‘I thought I explained about that.’

‘Oh, sure. You said. You’ve been dead. But you’re alive again, right?’ Mad Jim’s voice had that little chuckle in it that it always got when he’d found a real dingdong on the line and could picture all his insomniac listeners turning up the volume.

‘No. Still dead. It’s not something you get better from, Jim. Now—’

Johnny pattered around the corner and sped along John Lennon Avenue.

Mad Jim was saying, in his special dealing-with-loonies velvet voice: ‘So tell us all out here in the land of the living, Bill – what’s it like, being dead?’

‘Like? LIKE? It is extremely DULL.’

‘I’m sure everyone out there would like to know, Bill . . . are there angels?’

Johnny groaned as he turned the corner into Eden Road.

‘Angels? Certainly not!’

Johnny scurried past the silent houses and dodged between the bollards into Woodville Road.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Mad Jim in his headset. ‘I hope there aren’t any naughty men with pitchforks, then?’

‘What on earth are you blathering about, man? There’s just me and old Tom Bowler and Sylvia Liberty and all the rest of them—’

Johnny lost the thread of things when a sticking-out piece of laurel hedge knocked his headset off. When he managed to put it back on, it turned out that William Stickers had been invited to request a record.

‘Don’t think I know “The Red Flag”, Bill. Who’s it by?’

‘It’s the Internationale! The song of the downtrodden masses!’

‘Doesn’t fire a neuron, Bill. But for you and all the other dead people out there everywhere, tonight,’ the change in Mad Jim’s tone suggested that William Stickers had been cut off, ‘and we’re all dead sooner or later, ain’t that the truth, here’s one from the vaults by Michael Jackson . . . “Thriller”—’

The streetlamp by the phone box was alight.

And the little pool of light was all there was to see, unless you were Johnny . . .

The dead had spilled out on to the road. They’d managed to drag the radio with them. Quite a few of them were watching the Alderman.

‘This is how you have to do it, apparently,’ he said, moonwalking backwards across the frosty street. ‘Johnny showed me.’

‘It is certainly a very interesting syncopated rhythm,’ said Mrs Liberty. ‘Like this, you say?’

The ghostly wax cherries on her hat bounced up and down as she twirled.

‘That’s right. And apparently you spin around with your arms out and shout “ow!”,’ said the Alderman, demonstrating.

Oh no, thought Johnny, hurrying towards them. On top of everything else, Michael Jackson’s going to sue me—

‘Get down and – what was it the man on the wireless said?’ said the Alderman.

‘Bogey, I believe.’

They weren’t actually very good at it, but they made up for being eighty years behind the times by sheer enthusiasm.

In fact, it was a party.

Johnny stuck his hands on his hips.

‘You shouldn’t be doing this!’