People were everywhere as they continued onward down a huge dream of the Drapery, where towering houses made of leather had been cut into fantastic shapes on each side of the sloping street. Palatial mansions in the form of boots or shoes loomed over them, and dizzy pinnacles like ladies’ evening gloves. Adnitt’s department store was a tremendous corset with a multitude of jubilant spectators sitting on the stitching of the upper levels as they cried out their support or adulation. There were lower ranking builders in grey gowns that were still pregnant with all sorts of other colours, like a rain-cloud. There were ghosts in party clothing who threw streamers; shabby poltergeists who just gave a thumbs-up and grinned. The women, men and children of the higher township lined its streets in an uproarious throng, accompanied by phantom dogs and smoky spectral cats, by ghostly budgerigars freed from their mortal cages and the brilliant souls of goldfish, without their confining bowls or water, that just shimmered through the air, staring and mouthing silently, occasionally releasing a small bubble to drift upward like a weightless pearl.
Some of the crowd held banners while some carried placards bearing goodwill messages or simply naming favourite members of the Dead Dead Gang. Posthumous teenage girls squealed and held signs up that said merely ‘John’, but all six children seemed to have their followers. Michael was slightly miffed to realise that the majority of flags and waving notices said “Marjorie”, although it looked as though he was the next most popular, which perked him up a bit.
Emerging from the bottom of the Drapery they rocketed around a version of All Saints Church that looked bigger than the Tower of Babel. In the higher world this still had its great portico supported by thick columns, but up here there were at least eight monstrous porticos stacked one atop the other, piling up into a many-layered monolith of brown and yellow limestone that looked like old gold against the shifting blues and purples of the sky. Gathered below the highest porticos were hundreds of onlookers and well-wishers, whistling and stamping as the previously-extinct animal rode by, while underneath the broad sweep of the lowest canopy stood only a few privileged spooks as if this area were reserved for special guests, celebrities or royalty. Behind him, Phyllis dipped her head to whisper into Michael’s ear.
“That there’s John Bunyan, and the old boy sittin’ in the alcove, that’s John Clare. There’s Thomas Becket, Samuel Beckett and I think the feller on the end there is John Bailes, the button-maker who lived until he was getting on ’undred and thirty. Saints and writers, for the most part. Look, they’re wavin’ to yer. Why don’t you wave back?”
So he waved back. As they swerved into George Row, an appreciative audience up on the sills and ledges of a swollen alabaster law court threw down laurel wreaths or floppy garlands of imaginary flowers, some of which caught on Mammy’s frightening tusks to swing and rustle decoratively in the crystal-clear, invigorating Upstairs air. Right at this instant, Michael knew, the white-haired Master Builder would be crouching to his crucial shot, be sighting down the glaring shaft of light that was his cue, closing his blackened eye and drawing back his elbow. There was everything to play for.
Petals fell upon them from above, and ticker-tape, and even, inappropriately, ladies’ pants. A set of these got caught on Mammy’s tusk beside the wreaths and floral tributes but, since they had little daisies on them, didn’t look entirely out of place.
They hammered down St. Giles Street, here a mind-bending boulevard, and on their left the Guildhall, the Gilhalda of Mansoul, was an immense and skyscraping confection of warm-coloured stone, completely overgrown with statues, carven tableaux and heraldic crests. It was as if an architecture-bomb had gone off in slow motion, with countless historic forms exploding out of nothingness and into solid granite. Saints and Lionhearts and poets and dead queens looked down on them through the blind pebbles of their emery-smoothed eyes and up above it all, tall as a lighthouse, were the sculpted contours of the Master Builder, Mighty Mike, the local champion. In one hand the great likeness held a shield, and in the other one he held his trilliard cue. Unfolding from his back were wings of chiselled glass that spread across the better part of the illuminated town, so that a rippling aquarium light fell on the countless couples who seemed to be getting married on the Guildhall’s greatly magnified front steps. Beautiful brides in virgin white or iridescent green, in shawls or veils or intricate mantillas threw their bouquets and blew kisses as the Dead Dead Gang, the darlings of the afterlife, went roaring by.
And, oh, the stamp and shout of it, the showering affection and the shine soaked into all of them, enflamed them, and was better than a hundred Puck’s Hats. They crashed past a much-ennobled Black Lion, not the pub in Marefair that they’d passed through on their Cromwell capers but the other one, the one with all the ghosts. These leaned out of the astral tavern’s great increase of upper windows, cranking wooden rattles and releasing half-a-dozen different colours of balloon, each with one of the children’s faces stencilled on it. The balloons sailed up into the opal permutations of a peerless Mansoul sky, and Michael noticed with some satisfaction that the ones which had his features on were powder-blue.
The Black Lion wraiths who’d launched the bright, bobbing flotilla heavenwards, famous haunts who were doubly immortal thanks to the attention they’d received from all the psychic sleuths and the pot-boiling ghost hunters, were by and large a more old-fashioned and traditional variety of apparition, more the kind of spooks you read about in stories. Some had trailing chains and some carried their heads beneath their arms like footballers before the kick-off. Some had torn their garments open to reveal bare ribs that caged a scarlet pumping heart while others, phantoms of the old school, weren’t much more than sheets and breezes. They all whooped and whistled, hurling down psychic phenomena upon the passing children as a tribute, séance drums and trumpets, lengths of slimy muslin, disembodied pointing hands cascading down onto the burnished cobbles where accusing bloodstains bloomed mysteriously, indelibly, around the mammoth’s padded trundle.
The Dead Dead Gang surged along St. Giles Street upon their one-horse cavalcade and Michael tried hard to burn every detail into his blue eyes. He knew that he must not forget this, ever. He must hold these streets of glory fast within himself, these hordes of roaring celebrants, and know that in Mansoul he was important. In his mind’s eye he could see the Master Builders in their monumental trilliard hall, the white-haired champion crouched over the baize sliding his luminous cue back and forth in halting practice-jabs upon the bridge of his spread fingers. The smooth lacquered rod, sweat-lubricated, slipped against the web of cushioning flesh between the almost-diametrically opposing forefinger and thumb. All the potential force and energy was trapped, was held inside the hesitating cue and focussed on the blue-hot tip of it, thrumming and simmering, waiting to burst out.
Lifting her trunk to sound a clarion, Mammy carried them along the great stretch of the St. Giles Street carriageway to where it blurred into Spencer Parade outside the honey-coloured stone spectacle of St. Giles Church. This building, monstrously increased, now had the upper reaches of its castellated steeple lost amongst the beautifully modelled clouds that passed by overhead: a seahorse and a birthday cake; a map of Italy; a bust of Queen Victoria. A sizeable stone badge or emblem was raised from the tower’s lower reaches, fish-shaped, with a woman’s figure at its centre and the words “FEED LAMBS”. The graveyard grass around the hyper-church had become a savannah from which soaring obelisks and headstones rose in cliffs of inscribed marble, and atop the tallest monument danced somebody that Phyllis, whispering to Michael from behind him, said was Robert Browne who’d started the Dissenting movement in the fifteen-hundreds and who’d perished in Northampton Gaol, an eighty-year-old man who couldn’t pay his parish rates. Fizzing around Browne’s spirit in the air was a corona of banned sermons, blazing words and excommunications, while the jigging figure capered as if overjoyed to be in this dissenting heaven, a spectator to this splendid pageant. Everyone exalted as the phantom kids urged their ghost-mammoth on towards the crossways of York Road and Billing Road, towards the ashlar-fronted coliseum of the Mansoul General Hospital that swelled up with its bays and arches, storey after storey, into the ethereal haze which hung above the town.