What was irritating was that nobody would tell her how her novel ended or how she was meant to get it into print. She’d heard that Mr. Blake still published from a glowing workshop in the higher territories over Lambeth, but that seemed like a long hike along the Ultraduct just on behalf of the eleven sketchy and meandering chapters she’d completed thus far. Still, judging from her admirers within Mansoul’s upper echelons, the stoic little girl accepted that it was a journey she might one day find herself upon. Then she would have a green-and-gold bound copy of her memoir that she could hide in a century-old fantasy of Spring Lane School for Reggie Bowler to find in a dream, which was the thing that had inspired Marjorie’s novel in the first place. When she’d found out where the Dead Dead Gang had got their name from, she’d decided that to write the dream-book whence the name originated would be a dead clever writer’s trick. A fine conceit, as she had learned such things were called — not that she’d ever speak the phrase in earshot of her roughneck phantom colleagues, who would only take the mickey. It was fear of ridicule or even being ostracised that had made the otherwise fearless child feel disinclined to read or write much while she’d been alive. Down in the mortal Boroughs — the First Borough — all you really had was other people, all in the same leaky boat that you were in. Start talking posh or walking round with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man underneath your arm and you risked everybody thinking you were trying to get above yourself. Above them. People might just laugh and call you Brains or Lady Muck at first, but then they’d break your glasses. Even though she didn’t think that any of her current crowd would act like that, she’d still elected to pursue her literary education and commence work on her novel unannounced, so that she wouldn’t look so stupid if she failed.
Although she’d been with her ghost-gang associates for almost every moment since they’d saved her from the Nene Hag, Marjorie had found out that her secret double life as scholar and aspiring author was ridiculously easy to keep up, thanks to the ghost-seam’s solid nature. In the ghost-seam, time was something you could dig through. You could leave whatever you were doing, burrow off to somewhere different — say six months haunting a public reading room — and then dig back to half a second after you’d departed, before anyone had noticed you were gone. Marjorie had her own private existence outside the Dead Dead Gang and assumed the other members more than likely did as well. Phyllis had once said something that led Marjorie to conclude that she had another grown-up life, or lives, elsewhere within the simultaneous reaches of the afterlife, perhaps a husband in one region and a boyfriend in another. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Phyll Painter had lived to a ripe old age and it was only natural that there were different periods in that life that would be dear to her in different ways. Marjorie hadn’t even had the time to form a crush on anyone before she’d waded after India into the night chill of the river, so she didn’t have as many choices. It was the Dead Dead Gang, or the library, or nothing.
That said, Marjorie had been impressed by Tetsy Doddridge. Here was someone who’d been plucked from life at a much younger age than Marjorie, yet who had chosen to grow, posthumously, to a vibrant and attractive woman. It implied that Marjorie could have the same afterlife for herself, if that was what she wanted, and if that was what she dared. She could be taller, slimmer, prettier, without the National Health glasses that she only wore because she’d worn a pair in life. She wouldn’t even have to let her comrades know that she was gallivanting round the district’s spectral nightspots as a lovely debutante, since when she was with them she’d manifest as a four-eyed and podgy ten-year-old, the same as always. Marjorie imagined herself in the arms of some handsome young wraith or other, maybe Reggie Bowler if he grew a foot and smartened himself up a bit, both twirling round a ghostly Salon Ballroom. Wondering momentarily what sex was like, she felt herself blush a profound grey in the colourless continuum of the ghost-seam. Hoping nobody had noticed, the young author focussed herself on her current circumstances to dispel the clouds of heated speculation that had bothered her at intervals since she’d become a writer.
Marjorie was standing on the brilliant boardwalk of the Ultraduct with the Dead Dead Gang and the builder, Mr. Aziel. Looking out across its alabaster rail, they watched as all the idle moments of the Boroughs piled themselves up into decades: centuries of cobblers and crusaders, with the castle blooming like a huge and heavy granite rose only to wither with its petal bulwarks picked or fallen, one by one. Time steamed, and in its vapour-curls fugitive images and instants flared and melted as the past and future churned together, simultaneously and forever. One of the recycled flickering vignettes in particular caught Marjorie’s attention, blazing into being to go through its motions before vanishing, with this cycle repeating every few subjective minutes: on a low stone wall that had sprung up around the southerly front side of Doddridge Church down to her left, she saw a pair of oldish-looking men sitting there side by side, bent over double and convulsed with laughter. One of the two blokes, the tallest one, looked like he might be queer, dressed in a fluffy, girlish sweater with his messy hair down to his shoulders and what looked like make-up on his face. The other one, weeping with mirth beside his freakish friend, was really quite good-looking, even though he’d gone a bit bald at the front. Marjorie had the fuzzy and uncertain sense that she might know this second man from somewhere; that she might have run into him once but had forgotten it. She was just puzzling over this when lanky John distracted her by calling out from where he stood beside the rail, two dead kids and a builder to her right.
“Well, blow me. Come and look what I’ve found, nipper. Phyllis, hold him up so he can see what’s carved onto this railing.”
John was talking to the new boy, Michael Warren. Evidently, the tall lad had found something of note inscribed on the translucent balustrade that edged the Ultraduct. As Phyllis Painter followed John’s instructions, lifting up the dressing gown-clad toddler so that he could see, Marjorie and the other phantom children crowded round them as did Mr. Aziel, anxious for a peek at the discovery. Marjorie, at the group’s rear and herself not that much taller than the Warren kid, had to make do with second-hand descriptions, being unable to look at the graffiti for herself. She made sure she remembered all the details, though, convinced that she would need them when she wrote up her next chapter, or “The Riddle of the Choking Child” as she’d been recently informed that she was going to call it. John was pointing out something scratched on the handrail to the infant.
“See? There, dug into the marble-work or whatever it wiz, right where I’m pointing. ‘Snowy Vernall springs eternal’. That’s your granddad, that wiz. No, hang on. It’s your great-granddad. He must have been up here on the Ultraduct at some point, although Lord knows what he used to carve his name in the stone rail like that … unless he’d pinched one of the angles’ chisels.”
It was at this point that Mr. Aziel interjected, the lugubrious artisan sounding somehow annoyed, sad and reluctantly amused at the same time as he pronounced his brief burst of cascading gibberish.
“Hevdrin fawgs mobz cluptyx.”
This unfolded, in a part of Marjorie’s mind that seemingly existed only for the purpose of deciphering builder-talk, into a rolling and fluorescent speech that would have taken a good twenty minutes to read out, and then condensed again into the normal English of the chubby little girl’s own summary: