Johnny and the Dead Read online

‘Who?’

  ‘He was a famous scientist. He . . . invented the speed of light and things.’

  ‘Did he? I meant Solomon Einstein. He was a famous taxidermist in Cable Street. Stuffing dead animals, you know. I think he invented some kind of machine for making glass eyes. Got knocked down by a motor car in nineteen thirty-two. But a very keen thinker, all the same.’

  ‘I never knew that,’ said Johnny. He looked around.

  It was getting darker.

  ‘I think I’d better be getting home,’ he said; and began to back away.

  ‘I think I’m getting the hang of this,’ said the Alderman, moonwalking back across the path.

  ‘I’ll . . . er . . . I’ll see you again. Perhaps,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Call any time you like,’ said the Alderman, as Johnny walked away as quickly yet politely as possible. ‘I’m always in.’

  ‘Always in,’ he added. ‘That’s something you learn to be good at, when you’re dead. Er. Eeeeyooowh, was it?’

  Chapter 2

  Johnny raised the subject of the cemetery after tea.

  ‘It’s disgusting, what the Council are doing,’ said his grandfather.

  ‘But the cemetery costs a lot to keep up,’ said his mother. ‘No one visits most of the graves now, except old Mrs Tachyon, and she’s barmy.’

  ‘Not visiting graves has nothing to do with it, girl. Anyway, there’s history in there.’

  ‘Alderman Thomas Bowler,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Never heard of him. I was referring,’ said his grandfather, ‘to William Stickers. There was very nearly a monument to him. There would have been a monument to him. Everyone round here donated money, only someone ran off with it. And I’d given sixpence.’

  ‘Was he famous?’

  ‘Nearly famous. Nearly famous. You’ve heard of Karl Marx?’

  ‘He invented communism, didn’t he?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Right. Well, William Stickers didn’t. But he’d have been Karl Marx if Karl Marx hadn’t beaten him to it. Tell you what . . . tomorrow, I’ll show you.’

  It was tomorrow.

  It was raining softly out of a dark grey sky.

  Grandad and Johnny stood in front of a large gravestone which read:

  WILLIAM STICKERS

  1897-1949

  WORKERS OF THE

  WORLD UNIT

  ‘A great man,’ said Grandad. He had taken his cap off.

  ‘What was the World Unit?’ said Johnny.

  ‘It should have been unite,’ said Grandad. ‘They ran out of money before they did the “E”. It was a scandal. He was a hero of the working class. He would have fought in the Spanish Civil War except he got on the wrong boat and ended up in Hull.’

  Johnny looked around.

  ‘Um,’ he said. ‘What sort of a man was he?’

  ‘A hero of the proletariat, like I said.’

  ‘I mean, what did he look like?’ said Johnny. ‘Was he quite big with a huge black beard and gold-rimmed spectacles?’

  ‘That’s right. Seen pictures, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Johnny. ‘Not exactly.’

  Grandad put his cap back on.

  ‘I’m going down to the shops,’ he said. ‘Want to come?’

  ‘No, thanks. Er . . . I’m going round to Wobbler’s house.’

  ‘Righto.’

  Grandad wandered off towards the main gate.

  Johnny took a deep breath.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘It was a scandal, them not giving me the “E”,’ said William Stickers.

  He stopped leaning against his memorial.

  ‘What’s your name, comrade?’

  ‘John Maxwell,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I knew you could see me,’ said William Stickers. ‘I could see you looking right at me while the old man was talking.’

  ‘I could tell you were you,’ said Johnny. ‘You look . . . um . . . thinner.’

  He wanted to say: not thin like in thick. Just . . . not all there. Transparent.

  He said, ‘Um.’ And then he said, ‘I don’t understand this. You are dead, right? Some kind of . . . ghost?’

  ‘Ghost?’ said dead William Stickers angrily.

  ‘Well . . . spirit, then.’

  ‘There’s no such thing. A relic of an outmoded belief system.’

  ‘Um, only . . . you’re talking to me . . .’

