by Alan Moore
Over against the jitty’s left-hand wall ahead of her and Michael, Phyllis noticed Mrs. Gibbs’s brazier, that she’d got John and Reggie to dispose of. It was already beginning to break down into the dream-mulch that collected at the curbs and corners of Mansoul, starting to lose its form and function as the rusting fire-basket curled back in corroded petals from the spent coals resting at the blackened centre. Its three tripod legs were buckling together, fusing to a single stalk so that the whole thing looked like it was turning to a metal sunflower, charred from having grown too near the sun. It didn’t pay to sit still for too long here in the Second Borough, where things slid and shifted and you never knew what you’d end up as.
Stumbling along beside her, Michael Warren gave her what was probably as close as he could get to an appraising look.
“How old wiz you, then, befour yew wiz dread? Did you get many nights?”
Phyllis gave him a look that could have fried an egg.
“Don’t be so cheeky. Yer should never ask a lady when it wiz she died. Old as me tongue and a bit older than me teeth, I wiz, and that’s as much as yer’ll get ayt of me.”
The child looked mortified and slightly scared. Phyllis decided that she’d let him off the hook.
“Now, if yer’d asked when I wiz born, that’d be different. I wiz born in 1920.”
Obviously relieved to find he hadn’t irrecoverably overstepped the mark, the little boy moved onto safer ground as he resumed his questioning.
“Wiz that round here, down in the Boroughs?”
Phyllis gave a little hum of affirmation.
“I wiz born in Spring Lane, up the top. When I wiz late for school I could climb over ayr back wall into the playground. Dayn ayr cellar, yer could pull a board away and look dayn in the dark upon the spring itself, what Spring Lane wiz named after. There wiz never any money, but my childhood up there wiz the happiest time I ever ’ad. That’s why I’m like I am now. This is me ’ow I remember me when I wiz at me best.”
Ahead of them, the other four had reached the alleyway’s far end, where it emerged into Spring Lane. Her Bill and Reggie Bowler were already out of sight, having apparently turned right and started trudging up the hill, but Handsome John and Marjorie were hanging back to make sure Phyllis and her small companion knew where they were going. John waved to her from the jitty’s mouth and pointed up Spring Lane to indicate that was where him and Marjorie were heading next and Phyllis grinned, raising one thin arm in reply. The infant shuffling beside her in his slippers was still seemingly preoccupied by her last statement, about how she looked now being what she thought of as her best.
“Well, if this wiz your best, why wiz them niffy raggit-thins all round your neck?”
If she’d have wanted, Phyllis could have took offence at having the rank odour of her garland raised in conversation, when to her it was a smell she hardly noticed anymore. However, she was starting to find Michael Warren at least tolerable company and didn’t want to bust things up when they were going well. She kept the faint affront out of her voice as she replied to him.
“There’s lots of reasons. Rabbits are the ’oly magic animal raynd ’ere, along with pigeons. There are some who say that’s why they call this place the Boroughs, that it should be ‘Burrows’ ’cause of ’ow the streets are tangled in a maze and ’ow folk dayn there breed like rabbits. That’s not really why it’s called the Boroughs, naturally, but it just shows yer ’ow some people think. One of the reasons why I wear them is because, up ’ere, the rabbit stands for girls just like the pigeon stands for boys. Abington Street up town wiz what they used to call the Bunny Run because of all the factory girls went up and dayn it and yer’d have the chaps stood at the edges, whistling and winking. I wiz told that Bunny wiz an old Boroughs expression for a girl, by reason of another name for rabbit being coney, what wiz also called a cunny, and … well, it involves bad language what I shouldn’t say, so yer’ll just ’ave to take my word for it. And then, of course, they say that Chinamen can see a lady in the moon where we can see a man, and that she’s got a rabbit with ’er, so there’s one more reason rabbits are to do with girls.
