Johnny and the Dead Read online

  ‘I want to get out there and enjoy life. I never enjoyed it much when I WAS alive.’

  ‘Thomas Bowler! That’s no way for a respectable man to behave!’

  The crowd queuing outside the burger bar drew closer together as the chilly wind drove past.

  ‘Thomas Bowler? Do you know . . . I never really enjoyed being Thomas Bowler.’

  The audience in the Frank W. Arnold Civic Centre looked a bit sheepish, like a class after the teacher has stormed out. Democracy only works very well if people are told how to do it.

  Someone raised a hand.

  ‘Can we actually stop it happening?’ she said. ‘It all sounded very . . . official.’

  ‘Officially, I don’t think we can,’ said Mr Atterbury. ‘There was a proper sale. United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings could get unpleasant.’

  ‘There’s plenty of other sites,’ said someone else. ‘There’s the old jam works in Slate Road, and all that area where the old goods yard used to be.’

  ‘And we could give them their money back.’

  ‘We could give them double their money back,’ said Johnny.

  There was more laughter at this.

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Mr Atterbury, ‘that a company like United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings has to take notice of people. The boot factory never took any notice of people, I do know that. It didn’t have to. It made boots. That was all there was to it. But no one’s quite certain about what UACH does, so they have to be nice about it.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Big companies like that don’t like fuss. And they don’t like being laughed at. If there was another site . . . and if they thought we were serious . . . and if we threaten to offer them, yes, double their money back . . .

  ‘And then we ought to do something about the High Street,’ said someone.

  ‘And get some decent playgrounds and things again, instead of all these Amenities all over the place.’

  ‘And blow up Joshua N’Clement and get some proper houses built—’

  ‘Yo!’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Here here,’ said Yo-less.

  Mr Atterbury waved his hands calmly.

  ‘One thing at a time,’ he said. ‘Let’s rebuild Blackbury first. We can see about Jerusalem tomorrow.’

  ‘And we ought to find a name for ourselves!’

  ‘The Blackbury Preservation Society?’

  ‘Sounds like something you put in a jar.’

  ‘All right, the Blackbury Conservation Society.’

  ‘Still sounds like jam to me.’

  ‘The Blackbury Pals,’ said Johnny.

  Mr Atterbury hesitated.

  ‘It’s a good name,’ he said eventually, while lots of people in the hall started asking one another who the Blackbury Pals were. ‘But . . . no. Not now. But they were officially the Blackbury Volunteers. That’s a good name.’

  ‘But that doesn’t say what we’re going to do, does it?’

  ‘If we start off not knowing what we’re going to do, we could do anything,’ said Johnny. ‘Einstein said that,’ he added, proudly.

  ‘What, Albert Einstein?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘No, Solomon Einstein,’ said Mr Atterbury. ‘Hah! Know about him too, do you?’

  ‘Er . . . yes.’

  ‘I remember him. He used to keep a taxidermist and fishing tackle shop in Cable Street when I was a lad. He was always saying that sort of thing. A bit of a philosopher, was Solomon Einstein.’

  ‘And all he did was stuff things?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘And think,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Well, that kind of cogitation runs in the family, you might say,’ said Mr Atterbury. ‘Besides, you’ve got a lot of time for abstract thought when you’ve got your hand stuck up a dead badger.’

  ‘Yes, you certainly wouldn’t want to think about what you were doing,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Blackbury Volunteers it is, then,’ said Mr Atterbury.

  Frost formed on the receiver of the public phone in The White Swan.

  ‘Ready, Mr Einstein?’

  ‘Let’s go, Mr Fletcher!’

  The telephone clicked, and was silent. The air warmed up again.

  Thirty seconds later, the air grew cold in the little wooden hut twenty miles away that housed the controls of Blackbury University’s radio telescope.

  ‘It works!’

  ‘Off course. Off all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit. Gravity is easy-peasy by comparison.’

  ‘When did you think of that?’

  ‘It came to me ven I was working on a particularly large trout.’

  ‘Really? Well . . . let’s see what we can do . . .’

