Johnny and the Dead Read online

  ‘I’m not proposing to let anyone use my vote,’ said the Alderman. ‘I want to use it myself. No law against that.’

  ‘Good point.’

  ‘I served this city faithfully for more than fifty years,’ said the Alderman. ‘I do not see why I should lose my vote just because I’m dead. Democracy. That’s the point.’

  ‘People’s democracy,’ said William Stickers.

  The dead fell silent.

  ‘Well . . .’ said Johnny miserably. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Good man,’ said the Alderman. ‘And we’d also like a paper delivered every day.’

  ‘No, no,’ Mr Vicenti shook his head. ‘It’s so hard to turn the pages.’

  ‘Well, we must know what is happening,’ said Mrs Liberty. ‘There’s no telling what the living are getting up to out there while our backs are turned.’

  ‘I’ll . . . think of something,’ said Johnny. ‘Something better than newspapers.’

  ‘Right,’ said William Stickers. ‘And then you get along to these Council people and tell them—’

  ‘Tell them we’re not going to take this lying down!’ shouted the Alderman.

  ‘Yes, right,’ said Johnny.

  And the dead faded. Again there was the sensation of travelling, as if the dead people were going back into a different world . . .

  ‘Have they gone?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Not that they were here,’ said Yo-less, the scientific thinker.

  ‘They were here, and they’ve gone,’ said Johnny.

  ‘It definitely felt a bit weird,’ said Bigmac. ‘Very cold.’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Johnny. ‘I need to think. They want me to stop this place being built on.’

  ‘How?’

  Johnny led the way quickly towards the gates.

  ‘Huh! They’ve left it up to me.’

  ‘We’ll help,’ said Yo-less, promptly.

  ‘Will we?’ said Wobbler. ‘I mean, Johnny’s OK, but . . . I mean . . . it’s meddlin’ with the occult. And your mum’ll go spare.’

  ‘Yes, but if it’s true then it’s helping Christian souls,’ said Yo-less. ‘That’s all right. They are Christian souls, aren’t they?’

  ‘I think there’s a Jewish part of the cemetery,’ said Johnny.

  ‘That’s all right. Jewish is the same as Christian,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Yo-less, very carefully. ‘But similar.’

  ‘Yeah, but . . .’ said Wobbler, awkwardly. ‘I mean . . . dead people and that . . . I mean . . . he can see ’em, so it’s up to him . . . I mean . . .’

  ‘We all supported Bigmac when he was in juvenile court, didn’t we?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘You said he was going to get hung,’ said Wobbler. ‘And I spent all morning doing that “Free the Blackbury One” poster.’

  ‘It was a political crime,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘You stole the Minister of Education’s car when he was opening the school,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘It wasn’t stealing. I meant to give it back,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘You drove it into a wall. You couldn’t even give it back on a shovel.’

  ‘Oh, so it was my fault the brakes were faulty? I could have got badly hurt, right? I notice no one worried about that. It was basically his fault, leaving cars around with Noddy locks and bad brakes—’

  ‘I bet he doesn’t have to repair his own brakes.’

  ‘It’s society’s fault, then—’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Yo-less, ‘we were behind you that time, right?’

  ‘Wouldn’t like to be in front of him,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘And we were right behind Wobbler when he got into trouble for complaining to the record shop about the messages from God he heard when he played Cliff Richard records backwards—’

  ‘You said you heard it too,’ said Wobbler. ‘Hey, you said you heard it!’

  ‘Only after you told me what it was,’ said Yo-less. ‘Before you told me what I was listening for, it just sounded like someone going ayip-ayeepmwerpayeep.’1

  ‘They shouldn’t do that sort of thing on records,’ said Wobbler defensively. ‘Gettin’ at impressionable minds.’

  ‘The point I’m making,’ said Yo-less, ‘is that you’ve got to help your friends, right?’ He turned to Johnny. ‘Now, personally, I think you’re very nearly totally disturbed and suffering from psychosomatica and hearing voices and seeing delusions,’ he said, ‘and probably ought to be locked up in one of those white jackets with the stylish long sleeves. But that doesn’t matter, ’cos we’re friends.’

