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There’d been a lot of people do away with themselves in the Boroughs down the years. Old Mallard only stuck in Reggie’s memory because he’d been a man, when nearly all the others had been female. It was harder for the women, or at least that’s what he’d heard their husbands tell each other over beer in a pub garden, if the subject should arise.
“It’s something that’s in them old houses,” was the general opinion. “For the chaps it’s not so bad, because they’re out to work. The women, though, they’re left indoors with it and they can’t get away.”
He’d often wondered, in his idle moments, what “it” was. If it was something somehow “in” the houses, then it could be damp or dry-rot, some miasmal presence seeping from the beams and brickwork that could make a person so ill that they’d want to take their life, although he’d never heard of such a thing. Besides, the way that grown-up fellows talked about the matter, nodding solemnly over their pints of watery pale ale, had given Reggie the impression they’d been speaking of a living creature, something that had wandered in one day to take up residence and then refused to leave. Something so upsetting and so miserable that you’d be better dead than stuck at home with it, trying to do your housework with it sitting in the corner wriggling and clicking, looking at you with its knowing little black eyes. Reggie always pictured “it” as a giant earwig, although part of him knew full well it was only ordinary despair.
This was the nesting horror that had done for Reggie’s mother, so he thought about it quite a lot. She’d tried to kill herself so many times that by her third try even she could see the funny side. Her first attempt had been at drowning, in the Nene where it ran through Foot Meadow, but the river wasn’t deep enough at that point to accommodate her and she’d given up. Next she’d jumped from the bedroom window of their house in Gas Street, which resulted only in a pair of broken ankles. On the third occasion she’d tried kneeling with her head inside the oven, but the gas ran out before she’d finished and she didn’t have a penny for the meter. It was that, being too poor to even gas herself, which in the end made Reggie’s mother laugh about her troubles. So surprised were Reggie and his dad to see her chuckling again that they’d joined in, laughing along with her there in the freezing kitchen, with its windows open to dispel the rubbery and acrid fumes. Reggie himself had giggled most, although he hadn’t really understood the situation and was only laughing because everybody else was. Also, he supposed that he’d guffawed out of relief and gratitude, convinced that a dark chapter of his family’s story was now over.
In a sense, of course, he’d been quite right: some few weeks after the hilarity in the cold, smelly kitchen, Reggie’s mother once more threw herself out of the upstairs window, this time managing to hit the ancient and indifferent paving stones of Gas Street with her head, which finally seemed to do the trick. A chapter certainly had been concluded, but the ones that followed it were even darker, even worse.
Following his wife’s successful fourth and final stab at self-destruction, Reggie’s dad had started drinking heavily, chucking the ale back for dear life, and then had started fights. Night after night he’d carried on like that, blood jetting from smashed noses up against a privy wall, teeth spat into the Gas Street drains like miniature bone rockets with a shower of red sparks behind them, and inevitably the constabulary would be called. His first offence, they beat him up. His second one, they locked him up and Reggie hadn’t even known which gaol his dad was in. Abandoned, Reggie had lived in the Gas Street house alone for getting on a week, eating and sleeping in his parents’ big bed for the luxury of it, not answering the door the first time that the rent-man called. On his next visit, though, the rent-man had a bailiff with him, who had simply kicked the door in, by which time Reggie was scarpering through an untended back yard, hurdling the bottom wall and making off along the alleyway.
His subsequent address had been the wasteland that they called the burial ground, opposite Doddridge Church. He’d been pleased with himself about the little house he’d built there, up against the bounding wall that overlooked Chalk Lane. Even though it had only been a plywood packing crate, Reggie was proud of his own ingenuity in turning it into a home. He’d tipped it on its side, swept out the snails and tacked someone’s discarded curtain up across the opening as a sort of door. He camouflaged it with dead branches, thinking that this sounded like the sort of thing an Indian scout would do, and made a spear with which he could defend himself by sharpening a long stick with his rusty penknife, before realising the knife itself would make a better weapon. He’d been a bit dim back then, but then, he’d only been eleven.
That said, finding food and getting by, which in the circumstances you might well expect to be a hardship, these were things that Reggie found he took to naturally. He’d haunt the edges of the square on market night and find squashed fruit and veg thrown out amongst the tissue paper, straw and empty boxes. The back doors of baker’s shops at closing time would often yield a loaf that was no longer saleable though not entirely stale, and from the butcher’s there were sometimes bones for soup.
