The Gospel of Us (4 page)

When I turned back the crowd had cleared from around her, everyone pressing back in a circle, edging away from her death. Everyone, that is, except for the man who’d caught her.

Straight away spotlights were on them, and a camera crew, catching her last breath in his arms as he looked down into her face, his own obscured under a blue hoodie. The front of her chest was crimson, as was the ground beneath her, blood pouring from her back. She was shivering, shaking, so the man, still holding her in his lap with one arm, took off his hoodie with the other and laid it over her.

For a moment nothing else happened. It was like they were painted there, lit in the lights, her head
resting against his shoulder, her arms hanging limp, her knuckles resting on the ground. But then he lifted his head, and we all saw it was him.

The Teacher, clear as daylight, with that camera zooming in close now to shine up his image on the big screen behind us.

Staring through the barrier fence he looked towards the Company Man, still stood at his microphone on the platform. The Company Man returned his gaze. Eventually it was he who spoke first – not to the crowd, but just to the Teacher.

‘Who are you?’ he said. The Teacher looked confused, before trying to answer.

‘I’m… I am…’

But he got no further.

The Company Man filled the silence again.

‘If you have something to say, then say it.’

The Teacher looked blank. He looked down at the woman, dead in his arms, then up at the Company Man once more.

‘I have nothing to say,’ he said. ‘I came to listen.’

Before I tell you what happened that Saturday, I should tell you what else happened on the Friday night first. I don’t know why, but a few hours after that woman was shot, I went back to the secure area in the centre of town. It was dark by then, the big arc lights turned off, the civic buildings inking round the square like sleeping giants. ICU security and the police were still there, but unseen, in the shadows. The whole place was like a forgotten memory, as if whatever we did, whoever died, none of it would ever be noticed.

But not everyone had forgotten. I knew that as soon as I entered the square and saw the candles. I don’t know who’d brought them, but there they were, a huddle of them all different sizes, their wax
melting down their sides like tears. They’d been placed right where she’d fallen and right where he’d caught her. I walked closer to them. Their flames lit the ground so I could still see the stain of the woman’s blood, spreading like the map of a country over the paving slabs, cities and towns marked in dark spots of old chewing gum. Like I said, I still don’t know who’d put them there, who’d lit them, but it was enough that they did. Not forgotten, that’s what those flames said. Still burning and not forgotten.

I knelt down to feel their warmth against my hands. It was a gentle heat, like a breath or human blood. As I crouched there I listened to the nighttime town. It was death-bell quiet – just the usual sighs of cars and lorries over the Passover and somewhere else, streets away, a security alarm complaining. It was like the whole town wasn’t so much sleeping quiet as waiting quiet. Waiting for the morning, for this night to be done and for it all to begin again.

I stood to go and that’s when I saw the other light. Far away, up on the mountain. Just a lamp probably,
hung on a tree, but strong. A low star speaking to those candles at my feet, like a beacon. I knew right away it was him. Up there for the night with his new followers. And I knew, too, that the lamp was only that – a lamp, to help them cook, wash, see. But as I walked away, because of everything else that had happened that day I knew it wasn’t just a lamp either, was it? It was like those candles, that light up there – a memory, a not-forgotten, a sign that somewhere at least things were still burning.

I slept like a log that night. Slept like I’d never slept before, body sunk right through the mattress type of sleep. So first I knew about the new day was my phone kicking off somewhere under my clothes on the floor. Fumbling around, I found it and looked at its screen. It was my buttie Johnny over on Llewellyn street. I was late for band practice, that’s what he said. ‘Band Practice’. I had to laugh, we weren’t no band, at least not yet, not then. Johnny’d bought some drum kit up the valleys the week before, fifty quid for a mint set, never been used, ‘kept in towels the whole time butt,’ Johnny said. Anyway, as far as he
was concerned, that was enough. We’d be a band. Him, me and little Evs Bach. Fair dos, he’d had worse ideas, so I’d said I was up for it. He was still dead keen about the idea and I didn’t want to let him down so I climbed out of bed, threw on my clothes and made my way over to Llewellyn Street.

At least, that’s where I’d thought I was going. To the same old Llewellyn Street I’d always known – one row of pebbledash, flat-face terraces facing up to the pillars of the Passover. But I wasn’t, was I? The way there might have been the same – same pavements, same streets, same alleyways and underpasses. But the destination, well, that both was and wasn’t the same, like the whole place had been pushed through the looking glass.

