Johnny and the Dead Read online

  ‘They didn’t name the telephone after Bell,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘They named the bell after Bell, though,’ said Bigmac. ‘Telephone bells. Proves my point.’

  ‘Telephones haven’t had bells on for years,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘That,’ said Yo-less, ‘is due to the famous invention by Fred Buzzer.’

  ‘I think it’s impossible for anyone famous to come from here,’ said Wobbler, ‘because everyone around here is mental.’

  ‘Got one,’ said Bigmac, turning the microfiche knob.

  ‘Who? Which one?’

  ‘The footballer. Stanley “Wrong Way” Roundway. He played for Blackbury Wanderers. There’s his obituary here. Amost half a page.’

  ‘Any good?’

  ‘Says he scored a record number of goals.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Own goals.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Greatest number of own goals in the history of any sport, it says. It says he kept getting overexcited and losing his sense of direction.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But he was a good footballer, it says. Apart from that. Not exactly a Hall of Fame, though—’

  ‘Here, look at this,’ said Yo-less.

  They clustered around his viewer. He’d found an ancient group photograph of about thirty soldiers, all beaming at the camera.

  ‘Well?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘This is from nineteen sixteen,’ said Yo-less. ‘They’re all going off to war.’

  ‘Which one?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘The first one, you nerd. World War One.’

  ‘I always wondered why they numbered it,’ said Bigmac. ‘Like they expected to have a few more. You know. Like Buy Two, Get One Free.’

  ‘Says here,’ Yo-less squinted, ‘it’s the Blackbury Old Pals Battalion. They’re just going off to fight. They all joined up at the same time . . .’

  Johnny stared. He could hear people’s voices, and the background noises of the library. But the picture looked as if it was at the bottom of a dark, square tunnel. And he was falling down it.

  Things outside the picture were inky and slow. The picture was the centre of the world.

  Johnny looked at the grinning faces, the terrible haircuts, the jug-handle ears, the thumbs all up.

  Even today nearly everyone in the Blackbury Guardian had their photo taken with their thumb up, unless they’d won Super Bingo, in which case they were shown doing what the photographer thought was a high kick. The newspaper’s one photographer was known as Jeremy the Thumb.

  The people in the picture didn’t look much older than Bigmac. Well, a couple of them did. There was a sergeant with a moustache like a scrubbing brush, and an officer in jodhpurs, but the rest of them looked like a school photo.

  And now he was coming back from wherever he’d been. The picture dropped away again, became just an oblong on a page on a screen. He blinked.

  There was a feeling, like—

  —like on an aeroplane when it’s about to land, and his ears went ‘pop’. But it was happening with his brain, instead.

  ‘Anyone know what the Somme is?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s where they went, anyway. Some place in France.’

  ‘Any of them win any medals?’ said Johnny, struggling back into the real world. ‘That’d be famous. If there’s someone in the cemetery with a lot of medals.’

  Yo-less spun the wheels of the viewer.

  ‘I’ll look ahead a few issues,’ he said. ‘There’s bound to be something if— Hey . . . look at this . . .’

  They all tried to get under the hood at once. Silence came back as they realized what he’d found.

  I knew it was important, Johnny thought. What’s happening to me?

  ‘Wow,’ said Wobbler. ‘I mean – all those names . . . everyone killed in this big battle . . . ’

  Without saying anything, Johnny ducked into the other reader and wound it backward until he found the cheery photograph.

  ‘Are they listed in alphabetical order?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘I’ll read out the names under the photo, then. Um . . . Armitage, K . . . Atkins, T . . .’

  ‘Yes . . . no . . .’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Sergeant Atterbury, F . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hey, there’s three from Canal Street,’ said Wobbler. ‘That’s where my gran lives!’

  ‘Blazer . . . Constantine . . . Fraser . . . Frobisher . . .’

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .’

  They carried on to the end of the caption.

  ‘They all died,’ said Johnny, eventually. ‘Four weeks after the picture was taken. All of them.’

  ‘Except for Atkins, T.,’ said Yo-less. ‘It says here what a Pals’ Battalion was. It says, people all from one town or even one street could all join the Army together if they wanted, and all get sent to . . . the same place.’