He’d realised, after trudging through the streets with a bowed head for one long afternoon, how many small coins people lose, especially in the larger shops. Other than what he found, Reggie would sometimes beg a ha’penny or two, and had once tossed off an old tramp who’d promised him a thrupenny bit but then reneged. That had been in the jungle of unused riverside land between Victoria Park and Paddy’s Meadow, inaccessible except by paddling under Spencer Bridge, a wilderness where the damp-scented vagrant had a modest campfire made from bits of cardboard, wood and cut-off ends of carpet. Reggie still remembered with a shudder how the whiskery chap’s spunk had sizzled, following a slippery liquid arc into the yellow flames, and all for nothing, not a farthing. Still, despite such disappointments, Reggie managed to survive. He wasn’t hapless, wasn’t weak, not in his body or his mind. It hadn’t been a lack of sustenance that killed him, it had been an English winter, and however strong or clever or resourceful Reggie was there’d been no getting round it. When they’d found him curled up in his packing crate after a day or two, one of his eyelids was still frozen shut and sticking to the ball. That had been that, the end of Reggie’s life, though obviously not of his existence.
To be honest, he’d turned out to be better at death than he had ever been at life, taking to the new medium like a duck to water. Even so, he still remembered how surprised and lost he’d been, those first few hours after he’d passed on. It had been on a Sunday morning when it happened. He had woken to the sound of oddly-muffled church bells and the somehow worrying realisation that he was no longer cold. He’d tried to pull the curtain remnant serving as his door aside, but something puzzling had happened and he’d found himself crouching on hands and knees outside his makeshift crate-house, where the rags tacked up above its entrance were still hanging motionless and undisturbed.
The first thing that had struck him, thinking back, was that the grass upon which he was kneeling was now oyster-grey instead of green, although its rime of frost remained a granulated white. On climbing to his feet and looking round he’d seen that everything was black and white and grey, including the faint floral pattern on his tacked-up curtain, which he’d known should actually be an insipid blue. It made him smile now to recall how, with the subdued chiming of the bells, the black and white of everything had led him to the frightening conclusion that at some point in the night he’d been sent deaf and colour-blind, as if those were the worst things that could happen to you on a winter’s evening. It was only when he’d noticed all the pictures of himself that he was leaving every time he moved that Reggie had suspected there was something badly wrong, wrong in a way that spectacles or hearing trumpets would not remedy.
Of course, soon after that he’d started to experiment with touching things, discovering that he no longer could. Attempting to draw back the curtain from the mouth of his crude shelter, he’d found that his hand now passed through the material as if it wasn’t there and disappeared from sight until he’d pulled it out again. At that point Reggie had decided that to see inside the crate he’d have to push his face in through the fabric of the entrance, in the same way that he’d just done with his fingers.
He’d been pitiful, the little boy inside the box. Frozen into the same position in which he’d fallen asleep, bald knees drawn up and one hand welded to a flattened ear, his eyebrows had been frosted white. A crystal dusting glinted off the fine hairs of his freckled cheek and from one nostril there depended a grey icicle of snot. Unlike a lot of ghost-seam residents that he had subsequently met, Reggie had recognised his own corpse straight away. For one thing, the dead child was dressed in a long coat and bowler hat identical to those that he himself appeared to still be wearing. For another, it had Reggie’s tea-stain birthmark, roughly shaped like Ireland, on the left calf above the stiffened folds of its refrigerated ankle-sock. The leaping commas that he’d glimpsed out of the corner of his eye had turned out to be sober and pragmatic fleas abandoning their host. He’d screamed, a curiously flat sound that had little resonance, and jerked his head back through the hanging curtain, which had not so much as trembled as he’d done so.
Reggie had then sobbed for some time, the unsalted globs of ectoplasm rolling down his face, more like the memory of tears than tears themselves. At last, when it became apparent that however much he wept no one was g
oing to come and make it better, he’d sniffed loudly and had stood up straight, resolving to be brave. His lower lip and chin thrust out, he’d marched determinedly across the burial ground heading for Doddridge Church, with the frost-hardened soil feeling somehow springy and giving underneath his insubstantial tread, like sphagnum moss. Grey replicas peeled from his back, pursuing him in single file over the January wasteland, hindmost figures fading out as more were added to the front end of the queue.