  Mr Fletcher looked around the little room. It was currently occupied only by Adrian ‘Nozzer’ Miller, who’d wanted to be an astronomer because he thought it was all to do with staying up late looking through telescopes, and hadn’t bargained on it being basically about adding columns of figures in a little shed in the middle of a windy field.

  The figures the telescope was producing were all that was left of an exploding star twenty million years ago. A billion small rubbery things on two planets who had been getting on with life in a quiet sort of way had been totally destroyed, but they were certainly helping Adrian get his Ph.D. and, who knows, they might have thought it all worthwhile if anyone had asked them.

  He looked up as the telescope motors ground into action. Lights flickered on the control panel.

  He stared at the main switches, and then reached out for them. They were so cold they hurt.

  ‘Ow!’

  The big dish turned towards the moon, which was just over Blackbury.

  There was a clattering from the printer beside him, and the endless stream of paper it was producing now read:

  OIOIOIOOIOIOIOIOOOIOOOOIOOOOIIOOIIOOIOIO

  HEREGOESNOTHINGGGGOOOOOOOOOIIIOIIII

  WELLIMBACKOOOOIOOOI . . .

  Mr Fletcher had just bounced off the moon.

  ‘Vot was it like?’

  ‘I didn’t have time to see much, but I don’t think I’d like to live there. It worked, though. The sky’s the limit, Mr Einstein!’

  ‘Exactly, Mr Fletcher! By the vay, where did that young man go?’

  ‘I think he had to rush off somewhere.’

  ‘Oh. Well . . . we should go and tell the others, don’t you think?’

  It was a quiet night in Blackbury Central police station. Sergeant Comely had time to sit back and watch the little lights on the radio.

  He’d never really been happy about the radio, even when he was younger. It was the bane of his life. He suffered from education, and he’d never been able to remember all that ‘Foxtrot Tango Piper’ business – at least when he was, e.g., pelting down the street at 2 a.m. in pursuit of miscreants. He’d end up sending messages about ‘Photograph Teapot Psychological’. It had definitely blighted his promotion chances.

  He especially hated radio on nights like this, when he was in charge. He hadn’t joined the police to be good at technology.

  Then the phones started to ring. There was the manager of the Odeon. Sergeant Comely couldn’t quite make out what he was saying.

  ‘Yes, yes, all right, Halloween Spectacular,’ he said. ‘What do you mean, it’s all gone cold? What do you want me to do? Arrest a cinema for being cold? I’m a police officer, not a central heating specialist! I don’t repair video machines, either!’

  The phone rang again as soon as he put it down, but this time one of the young constables answered it.

  ‘It’s someone from the university,’ he said, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘He says a strange alien force has invaded the radio telescope. You know, that big satellite dish thing over towards Slate?’

  Sergeant Comely sighed. ‘Can you get a description?’ he said.

  ‘I saw a film about this, Sarge,’ said another policeman. ‘These aliens landed and replaced everyone in the town with giant vegetables.’

  ‘Really? Round he
re it’d be days before anyone noticed,’ said the sergeant.

  The constable put the phone down.

  ‘He just said it was like a strange alien force,’ he said. ‘Very cold, too.’

  ‘Oh, a cold strange alien force,’ said Sergeant Comely.

  ‘And it was invisible, too.’

  ‘Right. Would he recognize it if he didn’t see it again?’

  The young policemen looked puzzled. I’m too good for this, the sergeant thought.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So we know the following. Strange invisible aliens have invaded Blackbury. They dropped in at The Dirty Duck, where they blew up the Space Invaders machine, which makes sense. And then they went to the pictures. Well, that makes sense too. It’s probably years before new films get as far as Alfred Centuri . . .’

  The phone rang again. The constable answered it.

  ‘And what, we ask ourselves, is their next course of action?’

  ‘It’s the manager of Pizza Surprise, Sarge,’ said the constable. ‘He says—’

  ‘Right!’ said the sergeant. ‘That’s right! They drop in for a Number Three with Extra Pepperoni! It probably looks like a friend of theirs.’

  ‘Wouldn’t do any harm to go and chat to him,’ said the constable. It had been a long time since dinner. ‘You know, just to show a bit of—’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Sergeant Comely, picking up his hat. ‘But if I come back as a giant cucumber, there’s going to be trouble.’

