The Great Blue Yonder Read online

  ‘Just for luck,’ he said.

  I saw Arthur furrow his brow, stare at the machine and start to concentrate again.

  This machine was a little different. You didn’t want strawberries to win on this one, but a row of silver stars. The old man pressed the Start button.

  Clunkity-click, clunkity-click, clunkity-click, clunkity-click.

  And there they were, four silver stars in a row. And another mass of coins was dropping from the machine. The old man practically danced for joy. He had to borrow a carrier bag to put all his winnings in. But the arcade owner just looked furious, and he hurried the old man out of the door before he could play on any other machines or win anything else.

  ‘Early closing!’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But I’m feeling lucky today,’ the old man protested. ‘I’m on a winning streak, I can’t stop now.’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to go and be lucky somewhere else,’ the manager said. ‘You can’t be lucky here any more. I can’t afford it.’

  He closed the door and locked it and turned the sign round in the window.

  I looked at Arthur and saw that he was laughing. And as far as I could tell, he had done it all.

  ‘Arthur!’ I hissed across at him, in a kind of harsh whisper, forgetting that nobody would be able to hear me, apart from another ghost. ‘Arthur! Did you do all that?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It’s easy enough when you put your mind to it.’

  The arcade manager meanwhile was taking the back off the strawberry fruit machine and tinkering inside with a screwdriver.

  ‘What happened there?’ he muttered. ‘How did he win the jackpot? That’s not supposed to happen.’

  ‘Arthur,’ I said, ‘don’t you think we should get out of here before it all turns nasty?’

  ‘Oh, he won’t know it was me,’ Arthur said. ‘He’ll just think it was one of those things. You know, like a gremlin in the works.’

  Arthur was certainly that all right.

  But it was hard to have any sympathy for the arcade manager. It served him right really. All my sympathy was with the old man.

  Arthur walked out through the closed door, just like the ghost he was. And I followed him out to the street.

  ‘Where to then, Harry?’ he said. ‘Where do you want to go? Anywhere you fancy in particular?’

  I suddenly had an idea then. I suppose it was inevitable in a way. I was bound to think of it sooner or later. And it was such a temptation that who could resist it? Nobody I knew. And I bet you wouldn’t have been able to either.

  ‘Tell you what, Arthur,’ I said, ‘let’s go and have a look at my house. See how my mum and dad are, and Eggy, and Alt the cat and—’

  But Arthur didn’t look very happy about that idea.

  ‘I dunno, Harry,’ he said. ‘I dunno if I’d recommend you to do that. See, that’s what I did, you know, the first time I went haunting. I went off looking at all the old faces and the old places—’

  ‘We can go round to my old school too, Arthur!’ I said. ‘I’ll show you my class. And my seat in the classroom. I bet they’ll have kept it just as it was, Arthur, only it’ll be all decorated now with flowers and momentos and things. I bet it will.’

  ‘Harry—’ he tried to interrupt me, but I was well away then, and I wouldn’t listen.

  ‘Yeah!’ I continued, ‘come and see my house, Arthur, and my Family, and my old school. And I’ll show you the park where I go – I mean, where I used to go – at the weekends for football and stuff. And I can show you where I used to ride my bike. And I’ll show you where the accident happened. And the local swimming pool too, Arthur, where I used to go swimming and—’

  ‘No, Harry,’ he said, ‘I’m not so sure about that—’

  But there was no stopping me then, no stopping me at all.

  ‘Yeah, Arthur,’ I said. ‘Let’s go! Let’s go now. I’ll introduce you to Eggy, my sister. Though that’s not her real name. She’s called Eglantine really, which is a flower’s name – or at least a plant or something. You’ll like her. She’s all right. I mean, we argue a bit, but then brothers and sisters always do, don’t they, Arthur—’

  ‘Listen, Harry,’ he began to say, but I was well beyond listening to anyone. I’d made my mind up by then. My heart was set on it. I just had to see the old places, I just had to see my mum and dad and my sister again. And all my friends too. I had to see how they were all managing without me. I had to, I just had to, no matter what.