“As for the Boroughs, rabbits sum it up, the life down ’ere. There wiz so many of them on the wastelands and the bits of meadow what we ’ad about, we thought of ’em as vermin, just like all the people as lived at the better end of town would think of us: all ’opping raynd between the weeds and looking for a scrap to eat, all in ayr grey and brown and black and white, all ’aving lots of children because we knew nature would take some of them away. We thought of them as vermin, rabbits, or we thought of them as supper, and ayr dad would go ayt ’unting them, then bring ’em ’ome and skin ’em by the fire. We’d eat the meat and ’ang the skins up on a string, and when we’d got enough, ayr mam would send me up the rag-and-bone yard where the man would give me a few coppers for them. They’d be in a great long necklace, just like they are now.
“One time I ’adn’t gone straight to the junkyard with them, because I wiz ’aving fun pretending that I wiz a duchess with me fur coat raynd me shoulders. I wiz playing with the other Compton Street Girls, up Bellbarn and Andrew’s Street and all raynd there, and in St. Andrew’s Church there wiz a wedding gooin’ on. Of course, we thought all that wiz very glamorous and so we slipped into the chapel and we took a pew together at the back, so we could watch.
“The smell from off my rabbit skins wiz so bad that they ’ad to stop the wedding while the ushers chucked us ayt. I didn’t care. I liked ’em, and I still do. After all this time I’ve got so I can’t smell ’em anymore. Give it a while and yer won’t notice them yerself.”
They were now almost at the alley’s end, where it met Spring Lane’s slope in a T-junction. Phyllis noticed Michael Warren peering up at the old metal street-sign bolted to the jitty wall, black painted letters on a white ground specked with faecal orange, the plaque’s edges oxidised to friable iron wafer. Neither of the two words on the sign was wholly visible, obliterated by the rust so that only the cryptic message SCAR WELL RACE remained. Phyllis translated, for the toddler’s benefit.
“Scarletwell Terrace. It wiz what the jitty wiz before it wiz a jitty. That’s what all these back gates are that we’ve been passing on ayr right. Daynstairs in the three-sided world, all this ’as been pulled dayn by your time and there’s just the bottom playing-field of Spring Lane School, but up ’ere in the dream-crust it’s still standing.”
Michael didn’t comment on what Phyllis had just said, but seemed to understand. They traipsed around the corner, turning right into Spring Lane and facing up the hill. The view stopped Phyllis’s diminutive companion in his slipper-slapping tracks and made him gasp, so that she had to forcibly remind herself that all of this was new to him. Beyond the Attics of the Breath and the back alley they’d just left, the toddler had seen nothing of Mansoul itself. Watching the feelings and reactions wash across his upturned face as he gazed up the sloping lane, she tried to put herself back to when she was fresh arrived here in the Second Borough, tried to see the dream-hill as the child was seeing it.
It clearly wasn’t an abundance of the customary phantasmagoria you found around Mansoul that had so taken the small boy aback: Spring Lane was very much as it had been in life when Phyllis had been living down here, only more so. There were hardly any dreamlike touches of the kind that typified the upper world, no cellar grids with blackened teeth instead of bars, no fur upon the paving slabs. Instead there was no more than the familiar incline, but on fire with itself and shimmering with identity, with its own foot-worn history, with all the lights it had been saturated by across the thousand years of its existence.
Spring Lane burned with a mythology of chipped slates, pale wash-water blue and flaking at the seam. The summer yellow glow of an impending dawn diffused, diluted in the million-gallon sky above the tannery that occupied this low end of the ancient gradient, across the narrow street from where Phyllis and Michael stood outside the alley-mouth. The tannery�
�s high walls of browning brick with rusted wire mesh over its high windows didn’t have the brutal aura that the building had down in the domain of the living. Rather it was softly iridescent with a sheen of fond remembrance – the cloisters of some mediaeval craft since disappeared – and had the homely perfume of manure and boiled sweets. Past the peeling wooden gates that lolled skew-whiff were yards where puddles stained a vivid tangerine harboured reflected chimney stacks, lamp black and wavering. Heaped leather shavings tinted with corrosive sapphire stood between the fire-opal pools, an azure down mounded into fantastic nests by thunderbirds to hatch their legendary fledglings. Rainspouts eaten through by time had diamond dribble beading on their chapped tin lips, and every splinter and subsided cobble sang with endless being.
