The Great Blue Yonder Read online

  They need someone to tell their stories for them. So we kind of send them out, broadcast them, if you like, to someone who has the patience to listen. And that person might be a lady or it might be a man or it might be a girl or a boy. I don’t know. And I don’t think it matters. What matters is what you have to say.

  That’s something I always wanted to know about when I was alive. Why, if ghosts ever came back with a message for anyone, it would only be to say that ‘Uncle Norman sends his best’, or ‘Great-Auntie Beryl says all is forgiven and to remember to feed the budgie’. Because you don’t want to hear about that sort of stuff, do you? If a ghost is going to come back and say something, why doesn’t it tell you what it’s like to be dead? Why do they never mention the Other Lands and the man at the Desk and the sun that never quite sets and the Great Blue Yonder?

  You know, sometimes I think that these spiritualists and clairvoyants and astrologers are simply making the whole thing up.

  Arthur and I got nearer to the Desk and to the path that led back down to where we had come from – the Land of the Living. The long queue for the Desk was still there, longer than ever, and the man at the Desk looked as miserable as ever and as bored as ever too.

  ‘Name!’ he’d say, as each new person came along. ‘Address. Contact number in case of emergencies.’

  ‘What do you mean contact number for emergencies?’ the woman in front of his desk said. ‘I’m dead, aren’t I? I’ve already had my emergency.’

  The man at the Desk peered at her.

  ‘Rules,’ he said, ‘is rules. And paperwork is paperwork. And computers – apparently – is computers.’

  ‘Then they’re pretty stupid rules, aren’t they?’ the woman said. ‘And it’s pretty stupid paperwork as well. And they’re pretty stupid computers.’

  ‘Look, I don’t make the rules, I just enforce ’em,’ the man at the Desk said.

  ‘Then you’re a blithering idiot,’ the lady said. She looked a bit to me like she might well have been a schoolteacher or a headmistress when she was alive.

  ‘Now, see here, madam—’ the man at the Desk began.

  But I didn’t hear any more of the conversation because . . . ‘Now!’ Arthur hissed at me. ‘While he’s distracted. Come on!’

  And so saying, he began to run, and I ran after him, and the two of us dodged past the woman and past the Desk and we raced on down along by the queue of people waiting to come in.

  The man at the Desk must have seen us though, because I heard him shouting from behind.

  ‘Oi! You two! You boys! Where do you think you’re off to? You’re going the wrong way! Come back!’

  But we paid no heed to him and ran on.

  ‘Come on,’ said Arthur. ‘Come on, Harry. Don’t worry. He can’t come after us. He’s not allowed to leave his desk.’

  ‘Stop them!’ the man at the Desk shouted. ‘You in the queue there, stop those boys.’

  But no one even tried to. They were all too dazed and bewildered and unfamiliar with it all. They looked at us with a sort of confused surprise. But they didn’t even attempt to stop us. And why would they? Some of them could have been dead no more than a couple of minutes, and it does take you aback a bit for a moment or two, to work out what’s going on.

  You know what you think when you first realize you’re dead? The thoughts that run through your mind? Well, first you think, ‘Where am I?’ Then you look about and you see you’re in the queue leading up to the Desk, and you somehow instantly know that you’re dead. You know it, just like that. Just like you used to know whether you were hungry or thirsty or not. It’s that simple.

  Some people are too dazed to get the hang of it immediately, and they stand there saying, ‘Where am I? What happened?’ But usually someone else in the queue will come to their rescue and explain.

  ‘You’re dead, mate,’ they’ll say. ‘You’ve had your chips. You’ve done your time and it’s over. But don’t worry about it, we’re all dead here. We’re all in the same boat.’

  And that’s when you go into the second stage – the stage of not believing it. That’s when you think, ‘Dead? Me? No. I can’t be, surely. I never finished my homework’, or ‘I never put the cat out’, or ‘I’ve only just put those chips in the oven!’ or ‘What’s going to happen to all the money in my piggy bank?’

