afterlife that Michael liked. Walking through walls was fun, and seeing in the dark, and flying through the night was the thrill of a deathtime, but by far the best thing about being dead was eating Puck’s Hats. He had been put off at first by the idea of biting into pretty little fairies, but once he’d found out that they had sweet and succulent white fruit inside rather than giblets he had taken to it with surprising gusto. It was only like eating a jelly baby after all, he’d rationalised, even if, as with jelly babies, you still felt a wee bit guilty when you bit their feet off. Anyway, given the phantom blossoms’ luscious flavour, Michael thought he might have wolfed down Puck’s Hats by the dozen even if the starfish things had kicked and wept and begged him not to. Well, not really, but they did taste wonderful. He’d miss them when he finally got taken back to life again.
From what Phyllis had told him this would be quite soon, although apparently the Dead Dead Gang needed to take him for one last trip to the Upstairs place, Mansoul, before they took him home. That was why they’d just billowed like a thick fog of old photographs across the Mayorhold, letting the cars hurtle through them so that they’d caught blurry glimpses of dash-lit interiors, men muttering to themselves and couples bickering, before the gang had settled once more on the sunken paths of Tower Street. Peering up towards the hulking blocks of flats, the two huge landmarks with the NEWLIFE lettering that loomed over the underpasses and the cowering council houses, Michael thought the massive tombstones looked more worn out than they’d been a short while earlier, before the giant builders had their fight, when Michael had run off from all the others and got lost. The burrowing about through time could get confusing, it was true, but by his reckoning the previous visit to the tower blocks would have been no longer than twelve months ago. How could somewhere start looking so roughed-up and old within a year? His house along St. Andrew’s Road, the one that wasn’t there up in this draughty century, had been about a hundred years old when he and his family were living in it, and had still looked better-kept and nicer than the tall flats did.
He still wasn’t entirely sure what Phyllis and the others wanted him to see up in Mansoul or why they were determined he should see it, but if it was to be his last adventure in the Upstairs world then he was going to make the most of it. He privately suspected that the gang were going to show him something that was even more fantastic than the things he’d seen already, as a sort of special treat or party to commemorate his going away. At three, he’d been through enough Christmases and birthdays to know that when somebody was planning a surpris
