Johnny and the Dead Read online

  ‘I used to like it in there,’ said Einstein, wistfully. ‘After a hard day stuffing foxes, it wass nice to relax of an evenink.’

  ‘You did say space was a delusion,’ said Mr Fletcher. ‘Anyway, I thought we were going to do some more work on the television. You said there was no theoretical reason why we shouldn’t be able to make—’

  ‘I zink,’ said Mr Einstein carefully, ‘I would like to fool myself a little.’

  And then there was only Mr Grimm.

  He turned back, still smiling in a glassy kind of way, and settled down and waited for them to return.

  Chapter 7

  The Frank W. Arnold Civic Centre meeting room was about half full.

  It smelled of chlorine from the swimming baths, and of dust, and floor polish, and wooden chairs. Occasionally people would wander in thinking the meeting was the AGM of the bowls club, and then try to wander out again, pushing on the bar on the door marked ‘Pull’ and then glaring at it as if only an idiot would put ‘Pull’ on a door you pulled. The speakers spent a lot of the time asking people at the back if they could hear, and then holding the microphone too close to the loudspeakers, and then someone tried to make the PA system work properly, and blew a fuse, and went to find the caretaker, pushing on the door for a while like a hamster trying to find the way out of its treadmill.

  In fact, it was like every other public meeting Johnny had ever attended. Probably on Jupiter seven-legged aliens had meetings in icy halls smelling of chlorine, he thought, with the microphones howling, and creatures frantically aing at doors clearly marked ‘’.

  There were one or two of his teachers in the audience. That was amazing. You never really thought of them doing anything after school. You never knew about people, like you never knew how deep a pond was because all you saw was the top. And he recognized one or two people he’d seen in the cemetery walking their dogs or just sitting on the seats. They looked out of place.

  There were a couple of people from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings, and a man from the Council planning office, and the chairman of Blackbury Municipal Authority, who looked a lot like Mrs Liberty and turned out to be a Miss Liberty. (Johnny wondered if Mrs Liberty was her great-grandmother or something, but it would be hard to ask; you couldn’t very well say, ‘Hey, you look like this dead lady, are you related?’)

  They didn’t look out of place. They looked as though they were used to platforms.

  Johnny found he couldn’t listen to them properly. The pock-pock from the squash court on the other side of the wall punctuated the sentences like a rain of full stops, and the rattling of the door bar was a semi-colon.

  ‘—better. Future. For the young; people of our city—’

  Most of the people in the audience were middle aged. They listened to all the speakers very intently.

  ‘—assure the good. People. of Blackbury; that. We. At United Consolidated; Holdings value. Public. Opinion most highly; and have no intention. Of—’

  Words poured out. He could feel them filling up the hall.

  And afterwards – he told himself, in the privacy of his own head – afterwards, the day after tomorrow, the cemetery would be shut, no matter what anyone said. It’d vanished into the past just like the old boot factory. And then the past would be rolled up and tucked away in old newspapers, just like the Pals. Unless someone did something.

  Life was difficult enough already. Let someone else say something.

  ‘—not even a particularly fine example. Of Edwardian funereal sculpture. With—’

  The words would fill up the hall until they were higher than people’s heads. They were smooth, soothing words. Soon they’d close over the top of all the trilbies and woolly hats, and everyone would be sitting there like sea anemones.

  They’d come here with things to say, even if they didn’t know how to say them.

  The thing was to keep your head down.

  But if you did keep your head down, you’d drown in other people’s words.

  ‘—fully taken into. Account; at every stage of the planning process—’

  Johnny stood up, because it was that or drowning. He felt his head break through the tide of words, and he breathed in. And then out.

  ‘Excuse me, please?’ he said.

  The White Swan in Cable Street, known for years as The Dirty Duck, was a traditional English pub, with a ‘Nuke the Gook’ video machine that Shakespeare himself might have played. It was crowded, and noisy with electronic explosions and the jukebox.