  ‘I wonder if they all got there?’ said Yo-less. ‘Eventually,’ he added.

  ‘That’s dreadful,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘It probably sounded like a good idea at the time. Sort of . . . jolly.’

  ‘Yes, but . . . four weeks . . .’ said Bigmac. ‘I mean . . .’

  ‘You’re always saying you can’t wait to join the Army,’ said Wobbler. ‘You said you were sorry the Gulf War was over. And all the legs of your bed are off the ground because of all them copies of Guns and Ammo underneath it.’

  ‘Well . . . yeah . . . war, yeah,’ said Bigmac. ‘Proper fighting, with M16s and stuff. Not just all going off grinning and getting shot.’

  ‘They all marched off together because they were friends, and got killed,’ said Yo-less.

  They stared at the little square of light with the names on it, and the long, long line of cheery thumbs.

  ‘Except for Atkins, T.,’ said Johnny. ‘I wonder what happened to him?’

  ‘It was nineteen sixteen,’ said Yo-less. ‘If he’s still alive, he’ll be dead.’

  ‘Any of them on your list?’ said Wobbler.

  Johnny checked.

  ‘No-oo,’ he said, eventually. ‘There’s one or two people with the same name but the wrong initial. Everyone round here used to get buried up there.’

  ‘Perhaps he came back from the war and moved away somewhere else,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘It’d be a bit lonely around here, after all,’ said Bigmac.

  They looked at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I’m fed up with this,’ said Wobbler, pushing his chair back. ‘It’s not real. There’s no one special in there. It’s just people. And it’s creepy. Come on, let’s go down to the mall.’

  ‘I’ve found out what happens to dead bodies when old graveyards are built on,’ said Yo-less, as they stepped out into the Tupperware daylight. ‘My mum knows. They get taken to some kind of storage place called a necropolis. That’s Latin for City of the Dead.’

  ‘Yuk,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Sounds like where Superman lives,’ said Bigmac. ‘Necropolis!’ said Wobbler, zooming his hands through the air. ‘By day, mild-mannered corpse – by night . . . duh duh duhduh DAH . . . ZombieMan!’

  Johnny remembered the grinning young faces, not much older than Wobbler.

  ‘Wobbler,’ he said, ‘If you make another joke like that—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘. . . well . . . just don’t. Right? I mean it.’

  . . . ssshhhh . . . mean, yo, youknowhatI’msayin’? . . . sipsipsip . . . told the government that . . . sswwwsss . . . fact the whales enjoy being hunted, Bob, and . . . wwwhhhhh . . .

  Click!

  ‘So that’s wireless telegraphy, is it? Hah! So much for Countess Alice Radioni!’

  ‘I was an Ovalteenie when I was a little boy. That was during the war. The one against the Germans. Did I ever tell you? We used to sing along with the people on the wireless: “We are the Ov—” WHAT?
Who was Countess Alice Radioni?’

  ‘Which war against the Germans?’

  ‘What? How many have we had?’

  ‘Two so far.’

  ‘Now, come ON! Radioni? It was Marconi who invented the radio!’

  ‘Hah! And do you know who he stole the idea from?’

  ‘Who cares who invented the wretched thing? Will you listen to what the living are doing?’

  ‘Plotting to steal our cemetery, that is what they are doing!’

  ‘Yes, but . . . I didn’t know that all this was going on, did you? All this music and . . . the things they were talking about! Who is Shakespeare’s Sister and why is she singing on the wireless? What is a Batman? And they said the last Prime Minister was a woman! That can’t be possible. Women can’t even vote.’

  ‘Yes, they can.’

  ‘Hurrah!’

  ‘Well, they couldn’t in MY time!’

  ‘There’s so much we don’t know!’

  ‘So why don’t we find out?’

  The dead fell silent – or rather, more silent than usual.

  ‘How?’

  ‘The man on the wireless said you can ring the wireless station on the telephone to Discuss Problems That Affect Us All Today. A Phone-Ing Program, he said.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘There’s a phone box out in the street.’

  ‘Yes, but . . . that’s . . . outside . . .’