Michael Warren stood entranced and Phyllis Painter stood beside him, sharing his enchantment, looking at the heart-caressing vista through his eyes. The district’s summer sounds were, in her ears, reduced to a rich stock. The lengthy intervals between the bumbling drones of distant motorcars, the twittering filigree of birdsong strung along the guttered eaves, the silver gurgle of a buried torrent echoing deep in the night-throat of a drain, all these were boiled down to a single susurrus, the hissing, tingling reverberation of a cymbal struck by a soft brush. The instant jingled in the breeze.
Uphill, the other four official members of the Dead Dead Gang were climbing through a tentative prismatic haze that seemed to fog – deliciously – each windowsill and curbstone in the slanted lane. Making hard work of it, their slogging forms looked every bit as marvellously typical as the scrubbed doorsteps they were trudging past, looked just as indispensable to the beguiling composition of the scene. Phyllis’s Bill and Reggie Bowler were the closest to the top, with Handsome John and Marjorie sharing a joke as they ascended past the entrance to Monk’s Pond Street, opening to their left on Spring Lane’s other side. Trading a glance in which they both acknowledged what a marvel this all was, Phyllis and Michael started dawdling up the perfect street after their comrades.
Fastening the wine-red dressing gown more tightly round his waist the little boy took big steps to keep up with Phyllis, staring all the time in wonderment at the long terrace reaching from the hill’s foot to its crown, the row of painted wooden doors almost uninterrupted on their right as they went up. At last he could contain his curiosity no longer.
“What are all these houses? Spring Lane wizzn’t like this when I wiz alive still.”
Placing one blue shoe before the other on the pink and weathered pavement as she struggled up the hillside, Phyllis glanced towards the homes that they were passing with a wistful look upon her fair-skinned face.
“Yer right, it wizzn’t, but it wiz when I wiz little. Most of these got knocked dayn right before the war, and then it wiz just wasteland for the kids to play on until it got turned to the school playing field. That little row of ’ouses where your house wiz, on St. Andrew’s Road, that’s all that’s left of a big block of ’ouses. They wiz all up Scarletwell Street and Spring Lane, all along Crispin Street up at the top, and there wiz whole streets in between what ain’t there now. Scarletwell Terrace, what we’ve just come ayt of, that wiz one, and a bit further up on this side of the lane there’s Spring Lane Terrace.”
Michael Warren was still listening, but he was letting his gaze wander to the road’s far side where now the entrance to Monk’s Pond Street opened up, running off north from Spring Lane’s east-west line. Phyllis reflected that this side-street would look vastly altered, too, from the small boy’s perspective. Closest to them, on the left-hand side as they looked down Monk’s Pond Street, stood the east wall of the tannery, which would be recognisable from Michael’s lifetime. Opposite and on the right, however, some two dozen well-kept doorsteps stretched away north to connect with Crane Hill and the bottom end of Grafton Street. Two dozen sprawling families, perhaps two hundred people in their proudly-maintained row, which would, by Michael Warren’s day, become a patch of rubble that the local children called ‘The Bricks’ or else be factory property fenced off by walls of corrugated tin. Only up here, in the magnetic fields of dream and memory, were the old homesteads manifest.
Along the thoroughfare’s far end upon its leftmost, western side there was the feature that had evidently captured the youngster’s attention. The expansive pond from which the street derived its name, dried up down in the timely world since the late sixteen-hundreds, glittered in the sourceless sunlight. Two or three unhurried figures in dun-coloured habits stood conversing by the waterside, one of them carrying a fishing pole.
“They’re monks,” Phyllis explained to Michael. “They’re monks who lived a long while back at Andrew’s Priory, which wiz up near where St. Andrew’s Church wiz now, that I got booted ayt of when me rabbit skins wiz causing such a stink. They’re Frenchies most of them, I think, and it wiz one of them who let the King’s troops in to ransack everything, eight ’undred year ago. Up ’ere that’s all forgiven, by and large, but mostly they don’t mingle wi’ the local ghosts and still keep to themselves. Or sometimes the more boozy ones will ’aunt a pub, just for the company. There’s several of the inns round ’ere ’ave got a ghostly monk in the back cellar or the snug, though I can only think of one by name and that’s Old Joe who floats araynd the Jolly Smokers on the Mayorhold. Old Joe’s not his real name, ’cause that would be something French, but it’s just what the people Daynstairs call him.”