  In one corner, wedged between the video quiz game and the wall, in a black felt hat, nursing half a pint of Guinness, was mad old Mrs Tachyon.

  Mad is a word used about people who’ve either got no senses or several more than most other people.

  Mrs Tachyon was the only one who noticed the drop in temperature. She looked up, and grinned a one-toothed grin.

  The patch of chilly air drifted across the crowded room until it came up against the jukebox. Frost steamed off it for a second.

  The tune changed.

  ‘“Roses are Blooming in Piccardy”,’ said Mrs Tachyon happily. ‘Yes!’

  She watched carefully as people clustered around the machine and started to thump it. Then they pulled the plug, which made no difference.

  The barmaid screamed and dropped a tray of drinks when the games machine exploded and caught fire.

  Then the lights fused.

  A minute or two later, Mrs Tachyon was left in the dark, listening to the barman cursing somewhere in a back room as fuses kept blowing.

  It was quite pleasant, sitting in the warm glow of the melted machinery.

  From the wreckage on the floor, the ghosts of two pints of beer detached themselves and floated across to the table.

  ‘Cheers!’ said Mrs Tachyon.

  The chairman of the Council looked over her glasses.

  ‘Questions at the end, please.’

  Johnny wavered. But if he sat down, the words would close over his head again.

  ‘When is the end, please?’ he said.

  Johnny felt everyone looking at him.

  The chairman glanced at the other speakers. She had a habit, Johnny noticed, of closing her eyes when she started a sentence and opening them suddenly at the end, so that they’d leap out and surprise you.

  ‘When [close] we’ve fully. Discussed. The situation. And then I will call for [open!] questions.’

  Johnny decided to swim for the shore.

  ‘But I’ll have to leave before the end,’ he said. ‘I have to be in bed by ten.’

  There was a general murmur of approval from the audience. It was clear that most of them approved of the idea of anyone under thirty being in bed by ten. It was almost true, anyway. He was generally in his room around ten, although there was no telling when the lights actually went off.

  ‘Let the lad ask his question,’ said a voice from near the front.

  ‘He’s doing a project,’ said another voice. Johnny recognized Mr Atterbury, sitting bolt upright.

  ‘Oh . . . very well. What was it, young man?’

  ‘Um.’ Johnny felt them all looking at him. ‘Well, the thing is . . . the thing I want to know is . . . is there anything that anyone can say here, tonight, that’s going to make any difference?’

  ‘That [close] hardly seems an appropriate sort of [open!] question,’ said the chairman severely.

  ‘Seems damned good to me,’ said Mr Atterbury. ‘Why doesn’t the man from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings answer the boy? Just a simple answer would do.’

  The United man gave Johnny a frank, open smile.

  ‘We shall, of course, take all views very deeply into consideration,’ he said. ‘And—’

  ‘But there’s a sign up saying that you’re going to build anyway,’ said Johnny ‘Only I don’t think many people want the old cemetery built on. So you’ll take the sign down, will you?’

  ‘We have in fact bought the—’

  ‘You paid f
ivepence,’ said Johnny. ‘I’ll give you a pound.’

  People started to laugh.

  ‘I’ve got a question too,’ said Yo-less, standing up.

  The chairman, who had her mouth open, hesitated. Yo-less was beaming at her, defying her to tell him to sit down.

  ‘We’ll take the question from the other young man, the one in the shirt – no, not you, the—’ she began.

  ‘The black one,’ said Yo-less, helpfully. ‘Why did the Council sell the cemetery in the first place?’

  The chairman brightened up at this one.

  ‘I [close] think we have covered that very fully [open!],’ she said. ‘The cost of upkeep—’

  Bigmac nudged Johnny, pointed at a sheet of figures everyone had been given, and whispered in his ear.

  ‘But I don’t see how there’s much upkeep in a cemetery,’ said Yo-less. ‘Sending someone in once or twice a year to cut the brambles down doesn’t sound like much of a cost to me.’

