by Owen Sheers
I looked back at the slow cricket game, a woman laying a table for dinner beside one of the fat pillars of the Passover, an old bloke reading his paper beside a fireplace, a kid building an Airfix plane on his bed. Then I looked back at Johnny, my head still spinning.
‘What you on about Johnny?’ I said. ‘How did Alfie do all this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Johnny said, all bulging eyes and high brows. ‘But I’m telling you mun, he did. I saw him. I was out giving that stray some milk see, when I sees Alfie step out of his front door. I know he’s always been an odd one, but he was looking even odder today, staring over there at the pillars. And not just staring either, but speaking too. So I goes nearer, didn’t I? An’ he was saying numbers and names, over and over, the numbers of houses and the names of the people who’d lived in them I reckon.’
I put my hands out again, stopping him. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘Because,’ Johnny said, pulling himself up like this was his big moment, ‘when he said their names, they arrived, didn’t they?’
‘Arrived? From where?
‘I don’t know,’ he said, stepping closer to me, and dropping his voice. ‘But they did. All of ’em. Just appeared from behind the pillars. An’ that’s what I mean. Alfie, it was him who done it, him who built the street again, just by talking.’
I looked back at the street. It was all too much, and too much of a coincidence too. This had to be the Teacher. I knew it in my bones. The Company Man was going to take more of the town away so, to piss him off, the Teacher, with a little help from Alfie by the looks of it, was bringing other bits of it back. I didn’t know how, and like I said when you first came to listen to me, I still don’t. But I just knew it, deep down. This, the cricket game, the terrace of dreams, it was all him.
So for once I wasn’t surprised when I saw him. Because of course he was there, wasn’t he? Just as he was always in the middle of things yesterday. Only this time, there wasn’t just him. There were his followers too.
From what I could tell they’d started tagging along with him right from the start. Everyone knows that when he left the slip on Friday Joanne had followed him along the beach, stepping her feet in the prints of his. And we know, too, how he picked up Peter not long after, bumping into him when he was on his way back from fishing off the rocks at the end of the prom. But all the others? People find it hard to believe now, just how many there were. Bloody hundreds of them – most, by the look of it, fresh (or not so) off the mountain where he’d slept that night. He was walking out from one of the houses, one of the real ones mind, not one of Alfie’s, towards the front door of another. Walking steady and slow just like any normal bloke taking a morning stroll, only this one happened to have a wedding train of people in his wake. And so many of them. Old and young, men and women, poor and poorer.
I stepped away from Johnny to get a closer look at the Teacher. He looked the same as when I saw him yesterday, but different too. On the beach and then again in the secure area, he’d looked like a lost child. But now he wasn’t. He was walking with direction, and there was a light in his eye. Not of knowing, but of wanting to know. Like he was starving for stories, for voices. Which, it turned out, he was.
I couldn’t get into the house he entered. There was no room, what with the followers, the families who lived there, and now the TV crews too, the ones who’d come for the Company Man but who reckoned they’d sniffed out a juicier story with the Teacher. I still know what happened inside that house though because it all came back to us like Chinese whispers, running through the crowd like a voltage. How the Teacher had sat down and taken a cup of tea with the old woman who owned the house. How she’d told him her stories and then how everyone else did too. A blind boy. A young girl who cares for her mam. A mute girl, tapping out her tale for him on the arm of her wheelchair. How all he’d done was sit and listen, nothing else, and how, somehow, that listening had been enough. How it did something. How people came out of that house lighter, like a weight’d been taken off them. Like they’d been healed.
I was still standing at the back of that crowd, listening to the commentary filter through it, when I heard other voices, further off, towards town. I stepped away to try to hear them better, but still couldn’t make sense of them. It sounded like more of a droning than a conversation, like the ebb and flow of a hive. So I took a few more steps away from the people milling around the house, walking, as I did, through the imaginary walls of Alfie’s dream terrace, past a woman making a bed, a granddad struggling with his braces.
From what I could tell the voices were coming from over by the graveyards. And not just voices either, but lights too. Flickering lights like a slow strobe, flashing up under the underpass. Taking one more look at the crowd behind me, I decided to go and see what was going on. Maybe, I thought, the Teacher had done one of his disappearing acts and was already at work over there by the graves, conjuring up some more of his listening brand of healing.
But I was wrong. There wasn’t any kind of healing happening over by those graveyards.
Just hurting.
Legion we called them. The Legion Twins. Couple of scrawny kids living in the underpass between the cemeteries of St Mary’s. No one remembers why they got that name. You know how it is with nicknames. Something you did as a kid, or your dad did, or your cousin way back, and bang, you’re stuck with it. Well, theirs was the Legion Twins and always had been as far as I knew. Every town has people like them I reckon. That bloke you see every day, wandering round the streets, mumbling. You know who I mean, don’t you? Might stick out a skinny hand now and then, ask you for change. Ever talked to him? No, course you haven’t. Why would you? Can’t get a bloody word in edgeways with them types, can you? So busy talking to themselves. And that’s how it was with the Twins. We all knew them but no one ever spoke to them, and they never spoke to us either, just to themselves or to each other.
