Terry Pratchett - Johnny And The Dead

Johnny stared at it for some time, while the rain fell in the real world and the blue sky glittered on the sign.

It was pretty obvious that the building was going to take up more room than the site of the old boot factory.

The words above the picture said, 'An Exciting Development for United Amalagamated Consoli- dated Holdings: Forward to the Future!'

Johnny didn't feel very excited, but he did feel that 'Forward to the Future' was even dafter than 'If It's a Boot, It's a Blackbury'.

Before school next day he pinched the newspaper and tucked it out of sight behind William Sticker's grave.

He felt more daft than afraid. He wished he could talk to someone about it.

He didn't have anyone to talk to. But he did have three people to talk with.

There were various gangs and alliances in the school, such as the sporty group, and the bright kids, and the Computer Club Nerds.

And then there was Johnny, and Wobbler, and Bigmac, who said he was the last of the well hard skinheads but was actually a skinny kid with short hair and flat feet and asthma who had difficulty even walking in Doc Martens, and there was Yo- less, who was technically black.

But at least they listened, during break, on the bit of Avail between the school kitchens and the library. It was where they normally hung out — or at least, hung around.

'Ghosts,' said Yo-less, when he'd finished.

'No-oo,' said Johnny uncertainly. 'They don't like being called ghosts. It upsets them, for some reason. They're just ... dead. I suppose it's like not calling people handicapped or backward.'

'Politically incorrect,' said Yo-less. 'I read about that.'

'You mean they want to be called,' Wobbler paused for thought, 'post-senior citizens.'

'Breathily challenged,' said Yo-less.

'Vertically disadvantaged,' said Wobbler.

'What? You mean they're short?' said Yo-less.

'Buried,' said Wobbler.

'How about zombies?' said Bigmac.

'No, you've got to have a body to be a zom- bie,' said Yo-less. 'You're not really dead, you just get fed this secret voodoo mixture of fish and roots and you turn into a zombie.'

'Wow. What mixture?'

'I don't know. How should I know? Just some kind offish and some kind of root.'

'I bet it's a real adventure going down the chippie in voodoo country,' said Wobbler.

'Well, you ought to know about voodoo,' said Bigmac.

'Why?' said Yo-less.

' 'Cos you're West Indian, right?'

'Do you know all about druids?'

'No.'

'There you are, then.'

'I 'spect your mum knows about it, though,' said Bigmac.

'Shouldn't think so. My mum spends more time in church than the Pope,' said Yo-less. 'My mum spends more time in church than God.'

'You're not taking this seriously,' said Johnny severely. 'I really saw them.'

'It might be something wrong with your eyes,' said Yo-less. 'Perhaps there's a—'

' I saw this old film once, about a man with X-ray eyes,' said Bigmac. 'He could use 'em to see right through things.'

'Women's clothes and stuff?' enquired Wobbler.

'There wasn't much of that,' said Bigmac.

They discussed this waste of a useful talent.

'I don't see through anything,' said Johnny, eventually. 'I just see people who aren't ther— I mean, people other people don't see.'

'My uncle used to see things other people couldn't see,' said Wobbler. 'Especially on a Saturday night.'

'Don't be daft. I'm trying to be serious.'

'Yeah, but once you said you'd seen a Loch Ness Monster in your goldfish pond,' said Bigmac.

'All right, but—'

'Probably just a plesiosaur,' said Yo-less. 'Just some old dinosaur that ought to've been extinct seventy million years ago. Nothing special at all.'"

'Yes, but—'

'And then there was the Lost City of the Incas,' said Wobbler.

'Well, I found it, didn't I?'

'Yes, but it wasn't that lost,' said Yo-less. 'Behind Tesco's isn't exactly lost.'

Bigmac sighed.

'You're all weird,' he said.

'All right,' said Johnny. 'You all come down there after school, right?'

'Well—' Wobbler began, and shifted uneasily.

'Not scared, are you?' said Johnny. He knew that was unfair, but he was annoyed. 'You ran away before,' he said, 'when the Alderman came out.'

'I never saw no Alderman,' said Wobbler. 'Any- way, I wasn't scared. I ran away to wind you up.'

'You certainly had me fooled,' said Johnny.

'Me? Scared? I watched Night of the Killer Zom- bies three times — with freeze frame,' said Wobbler.

'All right, then. You come. All three of you come. After school.'

'After Cobbers,' said Bigmac.

'Look, this is a lot more important than—'

'Yes, but tonight Janine is going to tell Mick that Doraleen took Ron's surfboard—'

Johnny hesitated.

'All right, then,' he said. 'After Cobbers.'

'And then I promised to help my brother load up his van,' said Bigmac. 'Well, not exactly promised ... he said he'd rip my arms off if I didn't.'

'And I've got to do some Geography home- work,' said Yo-less.

'We haven't got any,' said Johnny.

'No, but I thought if I did an extra essay on rainforests I could pull up my marks average,' said Yo-less.

There was nothing odd about this, if you were used to Yo-less. Yo-less wore school uniform. Ex- cept that it wasn't really school uniform. Well, all right, technically it was school uniform, because everyone got these bits of paper at the start of every year saying what the school uniform was, but no-one ever wore it much, except for Yo-less, and

so if hardly anyone else was wearing it, Wobbler said, how could it be a uniform? Whereas, said Wobbler, since at any one time nearly everyone was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, then really jeans and T-shirt were the real school uniform and Yo-less should be sent home for not wearing it.

'Tell you what,' said Johnny. 'Let's meet up later, then. Six o'clock. We can meet at Bigmac's place. That's right near the cemetery, anyway.'

'But it'll be getting dark,' said Wobbler.

'Well?' said Johnny. 'You're not scared, are you?'

'Me? Scared? Huh! Me? Scared? Me? Scared?'

If you had to be somewhere frightening when it got dark, Johnny thought, the Joshua N'Clement block rated a lot higher on the Aaargh scale than any cemetery. At least the dead didn't mug you.

It was originally going to be the Sir Alec Douglas- Home block, and then it became the Harold Wilson block, and then finally the new Council named it the Joshua Che N'Clement block after a famous freedom fighter, who then became president of his country, and who was now being an ex-freedom fighter and president somewhere in Switzerland while some of his countrymen tried to find him and ask him questions like: What happened to the two hundred million dollars we thought we had, and how come your wife owned seven hundred hats?

The block had been described in 1965 as' an over- whelming and dynamic relationship of voids and solids, majestic in its uncompromising simplicity'.

Often the Blackbury Guardian had pictures of

people complaining about the damp, or the cold, or the way the windows fell out in high winds (it was always windy around the block, even on a calm day everywhere else), or the way gangs roamed its dank passageways and pushed shopping trolleys off the roof into the Great Lost Shop- ping Trolley Graveyard. The lifts hadn't worked properly since 1966. They lurked in the basement, too scared to go anywhere else.

The passages and walkways ('an excitingly brutal brushed concrete finish') had two smells, depend- ing on whether or not the Council's ninja caretaker had been round in his van. The other one was disinfectant.

No-one liked the Joshua N'Clement block. There were two schools of thought about what should be done with it. The people who lived there thought everyone should be taken out and then the block should be blown up, and the people who lived near the block just wanted it blown up.