  Though why you should worry about your money is totally daft. Because you know that expression ‘You can’t take it with you’. People often say that, don’t they? ‘Money, it’s not everything. Put some by for a rainy day, of course, but what’s the sense in hoarding it? You can’t take it with you.’

  But that’s only half the story. The point isn’t just that you can’t take it with you. The point is that even if you could, there’d be nothing to spend it on when you got there. Because there aren’t many shops here. None in fact. None at all.

  Anyway, that’s stage two, ‘Me? Dead? I can’t believe it.’ Then stage three is getting used to the idea, and stage four is just moping about for a while, thinking about your life and sort of saying goodbye to everyone inside your own mind. Then once you’ve done that and when you feel at peace, you seem to make your way to the Great Blue Yonder.

  But sometimes people get stuck between stages. People like me and Arthur and Ug the caveman, who can’t move on because something’s holding them back. Because they’ve got that unfinished business I was telling you about. And that’s what it all comes down to – unfinished business – in the end.

  So we ran on down past the line of people queuing to check in at the Desk.

  ‘Oi! Oi!’ the man at the Desk shouted again. ‘Come back here! Don’t you go nipping back down and causing any mischief. Oi! You two! it’s you two boys I mean!’

  But we were gone by then, out of sight, if not yet out of earshot, and there was no way he could fetch us back.

  Arthur was in front of me. The tails of his old-fashioned coat were flapping as he ran and he held his hat on with both hands, clutching it by the brim. It was a funny way to run, but it didn’t slow him down any, and it was all I could manage to keep up with him. In fact, we were going so fast that I didn’t see the precipice. He hadn’t warned me about that. One second, there we were, running helter-skelter, pelting down past the queue up to the Desk, the next we’d rounded a corner, and suddenly there was nothing there. And I mean nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not nothing like you know it when you’re alive. Not nothing like in ‘nothing doing’ or ‘nothing much on the telly’ but absolute total nothing. Just a cliff and beyond it – nothing. No light, no darkness, just – nothing.

  But it was too late to stop. Too late to even try. We just ran around the corner, stepped out into the void, and then suddenly there we were, falling through vast regions of nothingness, and I started to scream, at the top of my voice.

  ‘Help,’ I yelled. ‘Help, help! Somebody help! I’m going to die!’

  That’s right. I know. I know it was stupid. But I’ve got to admit it. It’s what I said, ‘Help, help! I’m going to die!’

  And it never occurred to me that I couldn’t die, on account of being dead already. So there are advantages to being dead, you see. It’s not all bad news. At least you only have to do it the once. It’s not like having a wash or having injections or doing your piano practice, which you have to do over and over. You only need to die the once and then you needn’t bother with it ever again. So, in a way, it’s a big load off your mind.

  ‘Help!’ I screamed again. ‘Help! Arthur! Help!’ And I closed my eyes and waited for whatever was down there to hit me.

  For a second there was absolute silence. Not even the sounds of falling or the whistling of the wind. And then I seemed to hear the sound of laughter.

  I was still too afraid to open both my eyes, but I managed to half open one of them. It couldn’t be much longer, I thought, any second now I’d go splat on something. A very big, loud and painful splat too. And I didn’t remember that nothing could hurt me, not any more.


  And there was the laughter again. Only it wasn’t what I’d first thought. It wasn’t the baying, cackling, malicious laughter of demons. We hadn’t jumped into some great pit of hell and damnation as I was starting to fear. No. It was the laughter of sheer delight. It was Arthur’s laughter. And he was laughing for the joy of being – well, dead, I suppose.

  And I realized then that we weren’t falling at all.

  We were flying.

  And the earth that I had once lived on was down there, far beneath us, and we were flying above it, free as birds, and it was the greatest feeling ever. The greatest feeling in the whole wide world.

  Back Down

  It’s a funny old world when you see it for the first time, and you know something, you never really do until you’re dead.

