The Great Blue Yonder Read online

  So I said what about your dad then? But he’d never really known his dad either, and he’d been brought up in the workhouse, just like Oliver in the Charles Dickens story. And then he’d ended up as an undertaker’s boy, also just like Oliver. In fact, I started to wonder if he was Oliver, or maybe the model for him. But when I asked him, he’d never heard of Oliver, nor of Charles Dickens either. And I suppose the difference was that Oliver sort of got rescued in the end and went on to live happily ever after. But Arthur didn’t. He got the fevers and died in the stable, lying next to the horse with no pyjamas and wearing his battered top hat. And I thought about baby Jesus then, and how he was born in a stable. And here was Arthur, and he’d gone and died in one. And I thought that was a bit of a coincidence, really, in its own way.

  I suggested to Arthur that maybe he could try and track his mum down. I thought that maybe the man on the Desk could help him, and look her up on the computer. But Arthur said he’d tried that, and it was hopeless because the man on the Desk didn’t have any sort of a proper filing system at all and his computer skills were next to useless. Besides, he was all on his own there, trying to check everyone in and, as you can imagine, there were loads and loads of people, all trying to find their relatives, and it could be real chaos sometimes.

  There were loads of people going round the Other Lands looking for their long-lost nearest and dearest, but in Arthur’s case, it was made so much worse by the fact that he didn’t even know what his mum looked like. So in a case like that, where do you even start? I mean, talk about needles in haystacks. It was quite a job he had on there, and I told him as much.

  ‘I hate to say it, Arthur,’ I told him, ‘but I can’t see you finding her easily. Especially when you don’t even have a photo or anything, or a little picture in a locket, like you’re supposed to have. You should definitely have a photo in a locket at the very least. That’s the minimum requirement, just to get your system up and running. You definitely slipped up there, Arthur, not having one of them.’

  He sighed then and said, ‘I don’t even have a locket, Harry, mate. Never mind one with a picture in it. All I have is this.’

  And he showed me this little ghostly button he had, which he said he’d had since he was a baby, and which was supposed to be off his mother’s blouse. He didn’t know if it was true or not, but it was what he’d been told by the people at the workhouse. But then you never know, do you? Maybe it was all lies. Maybe it was just any old button and they’d just given it to him to shut him up and because they felt sorry for him, and so’s he’d have something as a keepsake, even if it wasn’t a real keepsake at all.

  He handed me the button to look at. It was sort of coated in seashell, mother-of-pearl I think it’s called. It was a nice button, almost like a piece of jewellery. I admired it and then gave it back to him, and he put it away carefully in one of his ghostly pockets.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing though,’ Arthur says to me. ‘I’m not going till I find her.’

  He surprised me a bit saying that. I looked at him, sort of puzzled.

  ‘Not going where, Arthur?’ I asked. ‘Where is there to go? We’re dead, aren’t we? This is it. Where else is there to go now?’

  Arthur looked at me as if I was dead ignorant then.

  ‘How long have you been dead exactly, Harry?’ he says.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I’m not really sure. Not that long. It feels like I’ve only just arrived.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That explains it then. You won’t have heard.’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘I mean they won’t have told you.’

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘You have to find out everything for yourself here, Harry,’ Arthur said. ‘You’d think they’d give you a proper book on it. Not just that useless leaflet.’

  ‘But I don’t understand, Arthur,’ I said. ‘Where is there to go? Where can you go when you’re dead? It’s the end of the line, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, there’s more to it than that,’ Arthur said. ‘The next step is the Great Blue Yonder.’

  ‘Great Blue what?’ I said, thinking the name rang a bell somewhere.

  ‘Yonder,’ he said. ‘Over there.’

  And he pointed towards the far horizon, where the sun was always setting, but never quite did, and where, behind all the reds and golds, you could just about make out a faint haze of blue. And I remembered that the Great Blue Yonder was mentioned in the leaflet too.

