Johnny and the Dead

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 con- trol 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 grand- mother, 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 foil.'

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 scrap- book, 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.'

'/ 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 every- where, 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 feet, 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!'

'We're making carpets!' shouted Mrs Liberty.

'Cutting a rung,' corrected one of the dead.

'A rug,' said the Alderman, slowing down a bit. 'A rug. Cutting a rug. That's what Mr Benbow, who died in nineteen thirty-one, says it is called. Getting down and bogeying.'

'It's been like this all evening,' said Mr Vicenti. He was sitting on the pavement. In feet, he was sit- ting about half a metre above the pavement. 'We've found some very interesting stations. What exactly « a DJ?'

'A disc jockey,' said Johnny, giving up and

sitting down. 'He plays the discs and stuff' 'Is it some kind of punishment?' 'Quite a lot of people like to do it.' 'How very strange. They are not mentally ill, or

anything?'

The song finished. The dancers stopped twirling, but slowly and with great reluctance.

Mrs Liberty pushed her hat back. It had tipped over her eyes.

'That was extremely enjoyable,' she said. 'Mr Fletcher! Be so good as to instruct the man on the wireless to play something more!'

Interested despite himself, Johnny padded over to the phone box. Mr Fletcher was actually kneeling down with his hands inside the telephone. A couple of other dead people were watching him. One of them was William Stickers, who didn't look very happy. The other was an old man with a mass of white hair in that dandelion-clock style known as Mad Scientist Afro.

'Oh, it's you,' said William Stickers. 'Call this a world, do you?'

'Me?' said Johnny. 'I don't call it anything.' 'Was that man on the radio making fun of me, do you think?'

'Oh, no,' said Johnny, crossing his fingers.

'Mr Sticker iz annoyed because he telephoned Moscow,' said the white-haired man. 'They said they've had enough revolutions to be going on wiz, but vould like some soap.'

'They're nothing but dirty capitalists!' said William Stickers.

'But at least they want to be dean capitalists,' said Mr Fletcher. 'Where shall we try next?'

'Don't you have to put money in?' said Johnny.

Mr Fletcher laughed.

'I don't zink we've met,' said the white- haired man, extending a slightly transparent hand. 'Solomon Einstein (1869-1932).'

'Like Albert Einstein?' said Johnny.

'He vas my distant cousin,' said Solomon Einstein. 'Relatively speaking. Haha.'

Johnny got the impression Mr Einstein had said that line a million times, and still wasn't tired of it.

'Who're you ringing up?' said Johnny.

'We're just having a look at the world,' said Mr Fletcher. 'What are those things that go round and round in the sky?'

'I don't know. Frisbees?'

'Mr Vicenti just remembers them. They go round and round the world.'

'Oh. You mean satellites?'

'Whee!'

'But how do you know how to—'

'I can't explain. Things are a lot simpler, I think. I can see it all laid out.'

'All of what?'

'All the cables, all the ... the satellites ... Not having a body makes them a lot easier to use, too.'

'What do you mean?'

'For one thing, you don't have to stay in one place.'

'But I thought you—'

Mr Fletcher vanished. He reappeared a few seconds later.

'Amazing things,' he said. 'My word, but we shall have fun.'

'I don't underst—'

'Johnny?'

It was Mr Vicenti.

Someone living had managed to get through to Mad Jim. The dead, with much laughter, were try- ing to dance to a Country-and-Western number.

'What's going OM?' said Johnny. 'You said you couldn't leave the cemetery!'

'No-one has explained this to you? They do not teach you in schools?'

'Well, we don't get lessons in dealing with ghos— Sorry. Sorry. With dead people, I mean.'

'We're not ghosts, Johnny. A ghost is a very sad thing. Oh, dear. It's hard to explain things to the living. I was alive once, and I know what I 'm talking about.'

Dead Mr Vicenti looked at Johnny's blank face.

'We're ... something else,' he said. 'But now you see us and hear us, you're making us free. You're giving us what we don't have.'

'What's that?'

'I can't explain. But while you're thinking of us, we're free.'

'My head doesn't have to spin round and round, does it?'

'That sounds like a good trick. Can you make it do that?'

'No.'

'Then it won't.'

'Only I'm a bit worried I'm dabblin' with the occult.'

It seemed daft to say it, to Mr Vicenti in his pin- stripe trousers and little black tie and fresh ghostly carnation every day. Or Mrs Liberty. Or the big bearded shape of William Stickers, who would have been Karl Marx if Karl Marx hadn't been Karl Marx first.

'Dear me, I hope you're not dabbling with the occult,' said Mr Vicenti. 'Father Kearny (1891- 1949) wouldn't like that at all.'

'Who's Father Kearny?'

'A few moments ago he was dancing with Mrs Liberty. Oh dear. We do mix things up, don't we?'

'Send him away.'

Johnny turned.