  ‘We’d do it for nothing,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Would we?’ whispered Wobbler, who liked fresh air to be something that happened to other people, preferably a long way off.

  People were turning round in their seats.

  The chairman gave a loud sigh, to make it clear that Johnny was being just too stupid but that she was putting up with him nevertheless.

  ‘The fact, young man, as I have explained time and again, is that it is simply too expensive to maintain a cemetery that is—’

  As he listened, red with embarrassment, Johnny remembered about the chance to have another go. He could just put up with it and shut up, and for ever after he’d wonder what would have happened, and then when he died that angel – although, as things were going at the moment, angels were in short supply even after you were dead – would say, hey, would you have liked to have found out what happened? And he’d say yes, really, and the angel would send him back and maybe this was—

  He pulled himself together.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it isn’t simply too expensive.’

  The woman stopped in mid-sentence.

  ‘How dare you interrupt me!’ she snapped.

  Johnny ploughed on. ‘It says in your papers here that the cemetery makes a loss. But a cemetery can’t make a loss. It’s not like a business or something. It just is. My friend Bigmac here says what you’re calling a loss is just the value of the land for building offices. It’s the rates and taxes you’d get from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings. But the dead can’t pay taxes so they’re not worth anything.’

  The man from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings opened his mouth to say something, but the chairman stopped him.

  ‘A democratically elected Council—’ she began.

  ‘I’d like to raise a few points concerning that,’ said Mr Atterbury. ‘There are certain things about this sale which I should like to see more clearly explained in a democratic way.’

  ‘I’ve had a good look round the cemetery,’ said Johnny, plunging on. ‘I’ve been . . . doing a project. I’ve walked round it a lot. It’s full of stuff. It doesn’t matter that no one in there is really famous. They were famous here. They lived and got on with things and died. They were people. It’s wrong to think that the past is something that’s just gone. It’s still there. It’s just that you’ve gone past. If you drive through a town, it’s still there in the rear-view mirror. Time is a road, but it doesn’t roll up behind you. Things aren’t over just because they’re past. Do you see that?’

  People told one another that it was getting chilly for the time of year. Little points of coldness drifted around the town.

  Screen K at the Blackbury Odeon was showing a 24-hour, non-stop Halloween Special, but people kept coming out. It was too cold in there, they said. And it was creepy. Armpit, the manager, who was one of Wobbler’s mortal enemies, and who looked like two men in one dinner jacket, said it was supposed to be creepy. They said not that creepy. There were voices that you didn’t exactly hear, and they – well, you kept getting the impression that people were sitting right beh— Well, let’s go and get a burger. Somewhere brightly-lit.

  Pretty soon there was hardly anyone in there at all except Mrs Tachyon, who’d bought a ticket because it was somewhere in the warm, and spent most of the time asleep.

  ‘Elm Street? Elm Street? Wasn’t there an Elm Street down by Beech Lane?’

  ‘I don’t think it was this one. I don’t remember this sort of thing going on.’

  She didn’t mind the voices at all.

  ‘Freddie. Now that’s a NICE name.’

  They were company, in a way.

  ‘And that’s a nice jumper.’

  And a lot of people had left popcorn and things behind in their hurry to get out.

  ‘But I don’t think THAT’S very nice.’

  The next film was Ghostbusters, followed by Wednesday of the Living Dead.

  It seemed to Mrs Tachyon that the voices, which didn’t exist anyway, had gone very quiet.

  Everyone was staring at Johnny now.

  ‘And . . . and,’ said Johnny, ‘. . . if we forget about them, we’re just a lot of people living in . . . in buildings. We need them to tell us who we are. They built this city. They did all the daft human things that turn a lot of buildings into a place for people. It’s wrong to throw all that away.’

  The chairman shuffled the papers in front of her.

  ‘Nevertheless [close], we have to deal with the [open!] present day,’ she said brusquely. ‘The dead are no longer here and I am afraid they do not vote.’

  ‘You’re wrong. They are here and they have got a vote,’ said Johnny. ‘I’ve been working it out. In my head. It’s called tradition. And they outvote us twenty to one.’