Turns out though, as I discovered when I came round the corner towards the underpass, we’d been wrong about the Twins all along. All those years they weren’t talking to themselves but to them, the Dead. And to us, I suppose. The us we’d already forgotten. Even talking for us in a way. And we’d never known. Until that day, when coming round the corner and seeing them in the underpass hurting like that, it had all made sense.
I say sense, but that’s not really the right word for what I saw. I’m not going to even try and explain it, so let me just describe it for you instead.
All through that underpass, the same one I’d walked through a thousand times before, the Dead were coming out of the ground. Not in that Zombie way mind, not like in a film, but in film. Home movies, that’s what those flickering lights were. Home movies coming out of the ground, hitting the walls and roof of the underpass, loads of them. Weddings, christenings, children’s birthday parties, a boxing match, long-gone families and friends. Some in black and white, others in 60s and 70s colour. It was like a kaleidoscope under there, it was. A swirling kaleidoscope of gone lives in a gone town. Some of them were only coming partway through, squeezing their light through a tiny hole in the ground. Others, though, were on full show, shining from great big gaps in the tarmac, as if it was the pressure of the years that had pushed them through. But it hadn’t. Not on its own anyway. It was the old Legion Twins that had let them through, you see. I’d never seen them move so fast. Running from here to there, panting, manic-eyed, one carrying a big old pickaxe, strong as a miner, the other just working with his hands – doing whatever they could to open up that tarmac and let more of those memories out from under it.
I stood there watching them, sweating and strained, panicked. It was like their lives depended on getting those films out from under there, as if this was their one chance and unless they set them free it was all over. As I watched they started talking again, the same old Legion Twins mumble and mutter.
Only this time, for once, I listened.
‘Not forgotten, not forgotten,’ said one of them.
>
‘The last death is your name said for the last time. Name. Find the name,’ said the other.
‘So many under, so many under,’ said both of them. ‘Must get them out. Get them out.’
And that was when, as if in reply, those voices started up again.
It was like someone had turned up the volume on a hundred radios all at once; hundreds of voices, high, low, young, old, all speaking together and against each other. From where I was in the underpass I couldn’t work out, at first, where they were coming from. But as they got louder that soon became clearer. The graveyards. The voices were coming from the graveyards around the church.
As soon as they started one of the Twins clamped his hands to his ears, pressing them hard against his head.
‘Arrgghhh,’ he screamed. ‘I can hear one, I can hear one!’
‘Go, go!’ his brother shouted back at him.
And he was off, sprinting into the graveyard, while his brother ran to the wall of the underpass, picked up a piece of chalk and stood there, poised, ready to write. I didn’t know what was happening, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to miss it, so I ran after the first one, into the graveyard.
It was the Dead again, only this time not in film, but in person.
There was one of them standing beside every gravestone, standing in crooked lines like chess pieces in a half-played game. They weren’t moving, just standing there, speaking. At first I couldn’t make out what they were saying, all their voices mixing together in that drone. But when I stepped nearer to them, I realised they were telling stories. Each one telling a story about whoever’s name was carved on the stone beside them. Not stories of their deaths either, of how they’d died, but of their lives and how they’d lived.
I looked over to where the first Legion Twin was hurrying between them all, hands still at his head, pausing by each person, leaning in to listen – to a little girl, to an old man, to a young woman.
‘Find them! Find them!’ his brother called from the underpass.
He ran faster, searching between the stories, listen ing to the voices outside and inside his head. ‘Loved… loved… loved John the most! John the most! Where are they? Where are they?’
Then he stopped. All of a sudden, he stopped beside a grave where a little boy was reciting the poem of his life, over and over.
‘Dewi Phillips!’ he cried. ‘Dewi Phillips! Write it! Write it!’
I looked over to the underpass where the other Twin was searching now, searching for space on the underpass wall which was already scrawled with thousands of names.
‘Can’t find space! Can’t find space!’ he yelled back, panicking.
‘Arrghhh,’ his brother replied. ‘Quick, find space! Find space!’
Then from the underpass, ‘Writing! Writing!’
And as he did, the voices faded down, his brother took his hands from his head, and, standing up straight again, strolled over to his twin under the road.
‘Ta,’ he said. ‘Ta very much.’
‘No problem,’ his brother replied, slipping the chalk in his pocket. ‘Tidy.’
And that’s when it dawned on me. It was like what Johnny had said about Alfie on Llewellyn Street. What I was seeing and hearing was what the Legion Twins had always seen and heard. All of it, the memories under the ground, the stories of the lives of the dead, all of this was what the poor sods had been carrying around with them for years until now, finally, it was out, out for all to see.
I had to go get Johnny. I wanted him to see this too, wanted to know if he could see it too. But I was too late. Coming out of the graveyard I ran straight back into them all – the whole crowd from Llewellyn Street, rushing into the underpass. They must have heard the voices too, I guess, and seen the lights of the films. Or at least the Teacher had, and let’s face it, wherever he went by then, whatever he did, so did that crowd. I looked around for him and sure enough there he was again, already walking among those memories coming out of the ground, bathing in them, standing in their beams, allowing the gone faces and places to play all over him, to wash him in their flickering light.
