Johnny and the Dead Read online

  ‘Yes,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Yes,’ said Yo-less.

  They all looked at Johnny. They all looked like people with something on their minds.

  ‘Ahem,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Er,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘That was them, was it?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny. ‘It was them.’

  ‘It didn’t sound like normal radio. How can they use the phone?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose some of them knew how to use the phone when they were alive. And maybe being dead’s a bit like . . . electricity or something.’

  ‘They nearly said your name,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who was that one singing?’

  ‘I think it was William Stickers. He’s a bit of a communist.’

  ‘I didn’t think there were any communists left these days,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘There aren’t. And he’s one of them.’

  ‘You know, any minute now Rod Serling is going to come walking in here with a big book,’ said Bigmac. ‘You know. Like in The Twilight Zone.’

  ‘How come they know what’s on the radio?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘I lent them Grandad’s transistor.’

  ‘You know what I think?’ said Yo-less. ‘I think you’ve started something.’

  ‘That’s what I think, too.’

  ‘Nah!’ said Wobbler. ‘Come on! Voices on the radio? I mean! That’s just mucking about. Could be anything. Kids ringing up and messing about. Oh, come on! Ghosts don’t phone up radio stations!’

  ‘I saw this film once where they came out of the telephone,’ said Bigmac, winner of the All-Blackbury Mr Tactful Championship.

  ‘Just you shut up! I don’t believe you!’

  It was very, very chilly inside the phone box.

  ‘I must say, electricity is very easy to master when you’re dead.’

  ‘What are you doing, Mr Fletcher?’

  ‘Very easy indeed. Who shall we talk to next?’

  ‘We must speak to the Town Hall!’

  ‘But it is a Saturday, Mrs Liberty. There will be no one there.’

  ‘Then try to find young Johnny. I don’t know what he means about trying to find famous people buried in the cemetery. WE’RE here, after all.’

  ‘I’ll keep trying. It’s amazingly easy to understand.’

  ‘Where’s Mr Stickers gone?’

  ‘He’s trying to listen to Radio Moscow, whatever that is. On the wireless telegraphy apparatus.’

  ‘I say, this is rather invigorating, you know. I’ve never been out of the cemetery before.’

  ‘Yes. It’s a new lease of life.’

  ‘You can escape from almost anything,’ said Mr Vicenti.

  There was a faint cough. They looked around. Mr Grimm was watching them through the railings.

  The dead seemed to sober up. They always became more serious in front of Mr Grimm.

  They shuffled their spectral feet.

  ‘You’re outside,’ said Mr Grimm. ‘You know that’s wrong.’

  ‘Only a little way, Eric,’ said the Alderman. ‘That can’t do any harm. It’s for the good of the—’

  ‘It’s WRONG.’

  ‘We don’t have to listen to him,’ said Mr Vicenti.

  ‘You’ll get into terrible trouble,’ said Mr Grimm.

  ‘No we won’t,’ said Mr Vicenti.

  ‘It’s dabbling with the Known,’ said Mr Grimm. ‘You’ll get into dreadful trouble and it won’t be my fault. You are bad people.’

  He turned, and walked back to his grave.

  ‘Dial the number,’ said Mr Vicenti. The others seemed to wake up.

  ‘You know,’ said Mrs Liberty, ‘he may have a point—’

  ‘Forget about Mr Grimm,’ said Mr Vicenti. He opened his hands. A white dove shot out of his sleeve and perched on the phone box, blinking. ‘Dial the number, Mr Fletcher.’

  ‘Hello, directory enquiries, what name please?’

  ‘He’s called Johnny Maxwell and he lives in Blackbury.’

  ‘I’m afraid that is not sufficient information—’

  ‘That’s all we—’ (Listen, I can see how it works, there’s a connection—)(How many of us are there in here?)(Can I try, please?)(This is a lot better than those seances) . . .

  The operator rubbed her headset. For some reason, her ear had gone cold.

  ‘Ow!’

  She ripped it off.

  The operator on her right leaned over.

  ‘What’s up, Dawn?’

  ‘It went – it felt—’

  They looked at the switchboard. Lights were coming on everywhere, and it was beginning to be covered in frost.