One of the dead was still in the cemetery. He was standing right up against the railings, clasping them like a prisoner might hold the bars of his cell. He didn't look a lot different to Mr Vicenti, except that he had a pair of glasses. It was amazing that they weren't melting; he had the strongest stare Johnny had ever seen. He seemed to be glaring at Johnny's left ear.

'Who's that?' he said.

'Mr Grimm,' said Mr Vicenti, without looking around.

'Oh, yes. I couldn't find anything about him in the paper.'

'I'm not surprised,' said Mr Vicenti, in a low

and level voice. 'In those days, there were things they didn't put in.'

'You go away, boy. You're meddling with things you don't understand,' said Mr Grimm. 'You're imperilling your immortal soul. And theirs. You go away, you bad boy.'

Johnny stared. Then he looked back at the street, at the dancers, and the scientists around the tele- phone box. A bit further along there was Stanley Roundway, in shorts that came down to his knees, showing a group of somewhat older dead how to play football. He had 'L' and 'R' stencilled on his football boots.

Mr Vicenti was staring straight ahead.

'Um—' said Johnny.

'I can't help you there,' said Mr Vicenti. 'That sort of thing is up to you.'

He must have walked home. He didn't really remember. But he woke up in bed.

Johnny wondered what the dead did on Sundays. Blackbury on Sundays went through some sort of boredom barrier and out the other side.

Most people did what people traditionally do on Sundays, which was dress up neatly and get in the car and go for family worship at the MegasuperSaver Garden Centre, just outside the town. There was a kind of tide of potted plants that were brought back to get killed off by the central heating in time for next week's visit.

And the mall was locked up. There wasn't even anywhere to hang around.

'The point about being dead in this town,' said Wobbler, as they mooched along the towpath, 'is that it's probably hard to tell the difference.'

'Did anyone hear the radio last night?' said Johnny.

No-one had. He felt a bit relieved.

'When I grow up,' said Wobbler, 'I'm going to be out of here like a shot. Just you watch. That's what this place is. It's a place to come from. It's not a place to stay.'

'Where're you going to go, then?' said Johnny.

'There's a huge big world out there!' said Wobbler. 'Mountains! America! Australia! Tons of places!'

'You told me the other day you'd probably get a job working at your uncle's place over on the trading estate,' said Bigmac.

'Yes ... well ... I mean, all those places'11 be there, won't they, for when I get time to go,' said Wobbler.

7 thought you were going to be a big man in computers,' said Yo-less.

'I could be. I could be. If I wanted.'

'If there's a miracle and you pass Maths and English, you mean,' said Bigmac.

'I'm just more practically gifted,' said Wobbler.

'You mean you just press keys until something happens.'

'Well? Often things do happen.'

'I'm going to join the Army,' said Bigmac. 'The SAS.'

'Huh. The flat feet and the asthma will be a

big help there, then,' said Wobbler. 'I can just see they'll want you to limp out and wheeze on terrorists.'

' I 'm pretty certain I want to get a law degree and a medical degree,' said Yo-less, to keep the peace.

'That's good. That way they won't be able to sue you if you chop the wrong bits off,' said Bigmac.

No-one really lost their temper. This was all part of hanging around.

'What about you?' said Wobbler. 'What do you want to be?'

'Dunno,' said Johnny.

'Didn't you go to the careers evening last week?'

Johnny nodded. It had been full of Great Futures. There was a Great Future in retail marketing. There was a Great Future in wholesale distri- bution. There was a Great Future in the armed forces, although probably not for Bigmac, who'd been allowed to hold a machine gun and had dropped it on his foot. But Johnny couldn't find a Great Future with any future in it.

'What I want to be,' he said, 'is something they haven't got a name for yet.'

'Oh, yeah?' said Wobbler. 'Like, in two years' time someone's going to invent the Vurglesplat, and when they start looking around for Vurglesplat operators, you're going to be first in the queue, right?'

They went through the cemetery. The others, without saying anything, bunched up slightly. But there were no dead people around.

'You can't just hang around waiting for Great

Futures, that's the point,' Johnny murmured.

'Hey,' said Yo-less, in a dismally jolly voice, 'my mum says why don't you guys come to church tonight?'

'It won't work,' said Wobbler, afterawhile. 'You say that every week.'

' She says it'd be good for you. Especially Simon.'

'Simon?' said Wobbler.

'Me,' said Bigmac.

'She says you need looking after,' said Yo-less.

'I didn't know you were called Simon,' said Wobbler.

Bigmac sighed. He had 'Blackbury Skins' on his T-shirt, a suede haircut, great big boots, great big braces and LOVE and HAT in Biro on his knuck- les1, but for some reason Yo-less's mum thought he needed a proper home. Bigmac lived in dread that Bazza and Skazz, the only other Skins in Blackbury, would find out and confiscate his official braces.

'She said you're all growing up heathens,' said Yo-less.

'Well, I'm going to a funeral at the crem tomor- row,' said Johnny. 'That's almost church.'

