The United man gave Johnny a frank, open smile.

‘We shall, of course, take all views very deeply into consideration,’ he said. ‘And—’

‘But there’s a sign up saying that you’re going to build anyway,’ said Johnny ‘Only I don’t think many people want the old cemetery built on. So you’ll take the sign down, will you?’

‘We have in fact bought the—’

‘You paid fivepence,’ said Johnny. ‘I’ll give you a pound.’

People started to laugh.

‘I’ve got a question too,’ said Yo-less, standing up.

The chairman, who had her mouth open, hesitated. Yo-less was beaming at her, defying her to tell him to sit down.

‘We’ll take the question from the other young man, the one in the shirt – no, not you, the—’ she began.

‘The black one,’ said Yo-less, helpfully. ‘Why did the Council sell the cemetery in the first place?’

The chairman brightened up at this one.

‘I [close] think we have covered that very fully [open!],’ she said. ‘The cost of upkeep—’

Bigmac nudged Johnny, pointed at a sheet of figures everyone had been given, and whispered in his ear.

‘But I don’t see how there’s much upkeep in a cemetery,’ said Yo-less. ‘Sending someone in once or twice a year to cut the brambles down doesn’t sound like much of a cost to me.’

‘We’d do it for nothing,’ said Johnny.

‘Would we?’ whispered Wobbler, who liked fresh air to be something that happened to other people, preferably a long way off.

People were turning round in their seats.

The chairman gave a loud sigh, to make it clear that Johnny was being just too stupid but that she was putting up with him nevertheless.

‘The fact, young man, as I have explained time and again, is that it is simply too expensive to maintain a cemetery that is—’

As he listened, red with embarrassment, Johnny remembered about the chance to have another go. He could just put up with it and shut up, and for ever after he’d wonder what would have happened, and then when he died that angel – although, as things were going at the moment, angels were in short supply even after you were dead – would say, hey, would you have liked to have found out what happened? And he’d say yes, really, and the angel would send him back and maybe this was—

He pulled himself together.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it isn’t simply too expensive.’

The woman stopped in mid-sentence.

‘How dare you interrupt me!’ she snapped.

Johnny ploughed on. ‘It says in your papers here that the cemetery makes a loss. But a cemetery can’t make a loss. It’s not like a business or something. It just is. My friend Bigmac here says what you’re calling a loss is just the value of the land for building offices. It’s the rates and taxes you’d get from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings. But the dead can’t pay taxes so they’re not worth anything.’

The man from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings opened his mouth to say something, but the chairman stopped him.