I saw the cricket game first. They were playing it in the street, but slow, like their bones were made of lead. Young lads, a few girls and some older men too, bowling and batting right there on the tarmac. Then, as if that wasn’t surprise enough, I saw the other side of the street, the side that, ever since the Passover was built, hasn’t been a side for years. And that, well, that
stopped me in my tracks alright. To be honest, I thought I was having a flashback from a bad tab, until I realised that other people could see it too. And what could they see? Well, like I said, the other side of the street, there again, as if the concrete, bulldozers, cranes and trucks of the Passover had never been here at all. All of it was there, but ghosted. No walls as such, or roofs or windows, but the outlines of the houses were still there, along with their families inside them, watching telly, washing up, playing on the floors of their living rooms.

Imagine if you’d taken an x-ray of a whole street, then coloured it in with bright washing on lines, people’s faces, rugs, carpets and radios. Well, that’s what it was like. A demolished street brought back to life, not with the bricks that had built it, but with the families who’d lived inside them, back home at last.

I was still staring at that ghosted side of the street when I heard Johnny running up behind me, all panting and blathering.

‘It was Alfie, no lie now. It was him who done it. I swear it. You’ve gotta believe me butt.’

I put my hands out, trying to calm him. ‘Alright, Johnny, alright. Easy now. Now, what you sayin’ ’bout Alfie?’

‘It was him. As made the other side of the street.’

I looked back at the slow cricket game, a woman laying a table for dinner beside one of the fat pillars of the Passover, an old bloke reading his paper beside a fireplace, a kid building an Airfix plane on his bed. Then I looked back at Johnny, my head still spinning.

‘What you on about Johnny?’ I said. ‘How did Alfie do all this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Johnny said, all bulging eyes and high brows. ‘But I’m telling you mun, he did. I saw him. I was out giving that stray some milk see, when I sees Alfie step out of his front door. I know he’s always been an odd one, but he was looking even odder today, staring over there at the pillars. And not just staring either, but speaking too. So I goes nearer, didn’t I? An’ he was saying numbers and names, over and over, the numbers of houses and the names of the people who’d lived in them I reckon.’

I put my hands out again, stopping him. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Because,’ Johnny said, pulling himself up like this was his big moment, ‘when he said their names, they arrived, didn’t they?’

‘Arrived? From where?

‘I don’t know,’ he said, stepping closer to me, and dropping his voice. ‘But they did. All of ’em. Just appeared from behind the pillars. An’ that’s what I mean. Alfie, it was him who done it, him who built the street again, just by talking.’

I looked back at the street. It was all too much, and too much of a coincidence too. This had to be the Teacher. I knew it in my bones. The Company Man was going to take more of the town away so, to piss him off, the Teacher, with a little help from Alfie by the looks of it, was bringing other bits of it back. I didn’t know how, and like I said when you first came to listen to me, I still don’t. But I just knew it, deep down. This, the cricket game, the terrace of dreams, it was all him.

So for once I wasn’t surprised when I saw him. Because of course he was there, wasn’t he? Just as he was always in the middle of things yesterday. Only this time, there wasn’t just him. There were his followers too.

From what I could tell they’d started tagging along with him right from the start. Everyone knows that when he left the slip on Friday Joanne had followed him along the beach, stepping her feet in the prints of his. And we know, too, how he picked up Peter not long after, bumping into him when he was on his way back from fishing off the rocks at the end of the prom. But all the others? People find it hard to believe now, just how many there were. Bloody hundreds of them – most, by the look of it, fresh (or not so) off the mountain where he’d slept that night. He was walking out from one of the houses, one of the real ones mind, not one of Alfie’s, towards the front door of another. Walking steady and slow just like any normal bloke taking a morning stroll, only this one happened to have a wedding train of people in his wake. And so many of them.
Old and young, men and women, poor and poorer.

I stepped away from Johnny to get a closer look at the Teacher. He looked the same as when I saw him yesterday, but different too. On the beach and then again in the secure area, he’d looked like a lost child. But now he wasn’t. He was walking with direction, and there was a light in his eye. Not of knowing, but of wanting to know. Like he was starving for stories, for voices. Which, it turned out, he was.