  ‘It’s a perfectly understandable scientific phenomenon,’ said William Stickers. ‘Never let superstition get in the way of rational thought, boy. It’s time for Mankind to put old cultural shibboleths aside and step into the bright socialist dawn. What year is it?’

  ‘Nineteen ninety-three,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Ah! And have the downtrodden masses risen up to overthrow the capitalist oppressors in the glorious name of communism?’

  ‘Um. Sorry?’ Johnny hesitated, and then a few vague memories slid into place. ‘You mean like . . . Russia and stuff? When they shot the Tsar? There was something on television about that.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. That was just the start. What’s been happening since nineteen forty-nine? I expect the global revolution is well established, yes? No one tells us anything in here.’

  ‘Well . . . there’s been a lot of revolutions, I think,’ said Johnny. ‘All over the place . . .’

  ‘Capital!’

  ‘Um.’ It occurred to Johnny that people doing quite a lot of the revolutions recently had said they were overthrowing communist oppressors, but William Stickers looked so eager he didn’t quite know how to say this. ‘Tell you what . . . can you read a newspaper if I bring you one?’

  ‘Of course. But it’s hard to turn the pages.’

  ‘Um. Are there a lot of you in here?’

  ‘Hah! Most of them don’t bother. They just aren’t prepared to make the effort.’

  ‘Can you . . . you know . . . walk around? You could get into things for free.’

  William Stickers looked slightly panicky.

  ‘It’s hard to go far,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s not really allowed.’

  ‘I read in a book once that ghosts can’t move much,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Ghost? I’m just . . . dead.’ He waved a transparent finger in the air. ‘Hah! But they’re not getting me that way,’ he snapped. ‘Just because it turns out that I’m still . . . here after I’m dead, doesn’t mean I’m prepared to believe in the whole stupid nonsense, you know. Oh, no. Logical, rational thought, boy. And don’t forget the newspaper.’

  William Stickers faded away a bit at a time. The last thing to go was the finger, still demonstrating its total disbelief in life after death.

  Johnny waited around a bit, but no other dead people seemed to be ready to make an appearance.

  He felt he was being watched in some way that had nothing to do with eyes. It wasn’t exactly creepy, but it was uncomfortable. You didn’t dare scratch your bottom or pick your nose.

  For the first time he really began to notice the cemetery. It had a leftover look, really.

  Behind it there was the canal, which wasn’t used any more, except as a rubbish dump; old prams and busted televisions and erupting settees lined its banks like monsters from the Garbage Age. Then on one side there was the crematorium and its Garden of Remembrance, which was all right in a gravel-pathed, keep-off-the-grass sort of way. In front was Cemetery Road, which had once had houses on the other side of it; now there was the back wall of the Bonanza Carpet (Save £££££!!) Warehouse. There was still an old phone box and a letter box, which suggested that once upon a time this had been a place that people thought of as home. But now it was just a road you cut through to get to the bypass from the industrial estate.

  On the fourth side was nothing much except a wasteground of fallen brick and one tall chimney – all that remained of the Blackbury Rubber Boot Company. (‘If It’s a Boot, It’s a Blackbury’ had been one of the most famously stupid slogans in the world.)

  Johnny vaguely remembered there’d been some
thing in the papers. People had been protesting about something – but then, they always were. There was always so much news going on you never had time to find out anything important.

  He walked round to the old factory site. Bulldozers were parked around it now, although they were all empty. There was a wire fence which had been broken down here and there despite the notices about Guard Dogs on Patrol. Perhaps the guard dogs had broken out.

  And there was a big sign, showing the office building that was going to be built on the site. It was beautiful. There were fountains in front of it, and quite old trees carefully placed here and there, and neat people standing chatting outside it. And the sky above it was a glorious blue, which was pretty unusual for Blackbury, where most of the time the sky was that odd, soapy colour you’d get if you lived in a Tupperware box.

  Johnny stared at it for some time, while the rain fell in the real world and the blue sky glittered on the sign.

