She swung her stick-thin arm around so that her trophy-necklace swished repulsively and indicated the long, muddled terrace facing them across the fissured paving slabs.
“All this wiz made from people’s dreams what ’ave built up. All of the people what lived hereabouts Daynstairs, or all them what passed through, all ’avin’ dreams abayt the same streets, the same buildings. And all of ’um dream the places a bit different, and each dream they ’ave, it leaves a kind of residue up ’ere, a kind of scum what forms a dream-crust, all made out of ’ouses, shops and avenues what people ’ave remembered wrong. It’s like when all the dead shrimps build up into coral reefs and that. If yer see someone up ’ere who looks hypnotised, walkin’ abayt in just their underpants or night-things, it’s a safe bet that it’s someone who’s asleep and dreamin’.”
Here she paused and looked down thoughtfully at Michael, standing there in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers.
“Although I could say the same thing about you, but I just saw yer choke to death.”
Oh. That. He’d almost put that whole unpleasant business from his mind, and frankly wished that Phyllis wasn’t quite so blunt about the fact that he was recently deceased. It was a bit depressing, and the fact of it still frightened him. Ignoring his distressed wince, Phyllis Painter carried on her morbid monologue.
“I mean, if yer wiz dead, then I’d ’ave thought yer’d ’ave been in yer favourite clothes what yer remembered. Unless yer pyjamas wiz yer favourite clothes, yer lazy little bugger.”
He was shocked. Not by her implication that he was bone idle — indeed, his pyjamas were his favourite clothes — but by the fact that she had sworn in Heaven, where he’d not have thought that this would be allowed. Phyllis continued, blithely unconcerned.
“But then, if yer wiz dead, why wiz nobody there to pull yer up and dust yer dayn except for me? No, yer a funny little fourpenny funeral, you are. There’s summat about yer what’s not right. Come on. We better get yer to the Works and let the builders ’ave a look at yer. Keep up and don’t get lorst in all the dreamery-scenery.”
Lorst. The same way Michael’s mum pronounced the letter ‘o’ in lost or frost or cost or any word remotely similar. “Don’t get lorst.” “We’ve ’ad some frorst.” “ ’Ow much is all that gunner corst?” Not only was his escort definitely from the Boroughs, she was almost certainly from down the bottom end of it, near Andrew’s Road. He’d never heard of any Painters round where he lived, unless Phyllis had lived long before his time, of course. Michael was not allowed a breather to consider this, however. True to her word, Phyllis Painter was already skipping off across the moss-seamed paving stones without a backward glance to see if he was following. He shuffled dutifully in her wake, not able to run properly without the danger of his slippers coming off.
As he slapped awkwardly across the slabs he saw that there were openings let into the terrace on the far side of the bounding pavement, passages that he presumed led deeper into the heaped-up confusion of dream architecture. His companion, with her hydra-headed rabbit stole flailing about her, was about to disappear into one such dark chink, an alleyway that ran off from the house-fronts right between the place with its front door positioned halfway up its wall and the façade of the refigured Joke Shop. Picking up his pace Michael trailed after her, her pink-and-navy banner fluttering ahead, leading him on.
The alley, when he reached it, was exactly like the narrow jitty that ran from Spring Lane to Scarletwell Street, all along the back of Michael’s house-row. It was cobbled just the same and edged with weeds, and he could even see the grey roof of the stable with its missing slates in next door’s yard, the place that Doug McGeary kept his lorry, but viewed from the back. The major difference was that on his right, where there should be the wire fence and hedgerow at the bottom of Spring Lane School’s playing fields, there was now a whole row of houses with their latch-gates and their back-yard walls with the rear windows of the red brick dwellings looming up beyond. “Scarletwell Terrace” came into his mind, but was as quickly gone again. Already Phyllis Painter was some distance down the transformed alleyway and showed no sign of slackening her pace or caring much if he got left behind. He padded after her over the cobbles of the shadowed crevice that in real life or in dreams had always made him apprehensive.
On each side a corridor of back walls hemmed him in, the ones on Michael’s right completely unfamiliar to him and even the ones upon his left much altered from their counterparts along the rear of Andrew’s Road. He ventured a glance upward at the sky above the alley and discovered that this was no longer the unearthly picture-postcard blue that he’d admired through the glass roof of the arcade, nor were there clouds of rarefied geometry uncrinkling as they slid across it. This, instead, was a grey slice of Boroughs firmament that made the spirits sink, fulfilling as it did the usual pessimistic forecast. Michael was alarmed at just how suddenly this colour-change had altered the whole mood of his experience. Instead of being someone on a dazzling adventure, he felt orphaned and bereft, felt pitiful and lonely like a lost child out in his pyjamas past his bed time, trudging down a miserable back entry and expecting drizzle. Except he was worse than lost. He was already dead.
Anxiously, Michael cast his eyes back down from the bleak heavens visible between the rainspouts and the chimneypots and found that, to his horror, he’d been dawdling. The little girl was now much further off from him along the alley than she’d been before, shrunken by distance to the size she was when he’d thought of her as a corner-fairy, which now seemed like hours ago. He reassured himself that if he just ran faster and could manage not to take his eyes off her again, then he’d inevitably catch up with her.
Running with his gaze fixed straight ahead, however, meant that Michael wasn’t looking properly where he was going. He caught the plaid toe of his slipper in a sudden hole from which a cobblestone had been prised loose and pitched abruptly forwards on his hands and knees. Although the rounded stones felt hard and solid through the thin material of his pyjamas, Michael was agreeably surprised to find that his fall hadn’t really hurt him. It had scared him and upset him slightly, but he felt no pain, nor were there any injuries that he could see. One knee of his striped trousers had got rather wet and dirty, but the fabric wasn’t torn and, all in all, he thought he’d got off lightly.
Phyllis Painter, though, was gone.
Even before he’d lifted up his eyes to find the alley empty save for him he’d known she wouldn’t be there with the certain fatalism that he’d felt before in nightmares, in those dreams where the one thing you’re most afraid of is the one thing that you know is guaranteed to happen.
All around him was the sooty, weathered brickwork of the jitty, with on Michael’s right what seemed to be the rear wall of a factory or warehouse interrupting the long run of washing-line-festooned back yards. Was this “the Works” the girl had mentioned as their destination? A black wire mesh could just about be seen through the thick dust of this establishment’s high, isolated windows, and a rusting pulley-wheel stuck out beside the gated wooden platform of what Michael thought must be a loading-bay. The empty alley stretched before him, a much greater distance than he could recall its mortal counterpart extending, and he didn’t think that Phyllis Painter would have reached the far end of it before he’d looked up, even allowing for his clumsy tumble. It seemed much more likely to him that she’d turned off from the dismal passageway into a door or gate that opened in the factory’s rear on his right side.
Keeping this hopeful notion in his mind he stole a little further down the alley’s pathway, like a cobbled streambed in the overcast grey light, until he was around the point he thought the girl had been when he’d last sighted her. Between the blunt stones of the alley floor sage-coloured grass poked up and there were the same minute scraps of refuse that he would have ordinarily expected to be there: an untipped cigarette end, a beer-bottle cap that had been dented in its middle by a bottle-opener, some chips of broken glass. The bottle-top had “Mask-Mask” printed on it where there should have been the brewery’s name, and the glass fragments seemed on close inspection to be shards from broken soap-bubbles, but Michael doggedly refused to pay these things attention. He trod slowly onward, looking for an opening in the wall, a door or gap that Phyllis might have vanished into, and at last he found one.