‘It wasn’t always like this,’ said Mr Vicenti. ‘The nineteen thirties were rather gloomy.’

‘Yes, but now . . .’ The Alderman spread his arms and turned around. ‘Shops full of cinematography televisions! Bright colours everywhere! Tall people with their own teeth! An age of miracles and wonders!’

‘The people don’t look very happy,’ said Mr Vicenti.

‘That’s just a trick of the light,’ said the Alderman.

It was almost midnight. The dead met in the abandoned arcades of the shopping mall. The grilles were up and locked, but that doesn’t matter when you’re dead.

‘Well, that was fun,’ said the Alderman.

‘I have to agree,’ said Mrs Sylvia Liberty. ‘I haven’t enjoyed myself so much since I was alive. It’s a shame we have to go back.’

The Alderman crossed his arms.

‘Go back?’ he said.

‘Now, then, Thomas,’ said Mrs Liberty, but in a rather softer voice than she’d used earlier that evening, ‘I don’t want to sound like Eric Grimm, but you know the rules. We have to return. A day will come.’

‘I’m not going back. I’ve really enjoyed myself. I’m not going back!’

‘Me neither,’ said William Stickers. ‘Down with tyranny!’

‘We must be ready for Judgement Day,’ said Mrs Liberty. ‘You never can tell. It could be tomorrow. Supposing it happened, and we missed it?’

‘Hah!’ said William Stickers.

‘More than eighty years I’ve been sitting there,’ said Alderman Bowler. ‘You know, I wasn’t expecting that. I thought things went dark for a moment and then there was a man handing out harps.’

‘For shame!’

‘Well, isn’t that what you expected?’ he demanded.

‘Not me,’ said William Stickers. ‘Belief in the survival of what is laughably called the soul after death is a primitive superstition which has no place in a dynamic socialist society!’

They looked at him.

‘You don’t think,’ said Solomon Einstein, carefully, ‘that it is worth reconsidering your opinions in the light of experiental evidence?’

‘Don’t think you can get round me just because you’re accidentally right! Just because I happen to find myself still . . . basically here,’ said William Stickers, ‘does not invalidate the general theory!’

Mrs Liberty banged her phantom umbrella on the floor.

‘I won’t say it hasn’t been enjoyable,’ she said, ‘but the rules are that we must be back in our places at dawn. Supposing we stayed away too long and forgot who we were? Supposing tomorrow was Judgement Day?’

Thomas Bowler sighed.

‘Well, supposing it is?’ he said. ‘You know what I’d say? I’d say: I did the best I could for eighty-four years. And no one ever told me that afterwards I’d still be this fat old man who gets out of breath. Why do I get out of breath? I don’t breathe. I passed away, and next thing I knew I was sitting in a marble hut like a man waiting an extremely long time for an appointment with the doctor. For nearly ninety years! I’d say: you call this justice? Why are we waiting? A day will come. We all . . . arrive knowing it, but no one says when! Just when I was beginning to enjoy life,’ he said. ‘I wish this night would never end.’