  It was pretty obvious that the building was going to take up more room than the site of the old boot factory.

  The words above the picture said, ‘An Exciting Development for United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings: Forward to the Future!’

  Johnny didn’t feel very excited, but he did feel that ‘Forward to the Future’ was even dafter than ‘If It’s a Boot, It’s a Blackbury’.

  Before school next day he pinched the newspaper and tucked it out of sight behind William Stickers’ grave.

  He felt more daft than afraid. He wished he could talk to someone about it.

  He didn’t have anyone to talk to. But he did have three people to talk with.

  There were various gangs and alliances in the school, such as the sporty group, and the bright kids, and the Computer Club Nerds.

  And then there was Johnny, and Wobbler, and Bigmac, who said he was the last of the well hard skinheads but was actually a skinny kid with short hair and flat feet and asthma who had difficulty even walking in Doc Martens, and there was Yo-less, who was technically black.

  But at least they listened, during break, on the bit of wall between the school kitchens and the library. It was where they normally hung out – or at least, hung around.

  ‘Ghosts,’ said Yo-less, when he’d finished.

  ‘No-oo,’ said Johnny uncertainly. ‘They don’t like being called ghosts. It upsets them, for some reason. They’re just . . . dead. I suppose it’s like not calling people handicapped or backward.’

  ‘Politically incorrect,’ said Yo-less. ‘I read about that.’

  ‘You mean they want to be called,’ Wobbler paused for thought, ‘post-senior citizens.’

  ‘Breathily challenged,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Vertically disadvantaged,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘What? You mean they’re short?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Buried,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘How about zombies?’ said Bigmac.

  ‘No, you’ve got to have a body to be a zombie,’ said Yo-less. ‘You’re not really dead, you just get fed this secret voodoo mixture of fish and roots and you turn into a zombie.’

  ‘Wow. What mixture?’

  ‘I don’t know. How should I know? Just some kind of fish and some kind of root.’

  ‘I bet it’s a real adventure going down the chippie in voodoo country,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Well, you ought to know about voodoo,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Why?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘’Cos you’re West Indian, right?’

  ‘Do you know all about druids?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  ‘I ’spect your mum knows about it, though,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. My mum spends more time in church than the Pope,’ said Yo-less. ‘My mum spends more time in church than God.’

  ‘You’re not taking this seriously,’ said Johnny severely. ‘I really saw them.’

  ‘It might be something wrong with your eyes,’ said Yo-less. ‘Perhaps there’s a—’

  ‘I saw this old film once, about a man with X-ray eyes,’ said Bigmac. ‘He could use ’em to see right through things.’

  ‘Women’s clothes and stuff?’ enquired Wobbler.

  ‘There wasn’t much of that,’ said Bigmac.

  They discussed this waste of a useful talent.

  ‘I don’t see through anything,’ said Johnny, eventually. ‘I just see people who aren’t ther— I mean, people other people don’t see.’

  ‘My uncle used to see things other people couldn’t see,’ said Wobbler. ‘Especially on a Saturday night.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I’m trying to be serious.’

  ‘Yeah, but once you said you’d seen a Loch Ness Monster in your goldfish pond,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘All right, but—’

  ‘Probably just a plesiosaur,’ said Yo-less. ‘Just some old dinosaur that ought to’ve been extinct seventy million years ago. Nothing special at all.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And then there was the Lost City of the Incas,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Well, I found it, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t that lost,’ said Yo-less. ‘Behind Tesco’s isn’t exactly lost.’

  Bigmac sighed.

  ‘You’re all weird,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ said Johnny. ‘You all come down there after school, right?’

  ‘Well—’ Wobbler began, and shifted uneasily.

  ‘Not scared, are you?’ said Johnny. He knew that was unfair, but he was annoyed. ‘You ran away before,’ he said, ‘when the Alderman came out.’

  ‘I never saw no Alderman,’ said Wobbler. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t scared. I ran away to wind you up.’