  Everyone went quiet. Nearly as quiet as the unseen audience in Screen K.

  Then Mr Atterbury started to clap. Someone else joined in – Johnny saw it was the nurse from Sunshine Acres. Pretty soon everyone was clapping, in a polite yet firm way.

  Mr Atterbury stood up again.

  ‘Mr Atterbury, sit down,’ said the chairman. ‘I am running this meeting, you know.’

  ‘I am afraid this does not appear to be the case,’ said Mr Atterbury. ‘I’m standing up and I’m going to speak. The boy is right. Too much has been taken away, I do know that. You dug up the High Street. It had a lot of small shops. People lived there. Now it’s all walkways and plastic signs and people are afraid of it at night. Afraid of the town where they live! I’d be ashamed of that, if I was you. And we had a coat of arms for the town, up on the Town Hall. Now we’ve got some kind of plastic logo thing. And you took the old allotments and built the Neil Armstrong Shopping Mall and all the little shops went out of business. And they were beautiful, those allotments.’

  ‘They were a mess!’

  ‘Oh, yes. A beautiful mess. Home-made greenhouses made of old window frames nailed together. Old men sitting out in front of their sheds in old chairs. Vegetables and dogs and children all over the place. I don’t know where all those people went, do you? And then you knocked down a lot of houses and built the big tower block where no one wants to live and named it after a crook.’

  ‘I didn’t even live here in those days,’ said the chairman. ‘Besides, it’s generally agreed that the Joshua N’Clement block was a . . . misplaced idea.’

  ‘A bad idea, you mean.’

  ‘Yes, if you must put it like that.’

  ‘So mistakes can be made, can they?’

  ‘Nevertheless, the plain fact is that we have to build for the future—’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear you say that, madam chairman, because I’m sure you’ll agree that the most successful buildings have got very deep foundations.’

  There was another round of applause. The people on the platform looked at one another.

  ‘I feel I have no alternative but to close the meeting,’ said the chairman stiffly. ‘This was supposed to be an informative occasion.’

  ‘I thin
k it has been,’ said Mr Atterbury.

  ‘But you can’t close the meeting,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Indeed, I can!’

  ‘You can’t,’ said Johnny, ‘because this is a public hall, and we’re all public, and no one’s done anything wrong.’

  ‘Then we shall leave, and there will really be no point in the meeting!’ said the chairman. She swept up her papers and stalked across the platform, down the steps and across the hall. The rest of the platform party, with one or two helpless glances at the audience, followed her.

  She led the way to the door.

  Johnny offered up a silent prayer.

  Someone, somewhere, heard it.

  She pushed when she should have pulled. The rattling was the only noise, and it grew frantic as she began to lose her temper. Finally, one of the men from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings yanked the bar and the door jolted open.

  Johnny risked looking behind him. He couldn’t see anyone who looked dead.

  A week ago that would have sounded really odd.

  It didn’t sound much better now.

  ‘I thought I felt a draught,’ he said. ‘Just now?’

  ‘They’ve left the windows open at the back,’ said Yo-less.

  They’re not here, Johnny thought. I’m going to have to do this by myself. Oh, well . . .

  ‘Are we going to get into trouble?’ said Wobbler. ‘This was supposed to be a public meeting.’

  ‘Well, we’re public, aren’t we?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Everyone sat for a while looking at the empty platform. Then Mr Atterbury got up and limped up the steps.

  ‘Shall we have a meeting?’ he said.

  Cold air swirled out of the cinema.

  ‘Well, THAT was an education.’

  ‘Some of those tricks must have been done with mirrors, if you want MY opinion.’

  ‘What shall we do now?’

  ‘We should be getting back.’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Back to the cemetery, of course.’

  ‘Madam, the night is young!’

  ‘That’s right! We’ve only just started enjoying ourselves.’

  ‘Yes! Anyway, you’re a long time dead, that’s what I always say.’