'Anyone important?' said Wobbler.

'I'm not sure,' said Johnny.

Johnny was amazed that so many people had come to Thomas Atkins's funeral, but that was because they'd really come to the one before it. All there was for Atkins's was himself and a stiff-looking old

1 Th'e '.' kept rubbing off.

man in a blazer from the British Legion and the nurse from Sunshine Acres. And the vicar, who did his best, but had never met Tommy Atkins so had to put together his sermon out of a sort of kit of Proper Things to Say. And then some recorded organ music. And that was it.

The chapel smelled of new wood and floor polish.

The three others kept looking at Johnny in an embarrassed way, as if they felt he shouldn't be there but didn't know exactly how to put it.

He heard a faint sound behind him, just as the recorded music started up.

He turned around, and there were the dead, seated in rows. The Alderman had taken his hat off and was sitting stiffly at attention. Even William Stickers had tried to look respectable. Solomon Einstein's hair stood out like a halo.

The nurse was talking to the man in the blazer. Johnny leaned back so that

he could speak to Mr Fletcher.

'Why are you here?' he whispered.

'It's allowed,' said Mr Fletcher. 'We used to go to all the funerals in the cemetery. Help them settle in. Make them welcome. It's always a bit of a shock.'

'Oh.'

'And ... seeing as you were here... we thought we'd see if we could make it. Mr Vicenti said it was worth a try. We're getting better at it!'

The nurse handed Tommy Atkins's box to the British Legion man and walked out, waving at Johnny uncertainly as she went past. And then

the vicar ushered the man through another door, giving Johnny another funny look.

Outside, the October sun was shining weakly, but it was managing to shine. Johnny went outside and waited.

Eventually the man came out, holding two boxes this time.

'Uh,' said Johnny, standing up. 'Um.'

'Yes, lad? The lady from the Home said you're doing a project for school.'

Doing a project. It was amazing. If Saddam Hussein had said he was doing a school project on Kuwait, he'd have found life a lot easier ...

'Um, yes. Uh. Can I ask you some stuff?'

'Of course, yes.' The man sat down heavily on one of the benches. He walked with a limp, and sat with one leg stretched out straight in front of him. Johnny was surprised to see that he was probably as old as Grandad, but he had that dried- out, suntanned look of a man who keeps himself fit and is probably still going to be captain of the bowls club when he's eighty.

'Well ... when Mr Atkins said ...' Johnny began. 'I mean, he used to say that he was "the one". I know about the Blackbury Pals. I know they all got killed except him. But I don't think that's what he meant ...'

'You know about the Pals, do you? How?'

'Read it in an old newspaper.'

'Oh. But you don't know about Tommy Atkins?'

'Well, yes, he—'

'No, I mean Tommy Atkins. I meant, why he' so proud of the name. What the name meant?

'I don't understand that,' said Johnny.

'What do they teach you in school these days?'

Johnny didn't answer. He could tell it wasn't* really a question. j

'You see - in the Great War, the First World War ... when a new recruit joined the Army he had to fill in his pay book, yes? You know? Name and address and that sort of thing? And to help them do it, the Army did a kind of guide to how to fill it in, and on the guide, where it said Name, they put: Thomas Atkins. It was just a name. Just to show them that's where their name should be. Like: John Smith. But it ... well, it became a sort of joke. Tommy Atkins came to mean the average soldier—'

'Like The Man In The Street?'

'Yes ... very much like that. It was a nickname for a soldier, I do know that. Tommy Atkins — the British Tommy.'

'So ... in a way ... all soldiers were Tommy Atkins?'

'Yes. I suppose you could put it like that. Of course, that's a rather fanciful way of—'

'But he was a real person. He smoked a pipe and everything.'

'Well, I suppose the Army used it because they thought it was a common sort of name. So there was bound to be a real Tommy Atkins somewhere. I know he was very proud of his name. I do know that.'

'Was he the last man alive who fought in the

war?'

'Oh, no. Good heavens, no. But he was the last one from around here, that's for certain. The last of the Pals.'

Johnny felt a change in the air.

'He was a strange old boy. I used to go and see him every year at—'

There was a noise that might be made if a handful of silence was stretched thin and then plucked, like a guitar string.

Johnny looked around. Now there were three people sitting on the bench.

Tommy Atkins had his peaked hat on his knees. The uniform didn't really fit. He was still an old man, so his skinny neck stuck out of his collar like a tortoise's. He had an old-fashioned sort of face - one designed to wear a cloth cap and work in the rubber boot factory. He saw Johnny staring at him, and winked, and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Then he went back to gazing intently at the road leading into the car park.

Behind Johnny, the dead filed quietly out of the building, the older ones coming through the wall, the younger ones still using the door out of habit. They didn't say anything. They just stood and looked expectantly towards the main road.

Where, marching through the cars, were the Blackbury Pals.