  ‘No anchovies on mine, Sarge,’ said the constable, as Sergeant Comely stepped out into the night.

  There was something strange in the air. Sergeant Comely had lived in Blackbury all his life, and it had never felt like this. There was an electrical tingle to things, and the air tasted of tin.

  It suddenly struck him.

  What if it were real? Just because they made silly films about aliens and things didn’t actually mean, did it, that it couldn’t ever happen? He watched them on late-night television. They always picked small towns to land near.

  He shook his head. Nah . . .

  William Stickers walked through him.

  ‘You know, you really shouldn’t have done that, William,’ said the Alderman, as Sergeant Comely hurried away.

  ‘He’s nothing but a symbol of the oppression of the proletariat,’ said William Stickers.

  ‘You’ve got to have policemen,’ said Mrs Liberty. ‘Otherwise people would simply do as they liked.’

  ‘Well, we can’t have that, can we?’ said Mr Vicenti.

  The Alderman looked around at the brightly lit street as they strolled along it. There weren’t many living people around, but there were quite a lot of dead ones, looking in shop windows or, in the case of some of the older ones, looking at shop windows and wondering what they were.

  ‘I certainly don’t remember all these shopkeepers from my time,’ he said. ‘They must have moved in recently. Mr Boots and Mr Mothercare and Mr Spudjulicay.’

  ‘Whom?’ said Mrs Liberty.

  The Alderman pointed to the sign on the other side of the street.

  ‘Spud-u-like,’ said Mr Vicenti. ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Is that how you pronounce it?’ said the Alderman. ‘I thought perhaps he was French. My word. And electric light all over the place. And no horse . . . manure in the streets at all.’

  ‘Really!’ snapped Mrs Liberty. ‘Please remember you are in company with a Lady.’

  ‘That’s why he said manure,’ said William Stickers, happily.

  ‘And the food!’ said the Alderman. ‘Hindoo and Chinese! Chicken from Kentucky! And what did you say the stuff was that the clothes are made of?’

  ‘Plastic, I think,’ said Mr Vicenti.

  ‘Very colourful and long-lasting,’ said Mrs Liberty. ‘And many of the girls wear bloomers, too. Extremely practical and emancipated.’

  ‘And many of them are extremely handsome,’ said William Stickers.

  ‘And everyone’s taller and I haven’t seen anyone on crutches,’ said the Alderman.

  ‘It wasn’t always like this,’ said Mr Vicenti. ‘The nineteen thirties were rather gloomy.’

  ‘Yes, but now . . .’ The Alderman spread his arms and turned around. ‘Shops full of cinematography televisions! Bright colours everywhere! Tall people with their own teeth! An age of miracles and wonders!’

  ‘The people don’t look very happy,’ said Mr Vicenti.

  ‘That’s just a trick of the light,’ said the Alderman.

  It was almost midnight. The dead met in the abandoned arcades of the shopping mall. The grilles were up and locked, but that doesn’t matter when you’re dead.

  ‘Well, that was fun,’ said the Alderman.

  ‘I have to agree,’ said Mrs Sylvia Liberty. ‘I haven’t enjoyed myself so much since I was alive. It’s a shame we have to go back.’

  The Alderman crossed his arms.

  ‘Go back?’ he said.

  ‘Now, then, Thomas,’ said Mrs Liberty, but in a rather softer voice than she’d used earlier that evening, ‘I don’t want to sound like Eric Grimm, but you know the rules. We have to return. A day will come.’

  ‘I’m not going back. I’ve really enjoyed myself. I’m not going back!’

  ‘Me neither,’ said William Stickers. ‘Down with tyranny!’

  ‘We must be ready for Judgement Day,’ said Mrs Liberty. ‘You never can tell. It could be tomorrow. Supposing it happened, and we missed it?’

  ‘Hah!’ said William Stickers.

  ‘More than eighty years I’ve been sitting there,’ said Alderman Bowler. ‘You know, I wasn’t expecting that. I thought things went dark for a moment and then there was a man handing out harps.’

  ‘For shame!’