  ‘What happens there?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘you make your way there when you feel ready. You can go for, well, you know – what do they call it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m a new boy here. What do they call it?’

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘Thingumajig. What’samecallit. Thing.’

  ‘Thing?’

  ‘Yeah, you know. It’s like the next step, when you’re ready. They’ve got a new name for it now. Oh, what is it now? It’s here on the tip of my-my—’

  ‘Tongue,’ I said helpfully.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Recycling! That’s what it’s called now. Recycling.’

  I looked at him, puzzled and surprised.

  ‘Recycling?’ I said. ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it later,’ he said. ‘I think I just saw someone who might be my mum.’

  And he went.

  ‘One thing though, Harry,’ he called back to me, ‘in answer to your question—’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘About how long you’re dead for?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘Depends?’

  ‘On how long you want to be dead for. It all depends on you. I’ll see you later. Don’t go too far away. I’ll find you. Bye!’

  And Arthur hurried away then, going off after this woman he’d seen, who was dressed in an old-fashioned costume, and carrying an old-fashioned umbrella that wasn’t really an umbrella at all. That is, it was more to keep the sun off than the rain. A parasol is what I think they called them. She was wearing a bonnet too. So she was obviously taking no chances, what with a bonnet and a parasol, she was ready for all sorts of weather.

  Arthur ran after her, shouting, ‘Excuse me, excuse me!’, with his pearly button held tightly in his hand, the button his mum had been wearing when she died. But when the woman turned to see who was calling to her, you could see that all the buttons on her blouse were in place, and none of them were missing at all. So it wasn’t Arthur’s mum. Which was a shame, as she was a pretty lady, with a nice kind face, the sort of lady you wouldn’t mind having for a mum if you could choose.

  Arthur’s face fell when he saw she had all her buttons intact.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry to bother you. I just thought you were someone I knew.’

  And the lady smiled kindly, and she touched him on the cheek with her ghostly finger, and her hands were clad in these elegant, pale linen gloves.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘I’m looking for someone myself.’ And she smiled her sweet smile, and was gone into the crowd.

  I watched Arthur, and saw how disappointed he was. It was almost as if he couldn’t rest until he’d found his mum, as if he’d never be at peace with himself. It was almost – and this is going to sound very odd, but it’s what I thought – almost as if he hadn’t died properly. As if he still had unfinished business. And he wandered off into the crowd too, looking for Victorian ladies with bonnets and parasols and a button missing from their clothes.

  And I watched him go, and I thought that maybe I wasn’t exactly at peace with myself either, and that maybe I had a bit of unfinished business too.

  The Other Lands

  Now, you might well be thinking to yourself that considering where I was (wherever that was) and in view of what had happened to me, that I’d be running into all sorts of people from way back when – all sorts of famous historical figures and such.

 
; You’d expect – once you’re dead – to meet all kinds of people from the past. You’d expect to see people from the Iron Age and the Stone Age and the Middle Ages too. You might hope to run into somebody famous, like Napoleon, or Julius Caesar, or Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare, or the man who wrote Winnie the Pooh or anyone you care to name. And you might hope to get their autographs, or at least to exchange a few words and to tell them how famous they’d got over the years. Because they might not know, unless someone had already told them.

  But no. Charles Dickens was nowhere to be seen. Attila the Hun was nowhere to be seen. People wearing animal skins, cavemen who’d died thousands of years ago, were nowhere to be seen. (Well, apart from Ug, but I’ll tell you about him later.) Cleopatra was nowhere to be seen. Moses was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the overwhelming majority of dead people that you saw had all died – by the look of them – within the past few years. There were a few people like Arthur around, from a different era, but nowhere near as many as you might have thought. So where had they all gone? All the millions and millions of people who had died over the years, just like I had?

  Maybe, I thought, they had gone to a better place. Just like they say on the gravestones in cemeteries – Left This World and Gone to a Better Place.

  But it didn’t seem better to me, just different.

