Yes, he’d seen his mam and even seen his sister who was visiting with her two little girls, but since they’d not been able to see John he’d found the whole encounter both frustrating and depressing. What had made it worse was that his mam and sister, obviously, didn’t know that he was dead yet. When his sis had started reading out a letter John had sent home to her daughter Jackie, talking about all the fun he’d have the next time he was home on leave, with all of them sat round the family dinner table, tucking into mam’s bake pudden, John had broken down. His mam, sat in her armchair up the corner, had smiled fondly as her only daughter read the letter, scrawled in pencil on the tiny pages of a jotter, clearly looking forward to bake pudden with her sons as much as John had been the night he’d written to his niece. She didn’t know that the reunion feast would never come. She didn’t know that her son’s ghost was sitting on the lumpy horsehair sofa next to her, weeping with helplessness for her and for himself and for the entire rotten business of that bloody war. Unable to take any more, John had streamed through the closed front door, away along Elephant Lane towards Black Lion Hill, commencing his short-lived career as a rough sleeper.
Not that John had been as rough as most of that sort were, by any means. He’d always kept himself presentable while he was still alive, and thus approached the afterlife with a Boy’s Weekly sense of military discipline. He’d made himself a den in the unused round tower jutting incongruously from condemned Victorian business premises upon the far side of Black Lion Hill. He’d chosen the location partly from a sense that proper ghosts should haunt somewhere that looked appropriately creepy like a turret, and partly because his previous choice, St. Peter’s Church, seemed to be overrun by ghosts already. John had met at least fifteen on his first tentative excursion to the Norman-renovated Saxon building. By the gate in Marefair there had been the spectre of a crippled beggar-woman, talking in a form of English so archaic and so thickly accented that John could barely understand a word of it. Around the church itself John had met phantom pastors and parishioners from several different eras, and encountered a geologist named Smith who claimed to have identified the limestone ridge that stretched from Bath to Lincolnshire, called the Jurassic Way. According to the affable and chatty soul, it was the way that this primordial cross-country footpath met the river Nene which had determined where Northampton would be most conveniently situated. Smith himself, coincidentally, had died here in Marefair while passing through the town and was commemorated by a plaque fixed to the church wall, which he’d proudly pointed out to John.
After that limited exposure to the ghost-seam’s other occupants, John had decided on a policy of keeping for the most part to himself. He’d watched the wraiths coming and going from the window of his tower-room, but they’d seemed to him peculiar things, some of them monstrous, so that he’d not felt inclined to seek their company. For instance, John had one day spotted the giant wading-bird made out of stilts and rushes that he’d seen again just recently, up on the balconies outside the Works. Upon that first occasion he had watched it striding round St. Peter’s Church in a full circuit before struggling through a wall of thousand-year-old stones and out of sight. Back then he hadn’t had a clue what it might be, and was no wiser now. The wood-beaked creature that left puddles of ghost-water everywhere it set its spindly legs served only as an illustration of the half-world’s oddness, which had prompted John to take an isolated, self-sufficient path in all his dealings with the afterlife.
He’d found that he liked his own company, liked planning expeditions such as those he’d made to Naseby, even though his second visit halfway through the actual battle had been horrible and made him glad that he’d been done in by a shell and not a pike. In general, he’d felt lively and adventurous during those early months of being dead, and it had been around then John had realised that he was no longer wearing his army uniform. He’d just looked down one day and found that he was in black knee-length shorts, a jumper that his mam had knitted and the shoes and socks he’d worn when he’d been twelve. He realised now, of course, that his ghost-body had been slowly gravitating to the form that it had been the happiest with in life, but at the time he’d simply been delighted to discover that he was a lad again, and didn’t care to speculate how this had come about.
He’d thrown himself into his solitary escapades with renewed vigour, always choosing the most daring situations to investigate, fancying himself as a dead Douglas Fairbanks Junior. When that British bomber had crashed at the top of Gold Street, John had watched it passing overhead from his tower’s window at the foot of Marefair and had straight away gone racing through the sparkling dark along the east-west avenue, chased by a scrum of after-image schoolboys as he’d rushed to see if anyone was dead, if there were any new ghosts stumbling about confused, needing advice.
As it had turned out, nobody was killed by the huge aeroplane’s astonishing descent, the crew and pilot having already bailed out and the sole casualty being a late-night Gold Street cyclist who’d sustained a broken arm. The only ghost other than John upon the scene that evening was that of the plane itself. Amazingly, although its substance had been almost totally destroyed on impact, the ethereal framework of the aircraft had been driven down into the misty topsoil of the ghost-seam, so that underneath the surface of the street a phantom bomber was at rest and perfectly intact. It had been while John sat there in its cockpit, shouting out commands to his imaginary crewmen and pretending he was on a bombing-mission that, embarrassingly, he had found himself surrounded by four snickering ghost-children who had introduced themselves as the Dead Dead Gang.
Standing now in Hazelrigg House, watching Cromwell writing in his journal as the long, last rays of the day’s sun were spent outside, John smiled as he recalled that first adventure with the other ghost-kids, or “The Subterranean Aeroplane Affair” as Phyllis had insisted that they afterwards refer to it. Larking about there at the controls of the immaterial craft, the spectral urchins had discovered that they could make it move slowly forward by merely pretending they were flying it, provided they pretended hard enough. Although they couldn’t get up enough speed to break the surface tension of the streets and take the plane back up into the air, they found that they could glide round underground at a serene and stately pace, and even execute a dive into the geologic strata underneath the town by leaning on the joystick. Travelling through clay and rock, though, hadn’t been much fun, and so they’d mostly kept to a flight corridor that was a few feet down beneath the surface. Here they’d droned through tunnels, crypts and cellars and endured a comically disgusting episode while taxiing along a vintage iron sewer-bore. At last, laughing at their own ingenuity, they’d steered their phantom aircraft carefully into the space presented by a subterranean speakeasy, on the corner of George Row and Wood Hill, which, bizarrely, had been built to replicate the fuselage and seating of a passenger plane and so made a perfect parking-place for their ghost-vessel.
John had given up his independent ways upon the spot, throwing his lot in with these hooligans who’d managed to make death into their funfair. He’d not been back to his lonely turret-room since that hilarious night, preferring the nomadic life of the ghost-children as they capered through the decades and dimensions, moving between purgatory and paradise, from hidden den to hidden den. He liked the crew he’d fallen in with a great deal, even if Reggie Bowler sometimes seemed to squint resentfully from underneath his hat-brim and you seldom heard more than a word or two out of Drowned Marjorie.