“Father, what about when you have won your fight? What then?”
Initially, this line of questioning did not appear to have deflated the youth’s errant member, and indeed seemed to have made things rather worse. Grey eyes alight with visions of his future glory, Cromwell was apparently becoming more excited by the moment. His gaze glittering with firebrands, fixed on some unguessable horizon, the boy smiled, voice soft with awe at his own majesty as he replied.
“Why, then I shall be Pope instead.”
The stripling’s wonderstruck expression of self-satisfaction lasted only a short while before the chilly shadow from a cloud of doubt was cast across it. The young Lord Protector suddenly looked frightened, and John was relieved to see that his tumescence was subsiding. When the naked child began to speak again the adult voice was gone, with in its place the tremulous and reedy piping of a scared eleven-year-old boy.
“But if I am become a Pope, shall not God hate me? And the pauple, the poor people that have followed me shall hate me also if I dress in purple. They will find me out and hate me. They will take away my hat from off my shoulders. You must help me! You must tell them that your father was a child, a child like you who did not know what he was doing. You must …”
Here the boy trailed off, and something of his older self’s grey steel once more entered his eyes. The voice was now again the rough growl of a grown-up.
“You are not my children.”
Pimply face contorting to a mask of rancour, the bare body started fading in and out of view like something on a television set with faltering reception. Both the picture and the sound seemed to be going at the same time, so that anything the boy said was now punctuated by transmission gaps. Meanwhile the slumbering form upon the bed, a dark mass only visible to the three children’s tinsel-trimmed night vision, started mumbling in an eerie counterpoint to the dream-Cromwell’s flickering and interrupted speech.
“… fatherless bastards of a low kind, skulking … half the whores in Newport Pagnell say it was the Holy Ghost who put it in them! Get thee … or must I be pinn’d like a soot-coloured moth to history and ever … Father? Leave me be! I have not … faeries. They are devils, ghosts or faeries and they look upon my …”
Phyllis nudged John, leaning over Michael as he stood between them.
“ ’E looks like ’e’s wakin’ up. Come on, let’s goo aytside and see what them daft sods are gettin’ up to, ’fore ayr Bill does summat as ’e shouldn’t.”
Still with Michael dangling between them, John and Phyll turned from the intermittent spectre of the dream-youth and jumped through the front wall of Hazelrigg House, passing through stonework which, in 1645, had been in place less than a decade. Showering down upon the boggy street in a grey snapshot waterfall, the children dusted themselves off then peered into the dark for some sign of the gang’s remaining members.
John spotted them first, still scaring pigeons in the upper reaches of a night sky like blackcurrant cordial, darkness thick and settled at the bottom but diluting in the moonlight higher up. He could see trails of after-images dragged back and forth across the milky firmament like grubby woollen football scarves, and could deduce their pigeon-worrying from the abrupt and unexpected rain of bird-shit, spattering in Marefair’s mud from high above. In John’s opinion, having a bird do its business on your head was even worse for ghosts than it was for the living. Granted, you were spared the fuss of having to wash the repulsive stuff out of your hair and clothes, but on the other hand the droppings fell straight through you and you sort-of felt them, plunging through your skull into your neck, splashing on down to exit through your shoe-soles as a radiating splat of black and white. It came to John that pigeon-shit looked no worse in the ghost-seam’s half-tones than it did in mortal life’s full Technicolor. It was one of those things like remorse or unfulfilment that would still get on your nerves when you were dead.
Phyllis, who’d suffered from the aerial bombardment just as much as John had, lost her temper and announced that she was “gunna adda goo up there and sort ’em ayt”. Making a little hop to get her started, she commenced to swim laboriously up through the seam’s thicker and more buoyant air, doing a variation of the breast-stroke. Only after half a minute, when she was perhaps ten feet above them, did John realise that both he and Michael were intently staring up her frock. He thought that he’d strike up a conversation in an effort to divert them both into something more suitable.
“How do you like the Dead Dead Gang, then, nipper, now you’ve had a chance to get to know us? I’ll tell you for nothing, it’s a lot more fun than being in the army.”
All around them, Marefair was surrendering to blackness. A few couples wandered to and fro between the alley-mouths of Pike or Chalk Lane and the still-lit doors of the Black Lion, soldiers stumbling arm in arm with chortling, whispering women, pressed so close together that they looked like pairs in a licentious, drunk three-legged race. Strewn on the castle’s flank downhill the campfires had all burned down to a sullen glow, and other than the lustful mumblings of the stragglers the only other sound was that of bats, needle-sharp voices threaded round the steeple of St. Peter’s Church. Michael looked up at John from where he stood beside him, his blonde ringlets multiplying with the motion so that he looked for a moment like a tidier Struwwelpeter or a bleached-out gollywog.
“I like it ever such a lot. I like the clambering about in different days, and I think everybody’s nice, especially Phyllis. But I miss my mum and dad and gran and sister and I’d like it if I wiz back with them soon.”
John nodded.
“Well, that’s understandable. I bet your family are real good sorts, or at least if your dad wiz anything to go by. What you should remember, though, wiz that all these adventures what you’re having here are happening in no time at all. Up in the living world you’re only dead for a few minutes, if what everybody’s saying wiz to be believed. Looked at like that, before you know it you’ll be with your parents and this wizzle be forgotten, just as if it hadn’t happened. I’d enjoy it while you can, if I wiz you. Besides, I’ve got an interest in your family and I’m getting quite attached to having you about.”
Michael looked thoughtful, narrowing his eyes as he gazed at the older boy.
“Wiz it because you knew my dad and used to play with him?”
John chuckled, reaching out with four or five left arms to scuff up Michael’s hair.
“Yes, I suppose it’s something like that. I knew all your dad’s side of family, back when I wiz alive. How’s old May getting on, your dad’s mum? Wiz she still a terror? What about your aunt Lou?”
He still wasn’t sure why he was keeping the full story back from Michael, when it wasn’t really in John’s nature to be secretive. He’d wondered, when he’d first heard Michael’s surname, if it might be the same Warren family that he knew, but there’d been no point in mentioning that at the time in case he was mistaken. Then, when it had been confirmed, he’d quite enjoyed having a piece of secret information for himself, something than even Phyllis didn’t know about — although that wasn’t the whole picture, if he was completely honest. What it was, he didn’t want to burden Michael with the truth of who he was or their relationship. He didn’t want the boy or any of his family to hear first-hand the facts about how John had died in France, how scared he’d been, how he’d been trying to work up the courage to desert when they’d come under fire upon that country road. That was the real reason he’d spent all those years haunting a disused turret after he was dead, rather than going straight up to Mansoul. He’d had a guilty conscience, just as much as Mick Malone or Mary Jane or any of the area’s rough sleepers did, because both John and God knew that John was at heart a coward. Better, surely, to let all that rest. Better to keep up his white lie, best to allow the tot who now stood pondering beside him to retain his blissful ignorance of how the world could sometimes be, even in how it treated little boys who came from decent, working families. Michael was still considering John’s questions before venturing his answers.