Standing there to one side of the high-roofed quarters with his spectral playmates, Michael gazed across the polished oaken tabletop towards the top half of the man whose high boots he’d already seen, sitting at the far end and writing with a quill pen in some sort of log or ledger.
Dark hair, lank and greasy-looking, hung down to the dusty mantle of the man’s old-fashioned tunic, and his bowed head, bent above his writings, had a poorly-concealed bald spot. It was hard to judge his stature, seated as he was, although he didn’t look to be unduly tall. Despite this, his broad chest and shoulders fostered an impression of solidity and bulk. Skin grey in the drained radiance of the ghost-seam, the man looked like a lead soldier scaled up for the play of giants.
Coming to the end of a long paragraph the fellow sat back in his chair to read what he had written, so that the ghost-children could more clearly see his face. To Michael, the grave countenance looked almost thuggish, even though the general bearing of man suggested rank and prominence. His features were like thick-cut bacon, broad and fleshy and possessed of what might almost be an earthy sensuality if not for the expressionless grey eyes like flattened musket balls that dominated the arrangement, staring down unblinking at the page of cramped but ornate script that he’d just authored. A fat wart jewelled the depression between lower lip and chin, with a much smaller growth just over his right eyebrow. There was a nerve-wracking stillness to him that Michael imagined to be like the stillness of a bomb the moment after it’s stopped ticking.
Standing in the silent room beside him, Phyllis nudged him gently in his phantom ribs. She looked pleased with herself.
“There. See ’im? That’s the Lord Protector, that wiz.
“That’s Oliver Cromwell.”
SLEEPLESS SWORDS
That blowing-up bloke on the balcony had rattled John. He liked to think that generally he kept an even keel but the two-legged fireball had upset him, there was no denying.
For a kick-off, John had never seen before what an exploding person looked like, not in all that frozen detail and not from outside. When John himself had copped his lot over in France he hadn’t even realised it had happened for a good few minutes. He’d just taken it for a near miss and had gone running up the road with all the other lads. He’d noticed that the shell-fire was now muffled and that he was seeing everything in black and white, but just assumed the bang had made his eyes and ears go funny. Only when he’d realised he was leaving pictures in his wake, unlike his strangely unresponsive squadron-mates, had John begun to take in what had happened.
Once he’d understood his circumstances he’d been overcome by horror, which was only normaclass="underline" it had been a gruesome way to perish. So to see that fellow on the landings at the Works, inside his lethal halo with that forced smile and the tears turning to steam upon his cheek, remaining in that awful second for eternity because that was the way that he remembered himself best … John couldn’t make it out. When Bill had told them that these human bombs were doing it as part of their religion, waging holy war as you might say, that had just made John even more bewildered.
John had been a Christian while he was alive. Never a good one, mind you, nowhere near as serious about religion as his eldest brother had been, but more serious than his sister, mam, or either of his other brothers were. He’d gone to church up College Street most Sundays, where he’d been a member of the Boy’s Brigade. That was where John had prayed, sung hymns, been taught to march, and learned to see this combination as entirely natural. Onward Christian soldiers and all that.
There had been no religious books to speak of in the family home where he’d grown up except the Bible, which John was ashamed to say he’d found as dry as dust, and an old copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which he’d fared a little better with. He’d not had much idea, back then, what Bunyan’s allegorically-named characters were meant to represent, but found that he enjoyed the tales and fancied that he’d caught their basic moral gist. He’d even got halfway through Bunyan’s Holy War, the first place that he’d come across the name “Mansoul”, before he’d given up in bafflement and boredom. All of this had only underlined the notion that had been instilled in him by Boy’s Brigade — ten minutes’ prayer after an hour’s drill practice in the upper church hall, blue-black military caps on bowed young heads — the sense that Christianity and marching were bound up together inextricably. He was no stranger, then, to the association between warfare and religion, but that, surely, was a thing for proper wars, with soldiers who had proper uniforms. The fellow on the landing, a civilian blowing himself up and taking others with him in the name of God, that was a different matter. That was neither warfare nor religion as John comprehended them.
Also, whatever Boroughs-of-tomorrow the perpetually exploding man had wandered back to 1959 from, that was not a future that John comprehended either. How could his scuffed, peaceful neighbourhood produce something like that in only sixty years or so? Though John had been on various sorties into the twenty-first century with the Dead Dead Gang since first hooking up with them, he realised that he’d no more than the barest understanding of how people felt and thought and lived during those future decades, anymore than he could claim to know much about France simply because he’d died there. All he knew was that the sight of that half-man, half-Roman candle made him fearful for the Boroughs, and the England, and the whole world that was yet to come. Throughout the fight between the builders and the drama in the billiard hall, John had found that he couldn’t take his mind off that illuminated and fragmenting figure, shuffling on the wooden walkways of a Heaven that it couldn’t have conceived of or anticipated, wrapped forever in the flames of its own savage martyrdom.
Indeed, not until John had realised where Phyll Painter meant to take the gang after escaping from the snooker parlour had he started to pay much attention to their present undertaking, unable to banish the compelling vision of the man-explosion from his thoughts. The English Civil War, though, was John’s hobby in the afterlife, much in the same way Reggie Bowler had a craze for cars or Marjorie liked books. If anything could stop the image of the walking detonation from preoccupying him, it was the thought of tunnelling into the evening of June 13th, 1645, here in Marefair at Hazelrigg House, or, as locals called it, Cromwell House.
In the brief interlude between his death and his encounter with the Dead Dead Gang, a few subjective years at most, John had pursued his interest independently. He’d twice been out to Naseby, once an hour or two before the battle and once during, and he’d travelled up the Wellingborough Road to Ecton for a look at how the Royalist prisoners were treated afterwards. He’d never previously paid a visit, though, to the occasion he was currently observing: fresh from his promotion to lieutenant-general, rising Parliamentary star Oliver Williams-alias-Cromwell, bivouacked in Marefair on the night preceding the decisive battle of the English Civil War.
John could remember how alone he’d felt in those years following his death, before encountering Phyll and the gang. His journey back from France had been accomplished with surprising speed. One moment he’d been standing in the shell-pocked mud, staring appalled at his own offal, glistening as it spilled from the burst body at his feet, desperately wishing that he’d lived to see his home again. The next, he’d found himself stood in the middle of the green behind St. Peter’s Church, now grey and silvery in the colourless expanses of the ghost-seam. Spilled-milk clouds drifted at anchor in a sky of blazing summer platinum, and John had bounded down the grassy slope towards the terrace at the bottom, leaving a parade of muddy soldiers in the air behind him.