She pointed with her skinny left arm here, down the immeasurable length of the vast corridor, to where the thirty-foot vats were close-stippled dots beneath the bloody, golden forge-light beating down through the glass roof high up above.
“That’s the direction what up here we call the linger or the whenth of something, and it does goo on forever. What it is, if this way what we’re walking now is all the different rooms along your bit of Andrew’s Road, then that way, lingerways, that’s all the different moments of those rooms. That’s why the sky above this bit what were in now is always blue, because it’s ’alf-way through a summer’s day. The bit along the far end where it guz all brass and fireworks, that’s the sunset, and if yer went further on there’d be a stretch where it was purple and then black, and then yer’d ’ave tomorrow morning goo off like a bomb, all red and gold again. If yer get lost, then just remember: west is future, east is past, all things linger, all things last. Ooh, and be careful if yer ever in the twenty-fives, because they’re flooded.”
She appeared to find this a sufficient answer to his query, and they marched on side by side across the springy floorboards without speaking for a while, until he’d thought of something else that he could ask. He sensed it wasn’t quite as good a question as his previous one had been but posed it anyway, if only because he was finding that the lapses in their conversation gave him time to think about what had just happened to him, his new status as a dead kid, and that only made him scared.
“How wiz it that our bedroom and downstairs wiz all on the same floor up here appear?”
He’d been right. It had obviously been a stupid question. Phyllis rolled her eyes and tutted, hardly bothering to disguise the weariness and the annoyance in her voice as she replied.
“Well, ’ow d’yer think? If yer’d got plans made for a cellar that was drawn on the same bit of paper as plans for an attic, should yer think as that was queer, that they was on the same sheet, the same level as each other? ’Course yer wouldn’t. Use yer flippin’ loaf.”
Chastised but none the wiser, Michael scuffed along in silence there beside the slightly older, slightly taller girl, running a few steps now and then in order to make up the difference in their strides. A glance into the wooden-edged recess they were then passing on their right revealed a view down to an unfamiliar living room, with different furnishings to number 17 and with its doors and windows round the other way like a reflection in a mirror. Extending through the depths of the enlarged room were more glassy gorgon tentacles with lights inside, but these were different colours — dark reds and warm browns — clearly from a quite separate palette to Michael’s own family. Perhaps these were the living quarters of the Mays or possibly the Goodmans, further down the terrace?
He walked on with Phyllis Painter, briefly entertaining the not-utterly-unpleasant notion that if anyone should see them out together for a stroll like this then Phyllis might be taken for his girlfriend. Having never, as a three-year-old, experienced this enviable state, the thought put quite a swagger into Michael’s step for a few paces, until he remembered he was clad in slippers, baggy dressing gown and his pyjamas. The pyjamas, now he thought about it, might have a small yellow wee-stain on the fly, although he wasn’t going to check and call attention to it. Someone seeing them would be more likely to take Phyllis for his junior nurse than for his girlfriend. Anyway, they were both dead, which made the whole idea of being someone’s boyfriend less romantic and attractive.
Up ahead the variegated tumble of walls, ladders, balconies and windows was much nearer and much bigger than when he’d last looked. He could see people moving on the higher fire-escapes and walkways, although he and Phyllis were still too far off from these to make them out in any detail. This was probably just as well, he thought, since some of the parading figures didn’t seem entirely normal, being either the wrong size or the wrong shape. It struck him that the place in which he found himself was not like anything he’d been expecting to be waiting for him after his demise. It wasn’t like the Heaven that his parents had once sketchily described to him, which was all marble steps and tall white pillars like the adverts Pearl & Dean did at the pictures. Nor was it the Hell that he’d been warned of, not that he had been expecting to be sent to Hell. His mum had told him that he wouldn’t go to Hell except for something really bad like murder, which had seemed to him like manageable odds, assuming that he could get through his whole life without killing anybody. Luckily he’d died when he was three, and hadn’t had to put this to the test for very long. If he’d lived to be older, he consoled himself, he might have murdered Alma once he had the strength. Then he’d be burning in the special kind of fire his mum had muddily depicted as not ever killing you or melting you away to nothing, even though it was more hot than you could possibly imagine.
He was glad, all things considered, not to be in Hell, although this didn’t help with finding out where else this place might be. He thought that enough time might have elapsed since his last hesitant enquiry for him to attempt another one.
“Does this Upstairs have a religature? Has it got Pearl & Deany gates, or toga-gods with chess and peeping-pools like at the pictures?”
Though her eyes did not light up at his renewed interrogation, at least this most recent question didn’t seem to make her more annoyed with him.
“All the religatures are right in parts, which means none of ’em are ’cause they all thought as it was only them knew what wiz what. It doesn’t matter, anyway, what yer believe when yer daynstairs, although it’s best for yer that yer believe in something. Nobody up ’ere’s much bothered what it wiz. Nobody’s gunner make yer say the password, and nobody’s gunner throw yer out because yer didn’t join the right gang dayn below. The only thing what really matters wiz if you wiz ’appy.”
Michael thought about this as he walked beside her down the row of floor-doors. If the girl was right and all that mattered in life was one’s happiness, then he’d done relatively well, having enjoyed three years during which time he’d hardly managed to stop giggling. But what about if people had been happy doing things that were unpleasant, even horrible? There were such people in the world, he knew, and wondered if the same criteria applied to them as well. And what about those who through no fault of their own led lives that were continually miserable? Would that be held against them here, as if they hadn’t had a rotten enough time already? Michael didn’t think it sounded fair, and was about to chance his arm by asking Phyllis to explain herself when movements on one of the elevated balconies they were approaching caught his eye.
The pair had almost reached the near side of the cavernous arcade, and thus were close enough for Michael to make out the various people strutting back and forth along its levels in more detail. On the platform that had captured his attention, a railed walkway two or three floors up, two grown-up men were standing talking. Both seemed very tall to Michael and he judged them to be quite old, in their thirties or their forties. One of them had whiskers and the other had white hair, though, so he couldn’t really tell.
The white-haired and clean-shaven man was dressed in a long nightshirt, and he looked as if he’d just been in a fight. One of his eyes was closed and blackened, and some blood from a split lip had stained his otherwise completely spotless robe. His face was frighteningly angry and he gripped the wooden rail with one hand — in his other hand he held a long staff — as though he’d stepped out onto the balcony in order to calm down, although it didn’t look as though his whiskery companion standing next to him was helping much in this attempt. This second person, dressed in a great bush of dark green rags, appeared to be in fits of laughter over the first chap’s predicament. With his forked beard and with a mass of chestnut curls beneath his broad-brimmed leather hat, it looked like he was prodding the white-robed man in the ribs and clapping him upon the back, neither of which activities seemed likely to alleviate his black-eyed comrade’s filthy mood.