Terry Pratchett - Johnny And The Dead

'It probably sounded like a good idea at the time. Sort of...jolly.'

'Yes, but ... four weeks ...' said Bigmac. 'I mean ...'

'You're always saying you can't wait to join the

Army,' said Wobbler. 'You said you were sorry the Gulf War was over. And all the legs of your bed are off the ground because of all them copies of Guns and Ammo underneath it.'

'Well ... yeah ... war, yeah,' said Bigmac. 'Proper fighting, with Mi6s and stuff Not just all going off grinning and getting shot.'

'They all marched off together because they were friends, and got killed,' said Yo-less.

They stared at the little square of light with the names on it, and the long, long line of cheery thumbs.

'Except for Atkins, T.,' said Johnny. 'I wonder what happened to him?'

'It was nineteen sixteen,' said Yo-less. 'If he's still alive, he'll be dead.'

'Any of them on your list?' said Wobbler.

Johnny checked.

'No-oo,' he said, eventually. 'There's one or two people with the same name but the wrong initial. Everyone round here used to get buried up there.'

'Perhaps he came back from the war and moved away somewhere else,' said Yo-less.

'It'd be a bit lonely around here, after all,' said Bigmac.

They looked at him.

'Sorry,' he said.

'I'm fed up with this,' said Wobbler, pushing his chair back. 'It's not real. There's no-one special in there. It's just people. And it's creepy. Come on, let's go down to the mall.'

'I've found out what happens to dead bodies

when old graveyards are built on,' said Yo-less, as they stepped out into the Tupperware daylight. 'My mum knows. They get taken to some kind of storage place called a necropolis. That's Latin for City of the Dead.'

'Yuk,' said Wobbler.

' Sounds like where Superman lives,' said Bigmac.

'Necropolis!' said Wobbler, zooming his hands through the air. 'By day, mild-mannered corpse - by night ... duh duh duhduh DAH ... ZombieMan!'

Johnny remembered the grinning young faces, not much older than Wobbler.

'Wobbler,' he said, 'If you make another joke like that—'

'What?'

' ... well ... just don't. Right? I mean it.'

... ssshhhh ... mean, yo, youknowhatl'msayin'? . . , sipsipsip ... told the government that ... sswwwsss ... fact the whales enjoy being hunted, Bob, and ... wwwhhhhh ...

Click!

'So that's wireless telegraphy, is it? Hah! So much for Countess Alice Radioni!'

' I was an Ovalteenie when I was a little boy. That was during the war. The one against the Germans. Did I ever tell you? We used to sing along with the people on the wireless: "We are the Ov—" WHAT? Who was Countess Alice Radioni?'

'Which war against the Germans?'

'What? How many have we had?'

'Two so far.'

'Now, come ON! Radioni? It was Marconi who invented the radio!'

'Hah! And do you know who he stole the idea from?'

'Who cares who invented the wretched thing? Will you listen to what the living are doing?'

'Plotting to steal our cemetery, that is what they are doing!'

'Yes, but... I didn't know that all this was going on, did you? All this music and ... the things they were talking about! Who is Shakespeare's Sister and why is she singing on the wireless? What is a Batman? And they said the last Prime Minister was a woman! That can't be possible. Women can't even vote.'

'Yes, they can.'

'Hurrah!'

'Well, they couldn't in MY time!'

'There's so much we don't know!'

'So why don't we find out?'

The dead fell silent - or rather, more silent than usual.

'How?'

'The man on the wireless said you can ring the wireless station on the telephone to Discuss Problems That Affect Us All Today. A Phone-Ing Program, he said.'

'Well?'

'There's a phone box out in the street.'

'Yes, but ... that's ... outside

'Not far outside.'

'Yes, but ...'

'The little boy stood in front of us and talked to us. And he was so frightened. And we can't walk six feet?'

The speaker was Mr Vicenti. He looked through the crumbling railings to the street outside, with the eye of a man who'd spent much of his life escaping.

'But this is our PLACE! This is where we BE- LONG!'

'It's only a few steps ...'

It wasn't really much of a mall. But it was all there was to hang out in.

Johnny had seen films of American shopping malls. They must have different sorts of people in America, he'd thought. They all looked cool, all the girls were beautiful, and the place wasn't crowded with little kamikaze grandmothers. Or mothers with seven children. Or Blackbury United football fans walking ten abreast singing the famous football song,'UFlRRurrrURRR-UH!' (dapdapclap). You couldn't hang out properly in a place like that. All you could do was hang on.

The four of them hung on in the burger bar. Yo-less carefully read the pamphlet about how no rainforests were chopped down to make beef- burgers. Bigmac had his favourite Megajumbo Fries with fifteen packets of relish.

'Wonder if I could get a job here?' said Wobbler.

'No chance,' said Bigmac. 'The manager'd take one look at you and see where the profits would go.'

'You saying I'm fat?' said Wobbler.

'Gravitationally challenged,' said Yo-less, with- out looking up.

'Enhanced,' said Bigmac.

Wobbler's lips moved as he tried these out.

'I'd rather be fat,' he said. 'Can I finish up your onion rings?'

'Anyway, there's loads of people want jobs here,' said Bigmac. 'You have to have three A-levels.'

'What, just to make burgers?'

'No other jobs around,' said Bigmac. 'They're shutting all the factories

around here. Nothing to do. No-one's making anything any more.'

'Someone's making something,' said Wobbler. 'What about all the stuff in the shops?'

'That's all made in Taiwanaland or somewhere. Hah! What sort of future are we going to have, eh? That's right, eh? Johnny?'

'What?'

'You've just been staring at nothing the whole time, you know that?'

'Yeah, what's happened?' said Wobbler. 'Some dead people come in for a takeaway?'

'No,' said Johnny.

'What're you thinking about, then?'

'Thumbs,' said Johnny, still staring at the wall.

'What?'

'What?' said Johnny, waking up.

'What about thumbs?'

'Oh ... nothing.'

'My mother said last night that there's a lot of people angry about the cemetery being sold,' said

Yo-less. 'Everyone's moaning about it. And Pastor William says anyone who builds on there will be cursed unto the seventh generation.'

'Yes, but he always says that kind of thing,' said Wobbler. 'Anyway, United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings probably don't worry about that sort of thing. They've probably got a Vice- President in Charge of Being Cursed.'

'And he probably gets his secretary to deal with it,' said Bigmac.

'It won't stop anything, anyway,' said Yo-less. 'There's bulldozers just the other side of the fence.'

'Anyone know what United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings doT said Wobbler.

'It said in the paper that they're a multinational information-retrieval and enhancement facility,' said Yo-less. 'It said on the news it'll provide three hundred jobs.'

'For all the people who used to work at the old rubber boot factory?' said Bigmac.

Yo-less shrugged. 'That's how it goes,' he said. 'You all right, Johnny?'

'What?'

'You OK? You're staring at the wall.'

'What? Oh. Yeah. I'm OK.'

'He's upset about the dead soldiers,' said Wobbler.

Yo-less leaned across the table.

'Look ... that's all in the past, right? It's just gone. It's a shame they died but... well... they'd be dead anyway, wouldn't they? It's just history. It's nothing to do with ... well, with now.'

Mrs Ivy Witherslade was talking to her sister in the phone box on Cemetery Road when someone knocked impatiently on the glass, and that was odd, because there was no-one there. But she felt very cold and suddenly uneasy, as though she was walking on someone's grave. She stopped telling her sister about her legs and what the doctor said about them, and went home quickly.