  ‘I’m touched,’ said Johnny. ‘Probably,’ said Wobbler, ‘but we don’t care, do we, guys?’

  *

  His mother was out, at her second job. Grandad was watching Video Whoopsy.

  ‘Grandad?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How famous was William Stickers?’

  ‘Very famous. Very famous man,’ said the old man, without looking around.

  ‘I can’t find him in the encyclopedia.’

  ‘Very famous man, was William Stickers. Haha! Look, the man’s just fallen off his bicycle! Right into the bush!’

  Johnny took down the volume L-MIN, and was silent for a few minutes. Grandad had a complete set of huge encyclopedias. No one really knew why. Somewhere in 1950 or something, Grandad had said to himself ‘get educated’, and had bought the massive books on hire purchase. He’d never opened them. He’d just built a bookcase for them. Grandad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.

  ‘How about Mrs Sylvia Liberty?’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘She was a suffragette, I think. Votes for women and things.’

  ‘Never heard of her.’

  ‘She’s not in here under “Liberty” or “Suffragette”.’

  ‘Never heard of her. Whoa, look here, the cat’s fallen in the pond—!’

  ‘All right . . . how about Mr Antonio Vicenti?’

  ‘What? Old Tony Vicenti? What’s he up to now?’

  ‘Was he famous for anything?’

  For a moment, Grandad’s eyes left the TV screen and focused on the past instead.

  ‘He ran a joke shop in Alma Street where the multi-storey car park is now. You could buy stink bombs and itchy-powder. And he used to do conjuring tricks at kids’ parties when your mum was a girl.’

  ‘Was he a famous man?’

  ‘All the kids knew him. Only children’s entertainer in these parts, see. They all knew his tricks. They used to shout out: “It’s in your pocket!” And things like that. Alma Street. And Paradise Street, that was there, too. And Balaclava Terrace. That’s where I was born. Number Twelve, Balaclava Terrace. All under the car park now. Oh, dear . . . he’s going to fall off that building . . .’

  ‘So he wasn’t really famous. Not like really famous.’

  ‘All the kids knew him. Prisoner of war in Germany, he was. But he escaped. And he married . . . Ethel Plover, that’s right. Never had any kids. Used to do conjuring tricks and escaping from things. Always escaping from things, he was.’

  ‘He wore a carnation pinned to his coat,’ said Johnny.

  ‘That’s right! Every day. Never saw him without one. Always very smart, he was. He used to be a conjuror. Haven’t seen him around for years.’

  ‘Grandad?’

  ‘It’s all changed around here now. I hardly see anywhere I recognize when I go into town these days. Someone told me they’ve pulled down the old boot factory.’

  ‘You know that little transistor radio?’ said Johnny.

  ‘What little transistor radio?’

  ‘The one you’ve got.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You said it’s too fiddly and not loud enough?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Can I have it?’

  ‘I thought you’d got one of those ghetto-blowers.’

  �
�This is . . . for some friends.’ Johnny hesitated. He was by nature an honest person, because apart from anything else, lying was always too complicated.

  ‘They’re quite old,’ he added. ‘And a bit shut in.’

  ‘Oh, all right. You’ll have to put some new batteries in – the old ones have gone all manky.’

  ‘I’ve got some batteries.’

  ‘You don’t get proper wireless any more. We used to get oscillation when I was a boy. You never get it now. Hehe! There he goes – look, right through the ice—!’

  Johnny went down to the cemetery before breakfast. The gates had been locked, but since there were holes all along the walls this didn’t make a lot of difference.

  He’d bought a plastic bag for the radio and had sorted out some new batteries, after scraping out the chemical porridge that was all that was left of the old ones.

  The cemetery was deserted. There wasn’t a soul there, living or dead. But there was the silence, the big empty silence. If ears could make a noise, they’d sound like that silence.

  Johnny tried to fill it.

  ‘Um,’ he said. ‘Anyone there?’

