“You think we’re dead? You think we’re spirits, who didn’t quite make it to heaven?”
Simon shrugged again, and in the kitchen the kettle began to whistle like a crushed canary. Nancy lifted Simon’s hand and pressed it against her cheek. “Do I feel dead to you?”
“I don’t know. I never really touched nobody from Purgatory before. Not intimate-like.”
“But we’re walking around and talking to you,” said Josh. “Dead people don’t normally do that, do they?”
“Ah! Yes! But there’s dead, ain’t there, and then there’s gone beyond. You people from Purgatory, you’re not the same as your run-of-the-mill cold meat, are you? You’ve been sent back to give it another go. Too bent for heaven and too straight for hell, that’s it, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s a great idea. I only wish it was true. The trouble is, that particular description would fit seventy-five percent of the population of Marin County.”
Simon took the kettle off the gas. “So you didn’t come from Purgatory? You look like all the other people I’ve seen, what come from Purgatory. Same kind of clothes.”
“Have you seen many others?”
“Not a lot. Six or seven every year. Sometimes only one or two. One year none. And if I’m not sharpish, the Hoodies get to them first, and then they scuttle them off before I get the chance to … well, you know. Before I get the chance to say ‘how-d’you-do’.”
“You mean before you get the chance to rob them?”
“I take umbrage to that, guvnor. I’m a collector, not a foin.”
“Oh, a collector. I see. But is that what the Hoodies tell you, that these people come from Purgatory?”
“The Hoodies don’t tell nobody nothing. The Hoodies is the Hoodies. Everybody learns about Purgatory, from school. A Child’s Book of Simple Truth.”
“So you’ve always believed that people who come through the door come from Purgatory? Since you were small?”
Simon poured out tea, and nodded.
“Haven’t they ever told you any different? The people themselves?”
“I never talked to a Purgatorial before. Not conversational.”
“You mean you just robbed them and that was it?”
“Be fair, guvnor, I didn’t have time for the finer points of parlary, did I? It was touch-and-go to fleece them before the Hoodies showed up. And oftener than not, the Hoodies got there first. Or some other chancer.”
“Tell me something about the doors. Is there any way that you can tell that somebody’s just about to come through?”
“It’s like dowsing for water, guvnor. You got to have the feel for it.”
“So you can tell? And that means you can be lying in wait for anybody who steps out?”
“It’s possible, yes, guvnor. There are ways and ways. But it ain’t all that easy. The only guaranteed way to catch the Purgatorials one hundred percent is to stand by the door twenty-four hours through the day and never get no kip. But – if you know what you’re looking for, you can see the door change. Something in the substance of it, like that wobbly air you get, when the roads are hot. You came through it: you must have seen it for yourself. Me and San, we walked through the Yard today, and we saw the door was different-like, just the faintest of wobbles, and that’s when we knew that somebody had opened it. That’s why we was hanging around, waiting for you. Purgatorials generally come back to the door they come through, given an hour or two, although I never know why.”
“The Hooded Men … were they aware that we had come through, too?”
“Oh, yes. They always know. That’s why they was coming after you. Don’t ask me how they know. But nobody comes through them doors without the Hoodies being there in five or ten minutes at the most. Then phwwitt! that’s it, they’re catched and off to wherever they take them.”
“But if the Hoodies don’t want us here,” said Nancy, “why don’t they simply close the doors off? Brick them up, so nobody can get through?”
“Because bricking them up wouldn’t make no difference. The doors is always there, even if you build a church on top of them. I know for a fact that one of the doors is right slap bang in the middle of the river these days, even though it must have been on dry land, when it was first opened up.”
“You know where all the other doors are?” asked Josh.
“I wish I did. There’s one at Southwark, I do know that, on the corner of Bread Street and Watling Street. My old china Crossword Lenny looks after it, so to speak. I heard there was some up west, too, but as for their precise whereabouts, you’d have to ask an expert on doors and their precise whereabouts, if there is such a person.”
They cleared books and magazines out of the seats of the huge sagging armchairs and sat back and sipped their tea out of thick British Railways cups. Josh was beginning to feel exhausted – not only from their chase across the rooftops of Chancery Lane, but because this world in which he and Nancy had found themselves was so familiar, and yet so disturbingly different. It felt different. There were different noises, different smells, different sounds; and when Simon and San talked together, they used words that Josh had never heard of, and referred to events that had never happened. Not in the “real” world, anyhow. He thought, even if you went to Beijing, you could say “McDonald’s!” or “Julia Roberts!” and people would know what you were talking about. Here, they simply didn’t exist, and never had.
“What if I said to you, ‘the Beatles’?” Josh asked Simon.
Simon looked uneasy. “The beetles? I don’t understand.”
“The Beatles. The 1960s pop group.”
“Pop? Group? What’s that?”
“You’ve never heard of the Beatles?”
“Never.”
“The Rolling Stones? Glenn Campbell? Hootie and the Blowfish? The Doors?”
“I don’t understand.”
Nancy said, “All right … let me ask you something more serious. What is the name of the current President of the United States?”
“The United States of what?”
“The United States of America, of course.”
“Oh, America! Well, America doesn’t have a president. They have a Lord Protector, like us.”
“No President? No White House?”
Simon was completely bemused. “Why don’t you have some more tea?” he asked them.
“Don’t you British have royalty any more?” Josh wanted to know. “What about the Queen and Prince Charles and the Duke of Edinburgh?”
“The last king was Charles I. Sixteen-something. Chopped his bonce off, didn’t they?”
“So who ruled England after him?”
“The same people that run it now. The Commonwealth.”
“And America is being run by the Commonwealth?”
“Of course.”
Josh said, “What about World War Two?”
Simon shook his head.
“You’ve never heard of World War Two? When America and Britain got together and fought against the Germans?”
“We never fought the Germans,” said Simon, as if the very idea of it was totally ridiculous.
“What about the Japanese? Did you ever hear of Pearl Harbor? How about Hiroshima, and the atom bomb?”
“Sorry, guvnor.”
“All right, then, let’s go back a bit. World War One? No? Fighting in the trenches? No? How about the Titanic? No? You must have heard of the American Civil War, north versus south. You must have heard of Abraham Lincoln.”
“No … I don’t think so. I’ve heard of Lincoln cars, they’re American, aren’t they?”
Josh sat back. “OK, tell me. What was the most important worldwide event of the past decade? In your opinion?”