“That’s good. We’re ’ere before they’ve properly got started. We can watch the ’ole thing now, from start ter finish.”
Michael had been puzzled.
“Who are those two ladies? I thought we wiz coming here to see the Great Fire of Northampton.”
Phyllis looked at Michael patiently, patting his tartan sleeve as she explained.
“They are the Gret Fire o’ Northampton.”
Tall John butted in.
“Phyllis wiz right. That’s why nobody else can see ’em, and that’s why their hair wiz coloured when the rest of us are all in black and white. If you look closer, it’s not hair at all. It’s flames. They’re Salamanders.”
The fire-headed women tripped and laughed amongst the dross of Mary’s Street. They looked enough alike for Michael to be sure that they were sisters, with the plumper of the pair being perhaps nineteen or twenty and the leaner one some five years younger, barely in her teens. He noticed that right at the bottoms of their tummies, where their willies should have been, the little patch of hair they had was made of orange fire as well, with stray sparks drifting up around their belly-buttons. They swung lazily around the wooden posts supporting musty barns and tightrope-walked along the duckboards. Neither of them spoke a word — Michael was somehow sure they couldn’t — but communicated only in shrill laughs and giggles that were reminiscent of the way that early-morning songbirds talked together. The two didn’t seem to have a single thought between them that was not about their laughter or their random, skittering dance. They were so happy and carefree that they looked almost idiotic.
Seeming to guess what the little boy was thinking, Phyllis gently put him straight.
“I know they look ’alf sharp, but that’s just ’ow they are. They don’t ’ave proper thoughts or feelings like we ’ave ’em. They’re all spirit. They’re all urge, all fire. Me and Bill saw ’em first, before we started up the Dead Dead Gang. We’d both been dayn to Beckett’s Park, Cow Medder, in the fourteen-’undreds at the old War o’ the Roses, and we wiz just diggin’ ayr way back up through the sixteenth century. Abayt 1516 we broke through into this one day where everything wiz like a bloody gret inferno with the Boroughs burning dayn araynd us, and this wiz when there weren’t much more to Northampton than the Boroughs, mind you.
“The two Salamanders, the two sisters, they wiz pirouettin’ through the blaze and settin’ fire to everythin’ they touched. O’ course, they wiz both younger by a century or two in them days. The plump girl, the eldest one, she looked abayt eleven and the youngest one wiz only five or somethin’. They wiz trottin’ back and forth between the burnin’ ’ouses, carrying the fire with ’em in their cupped ’ands and then splashin’ it all over everywhere like two kids playin’ with a tub o’ water. Only it weren’t water.
“I’ve met ghosts who’ve told me abayt when the two of ’em were first seen araynd ’ere. That wiz twelve-sixty-somethin’, when ’Enry the Third ordered the town burned dayn and ransacked as a punishment for sidin’ with de Montfort and the rebel students. From what these old-timers told me, when King ’Enry’s men were let into the Boroughs through a big ’ole in the priory wall dayn Andrew’s Road, the sisters came in through it with them, walkin’ naked and invisible beside the ’orses. The big girl looked to be six then, and was carryin’ ’er baby sister in ’er arms. Nobody’s ever ’eard ’em say a word. They only giggle and set light to things.”
The ghost gang watched the trilling, tittering duo as they flounced from house to house along seventeenth century St. Mary’s Street, slipping between the traders and the scowling, put-on housewives without anybody knowing they were there. Their hair billowed behind them on the westerly in trailing orange pennants, flickering and hazardous. Seeing them, Michael noticed for the first time just how well grey and bright orange went together, like a bloated morning sun seen through the fog above Victoria Park. In their meandering the women seemed to gravitate towards a single dwelling, a thatched house on the Pike Lane side of the street, a little closer to Horsemarket than the children were.
“Come on. It looks like that’s the ’ouse. Let’s goo and ’ave a butchers at ’em when they set it orf.”