  ‘You certainly had me fooled,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Me? Scared? I watched Night of the Killer Zombies three times – with freeze frame,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘All right, then. You come. All three of you come. After school.’

  ‘After Cobbers,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Look, this is a lot more important than—’

  ‘Yes, but tonight Janine is going to tell Mick that Doraleen took Ron’s surfboard—’

  Johnny hesitated.

  ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘After Cobbers.’

  ‘And then I promised to help my brother load up his van,’ said Bigmac. ‘Well, not exactly promised . . . he said he’d rip my arms off if I didn’t.’

  ‘And I’ve got to do some geography homework,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘We haven’t got any,’ said Johnny.

  ‘No, but I thought if I did an extra essay on rainforests I could pull up my marks average,’ said Yo-less.

  There was nothing odd about this, if you were used to Yo-less. Yo-less wore school uniform. Except that it wasn’t really school uniform. Well, all right, technically it was school uniform, because everyone got these bits of paper at the start of every year saying what the school uniform was, but no one ever wore it much, except for Yo-less, and so if hardly anyone else was wearing it, Wobbler said, how could it be a uniform? Whereas, said Wobbler, since at any one time nearly everyone was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, then really jeans and T-shirt were the real school uniform and Yo-less should be sent home for not wearing it.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Johnny. ‘Let’s meet up later, then. Six o’clock. We can meet at Bigmac’s place. That’s right near the cemetery, anyway.’

  ‘But it’ll be getting dark,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Well?’ said Johnny. ‘You’re not scared, are you?’

  ‘Me? Scared? Huh! Me? Scared? Me? Scared?’

  If you had to be somewhere frightening when it got dark, Johnny thought, the Joshua N’Clement block rated a lot higher on the Aaargh scale than any cemetery. At least the dead didn’t mug you.

  It was originally going to be the Sir Alec Douglas-Home block, and then it became the Harold Wilson block, and then finally the new Council named it the Joshua Che N’Clement block after a famous freedom fighter, who then became presi
dent of his country, and who was now being an ex-freedom fighter and president somewhere in Switzerland while some of his countrymen tried to find him and ask him questions like: What happened to the two hundred million dollars we thought we had, and how come your wife owned seven hundred hats?

  The block had been described in 1965 as ‘an overwhelming and dynamic relationship of voids and solids, majestic in its uncompromising simplicity’.

  Often the Blackbury Guardian had pictures of people complaining about the damp, or the cold, or the way the windows fell out in high winds (it was always windy around the block, even on a calm day everywhere else), or the way gangs roamed its dank passageways and pushed shopping trolleys off the roof into the Great Lost Shopping Trolley Graveyard. The lifts hadn’t worked properly since 1966. They lurked in the basement, too scared to go anywhere else.

  The passages and walkways (‘an excitingly brutal brushed concrete finish’) had two smells, depending on whether or not the Council’s ninja caretaker had been round in his van. The other one was disinfectant.

  No one liked the Joshua N’Clement block. There were two schools of thought about what should be done with it. The people who lived there thought everyone should be taken out and then the block should be blown up, and the people who lived near the block just wanted it blown up.

  The odd thing was that although the block was cramped and fourteen storeys high, it had been built in the middle of a huge area of what was theoretically grass (‘environmental open space’), but which was now the home of the Common Crisp Packet and Hardy-Perennial Burned-Out Car.

  ‘Horrible place,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘People’ve got to live somewhere,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Reckon the man who designed it lives here?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘I’m not going too near Bigmac’s brother,’ said Wobbler. ‘He’s a nutter. He’s got tattoos and everything. And everyone knows he pinches stuff. Videos and things. Out of factories. And he killed Bigmac’s hamster when he was little. And he chucks his stuff out of the window when he’s angry. And if Clint’s been let out—’

  Clint was Bigmac’s brother’s dog, which had reputedly been banned from the Rottweiler/Pit Bull Terrier Crossbreed Club for being too nasty.

  ‘Poor old Bigmac,’ said Johnny. ‘No wonder he’s always sending off for martial arts stuff.’