From Bill’s own lifetime, his most striking anecdote about the place had been one that he didn’t even feature in himself. It had been there in Martin’s Yard, as he recalled, that the police had placed surveillance officers when they were keeping an eye on the land along the far end of St. Andrew’s Road belonging to Paul Baker, a notorious villain Bill had known back in the day. The coppers had thought Baker might be hiding loot from some bank job or other on the property, and had their suspicions raised when they’d spotted two shady types who’d appeared to be tunnelling into the fifty-year-old piles of ashes and composted waste that hulked from Baker’s territory.
In actuality, these two supposed accomplices had been Bill’s old mates Roman Thompson and Ted Tripp. Ted had been an accomplished and discerning burglar who only burgled stately homes, while Rome had been a fearless union fighter and a celebrated all-round nut job. They’d been on Paul Baker’s patch of ground with his permission, digging in the mounds of compressed mud and cinders dumped there decades earlier as waste from the Destructor up in Bath Street. Ted and Roman had been on a hunt for old Victorian stone bottles, the kind with the little marble for a stopper, for which they could likely get a few bob up at the antique shops. Rome, who’d always taken reckless courage to the point of death-wish, had been tunnelling into the heap’s side, tempted further in and further still by an enticing partial glimpse of the words ‘ginger beer’ upon a curving surface. In the end, there’d only been his ankles sticking out, which had been when the entire hillock had decided to collapse on top of Roman Thompson.
Ted, a sturdy chap considering his size, had taken hold of Roman’s feet and hauled him from the suffocating dirt and clinker in a great surge of adrenaline. It was at this point that some two or three cars full of coppers, who’d been watching the whole episode from up St. Martin’s Yard, had roared onto Paul Baker’s premises and had come screeching to a halt beside the thoroughly disoriented pair. Bill hadn’t known what the police were hoping to achieve by their manoeuvre, but he’d bet they weren’t expecting the appalling sight of Roman Thompson, covered head to toe in black filth, hair and beard plastered to muddy spikes and his crazed, furious eyes blazing amidst the soot and mire. It had occurred to Bill, as he’d thought back upon the incident from there in Martin’s Yard, nosing around with Reggie, Marjorie and Michael, that if not for Ted Tripp’s timely actions, the Destructor would have killed Rome Thompson even after it had been demolished for the better part of forty years. If Bill had been the superstitious type, the sort who readily believed in demons, ghosts and thousand-yard-long river monsters, he might even have concluded that this had been the Destructor’s murderous intent.
As they’d continued wandering around the reconditioning yard — Bill hadn’t known what time it was, except that it was clearly outside working hours — they’d come at last upon about a dozen drums that had been set apart from all the rest, perhaps to begin work upon first thing the morning following. One of the battered metal cylinders, which stood a yard or two away from its companions, had a strip of tape dangling from it; its fierce warning-notice trailing into grit and oily puddles where it had become detached at one end.
Destiny. Fate. Kismet. Bingo.
Bill, delighted that for once in his precarious existence things seemed to be working out as planned, had organised the other three ghost-children as if for a game of trains. Since Reggie was the tallest, Bill had let him be the locomotive at the front of their impromptu conga line, with Michael, Marjorie and Bill himself playing the coal tender and coaches. With Reg Bowler trying hard to make appropriate train-whistle sounds and puffing noises, they’d set off in a restricted circle round the isolated drum, chugging around their miniature loop of imaginary track as if they were pretending to be a toy train rather than a full-sized one.
Even in the sluggish atmospherics of the ghost-seam they had quickly gathered speed, as Bill had learned would happen if there were enough of you all pushing. Circling faster and still faster, their pursuing after-images had fused into what must have looked from outside like a grey and spinning giant doughnut made of blur: a torus, as Bill had heard this apparently important shape described by Mansoul’s brainier inhabitants. About the bottom of the drum, the dust and fag-ends had begun to get caught up in the rotating currents of the mini-whirlwind that the phantom kids had been creating. Glittering metallic toffee-wrappers and spent matches spiralled up into the night, and Bill had shouted above Reggie Bowler’s dopey sound effects for the Victorian urchin to run faster. The detached end of the warning tape had started lifting itself from the pool of water, oil, and indeterminate hazardous chemicals that it was draped in, flapping dolefully, with toxic droplets flung out from its snapping, fluttering extremities. Bill had called out to Reg again, to tell him he was running like a girl, which had resulted in the anger-fuelled acceleration Bill had hoped for. Soon the drum had been wrapped tight in a tornado of revolving lolly-sticks and spinning grit, the length of tape standing straight up into the darkness over the container, rattling against the cyclone like a tethered kite.
Eventually the other end had come unstuck as well, at which point Bill had yelled for Reg to stop and they’d all run into each other, falling over in a breathless, laughing heap. The roughneck spectres had sat in St. Martin’s Yard and watched while the soiled streamer sailed away, bowling across the property’s enclosing fence and off into the sodium-lamp sparkle of the night. Mission accomplished, even if nobody except Bill had known precisely what the mission was.
They hadn’t hung about long after that. They’d bounced and swum and doggy-paddled up into the windswept firmament as they’d returned to the unfolded earthworks, back the way they’d come, treading the moonlight over Spencer Bridge and the whore-magnet of the overnight long-distance lorry park. This was tucked in the corner where the bridge met with Crane Hill and the St. Andrew’s Road, the transport café that had previously been a public lavatory and, prior to that, a slipper-baths. This had become a major point of trade that had supplied the customers who drew the girls, who brought the pimps, who dealt the drugs, which bred the guns that shot the kids who lived in the house that crack built. Even though Bill had lived a fair way into that current century, the twenty-first — much longer than he’d been expecting to, at any rate — he’d found that visiting the period made him just as uncomfortable as it made Reggie Bowler or, to judge from her expression, Marjorie.
It had been something in the way the streets and factories and houses looked from up above, something that made you think of all the sacrifices and the struggles, the ambitions and the childbirths and the deaths and disappointments that those doll-sized little homes had seen across the years, all of it leading up to what, exactly? Bill had been unable to suppress the melancholy feelings that things had been meant to turn out a lot better than the way they had. The world that everybody had been given hadn’t been the one that they’d been promised, that they’d been expecting, that they’d been supposed to get. Although when Bill had thought about the state Mansoul was in during these early reaches of the new millennium, the damage done by the Destructor and its widening arc of influence, he couldn’t say he was surprised. The modern streets of heaven were in terrible condition, right here at the divinely appointed centre of the country’s fabric. Was it any wonder, Bill had mused, that present-day English society should start to fall to bits, start to unravel, as the burn-hole in the middle of its painstakingly-woven fibres had begun to spread, to gradually unpick the whole of the material?