I couldn’t get into the house he entered. There was no room, what with the followers, the families who lived there, and now the TV crews too, the ones who’d come for the Company Man but who reckoned they’d sniffed out a juicier story with the Teacher. I still know what happened inside that house though because it all came back to us like Chinese whispers, running through the crowd like a voltage. How the Teacher had sat down and taken a cup of tea with the old woman who owned the house. How she’d told him her stories and then how everyone else did too. A blind boy. A young girl who cares for her mam. A mute girl, tapping out her tale
for him on the arm of her wheelchair. How all he’d done was sit and listen, nothing else, and how, somehow, that listening had been enough. How it did something. How people came out of that house lighter, like a weight’d been taken off them. Like they’d been healed.

I was still standing at the back of that crowd, listening to the commentary filter through it, when I heard other voices, further off, towards town. I stepped away to try to hear them better, but still couldn’t make sense of them. It sounded like more of a droning than a conversation, like the ebb and flow of a hive. So I took a few more steps away from the people milling around the house, walking, as I did, through the imaginary walls of Alfie’s dream terrace, past a woman making a bed, a granddad struggling with his braces.

From what I could tell the voices were coming from over by the graveyards. And not just voices either, but lights too. Flickering lights like a slow strobe, flashing up under the underpass. Taking one
more look at the crowd behind me, I decided to go and see what was going on. Maybe, I thought, the Teacher had done one of his disappearing acts and was already at work over there by the graves, conjuring up some more of his listening brand of healing.

But I was wrong. There wasn’t any kind of healing happening over by those graveyards.

Just hurting.

Legion we called them. The Legion Twins. Couple of scrawny kids living in the underpass between the cemeteries of St Mary’s. No one remembers why they got that name. You know how it is with nicknames. Something you did as a kid, or your dad did, or your cousin way back, and bang, you’re stuck with it. Well, theirs was the Legion Twins and always had been as far as I knew. Every town has people like them I reckon. That bloke you see every day, wandering round the streets, mumbling. You know who I mean, don’t you? Might stick out a skinny hand now and then, ask you for change. Ever talked
to him? No, course you haven’t. Why would you? Can’t get a bloody word in edgeways with them types, can you? So busy talking to themselves. And that’s how it was with the Twins. We all knew them but no one ever spoke to them, and they never spoke to us either, just to themselves or to each other.

Turns out though, as I discovered when I came round the corner towards the underpass, we’d been wrong about the Twins all along. All those years they weren’t talking to themselves but to them, the Dead. And to us, I suppose. The us we’d already forgotten. Even talking
for
us in a way. And we’d never known. Until that day, when coming round the corner and seeing them in the underpass hurting like that, it had all made sense.

I say sense, but that’s not really the right word for what I saw. I’m not going to even try and explain it, so let me just describe it for you instead.

All through that underpass, the same one I’d walked through a thousand times before, the Dead were coming out of the ground. Not in that Zombie way
mind, not like in a film, but
in
film. Home movies, that’s what those flickering lights were. Home movies coming out of the ground, hitting the walls and roof of the underpass, loads of them. Weddings, christenings, children’s birthday parties, a boxing match, long-gone families and friends. Some in black and white, others in 60s and 70s colour. It was like a kaleidoscope under there, it was. A swirling kaleidoscope of gone lives in a gone town. Some of them were only coming partway through, squeezing their light through a tiny hole in the ground. Others, though, were on full show, shining from great big gaps in the tarmac, as if it was the pressure of the years that had pushed them through. But it hadn’t. Not on its own anyway. It was the old Legion Twins that had let them through, you see. I’d never seen them move so fast. Running from here to there, panting, manic-eyed, one carrying a big old pickaxe, strong as a miner, the other just working with his hands – doing whatever they could to open up that tarmac and let more of those memories out from under it.

I stood there watching them, sweating and strained, panicked. It was like their lives depended on getting those films out from under there, as if this was their one chance and unless they set them free it was all over. As I watched they started talking again, the same old Legion Twins mumble and mutter.

Only this time, for once, I listened.

‘Not forgotten, not forgotten,’ said one of them.

‘The last death is your name said for the last time. Name. Find the name,’ said the other.

‘So many under, so many under,’ said both of them. ‘Must get them out. Get them out.’

And that was when, as if in reply, those voices started up again.

It was like someone had turned up the volume on a hundred radios all at once; hundreds of voices, high, low, young, old, all speaking together and against each other. From where I was in the underpass I couldn’t work out, at first, where they were coming from. But as they got louder that soon became clearer. The graveyards. The voices were coming from the graveyards around the church.