I felt a tug on my sleeve and turned round to see Johnny.
‘Have you seen this?’ I said to him, throwing my arms at the underpass. ‘And in the graveyards? The twins and everything? What’s going on Johnny?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, waving his phone in front of me. ‘But never mind this, we got to get over to the shopping centre.’
I looked at the screen of his phone. Someone had sent him a photo from the centre. At least, it looked like it was from the centre but, just like Llewellyn Street, it looked totally unlike the shopping centre too. It was packed. Not just a busy Saturday either, I mean totally roofed. I could make out huddles of people in red blankets, makeshift stalls and stands, a tower of old TVs and in the foreground a band playing on the roof of the café, all of them in balaclavas, their faces hidden.
‘When was this taken?’ I asked Johnny. ‘When’s this photo from?’
Pocketing his phone he leant in and, with that sense of drama he’d come to love so much, whispered into my ear.
‘Now,’ he said, low and hoarse, his voice all excite ment and wonder. ‘That photo is now.’
We heard the shopping centre kicking off before we saw it. It sounded like a mix of a music festival and a prison riot, all amplified by the big echoing space of it all, like the whole place had been turned into a giant speaker.
There were that many people it was a job to get inside. But when we did I knew right away this wasn’t going to end well; that there was no way the Council, much less ICU would let what was happening in there go unnoticed or unpunished.
One part of the floor looked like a refugee camp. The Company Man obviously hadn’t wasted any time with those plans of his, with his moving of people from their homes. But something must have gone wrong too. Because usually the Company wouldn’t let us see the results of their dirty work, would prefer to brush them under the carpet or move them out of sight. But this time that hadn’t happened, and that’s why the camp on the floor of the centre was crammed with families and people who’d been chucked out of their homes. For once they hadn’t gone elsewhere, but had stayed instead; not-forgotten, still burning. Some local groups had been handing out red blankets to them which just made them stick out even more, as if ICU had cut into the flesh, not the soil of this town, and these people flowing into this camp were its blood. Which, of course, they were.
All around that camp were the possessions they’d managed to bring with them. Not in piles, not just strewn about but ordered, arranged, like shrines. Their owners were quiet beside them, not kicking up a fuss or anything. As if they knew that by just being there, by not going away, by being in sight and therefore in mind, they were causing trouble enough.
The rest of the centre though, well, that wasn’t quiet at all. Something – the assassination attempt on the beach the day before, the leaking of ICU’s plans, the shooting of the woman, the Teacher – something had lit a spark that had lit a fire, the flames of which were now burning brightly in that shopping centre. Banners of protest, flash mobs of kids playing havoc with the Council police, banks of TVs showing testaments from the imprisoned and the disappeared. No wonder the Resistance boys were in there too. Must have thought it was their hour, their day, that finally the Town was going to listen to them and wasn’t going to take ICU’s messing lying down any more. The very fact The Band had turned up again, well, that was a sign of just how confident they suddenly were.
Still, no one really knows who The Band were, other than every now and then they’d crop up, sing their Resistance songs, then disappear again before the Council could get their hands on them. Always played in balaclavas, and hardly ever on a stage. Always somewhere they could cut and run if they had to – on a car-park roof, down some back alleyway, in the derelict cinema. I hadn’t seen them for ages and, I’ll be honest, I think we’d all assumed they’d been caught or disappeared. Or, like
most everyone else, that they’d just given up. But they obviously hadn’t, had they? And now they were back to prove it, back to help fan those flames which had caught all over town.
Like I said though, as soon as I’d seen the state of the shopping centre, all those people gathering, the protest stalls, the shrines of belongings, The Band, I’d known ICU wouldn’t let it go on for too long before stepping in with their size nines. And sure enough, that’s just what they did, a full raid on the place, about twenty or so pairs of size nines to be exact, all attached to the feet, legs and riot armour of ICU security, Old Growler at their head.
It was The Band they were after but as ever The Band were too quick. They’d set up their signaling chain before they’d started playing, and the call had come down the line a good few minutes before the security came barging through. So by the time they did The Band were already gone, just their kit abandoned on the café and the buzz of a single amp; that was all that was left of the song that had, just minutes before, been filling the place.
Seeing the security come in we’d all braced ourselves for what would happen next. But ICU must have been more nervous about what was happening than we thought, because there was no clearing of the place, no arrests, just regular ID checks, a few searches of bags and then they drifted away to the edges to keep an eye on everything from there.
The Company Man must have known he’d have to play this one subtly, I reckon – that he couldn’t just come down hard again. That what was happening was something new, something different and as such he’d have to come up with something new and different himself to counter it. If only we’d known exactly how new and how different then we might have been able to stop it. Except of course, he never wanted it stopped, did he? The Teacher, I mean. Because he might have walked down that dune on Friday morning looking like a lost child, but by the time the shopping centre was kicking off, he already knew, I reckon. Somehow, from all he’d seen and heard, he already knew what was going to have to be done. And how he was going to do it.