  The point is—

  —that all through history there have been people who couldn’t invent things because the rest of the world wasn’t ready. Leonardo da Vinci hadn’t got the motors or materials to make his helicopter. Sir George Cayley invented the internal combustion engine before anyone else had invented petrol.1

  And in his life Addison Vincent Fletcher had spent long hours with motors and relays and glowing valves and bits of wire, pursuing a dream the world didn’t even have a name for yet.

  In his phone box, dead Mr Fletcher laughed. It had a name now. He knew exactly what a computer was when he saw one.

  1So he ran it on pellets of gunpowder. Really. It was nearly the external combustion engine.

  Chapter 5

  Johnny went home. He didn’t dare go back to the cemetery.

  It was Saturday evening. He’d forgotten about the Visit.

  ‘You’ve got to come,’ said his mother. ‘You know she likes to see you.’

  ‘No she doesn’t,’ said Johnny. ‘She forgets who I am. She calls me Peter. I mean, that’s my dad’s name. And the place smells of old ladies. Anyway, why doesn’t Grandad ever come? She’s his wife.’

  ‘He says he likes to remember her as she was,’ said his mother. ‘Besides, it’s Markie and Mo’s Saturday Spectacular. You know he doesn’t like to miss it.’

  ‘Oh . . . all right.’

  ‘We don’t have to stay long.’

  *

  About ten minutes after Johnny had gone, the phone rang. Grandad dealt with it in his normal way, which was to shout ‘Phone!’ while not taking his eyes off the screen. But it went on ringing. Eventually, grumbling and losing the remote control down the side of the cushion where it wouldn’t be found for two days, he got up and shuffled out into the hall.

  ‘Yes? He’s not here. Gone out. Who? Well, I’ll . . . is it? Never! Still doing the conjuring tricks, are you? Haven’t seen you about the town much lately. No. Right. That’s right. I don’t get out much myself these days. How are you, in yourself? Dead. I see. But you’ve got out to use the telephone. It’s wonderful, what they can do with science. You sound a long way off. Right. You are a long way off. I remember that trick you used to do with the handcuffs and the chains and – well, nearly did. Yes. Yes. Right. I’ll tell him. Nice to hear from you. Goodbye.’

  He went back and settled down in front of the TV again.

  After a few minutes a small worried frown crossed his face. He got up and went and glared at the telephone for a while.

  *

  It wasn’t that Sunshine Acres was a bad place. As far as Johnny could see, it was clean enough and the staff seemed OK. There were bright murals on the walls and a big tank of goldfish in the TV room.

  But it was more gloomy than the cemetery. It was the way everyone shuffled around quietly, and sat waiting at the table for the next meal hours before it was due, because there wasn’t anything else to do. It was as if life had stopped and being dead hadn’t started, so all there was to do was hang around.

  His grandmother spent a lot of time watching TV in the main lounge, or watching her begonias in her room. At least, his grandmother’s body did.

  He was never certain where her mind was, except that it was often far away and long ago.

  After a
while he got even more depressed at the conversation between his mother and his grandmother, which was exactly the same as the one last week and the week before that, and did what he always did, which was wander out into the corridor.

  He mooched towards the door that led out into the garden, staring vaguely at nothing.

  They never told you about this ghost stuff at school. Sometimes the world was so weird you didn’t know where to start, and Social Education and GCSE Maths weren’t a lot of help.

  Why didn’t this sort of thing happen to anyone else? It wasn’t as if he went looking for it. He just tried to keep his head down, he just tried to be someone at the back of the crowd. But somehow everything was more complicated than it was for anyone else.

  The thing was . . .

  Mr T. Atkins.

  He probably wouldn’t have noticed it, except that the name was in the back of his mind.

  It was written on a little curling piece of paper stuck in a frame on one of the doors.

  He stared at it.

  It filled the whole world, just for a second or two.

  Well, there could be lots of Atkinses . . .

  He’d never find out unless he knocked, though . . . would he? . . .

  ‘Open the door, will you, love? M’hands are full.’