  So anyway, there I am wandering around the Other Lands or whatever they’re called, and I’m half expecting to see all these famous figures from the past – or even a lot of ordinary people from the past, people you could have a chat to, and compare things with. And you could tell them all about cars and jet planes and computers, and watch their jaws drop and their eyes go wide, but there’s very few people like this around.

  And even the ones who are from dim and distant times, they seem to have heard all about it already. And if you mention computers to them – even to Ug the Caveman – they just shrug, as if to say, ‘Yeah. Computers. So what?’ and they go on their way. Not that Ug the Caveman says that. All he ever says is ‘Ug’. So that’s what we’ve ended up calling him, because even when you ask him what his name is, he just says ‘Ug’ again, every time.

  The people from the really olden times always seem to be searching for something too. And they go on wandering and wandering, just as if there’s something they have to find before they can die properly. As if they had unfinished business. Just like Arthur. And maybe, in a way, just like me.

  Unfinished business. I suppose you could call it that. It made me feel bad too, every time I thought about it. It was something I’d said to my sister Eggy. Her real name was Eglantine, but I always called her Eggy, usually to annoy her. I think my mum and dad regretted calling her Eglantine, and had maybe done it in a moment of madness. Everyone called her Tina now, and she tried to keep Eglantine all hushed up, like it was a big embarrassment and an awful Family secret and a big sort of skeleton in the cupboard that we were never to mention to strangers.

  So everyone called her Tina then, apart from me. And I stuck with Eggy, just to let her know that I had one over on her, no matter how posh she pretended to be to other people, and so as to remind her of her humble beginnings, before she got all swanky.

  Anyway, we’d had this big row about her not letting me borrow her pens, just a few minutes before I stomped off out of the house and rode off on my bike to buy my own pens from the stationer’s with my pocket money. It was an awful, terrible, dreadful row, all over nothing really. And we’d said all the awful, terrible, dreadful things that brothers and sisters sometimes say to each other. And you mean them at the time, and yet you know you don’t really mean them, you’re just saying them because you’re angry and upset.

  Anyway, she wouldn’t let me use her pens because she said I was too ham-fisted with them and used too much force and I always squashed the points of them and flattened her felt tips. So I ended up saying stuff your pens then, I’ll buy my own, and I wouldn’t use your pens now if you paid me. I wouldn’t even use your pens if you went down on your knees and begged me to a million times over.

  And she said I could wait until the sun turned to ice – fat-face – before she’d do that! And I could go and buy my own pens too and good riddance to bad rubbish and she never wanted to see my ugly mug again either. So, just before I slammed the door, I said, well, we’ll see, we’ll see! And I hate you! Absolutely hate you! And I hate this house and this whole Family and I never want to come back or to see any of you ever again. And she said, so don’t then. And I said, you’ll be sorry. You’ll be sorry you said that, Eggy. You’ll be sorry one day when I’m dead. And she said, no I won’t be, I’ll be glad. So get lost, and don’t call me Eggy. And I slammed the door then, and I went off on my bike.

  And got killed.

  And now here I am, dead as mutton, as dead as a doornail. And the last terrible, awful words I said to my sister were, ‘You’ll be sorry one day when I’m dead.’ And the last terrible, awful words she said to me were, ‘No I won’t be, I’ll be glad.’

  And I want to see her again so much. To say I’m sorry and that I didn’t mean it. And so that she can say she’s sorry too and that she didn’t mean it either. Because I know she didn’t, any more than I did. It was just one of those stupid things you say, and I know she must be feeling awful about it now, every bit as bad as me.

  So I want to go back and to say that to her. To tell her that I love her really, and that she’s not to be sad, or to blame herself, or to cry or anything like that. And to tell her that she can have all my stuff, including my special conker that’s four years old now, and also my stick insect.

  But I can’t. I can’t go back, can I? Because I’m dead.

  So I think that I’m a bit like Arthur, and a bit like Ug the Caveman too probably. (Though who can guess what his unfinished business is? And he certainly can’t tell us. All he can do is grunt and say ‘Ug’ and look ferocious – when he’s not looking stupid, that is.) But yes, I reckon that in some ways I’m like them both. I also have things to settle, I too still have things to do.