  ‘Not far outside.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘The little boy stood in front of us and talked to us. And he was so frightened. And we can’t walk six feet?’

  The speaker was Mr Vicenti. He looked through the crumbling railings to the street outside, with the eye of a man who’d spent much of his life escaping.

  ‘But this is our PLACE! This is where we BELONG!’

  ‘It‘s only a few steps . . .’

  It wasn’t really much of a mall. But it was all there was to hang out in.

  Johnny had seen films of American shopping malls. They must have different sorts of people in America, he’d thought. They all looked cool, all the girls were beautiful, and the place wasn’t crowded with little kamikaze grandmothers. Or mothers with seven children. Or Blackbury United football fans walking ten abreast singing the famous football song, ‘URRRurrrURRR-UH!’ (clapclapclap). You couldn’t hang out properly in a place like that. All you could do was hang on.

  The four of them hung on in the burger bar. Yo-less carefully read the pamphlet about how no rainforests were chopped down to make beef-burgers. Bigmac had his favourite Megajumbo Fries with fifteen packets of relish.

  ‘Wonder if I could get a job here?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘No chance,’ said Bigmac. ‘The manager’d take one look at you and see where the profits would go.’

  ‘You saying I’m fat?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Gravitationally challenged,’ said Yo-less, without looking up.

  ‘Enhanced,’ said Bigmac.

  Wobbler’s lips moved as he tried these out. ‘I’d rather be fat,’ he said. ‘Can I finish up your onion rings?’

  ‘Anyway, there’s loads of people want jobs here,’ said Bigmac. ‘You have to have three A-levels.’

  ‘What, just to make burgers?’

  ‘No other jobs around,’ said Bigmac. ‘They’re shutting all the factories around here. Nothing to do. No one’s making anything any more.’

  ‘Someone’s making something,’ said Wobbler. ‘What about all the stuff in the shops?’

  ‘That’s all made in Taiwanaland or somewhere. Hah! What sort of future are we going to have, eh? That’s right, eh? Johnny?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve just been staring at nothing the whole time, you know that?’

  ‘Yeah, what’s happened?’ said Wobbler. ‘Some dead people come in for a takeaway?’

  ‘No,’ said Johnny.

  ‘What’re you thinking about, then?’

  ‘Thumbs,’ said Johnny, still staring at the wall.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’ said Johnny, waking up.

  ‘What about thumbs?’

  ‘Oh . . . nothing.’

  ‘My mother said last night that there’s a lot of people angry about the cemetery being sold,’ said Yo-less. ‘Everyone’s moaning about it. And Pastor William says anyone who builds on there will be cursed unto the seventh generation.’

  ‘Yes, but he always says that kind of thing,’ said Wobbler. ‘Anyway, United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings probably don’t worry about that sort of thing. They’ve probably got a Vice-President in Charge of Being Cursed.’

  ‘And he probably gets his secretary to deal with it,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘It won’t stop anything, anyway,’ said Yo-less. ‘There’s bulldozers just the other side of the fence.’

  ‘Anyone know what United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings do?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘It said in the paper that they’re a multinational information-retrieval and enhancement facility,’ said Yo-less. ‘It said on the news it’ll provide three hundred jobs.’

  ‘For all the people who used to work at the old rubber boot factory?’ said Bigmac.

  Yo-less shrugged. ‘That’s how it goes,’ he said. ‘You all right, Johnny?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You OK? You’re staring at the wall.’

  ‘What? Oh. Yeah. I’m OK.’

  ‘He’s upset about the dead soldiers,’ said Wobbler.

  Yo-less leaned across the table.

  ‘Look . . . that’s all in the past, right? It’s just gone. It’s a shame they died but . . . well . . . they’d be dead anyway, wouldn’t they? It’s just history. It’s nothing to do with . . . well, with now.’

  Mrs Ivy Witherslade was talking to her sister in the phone box on Cemetery Road when someone knocked impatiently on the glass, and that was odd, because there was no one there. But she felt very cold and suddenly uneasy, as though she was walking on someone’s grave. She stopped telling her sister about her legs and what the doctor said about them, and went home quickly.

