Jerusalem Read online

  There were none of the frilly, crawling jewels that Michael knew to be his family apparent in the scene below him, neither upstairs in the empty bedrooms nor down in the yard below. He could, however, still make out the wooden chair that he and his mum had been sitting on before he’d choked. This must, he thought, be a few moments after everyone had rushed indoors out of the yard and left the chair behind. All the human activity was going on down in the kitchen and the living room, the scene that he’d just witnessed with his sister sitting weeping and his gran keeping an eye on her, so that the bedrooms were both empty here. The only living thing that flickered through the crystallised scenario was an amazing iridescent column that appeared to be made out of beautifully crafted ladies’ fans. This seemed to plunge into the clarified time-gravy from a point close to the rooftop’s rim, and then described a breathtakingly elegant trajectory down into the far depths of the back garden. It occurred to him that it was probably a pigeon, with its moving wings transforming it to an exquisite glass-finned ornament.

  Aware that if he wasn’t careful he would break into a dawdle, Michael turned away from this enchanting still life, though reluctantly, and hastened to re-join the little girl. The trouble with this place, as far as Michael was concerned, was that there wasn’t anything that didn’t fascinate him. Its most minor detail seemed to be inviting him to stare entranced at it for hours. Why, probably even the plain pine floorboards he was walking on, if he were only to look down at them, would …

  … would envelope him within a flowing tide-map universe of grain, with near-invisible striations rippling from the knothole’s vortex eye into a peacock feathering, the frozen pulse of a magnetic field. The engraved hearts of hurricanes, reverberating outward in concentric lines of vegetable force; the accidental faces of mad, decomposed baboons trapped snarling in the wood; trilobite stains with legs that trailed away to isotherms. The sweet and fatherly perfume of sawdust would completely overwhelm him with its atmosphere of honest labour, would immerse him in long, silent histories of dripping forest and time measured out in moss, if he were only to look down beyond his stumbling slippers and …

  Michael snapped out of it and hurriedly fell into step with Phyllis Painter, who’d not broken stride while he inspected the new aperture, and who was clearly finished with indulging Michael in his tardiness. They carried on along the wooden avenue between the vats towards the heaping side-wall of the grand arcade gradually getting bigger up ahead of them, a teetering hodgepodge pile of mismatched buildings, taller than a town. He wondered what ungraspable new shapes the folded paper clouds were making up beyond the see-through ceiling overhead, but prudently decided that he wouldn’t look to see. Instead, he thought he’d better concentrate upon his ragamuffin tour-guide before she lost interest in him altogether. To this end, he plied her with fresh questions.

  “Wiz this all Northampton what we see here, open for Upstairs-men to look down on?”

  She spared him a faintly condescending sideways glance, letting him know she thought he was an idiot.

  “ ’Course not. This wiz just the Attics of the Breath above your bit of Andrew’s Road. In the direction what we’re gooin’ now, the attic doors all open dayn on different rooms and floors and whatnot of the ’ouses in your street. The line we’re walking dayn, that’s all them different places laid ayt in a row, so it goes on a mile or two but don’t goo on forever. Now, the other way, along the overhall …”

  She pointed with her skinny left arm here, down the immeasurable length of the vast corridor, to where the thirty-foot vats were close-stippled dots beneath the bloody, golden forge-light beating down through the glass roof high up above.

  “That’s the direction what up here we call the linger or the whenth of something, and it does goo on forever. What it is, if this way what we’re walking now is all the different rooms along your bit of Andrew’s Road, then that way, lingerways, that’s all the different moments of those rooms. That’s why the sky above this bit what were in now is always blue, because it’s ’alf-way through a summer’s day. The bit along the far end where it guz all brass and fireworks, that’s the sunset, and if yer went further on there’d be a stretch where it was purple and then black, and then yer’d ’ave tomorrow morning goo off like a bomb, all red and gold again. If yer get lost, then just remember: west is future, east is past, all things linger, all things last. Ooh, and be careful if yer ever in the twenty-fives, because they’re flooded.”

  She appeared to find this a sufficient answer to his query, and they marched on side by side across the springy floorboards without speaking for a while, until he’d thought of something else that he could ask. He sensed it wasn’t quite as good a question as his previous one had been but posed it anyway, if only because he was finding that the lapses in their conversation gave him time to think about what had just happened to him, his new status as a dead kid, and that only made him scared.

  “How wiz it that our bedroom and downstairs wiz all on the same floor up here appear?”

  He’d been right. It had obviously been a stupid question. Phyllis rolled her eyes and tutted, hardly bothering to disguise the weariness and the annoyance in her voice as she replied.

  “Well, ’ow d’yer think? If yer’d got plans made for a cellar that was drawn on the same bit of paper as plans for an attic, should yer think as that was queer, that they was on the same sheet, the same level as each other? ’Course yer wouldn’t. Use yer flippin’ loaf.”