  ‘Come on, Arthur,’ I said. ‘Come on. Let’s go to the school first!’ Because I could see by the hands of the cathedral clock that there’d be no point in going home as there wouldn’t be anyone there yet. Eggy would be at her school (an all-girls one, and different from mine) and my mum and dad would both be at work, and nobody would be back at the house for hours.

  ‘Harry, wait!’ I heard Arthur cry, as I sped off, heading for the north of the city and making for the patch of green which was the playing field of my school. ‘Wait up, Harry,’ he called. ‘It’s not so simple. You’ve got to understand a few things first, Harry. You’ve got to understand. Wait up!’

  But, as I say, I was past waiting up for anyone. My mind was decided, and once it’s made up good and proper, it takes at least two earthquakes and a major hurricane to shift it.

  ‘Wait up, Harry, wait for me!’ he cried. But I sped on through the sky, past the buildings and over the traffic, skimming on the air the way a stone skims on water, skipping over the waves and foam.

  ‘Wait up, Harry! Wait up! Wait up!’

  But his voice faded far behind me, and I wasn’t in the mood to wait up for anyone. Not even for the devil himself. And come to think of it, who was the devil? Where was the devil? Why hadn’t I met him yet? Or was he just something else that didn’t exist?

  And you know what I thought then, as I sped along? I thought there is no devil. Someone made him up once to blame things on and to frighten little children with. But there is no devil, not really, and the only devils that do exist are the ones you make for yourself. Devils and fears and worries and things that go boo and the monsters in the wardrobe, we usually make them up all on our own, without any help from anyone.

  School

  I hovered over the school gates and waited there for Arthur to catch up with me. He seemed to be taking his time, so I sat down on one of the great concrete globes that decorate the two pillars of the entrance. This wasn’t because I was tired or anything – because you don’t really get tired when you’re dead. Not even dead tired. And you don’t get hungry or thirsty either. Or anything really. Nothing physical, anyway. But you still sort of have feelings though. You can still feel happy or sad, or lonely even, or remorseful, or guilty. You can even laugh.

  Anyway, I perched there on the concrete globe, not because I needed to rest, but more for the look of the thing really. Because it does look pretty cool, being able to perch on the top of the school gates, looking like you’ve been dead for centuries and it’s all in a day’s work. I suppose I wanted Arthur to see that I was really getting in to this being dead lark and that I’d got the hang of it already, and there was nothing to it really.

  As I sat there on top of the gates, waiting for Arthur to get there, I started to wonder about the fruit machines and how he’d managed to control them, as if he’d done it with the force of his mind and nothing else. I wondered if I’d have those kinds of powers too, and so decided to give it a go.

  Just across the road from me was a large maple tree – one of those really big old ones, that look as if they’ve been growing for years. It was getting so big it looked as if it might crack the pavement up with its roots, and the men from the council must have been round to crop its upper branches, and you could see where they’d recently been cut. And it may have been necessary, but it didn’t look very nice. All in all, it looked like a tree that had just had a bad haircut, and was maybe thinking about asking for its money back.

  I realized, as I looke
d at the tree, that autumn must be setting in. Most of the leaves had fallen from it, and had been trodden into a squashy mush on the pavement below.

  I didn’t reckon all that much to this at first, but then the thought struck me that several weeks must have gone by since I was done in by the lorry. Because it had been late summer then – well, early autumn, I suppose, but with very summery weather. We’d only been back at school a couple of weeks when my accident had happened. And now here we were – sorry, here they were – with winter nearly upon us – them.

  It was odd that so much time had gone by. Because to me it seemed as if the accident had only just happened, no more than a few hours, or even a few minutes ago. How could so many weeks have gone by without my noticing? How could so much time have vanished? So much would have happened that I’d have missed out on. They’d have started new projects at school. There’d be whole new games of football, and I wouldn’t be on the team. They must be having a bad season though, I was sure of that. Must be, when they were missing their best midfielder – yours truly. How could they ever have replaced me, I wondered? Maybe they hadn’t been able to. Maybe they’d had to give up football altogether

  But then I heard the sound of people shouting and calling and kicking a ball around, coming from the field on the other side of the school block. And I realized that football was still going on, even though I wasn’t there. Still going on – without me.