Following Phyllis’s suggestion the dead urchins doppelganged towards the ordinary-looking dwelling, just in time to pursue the two sisters in through its front door, a poorly-fitting thing propped open by a brick. Inside, the downstairs of the cottage was a single room, gloomy and cluttered, evidently serving as a front room, living room, kitchen and bathroom all rolled into one. An infant with a dirty nose crawled on the coarse rugs that were spread about a cold brick floor, while by the open hearth a woman who appeared too old to be the baby’s mum stood frying scraps of meat in melted dripping, shaking the round-bottomed iron pan she held above the fireplace in one hand. At the same time, using her other hand, she stirred a clay jug of what turned out to be batter with a wooden spoon. The way that the old lady could do both things at the same time impressed Michael. When he’d watched his mum and gran cook in their kitchen down St. Andrew’s Road, they’d always split the chores so that each of them only had to do one thing at once. The other members of the Dead Dead Gang were nodding knowingly, all except Bill who was too busy ogling the naked fire-nymphs as they poked inquisitively round the crowded, cosy living space.
“She’s makin’ a Bake Pudden. When she’s stirred the batter up, she’ll tip it in atop the meat, then put the ’ole lot in the oven — that’s the little black iron door beside the fireplace — until it’s done. A lot o’ people say as Yorkshire Puddin’ is a recipe them northern buggers pinched from us, but were too tight to put the bits o’ meat in. It was just a way of makin’ up a proper meal from leftovers and odds and ends.”
As Phyllis wandered into the specifics of Bake Pudden-making and its history, Michael was watching the two sisters in their progress round the murky, fire-lit room. Surprisingly, they seemed uninterested in the fireplace itself and were converging on a patch of carpet to the far side of the central wooden table, where the crawling infant was investigating a fat garden spider that had probably retreated indoors at the first hint of a chill to the September air. The Salamanders made a great fuss of the baby, stooping down and chuckling in their musical brass wind-chime voices to it while they pulled a lot of silly, grinning faces.
Michael realised with a start that the small child, barely a year old from the look of him, could see the snickering, flickering young women. The tot’s gaze was shifting back and forth, tracking the movement of their bonfire beehive hairdos as they wavered in the drafts blown from the open door. The Salamanders winked and smirked and played games, walking their slim fingers back and forth along the table’s edge like tiny pairs of legs to catch the babe’s attention as it crawled there on the floor below. They marched their digits over the piled apples in a wooden fruit bowl resting on the tabletop, cooing and beaming at their fascinated audience of one. The baby gurgled happily as it watched the two flame-haired women from its spot down near the dangling hem of a slipped tablecloth that looked like it had previously seen service as a lady’s shawl. Only when the child’s chubby, grubby hand reached for the cloth’s fringed edge did Michael realise what the fire-sprites were up to. He called out a garbled warning to the others — “Look! The fieries want to bake the maybe start an appleanch!” — but by the time they’d worked out what he meant, it was too late.
Things came together like the comically elaborate machinery in a cartoon: the baby grabbed the hanging makeshift tablecloth, thus dragging the heaped fruit-bowl to the table’s edge, then over it. Missing the child the wooden bowl fell clattering to the rug, although one of its bouncing apples struck the startled mite above his eye and made him wail. Alarmed, the stooped old woman who was possibly the baby’s grandmother turned from her cooking to see what was up, at which point the round-bottomed iron pan that she was using tipped up slightly, spilling melted fat into the blazing hearth and setting fire to the pan’s contents simultaneously. The hissing gout of flame resulting from this momentary carelessness surged upward to ignite the dusters hanging with the pots and saucepans from the mantelpiece, causing the by-now frightened and confused old dear to reach out with her ladle, batting the offending blazing rags down from the hearthside to the brick floor and, disastrously, one of the dusty rugs. Within about five seconds nearly everything that could be on fire was. The woman stood there staring in stunned disbelief at what she’d done for a few instants, then ran round the table to scoop up the howling tot before she hauled it through the front door, shrieking “Fire!” as they fell stumbling out into St. Mary’s Street.