  There was a large black woman behind him, her arms full of sheets. Johnny nodded mutely and turned the handle.

  The room was more or less bare. There was certainly no one else there.

  ‘I see you come up here every week to see your gran,’ said the nurse, dumping the sheets on the bare bed. ‘You’re a good boy to come see her.’

  ‘Uh. Yes.’

  ‘What was it you were wanting?’

  ‘Uh. I thought I’d . . . you know . . . drop in to have a chat with Mr Atkins? Uh.’ Inspiration seized him. ‘I’m doing a project at school. About the Blackbury Pals.’

  A project! You could get away with anything if you said you were doing a project.

  ‘Who were they then, dear?’

  ‘Oh . . . some soldiers. Mr Atkins was one of them, I think. Uh . . . where . . . ?’

  ‘Well, he passed away yesterday, dear. Nearly ninety-seven, I think he was. Did you know him?’

  ‘Not . . . really.’

  ‘He was here for years. He was a nice old man. He used to say that when he died the war’d be over. It was his joke. He used to show us his old Army pay book. “Tommy Atkins,” he’d say. “I’m the one, I’m the boy, when I’m gone it’s all over.” He used to laugh about that.’

  ‘What did he mean?’

  ‘Don’t know, dear. I just used to smile. You know how it is.’

  The nurse smoothed out the new sheets and pulled a cardboard box from under the bed.

  ‘This was his stuff,’ she said. She gave him an odd look. ‘I expect it’s all right for you to see. No one ever visited him, except a man from the British Legion regular as clockwork every Christmas, God bless them. They’ve asked for his medals, you know. But I expect it’s all right for you to have a look. If it’s a project.’

  Johnny peered into the box while the nurse bustled around the room.

  There were a few odds and ends – a pipe, a tobacco tin, a huge old penknife. There was a scrapbook, full of sepia postcards of flowers and fields of cabbages and simpering French ladies dressed in what someone must once have thought was a very daring way. Yellowing newspaper cuttings were stuck between the pages. And there was a small wooden box lined with toilet paper and containing several medals.

  And there was a photograph of the Blackbury Pals, just like the one in the old newspaper.

  Johnny lifted it out very carefully, and turned it over. It crackled.

  Someone had written, in violet ink, a long time ago, the words: Old Comrades!!! We’re the Boys, Kaiser Bill! If You Know A Better ‘ole, Go To IT!!

  And there were thirty signatures underneath.

  Beside twenty-nine of the signatures, in pencil, someone had made a small cross.

  ‘They all signed it,‘ he said, quietly. ‘He must have got a copy from the paper, and they all signed it.’

  ‘What was that, dear?’

  ‘This photo.’

  ‘Oh, yes. He showed it to me once. That was him in the war, you know.’

  Johnny turned it over again and found Atkins, T. He looked a bit like Bigmac, with jughandle ears and a second-hand haircut. He was grinning. They all were. All the same kind of grin.

  ‘He used to talk about them a lot,’ said the nurse.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘His funeral’s on Monday. At the crem. One of us always goes, you know. Well, you have to, don’t you? It’s only right.’

  He dreamed, on Saturday night . . .

  He dreamed of Rod Serling walking along Blackbury High Street, but as he was trying to speak impressively to the camera, Bigmac, Yo-less and Wobbler started to peer over his shoulder and say things like, ‘What’s this book about, then?’ and ‘Turn over the page, I’ve read this bit’ . . .

  He dreamed of thumbs . . .

  And woke up, and stared at the ceiling. He still hadn’t replaced the bits of cotton that held up the plastic model of the Space Shuttle. It was forever doing a nosedive.

  He was pretty sure other kids didn’t have lives like this. It just kept on happening. Just when he thought he’d got a grip on the world, and saw how it all worked, it sprang something new on him, and what he thought was the whole thing, ticking away nicely, turned out to be just some kind of joke.

  His grandad had mumbled a very odd message when Johnny had arrived home. As far as he could understand, Wobbler or someone had been making odd phone calls. His grandad had also muttered something about conjuring tricks.

  He looked at his clock radio. It said 2.45. There was no chance of going back to sleep. He tried Radio Blackbury.