  If Johnny had been there, he would have heard what happened next. But he wasn’t, so everyone else would have just heard the wind, and perhaps, just perhaps, the faintest of arguments:

  ‘You should know, Mr Fletcher. YOU invented it.’

  ‘Actually, that was Alexander Graham Bell, Mrs Liberty. I just improved upon it.’

  ‘Well . . . make it work. Let me speak to the man on the wireless machine.’

  ‘Was it really Alexander Graham Bell?’

  ‘Yes, Alderman.’

  ‘I thought it was Sir Humphrey Telephone.’

  The telephone stayed on its hook, but there were a few electric crackles and pops from somewhere in the machinery.

  ‘I think I have mastered the intricacies, Mrs Liberty—’

  ‘Let ME do the talking. The people’s voice must be heard!’

  Frost was forming on the inside of the telephone box.

  ‘Certainly not. You are a bolshevik!’

  ‘What did Sir Humphrey Telephone invent, then?’

  ‘Mr Fletcher! Be so good as to expedite the electric communication!’

  *

  When there wasn’t the burger bar to hang out in, and when they weren’t allowed in J&J Software because of whatever Wobbler’s latest crime was, there was only the fountain area with the sad, dying trees in it or Groovy Sounds record store, which was pretty much like any record store would be if it was called Groovy Sounds.

  Anyway, Yo-less wanted to buy a tape for his collection.

  ‘Famous British Brass Bands,’ said Wobbler, looking over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes, but this is a good one,’ said Yo-less. ‘It’s got the old Blackbury Rubber Boot Factory Band playing The Floral Dance. Very famous piece.’

  ‘You’re just basically not black, are you,’ said Wobbler. ‘I’m going to report you to the Rastafarians.’

  ‘You like reggae and blues,’ said Yo-less
.

  ‘That’s different.’

  Johnny listlessly shuffled through the tapes.

  And froze.

  There was a voice he recognized. It was crackly with static, but it sounded a lot like Mrs Sylvia Liberty, and it was coming over the radio.

  The radio was on the counter, tuned to Wonderful Radio Blackbury’s Mike Mikes Radio Show, which was as excellent and totally bodacious as two hours of phone-ins and traffic reports from the Blackbury bypass could be.

  This time it was different. The phone-in had been about the Council’s proposal to knock down the old Fish Market, which was going to happen no matter what anyone said, but it was a good subject for people to moan about.

  ‘Well, what I say is hello? Hello? This is Mrs Sylvia Liberty speaking on the electric telephone! Hello? not to be allowed, er, in my opinion, er, it is totally hello? (click . . . fizz . . . crackle) I demand to be heard this INSTANT! The Fish Market is of NO importance whatsoever! er . . . er . . . and . . .’

  In his little studio on top of the Blackbury and Slate Insurance Society, Mike Mikes stared at his engineer, who stared at his switchboard. There was no way of cutting off the intrusive voice. It was coming in on all telephone lines at once.

  ‘Er, hi,’ he said. ‘The caller on . . . er . . . all the lines . . .’

  ‘Here, someone’s You listen to me, young man! And don’t cut me off to start playing any more of your phonograph cylinders! crossed line here, Mike, I Do you realize that innocent citizens are being EVICTED (click . . . garble . . . whirr . . . fizz) many years of VALUED sevice to the community (wheeeowwwwwh . . . crackle) merely because of an ACCIDENT of birth (fizzle . . . whipwhipwhip . . . crackle) you listen to young Johnn (snap . . . fizz . . .) The People’s Shroud is Deepest Black (wheeeyooowwww . . . pop) We’re Coming BACK . . . stop that this minute, William, you are nothing but a bolshevik agit . . .’

  But no one heard the rest of the sentence because the engineer had pulled all the plugs and hit the switchboard with a hammer.

  Johnny and his friends had gathered around the radio.

  ‘You get some real loonies on these phone-ins,’ said Wobbler. ‘You ever listen to Mad Jim’s Late Night Explosion?’

  ‘He’s not mad,’ said Yo-less. ‘He just says he is. And all he does is play old records and go “yeah!” and “yowsahyowsah!” a lot. That’s not mad. That’s just pathetic.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wobbler.