  I felt an odd sort of pang then. A pang of – I don’t know – sadness, longing, of wanting – to be alive again, I suppose. But it soon passed, because I’ve always been the sort of person who tries to make the best of a bad job and to look on the bright side. ‘What can’t be cured must be endured,’ as they say. Or, in other words, ‘Like it or lump it’. So I try to like it if I can, because who needs lumps, after all.

  I turned my attention back to the tree. One of the upper branches had a solitary leaf left on it. Well, I thought, if Arthur can get four strawberries to line up on the fruit machine just by willing them to, there’s no reason why I can’t make that last leaf drop off, just by doing the same.

  So I started willing.

  I stared at it, really hard, focusing my thoughts on it, the same way as you would focus the rays of the sun through a magnifying glass. And when you do that with a magnifying glass – as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried it – you can focus the sunlight so sharply that the heat becomes intense and you can burn a hole in a piece of paper, or even a bit of wood, just by concentrating the sunlight on that particular spot.

  ‘I’m the lens,’ I said to myself. ‘And my thoughts are the sunlight. And that leaf is the piece of paper.’

  So I stared and stared at it, trying not to move, to hold really steady – just as you need to keep the magnifying glass steady.

  ‘Fall!’ I thought. ‘Fall, fall, fall!’

  But nothing happened.

  I didn’t give up though, I kept on trying. Mind over matter, that’s all it was. Because if Arthur could do it, why not me? I was as good as he was, and just as dead. The only difference between us was that he was maybe a bit deader. Or rather, he’d been dead longer. But just because you’ve been at something longer, that doesn’t mean you’re better at it. You may even be worse, because you’ve gone stale. Whereas if you’re only just dead, you might have a whole new approach and a whole new way of seeing things and a fresh angle on it.

  And besides, how can one person be deader than another? Because you don’t really get the equivalent of good, better and best for being dead, do you? Like, dead, deader and deadest. I don’t recollect doing that during English.

  No, I was just as good and just as dead as he was. And besides, it’s not really a competition, is it? You’re just either dead or you’re not. Same as you’re either – I don’t know – a kipper or you’re not. You can’t be half a kipper, can you? Or a sort of a kipper. Or a kipper on Tuesdays, but the rest of the time you’re a banana. And so that was what I thought. If Arthur could do it, why not me?

  ‘Fall,’ I thought, as I stared at the leaf. ‘Fall, fall! I command you to fall.’

  But the leaf clung on to that branch as if it had been super-glued on to it.

  ‘Fall!’ I went on thinking. ‘Fall, fall!’ And I turned all my thoughts into a kind of small, tiny dot of concentration, and I aimed the dot of concentration right at that leaf, at exactly where it grew from the branch.

  ‘Fall,’ I willed it. ‘Fall!’

  And just then, it began to move. It moved as if tugged at by a gust of wind. And I saw that the branch was swaying. It’s true that it was quite a windy day, because you could see the clouds being blown about up in the sky, even if I couldn’t feel the air itself on my face any more, like I’d been able to back when I was alive.

  It’s a wonderful sensation that, you know, the feel of a refreshing breeze on your face. I missed it. Funny how much you take for granted when you’re alive, all the ordinary, simple things. But I missed it so much. More than I’d ever have thought. In fact, if I’d had to fill in a questionnaire when I was alive, or write an essay called Things I Will Miss The Most When I Am Dead I’d never have put the feel of the wind on my face in there. I’d have said things like my mum and dad, of course, and my friends, and my sister even, I suppose, and all the things I’d got used to doing, and the football and the telly and the computer and all the rest.

  But the wind on my face. I’d never have thought of that.

  The leaf began to move, to tremble in the wind, making a sound like a piece of paper stuck in bicycle spokes.