It having been a Sunday, Reggie had seen a few individuals and couples making their way through the slanting Boroughs streets towards the church, although since it was also perishingly cold these were less numerous than they might otherwise have been. Striding across the burial ground towards the old church and its gathering congregation, he’d become aware that no one else was shedding pictures of themselves behind them in a trail the way that he was. He’d had an uneasy intimation as to what this meant, but had tried calling out to the churchgoers anyway, bidding them a good morning. This had come out as “God mourning” by mistake, although he didn’t think it would have made a difference to the pious throng’s response, however he’d pronounced it. They’d ignored him as they exchanged pleasantries with one another, bundled in their winter clothes and shuffling towards the building’s worn iron gates. Even when he’d danced round in front of them and called them names – queer jumbled-up names that had sounded wrong even to Reggie – they just looked straight through him. One of them, a tubby girl, had even walked straight through him, giving him a brief unwelcome glimpse of squirting veins and bones and flickering stuff that he’d thought might be her brains. Reggie had been at last convinced of his condition by this incident, had finally accepted that these people neither saw nor heard him, being still amongst the living whereas he was now apparently amongst the dead.
It had been while he’d stood there by the gate allowing this dire fact to sink in that he’d heard the tiny, chirping voices from above him and looked up towards the eaves of Doddridge Church.
Since he’d passed over Reggie must have had the whole phenomenon explained to him a thousand times, how all of it made sense according to some special version of geometry, but for the life of him he couldn’t get to grips with it. He’d never really fathomed ordinary geometry, which meant this new variety was bound to be beyond his grasp. He doubted he would ever truly understand what he had seen when he’d glanced upwards at the higher reaches of the humble structure.
All the buttresses and things that you’d expect to poke out from the upper walls had looked instead like they were poking in, as if they’d all turned inside out. In the apparent cavities and indentations caused by this effect there had been little people perching, no more than three inches high, all waving frantically at Reggie as they called down to him with their twittering bat-like voices.
Back then, at the age of twelve, he would have probably been just about prepared to accept that they might be pixies, if they hadn’t been so drab and scruffy in their dress or homely in their features. In minute flat caps and baggy trousers hoisted by minuscule braces, wearing aprons and black bonnets, they’d milled back and forth along miniature balconies formed from inverted recesses. They’d beckoned and gesticulated, mouthed at him through lips that were infinitesimal, their faces marked by all the warts and lazy eyes and strawberry noses that you’d find in any ordinary pauper crowd on market day. The women’s coats had microscopic brooches, cheap and tarnished, pinned to the lapels. The fellows’ waistcoat buttons, those that weren’t already missing, verged on the invisible. These hadn’t been the sharp-eared fairies from the picture-books in all their gaudy finery, but had instead been normal folk in all their plainness and their ugliness, somehow shrunk to the size of horrid, chittering beetles.
As he’d stood and gaped in mingled fascination and revulsion at the capering homunculi, he’d noticed that nobody else amongst the scattering of worshippers converging on the church was doing so. No one had looked up at the strangely concave ledges where the slum-imps gestured, trilled and whistled, and it had occurred to Reggie that live people could not see them. He’d concluded that only the dead could do that, displaced souls like him who left grey pictures in their wakes rather than the faint puffs of fogging breath that marked the living on that bitter January day.
He’d not known what the creatures were and, back then, hadn’t wanted to find out. It had been slowly dawning on him, ever since he’d seen what was inside the crate, that he was dead yet didn’t seem to be in heaven. That, in Reggie’s limited grasp of theology, left only one or two more places that this ghostly realm might be, and neither of them sounded very nice. In mounting panic he had backed away, passing between or through oblivious Boroughs residents arriving at their place of worship, all the while keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the scuttling apparitions in the eaves, in case the rat-like men and women suddenly teemed skittering down the church walls and surged towards him.
Finally he’d turned and run away with his pursuing trail of after-pictures hurrying to keep up, haring around the left side of the church and into Castle Terrace, where an even more bewildering sight awaited. It had been that old door, halfway up the western face of Doddridge Church. In life he’d often puzzled over this and tried to guess its purpose, but as he’d dashed round the corner and stopped dead with all his phantom doubles piling up behind him, Reggie had at last been furnished with an answer, even if he had no way of understanding it.
Although he looked back with amusement now at his uncomprehending first glimpse of the Ultraduct, if he was honest Reggie wasn’t that much clearer as to what it was or how it functioned even after all these years, whatever meaningless immeasurable number that might be. He just recalled the breathless awe with which he’d reeled, dazed, through the spaces of its marvellous white pilastrade, his head tipped back to goggle at the glassy underside of the impossibly-constructed pier above him. Beyond the translucent alabaster of its planking, phosphorescent patches had moved purposefully back and forth, over his head and over Castle Terrace, fugitive light falling through the chiselled struts to settle on his upturned features like the snow that everyone had said it was too cold for.
