As he fell into step beside her, Phyllis Painter cast a sidelong look at him and sniffed, as though in reprimand for Michael having lagged behind again.
“I know that it’s a marvelation to yer, but yer’ve got fourever to explore and see the sights. All this’ll still be ’ere when yer get back. Reternity ent gooin’ anywhere.”
He more or less knew what she meant but still wanted to understand as much of this new territory as he could while he was passing through it. This was not as far as he could see unreasonable, and he decided to risk irritating his corpse-hung companion further with what seemed to him entirely natural questions for an expired lad in his position.
“If the longways rows wiz all our living room over again, then what wiz all these wideways ones?”
He gestured, with one little hand protruding from a too-large tartan sleeve, towards the framed vat they were walking past. Rather than wooden edging, all the inlaid rectangles in this specific row seemed to be bordered with white plasterwork, at least for nearly three of their four sides, with pointed blue brick capstones constituting the remainder of the frame. The girl nodded disinterestedly at the enclosure closest to them on their left as they strolled down one of the mile long avenues that led between the tanks, towards the heaped-up jumble of the arcade’s nearest side.
“See for yerself, so long as you don’t dawdle over it.”
He scampered extra quickly to the raised edge of the thirty-foot-square vat, just to convince her that he wasn’t dawdling, and peeped over its side. It took him a few seconds to work out what he was peering down at, but eventually he understood that it was an expanded overview of the top floor of 17, St. Andrew’s Road, or the back section of the house, at any rate. Banked plaster steps with what looked like wallpaper carpeting replaced the peeling, painted woodwork that had framed the elevations of their living room, but only for two-and-a-bit sides of the oblong’s tiered perimeter. This was because the greater portion of the open-topped space that the frame enclosed was taken up by a big L-shape made from bedrooms, stair-head, and a section of their landing as glimpsed from above. The vertical bar of the L was formed by his and Alma’s bedroom, with the top of their stairs and some of the landing visible down at the bottom, where it met the horizontal line that was their gran’s room. This indoors-part of the roughly-square area contained within the frame was what accounted for the wallpaper-and-plaster trim that he could see along at least two of its sides, while the remainder of the shape was taken up by a view straight down from the level of the guttering into the higher part of their back yard. It came to Michael that the slate-blue capstones edging the rightmost upper corner of this tank were an expanded version of the stones that topped their garden wall.
There were none of the frilly, crawling jewels that Michael knew to be his family apparent in the scene below him, neither upstairs in the empty bedrooms nor down in the yard below. He could, however, still make out the wooden chair that he and his mum had been sitting on before he’d choked. This must, he thought, be a few moments after everyone had rushed indoors out of the yard and left the chair behind. All the human activity was going on down in the kitchen and the living room, the scene that he’d just witnessed with his sister sitting weeping and his gran keeping an eye on her, so that the bedrooms were both empty here. The only living thing that flickered through the crystallised scenario was an amazing iridescent column that appeared to be made out of beautifully crafted ladies’ fans. This seemed to plunge into the clarified time-gravy from a point close to the rooftop’s rim, and then described a breathtakingly elegant trajectory down into the far depths of the back garden. It occurred to him that it was probably a pigeon, with its moving wings transforming it to an exquisite glass-finned ornament.
Aware that if he wasn’t careful he would break into a dawdle, Michael turned away from this enchanting still life, though reluctantly, and hastened to re-join the little girl. The trouble with this place, as far as Michael was concerned, was that there wasn’t anything that didn’t fascinate him. Its most minor detail seemed to be inviting him to stare entranced at it for hours. Why, probably even the plain pine floorboards he was walking on, if he were only to look down at them, would …
… would envelope him within a flowing tide-map universe of grain, with near-invisible striations rippling from the knothole’s vortex eye into a peacock feathering, the frozen pulse of a magnetic field. The engraved hearts of hurricanes, reverberating outward in concentric lines of vegetable force; the accidental faces of mad, decomposed baboons trapped snarling in the wood; trilobite stains with legs that trailed away to isotherms. The sweet and fatherly perfume of sawdust would completely overwhelm him with its atmosphere of honest labour, would immerse him in long, silent histories of dripping forest and time measured out in moss, if he were only to look down beyond his stumbling slippers and …
Michael snapped out of it and hurriedly fell into step with Phyllis Painter, who’d not broken stride while he inspected the new aperture, and who was clearly finished with indulging Michael in his tardiness. They carried on along the wooden avenue between the vats towards the heaping side-wall of the grand arcade gradually getting bigger up ahead of them, a teetering hodgepodge pile of mismatched buildings, taller than a town. He wondered what ungraspable new shapes the folded paper clouds were making up beyond the see-through ceiling overhead, but prudently decided that he wouldn’t look to see. Instead, he thought he’d better concentrate upon his ragamuffin tour-guide before she lost interest in him altogether. To this end, he plied her with fresh questions.
“Wiz this all Northampton what we see here, open for Upstairs-men to look down on?”
She spared him a faintly condescending sideways glance, letting him know she thought he was an idiot.
“ ’Course not. This wiz just the Attics of the Breath above your bit of Andrew’s Road. In the direction what we’re gooin’ now, the attic doors all open dayn on different rooms and floors and whatnot of the ’ouses in your street. The line we’re walking dayn, that’s all them different places laid ayt in a row, so it goes on a mile or two but don’t goo on forever. Now, the other way, along the overhall …”