“This wiz where I used to live, back when I used to live.”
Up four stone steps the door of number 3 Spring Lane was olive green bleaching to grey, like stale sage, in the sun. The house was narrow and had clearly once been one half of a somewhat larger place along with number 5, next door and downhill on the right. Still further down in that direction were the rear wall and back gate of Spring Lane School, so that on mornings when she’d woken up too late, Phyllis could pull her trick of popping out of the back door, down to the bottom of the back yard that they shared with number 5 and climb over the wall to drop straight into the school playground. This had meant that Phyllis’s report card always had high marks for punctuality, although both Phyllis and her parents were aware that she didn’t deserve them, strictly speaking.
Phyllis knew that past the weathered door, where brittle paint peeled back from blisters to reveal imaginary continents of plain wood underneath, beyond the door there was no passageway or hall. You just stepped without preamble into the Painter family living room, which was the house’s only room downstairs. A twisting flight of stairs ran from it to the single chamber up above, her parents’ bedroom, with the attic in which Phyllis and her sisters slept directly over that. On Friday nights when it was warm they’d sit out on their window-ledge and watch the fights outside the pub across the street at chucking-out time. Shouts and shatterings would waft up to them through warm air that smelled of hops and copper, blood and beer. It was the 1920s, and they’d not had television then.
With only the one space downstairs there’d obviously been no room for a kitchen, and the nearest that they’d had was the cold water tap and old tin bucket, standing on a glistening-wet concrete block atop the flight of blue brick steps that led down to their cellar. This was shared, like the back yard, with number 5 next door and consequently it was cavernous with lots of twists and turns and alcoves that you could get lost in. Up one corner of the cellar, under number 5 and therefore technically a part of next door’s house rather than Phyllis’s, there was a stone slab in the ground what you could move if there were two of you. Lying there with your belly pressed into the chill and coal-dust of the cellar floor you could peer down a short black chimney-well, with pallid silver rings and ripples dancing on its sides, to where the spring that gave the lane its name roared downhill through the dark below. Although the secret torrent had foamed white as spit, Phyllis had always felt as if she were a doctor, gazing spellbound down an aperture into a rushing open vein, part of the Boroughs’ circulation system that would link up with the Monk’s Pond and the Scarlet Well. There was a lot of water hidden underneath the neighbourhood, and it was Phyllis’s conviction that the water was where all of the emotions and the memories collected as trace elements that gave the stream its biting, reminiscent tang; the cold, fresh spray which damped the cellar air.
Phyllis glanced down and to one side at Michael Warren, standing next to her.
“Do yer know, when I wiz alive, if I wiz very ill or very troubled for some reason, it would always be the same dream what I ’ad. I’d be stood in the street ’ere, in Spring Lane where we are now, and it would just be getting dusk. I’d be the age what I am now, a little girl, and ’stead of going in the ’ouse I’d just be stood ’ere, mooning up at ’ow the gaslight in the living room wiz made all green and pink as it fell through the coloured curtains what were drawn across the daynstairs window, ayt into the twilight. In the dream, I’d always ’ad the feeling that no matter where I’d been, no matter ’ow long or ’ow rough the journey wiz, when I wiz standing ’ere and looking at the light shine through the roses on those curtains, I’d come ’ome at last. I always felt sure that when I wiz dead, this place would still be waiting ’ere for me, and everything would all be ’unky-dory. As it turned ayt, I wiz right, as usual. There’s not a minute of ayr lives is ever lost, and all the pulled-dayn ’ouses what we miss are ’ere forever, in Mansoul. I don’t know why I ever got so worried in the first place.”
Phyllis sniffed and took a last look at her former residence for now, then they continued up the hill. The next door on their right and to the left of number 3 was that of Wright’s, the sweetshop, with the stout bay window that displayed its wares behind small, thick panes of myopic glass just past the bell-rigged door as you went up. Because this higher landscape was accreted from the husks of dreams, the row of glinting chandelier-glass jars that the shop wore like a best necklace in its window were not filled with actual sweets, but with the dreams of sweets. There were small Scotty dogs made out of amber barley-sugar that had twisted middles, many of them fused to nine-dog lumps by the warm day, and in the jar of rainbow sherbet (which you could make kali water out of) there were extra strata of the different-coloured powders which, unlike the ordinary ones, fluoresced. There was a purplish layer that you couldn’t really see up at the top, and at the bottom of the jar a pinkish layer that was similarly difficult to look at, but which made your tongue feel cooked if you ate any of it. Only chocolate rainbow drops seemed anything like normal, or at least until she noticed two or three of them were climbing up the inside of their jar and realised they were outsized ladybirds that had shells coated with hundreds-and-thousands, pink and white and blue. Though their mobility put Phyllis off, the pretty beads of sugar on their backs meant that they still looked as though they’d be nice to eat. She didn’t blame the toddler she was escorting for the way he lingered by the sweetshop, staring longingly in through its panelled window until Phyllis tugged the cuff of his pyjama top and made him hurry up.
Before they knew it, they were at the peak and gazing back down the long street that they’d just climbed. She knew that in the living world Spring Lane was nowhere near as long, nor yet as steep, but knew that this was how small children would remember it, hanging annoyingly onto their mother’s coat-tails as they tried to trick her into towing them up the demanding slope. Phyllis and Michael, standing at the top end of Spring Lane, looked west across the bottom of the valley over memories of the coal yard on St. Andrew’s Road, striped as though by the rays of a low sun. Beyond were railway yards where spectral drifts of steam like spirits of departed trains followed the lost, dead tracks on into nettle-beds, and past these the green daybreak of Victoria Park suffused the wide sky’s far edge with a lime blush that looked drinkable. After admiring the soft radiance of the deadworld panorama for a moment, both of them turned left and followed Handsome John, Bill, Marjorie and Reggie into Lower Harding Street.
Running along to Grafton Square where once the Earl of Grafton had some property, the resurrected Lower Harding Street was different in its atmosphere to the surrounding thoroughfares of the dream neighbourhood. It had not been remembered in its pristine state, with all the brickwork and the pointing good as new in brilliant orange that appeared to have been painted on. Instead, it had been fondly recollected from some later point, during the street’s decline. Where once two rows of terraced houses faced each other without interruption save the opening to Cooper Street which sloped off on the right, here there were breaks along the left-side row where dwellings had been emptied prior to demolition. Some of the abandoned buildings were already half knocked-down, with roofs and water services and upstairs floors conspicuously gone. Halfway up one sheer wall, which had become a palimpsest of several generations’ wallpaper, a former bedroom door hung on its hinges, opening no longer to the promise of a good night’s sleep but on a sudden plummet into rubble. Some half-dozen houses opposite the lower end of Cooper Street were barely there at all, their lines merely suggested by a few remaining outcroppings of brick shaped like stray jigsaw pieces, poking from the grass and weeds that had supplanted a beloved front-room carpet.