Passing underneath the glorious eye-straining structure in a dazzled trance he had eventually stumbled out the other side, with his evaporating replicas all stumbling after him. Freed from the Ultraduct’s transfixing glamour, Reggie had let out a great moan of perplexity at the sheer overwhelming strangeness of his situation. Without looking back he’d raced off in a funk down Bristol Street, his ghost-hat clapped tight to his head, his spectral greatcoat flapping around his bare knees. Blindly he’d charged deeper into the sallow echo of the Boroughs that had seemed, then, to be his new home for all eternity, the awful place he’d been condemned to. He’d roared down the colourless coal-chute of Bath Street like a steam-train, towing look-alikes instead of carriages and tenders. Down there in the district’s pallid guts he’d trickled to a halt, then sat down in the middle of the road and taken stock of things.
Of course, it hadn’t been long after that when he had come across his first rough sleepers: a small crowd of what had looked and talked like drinking men from several different centuries. They’d put him straight about the nature of the ghost-seam or, as they had called it, purgatory. Like many of the Boroughs’ wraiths they’d been at heart a sentimental crew and taken him beneath their wing, instructing him in a variety of useful skills. They’d taught him how to scrape away accumulated circumstance and dig through time, then told him where to find the sweetest Bedlam Jennies, growing in the higher crevices that people with a heartbeat couldn’t see. They’d even found the ghost of an old football for him, although his first kick-around had underscored the limitations of the game, or at least this posthumous version of it: for one thing, the football didn’t bounce so high, in much the same way as sound didn’t resonate so clearly. For another, being insubstantial, the ghost-ball would be forever sailing through the house-walls of the living. Constantly retrieving i
t from underneath the table or inside the armchair of a family eating dinner unaware had rapidly become far too much of a bother.
Reggie had been grateful for the old revenants’ help and camaraderie, and yet with hindsight he could see they hadn’t really done him any favours. While they’d helped him to adjust to his new state they’d also fostered in him the belief that this bleak half-world, this unsettling ink-wash purgatory, was all that he deserved. He’d taken on their disappointed, self-defeating outlook as his own and looked to them for all his cues. They’d told him he could have his life over again if that was what he wanted, although there was something in the way they’d said it which implied that this would be a very bad idea. Back then, he’d been inclined to share this view, and in a sense was still of that opinion. Living through his mother’s suicide attempts again was nothing he looked forward to, and neither was the prospect of reprising his dad’s drunken rages. Nor did a repeat of wanking off the tramp or being once again frozen to death inside a packing crate seem to provide much real incentive. Now he was outside his life he could at last admit to himself what a nightmare and a torment it had been. The thought of going through it all again, a thousand times or even just the once, was more than he could bear.
The broken-hearted mob of ghosts who had been Reggie’s mentors in the afterlife had also counselled against going “Upstairs” to a place they called “Mansoul”. That, they’d explained, was for a better class of dead folk who had led respectable and carefree lives, not for the sorry likes of Reggie and his new-found friends. Their poor opinion of themselves had chimed with his own faltered self-esteem, and it occurred to Reggie that he might still be one of their company, to this day shambling through the joyless alleys of the ghost-seam with them, listening to their complaints and their regrets there in that muted landscape where each sound and every hope fell flat. He’d almost certainly still be amongst that wretched fellowship, he realised soberly, if it had not been for the great ghost-storm of 1913.
That had been like the Almighty trumping, in that it was deafening and unexpected. It had been much worse than the comparatively minor squall that Reggie and the Dead Dead Gang had just affected their escape from, down in 1959. Both had been caused, though, by the same phenomenon: by the violent activity of higher supernatural forces in the region of Mansoul that corresponded to the Mayorhold, where there was a place they called the Works. In 1913 these superior powers, be they the builders or the former builders who had been reclassified as devils, were in uproar over something that was said to be connected with the coming war. Their outraged flailings had provoked a wind of terrible ferocity that had torn through the phantom neighbourhood and had blown all of Reggie’s fatalistic chums away to Delapre. That was the reason it had put the wind up Reggie, so to speak, when him and all the other kids had heard Black Charley say there was a ghost-storm on its way: Reggie had been through one before.
