Grandad watched it for a while, and then sat up. ‘Hey, girl, it says they’re trying to save the old cemetery.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

‘It looked like our Johnny on the stage there.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

‘No one tells me anything around here. What’s this?’

‘Chicken, Dad.’

‘Right.’

They were somewhere in the high plateaus of Asia, where once camel trains had traded silk across five thousand miles and now madmen with guns shot one another in the various names of God.

‘How far to morning?’

‘Nearly there . . .’

‘What?’

The dead slowed down in a mountain pass, full of driving snow.

‘We owe the boy something. He took an interest. He remembered us.’

‘Zat’s absolutely correct. Conservation of energy. Besides, he’ll be worrying.’

‘Yes, but . . . if we go back now . . . we’ll become like we were, won’t we? I can feel the weight of that gravestone now.’

‘Sylvia Liberty! You said we shouldn’t leave!’

‘I’ve changed my mind, William.’

‘Yes. I spent half my life being frightened of dying, and now I’m dead I’m going to stop being frightened,’ said the Alderman. ‘Besides . . . I’m remembering things . . .’

There was a murmur from the rest of the dead.

‘I think ve all are,’ said Solomon Einstein. ‘All the zings we forgot when we were alive . . .’

‘That’s the trouble with life,’ said the Alderman. ‘It takes up your whole time. I mean, I won’t say it wasn’t fun. Bits of it. Quite a lot of it, really. In its own way. But it wasn’t what you’d call living . . .’

‘We don’t have to be frightened of the morning,’ said Mr Vicenti. ‘We don’t have to be frightened of anything.’

A skeleton opened the door.

‘It’s me, Johnny.’

‘It’s me, Bigmac. What’re you, a gay ghost?’

‘It’s not that pink.’

‘The flowers are good.’

‘Come on, let me in, it’s freezing out here.’

‘Can you float and mince at the same time?’

‘Bigmac!’

‘Come on, then.’

Somehow, it looked as if Wobbler hadn’t really put his heart into the decorations. There were a few streamers and some rubber spiders around the place, and a bowl of the dreadful punch you always get in these circumstances (the one with the brownish bits of orange in it) and bowls full of nibbles with names like Curly-Wigglies. And a vegetable marrow that looked as though it had walked into a combine harvester.

‘It was sposed to be a Jack-o’-Lantern,’ Wobbler kept telling everyone, ‘but I couldn’t find a pumpkin.’

‘Met Hannibal Lecter in a dark alley, did it?’ said Yo-less.

‘The plastic bats are good, aren’t they,’ said Wobbler. ‘They cost fifty pence each. Have some more punch?’

There were other people there, too, although in the semi-darkness it was hard to make out who they thought they were. There was someone with a lot of stitches and a bolt through his neck, but that was only Nodj, who looked like that anyway. There were a bunch from Wobbler’s computer group, who could get drunk on non-alcoholic alcohol and would then stagger around saying things like, ‘I’m totally mad!’ There were a couple of girls Wobbler vaguely knew. It was that sort of party. You just knew someone would put something daft in the punch, and everyone would talk about school, and one of the girls’ dads’d turn up at eleven o’clock and hang around looking determined and put a damper on things, as if they weren’t soaking wet already.