  ‘—yowsahyowsahyowsah! And the next caller on Uncle Mad Jim’s bodaaaacious Problem Corner iiiissss—’

  Johnny froze. He had a feeling . . .

  ‘William Stickers, Mad Jim.’

  ‘Hi, Bill. You sound a bit depressed, to me.’

  ‘It’s worse than that. I’m dead, Jim.’

  ‘Wow! I can see that could be a real downer, Bill. Care to tell us about it?’

  ‘You sound very understanding, comrade. Well . . .’

  Of course he’s understanding, thought Johnny as he struggled into his dressing gown. Everyone phones up Mad Jim in the middle of the night. Last week he talked for twenty minutes to a lady who thought she was a roll of wallpaper. You sound totally sane compared to most of them.

  He snatched up his Walkman and switched on its radio so that he could go on listening as he ran down the stairs and out into the night.

  ‘—and now I just heard there isn’t even ANY Soviet Union any more. What happened? ’

  ‘Seems to me you haven’t been keeping up with current events, Bill.’

  ‘I thought I explained about that.’

  ‘Oh, sure. You said. You’ve been dead. But you’re alive again, right?’ Mad Jim’s voice had that little chuckle in it that it always got when he’d found a real dingdong on the line and could picture all his insomniac listeners turning up the volume.

  ‘No. Still dead. It’s not something you get better from, Jim. Now—’

  Johnny pattered around the corner and sped along John Lennon Avenue.

  Mad Jim was saying, in his special dealing-with-loonies velvet voice: ‘So tell us all out here in the land of the living, Bill – what’s it like, being dead?’

  ‘Like? LIKE? It is extremely DULL.’

  ‘I’m sure everyone out there would like to know, Bill . . . are there angels?’

  Johnny groaned as he turned the corner into Eden Road.

  ‘Angels? Certainly not!’

  Johnny scurried past the silent houses and dodged between the bollards into Woodville Road.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Mad Jim in his headset. ‘I hope there aren’t any naughty men with pitchforks
, then?’

  ‘What on earth are you blathering about, man? There’s just me and old Tom Bowler and Sylvia Liberty and all the rest of them—’

  Johnny lost the thread of things when a sticking-out piece of laurel hedge knocked his headset off. When he managed to put it back on, it turned out that William Stickers had been invited to request a record.

  ‘Don’t think I know “The Red Flag”, Bill. Who’s it by?’

  ‘It’s the Internationale! The song of the downtrodden masses!’

  ‘Doesn’t fire a neuron, Bill. But for you and all the other dead people out there everywhere, tonight,’ the change in Mad Jim’s tone suggested that William Stickers had been cut off, ‘and we’re all dead sooner or later, ain’t that the truth, here’s one from the vaults by Michael Jackson . . . “Thriller”—’

  The streetlamp by the phone box was alight.

  And the little pool of light was all there was to see, unless you were Johnny . . .

  The dead had spilled out on to the road. They’d managed to drag the radio with them. Quite a few of them were watching the Alderman.

  ‘This is how you have to do it, apparently,’ he said, moonwalking backwards across the frosty street. ‘Johnny showed me.’

  ‘It is certainly a very interesting syncopated rhythm,’ said Mrs Liberty. ‘Like this, you say?’

  The ghostly wax cherries on her hat bounced up and down as she twirled.

  ‘That’s right. And apparently you spin around with your arms out and shout “ow!”,’ said the Alderman, demonstrating.

  Oh no, thought Johnny, hurrying towards them. On top of everything else, Michael Jackson’s going to sue me—

  ‘Get down and – what was it the man on the wireless said?’ said the Alderman.

  ‘Bogey, I believe.’

  They weren’t actually very good at it, but they made up for being eighty years behind the times by sheer enthusiasm.

  In fact, it was a party.

  Johnny stuck his hands on his hips.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing this!’

  ‘Why not?’ said a dancing dead.

  ‘It’s the middle of the night!’

  ‘Well? We don’t sleep!’

  ‘I mean, what would your . . . your descendants think if they could see you acting like this?’

  ‘Serve them right for not visiting us!’