By now they’d crossed Chalk Lane and were progressing over the peculiar and unfolded stretch of wasteland that extended to the high wall of St. Andrew’s Road. This was a startling feature of the landscape, even by the standards of the ghost-seam, and so Marjorie was not at all surprised when Michael Warren asked the gang to pause so he could take a look at it. From what she’d pieced together from the ghostly conversations that she’d overheard, Marjorie understood the patch of rough ground to be an example of astral subsidence, very like the overlapped asylums that the children were at present heading for. She found the concept of ethereal collapse obscurely frightening, the thought that even the eternal had its breakable and transient components, and yet here beneath her was the evidence.
Part of the higher reaches of Mansoul, made out of congealed dreams and memories, had tumbled through into the ghost-seam, so that the grey half-world was itself pressed down into the mud and puddle-sumps of the material domain. This lowest, earthly level, as seen from the Ultraduct, seemed to have been a wilderness for some considerable time, without the constant rise and fall of mortal dwellings that seethed everywhere about. Only the craggy contour lines of the neglected land were warping, shifting up and down, with straggly trees and bushes flowering briefly into life before they were sucked back into the underlying clay, like transient blooms of algae. On this relatively tiny scrap of physically-existent dirt, the massively expanded and imaginary structures of Mansoul had fallen in, so that the area that they were looking down on seemed in consequence immense: a yawning earthworks where straight edges were cut into looming cliffs of flint and limestone and compacted soil. What were no more than puddles down there on the bumpy waste ground of the mortal level were also refracted in the higher spaces that had caved in from above, the separate spills of petrol-coloured rain unwrapping into an opaque lagoon that lapped against the towering and irregular mud walls. Seen from above the excavation looked enormous, prehistoric, like a monstrous rock pool where the escaped fantasies of Mansoul or back-broken wraiths from the crushed ghost-seam might be scuttling like awful crabs beneath the black and silver shiver of the lake’s reflective surface. All in all, it looked like a tremendous place for scruffy little apparitions to have fun in, and predictably the Warren toddler asked if they could clamber down and play there for a while. Phyllis refused, of course, though not in an unkindly way. Something about Phyll Painter’s attitude to Michael Warren seemed to have changed drastically since they’d all been to visit Doddridge Church, at least in Marjorie’s opinion.
“If that’s where yer fancy gooin’ then we’ll ’ave a poke abayt there a bit later, on ayr way back from the madhouses. We’ll goo and do ayr bit o’ scrumpin’ first, though, so we won’t be playin’ on an empty stomach and get shirty with each other. ’Ow does that saynd?”
This seemed to mollify their mascot, and so they continued on their way, over the deep plunge of St. Andrew’s Road and further still, across the railway station and the river, which as usual made Marjorie think of her bit of bad luck, and the Nene Hag.
She had known that she was going to drown the moment that the toecaps of her scuffed shoes were unable to locate the river bottom and she’d at last understood the simple physics of her situation. Still, she’d had Victorian stories read to her where heroines slipped peacefully and elegantly to a watery death, their petticoats billowing up around them, opening like lace anemones, which all made drowning sound like quite an easy, dignified and above all poetic way to die. That had, of course, turned out to be a load of shit.
In her post-mortem readings she had learned that the first stage of drowning was what experts called “the surface struggle”, which in Marjorie’s own view was a succinct and accurate description of the process, or at least as she remembered it: the first thing is the frightening realisation that you’re having difficulty keeping your head up where there’s still air for you to breathe. Then, if you can’t swim, what you try to do is try to climb out of the river as if you’re caught in a flow of stepladders rather than icy water. When that doesn’t work you thrash around in desperation for a bit and then get tired, and stop for just a second, and go under. As you sink, you’ll hold your breath and wait for the Victorian swoon to come, so that you won’t know anything about what’s happening, but it doesn’t, and eventually you can’t help …
Marjorie was shuddering and squirming at the same time as she thought about it. The idea, the memory of it, set her ghostly teeth on edge and made her phantom toes curl up.
Eventually you can’t help opening your mouth and breathing in some water, then that makes you cough so that you inhale a lot more and … aarrgh. She couldn’t stand it, the remembered black ache in her chest. That dreadful instant when you understand that you will never draw a breath again, and that your life is finished as the empty, silent darkness at the edges of your sight begins to crowd into the centre and the pain and horror is all happening to someone else; to that fat, specky little girl down there.
It was the next bit, though — the stage of drowning that is talked of everywhere but very seldom written of in reputable journals — that had been the point where everything became all weird and unexpected. This was the supposed juncture of the drowning process where “you see your whole life flash before your eyes”, and yes, Marjorie could confirm from personal experience that this was just what happened, although not quite in the fashion that the phrase would lead you to expect. Marjorie had assumed that when your whole life flashed before your eyes it would be like an old Mack Sennett film and full of crackling people flashing through each comical or poignant episode. The actuality of what had opened up inside her mind as she had drifted down towards the river-bottom’s rising sediments with her lungs full of freezing green, however, had been nothing like that. For one thing, the Keystone Kops scenario that she’d envisaged would have had its giddy and accelerated incidents all happening in a sequence, chronologically, with one thing following another. This came nowhere near describing the phenomenon that Marjorie had subsequently learned was called “The Life Review”.
It had been a mosaic of moments, an arrangement like the Delft tiles Marjorie had lately noticed all around the fireplace at the Doddridge house. Each vital second of her life was there as an exquisite moving miniature, filled with the most intense significance and limned in colours so profound they blazed, yet not set out in any noticeable order. Furthermore, each scene was less a painted vignette than it was a whole experience, so that to look on a depicted instant was to live through it again, with all its smells and sounds and words and thoughts intact, its shockingly strong pleasures and its crystal-sharp ordeals.
The glowing, living pictures weren’t a bit like, say, for instance, The Rake’s Progress, in that firstly they weren’t all arrayed as a progression of events, and secondly they didn’t have a moral. Some of the illuminated episodes portrayed deeds Marjorie was not particularly proud of, some showed what she thought of as her better side, and the majority appeared to be entirely neutral, even insignificant. Nowhere in any of the glimmering vignettes, though, did she feel a sense of moral judgement, or have the impression that one likeness represented good things she’d accomplished while another signified the bad she’d brought about. Instead, the foremost apprehension that accompanied the tessellated drift of imagery was, overwhelmingly, one of responsibility: these, good or bad, were things that Marjorie had done.
As an example, she remembered now one of what, at the time, had seemed like the more humdrum and less promising scenarios. Amongst the mosaic tableaux spread before her was a study in soft browns and greys, Marjorie and her mother in the unlit kitchen of their house in Cromwell Street. Her mum fussed at the stove, scrawny and woebegone, with an expression of exasperation as her little daughter tugged her skirts and pleaded with her. Studying the moment as it hovered with its fellows in the shimmering curtain honeycombed with moving images that hung before her, Marjorie had lived it all again down to its most minuscule detail. She had smelled once more the nothing-scent of suet off the glutinous bacon-and-onion roll her mother was preparing, and had heard the instantly-familiar rhythm of the dented brass tap as its signature drip-pattern fell into the old stone sink. One of the Bakelite stems of her ugly spectacles was chafing over her right ear, where it had made a sore pink place, and most of all she relived every impulse, every notion that had crossed her mind and every syllable that passed her lips as she’d stood in the gloomy kitchen, badgering her poor mother relentlessly, the same words over and over again. “Can we, mum? Can we have a dog? Why can’t we have a dog, mum? Mum? Mum, can we? I’d look after it. Mum, can we have a dog?”