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And when they looked round, so was Michael Warren.
“Oh my giddy aunt, ’e’s run orf! Quick, which way’s ’e gone?”
Reggie was mildly startled at how panicked Phyllis sounded. She was turning round in anxious circles, squinting anxiously into the silvered darkness for some sign of the absconded toddler. Settling his bowler hat to what he thought was a more sympathetic angle, he did his gruff best to reassure her.
“Don’t worry, Phyll. ’E’ll soon be back, and even if ’e’s not, it’s not our business. Everybody says ’e’s going back to life soon, anyway. Why not let all that take care of itself? Then we can just get on with scrumping Puck’s Hats from the madhouses, and our adventuring and everything. What about Bill’s plan to dig a big ’ole all the way down to the Stone Age, so that we can capture a ghost woolly-elephant and tame it for a pet?”
Phyllis just stared at him as if appalled by his stupidity. Reggie adjusted his hat to a more defensive slant as she replied in an explosive shower of double-exposed spirit-spit.
“ ’Ave you gone orf yer ’ead? You ’eard what Mrs. Gibbs an’ old Black Charley said about the builders and their punch-up! And there’s all this to-do with the Vernalls and the Porthimoth di Norhan that we ’aven’t sorted ayt yet! You goo and catch mammoths if yer like, but I’m not gunna be in the Third Borough’s bad books, not if I can ’elp it!”
With that, Phyllis turned and raced towards the gated lower Scarletwell Street entrance of Greyfriars flats, which was about the only place that Michael Warren could have disappeared into while they weren’t looking, rabbit-scarf and pictures of herself trailing behind her in a string of grimy flags. The other members of the Dead Dead Gang stared after her for a stunned instant, shocked as much by Phyllis’s bold reference to the Third Borough – Reggie hardly dared to even think the name – as they were by her desperate flight. Gathering themselves up from their gaping stupor they rushed after her, a clattering mob of four, twelve, sixteen, eighty phantom children pouring down the brief and narrow passage leading to the inner courtyard of Greyfriars, pushing their smoky substance through the black iron railings of a gate that had been there for only a few years and thus provided no impediment. Hot on the multiplying heels of Phyllis Painter they burst out into the lower level of a large two-tier concrete enclosure ringed by silent 1930s flats, where everybody paused to take stock of their suddenly alarming situation.
From the gilt-trimmed shadows of the upper courtyard came the frightened cries of cats and dogs, who were no fools when it came to detecting ghostly presences, and the cross shouting of their human owners, who quite clearly were. Along with his deceased companions, Reggie peered into the gloom of the split-level quadrangle. Down at the lower end where they were, half-dead vegetation rustled on a small patch of neglected ground originally intended as a modest arbour. Up three granite steps, on the top deck of the communal yard, a single pair of lady’s tights dangled forgotten from the washing line and brick dustbin-enclosures guarded black bags, split and spilling the unfathomable prolapsed waste of the twenty-first century, the slimy plastic trays and rinds of unfamiliar fruit. Of Michael Warren there was not the slightest trace.
Seeming to summon fresh resolve out of adversity, a steely and determined look came into Phyllis’s pale eyes.
“Right. ’E’ll ’ave either ’eaded up the ’ill and over Lower Crorse Street to the maisonettes, or ’e’ll ’ave cut along the bottom ’ere and come ayt into Bath Street. We’ll split up in two groups so we’ve got a better chance of findin’ ’im. Marjorie, you and John and me wizzle search through the maisonettes. And as fer you two …”
Phyllis turned a somewhat frosty gaze on Bill and Reggie.
“You two can search Bath Street and Moat Place and all round there … or yer can goo and look fer woolly elephants, fer all I care. Now, ’urry up and piss orf, or there’s no tellin’ ’ow far away the little nuisance might ’ave got.”
With that, Phyllis and John and Marjorie swirled up the stone steps and away into the tinfoil glitter of the Greyfriars darkness, leaving Bill and Reggie on the murky path that cut across the courtyard’s lower reaches from Bath Street to Scarletwell. Bill laughed, the laugh of a much older and much lewder individual, despite the little boy’s high voice.
“The dirty old tart.
She just wants to be off in the dark with Johnski, and she’s letting poor old Drowned Marge tag along for cover. So, it looks like it’s just you and me then, Reggie me old mucker. Where d’yer fancy lookin’ first?”
Reggie had always got on well with Bill. The lad had substance but it was a substance with rough edges to it; less intimidating than the burnished aura of nobility that hung around big John in a heraldic sheen. The ginger nipper was approachable and funny, with a repertoire of more rude jokes than Reggie had imagined could exist, and was astonishingly knowledgeable for an eight-year-old, even a dead one. Reggie shrugged.
“I reckon we’d be best to do as Phyllis says fer once, so we’re not in worse trouble with ’er. We can catch that woolly elephant another time. Let’s ’ave a look in them new flats where Moat Street was and see if we can spot the little blighter. Then we can be shot of this whole bloody century and get back down where it’s more comfortable.”
The two of them were walking side by side, their hands deep in their pockets, following the path along the bottom edge of the night-steeped enclosure, wandering unhurriedly towards another gated passage that led out to Bath Street. Bill was nodding in acknowledgement of Reggie’s last remark, the after-images stretching his face into a sort of carrot shape to match his carrot top, albeit only momentarily.
“You’re not wrong, Reg, much as it pains me to admit it to a fuckin’ dead Victorian bugger like yerself. Now, me, I lived into this fuckin’ century we’re in now, lived for a lot longer than I was expecting, and I’ll tell yer, even I think it’s a load o’ shit. Give me the ’Fifties or the ’Sixties any day. I mean, I know places like this wiz run-down even then, but look at all this. This wiz just taking the fuckin’ piss.”
Bill’s sweeping many-handed gesture took in the wide, litter-strewn tarmac expanse upon their left, the patch of dying hedges to their right side and, by implication, the whole devastated neighbourhood surrounding them. As they passed through the black bars of the Bath Street gate and left the shadow-crusted yard behind them, Reggie studied Bill appraisingly and wondered if he could confess his ignorance of almost the entire world they existed in without appearing stupid or inviting ridicule. Despite the fact that Bill appeared a great deal younger than did Reggie, Reggie thought he’d very likely lived to be much older and much wiser than Reggie himself had managed, with his wretched twelve years. In a strange way, he looked up to the much shorter boy as if Bill were an adult of considerable experience, and Reggie was reluctant to expose his own humiliating lack of knowledge by bombarding Bill with all the questions that he’d dearly love to know the answers to: the basic details of their puzzling afterlife that he had never had explained to him and had been too embarrassed to enquire about. His policy had always been to maintain a façade of knowing, worldly silence so that no one could make any smart remarks about him being an unschooled and backward half-wit from a backward century, which secretly he feared he was. Still, Bill had never seemed like the judgemental sort and as they ventured out onto the dark incline of Bath Street, Reggie thought he’d chance his arm while they were both alone together and he had the opportunity.
“Wiz you expecting it to be like this once you wiz dead? With all the builders and the black and white, and all the leaving pictures of yourself behind yer?”
Bill just grinned and shook his briefly-multiplying heads as the boys drifted over the benighted street in the direction of the Moat Place flats.
“O’ course I wasn’t. I don’t reckon anybody thought that it’d be like this. None o’ yer main religions sussed it, and I don’t remember any of the Maharishis or whatever talking about after-images, or Bedlam Jennies, or just living the same life time after time, with all yer fuck-ups coming back to ’aunt yer and fuck all that you can do to change ’em.”
They were starting to head down a drive that dipped into a hollow, with the garage doors of the flats’ basement level on their left and on their right a stretch of featureless grey brickwork. Bill was looking thoughtful, as though reconsidering his last remark.
“Mind you, ’avin’ said that, there wiz this bird that I used to knock about with, and fuck me, she knew all sorts of stuff, and she’d go on about it if you let ’er. I remember ’er tellin’ me once ’ow she thought we ’ad the same lives over again. She said it ’ad to do with stuff about the fourth dimension.”
Reggie groaned.
“Oh, not the ruddy fourth dimension! I’ve ’ad everyone try and explain it to me and I’m none the wiser. Phyllis said the fourth dimension was the length of how long things and people last.”
Bill wrinkled up his nose into an amiable sneer.
“She don’t know what she’s on about. I mean, she’s right in one way, but time’s not the fourth dimension. As this bird I knew described it to me, passing time’s just ’ow we see the fourth dimension while we’re still alive.
“She used to talk about these blokes who first went on about the idea of the fourth dimension, chaps from not long after your time. There was this bloke ’Inton, who got in the shit over a threesome with his missus and another bird and ’ad to leave the country. He said what we saw as space and time wiz really one big fuck-off solid block with four dimensions. Then there wiz this other feller, by the name of Abbott. He explained it all with kinda like a children’s story, in this book called Flatland.”
