“Tom? Look, we wiz sent up ’ere to look for an old tramp called Freddy Allen. Could you ask if anybody’s seen ’im anywhere?”
The corners of the maestro’s eyes crinkled with mirth. Bill thought that Tom’s admirers had been wrong when they’d said that he was like Falstaff. Rather, he was more the man that Falstaff wished he was. His voice, when he called down to Bill over the hubbub, possessed the endearing creak of honey casks or kegs of mead.
“Hahaar! As if I could say no to little Bert the Stab! I’ll see to it immediately.”
Turning his personal volume to eleven, the seasoned performer next addressed the bustling room. All conversation stopped as the attendant phantoms paid attention to this noisy soul who seemed to be dressed as a monstrous bag of sweets. Even the wooden torture-victim at the bar and his bull-dyke tormentor stopped what they were doing so that they could listen.
“HahaHAAAR! Lamias and gentlemen, boys and ghouls, can I have your attention for a moment PLEASE! Thank you. You’re very kind. You’re very generous for a crowd of unsuccessful coffin-dodgers. Now, does anybody know the whereabouts of somebody called … Freddy Allen was it? Freddy Allen. Is he in heaven or is he in hell, that damned elusive pimpernel? Hahaaaar!”
Jem Perrit, pausing for a moment in his trampling of the bulging mask-face back into the floorboards, raised his black and flapping crow-voice in the sudden silence.
“Fred Allen’s dayn the place along the end o’ Sheep Street, Bird in ’And or Edge O’ Tayn or whatever they calls it now. The breather pub. ’E’s dayn there with that ’alf-sharp lad o’ mine. When are we gunna ’a’ some music, then?”
That was the long and short of it. Bidding a fond farewell to Bill and Michael, Hall had drifted like some playschool sea-mine through a lapping scum-tide of the place’s patrons, making for the spot where his accompanists were tuning up. The two ghost-children, their corpulent cover gone, rushed for the bar door and went down the staircase in one long, slow jump, with Bill still holding Michael’s hand as he had been throughout. The infant hadn’t said a word during their visit to the phantom watering-hole. He’d simply stood there, rooted to the spot with terror, staring transfixed at Mangle-the-cat and all the other monsters, the poor little bugger. Bill wished that he hadn’t had to take the toddler up there with him, but it had helped ensure Bill’s own safety and besides, wherever they took Michael would turn out to be where he was meant to go. That was what Phill Doddridge had said.
They reached the street door, bursting out onto the lamp-lit walkway where their friends were waiting for them. Slamming the air-door back to its 2D state behind him, Bill informed Phyll as to the suspected whereabouts of Freddy Allen, upon which the gang took off for Sheep Street. Swimming through the air or bouncing upwards from a standing start, the gang ascended from the underpass and smeared themselves across the busy traffic junction of the Mayorhold, after-pictures mingling with the exhaust fumes as they poured into the mouth of Broad Street.
The ghost-kids raced down the grimly functional dual carriageway along the three-foot high raised concrete wall that was its central reservation, rivers of bright light and metal flowing in opposed directions to each side of them. They were approaching Regent Square, where Sheep Street and Broad Street converged, north-eastern limit of the Boroughs that was marked upon the angle’s trilliard table with a crudely-rendered skull, the corner-pocket of demise, death’s quadrant. This was where they’d burned the witches and the heretics, where they’d stuck heads on spikes, with astral remnants of these dreadful moments sometimes visible on a clear day, despite the intervening centuries. It struck Bill forcefully, not for the first time, what an unbelievably strange place the Boroughs was and always had been.
Bill had not been born down in the area, nor had he lived there, but it was the place his mum’s side of the family had come from. Bill, like stately-home-invader Ted Tripp, had been raised a Kingsley boy, but from an early age he’d known about the Boroughs and its alternately wondrous or disturbing aura. The district’s split personality was nicely illustrated by that time when Bill had been comparing childhood anecdotes with Alma, the unnerving elder sister of the wee ghost he was just then chaperoning along Broad Street. Alma had described an incident when she’d been visiting her fearsome-sounding grandma, May, who’d lived down Green Street. May had chicken-coops in her back yard, apparently, as did a lot of people during those days of post-war austerity. Alma had dreamily recalled the magical occasion when she’d been called by her dad to have a look at what was happening in her nan’s kitchen. Sitting on the top stone step, she’d gazed down at the sunken floor, which was completely carpeted with fluffy yellow chicks, chirping and stumbling against each other on their new legs. That was the idyllic aspect of the Boroughs, while the anecdote that Bill had countered with, though similar in many ways, reflected the old neighbourhood’s more startling face.
Bill, too, had been out visiting a grandparent who lived down in the Boroughs, though in Bill’s case it had been his granddad’s house in Compton Street. He’d been accompanied by a parent, just like Alma had, albeit by his mother rather than his dad, and there had been a miracle of nature in the kitchen, although nowhere near as charming as the Easter vision Alma had remembered. What it was, Bill’s granddad used to catch and jelly his own eel. On the occasion when five-year-old Bill and his mum had been visiting, the old man had just brought home a fresh load of elvers, baby eel he’d netted from the wriggling hordes that were then currently migrating up the River Nene. He’d got them in a big iron pot, its lid held down securely, and was taking them into the kitchen so that he could kill and skin them. Bill had only wanted to see all the little eel, and even though his mum and granddad had done their best to dissuade him, although they’d explained that the eel would be released in a sealed kitchen which would not be opened up until the job was done, he’d still insisted. Even at that age, he’d usually had his own way, and even at that age it had all usually ended up as something dreadful. This occasion had been no exception. He’d followed his grandfather into the little kitchen and his mum had shut the door behind him, from the other side. She wasn’t stupid, and knew what was coming next. Bill’s granddad had then cautiously removed the iron cover from the pot.
The slippery black question-marks had boiled up in a horrifying rush from the receptacle, desperate for liberty, and had gone everywhere. There must have been at least two hundred of the fucking things, slivers of inner-tube with tiny staring eyes, rippling across the worn tiles of the kitchen floor and somehow pouring themselves up the walls, the door, the table-legs, the screaming five-year-old. They’d been all over him, inside his clothes and in his ginger hair, and he had realised too late why no one would be opening the kitchen door to let him out until all this was over. Grim-faced and, with time, completely drenched in eel-blood, Bill’s grandfather had beheaded and then skinned the slithering abominations by the handful. It still took a good half-hour, by which time young Bill had been absolutely traumatised, standing there with the shakes, staring and mumbling, nowhere near as pleased with the experience as Alma had been by her lovely little chickens. But then that was what the Boroughs had been like, he thought now: fluffy sentiment next door to wriggling fear and madness.
The ghost-gang had by now reached the end of Broad Street and were flurrying in a smudged arc about the rounded building on the end. This place had once belonged to Monty Shine, the bookmaker, before it had become a night-spot and had undergone so many changes in identity that Bill thought it might be in some witness-protection programme, for its own good. It had been at one point a Goth hangout called MacBeth’s, and Bill knew that its curving front wall had been painted a vampiric lilac, although in the ghost-seam this appeared as a cool grey, which looked much better. Bill had often thought that giving this place a Goth makeover was over-egging the blood-pudding or gilding the funeral lily. Heads on spikes, witch burnings … just how Gothic did these people want it?