  You might think you do, and I’m sure you could cite me instances and say, ‘What about babies then? They see the world as new, don’t they? They see it all as fresh and different, the first time they open their eyes.’ But they don’t, you know, not really, because they can’t understand it, they don’t know what it is. They just see eyes and faces and hear people going, ‘Ooos a dittle didums den!’ and ‘Coochie coochie coo!’ and it doesn’t make any sense at all.

  When you’re only about half a minute old, you’ve no idea what a face is or what a nice bit of scenery might be, let alone a cot or a nappy. And as for what a ‘didums’ is and what a ‘coochie coochie coo’ might be, you’re totally lost.

  Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you never really get to see the world as it actually is. Not as if you’d just arrived in a flying saucer. Not as a totally, brand-new place, as if it had all crept up on you at once, and boom! there it was – the planet Earth.

  So it was quite a sight to see, as Arthur and I swept down upon on it, swooping lower and lower, like great birds of prey flying down from high mountains to the lowlands.

  Yet, even as we flew, I felt sort of once-removed – if you understand what I mean. A bit like they say about relations, like when you have a cousin once-removed, meaning sort of distant and far away. It was as if you were part of what was all around you, and you could see everything that was happening, yet you had no way of influencing events. You were like a goldfish in a bowl, watching the world outside.

  We flew on down through the clouds.

  ‘It’s great, Arthur!’ I shouted. And by way of an answer, he looped the loop. So I had a go, and I got the hang of it at once.

  ‘Which way?’ I called to him.

  ‘Just follow me down,’ he said. ‘We’ll go all the way.’

  So down we went. And as we did, I started to recognize many old familiar landmarks. The spires of churches, the tops of high buildings, fields with pylons in them, and then the flashing neon lights of the city advertising hoardings, lights which stayed on all day, but which only really came alive at night.

  And somehow that sort of described Arthur and me – alive at night. And I thought, that’s what I am now, one of those creatures of the darkness you’re always reading about in horror books. And I thought, fancy that! What a turn-up. Fancy harmless old me being a scary creature of the darkness. And it sort of made you smile, really, and feel a bit chuffed with yourself, and it made you wonder if people had ever got anything right. Because how was I ever going to frighten anyone? Me! Who’d hardly say boo to a goose, or to a duck, or to a turkey or anything.

  We swooped down over the city. The traffic roared beneath us, but with a muffled, muted roar, as if behind a pane of thick glass. That’s how it all was, the real world. It was shielded from us behind an invisible barrier, and we could watch, but we couldn’t take part any more. We couldn’t do anything, or make anything happen. Or at least that was what I thought. But on that count, I’d got things a bit wrong.

  ‘This way,’ Arthur shouted. ‘We’ll go jack-potting.’

  ‘Jack-potting?’ I called after him. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  On he flew and I flew after him. We were level with the buildings now, flying past the top storeys of the high office blocks and the big hotels and the great department stores.

  ‘Wotcha!’ Arthur shouted as we flew by a window. There was a man inside, sitting alone at a great big desk, which was so huge that you could have played table tennis on it or even have had a game of five-a-side football at a pinch. He looked like he was really important, with his great big desk and his great big office, though to tell you the truth, he was doing something a bit nasty, because he was sitting there with his finger up his nose. Yes, that’s what I thought – disgusting.

  Anyway, Arthur swooped over to the window and looked inside the room.

  ‘Ya!’ he yelled. ‘Wotcha, baldie!’ he called – because the man was going thin on top. ‘We can see what you’re doing!’

  And he pulled the most horrible face I’ve ever seen anyone pull. And I’ve seen some bad ones, believe me, because we used to hold competitions at our school for who could look the ugliest. And I quite often used to win.