  After Arthur had disappeared into the crowd, I wandered around a while on my own, thinking things over, and trying to make some sense of them all. I gradually began to work it out then, little by little, and I slowly realized that being dead wasn’t the be-all and end-all like you might think. Because if it was, then everyone would still be there in the Other Lands, wouldn’t they? Everyone from time immemorial, everyone who had ever lived. But they weren’t. So they must have moved on to other things. Maybe it all had something to do with the Great Blue Yonder, over there on the far horizon. And maybe I could move on too. Or maybe I couldn’t. Maybe it all depended on settling the unfinished business. Only how was I going to do that?

  I walked around for a good long time, not really going anywhere in particular, just strolling aimlessly, and nodding to the people that I passed on the way.

  What I said to Eggy those few minutes before the lorry got me had been tormenting me ever since I’d arrived.

  Of all the things to say, I kept thinking to myself. Of all the stupid things to say. Of all the final things there are in the world to say to someone, I had to go and say that – ‘You’ll be sorry one day when I’m dead.’

  Because you sometimes imagine it, don’t you – about being dead, and how everyone will be so upset, and they’ll all cry something terrible, and they’ll all be so sad as they carry your little coffin down to the cemetery, and everyone will say what a wonderful boy or what a wonderful girl you really were deep down inside – even if you were naughty occasionally and did have some nasty habits. Maybe it’s just me, and maybe you’ve never done this, but sometimes I’d lie in bed at night, and just before I fell asleep, I’d think what it would be like if I never woke up again, and what they’d all do and say, and how my mum and dad would break the bad news to everyone.

  I’d imagine the funeral and the flowers and everyone at school being unable to believe it, and how anyone who had ever been nasty to me or said a
bad word about me would be really, really guilty. They’d feel really, really bad about it. And it would serve them right. But I’d find it in my heart to forgive them just the same. And Jelly Donkins – who’d got me at the back of the Portacabin once – would be really sorry that he’d got me, especially now that he’d never be able to make amends for it. He’d feel bad for months, or even years or even the rest of his life. And maybe he would start being kind to little children and sending money to Oxfam and helping old ladies over the road and going on sponsored walks and doing good deeds every day – just to make it up to my memory. And all the grown-ups would be amazed, and they’d say, ‘Whatever has caused this change in big, bad Jelly Donkins? Why, he seems like a different boy now. He’s all but saintly. He’s even stopped pulling the legs off spiders and shaking salt onto snails when his mum’s not looking.’

  And no one would ever know why Jelly Donkins was a changed boy. Apart from me. Only I’d never tell anyone, because I’d be dead. But even dead, I’d still be an inspiration to others. An inspiration and a fine example.

  One thing about these dreams I used to have though, was that I was still there. I mean I was dead and gone, but I was also still there to see everyone, to see them find me all cold and peaceful in the morning, to hear them crying softly and tiptoeing about the house, saying things like, ‘Poor Harry, he was such a good, kind, marvellous boy,’ and ‘There’ll never be another Harry, never.’

  And I’d feel really sorry for them, not having me with them any more. And I’d wonder how they’d ever manage without me. And they’d probably have to go for counselling to get over it all, or get some beer in to drown their sorrows.

  And to see everyone so sad about you dying – even if only in your mind – it kind of made you feel all warm inside, just like you’d been sucking extra-strong peppermints. And you even felt a bit sort of heroic too. Especially if you hadn’t died in your bed, but more if you’d died from doing something brave like rescuing a little baby from a flooded river. And you’d just managed to swim to the river bank with the baby in your arms and to return it to its weeping mother, who could never fully express her gratitude to you, as you collapsed and died right there in the mud. And they put a statue up in honour of your memory then, and they gave you a medal, even though you were dead, and couldn’t wear it. And then all the local pigeons would come and stand on your head.