  Chastised but none the wiser, Michael scuffed along in silence there beside the slightly older, slightly taller girl, running a few steps now and then in order to make up the difference in their strides. A glance into the wooden-edged recess they were then passing on their right revealed a view down to an unfamiliar living room, with different furnishings to number 17 and with its doors and windows round the other way like a reflection in a mirror. Extending through the depths of the enlarged room were more glassy gorgon tentacles with lights inside, but these were different colours – dark reds and warm browns – clearly from a quite separate palette to Michael’s own family. Perhaps these were the living quarters of the Mays or possibly the Goodmans, further down the terrace?

  He walked on with Phyllis Painter, briefly entertaining the not-utterly-unpleasant notion that if anyone should see them out together for a stroll like this then Phyllis might be taken for his girlfriend. Having never, as a three-year-old, experienced this enviable state, the thought put quite a swagger into Michael’s step for a few paces, until he remembered he was clad in slippers, baggy dressing gown and his pyjamas. The pyjamas, now he thought about it, might have a small yellow wee-stain on the fly, although he wasn’t going to check and call attention to it. Someone seeing them would be more likely to take Phyllis for his junior nurse than for his girlfriend. Anyway, they were both dead, which made the whole idea of being someone’s boyfriend less romantic and attractive.

  Up ahead the variegated tumble of walls, ladders, balconies and windows was much nearer and much bigger than when he’d last looked. He could see people moving on the higher fire-escapes and walkways, although he and Phyllis were still too far off from these to make them out in any detail. This was probably just as well, he thought, since some of the parading figures didn’t seem entirely normal, being either the wrong size or the wrong shape. It struck him that the place in which he found himself was not like anything he’d been expecting to be waiting for him after his demise. It wasn’t like the Heaven that his parents had once sketchily described to him, which was all marble steps and tall white pillars like the adverts Pearl & Dean did at the pictures. Nor was it the Hell that he’d been warned of, not that he had been expecting to be sent to Hell. His mum had told him that he wouldn’t go to Hell except for something really bad like murder, which had seemed to him like manageable odds, assuming that he could get through his whole life without killing anybody. Luckily he’d died when he was three, and hadn’t had to put this to the test for very long. If he’d lived to be ol
der, he consoled himself, he might have murdered Alma once he had the strength. Then he’d be burning in the special kind of fire his mum had muddily depicted as not ever killing you or melting you away to nothing, even though it was more hot than you could possibly imagine.

  He was glad, all things considered, not to be in Hell, although this didn’t help with finding out where else this place might be. He thought that enough time might have elapsed since his last hesitant enquiry for him to attempt another one.

  “Does this Upstairs have a religature? Has it got Pearl & Deany gates, or toga-gods with chess and peeping-pools like at the pictures?”

  Though her eyes did not light up at his renewed interrogation, at least this most recent question didn’t seem to make her more annoyed with him.

  “All the religatures are right in parts, which means none of ’em are ’cause they all thought as it was only them knew what wiz what. It doesn’t matter, anyway, what yer believe when yer daynstairs, although it’s best for yer that yer believe in something. Nobody up ’ere’s much bothered what it wiz. Nobody’s gunner make yer say the password, and nobody’s gunner throw yer out because yer didn’t join the right gang dayn below. The only thing what really matters wiz if you wiz ’appy.”

  Michael thought about this as he walked beside her down the row of floor-doors. If the girl was right and all that mattered in life was one’s happiness, then he’d done relatively well, having enjoyed three years during which time he’d hardly managed to stop giggling. But what about if people had been happy doing things that were unpleasant, even horrible? There were such people in the world, he knew, and wondered if the same criteria applied to them as well. And what about those who through no fault of their own led lives that were continually miserable? Would that be held against them here, as if they hadn’t had a rotten enough time already? Michael didn’t think it sounded fair, and was about to chance his arm by asking Phyllis to explain herself when movements on one of the elevated balconies they were approaching caught his eye.

  The pair had almost reached the near side of the cavernous arcade, and thus were close enough for Michael to make out the various people strutting back and forth along its levels in more detail. On the platform that had captured his attention, a railed walkway two or three floors up, two grown-up men were standing talking. Both seemed very tall to Michael and he judged them to be quite old, in their thirties or their forties. One of them had whiskers and the other had white hair, though, so he couldn’t really tell.

  The white-haired and clean-shaven man was dressed in a long nightshirt, and he looked as if he’d just been in a fight. One of his eyes was closed and blackened, and some blood from a split lip had stained his otherwise completely spotless robe. His face was frighteningly angry and he gripped the wooden rail with one hand – in his other hand he held a long staff – as though he’d stepped out onto the balcony in order to calm down, although it didn’t look as though his whiskery companion standing next to him was helping much in this attempt. This second person, dressed in a great bush of dark green rags, appeared to be in fits of laughter over the first chap’s predicament. With his forked beard and with a mass of chestnut curls beneath his broad-brimmed leather hat, it looked like he was prodding the white-robed man in the ribs and clapping him upon the back, neither of which activities seemed likely to alleviate his black-eyed comrade’s filthy mood.