  A fox leapt up from behind one of the stones and scurried away into the undergrowth.

  ‘Hello? It’s me?’

  The absence of the dead was scarier than seeing them in the flesh – or at least, not in the flesh.

  ‘I brought this radio. It’s probably easier for you than newspapers. Um. I looked up radio in the encyclopedia and most of you ought to know what it is. Um. You twiddle the knobs and radio comes out. Um. So I’ll just tuck it down behind Mr Vicenti’s slab, all right? Then you can find out what’s going on.’

  He coughed.

  ‘I . . . I did some thinking last night, and . . . and I thought maybe if people knew about all the . . . famous . . . people here, they’d be bound to leave it alone. I know it’s not a very good idea,’ he said, hopelessly, ‘but it’s the best I could come up with. I’m going to make a list of names. If you don’t mind?’

  He’d hoped Mr Vicenti would be about. He quite liked him. Perhaps it was because he hadn’t been dead as long as the others. He seemed friendlier. Less stiff.

  Johnny walked from gravestone to gravestone, noting down names. Some of the older stones were quite ornate, with fat cherubs on them. But one had a pair of football boots carved on it. He made a special note of the name:

  STANLEY ‘WRONG WAY’ ROUNDWAY

  1892-1936

  The Last Whistle

  He nearly missed the one under the trees. It had a flat stone in the grass, without even one of the ugly flower vases, and all it declared was that this was the last resting place of Eric Grimm (1885–1927). No ‘Just Resting’, no ‘Deeply Missed’, not even ‘Died’, although probably he had. Johnny wrote the name down, anyway.

  Mr Grimm waited until after Johnny had gone before he emerged, and glared after him.

  1But according to Wobbler it was really: ‘Hey, kids! Go to school and get a good education! Listen to your parents! It’s cool to go to church!’

  Chapter 4

  It was later that morning.

  There was a new library in the Civic Centre. It was so new it didn’t even have librarians. It had Assistant Information Officers. And it had computers. Wobbler was banned from the computers because of an incident involving a library terminal, the telephone connection to the main computer, another telephone line to the computer at East Slate Air Base ten miles away, another telephone line to a much bigger computer under a mountain somewhere in America, and almost World War Three.

  At least, that’s what Wobbler said. The Assistant Information Officers said it was because he got chocolate in the keyboard.

  But he was allowed to use the microfiche readers. They couldn’t think of a good reason to stop him.

  ‘What’re we looking for, anyway?’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Nearly everyone that died here used to get buried in that cemetery,’ said Johnny. ‘So if we can find someone famous who lived here, and then we can find them in the cemetery, then it’s a famous place. There’s a cemetery in London with Karl Marx in it. It’s famous for him being dead in it.’

  ‘Karl Marx?’ said Bigmac. ‘What was he famous for?’

  ‘You’re ignorant, you are,’ said Wobbler. ‘He was the one who played the harp.’

  ‘No, Karl was the one who usedta talka lika dis,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Actually, he was the one with the cigar,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘That’s a very old joke,’ said Johnny severely. ‘The Marx Brothers. Hah, hah. Look, I’ve got the old newspaper files. The Blackbury Guardian. They go back nearly a hundred years. All we’ve got to do is look at the front pages. That’s where famous people’d be.’

  ‘And the back pages,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Why the back pages?’

  ‘Sports. Famous footballers and that.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Hadn’t thought of that. All right, then. Let’s get started . . . ’

  ‘Yeah, but . . .’ said Bigmac.

  ‘What?’ said Johnny.

  ‘So this Karl Marx, then,’ said Bigmac. ‘What films was he in?’

  Johnny sighed. ‘Listen, he wasn’t in any films. He was . . . he led the Russian Revolution.’

  ‘No he didn’t,’ said Wobbler. ‘He just wrote a book called, oh, something like It’s About Time There Was a Revolution, and the Russians just followed the instructions. The actual leaders were a lot of people with names ending in ski.’

