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.”
As they floated up the concrete steps to one side of the wall that blocked the hollow’s far end, Reggie wondered if a “threesome” was the racy episode that he imagined it to be, but then forced his mind back with some reluctance to the subject that Bill was discussing. Reggie felt sure that if he was ever going to understand this special geometric business, then an explanation told so that a child could understand it was, in every likelihood, his last, best hope. He did his best to concentrate upon what Bill was saying, listening intently.
“What ’e did, this Abbott geezer, was instead of goin’ on about a fourth dimension nobody could get their ’eads round, Abbott talked about the whole thing as if it was ’appenin’ to little flat things what wiz in a world with two dimensions, as if they wiz livin’ on a sheet o’ paper. How he told it, these flat fuckers, right, they’ve just got length and breadth, and they can’t even picture depth. They’ve got no idea about up and down. It’s all just forwards, backwards, right and left to them. The third dimension what we live in, it makes no more sense to them than what the fourth dimension does to us.”
This was already sounding promising to Reggie. He could easily imagine two-dimensional things, flatter than the wrigglers you could sometimes see if you got right down near a pool of rain and squinted with the vastly improved vision of the dead. He pictured them as shapeless little blobs going about their forwards-backwards-sideways lives on their flat sheet of paper, and the image made him smile. They’d be like draughts manoeuvring around a board, though obviously much thinner.
At the top of the stone steps there was a car park, open to the night sky and hemmed in by high black hedges on its southern side, though Reggie had a notion that when him and the Dead Dead Gang had passed through here in the 1970s, while on their way to Snow Town, it had been a queer and ugly playground for the bafflement of children. Now a dozen or so modern cars, snub-nosed and predatory, were hunkered down in darkness as though snoozing between kills. The Warren kid was nowhere to be seen.
The car park had been built where Fitzroy Street was situated, half a century beneath them in the past. Reggie and Bill streamed up its slope beneath the black quilt of a sky patched with grey cloud and a few isolated stars, almost too faint to see. The sprawl of square-cut buildings they were leaving, the drab, peeling blocks of Fort Place and Moat Place with their railed balconies and sunken walkways, had been put up in the 1960s on the rubble of Fort Street and Moat Street, and to Reggie’s eye looked even more disheartening than the neglected 1930s hulk of Greyfriars, which at least had some curves to its concrete. As their likenesses went stuttering up the darkened car park’s exit ramp towards Chalk Lane and the raised hillock at the foot of Castle Street, Reggie could make out lumpy children’s drawings stuck up in the windows of the single-storey building on the mound. He had an idea that the place was once a dancing-school of some sort, but across the flickering passage of the years had been transformed into a nursery. Still, there were worse fates. In the silver-threaded murk beside him, Bill continued his description of the little flattened people in their squashed world that they thought was the whole universe.