The Dead Dead Gang wandered, chatting, whistling and singing down the brilliant boardwalk as it swept over St. James’s End, swooping above the Weedon Road and out to Duston. Here, on the more recent strata of the simultaneous timescape, there were nicer homes, at least when compared with the Boroughs’ soot-cauled terraces. Semi-detached, these were the homes of families who, through hard work or luck, had managed to put a considerable and literal distance between themselves and the downtrodden neighbourhoods their parents had been born in. Houses like the ones in Duston, not the sweet stone cottages of the original outlying village but the later dwellings, always looked to Marjorie as if they had expressions of pained condescension on their big flat faces, probably something to do with the arrangement of those wide and airy modern windows. They all looked as if somebody had just dropped one. Marjorie’s own view was that those who decried it very probably supplied it.
From her current vantage, looking down upon the architecture of a dozen centuries occurring all at once, Marjorie couldn’t see the people, live or dead, who must presumably be swarming through the different structures as they rose and fell. Compared with static streets or buildings, ghosts and living people never stayed still long enough to register in the accelerated urban simmer that was visible from up here on the Ultraduct. Even so, Marjorie had ventured out this way before, down in the ordinary ghost-seam, and she knew about the phantoms who resided in the drained grey cul-de-sacs and crescents that the gang were passing over, although they were nowhere to be seen at present.
She knew, for example, that the pleasant mews beneath them had a much more crowded ghost-seam than did the run-down lanes of the Boroughs. Whereas in the phantom half-world superimposed over Scarletwell Street you might bump into perhaps another ghost or two at any given time, in this more well-to-do location there were often dozens of dead doctors, bankers, office managers and neatly coiffured housewives loitering beside well-tended flowerbeds or running wistful, immaterial hands over the contours of parked cars. In the sedate front parlours of homes sold by grown-up children following their parents’ deaths you would find uncommunicative deceased couples criticising the new owner’s renovations, fretting endlessly about whether the value of their former property was going up or down. Sometimes you’d see a crowd of them: an otherworldly civic action group standing there glumly on the edges of some previously rural meadow where they’d used to walk their Labradors and where a new council estate was now under construction. Either that or they’d convene in the back garden of whatever Pakistani couple had just moved into the area, simply to mutter disapprovingly and glare, these demonstrations obviously rendered doubly futile by the protestors’ invisibility. That must be, Marjorie concluded, why they never bothered making any placards.
It was funny, now she thought about it, all the differences there were between the spirit world above the Boroughs and the one over this better class of residences. The main difference, paradoxically enough, was that down in the Boroughs there was nothing like the number of rough sleepers, people resting only fitfully in their own afterlives. Moreover, the unhappy spectres of the poorer neighbourhood were for the most part burdened only by low self-esteem, a sense that they weren’t good enough at life to dwell up in the higher district of Mansoul. That clearly wasn’t what was keeping the successful types below tied to their earthly habitats, however. Was it, then, the opposite? Was the suburban ghost-seam that the gang were passing over occupied by souls that felt they were too good for Heaven?
No. No, Marjorie suspected that it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. Perhaps it was more that the poor had fewer things in their material lives that they were reluctant to give up. There wasn’t much point, after all, in hanging round the home in which you’d lived your life when it had been demolished or passed on to other council tenants. Not when you were only renting anyway. It was much better to go up into the “many mansions” of Mansoul, the way that the majority of Boroughs people did. The spirits around these parts simply didn’t have the same incentives to salvation as they did where Marjorie had come from, but she was still not wholly convinced by her own argument. An inability to let go of material possessions seemed an insufficient reason to forgo the glories of the Second Borough, even if you were ridiculously posh. It didn’t ring true. Anyway, there were a lot of lovely people in Mansoul who were by no means working class and yet who’d rushed Upstairs without a second thought the instant that their lives were over. Look at Mr. Doddridge and his family. It must be something else, some other factor that prevented such a lot of these suburbanites from moving up to the eternal avenues above.
It came to her after a moment’s thought that it was more than likely status. That was probably the word that her beginner-writer’s mind was searching for. The well-off phantoms down beneath her shunned Mansoul because one’s earthly status had no meaning there. Other than builders, devils, Vernalls, deathmongers and special cases like the Doddridge family or Mr. Bunyan, Mansoul was without rank. One soul could not be rated superior to another, save for in whatever individual innate virtues they might happen to possess, and even that was in the eye of the beholder. For those people, of whatever class, who’d never really been concerned by status, moving up into Mansoul was not a difficulty. On the other hand, for those who could not bear that radiant commonality, it was to all intents and purposes impossible.
She thought about the few scraps of the Bible that she could recall from Sunday school, the bit about the camel squeezing through the needle’s eye and how rich people would find it as hard to enter Heaven. When she’d heard that, she’d assumed there must be some bylaw in paradise prohibiting the posh from getting in, but now she realised it wasn’t like that. There was no door-policy in Mansoul. People kept themselves out, rich and poor alike, either because they thought they were too good to mingle, or too bad.
Pursuing the idea — it might turn out to be a poem or short story one day, who could say — Marjorie felt that it could also be applied to the born aristocracy, those who were truly posh and truly rich, the upper classes with their country seats or castles in Northamptonshire’s outlying towns and villages. By definition, they’d have more material possessions to relinquish and more status to give up than anyone. No wonder there were so few toffs in Mansoul. Oh, you got the odd one, rarities who’d been born to the purple but had never placed much stock in their position or had even turned their backs on it, but they were in a vanishingly small minority. The vast majority of people Upstairs were the working classes of a dozen or more centuries, with a comfortable rump of middling sorts and then a scattering of isolated Earls, Lords and repentant squires like golden pimples on that rump.
Meanwhile the ghost-seam of the Boroughs was in consequence mostly deserted, and these streets out in the suburbs appeared relatively thick with posthumous professionals and suchlike by comparison. What must the stately homes be like? Packed with innumerable generations’ revenants and banshees bearing medieval grudges, everybody claiming seniority and wondering where all the underlings had gone … Marjorie shuddered even as she sniggered. It was hardly any wonder that such fancy places were notoriously haunted: they were dangerously overpopulated, creaking at their stone seams with ancestral ghouls and spectres, twenty to a parlour, contravening astral fire and safety regulations. It was strange to think of all the regal piles and palaces as overcrowded wraith-slums, heaving ghostly tenements with syphilitic great-great-great-grand-uncle Percy raving about Gladstone in the next room, but in some ways the idea made perfect sense. The first shall be the last, and all of that. Justice above the Street.