Michael Warren looked at her, perplexed.
“Can people who are still aliveable see ghosts, then?”
Phyllis shrugged.
“Some of them can, but only if they’re a bit funny in the ’ead, like mystic people are, or people who’ve gone mad. People who drink a lot or who smoke opium or things like that, they can see ghosts as well. That’s why yer get more ’aunted pubs than any other sort of building, because dead folk like a place where there’s a chance someone wizzle be drunk enough to notice them. But even the few people what are able to see ghosts can only see them when they’re wandering abayt dayn in the ghost-seam.”
Monk’s Pond Street was vanishing behind them on their left as they continued up the fond and sparkling daydream of the hill. The tartan-shrouded toddler’s attention was now wholly fixed on Phyllis.
“What’s a ghost-seam?”
Phyllis couldn’t help herself from saying “Funny, till yer get to know ’im,” which was an old joke up in Mansoul and which the baffled infant clearly didn’t get. She answered him again, more seriously.
“The ghost-seam’s what it saynds like. It’s a ragged seam what joins the Upstairs to the Dayn-below, and it’s where all the real ghosts ’ang ayt, all the ones what don’t feel comfortable up ’ere. It’s like the Second Borough’s on the top with the First Borough underneath, and in between them there’s the ghost-seam, like when yer go in a pub and all the fag-smoke’s ’anging in the air like a grey blanket, wobblin’ abayt when people move and cause a draught. That’s what the ghost-seam’s like. ’Ere, look ’ere on the right. It’s Spring Lane Terrace, what I said abayt, one of the streets what got pulled dayn to make the playing field.”
They were just walking past the corner where the terrace trickled off due south, towards their right, with house-fronts in a line to either side of dusty flagstones that were smeared with a thin margarine of morning light. Rather than peering down the tributary street, however, Michael Warren was more interested in the corner of it that was opposite the one which he and Phyllis had just passed, the corner they were now approaching as they walked across the mouth of Spring Lane Terrace. In the stead of doorways and net-curtained downstairs windows like the ones that started further down the side street, up this end was only plain brick wall supporting low slate roofs, which Phyllis knew to be the backside of a row of stables. As the pair of them continued up Spring Lane, leaving the offshoot terrace in their wake, they passed the gated yard upon their right out onto which the stables opened. There was the warm, hairy Bovril scent of horses and the st
ronger smell of disinfectant, which, though Phyllis didn’t like it, always made her nose excited.
The small boy gazed pensively at the closed gate as they walked by it, carrying on uphill. The deep fire-engine red that its gnawed woodwork had once been was faded by forgotten decades to the colour of a kiss. Phyllis explained, before the kid could ask.
“I think this yard’s still ’ere while yer alive, but it’s part of a factory by your time. Back when I was living dayn ’ere, though, it wiz the place they kept the fever cart.”
It made her ghostly substance shiver, even to pronounce the words. The fever cart, to Phyllis, had since she was small seemed to be from the night-side of the Boroughs. Rattling down the huddled byways it had been one of those sinister phenomena, like deathmongers or phantom monks, which she’d believed to be peculiar to the area. Such things spoke of the neighbourhood’s relationship with death, a tiger-trodden foreign land to little girls enjoying a relationship with liquorice-whip and dandelion-clock life.
The baby in his night-things, trotting there beside her, just stared at her blankly.
“What’s a fever cart?”
She sighed theatrically and rolled the memory of her childhood eyes. She’d obviously been right in her assumption that this nipper had been brought up soft. Phyllis supposed that most of those born in the ’Fifties had things cushy, what with all the science and medicine they had by then, at least compared with how things were when she was young.
“Yer don’t know nothing, do yer? What the fever cart wiz, it wiz a big wagon what they put the kids in when they ’ad the smallpox and diphtheria and that. It took ’em to a camp near the stone cross what’s ayt near ’Ardingstone, that’s there to mark the spot where Queen Eleanor’s body wiz put down when she wiz being taken back to London. In the fever camp, ayt in the open air with all the other children what were ill, they’d either die or they’d get better. Usually they’d die.”