  Just then a gust of breeze must have blown down the walkway, with the bearded man’s confusion of green pennant rags all fluttering wildly as a consequence. Michael was startled to discover that each flapping scrap was lined upon its underside with silk of brilliant crimson. As the wind disturbed the laughing figure’s tatters they flared upwards, rippling in abandon, so that the effect was like a leafy shrub that had spontaneously and suddenly burst into flame. It was a wonder, Michael thought, that the man’s leather hat had not blown off as well. Probably it was held in place with cord tied underneath his whiskered chin much like the headgear worn by Spanish priests, which it resembled.

  Michael realised that he was in danger of becoming engrossed in this place’s details once again, and lowered his gaze from the crow’s-nest perches overhead back down to Phyllis Painter. She was by now quite some way in front of him and Michael felt a surge of panic as he ran to catch her up. He knew that if he lost sight of her it would be the way it was in dreams, where he could never find the people that he’d promised he would meet.

  He overtook her just as she was coming to the end of the long boardwalk, with the last line of the inset vats reaching away on either side of her. A quick peep into one of these revealed another aerial view of a back garden not his own, despite some superficial similarities. Since it was right at one end of the mile-long row, he wondered if it might be the back garden of the corner house, where Andrew’s Road ran past the foot of Scarletwell Street. Michael had no time to ponder this idea, since Phyllis Painter was already marching out beyond the endless grid of apertures to where the wooden floorboards ended, somewhat startlingly, in a raised curb made of worn grey brick and then a broad strip of distressed and fractured paving slabs, just like the ones along St. Andrew’s Road.

  Across these flagstones, facing Michael and the bunny-collared little girl, the lowest level of the monster arcade’s bounding wall confronted them, a lengthy terrace made from disparate brick buildings that were clearly not intended to be standing side by side with one another. Two or three of them resembled houses from his street but changed, as if they’d been remembered incorrectly, so that one had got its front door halfway up the wall on the first floor, with almost twenty stone steps rising to it rather than the normal three. Another had the nettle-fringed earth entrance of a rabbit hole where the brick hollow of the boot-scrape should have been, at pavement level down to one side of the doorsteps. In amongst these hauntingly familiar yet distorted house-fronts there were other almost-recognisable constructions, though the places they reminded Michael of did not belong in Andrew’s Road. One of them bore a strong resemblance to the school caretaker’s house up at the top end of Spring Lane, with black iron railings fencing off a downstairs window that was set perhaps a foot back from the street. Beside this was a section of the school wall which enclosed the always-locked arched entranceway that led into the juniors’ playground.

  Set between this odd assortment of locations, which at least were all from the same neighbourhood, was one half-glass door with a display window next to it that Michael thought more properly belonged in the town centre. More precisely, it belonged in the real-life Emporium Arcade, that dim-lit incline rising from the fancy scrolling ironwork of its gateway on the Market Square. The shop that he was looking at, nestled incongruously amongst the displaced houses, was an almost perfect duplicate of Chasterlaine’s Joke, Novelty & Toy Shop, halfway up the right side of the arcade’s slope as you ascended. The wide window with the shop’s name in antique gold lettering above it, as he saw it now, was bigger than it should be and the words upon the sign seemed to be wriggling into different orders as he watched, but it was definitely Chasterlaine’s, or at least an approximation of the place. “Realist chanes” was what the shop appeared to be called at the moment, though when he looked back it seemed to read “Hail’s ancester”. How long had he been able to read, anyway? Regardless, Michael was so taken by surprise at this familiar store in such an unfamiliar setting that he thought he’d ask the girl about it as they walked the last few yards of floorboards to the boundary of the massive passageway.

  “Are we in the Euphorium Arcade, like on the market? That place there looks like the Choke & Joy Shop.”

  Phyllis squinted in the vague direction that one baggy sleeve of Michael’s dressing gown was pointing.

  “What, yer mean The Snail Races?”

  Michael looked back at the shop in question and discovered that “The Snail Races” was indeed the name that the establishment was trading under at that instant. He and Phyllis were mounting the curb that edged the wooden Attics of the Breath,
as she’d referred to the huge hall, so that Michael was close enough to see the merchandise on show within the 40-watt-bulb-lighting of the window. What he’d taken to be Matchbox cars all standing on a podium of the red-and-yellow cardboard boxes that they came in, such as would have been displayed at the real Chasterlaine’s, were in fact life-sized painted replicas of snails. Each stood upon its little individual box, the way that the toy cars and lorries would have done, but now the packaging had got a picture label showing the specific model snail resting on top of it. The reproduction molluscs all had shells that had been customised or painted in the style of actual Matchbox cars that he had seen, so that one was in navy blue with “Pickford’s” in white lettering across it, while another had the snail itself in pillar-box red with a tiny curled-up fireman’s hose set on its back where normally the spiral shell would be. Looking back up at the sign above the window, Michael saw that it still read as “The Snail Races”, so perhaps he had been wrong about the letters changing. Probably that’s what the sign had said the whole time he’d been scrutinising it. Still, all this made no difference to his basic point, which had been that the place resembled Chasterlaine’s Aladdin’s cave of novelties, up the Emporium Arcade. Michael turned back to Phyllis Painter – they were walking over the broad ribbon of cracked pavement now – and stubbornly restated his assertion.