Bill and Phyllis murmured to each other somewhere nearby. Bill was saying “Well, we must be gunna work out some way ’e can keep ’is memories, ’cause we’ve seen the pictures.” What did that mean? Were they talking about all the pictures on the tiles that Michael still felt half-submerged in? Elsewhere, Tetsy Doddridge was insisting that Drowned Marjorie should sign her name on something. “Won’t you be a sport? It shall take but a moment.” He could hear a faint and rhythmic beat that he at first took for his pulse before remembering he didn’t have one anymore and realising it must be the ticking of a kitchen clock, counting the moments of that timeless world.
At some point later on he was picked up by someone, one of the two older boys to judge from how it felt, and, judging from the clean and dry smell, probably not Reggie Bowler. That meant it was John who carried him, like a limp sack of flour against the taller youngster’s chest and shoulder, from the kitchen into the short passageway and on towards the parlour. Michael heard the other members of the gang clumping and clattering around them and presumed they were all leaving now that teatime was concluded. He was sure that if his mum Doreen were here she’d tell him to wake up, to thank the Doddridge family for having them and say goodbye to everybody properly. He did his best to rouse himself and tried to force his eyelids to creak open, but they wouldn’t budge and anyway he was too snug and comfortable in John’s arms for the moment. He remained content to let it all slip by him in a luminous and rosy fog.
They were now in the parlour and ahead of them he could hear Mr. Doddridge bringing to an end his conversation with the grey-robed builder chap, who Mrs. Gibbs had said was Mr. Aziel. Michael discovered that it was much easier to understand the strange, spiralling rubbish that the angles spoke if you were half asleep. From what he could make out, the gold-wigged doctor of divinity was still interrogating Mr. Aziel upon the subject of suspicious Sam O’Day, asking the worker how the different entities related to each other, all the devils and the ordinary people and the builders, and how all of these connected up to the mysterious “Third Borough”. Doddridge’s guest chuckled and said “Te wysh folm updint”, which instantly unravelled within Michael’s slumbering awareness into something that was only marginally more comprehensible:
“They fold up into you. You fold up into us. We fold up into Him.”
This seemed to both intrigue and satisfy the parson, who hummed thoughtfully before he ventured one last question to the amiable artisan.
“I see. And might I ask if, anywhere in this ingenious arrangement, any of us ever truly had Free Will?”
The lanky angle sounded somehow mournful and apologetic as he answered with a syllable that was apparently the same in English as in his own tongue.
“No.”
After a well-timed pause as if before the punch line of a joke, he went on to pronounce another angle-word that Michael understood almost immediately.
“Dyimoust?”
What this meant was “Did you miss it?”
There was a shocked silence, and then both the reverend doctor and his guest began to laugh uproariously although Michael didn’t see what was so funny. As with the majority of grown-up jokes, he evidently didn’t get it. Like the one that ended ‘If I put a penny in the slot and press the button, will the bells ring?’ He’d had no idea what that one was to do with either, eider, duck-down drifting off into the candyfloss of his snug thoughts.
When the amusement shared by Mr. Doddridge and his visitor had died away, the doctor said his farewells to the children, as did Mrs. Gibbs, Miss Tetsy and her mother. Of these goodbyes, Mr. Doddridge’s was the most lengthy and effusive.
“Thank you, children, for your visit. I hope I shall see you all again, and not just Master Reggie when he comes to study at my afterlife academy. And as for you, young Phyllis Painter, you should know that you and your associates are being trusted with this child because such wiz the will of the Most High. All the experiences you share with him, even your truant capers and transgressions, are the lessons he must learn. That he recall those lessons shall be your conundrum to unpick, though be assured that we who serve Mansoul have every faith in you. As for the fiend we spoke of earlier, it seems apparent he shall have his way at some point, and when that time comes then my best counsel would be to remind you that even the lowest creatures are but the unfolded leaves of the Third Borough and are in the end subservient to His design. Now, be upon your way with our friend Mr. Aziel. Have faith, and do not fear.”
As if from far away, Michael heard Phyllis ask the reverend if what he’d said regarding truant capers and transgressions meant that the Dead Dead Gang could take Michael scrumping for mad apples out at the asylums, without getting into any trouble? Doddridge laughed again, and said that he supposed it did. There followed more goodbyes and Michael felt at least two small, damp kisses on his almost-sleeping cheek, most likely from the doctor’s wife and daughter.
Then there was the brief sensation of elaborate wood-grain as they passed through the door halfway up the church’s western wall. It wasn’t as if Michael suddenly felt cold, simply that he no longer felt the slightest trace of any temperature at all. The smell of Phyllis Painter’s vermin stole was shut off like a tap and he could almost hear the crinkling of the ghost-seam’s cotton wool, stuffing itself into his ears. He opened eyes gluey with ectoplasm to a world of black and white, just as John gently lowered him onto the phosphorescent planking of the Ultraduct, where time boiled up like scalding milk all round them.
Phyllis asked if anybody was still hungry.
THE TREES DON’T NEED TO KNOW
Marjorie Miranda Driscoll was amongst the well-read dead. She hadn’t been much of a reader when she’d followed her dog India into the dark Nene down at Paddy’s Meadow, but she’d caught up in the timeless time since then. She’d loitered, liminal, in libraries, skulked spectrally in sitting rooms and crept, crepuscular, through classes. The bespectacled girl’s tubby, weightless form had bobbed unseen at scholars’ shoulders like a grey, translucent pillow as she’d followed them through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Dickens, into the linguistic hinterlands of Joyce and Eliot with quite a lot of M.R. James and Enid Blyton on the way. She’d enjoyed nearly all of it, particularly Dickens, although she’d remained entirely unimpressed by the demise of Little Nell, who Marjorie considered a theatrical young madam. If she’d written it, somebody would have chucked the whining little bugger in the Thames; see how she handled that.
Not that Marjorie could have written The Old Curiosity Shop, if the truth be told. She knew, despite the recent unexpected flattery from Mr. Aziel and the Doddridge family, that she was nowhere near as good as that. It was exciting, she’d admit, to think that somewhere further down the linger of eternity her novel was already finished, somehow published, and apparently quite well received. However, being a realistic sort, Marjorie thought her future popularity was probably more on account of The Dead Dead Gang’s novelty than any special literary merit. Hardly anybody wrote books after they were dead and even fewer saw their efforts through to ghostly publication, and so she supposed that anyone who did was bound to get a fair bit of attention.
Marjorie was a beginner, she knew that, with only a beginner’s sense of how to craft a narrative or shape a story. She’d worked out a few things on her own — a chapter would seem more complete unto itself if it set up some minor question in the reader’s mind right at the start, then answered it, perhaps in the concluding lines — but other than a smattering of similar devices, she felt horribly under-equipped to deal with the demands that writing a whole book had placed upon her.