  ‘Like Stalin,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Stalin means Man Of Steel,’ said Yo-less. ‘I read where he didn’t like his real name, so he changed it. It’s Man of Steel in English.’

  ‘What was his real name?’

  ‘His secret identity, you mean,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘What are you talking about now?’ said Bigmac.

  ‘No, I get it. Man of Steel? Yo-less means he could leap Kremlins in a single bound,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ said Wobbler. ‘I always thought it was unfair, the way the Americans got Superman. They’ve got all the superheroes. I don’t see why we couldn’t have had Superman round here.’

  They thought about it. Wobbler then spoke for them all.

  ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘round here he would have had trouble even being Clark Kent.’

  They disappeared under the hoods again.

  ‘What did you say the Alderman was called?’ said Wobbler, after a while.

  ‘Alderman Thomas Bowler,’ said Johnny. ‘Why?’

  ‘It says he got the Council to build a memorial horse trough in the square in nineteen hundred and five,’ said Wobbler. ‘It came in useful very quickly too, it says here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well . . . it says here, the next day the first motor car ever to arrive in Blackbury crashed into it and caught fire. They used the water to put the fire out. Says here the Council praised Alderman Bowler for his forward thinking.’

  They looked at the microfilm viewer.

  ‘What’s a horse trough?’ said Bigmac.

  ‘It’s that big stone trough thing that’s outside Loggitt and Burnett’s Building Society,’ said Johnny. ‘The one that’s been filled with soil for a tasteful display of dead flowers and lager cans. They used to put water in those things for coach horses to drink out of.’

  ‘But if cars were just coming in,’ said Bigmac slowly, ‘then building things for horses to drink out of was a bit—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny. ‘I know. Come on. Let’s keep going.’

  . . . WHEEEsssh . . . we built this city on . . . ssshshhh . . . on the phone right now . . . wheeesshhh . . . that was at Number Two . . . ssshwupwup . . . told a meeting in Kiev . . . wsswssshsss . . . Prime Minister . . . shsss . . . today . . . shhssss . . . scaramouche, can you . . . shssssss . . .

  The tuning knob of the little radio behind Mr Vicenti’s grave turned back and forth very slowly, as if it was being moved with gr
eat effort. Occasionally it would stop on a programme, and then move again.

  . . . ssshhhwwwss . . . and the next caller . . . shhwwsss . . . Babylon . . .

  And around it, for quite some distance, the air was cold.

  *

  In the library, the boys read on. Silence surrounded them. The Assistant Information Officers grew worried, and one of them went to find the cleaning fluid and the bent paperclip for getting chocolate out of keyboards.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ said Wobbler, eventually, ‘this is a town where famous people don’t come from. It’s famous for it.’

  ‘It says here,’ said Yo-less, from his viewer, ‘that Addison Vincent Fletcher of Alma Terrace invented a form of telephone in nineteen twenty-two.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ said Wobbler. ‘Telephones had been invented years before that.’

  ‘It says he said this one was better.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Wobbler. He dialled an imaginary number. ‘Hello, is that— Who invented the real telephone, anyone?’

  ‘Thomas Eddison,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Sir Humphrey Telephone,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Alexander Graham Bell,’ said Johnny. ‘Sir Humphrey Telephone?’

  ‘Hello, Mr Bell,’ said Wobbler, speaking into an imaginary mouthpiece, ‘You know that telephone you invented years ago? Well, mine’s better. And I’m just off to discover America. Yes, I know Christopher Columbus discovered it first, but I’m discovering it better.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ said Bigmac. ‘If you’re going to discover somewhere, you might as well wait until there’s proper hotels and stuff.’

  ‘When did Columbus discover America, anyway?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Fourteen ninety-two,’ said Johnny. ‘There’s a rhyme: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’

  Wobbler and Bigmac looked at him.

  ‘Actually, he could have got there in fourteen ninety-one,’ said Yo-less, without looking up, ‘but he had to sail around a bit because no one could think up a rhyme for “one”.’

  ‘It could have been Sir Humphrey Telephone,’ said Bigmac. ‘Stuff gets named after inventors.’