  ‘Well, isn’t that what you expected?’ he demanded.

  ‘Not me,’ said William Stickers. ‘Belief in the survival of what is laughably called the soul after death is a primitive superstition which has no place in a dynamic socialist society!’

  They looked at him.

  ‘You don’t think,’ said Solomon Einstein, carefully, ‘that it is worth reconsidering your opinions in the light of experiental evidence?’

  ‘Don’t think you can get round me just because you’re accidentally right! Just because I happen to find myself still . . . basically here,’ said William Stickers, ‘does not invalidate the general theory!’

  Mrs Liberty banged her phantom umbrella on the floor.

  ‘I won’t say it hasn’t been enjoyable,’ she said, ‘but the rules are that we must be back in our places at dawn. Supposing we stayed away too long and forgot who we were? Supposing tomorrow was Judgement Day?’

  Thomas Bowler sighed.

  ‘Well, supposing it is?’ he said. ‘You know what I’d say? I’d say: I did the best I could for eighty-four years. And no one ever told me that afterwards I’d still be this fat old man who gets out of breath. Why do I get out of breath? I don’t breathe. I passed away, and next thing I knew I was sitting in a marble hut like a man waiting an extremely long time for an appointment with the doctor. For nearly ninety years! I’d say: you call this justice? Why are we waiting? A day will come. We all . . . arrive knowing it, but no one says when! Just when I was beginning to enjoy life,’ he said. ‘I wish this night would never end.’

  Mr Fletcher nudged Solomon Einstein.

  ‘Shall we tell them?’ he said.

  ‘Tell us what?’ said William Stickers.

  ‘Vell, you see—’ Einstein began.

  ‘Times have changed,‘ said Mr Fletcher. ‘All that stuff about being home at dawn and not hearing the cock crow and stuff like that. That was all very well once upon a time, when people thought the Earth was flat. But no one believes that now—’

  ‘Er—’ One of the dead raised a hand.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Fletcher. ‘Thank you, Mr Ronald Newton (1878–1934), former chairman of the Blackbury Flat Earth Society. I know you have Views. But the point I’m trying to make is—’


  ‘—dawn is a place as well as a time,’ said Einstein, spreading his hands.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ said Mrs Liberty.

  ‘On Earth, and around earth,’ said Einstein, getting excited. ‘One night and one day, forever chasing one another.’

  ‘There is a night that never comes to an end,’ said Mr Fletcher. ‘All you need is speed . . .’

  ‘Relatively speaking,’ said Einstein.

  Chapter 8

  There is a night that never comes to an end . . .

  The clock of the world turns under its own shadow. Midnight is a moving place, hurtling around the planet at a thousand miles an hour like a dark knife, cutting slices of daily bread off the endless loaf of Time.

  Time passes everywhere. But days and nights are little local things that happen only to people who stay in one place. If you go fast enough, you can overtake the clock . . .

  ‘How many of us are in this phone box?’ said Mr Fletcher.

  ‘Seventy-three,’ said the Alderman.

  ‘Very well. Where shall we go? Iceland? It’s not even midnight yet in Iceland.’

  ‘Can we have fun in Iceland?’ said the Alderman.

  ‘How do you feel about fish?’

  ‘Can’t abide fish.’

  ‘Not Iceland, then. I believe it’s very hard to have fun in Iceland without fish being involved in some way. Well, now . . . it’ll be early evening in New York.’

  ‘America?’ said Mrs Liberty. ‘Won’t we get scalped?’

  ‘Good grief; no!’ said William Stickers, who was a bit more up to date about the world.

  ‘Probably not,’ said Mr Fletcher, who had been watching the news lately and was even more up to date than William Stickers.

  ‘Look, we’re dead,’ said the Alderman. ‘What else have we got to worry about?’

  ‘Now, this may strike you as an unusual means of travel,’ said Mr Fletcher, as something in the telephone began to click, ‘but all you have to do, really, is follow me. Incidentally, is Stanley Roundway here?’

  The footballer raised his hand.

  ‘We’re going west, Stanley. For once in your death, try to get the directions right. And now . . .’

  One by one, they vanished.

  *