Terry Pratchett - Johnny And The Dead

The operator rubbed her headset. For some reason, her ear had gone cold.

'Ow!'

She ripped it off

The operator on her right leaned over.

'What's up, Dawn?'

'It went - it felt—'

They looked at the switchboard. Lights were coming on everywhere, and it was beginning to be covered in frost.

The point is—

—that all through history there have been people who couldn't invent things because the rest of the world wasn't ready. Leonardo da Vinci hadn't got the motors or materials to make his helicopter. Sir George Cayley invented the internal combustion

engine before anyone else had invented petrol.1

And in his life Addison Vincent Fletcher had spent long hours with motors and relays and glow- ing valves and bits of wire, pursuing a dream the world didn't even have a name for yet.

In his phone box, dead Mr Fletcher laughed. It had a name now. He knew exactly what a computer was when he saw one.

lSo he ran it on pellets of gunpowder. Really. It was nearly the external combustion engine.

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.