  ‘Fall!’ I willed it. ‘Fall!’

  It moved more rapidly. I don’t rightly know if it was me doing it or if it was the gust of wind, or maybe it was a bit of both. But the leaf suddenly broke from the branch and it fluttered down to the pavement, and it lay there on the ground, waiting for someone to tread on it and to turn it to mush like all the rest.

  I felt a bit shocked. The way you do when you’ve just managed to do something you didn’t think you could. Only had I done it? Had I? Or was it just the gust of wind? Maybe I ought to try it again on something else before—

  But before I could there was someone calling my name.

  ‘Wotcha, Harry. What you doing? Daydreaming? You look a bit far away.’

  I looked across and there was Arthur, sitting on the opposite concrete globe on top of the other gatepost.

  I blushed. Well, I would have blushed, if I’d had anything left to blush with.

  ‘Eh, nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m not doing anything. Just thinking.’

  Arthur hopped over from his gatepost and sat next to me on mine.

  ‘Listen, Harry,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you something. Got to warn you, that is.’

  ‘About what?’ I said, only half listening to him, still looking around for another leaf to concentrate my great powers on.

  ‘This your old school, is it?’ Arthur said, jerking his thumb at the buildings behind me.

  ‘That’s right. Come in with me, Arthur,’ I suggested.‘I’ll show you about. I’ll point out my class to you, and all my old friends and—’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Arthur said. ‘I won’t come in, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘But, Arthur,’ I said, a bit annoyed and bewildered at his refusal, ‘it’ll be really interesting. Things have changed an awful lot since when you were at school.’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so,’ he said. ‘Not that much. Besides, I was never really at school much anyhow.’

  ‘No, but they have changed, really.’

  ‘No, I doubt it somehow. It’s still reading, writing and arithmetic mostly, I should imagine. We had that a hundred and fifty years ago. I shouldn’t think much has changed.’

  ‘But, Arthur,’ I protested, ‘I can show you the computer room. I bet you never had computers.’

  ‘No,’ he conceded, ‘not the sort you have now. But we had some pretty good gadgets, you know. Mechanical more than electrical, but good just the same. And a
nyway, I’ve kept myself abreast with modern trends by popping down here to the Land of the Living every now and again to see how things were moving along. So I’ve seen computers already, thank you very much. It’s no big deal to me. There’s even one up in the Other Lands now, but it hasn’t made much difference. They still can’t find my mum.’

  I was rather disappointed at that, because I’d been looking on Arthur as a bit of a country cousin. The sort who comes up to the big city every once in a while with a straw stuck between his teeth and wearing big mucky wellingtons, and who hasn’t got a clue about anything, except how to milk the cow. And you take him round the city and he keeps going, ‘Cor! I never saw anything like that before!’ when you take him down to the bowling alley or round to the Laser Quest.

  But Arthur didn’t seem the sort to be impressed at all. I suppose he’d just seen too much already and had lived too long – well, you know what I mean.

  ‘Anyway,’ Arthur went on, ‘to be honest, Harry, I’m not all that keen on school. I never went there much myself, and when I was there I never liked it, as they used to whack us. I know they don’t whack you these days, and you should consider yourselves lucky. But we got whacked all the time. And you can’t really enjoy your schooldays, not when you’re getting whacked. In fact, I don’t think you can enjoy anything when you’re getting whacked, because all you can think about is the whacking, and wonder when it’s going to stop. And once it has stopped, you just worry if it’s going to start again, and whether your bottom will ever get back to normal. So I’m not all that keen on schools, not really.’

  I stood up on top of the gatepost.

  ‘OK, Arthur,’ I said. ‘Please yourself. I’ll go in on my own. You can go back if you want to.’

  ‘No, I’ll wait here,’ Arthur said, ‘until you’ve finished. You might not find your way back to the Other Lands on your own.’

  ‘I’m sure I can manage, thank you, Arthur,’ I said in a polite, but distant, voice, thinking to myself that if I could make leaves drop off trees, then I should be able to find my way back to wherever the Other Lands were without too much trouble.