  ‘Hey, wooden brains!’ Arthur called. ‘Where’s your manners!’ And he put his thumb to his nose and waggled his fingers. But the man just carried on as though we weren’t there – which we plainly weren’t as far as he was concerned. And then there was a knock at the door, and he pretended to be busy with some paperwork, and he shouted, ‘Come in’, and another man entered with some papers for him to sign. So he signed the papers and looked important for a while, and then, when the other man had gone, he began to draw doodles on his notepad. Doodles and matchstick men, just like you’d do yourself when you were bored. So maybe he wasn’t so important after all, not if all that he had to do was to sign papers and do doodles and wait for five o’clock to come round so that he could go home.

  ‘He can’t see us, Arthur,’ I said as we gawped in.

  ‘Course not,’ he said. ‘We’re ghosts, aren’t we? You don’t see ghosts, do you? Come on, let’s go and do some jack-potting. This way.’

  We were just about to fly on when a voice called from behind me.

  ‘Hello, boys,’ it said. ‘How are you?’

  I turned, and there was a woman, quite a beautiful one, flying along behind us. She looked quite young and quite modern. Not as modern as me, but not as old as Arthur. More sort of in between. Pretty recent anyway.

  ‘Hello, Miss Truly,’ Arthur said. ‘Keeping well?’

  ‘Not so bad, Arthur,’ she said. ‘Mustn’t grumble. There’s plenty worse off than me.’

  I couldn’t quite imagine who she meant, but I didn’t say anything, and I just watched as she flew off down towards one of the windows of the cathedral and popped inside.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked Arthur.

  ‘Miss Truly,’ he said.

  ‘Miss Truly who?’

  ‘Don’t know. Just Miss Truly, as far as I know.’

  ‘What unfinished business has she got?’ I asked him.

  ‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘something to do with true love, I should think. It’s mostly true love,’ he said, ‘is unfinished business, one way or another. Come on.’

  He swooped down towards the street then and I followed along behind him. He turned a corner and he nipped into a place called The Golden Arcade – Hottest Slots in Town – the kind of place my mum always told me I wasn’t to go into as they were a waste of time and money.

  We went inside and Arthur peered around, looking to see who – if anyone – was playing the one-armed bandits.

  An old man was in there on his own, feeding coins from a paper cup into a machine with lots of flashing lights on it. The old man looked a bit lonely, as if the one-armed bandit he was playing on was his only friend. The fruit machine promised no end of ‘Big wins’ and ‘Huge Jackpots’, and although the old man looked as if he could have done with a big win and a jackpot to pad out his pension, he didn’t seem as though he’d had one in a long time.

  He needed a row of four strawberries to get the big pri
ze and the odds were plainly stacked against him. We watched as he dropped his last coin into the slot and reached out to pull the handle.

  ‘Now watch this,’ Arthur said.

  Arthur stared at the fruit machine, at the rotating drums as they spun around. He stared at them intently, his face kind of screwed up a bit, as if he was concentrating really hard and focusing all his thoughts upon the little strawberries and oranges and coconuts as they went round and round.

  Scrunch!

  One of the drums stopped. On a strawberry.

  Arthur smiled, then he concentrated hard once more.

  Click!

  The next drum stopped. A strawberry again.

  The old man watched, bleary-eyed, with no real hope or expectation of winning. He’d plainly had two strawberries before, but it had never come to anything.

  Scrunch! Click!

  Another strawberry – three now.

  Scrunch!

  The last one. Four. Four strawberries in a row! There was a pause, a lull, a moment’s silence, then the slot machine shuddered and seemed to give an enormous hiccup before belching out a great cascade of coins. They tumbled out into the slot tray and spilled over on to the floor.

  The old man pounced on them with delight.

  ‘I’ve won!’ he shouted. ‘The jackpot! I’ve won!’

  The manager of the amusement arcade smiled thinly at him from his stool behind the change booth and did his best to congratulate him. But you could tell that he was miffed really that the old man had won.

  The old man gathered up his winnings and stuffed the coins into his pockets until they bulged almost fit to burst.

  He looked as if he were on his way out then, to celebrate his winnings with a pint of beer and a pork pie in the pub.

  But as he headed for the door, he paused and dropped a coin into another machine.